JUNE 1992
A SUMMER RAINSTORM swept through Trg Bana Jelacica in the early evening, just as Anna was crossing the square. She paused at a sheltered tram stop, pulled out her little umbrella and silently congratulated herself as it blossomed over her. A tram—blue with a cream top—hummed up to the crowded stop. The number 11 to Dubrava looked shiny and new, washed clean by the rain. It was brightly lit inside and she saw the passengers as if they were on display behind glass, a collection from a gloomy, drab and utilitarian species. Zagreb was a city at war and Anna sensed its inhabitants had become deeply suspicious of one another.
Posters of President Franjo Tudjman seemed to be plastered everywhere she looked, staring grimly at her from the wall of the tram shelter and down from prominent places around the square. The intended message: This man, you can trust. Anna found the image both bland and repulsive, yet she knew that a team of propagandists must have chosen this face with its frozen wave of white hair, its cold blue eyes half-hidden behind outsized spectacles, its tight, downturned mouth. It was the face of a strongman to reassure doubters that violence, pain and loss were necessary sacrifices.
Anna had her own reasons to despise this Croatian messiah. Tudjman was an unrepentant Holocaust denier: a historian who claimed the estimated number of six million murdered Jews was founded on exaggerated data and on biased, emotional testimony. Exaggerated! Emotional! She would have liked to put him in a room with her mother. In the same way, the good professor Tudjman had sought to diminish the numbers of people murdered by the wartime Ustasha in their own concentration camps so as to relieve modern Croatians of the need to feel collective guilt. It seemed that every time Anna came back to Zagreb, the urge to deny, to forget and to rewrite history had become stronger.
Throughout the square, the red, white and blue flags with the chequerboard emblem, once so dearly embraced by the Ustasha, hung damp on high poles. In the crisp light above the flow of black umbrellas, and above the crisscross of electric tram wires, Anna read the neon signs high on the baroque buildings that walled in the open space—Kerametat, Kras, Varteks, Chromos, Zagrebacka Banka, Kuca, Evropska Moda. The signs seemed to have their own significance. Money was flowing into this newly declared independent state. A giant screen on the Chromos building advertised in psychedelic colours the eight million Kuna lottery. Anna felt she understood the subliminal message: money will flow to all you citizens, as if via a drip-feed, provided we all embrace the helpful mafia, which has agreed to control the flow of capital.
Anna felt the beat of corruption like the pulse of the city. On the way here she had passed the crass steel-and-glass structure of the Hotel Dubrovnik and found the street outside it packed with new-model black beemers. Hulking black-suited drivers and bodyguards gathered close to the vehicles, smoking and gossiping as their bosses caroused inside.
She was early for her meeting with Pierre and decided to stop for an aperitif at a bar with a dripping outdoor awning. A young, black-eyed waiter, his dark hair in a crew cut with a geometrically correct flat top, fiddled with his bow tie as he apologised. They were not serving out here in the rain, but by all means sit. She did so with a small display of petulance and pulled out her notepad.
In front of her, in the centre of the square, was the statue of a horseman in a hussar’s outfit, sword upraised. Floodlit in the rain, man and beast shone a slick silvery-grey and were reflected in pools on the ground, swirling in a neon rainbow. Anna knew the horseman to be Ban Jelacic, the nineteenth-century nationalist for whom the square was now named and she was fascinated to make his acquaintance. The last time she was here the horseman had been conspicuously absent and the square called Trg Republike. That had been the case since 1947, when the communists tore the statue out like a rotten tooth and denounced Ban Jelacic as ‘a servant of foreign interests’.
When the newly elected President Tudjman had declared Croatia’s independence less than two years ago, he brought Ban Jelacic galloping back into the square to ride forevermore on his granite plinth into the bright, autonomous future he had dreamed of for Croatia but failed to achieve. The Ustasha had briefly achieved the dream of an independent state with Hitler’s help, but it collapsed along with the Third Reich. And now came Tudjman. Anna imagined a time in the not-too-distant future when statues of the revanchist historian would be erected in the squares and plazas of Zagreb—no horse, no sword, nothing anachronistic, but swathed perhaps in the handmade Italian suits preferred by populist demagogues.
As the rain began to ease, a gang of youths ran hooting across the square. They were dressed in the exported costume of young black Americans—baggy singlets, basketball shorts hanging down past their knees and oversized trainers. All orange and black, they skipped between the arriving and departing trams.
Anna noticed the giant screen had changed to an ad for cigarettes featuring Hravatskoi Sam as the indigenous Joe Camel. She made a note to herself about the intersection between globalism and nationalism and got up to leave, reflecting grimly that she had agreed to meet Pierre at the Sheraton’s American Bar.
•
Anna took a seat at the bar as the night’s entertainers were setting up in the corner. The sign on the bass drum read: Domingo—The Band. They were tuning up by the time Pierre slid onto a stool beside her and she nodded at the retro-garbed players, raising her eyebrows at him.
‘It seemed like the most convenient place,’ Pierre said defensively. ‘I’d have asked you to the apartment, but Chiara …’
‘What?’
‘She’s convinced we have a past.’
‘We do,’ said Anna. ‘Just not the one she imagines. Is this going to be a problem?’
‘It’s her problem.’
‘We’ll be away for a while. She’s okay with that?’
‘This is what I do,’ Pierre said dismissively. ‘I can’t pick and choose who I work for based on her paranoia. Let’s have a drink.’ He ordered beers with slivovic chasers.
It had been seven months since she and Pierre had ventured into Vukovar. Anna had gone home to her daughter and her safe life in Sydney where she had endured terrible memories and nagging thoughts about the large, green-eyed Australian who called himself The Cicada. A week ago, Pierre had called her with news that a man answering that description with the same nom de guerre was now in command of a large militia of Croat and Muslim fighters, and in control of a swathe of strategically vital territory west of the besieged city of Mostar. It had not been hard to convince her editor to send her back.
Anna tossed down the liquor and asked: ‘Have you heard anything new?’
Pierre winced, as if the question contained an implied rebuke. ‘Your pimpernel is damned elusive,’ he replied. ‘Not a single picture of him that I’ve been able to find. What’s confirmed is that he goes by Cvrčak, he’s a big man and he’s got green eyes.’
