The apartment in which I’m now writing this is in a block of six in the suburb of Grbavica. It’s the same room Santo brought me to the day after I arrived in camp. ‘It is a good place to start,’ he said, as if he were dropping me off at some department in a company headquarters on my first day at work. It’s also the apartment from which I failed to shoot that publisher’s reader.
Grbavica was seized by the Serbs at the very beginning of the war, in May 1992. The suburb penetrates the belly of the town like the nodule on a piece from a jigsaw puzzle, stretching down from the steep lower slopes of Mount Trebevic to the south bank of the river. It’s the only part of Sarajevo they’ve managed to capture, and it’s scarcely a good advertisement for Serb rule. It’s a shell, a ruin, a mass of twisted, tortured, tilted steel and concrete. The only glass is underfoot. Any surface that’s still vertical is pitted with shrapnel and bullet holes. Personal belongings – crockery, books, children’s toys, articles of clothing, smashed furniture – lie scattered in the streets. Garbage spills out of ripped bags, the pulped, liquefied, stinking mess licked and picked at by both skeletal dogs and humans. Great mounds of masonry block many of the roads. At night there are bursts of manic laughter, screams, shouts, gunfire, running footsteps and smashing bottles. People flit from doorway to doorway like ghosts. Tanks rumble in the distance. I wonder briefly which is the more desirable suburb: Grbavica or across the river in the city. The six apartment blocks are down by the river. Three run east-west, and lie directly one behind the other. I’m in the front building, on the twelfth and top floor, facing the Miljacka River. The centre of the city lies at about two o’clock to my position, across the reddish, tumbling waters of the narrow river. The buildings are ordinary, what I would call Eastern European trash. Behind them are many more apartment blocks, more of the same, but with fewer floors. That’s their only redeeming feature: fewer floors. They’re concrete rectangles, like dominoes lying on their sides, with flat roofs and row upon row of small windows. The walls are dotted with gaping holes as if someone had come along with a sledgehammer and added a few extra windows. It’s a dangerous place to hang around, yet some families still skulk in the basements of the rear apartments, which are linked together by fetid, rubble-strewn, almost pitch-black corridors. These are the troglodytes of war, wrapped in rags, huddled over candles or kerosene stoves, shrinking back into the shadows whenever a sniper passes by on his way to a new eyrie.
At ground level there’s only dust and rubble. Doors have been removed, probably for firewood. The walls are chipped, the paint flaking, and graffiti, spidery black and uninspired, crawls at random across every surface. The rooms have been stripped bare. I sit well back from the windows on an old mattress I found downstairs. I prize it, my only possession, my only shred of domesticity. Why wasn’t it removed, along with everything else? I think someone must have salvaged it for themselves, and then was forced to flee and leave it behind. Maybe they were killed in the street when they went out to get a loaf of bread or a container of water. It’s more than likely.
It’s important I write these notes or observations (call them what you will) as if I’m writing them for me. (But note the ‘you’ in that sentence, sneaking in, unheralded, unwanted. Is it simply a figure of speech, or is it in fact some nameless reader I already have in the back of my mind?) I don’t want to have a reader sitting in front of me, influencing what I write. They’ve spurned me in the past, so why should I bother with them now? When I wrote my last novel I had a reader in front of me. He was a creation, as fictional as my novel, but real nevertheless. He was my ideal audience and, when I was writing I’d ask myself, how will he take this, what will he make of that piece of news, will such and such be of interest to him? This is normal, I believe. But now I don’t want him. It’s too constraining to have a reader in front of you all the time. It’s like a guard dog, watching your every movement with a critical eye, barking whenever he’s displeased, whining when he wants something he hasn’t received, attacking you should you wander off his favoured path. I want to be free, to write only for myself – if that’s possible. Can putting a word down on a piece of paper ever be just for oneself? I could argue that I’m keeping this journal now in order to remind myself of these incidents in my life later. But if it’s not a strict reminder note – Go to the shops and buy some butter – then surely those words are for someone else? Ultimately.
I notice a certain reluctance on my part to pick up my rifle, my Steyr SSG. Is note taking my excuse, or is it because of the fiasco with the publisher’s reader? Although I came to Sarajevo to be a sniper, I’m already wondering if I can get by with just talking to people and listening. But how long would it be before Santo and the others realised I was a fake? So I dutifully go through the motions, crouching by a window, rifle at the ready, staring across the river at the deserted city, half hoping no one will appear. But this afternoon someone did.
A man walked onto the bridge that crosses the Miljacka River just to the west of the Skenderija sports centre. It’s the bridge where the first person, a female student, was shot dead in the war, in 1992. The bridge has iron railings and narrow pavements on either side, with cobblestones in the centre. On the far bank is a building that appears to have been skinned alive by bullets and mortars, most of the red brickwork, like raw bleeding flesh, now clearly visible. Behind it are the ruins of the Parliament.
This man strolled onto the bridge as if he had all the time in the world. Having spent a couple of days watching people run everywhere, even when they were carrying containers of water or baskets of food, such behaviour struck me as unusual. It was noticeable because it was different. He was so calm and relaxed he could have been taking a stroll in Hyde Park on a Sunday afternoon. He was probably one of the suicidal ones Santo had told me about, those who stroll along the pavements of Sarajevo as if they’re out shopping in London or Paris. ‘It is up to you if you waste those idiots. I think if they are so keen to die, we should oblige, we should help them on their way. But others say we should not help them, that we should make them suffer. Why kill them if they want to die? They say, let those who want to die, live, and let us concentrate on killing the ones who want to stay alive.’ And he’d slapped me several times on the back, and laughed his machine-gun laugh, and taken another swig from his bottle of Slivovitz.
