Sandstealers

‘You know the real difference between us and them, Rachel? We can come and go; we’ve got our UN accreditation and a ride pretty much any time we want on Maybe Airlines, but they can’t leave until the war is over.’

Rachel thought it best not to tell him what was running through her head: that she didn’t ever want to leave.

‘And here we are on Snipers’ Alley.’ Danny was playing the tour guide on the ultimate holiday-from-hell. ‘See those blocks of flats? There are Serbs up there who’ll shoot at anything that moves, faceless, nameless bastards that they are.’

She saw people walk nervously behind the cover of buildings, then gather in small clusters where they peered across the Miljacka as if they might be able to see the snipers who terrorised them every time they ventured out. Suddenly, they would take their chance and dart across exposed ground until they reached the next block and its temporary sanctuary. She watched an old man willing his weary legs to run as fast as they had when he was young, and a mother trying to zigzag across the open street, dragging her child behind her.

Becky started strapping on her helmet and Rachel wondered whether she should have brought one as well as her flak jacket. Still, Danny wasn’t wearing any body armour at all. Later Rachel would learn this was his moral stand: if the ordinary people of Sarajevo had to survive without Kevlar to cover their heads and hearts, then so would he.

‘So this is where I turn into the king of drag-racing.’

Like the good, law-abiding citizen that she was, Rachel fastened her seat belt, while Danny stabbed his boot down on to the accelerator and crashed up and down through the gears. Swerving and sometimes skidding, he dodged craters, fallen lampposts, wrecked buses and trams, and the burnt-out, bullet-ridden vehicles of all those racing drivers who hadn’t quite made it to the chequered flag. Black ice lay in wait beneath freshly fallen snow, ready to pick them off, just like the Serbs.

‘You know what?’ he shouted over the groaning gears. ‘My greatest fear is to die here stupidly.’

‘As opposed to what—heroically?’ said Becky from the back.

‘Yeah, heroically. A sniper’s bullet or a mortar. I want you guys to put up an epitaph for me that says what a brave reporter I’ve been, not what a goddamned awful driver.’

Rachel was beginning to wish he’d talk less and worry more about the road.

‘So, Rachel, why have you come?’

The question took her by surprise. She could have given him so many reasons but wasn’t sure where to start. After all, what could she possibly say about Yugoslavia that would be of any interest to someone who’d written 423 pages on the subject? It was easier to say nothing.

‘Oh, I…I don’t know really.’

‘Come on! I’m driving you down the most dangerous road in the fucking world and you don’t know?’

‘What I mean is, I could give you all the usual reasons. But in the end I guess…well, you’re gonna think this is really terrible, but I suppose I was just bored.’

Rachel looked at more blackened, roofless homes, but all she kept seeing was the small pink bedroom where she had been hidden for too many of her 23 years. Even as she had packed for Bosnia, she had peered down from their doll’s house on Lakeside Drive to the front lawn—manicured to death by her father, who would tiptoe around it with lengths of string, trying to measure the length and width of the hedge so that his shears could trim it with mathematical certainty. A world of meticulous perfection, where she was suffocated by a lonely father’s love. A world away from Sarajevo.

‘Don’t you think that’s unbelievable?’ said Danny. ‘For pretty much the first time this century we’re the generation that don’t have to fight a First World War or Second World War or Cold War, and yet we race out here in search of, well…war. We’ve got peace—millions died so we could have it—and all we say is: No thanks, that’s a bit tedious. You wouldn’t believe the desperadoes who turn up here. Peace is boring, they say, war is fun! I want what you guys had—in 1914, or 1939.1 want a slice of the action too. I want to live my dreams living other people’s nightmares.’

It was the first of many speeches she would hear from Danny, and she felt chastened. Despite the cold, her face was turning red and hot. Was he calling her a desperado? On one level it was an attack on all the war correspondents in the city—including himself, presumably—but the way he said it sounded like he was accusing her.

The Holiday Inn loomed into view at last, one of the great war hotels. The Commodore in Beirut, the Colony in Jerusalem, the Intercon in Kabul, the al-Rashid in Baghdad—Rachel had read about them all, and now she could say she’d stayed in one.

The ugly yellow box was the one building in Sarajevo most people would have happily seen blasted off the map, an eyesore that belonged not in this ancient Ottoman city but on the dismal outskirts of Anywhere, America. Yet in the space of a couple of years it had achieved mythical status. Journalists flocked to stay in it. Just like them, the Holiday Inn was enjoying a war which was good for business. Hack or hotel, Sarajevo could make your name.

The rooms on the south side, facing the Serb suburb of Grbavica, no longer had windows, or in some cases even walls. Even so, they cost 90 bucks a night, and demand outstripped supply.

The tyres squealed as Danny plunged down a ramp into the hotel’s underground car park, a fortified sanctuary where the occasional reporter had been known to hide like a shell-shocked Tommy in the trenches. The car park was crammed with white armoured Land Rovers just like Danny’s, tightly packed together.

Becky got out of the car and Rachel noticed her touch a wall three times.

‘One of her little rituals,’ Danny explained. ‘Along with the blue underwear.’

Becky pushed him playfully.

‘So? And what about your lucky boots then? He wears the same ones every day, Rachel. Had them for years. They absolutely stink, of course. Anyway, superstition, religion: it’s all the same. All about making sure we stick around as long as possible.’

Rachel heaved her rucksack on to her back, picked up her bag, and staggered after the others through the echoing chasm of the car park and up into the hotel lobby. Perhaps Danny had a point: it was strange that a generation born in peace should want to come here. And having got here, to kneel at the altar of survival with sacrifices of walls and underwear and smelly boots, just to make sure it didn’t die.