‘It’s got to be him, hasn’t it?’
‘I haven’t found anyone who says he’s Australian, but I wouldn’t have let you come all this way if I didn’t think it was likely. How’s my goddaughter, by the way? She’s doing the HSC this year, isn’t she?’
‘Rachel sends her love. She’s staying with my dad. She loves being with him,’ said Anna, aware that she was the one who sounded defensive now. ‘Rach’ll be fine … So, what’s the plan?’
‘I’ve found someone who’s agreed to help us. You’ll have to pay him a modest fee.’
‘Shit,’ said Anna. She hated sounding like a penny-pinching freelancer, but she was already paying Pierre a daily rate and even though Leon had agreed to fund the trip, the magazine operated on the thinnest of margins and she was restricted to a shoestring budget. On the other hand, she knew that false economies in a warzone could put lives at risk. If she had to dip into her own pocket she would do that, and argue the toss with Leon later.
‘Who is he?’
‘Adin Genjac, he’s a local journo,’ said Pierre, all business now. ‘Works in Mostar for Oslobodjenje.’
This was a positive. Anna knew the paper’s reputation for fearless reporting. It was being published daily from a nuclear fallout shelter close to the frontlines in Sarajevo.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘How well do you know him?’
‘Mostly by reputation. I’ve met him once or twice. He’s smart, he’s funny, but the downside is we’re going to have to go to Mostar and pick him up.’
‘You can still get in?’
Pierre nodded. ‘You can from the south, yeah.’
‘There’s a “but”, right?’
‘The Serbs are still shelling the shit out of the place.’
‘Why do we need Genjac?’
‘He has an in,’ said Pierre. ‘He knows some of the Muslims fighting with The Cicada’s outfit, and he’s a mate of the military commander in Mostar. He also knows where to find them and the safest way to get there. That’s something I just can’t do for you, Anna. The roads are dangerous, the situation’s fluid. The lines are shifting all the time. We need local knowledge.’
‘Okay, I get it,’ said Anna. ‘Let’s book him.’
Pierre smiled at that. ‘I already did,’ he said, without a trace of embarrassment.
Anna knew better than to be annoyed at Pierre’s presumption. She trusted his judgement and, still affected by jet lag, she was relieved that he had accomplished so much while she was travelling.
‘Good one,’ she said. ‘When do you want to leave?’
‘Tomorrow morning. We’ll drive south, head down the coast to Split, overnight there, and then up to Mostar the next morning. Can you be ready to go at 5 am?’
‘Of course.’
‘That was never your strong suit.’
‘You’ve got it the wrong way round,’ Anna replied with feeling. ‘The short-term memory loss must have been permanent.’
Pierre didn’t laugh but instead stared hard at her. ‘One thing I never forgot is how big a fuckwit Marin Katich is. Are you sure you want to go through with this? Last chance to back out.’
‘Are you serious? I twisted Leon’s arm to pay for this trip. An Australian warlord with his own army in Bosnia? That’s a big story if we can make it stand up.’
‘I can see the front cover,’ Pierre drew his thumb and forefinger in a straight line through the air. ‘Anna Rosen’s Heart of Darkness: A Love Story.’
‘Give it a rest, Pierre.’
‘Mistah Katich, he dead,’ he responded with an inappropriate grin.
Anna felt like knocking him off his stool, but then the band started up noisily with an ABBA song, in which a fellow called Fernando was asked repeatedly if he could hear the distant drums and if he remembered the roar of guns and cannons. The singer was terrified, but ready to die if she had to.
Pierre began to sing along, laughing like an idiot. Finally caught up by his infectious mood, Anna joined in.
•
They made it to Split late afternoon the following day, settled into the simple hotel Pierre used whenever he visited the Adriatic port town, and went out for a meal at the Boban restaurant. They were shown to an outdoor table overlooking the harbour under a bruised purple sunset.
‘Boban,’ said Anna. ‘The name’s familiar.’
‘It should be,’ said Pierre. He paused to ask the waiter for a bottle of wine, before leaning in to talk quietly. ‘The place was named in honour of Rafael Boban, commander of Pavelic’s Black Legion. There’s a lot of nostalgia for the Ustasha these days. That’s why I booked here. We might learn something. Also, the seafood is pretty amazing.’
Their waiter was a short, thickset man wearing a white apron. His name was Davor, as Pierre elicited when he returned with an unlabelled bottle of local white. After a brief discussion, Davor returned with a plate of fresh fish and when Pierre chose the flounder-like rombo Davor congratulated him on his good judgement.
‘This’ll be something,’ said Pierre. ‘They do it in a wood-fired oven.’
‘I guess we can put up with this,’ said Anna, pouring wine for each of them. ‘In the interests of research.’
The restaurant was full. While there were a few other women in the room, the clientele were mostly men, flashily dressed, loud and unrestrained in their machismo.
‘It’s owned by a Canadian Croat,’ Pierre explained. ‘There’re a lot of people returning from the diaspora with dollars and deutschmarks, especially here on the coast. They’re buying up everything they can while prices are at rock bottom. A lot of the local Croats are seriously pissed off. They’ve got no money and these rich fuckers are flooding back like they own the place, which they will soon enough. Not to mention they’re the ones who’ve kept the Ustasha legacy alive.’
‘You’re saying the Katich family would have fitted right in?’
‘I’m saying if Marin Katich is commanding a militia a few hours north of here, the money’s got to come from somewhere, right?’
It took some time before Davor returned, carrying a cast-iron pan with a heavy lid. He laid it on the table, removed the lid with a magician’s flourish and a rich aroma rose with the steam. The rombo was in a mixture of garlic, potatoes and vegetables and some kind of spiced stock. As Davor filleted and de-boned the fish, he proudly described how it had cooked slowly in the pan, buried under red-hot cinders.
‘Eat, eat,’ he encouraged them when he was done. ‘Enjoy.’
‘Perhaps you’ll have a drink with us later, Davor?’ Pierre asked. ‘Tell us the secret recipe.’
‘Sure, sure—drink, yes,’ said Davor, beaming. ‘Secrets, no.’