I watched the man for a few minutes before raising my rifle. My hands were shaking. Seeing he was making no attempt to keep under cover, he’d be an easy target. The nerve of the fellow surprised me. I was adjusting the SSG’s sights – windage, five-to-seven east–west, distance four hundred yards – not, I have to admit, with much enthusiasm, when he reached into his jacket pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes. He lit one, as calm as anything, as if he were in a commercial extolling the virtues of this particular brand. There was a certain theatricality about his movements, as if he were acting this ever-so-cool part. It was too bizarre and, to tell the truth, I was fascinated. I could scarcely believe what I was seeing. It was so crazy, this man enjoying his last cigarette, he had me captivated. He made me smile. I decided to join in the fun.
The dust kicked up just to his left, right at his feet, but he never moved, never turned round, didn’t even flinch. All he did was take another puff of his cigarette. I could see it clearly. I adjusted the rifle, took careful aim and put a shot to the other side of him, just to his right. Again I saw the dust kick up, but the man continued to puff away, leaning on the railings, staring down into the water as if these bullets cracking into the stone around him were of no concern or interest to him whatsoever. He treated the bullets like they were flies, some minor irritant, except that he was not even bothered to brush them aside. I’ll say that for him, he was cool, really cool. I liked him, he didn’t give a fuck about anything. I fired three or four more shots around him, the ricochets of which must have almost deafened him, but he never flinched. By this time it was as if we’d reached an agreement together; simultaneously agreeing, even though we were several hundred yards apart, that this was some kind of amusing game we were involved in, a game of bluff, a little joke between ourselves and, on my part at least, nothing fatal was about to occur. He finished his cigarette, dropped it on the pavement, ground it beneath his foot, raised his collar a little higher against the cold – as if he were the lead part in some B-grade detective movie – put his hands in his pockets and strolled off towards the city.
And there was this argument raging in my head as I tracked the man with my rifle. I couldn’t afford to let him go … could I? But nor was I too happy about shooting someone who was simply offering himself as a target. Why didn’t he keep under cover? It was too cold-blooded to shoot him like this. By now my heart was beating so violently, I could scarcely hold the SSG steady. I had my finger on the trigger. I held my breath … I was struggling with indecision. And as I hesitated, the man suddenly jerked forwards, his body hit with such force that he spun sideways and landed face up on the road. I was shocked. For a fraction of a second I thought I’d squeezed the trigger, then realised it must have been another sniper, possibly someone in the adjoining apartment block.
I had suspected there was one of our snipers nearby. It’s scarcely surprising. There’s no coordination of sniper positions as far as I can see: we don’t get together every morning to be allocated places to go. It’s totally haphazard, people heading off from camps around the city in any direction they want, many staying where they are overnight. But this other sniper was too close. Snipers are like large predatory animals. We need a lot of space between each other. Birds, small mammals, squirrels and suchlike can live surprisingly close to each other, even in adjoining trees. They don’t need a lot of territory. But lions, tigers, hippos, elephants – even the bears that are said to still roam these hills – they’re not keen to brush up against their neighbours. They need their space, they want air. It’s the same with snipers: we like a few hundred yards between us, then there’s no overlapping of interests, no conflict, and we’re not a menace to each other.
Work it out. The telescopic sight I’m using magnifies by the power of six. It places someone who is three hundred yards away from me just fifty yards away. Someone who is fifty yards from me might as well be in the same room. I can see the colour of his eyes and the stubble on his chin. So I’m not too happy being that close to another killing machine, even if he’s on the same side as me. I never forget: all that can beat a sniper is another sniper. Already I’ve learnt not to trust anyone.
The fact is, we had our own targets, my neighbour and I. I always divide up my area of operations as if I were slicing a cake. I’m at the centre, and the thin slices fan outwards as far as the eye can see. There were the bus and train stations, the National Museum, the Holiday Inn hotel, the mustard-yellow hotel where overseas journalists stay, and behind that, twin office towers. If I could shoot someone near the hotel and on Snipers’ Alley – so-called because it’s the main road that leads out of town to the airport and is open to all of us up in the hills – there was a good chance of making it onto the evening news back home. It was even possible that my parents, sitting in front of their telly, might see one of my victims crumple to the pavement. Look at our son. Doing a fine job, isn’t he? Gone and hit another one. Makes you proud. Some of the overseas news cameramen, I’ve been told, leave their videos running all day, covering the intersection in front of the Holiday Inn hotel, hoping they’ll catch the actual moment someone is shot and killed. Ideally, they’d like to recreate Robert Capa’s photograph of the soldier killed in the Spanish Civil War. They’d make a tidy sum for such a scoop, a well-paid, legitimate snuff movie.
My neighbouring sniper must have been facing the city proper, including the old town, the main post office, the City Hall and the National Library, and mosques and offices. This means he’d definitely shot someone in my sector. What’s more, and even more worrying, is the fact he obviously saw me shooting around the cigarette smoker, intentionally missing him. I wondered what would happen if he told everyone back in camp.
Despite the cold, I was almost blinded by sweat. The cigarette smoker lay motionless. He wasn’t about to inhale again, that was for sure. I looked towards the open door, fearful that my failure, or indecision, had been witnessed. I couldn’t believe I’d failed again. I told myself that I’d been close to succeeding. I’d just been unnerved by the fact the man hadn’t been running, hadn’t been trying to hide. I’d been frozen by his immobility, by his naked vulnerability. It would have been too close to murder. I needed him to have run, to have been like one of those rabbits in Mr Sinclair’s field darting – no, haring – for the safety of its burrow. Then it might have been possible.