The wreckage of her last conversation with her father came back to her; the two of them sitting in the chintzy sitting room, Billy Kelly pleading with his daughter as they waited for the cab that would take her to the airport.

‘It’s just that there’s only you, sweetheart,’ he had told her. ‘What else do I have in my life? Who else do I have?’

‘But I’m not leaving your life, Dad. I’m just going away for a while. Surely you don’t want me to stick around here forever?’

His silence had implied he did.

‘So when will you be back?’ he’d asked. When the war ends, she could have said—that is, unless another one has started up by then. But they both knew there was no certain answer to his question, and so Billy had cried more than at any time since creeping cancer had destroyed his wife a decade earlier, leaving behind a broken husband and a bewildered daughter. It was his fault: he had smothered her with his love, what father wouldn’t have? He hated it when she got a boyfriend or a car, or took a plane ride to another city. He wanted to lock her up, his princess in the tower.

Like many Americans, Billy—sales representative, golfer and Sunday Christian that he was—understood very little of Yugoslavia’s meltdown. He didn’t see what it had to do with him, apart from the fact that the only thing he cared for in his life wanted to run away there. Patiently, like a history teacher, Rachel sat with him and tried to explain how, since the Second World War, the communist dictator Marshal Tito had managed to keep a lid on all its squabbling parts, but his death in 1980 had blown it off. She described the rise of Slobodan Milosevic and Serb nationalism, and how the rival republics had started clamouring for independence, including Bosnia in 1992. She told him how, although Western nations had recognised that independence, the Serbs had not, attempting to crush it by surrounding Sarajevo with their big guns and laying siege to it. When Billy still looked confused, she talked to him with kindergarten simplicity: the Bosnian Muslims were the good guys in white hats, just trying to recreate their homeland in the post Cold War world. The baddies in black were the Serbs, trying to throttle an independent, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural Bosnia at birth. But when Rachel threw in the added complication of the Bosnian Croats, it was just too much for Billy Kelly.

‘How in the heck can you have two civil wars going on at once, between three sides? This stuff is making my head spin.’

‘Dad, it’s the story of my generation. It’s what I want to do.’

He had grabbed her by the shoulders.

‘I promised your mother I’d look after you, I promised her on her deathbed. What if she knew I’d let you go to war? What would she say if you wind up next to her in a grave?’

But as Rachel made her way through the bowels of the Holiday Inn, she was more convinced than ever she’d done the right thing. When Becky opened the doors for her into the hotel foyer, it was as though someone was pulling apart the curtains for the beginning of Act One. Finally, she was stepping on to the mighty stage of Sarajevo.

‘My, my, so this is where it begins,’ she said, primarily to herself. Danny was walking just ahead, and she wondered what he made of her. Despite his little tirade in the car, did he quite like her fresh-faced, ever-ready enthusiasm, or did he find it irritating? Did he really think she was a desperado? She supposed she shouldn’t care.

It was probably colder inside the hotel than outside, Rachel decided. In the cavernous atrium of the lobby, she could see her breath exhaling in white puffs. She heard the echo of a strange ripping noise and looked up to see another group of reporters pulling apart the Velcro fasteners of their flak jackets. TV crews were coming and going, speaking a multiplicity of languages, heaving silver boxes around, wielding cameras and fluffy microphones. Behind the reception desk sat a couple of greying women in scarves and overcoats. They could have been waiting at a bus-stop.

‘Room 331,’ said one, handing her the key.

‘Thanks, I’m sure it will be lovely.’ Rachel wasn’t sure of it at all. She pulled out the Maglite torch that would become her saviour, and negotiated her way through the blackness of the hotel stairwell. The hotel lifts looked encouragingly modern, but without electricity they sat lifeless and forlorn—like so much else in Sarajevo, a city slipping back in time. The place reeked of stale cigarette smoke and her feet crunched on broken glass. Even with the Maglite, Rachel stumbled and tripped as she made her way up to 331, where she fumbled the key into the lock.

If the hotel were a fridge, Rachel’s room was the icebox. Instead of glass in the window, there was UN polythene sheeting. Instinctively, stupidly, she checked the radiator, praying for a miracle of creeping warmth that never came. No power, no heat, and only sporadic water. A lot of nothing to pay good money for, thought Rachel, I might as well be sleeping in the street.

On the other hand, the room could boast at least some of the trappings of a real hotel. There was a flat yellow phone with a brown receiver. The sheets of her bed were white and clean, and in the bathroom there was even a small, but brand-new, bar of soap, and a toilet sealed with a strip of paper claiming it was sanitised. What was missing, Rachel realised, were the towels. Of course she hadn’t brought any and perhaps because of this, or because she felt as though she was getting frostbite, or because Danny had made her feel so inadequate, or because she was alone for the first time since her arrival, she began quite unexpectedly to cry.

It was a raucous voice in the corridor outside that woke her. Rachel was groggily confused: at first she thought she was back in her bedroom on Lakeside Drive, but this was a different place altogether. She was surprised how long it took her to remember—four or five long, perplexing seconds. The voice got louder, until it was followed by a determined knock. Still disorientated, she swung her legs off the bed and staggered over to answer it.

It was Becky, who had just managed to wash her hair.

‘There was only a bloody trickle, and so cold I thought it might freeze on my scalp!’

Rachel was unsure if it had been worth the ordeal: Becky hardly looked any different, except that now her curls were damp and limp.

‘Just brought you a little present to say hello. You know, welcome to Sarajevo and all that.’ She was carrying a bottle of Ballantine’s whisky, a Vranac red wine and a Swiss Army knife. From the array of blades, she pulled out a miniature corkscrew: like a good girl guide she was prepared for anything. Rachel made a mental note to buy one next time she was at a duty-free.