Anna had rarely tasted anything so delicious, but she couldn’t stop herself looking around and speculating on the nature of her fellow diners. They reminded her of the carpetbagger she’d run into on the Vukovar ferry, men who saw opportunities in a war that brought despair to the many. At the end of the meal, Davor brought to the table a bottle of herb-infused liqueur and Pierre convinced him to join them.
‘Just one,’ the waiter agreed, pulling up a chair. ‘I have much to do before I can go home.’
‘We’re driving to Mostar in the morning,’ said Pierre.
‘Oh,’ cried Davor. ‘Then I should leave you with this bottle.’
‘Good idea,’ said Pierre, draining and refilling his glass. ‘What have you heard?’
‘Same as everyone,’ said Davor. ‘Serbs are bombing the city to rubble. Just like in Sarajevo, but no one is watching. Many people are dying, Croats and Muslims together. You will see. Maybe you will die if you go there.’ He paused, sipped his drink and looked at Anna. ‘Best pray to God. It is not a place for women.’
‘I’m looking for a man I once knew,’ said Anna abruptly. ‘A Croat from Australia. He is fighting against the Serbs. They call him Cvrčak.’
Davor looked at her with undisguised curiosity. ‘A man you once knew,’ he repeated. ‘And for this you risk your life?’
Pierre went to interrupt, but Anna put a hand on his arm to stop him as she held Davor’s gaze. ‘Do you know about him?’
Davor shifted uncomfortably. ‘I can’t help you,’ he said and began to get up from the table.
‘Do you know anyone who can?’
Davor paused and lowered his voice. ‘The men at the table behind me. You could ask them, but they may not want to answer your questions. You should be careful.’
With that, the waiter stood up, cleared the remaining plates from their table and retreated to the kitchen. Anna looked over at what was now the only other occupied table in the restaurant. She had noticed that the two older men—in their sixties, she guessed—had been drinking steadily since they finished their meal and were locked in a passionate discussion. One of them, in particular, caught her attention because of his antique eyewear: a tortoise-shell frame with flipped-up blue sun-lenses. The man’s lean, heavily lined face was darkly tanned and she imagined him spending long days in a poolside deckchair issuing orders to subordinates. The other, smoking a cigar he occasionally dipped into a liquor glass, was equally dark-skinned. He was a broken-faced, thickset fellow with a large gold crucifix sitting on his smooth chest inside an open shirt. Davor need not have warned her to be cautious. They were a dangerous-looking pair.
‘Let me speak to them,’ said Pierre.
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Anna.
‘Trust me this once, will you, Anna? Fellows like this have only one idea about women.’
‘I don’t give a rat’s what—’
‘I know you don’t,’ Pierre cut in. ‘Look, you already gave the waiter a hint that this is personal. If these fellows are “connected”, and Davor seems to think they are, how long do you think it would take for the news to reach the great General that his girlfriend from Australia is on the way up the mountain to meet up with him on the frontlines. You’ll be a legend before you get anywhere near him, like some tragic character from a gypsy love song.’
‘Christ, Pierre,’ Anna said, her face red with indignation. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you really think?’
‘I think you should go back to the hotel,’ he said. ‘Wait up for me. I’ll see what I can find out from these fuckers.’
•
Anna left the Boban in a belligerent mood. She ignored Pierre’s advice and headed to the harbour. It was a hot, still night and she wanted to find a place to swim, or at least to walk off her anger. She understood Pierre had a point about the old fascists at the restaurant. Probable fascists, she should say. But his suggestive jibes were starting to get on her nerves. Keeping the secret of her daughter’s conception from her old friend had become a burden and she realised it may have been a mistake. She was sure Pierre would think and behave differently if he knew why she was so determined to track down Marin Katich.
She was asking a great deal of him, she knew that. After all, Pierre was putting his own life at risk and he didn’t really know why; that was unfair. But while Rachel herself had no idea who her father was, Anna still felt she could not tell Pierre the truth about her motives. The promise she had held out to her editor of a powerful, revelatory story about an Australian militia commander in a hot zone of the Bosnian war would have to be enough for him, too.
She came out from a lane between some old buildings and found herself on the harbour promenade under a line of tall palm trees. It was well lit but eerily empty for a place that, were it not for the war, would have been full of tourists now, in early summer. She passed a moored yacht and caught the unmistakable sweet scent of marijuana.
On the brightly lit stern, a group of young people were smoking, drinking and laughing. One man in that company, puffing happily on a joint, leant over the rails and gestured to her, calling out in French that she should come aboard and join the party. The town is dead, he kept repeating—C’est morte—there’s nothing to do here, nothing, come and have some fun. When Anna turned him down, he smiled wistfully and gave a sad, theatrical bow.
As she walked along the dark, empty docks, Anna found herself thinking about her would-be suitor on the yacht. His voice and manner had reminded her of Jean-Michel Nicholier, the young Frenchman she and Pierre had met in the bowels of Vukovar Hospital. Despite a negotiated agreement, the Serbs had refused to allow the Red Cross to evacuate wounded prisoners of war. Having told Anna about the Australian comrade who called himself Cvrčak—the Cicada—Nicholier was dragged away on his crutches by the Serb irregulars. Anna had reported his arrest to the Red Cross and made regular inquiries about the young Frenchman ever since. Only a few weeks ago, she had learned that his body had been found in a mass grave. Nicholier had been rounded up with three hundred other wounded men in the hospital who the Serbs identified as having fought with the city’s Croat defenders. They were taken to a place called Ovcara, a farm in the southern outskirts of Vukovar. Left in the custody of paramilitaries, the men were systematically beaten, then split into smaller groups and shot. Their bodies were bulldozed into the earth.
Following the coastline immediately south of the docks, Anna found herself on a small empty beach. Thinking about the young Frenchman had filled her with sadness, and she thought a swim might wash some of it away. She made sure that she was really alone, stripped off her clothes and stroked out into the deep water as she liked to do at home. She swam until the harbour city was reduced to distant lights, then rolled onto her back and looked up at the stars. Floating there in the warm, velvety sea, she found herself blissfully suspended in a peaceful moment between the tormenting mysteries of her past and the dangerous path she was about to follow. But when her thoughts turned inevitably to Rachel, tears filled her eyes, and she turned and swam back to the shore.
