At the airport in Istanbul, I’d binned the washing-line kit, bought some new clothes, and cleaned up while Jerry called his source and the Sunday Telegraph to explain the change of plan. We’d taken a flight to Vienna, then caught a connection here. Jerry’s card had taken a real beating, but the paper was going to pay him back, so what the fuck?
Once through the terminal, we looked for a taxi. An old man conjured up a newish red Vauxhall Vectra from the line about fifty metres to our left. As it left the front of the rank, the drivers behind moved their vehicles forward three or four metres without starting their engines, pushing on the window pillar and steering through an open window. After years of war shortages, old habits died hard.
The Vectra pulled up with the world’s largest man in the driver’s seat. They were all big in this neck of the woods; there must have been something in the water. He jumped out to fiddle with the windscreen wiper and show off his crewcut and black-leather bomber; it was the jacket of choice around here too. Most of the boys in Sarajevo had looked as if they should be in the Russian mafia. Maybe they were now.
The Bosnians had their own currency, the Konvertible Mark. We hadn’t been able to get any in Vienna, so we made a deaclass="underline" thirteen euros for the trip to the hotel – far more than the eight-K journey was worth. During the war it had been Deutschmarks everyone wanted. Now, it was euros. This had to be about the only area of the world that wasn’t much fussed about the dollar.
Justin Timberlake was getting it all on as we headed for the hotel. Jerry’s gaze seemed to be fixed on the mountains that hemmed us in on both sides. These days, they looked like something out of The Sound of Music, but ten years ago the Serbs had used them to bomb the shit out of the city.
Sarajevo sat in a wide valley shaped like a soup spoon, with the handle cut off, just a little way down by the airport runway. A fast-flowing river, the Miljacka, ran through the middle of it. Before the war tore it apart, the city had probably been beautifuclass="underline" the guide books had gone on about modern high-rise towers nestling side by side with elegant Austro-Hungarian mansions, which nudged up in turn against the Ottoman heart of the city. But that was a lifetime ago. The Serbs, or aggressors as they were known around here, laid siege to the city from May ’92 until February ’96. In some areas the front line was actually inside the city, the two armies separated by just the wall of a house. The Serbs killed over ten thousand people in the longest siege in history.
The houses facing the airport were still standing; some had been replastered, but many looked as if they belonged in Berlin at the end of the Second World War. The taxi driver kept glancing at Jerry in his rear-view.
‘Where you from?’
In this town I didn’t have to worry about Jerry opening his gob and putting us in the shit. He knew very well what to say. ‘America.’ The Brits and Canadians weren’t liked that much round here: their troops had had to stand on the sidelines during the slaughter because they were under the command of the UN, who didn’t have the remit to intervene.
He waved his thumb in Jerry’s direction. ‘You Muslim?’
Jerry nodded, and got a smile of approval.
It was my turn. ‘You American?’
‘Australian.’
Satisfied, he went back to working his way on to the main.
66
We hit the main drag that paralleled the Miljacka. The broad dual carriageway was heaving with vehicles, and every other one was a VW Golf. Volkswagen had had a factory here before the war, and every man and his dog seemed to drive one.
The driver tore along Vojvode Putnika as if it was still Snipers’ Alley and he knew he was in somebody’s sights. The Serbs had enjoyed a good arc of fire from the high ground. Hundreds of Sarajevans had been killed in crashes as they drove through the city at 120 k.p.h.
Jerry was still in his own world as we drove past a host of new construction sites alongside bombed-out reminders of the past. One was the concrete skeleton of what had been a brand new old people’s home. The first pensioners had only just moved in when the Serbs started lobbing shells at it. It looked exactly the same as it had when I last saw it; even the recently erected billboards couldn’t cover up what had happened.
Despite everything, I liked Sarajevo. I always had. Like Baghdad, it was a grown-up place. It had been here for centuries. There were winding streets, and hundreds of dead ends and small alleyways that went nowhere in particular. Minarets poked up into the sky everywhere you looked, from small wooden mosques, brick ones the size of bungalows, and great big fuck-off ones as big as palaces. The majority of the city’s inhabitants were Muslim, these days, but there was still a scattering of Jews, Orthodox Christians, and even a few hippies who had forgotten to go home in the sixties.
We passed the UN compound. Lines of white Land Rovers and Land Cruisers were parked outside a square block of concrete and glass. This part of the main had bristled with steel hedgehogs, X-shaped obstacles, placed in the road to prevent the Serb army’s two hundred and fifty or so tanks screaming into the city. Sometimes I’d been able to hear them revving from down town. The hedgehogs hadn’t been the only obstacles you had to try to avoid as you drove towards the airport. There was also any amount of falling concrete, burnt-out vehicles and, now and again, a body or two.
About a K ahead, a bombed-out tower block – what had been the parliament building – loomed above the city centre.
‘Nearly there, Sunny Side Up.’
Jerry said it as I thought it.
I couldn’t help but smile. I hadn’t heard that saying for nearly ten years.
We hadn’t talked about Rob and Benzil at all. But then, there wasn’t a lot to say.
The taxi pulled up outside the large yellow cube with a Holiday Inn sign. Last time I was here the ground had been covered with snow, and its nickname was born. It still looked much the same, just a whole lot quieter than when four thousand shells and mortar rounds a day were raining down on the city. To me, it brought back good memories of great chips, and sometimes even sausages when they were on the menu. At least until a sniper got the cook on his way to work one day.
67
The Holiday Inn had been forced to close before the war because it was bankrupt, but as all the other hotels in the city were bombed out one by one, it reopened. Even though the prices rose higher and higher the longer the siege went on, it was never short of guests. It didn’t seem to matter that its upper floors were constantly hammered by Serb artillery, rocket and mortar fire: just like the Palestine, it existed to make cash, and it remained the HQ and doss-house for the world’s media.
Sometimes the power was on, sometimes it was off. Sometimes the rooms were freezing cold, sometimes they were too hot. Whatever, it had to be the only hotel in the world where the most expensive rooms were those without a view. The golden rule of survival was: if you see the sniper, the sniper sees you, and he wouldn’t necessarily be a Serb. This war had attracted weirdos from all over: the neo-Nazis, anyone else who didn’t like Muslims, and the ones who just liked killing people. They all came for a bit of war tourism, were escorted into fire positions on the high ground, and had a crack at anything that moved. There was even some avant-garde Russian writer caught on camera, sniping into the city.
The Firm’s operations room above the café was about twenty minutes’ walk away – in peace time – but as much as two or three hours during the siege if the snipers were active and people were backed up on the street corners, waiting for the courage to make a run for it.