We Had It So Good (23 page)

And it was all reachable within a two-hour flight from London, the Italians could go home for the weekend. Its advantage was that there was more than enough war for everybody and it wasn't even an expensive destination.

Now a barrier stood between the media and the war. Each of the two men had heard that the press cards would be available tomorrow. Neither revealed this information to the other. They had obtained it from the same source, the hotel desk clerk who had a web of connections throughout the city. The girl, they assumed, was too green to ask.

“If you do get your press card, how are you getting in?” said Colin.

“I've got a plane ticket to Split, then I'll rent a car.”

“What would you do if you were ambushed on the road and they want to take it off you?”

“I'm not giving them my car.”

“Quite right, that's the spirit,” said Tim.

“But what if they threatened to shoot you,” Colin said, “what's your strategy then?”

“Give it to them?”

“Of course not, they'll take the car and leave you in the middle of nowhere, you'll die of exposure. You'd be an idiot to give away your car.”

“But you said they'd shoot me if I didn't give it to them.”

“That's the conundrum, yes.”

The bar filled up with a party of European politicians who
ordered cocktails. Marianne observed that everyone was beautifully dressed, they did not wear jeans and boots and stone-colored cotton jackets with multiple pockets, but cashmere Italian coats and cocktail dresses and she was with the two old men sitting at the bar who were trying to make a fool of her. But she would rather sit on her stool with her camera bag at her feet than engage in the light chatter about UN resolutions and peace conferences.

Her mother had asked her, “What is the moral dimension of this project,” and Marianne replied, “I don't know. I didn't realize there had to
be
a moral dimension. I just want to show people what I see.” (But they both hated and were afraid of war, her parents, they were of that generation.)

“So what would
you
do?” she said.

“Me? I wouldn't rent a car at all. I'd hitch a ride with one of the UN convoys.”

“Then I'll do that.”

“But if you're on one of the convoys, you haven't got the story. You're at their beck and call. You have to go where they're going. You might as well be an embed. Have you got a flak jacket?”

“Yes.”

“Does it have Mylar plates?”

“I don't know, I don't think so, it's very heavy, a friend of my dad's got it for me.”

“You should go home,” Colin said. “It'll all be over by the summer anyway, go back to your boyfriend.”

“No, no, she'll be all right,” Tim said. “She's gutsy.”

She wasn't his type. But in all honesty, he conceded, in this line of work anyone can be your type if you've got time on your hands.

They bought her dinner. Under the gilded dome of the empty dining room, eating ridiculous food and drinking sweet German wine, their faces lit by the glittering chandeliers, Marianne thought, I could take portraits of them, but how can I capture the way their eyes never focus, they are always darting from one side to the other
in case they miss something, everything happens at the periphery of their vision, they just don't stop and
look
.

The school she had gone to had taught her to fit in, to be a leader or be bullied. At school, girls were her friends because they were frightened of her, her eyes on their faces made them nervous. She seemed to stop dead and stare, locking on, they called it, trapping them in her headlights. But then she would say something outlandish that they did not understand, such as, “Do you know you look like a pelican,” to the self-styled most beautiful, vain girl in the school, which would
destroy
her and send her to the cloakroom in tears. Unattractive girls received compliments they would cherish for the rest of their lives: “Leonardo da Vinci would have wanted to paint you.” At school she was a kind of heroine, with her heavy bust bouncing inside her bra, and suddenly the fat melting away over the course of a few months, proving that ugly ducklings could turn into some kind of swan.

She had lost weight by the simple, effective method taught to her by Ivan's wife, Simone: she ate only half of whatever was on her plate. Half a bread roll, half a pat of butter, half a steak, half a potato. If she ate fifty percent, she could be one hundred percent what she wanted to be.

“You haven't eaten much,” Tim said. “On a diet?”

“No. I'm not very hungry.”

“So what's your assignment?”

“The raped women.”