•
When the sun rose the next morning, Split was far behind them and they were driving up into the mountains, whose limestone karst skeleton was a high wall between Croatia and Bosnia. Since she and Pierre had set off in the pre-dawn darkness, there had been a chilly silence in the car.
This was a hangover from the ill-tempered confrontation between them when Anna had returned to the hotel close to midnight. After she tapped lightly on Pierre’s door, it had flown open.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ he blustered, wide-eyed with rage. ‘I’ve been worried sick!’
Anna knew that Pierre’s agitation mostly arose from his concern for her safety, but his opening line pressed too many buttons. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ she cried. ‘If I’d wanted a fucking husband, I would have married one.’
‘You could have left me a note.’
‘I didn’t come back to the hotel, Pierre. I went for a swim.’
‘Anything could have happened to you. How would I know?’
‘You don’t need to know what I’m doing.’
‘There’s been a lot of nasty shit happening in this town.’
Anna dropped her gaze and unclenched her fists, deliberately calming herself. ‘Look, Pierre, I’ve been taking care of myself for over forty years. You were talking to those old Ustashi, or whatever they were. I admit I was annoyed when you told me to go back to the hotel, so I went for a swim, that’s all.’ Anna gathered herself then and asked in a quieter voice, ‘Did they tell you anything?’
Pierre had smoothed his frazzled hair, stood back from the door and gestured for her to come in. ‘I only got one thing,’ he said, sitting on the edge of his bed. ‘They didn’t want to talk about The Cicada, claimed not to know anything much about him, except to say that they are hugely pissed off that he’s fighting alongside the Muslims. They couldn’t help themselves. It was obvious in the end that the Croat nationalists want that part of Bosnia for themselves. They hate the Muslims as much as the Serbs. If it was up to these guys, they’d be at war with both of them.’
•
Pierre was now motoring fast through switchbacks, climbing up and up the empty mountain road. Every now and then, they saw signs that normal life continued, as Anna knew it inevitably did, even close to catastrophic conflicts. An old woman in a headscarf, carrying a hoe on her shoulder, stopped and watched blankly as they passed. A draughthorse grazed beside the road. Tall, conical haystacks, propped up like tepees with long sticks, stood in patches of farmland. A cart carried men collecting firewood; one sat grimly atop the woodpile. Minarets rose like sentinels above many small settlements. In one village, an Orthodox church, intact on the outside, had been stripped and left as a shell while, nearby, blue smoke rose from an open-sided hut in which a man in shorts and a singlet tended a spitted lamb over glowing coals. From time to time, they saw children on the side of the road holding out jars of wild berries.
‘We should get some,’ said Anna as Pierre shot past them.
‘I can’t turn around,’ he said irritably.
But Pierre stopped dutifully at the next village and they bought jars of blackberries and raspberries picked from the forest. Anna threw a handful of raspberries into her mouth, too many, and a thin line of red juice ran down from the corner of her lips. The children laughed at her comically bad manners, but when she dabbed the juice away with a white handkerchief it looked bloodstained and she thrust it quickly into her pocket. Pierre watched this small sequence and said to her gently, ‘Don’t worry. It’s not an omen.’
•
They knew they were close to Mostar when they began to come across abandoned villages; then roadblocks appeared, manned by armed Muslim soldiers wearing patches of the army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. At each checkpoint from then on they were guided to the next with warnings that the Serbs were close by, that sometimes the road was shelled, sometimes there were snipers. Sometimes people died randomly. Large signs taped on the bonnet and windows of Pierre’s grimy old Golf identified them as journalists, but they both knew that these were mere talismans; they offered no guarantee of protection.
Then, without warning, they found themselves looking down on the city. Mostar was hunched below them, seemingly defenceless against any armed force that held these heights securely enough to plant artillery batteries. The buildings were so ravaged by the shelling that on this quiet, clear morning they appeared to Anna tremulous and vulnerable.
Pierre knew the city well enough to get them quickly to the sandbagged building in which Adin Genjac shared a basement office with other journalists. He parked close to the entrance and they went downstairs into a noisy newsroom, familiar to Anna in every way except for the fact it was underground and windowless. A dozen or more people, most of them smoking, talked intensely into phones or chatted to each other in small groups.
Pierre led Anna across the room to one such group, in the centre of which was a very tall man with thinning black hair tied into a ponytail. He had a crumpled, appealing face, which seemed to reflect his every emotion like fast-changing cloud formations, swirling from delight to disbelief to sudden annoyance and back to delight as he spoke and listened. When he saw them coming towards him, the man’s large brown eyes registered both recognition and pleasure, and he broke away from the group, taking two strides to gather Pierre in a powerful hug.
‘You made it, comrade,’ he cried in his own language, then switched to English as he turned to Anna. ‘And you are Anna! Genjac, Adin Genjac. Adi, if you like. I’m happy to meet you. Fucking Serbs are quiet for a moment.’
‘Has there been a ceasefire?’ asked Anna.
Genjac pulled a soft packet of cigarettes from the pocket of his brown T-shirt and shook out a few. He offered them around, and Anna took one, which Genjac lit for her.
‘No,’ he said, sucking so hard on his smoke she thought he might finish it in one long drag. ‘They like to keep us guessing. Maybe they are too hungover right now. Soon they start drinking again. They like best to kill people when they are drunk. Sometime today they will begin again. They have many bombs. So, for us, right now, this is good. We could stay here, maybe drink some coffee, but I think we should go out quickly while the Serbs are sleeping, yes?’
When they agreed, Genjac quickly farewelled his fellow journalists and shepherded Anna and Pierre from the office in a manner that suggested they were now under his protection, in his town, in his hands.
When they reached the car he turned to Pierre. ‘Maybe it’s best I should drive,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’
Anna was already climbing into the front passenger seat. She dipped her head to see Pierre’s reaction, catching his eye as he reluctantly handed over the keys and climbed into the back. He was a nervous passenger when she was behind the wheel and she was curious to see how he would respond to this latest relegation, but as she turned back to rib him about it Genjac gunned the engine and tore away from the kerb. The Bosnian took a fast left, drifting around the corner on squealing tyres, and then looked recklessly across at her, laughing as she fumbled to get her seatbelt on.
