With an effort, Vivien wiped the images from her mind, before Greta’s beautiful face appeared out of the past to remind her of the pain of the present.
‘And you?’
She had interrupted Russell’s story with that simple question, although she couldn’t explain to him that she was asking it of both of them.
‘Me?’
Russell said this as if only now remembering that he, too, had a place in the story he was telling. A place of his own, which he had sought for a long time to no avail. A shy smile appeared on his face, and Vivien realized that he was smiling at his own past naivety.
‘To copy him, I also started messing around with cameras. When I told my father I’d bought a few cameras, he looked like someone who sees his own money being thrown out the window. Robert, on the other hand, was really supportive. He helped and encouraged me in every way he could. And he taught me everything I know.’
Vivien noticed that, even though he had said he was hungry, he hadn’t finished even one of his two cheeseburgers. She knew from personal experience how easily powerful memories could take away your appetite.
As Russell continued, Vivien had the impression that this was the first time he had talked about these things to anyone. She wondered why he had chosen her.
‘I wanted to be like him. I wanted to show my father and mother and all their friends that I amounted to something, too. So when he left for Kosovo, I asked him to take me with him.’
So far, he had been looking away, but now he turned to her, with a new familiarity.
‘Do you remember the war in the Balkans?’
Vivien didn’t know that much about it. For a moment she felt embarrassed by her own ignorance. ‘More or less.’
‘At the end of the Nineties, Kosovo was an autonomous province of former Yugoslavia, with an Albanian Muslim majority, ruled with a rod of iron by a Serb minority that suppressed the separatists who wanted to join Albania.’
Vivien was fascinated by Russell’s voice, his ability to tell a story in such a way that he made the person listening part of it. It struck her that this might be his true talent. She was certain that, when this was all over, he would be able to tell a great story.
His great story.
‘It all started a long time ago. Hundreds of years ago, in fact. To the north of Pristina, the capital, there’s a place called Kosovo Polje. The name means ‘the plain of blackbirds’. At the end of the third century, there was a battle there between a Christian army composed of a Serbian and Bosnian coalition led by a man named Lazar Hrebeljanovic and an army of the Ottoman Empire. The Christians were wiped out. The Serbs in particular suffered enormous losses. After that defeat, a monument was built on the site that I think is unique in the world. It has a curse inscribed on it, wishing any Serb who doesn’t take up arms against the enemies of the Serbian people the loss of everything they possess, now and for ever. I’ve been there. Standing in front of that monument I realized one thing.’
He paused briefly, as if searching for the right words to sum up his idea.
‘Wars end. Hate lasts for ever.’
Vivien wondered if he was again thinking of the words of the letter and all they implied.
All my life, before and after the war, I worked in theconstruction industry …
‘Robert told me that in 1987 Slobodan Miloševic swore that no one would ever again lift a hand to a Serb. That declaration of intent turned him overnight into the leading light of the Serbian nationalist movement, and he became president. In 1989, exactly six hundred years after the battle of Kosovo Polje, he stood in front of that monument and made a warlike speech to more than five hundred thousand Serbs. That day, all the Albanians stayed home.’
Russell made a gesture, as if to hold time in his hand.
‘We arrived at the beginning of 1999 when the repression, and the fighting between the government and the Kosovo Liberation Army, had persuaded the international community to intervene. I saw things I’ll never forget. Things that Robert was so used to, he was quite impervious.’
Vivien wondered if Russell would ever be free of the ghost of Robert Wade.
‘One night, just before the NATO bombardment began, all the journalists and photographers were expelled. The reasons weren’t openly stated, but it was widely believed that they planned to carry out ethnic cleansing on a grand scale. The prefect of Pristina had summed it up by saying that he wished those who left a safe journey, but couldn’t guarantee anything to those who stayed. Some didn’t make that journey. And we were among them.’
Vivien ventured a question. ‘Are you sure Robert was really a brave man?’
‘I used to think so. Now I’m not so sure.’
Russell continued with his story, and there was both relief and strain in his voice.
‘Robert had a friend, Tahir Bajraktari, if I remember correctly, a schoolteacher who lived on the outskirts of Pristina with his wife Lindita. Robert gave him money and before leaving the city he hid us in his house, in a cellar that you reached through a trapdoor under a carpet, at the back of the building. We could hear the sounds of fighting outside. The Kosovo Liberation Army would attack, strike, and then vanish into thin air.’
Vivien had the impression that if she had looked deep in his eyes she would have seen the images he was reliving.
‘I was terrified. Robert did everything he could to calm me. He stayed with me for a while, but the call of what was happening outside was too strong to resist. A couple of days later, with machine-gun fire still echoing on the streets, he left our hiding place with his pockets full of rolls of film. That was the last time I saw him alive.’
Russell picked up the bottle of water and drank deeply from it.
‘When he didn’t come back I went out to look for him. Even now I don’t know how I summoned up the courage. I walked through the deserted streets. Pristina was a ghost town. The people had run away, leaving some of the houses with their doors open and the lights on. I reached the centre, and after a while found him. Robert was lying on the sidewalk, in a little tree-lined square, surrounded by other bodies. He had been hit in the chest by machine-gun fire, still clutching his camera in his hand. I grabbed the camera and ran back quickly to hide. I wept for Robert and I wept for myself, until I didn’t even have the strength to do that. Then the NATO bombardment began. I don’t know how long I hid there, listening to the bombs fall, without washing, rationing the food I had, until I realized that the voices coming from outside were speaking English. That was when I realized I was safe and came out.’
He drank again, greedily, as if the memory of his tears had dried every trace of liquid from his body.
‘When I managed to develop the photographs in Robert’s camera and took a look at them, I was struck by one shot in particular. I immediately realized that it was an exceptional photograph, the kind a photographer spends his whole life chasing after.’