“That? It's yesterday's news,” Colin said. “A few years back we were all trying to get to the bottom of the rape story. I saw through it. If all the Bosnian women had been raped by the Serb irregulars there should have been a whole crop of rape babies, except no one could find any. There was no spike in the birth rate. So where were all these babies?”

“Just because they were raped didn't mean they got pregnant. A lot of them had stopped menstruating because of the shelling.”

“That's just a theory. Each side will tell you anything that serves their interests. The main thing to know about war is that you need to treat everyone as a liar. They'll show you pictures of men with their dicks and balls cut off and stuffed in their mouths and swear on their mother's life it was taken a week ago and they know the guy personally, they were at school with him, or he's their uncle or their brother or the mayor or what have you. That picture has been doing the rounds since the First World War. Who knows who the poor bastard was, I don't. The point is, there are always atrocities. You just have to peer through the fog of war and see if you can make out a shape of something, but even then, you can't always understand what it is.”

“But women were raped,” said Marianne, stubbornly.

“There's no real evidence.”

“No one's
found
it, that's not the same thing.”

“War is mostly lies, bullshit, and occasionally some glamour, but even that's dying out. The pictures I take no one wants to look at, they're just of depressed-looking people walking along a road with their belongings, and some teenager with an AK-47 and a bottle of slivovitz in his pocket. You've turned up too late, far too late. It's all over.”

A waiter in a short white jacket wheeled a metal trolley to their table. It contained rum baba, apple strudel, Black Forest gâteau, crème brûlée, English trifle, and a spirit lamp and small pan to make crepes flambéed with black cherries. He was the priest of the high craft of patisserie.

The men scorned sweet things, they thought they were womanly.

At the revolving doors of the hotel, Tim said, “I'll walk you back, if you like.”

“No, I'm okay.”

Outside, the streets were completely empty, the shops dark, the boulevards wet and black. “It must be the dullest capital in Europe. There's no nightlife, or we could have gone for a drink.”

“I'm not looking for nightlife.”

“I suppose not. Listen, the cards will be in tomorrow. Get there first thing and you can be on the plane to Split by lunchtime.”

“Thank you for telling me.”

“Any chance of a kiss of gratitude?”

“No, not really.”

“Boyfriend at home?”

“I don't have a boyfriend, no.”

“You should have a boyfriend, you look like you need one.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“You seem like a new toy that's just been taken out of the box and no one's played with her yet.”

“You mean I'm a sex toy?”

“I just mean you look a bit untouched.”

“I suppose you prefer your women shop-soiled.”

“I do have a type, that's true, my type is a short little blond girl with a big smile. You're nothing like that, but you're still attractive, not sure you know it, though. You look like a girl who deep inside thinks she's a dog. You walk like a fat girl, to be honest, which is weird, because you aren't fat. I think you used to be fat, didn't you?”

Usually getting under women's skin caused a reaction, of some sort. They cried or were angry. But the tall dark girl with the camera bag simply looked at him, like an X-ray machine, then turned away and walked down the street, slightly stooped to one side as the weight of the equipment bore her in one direction.

Lying in her room beneath the yolk-colored counterpane, Marianne had already forgotten about Tim and Colin. She was thinking about the raped women and what a woman who has been raped dozens of times by dozens of men might look like now, a few years later, what there would be in the eyes. She was trying to imagine people she had never met and working out how to frame the shot. Her mother had showed her the articles about
the raped women of Bosnia, they had sat and read them together at the kitchen table. “Oh my God, those poor girls,” Andrea had said.

No one had taken them seriously at first. Andrea had a friend who had a friend in Dubrovnik, a Jungian analyst. She had treated a woman for six weeks, insisting that her lurid stories were sexual fantasies. Eventually the penny had dropped. We're not always right, said Andrea. Sometimes we miss it by a mile.