‘Fast-moving target is best,’ he shouted. ‘To avoid snipers.’
‘Where are we going?’ she asked, matching his volume.
‘Pierre said you want to go to the frontline. We start there. Later today, if roads are clear, we go to the town of Ljubuski, where is the headquarters of General Cvrčak.’ Genjac looked over to Anna again. ‘Stupid name, don’t you think?’
Anna shrugged. ‘Have you met him?’
‘No,’ said Genjac, accelerating fast into another corner. ‘He’s a very secret man, this big insect. Hides in the trees and makes a loud noise, ha ha!’
‘Pierre says no one has a picture of him.’
‘I take my camera today,’ said Genjac. ‘Maybe I’ll win Pulitzer.’
Anna frowned, turned back to the road ahead and flinched as the car narrowly missed an old couple attempting to cross it.
‘Watch it, Adin!’ cried Pierre from the back.
Genjac uttered an expletive under his breath and was still grumbling when Anna tapped his arm.
‘You’re working for me today, Adin,’ she said firmly. ‘I’ll pay for any pictures we use. But they’ll have to be exclusive for my story.’
A sullen cloud crossed Genjac’s face. ‘You’re the boss,’ he said.
•
The Bosnian was forced to slow down when they entered the narrow streets of the old town. There were damaged and destroyed buildings on either side of them. Orange tiles blown from their moorings teetered from cracked roofs, waiting, it seemed, for a breeze to send them clattering into the street. Mosques were the most sought-after of targets; when they passed the blackened stump of an amputated minaret, Genjac slowed to a crawl and Anna saw on the ground beside it, wedged where it had fallen, the minaret’s shattered spire, its severed end like a splintered bone. She felt a visceral outrage that four-hundred-year-old Ottoman treasures were now sport for drunken artillerymen.
‘See what they have done?’ said Genjac, his voice seized with emotion. ‘They are murderers of history.’
From once-elegant Turkish houses and the ancient limestone shop fronts of the bazaar, piles of rubble spewed onto the cobblestone street. Genjac steered around them until the road ahead was too narrow for the car. He backed it into a space between two buildings facing out—for a quick getaway, he explained. But the skies were clear and not even the crackle of small arms interrupted what Anna felt, given the level of destruction all around her, was a perverse, unnatural stillness.
‘We walk from here,’ said Genjac. ‘The bridge is close.’
He led them around a corner into a street that ran alongside the Neretva River on its western bank and high above the emerald waters. Up ahead, Anna saw the unmistakable high arch of Stari Most, the Old Bridge, with its fortified limestone towers on either bank. For a moment, she forgot to be scared.
‘I’ve never seen it,’ she said to Pierre, bumping along beside him like some tourist. ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘One day I’ll tell you why Suleiman the Magnificent had it built,’ he said. ‘But right now I can only think about the Serbs up in those hills.’ He called to Genjac, who was blithely striding ahead of them. ‘How safe is this street, Adi?’
‘It’s not at all safe,’ Genjac replied. ‘But it is quickest way.’
‘It’s very exposed. Are there snipers up there?’
‘I hope not,’ said Genjac. ‘Our boys are dug in above the bridge on the east side, sometimes they hold the ridgeline, sometimes the Serbs. No one’s shooting at us yet, so maybe this is a good day.’
Pierre glanced at Anna, who shrugged.
‘He must know more than that,’ he said to her, before calling again, ‘Are you taking the piss, Adi?’
‘Maybe, maybe not,’ said the Bosnian. ‘We could crouch down and crawl along the wall, but I’m too old for that, my back won’t let me. I came this way yesterday and no one shot me.’
They reached the famous footbridge without incident and Genjac asked them to wait while he crossed it to find someone. Close to its entrance, Anna found a middle-aged woman with dyed orange hair clambering through the wreckage of a salon. She watched the woman picking her way through the mess, stuffing anything salvageable into a bag: a dust-encrusted brush, a pair of scissors, plastic containers of hair products, scarred bottles of nail polish and other, unidentifiable, items. The woman had to climb over an obstacle course of red leather make-up chairs; they were sprawled across the vinyl floor, bent-legged and misshapen beyond repair. She attempted to haul upright a hairdryer beneath whose dome, Anna imagined, generations of local women had had their perms set. Such quotidian destruction contained its own kind of sadness, an ordinary sadness for the end of everyday life.
The woman spoke no English, so Anna called on Pierre to translate. He crunched over broken glass and called through the opening that had once held a plate-glass window, now shattered into thousands of tiny, angular particles. Somewhere in those fractured pieces, the woman told them, was the handpainted sign Sabira Salon. It had been blown apart, along with her livelihood, by the shell dropped through the ceiling.
As they were talking to the woman, Genjac appeared with two Muslim soldiers in tow and interrupted Pierre’s translation. ‘We must go,’ he said. ‘These men will take us across the bridge to the front lines.’
Anna reached out to shake the hairdresser’s hand and the woman lurched sobbing into her arms. The two women were caught like that in a tableau of despair when the first shell came whistling through the air and exploded on a rocky outcrop on the other side of the bridge. Anna felt a tremor of fear run through the hairdresser’s body before the woman pulled away, dropped her bag of salvaged items and ran clumsily up the street, away from the bridge, slipping on the cobblestones as she went.
As Anna bent to pick up the bag, a second shell whistled in and exploded with a terrible roar, much closer. Genjac suddenly gripped her shoulders.
‘Anna! Come on!’ he shouted. ‘Mortars!’
His face was a mask of fury or terror, she couldn’t tell which. He tore the bag out of her hands and tossed it aside. The Muslim soldiers were already running back over the bridge. One of them had hold of Pierre’s arm, dragging him along and he turned, crying out to Anna. She sprinted after him onto the bridge alongside Genjac. It was steeper than she had imagined, much steeper, and she felt as if she was in one of those dreams in which you run and run and make no ground. She stumbled and almost fell on her face trying to keep up with the Bosnian. Another shell exploded and then another, and her ears rang from the concussions.
As she scrambled over the highest point of the arch, clouds of dust from the explosions rose above the hill in front of them. Below her, she saw Pierre and the soldiers sheltering in the stone fortifications at the other end, waiting for them. Running downhill, Anna heard a louder whistling, more like a scream. She instinctively threw up her arms as an intense flaming light blossomed in front of her. From the heart of the flame a terrible force erupted and she felt herself flying backwards into a dark void.