Marianne was not a virgin. She had had sex with two boys, both her own age, and it had hurt, quite badly, particularly the first time. She had never told anyone this. She feared she might have an unusual physiological condition, which she could not cope with, not on top of having so recently been fat. Sex, she thought, is not for me. Or, I'll try again later, in a year or two, maybe it will have worked itself out by then. She wished she could talk to her mother, but Andrea would not just sit and offer grown-up advice, like other mothers, usually, but not always, hitting the mark. She would devour Marianne's very soul with her analysis, she would become her mother's subject. Everything had an underlying meaning, according to her mother, and Marianne wanted to work out those meanings for herself, at a time of her own convenience.

For example, the interesting thing about Grace was that she seemed unable to live without a man, however pathetic, and Grace's men were poor specimens. Grace has never really been free, that generation is so hung up on sex, she thought. They can't bear the idea of being without it, and they're romantics too. Which led to: No, sex isn't for me.

She knows she has entrapped herself at the wrong end of a lens, that she is looking without being seen, that she has not yet forged emotional connections. She knows her mother believes she has a fear of intimacy. Marianne thinks she doesn't, she simply has a curious and restless mind and the world is so large and interesting, she has to move on into the center of it.

But now, under the yellow counterpane, she thought of tomorrow and the plane to Split. Life is beginning! Grace's way, but with the necessary corrections.

Light rain in the mountains. The road is lonesome and no birds sing in the wet trees.

Other vehicles passed her on the road, UN trucks, private cars, a troop of Dutch soldiers eating chocolate, even buses transporting civilians from village to village. Marianne had taped TV to the roof and sides of her 4x4, the new universally accepted sign of the media. Its message, not always understood, was,
Don't shoot!

An hour and a half from Split, she turned a bend and came to a primitive roadblock, a telephone pole resting on two oil drums. No one seemed to be around, the trees dripped rain from their branches, the sky was a gray hood. She had made up her mind that if she was hijacked on the road she would try to use her youth to deal with the situation, the militias were no older than she was, and she was used to dealing derisively and firmly with teenage boys. She did fear being raped, the fear was the pain of penetration. But she did not think it would come to that; in her experience, people usually surrendered to her will, they were too intimidated not to.

She waited for a few minutes but no one came. She turned off the engine, got out of the car and walked toward the barrier, wondering if she was strong enough to move it with her arms or if she could kick the pole down with her booted foot.

Out of the trees came a flash of vivid pink which she thought was an optical illusion or a tropical bird flown disastrously off course. The pink was a nylon bubble wig worn by a boy in a blue tracksuit, and with him another kid dressed in the usual army fatigues you could buy in market stalls anywhere in Eastern Europe. In their hands they proudly held Kalashnikovs. Not very
good Kalashnikovs, being Bulgarian imitations, and inclined to rust easily, jam or even break up in your hands as you were trying to shoot them.

Before they'd got their Kalashnikovs the two boys had practiced on small animals with rusty Second World War revolvers or farm shotguns, working their way up from chickens to dogs, whose heads blew off and turned into splintery pulp. They had heard that killing children was pleasantly easy, they dropped to the ground without a sound, like killing mice with a catapult, leaving only the echo of the retort in the air.

The girl was ugly, which itself was no impediment to rape. They had friends who had raped grandmothers, but there was a bigger Christmas present sitting on the road and it wasn't worth wasting time dropping their jeans to humiliate her. Older boys might come along and take it from them if they weren't quick.

A torrid drenching shame briefly heated Marianne's body, as she understood that the car keys were in the ignition, and her camera bag on the passenger seat. The boys pointed at the Toyota and began a discussion. After a few exchanges, they directed their guns at her and she understood she was to sit down on the wet leaves at the side of the road.

The boys got inside the Toyota. They lit cigarettes, offering her the packet through the window, but Marianne associated smoking with Grace, the cigarette with the red-stained tip, taken from the lips,
“God, what a fat lump.”
She let out a torrent of raging abuse, fixing them with her headlamp eyes, jabbing her fingers at them.