•
Anna was aware only of a ceaseless, circular chanting in the dark. Then came colour and scent—saffron robes, oil lamps, incense. She looked up into the open eyes of the sleeping divinity. Her fingers held on lightly to the sacred white thread. In this way she drifted above the pain until at last, against her will, she was drawn back down to it, down to the clamour of voices in a large room and to a strange booming. Her right eye opened, blinking in the fluorescent light, darkness still on the left. The ringing pain in her head came dully at first, then it rushed to the surface, blurring her vision.
‘Anna.’
A voice she knew. She tried to sit up. There was a tube in her arm, a drip stand beside her. A figure leant in, blocking the light.
‘Anna.’
She turned to the voice. A familiar face, eyes swimming behind thick lenses. ‘Pierre,’ she said, and then winced as the pain focused into a sharp point. She lifted her hand and found the bandage over her left eye, wrapped tightly around her head. A sudden panic.
‘Don’t worry, your eye’s okay,’ he said. ‘They had to stitch you up below it. You were lucky.’
A crashing boom came in the distance and then another, much closer. She felt it in her chest and it seemed to shake the walls. Then another, further away again.
‘They’re still shelling,’ said Pierre. ‘You’re safe here. We’re underground. How are you feeling?’
‘My head hurts.’
‘Is it bad?’
She nodded.
‘The morphine’s wearing off. We could ask for more painkillers. Do you remember anything?’
‘Running, an explosion … Then nothing.’
‘You caught a piece of shrapnel and got knocked down. We thought you might have fractured your skull, but the X-rays are clear. You have a concussion. Are you following me? You’re okay. I haven’t called Rachel yet.’
‘Don’t. Not yet.’ She looked at him and the gears slowly engaged in her mind. ‘How long?’ she asked.
‘You’ve been out for six hours.’
She touched the bandage again, thought of asking for a mirror, and then she remembered. ‘Genjac?’
Pierre’s face tightened. ‘Not so good. But he’s alive.’
Anna struggled to push herself up. ‘I want to see him.’
Pierre put a hand on her shoulder, gently restraining her. ‘You can’t. He’s back in surgery. They’re trying to save his leg.’
She sunk back into the pillow. Her head pounded in time with her pulse and the pain finally assailed her defences.
‘Morphine,’ she said. ‘Please.’
•
Anna was alone when she woke again. The ward was quiet and dark, emergency lighting only. The shelling had stopped. So, she thought: night then. The drip was still in, but empty, and her mouth was terribly dry. Her head still pounded, but it was bearable now. She put her hand to her cheekbone and touched the bandage, sharper pain.
Genjac!
They’re trying to save his leg.
She found a water bottle beside her and drank half of it in one go. Inevitably, she had to pee.
No sign of a nurse. She carefully stripped the adhesive bandage from the needle in her arm and eased it out, put the bandage back and held it there to stop any bleeding. She eased her legs over the side and stood. Leaning against the bed, she waited for the worst of the dizziness to pass. Her clothes were neatly folded on a wooden locker at the end of the bed. She stripped off the hospital gown and dressed slowly: T-shirt, jeans and the light jacket with many pockets. She sat on the locker and her head pounded when she bent to pull on her boots. She found paracetamol tablets, swallowed four of them and left the ward slowly, her limbs stiff and sore.
Anna found a bathroom and examined her face in the cloudy, black-spotted mirror. She lifted the edge of the head-wrapping and uncovered her bloodshot left eye and her bruised, swollen cheekbone. A smaller bandage concealed the stitches, so there was no way to assess the likely scar. She removed the outer bandage, unravelling it like a turban. She looked less of an invalid with it off. Sunglasses would cover most of the damage in daytime.
Anna limped back into the corridor and found a nurse dozing in an armchair. The woman woke with a start. She understood enough to lead Anna to a makeshift recovery room, in what must have been a storage place for documents. Institutional filing cabinets had been pushed aside to make space. Pierre was sprawled on a wheeled bed, snoring loudly. In the next bed was the unconscious figure of Adin Genjac. In a chair beside him a strikingly beautiful young woman was curled up asleep, her arms wrapped around a pillow. The nurse excused herself and left.
Genjac was barely recognisable. An oxygen mask was clamped to his pale face, concealing the ridge of his large nose, and his ponytail was trapped under his neck. His cheeks were hollow and without animation; he seemed older and frailer. His left leg was in a sling raised above the bed and encased from thigh to toe in a plaster cast, from which emerged a complex framework of steel braces, joints and screws. His right leg lay under the sheet and Anna traced its shape down to the raised tent over his toes. He had come out of surgery with both legs. She found herself weeping with relief.
Some sound from Anna prompted the young woman to open her eyes. Her voice startled Anna.
‘You were with my father.’
Anna turned to the young woman, whose large brown eyes were immediately familiar, and said, ‘We were running across the bridge. And then … He was taking us to the front.’
‘You’re crying,’ said the young woman.
‘This is my fault.’
The girl shook her head. ‘Every day Adin goes to the front,’ she said calmly. ‘He does not go for you. This is his war. The Serbs have tried many times to kill him, but they cannot, inshallah.’
On the other bed Pierre stirred, woken by the voices. ‘Anna,’ he
cried, sitting, and then stumbling over to her. ‘You shouldn’t be up.’
‘I had to know how he was.’
Pierre led Anna to the bed he had vacated and made her sit down. ‘You’re in no shape to be wandering around.’
‘I’m okay,’ she said, prodding Pierre on the chest. ‘Tomorrow we’ll drive to Ljubuski.’ When Pierre didn’t respond, she mumbled, ‘We will.’
Then she lay down, rolled onto her right side and fell asleep.
•
It had been difficult for Anna to persuade Pierre that she was in any shape to travel. He argued that she had nearly died and had taken a piece of shrapnel in the head, so she was likely still in trauma, and if it were up to him he would hire an ambulance and have her driven to the hospital in Split. She told him he was being ridiculously overprotective and that, in any event, Ljubuski was south-west of Mostar, and therefore on the way to Split. As to trauma, she had nothing more than a headache, manageable now with moderate painkillers. She put on sunglasses to show how much better she looked if you couldn’t see her swollen black eye.
The truth was very different. She had hidden from Pierre that she was weak and dizzy, and that she found it hard to focus her thoughts, except on making this one argument: They had made it this far and so should carry on. Anna left Genjac’s daughter Ena with half the US dollars she was carrying and promised to send more from Sydney. She sat by the Bosnian’s bed and told him she had decided to continue to Ljubuski.
‘You must do that,’ he whispered.
Even in his weakened state, Genjac had insisted on passing on, with Ena’s help, the names of his Muslim contacts in Cvrčak’s militia and writing a personal note for her to carry to them.
They had left the hospital during a morning lull in the Serb bombardment and Anna felt herself panicking as she stepped out of the basement into the open air. The thought that shells could rain from the clear sky at any moment was unbearable. She flinched as the lightning flash and the roar of the explosion replayed in her head like a single startling frame in a movie reel.
She made it to the car, climbed in and slammed the door, but felt as if a veil had come down over her eyes. Her breathing was altered, her heart began to race and it seemed she might lose a grip on herself, as if the moorings of her personality had been loosened and she could come undone at any minute. All of this she hid from Pierre, saying only in a strained voice: ‘Let’s get out of here.’
•
Looking back, Anna would remember the journey to Ljubuski as a series of impressions.
She had closed her eyes as they raced through the empty streets, refused to look at the blackened wrecks of the looming buildings and concentrated only on controlling her breathing. The symptoms only eased when they left the precincts of the city behind them and entered the mountains, but she knew now the extent of the hidden damage she had suffered and how much more fragile she was than she had imagined, how vulnerable to weakness.
They stopped at Medjugorje, a town whose name literally meant ‘between mountains’. Pierre found them a small restaurant he had stopped at once before. They hadn’t eaten a meal for more than a day and he was voraciously hungry. Anna drank strong, sweet Turkish coffee and picked at a Bosnian cake. She felt nauseous, her head seemed to be in a vice, and she swallowed another small handful of tablets as Pierre watched anxiously.
‘Are you sure you can manage this?’ he asked.
‘I’m fine,’ she lied. ‘Just a headache.’
At least Pierre’s mood had lightened and she knew that was all to do with putting the perils of Mostar behind them. He told her the strange story of the town they were in, about how in the years before the current conflict millions of Catholics from all over the world had made pilgrimage to Medjugorje.
In 1981, six local children had claimed to have had visions of the Virgin Mary. The children’s stories might have been dismissed as youthful hysteria, but their dreamlike accounts were given currency by the Croatian parish priest, Father Zovko, and the town’s fame quickly spread. Soon this purported miracle got the attention of the Yugoslavian communist authorities and agents of the state’s secret police (the notorious UDBA) were sent to investigate. Father Zovko was arrested, tried and sentenced to three and a half years’ hard labour for ‘participating in a nationalist plot’. Nothing worried Belgrade so much as a revival of the religious fervour that had underpinned the wartime Ustasha movement.
In recent years, as the power of the central communist authority had waned, so had their grip on religion. Catholic pilgrims began to flood back into the town, where two of the visionary children, now adults, claimed to be the recipients of regular monthly messages directly from the Blessed Virgin. Her messages, received by both of them, were like punctual celestial telegrams: one on the second of each month, the other on the twenty-fifth.
‘Unbelievable, every single month?’ said Anna, pleased to have her thoughts diverted. ‘What a curse. It must be like having your period.’
‘A bloody Mary?’ Pierre ventured.
When Anna rewarded his crude joke with a smile, her first moment of levity since she was blown up, Pierre went on.
‘That’s not all. Eventually the pilgrims themselves started reporting strange hallucinations. They would see the sun spinning in the sky and changing colour, or a halo of light around the sun full of crosses and hearts.’
Anna automatically stared up at the sun, twin reflections of it in her dark polaroid lenses.
‘Careful now,’ said Pierre. ‘A whole bunch of dim-witted pilgrims got permanent eye damage doing that.’
‘I’d like a sign from God,’ said Anna. ‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘You’re still alive,’ he said. ‘I’ve had my miracle.’
•
They drove on from Medjugorje and eventually entered a long valley with mountain ranges on either side. The town of Ljubuski sat in a bowl of mountains, close under the Butorovic Range at its northern end. From the outskirts of the town, Anna could see a jagged, broken-toothed structure emerging from the highest peak and Pierre explained she was looking at the ruins of an ancient fortress. In the fifteenth century, Croatian pioneers built the original town on the mountain and it thrived until their defences were overrun during the Ottoman invasion. The Turks had fortified the town with high battlements and made it a border garrison, establishing it as the Western edge of their empire.
Over the years, Anna had heard different versions of the history of this region from both Croat and Serb nationalists, for whom the Muslim invasion seemed like recent history. Such people often referred to their Muslim neighbours as ‘Turks’, even though they were in fact ethnically identical Slavic people.
Here, in the region of Herzegovina, of which Ljubuski was one of the largest towns, Croats were in the majority. Most Croat nationalists regarded Herzegovina as the homeland of their Catholic faith, so one of the most surprising things about the warlord Cvrčak was that he had so strongly allied himself with the local Muslim Bosniaks, going so far as to recruit thousands of them into his militia.
About Ljubuski, Anna had learned the following facts in preparing for this journey: There were fewer than thirty thousand people in the surrounding region, of whom about seven thousand five hundred lived in the town itself; three quarters of the town’s population were Croatian; twenty per cent were Bosnian Muslim; and one per cent were Serb. She wondered how many of that one per cent had remained; she guessed that some in that category must have married Croats or Muslims, and they might still be here.
As they drove into the centre of the town, Anna saw large numbers of armed men in the streets. Some wore camouflage, but many were in black fatigues reminiscent of the Ustasha’s Black Legion, which she assumed was no accident. Pierre drove slowly past clots of these men who, when she looked at them closely, seemed unkempt and ill-disciplined. They bore their weapons haphazardly and took no pride in their appearance, from their dirty uniforms to their unwashed, straggly hair. She thought, perhaps fancifully, that many of them looked like criminals; they had the sullen expressions of street thugs looking for a mark. Some stopped in their tracks and stared with open hostility at the outsiders whose car marked them clearly as journalists. She saw the faces of lean, angry, rat-faced men, and felt waves of antagonism emanating from them.
‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this place,’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ said Pierre. ‘Something’s not right, that’s for sure.’
They parked in the main street of what otherwise appeared to be a neat, respectable and even mildly prosperous town; it had the usual mixture of elegant old baroque buildings and ugly, shoddily built communist-era office blocks and apartments. They approached a café where a group of soldiers were drinking beer at a table beneath a pair of red Coca-Cola umbrellas, their weapons leaning against the wall beside them or lying at their feet.
At a closer table sat a wiry man with a much larger mate, both basking in the sun, sipping espresso from tiny cups. The thin one had straggly blond hair to his shoulders and a deeply lined brown face. He wore an outsized mauve singlet and tie-dyed jeans, and might have been a roadie for a hard rock band were it not for the bandolier of cartridges around his emaciated waist. As they walked past him, the man called out, pulled from his belt a sawn-off shotgun and aimed its twin barrels at Pierre’s chest.
‘Hey!’ yelled Anna. ‘Put it down!’
The thin man and his fat mate laughed, as if this were the funniest thing they had heard all morning.
‘Hey!’ cried the thin man, waving the weapon about. ‘Hey!’
Anna saw that the scrawny outlaw had a collection of women’s watches and bangles on either wrist.
‘Keep moving,’ said Pierre.
But when they reached the dishevelled group of black-uniformed drinkers, the closest soldier looked up at them. The man was slumped low in a plastic chair, feet on the table, lazily rolling a cigarette.
‘You are here for the news?’ he asked in English.
Pierre looked puzzled. ‘What news?’
‘The killings.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Don’t lie!’ said the soldier and he sat up, no longer lazy but intense, like a switch had flicked inside him.
‘I’m not lying,’ said Pierre.
Anna read pure hatred in the man’s face, and something more. Could it be grief?
‘Fuck off out of here!’ the soldier cried. ‘Go, before you get a bullet for your troubles. You people are no better than flies on shit.’
•
A careworn old man in a crumpled grey suit directed them to the militia headquarters. It was not far, he told them nervously. As they walked the prescribed route, the vice around Anna’s head returned. She had stupidly left the pain medication in the car and had no other choice than to bear the migraine as it tightened its grip. Now the pain was affecting the peripheral vision in her damaged left eye, in which she had begun to see flashes of coloured light.
They entered a long driveway. At the end was a solid and once-elegant building in need of a paint job. Anna imagined it had once been the villa of a wealthy family until being transformed by the communists into a municipal office of some sort. It was surrounded by overgrown gardens. Ahead was a circular courtyard in which several vehicles were parked on one side. There was a wide portico over steps going up to the front door, and above it hung the familiar red-and-white chequerboard flag. A group of black-uniformed men sprawled listlessly on the steps. As Anna got closer, she saw that there were multiple bullet holes in the windscreens and doors of three of the parked vehicles, one of which sat lopsided on flattened tyres.
The pain in her head and the flashing in her vision were becoming more intense. Several of the soldiers looked up as they approached. One of them—a bearded man, with his head down and the butt of his Kalashnikov between his feet—did not raise his eyes. An older soldier appeared in the doorway—an officer with grey hair slicked back and a holstered automatic at his waist. Pierre called out a greeting to him.
‘What do you want?’ the man asked gruffly.
‘We’ve come from Australia. To meet the general.’
The man looked at each of them; his face expressing surprise and disbelief.
‘Come inside,’ he said, and they followed him up the stairs and into a room with desks and maps and telephones. It was strewn about with many weapons including, Anna saw, a heavy machine gun, boxes of ammunition, boxes of hand grenades and mortar shells. Then she noticed high on the wall a large coloured poster with slogans in Croatian at top and bottom. It was the photographic portrait of a heavily bearded man in camouflage uniform with a black forage cap. He wore the shoulder boards of a senior officer. Anna was uncertain what rank they designated, but something like general was surely possible.
She walked over to it, transfixed. Her head was pounding now, the pain was almost crippling. Looking closely, she saw the unmistakable green eyes. There was no question.
This was Marin Katich.
‘You have come to see the general?’ asked a voice from behind her, speaking in American-accented English.
‘Yes,’ said Pierre.
Anna turned to a man standing in the doorway, which had opened from a large office. He was dressed in a uniform similar to the one worn by the bearded Marin Katich. He was tall and athletic, smooth-shaven and bareheaded with short, steel grey hair. A good-looking fellow, some might say, and Anna may have agreed were it not for his disturbingly protuberant eyes.
‘All the way from Australia?’ the man asked.
‘Yes,’ said Pierre.
The man looked to Anna, still standing by the wall poster. He paused for a moment, as if considering his next move.
‘I am General Rebic,’ he said, reaching out to shake her hand. ‘Jure Rebic. And you are?’
‘Anna Rosen,’ she said, stepping back. ‘This is my colleague Pierre Villiers. We are journalists.’ She pointed to the poster. ‘Please can you tell me where we can find this man?’
‘You know him?’ asked Rebic.
‘Many years ago, yes.’
‘Please,’ said Rebic. ‘Come into my office. We can talk there.’
Rebic directed them to chairs, then sat on the edge of his desk in front of them.
‘I’m sorry, I have bad news for you,’ he said in the sonorous tone of a sympathetic priest. ‘I will be blunt. The general is dead.’
Anna swayed back in her chair as if she had taken a blow. The flickering light at the edge of her vision darkened and she saw Rebic as if at the end of a tunnel. Her head seemed to be splitting apart, but through the pain she still managed to hear Pierre’s next questions.
‘What happened to him?’
‘You saw those destroyed vehicles as you came in? The general was in the lead car. They were ambushed. Most of his staff officers were with him. It happened yesterday. Nine killed. I was lucky to be here, or I too would be dead.’
‘Ambushed by who?’
‘By the Croatian army at a roadblock they set up to trap him. It was a terrible act of betrayal by his own brothers in arms.’
Anna stood up and the dark tunnel narrowed. The pain was overwhelming. She felt herself toppling.