Kevin Sullivan - The Longest Winter

‘It’s a waste of time to go there,’ Sanela said. ‘They know even less than we do, and what they know they won’t tell.’

‘They have coffee,’ Brad said. Sanela pretended to be astonished. Coffee was difficult to come by. ‘And central heating,’ he added. Her eyes opened wider. Central heating had vanished long ago. People heated their apartments with wood-burning stoves. Except that wood was hard to come by too.

Outside, there were flashes as howitzers in the surrounding hills registered positions further to the north, and then they began to hear the rat-tat-tat of small-arms fire near the river.

‘Perhaps we should go with him to see the General,’ Zlatko said. ‘Perhaps he finds things out and he doesn’t share these things with us.’ He sipped his beer and screwed up his fine face. ‘Weaker and weaker! Soon we’ll be drinking lemonade.’

Opposite sat three soldiers, the one in the centre overweight and scowling. The women sitting with the soldiers wore a kind of uniform: leather trousers, tight sweaters, heavy make-up. The men lounged with their rifles piled behind the long, plastic-covered bench. The three couples watched the rest of the clientele insolently, as though the others in the bar were a kind of casual cabaret.

‘I despair when I see them,’ Zlatko said.

Sanela whispered, ‘You should not presume that people do not speak English.’

‘They know as much English as Brad knows of our language,’ Zlatko said.

Brad asked, ‘Who are they?’

‘The one in the middle is a deputy to the Special Forces commander. Before the war he ran a nightclub. I don’t know about the others.’

Brad glanced at the soldiers. The scowling one stared back.

‘How will we win when the high command spend their time here?’ Zlatko said. He became suddenly angry. He was struck by the way they lolled there, filled with the smugness of stupidity and power. They were the kind of people, Zlatko thought, for whom the chaos of conflict is congenial, for whom the collapse of order represents a release from irksome obligation. Zlatko didn’t like this. That was why he’d used his family connections to avoid being drafted. He didn’t object to being exposed to danger. He objected to being exposed to danger by the kind of men who were now sitting on the other side of the bar.

‘I think we’re attracting attention,’ Brad said under his breath. ‘Better to change the subject.’

Zlatko was irritated by Brad’s timidity. He looked at the soldiers again. They stared back at him.

Sanela now affected unconcern. ‘We are a civil society. They can hear if they like,’ she said.

She finished her cigarette and stubbed it out. She wished she could brush her teeth. She wished she could bathe. She hated the dirt more than anything. She hated the smell. ‘We shouldn’t have come,’ she added. ‘It makes me despondent.’

Brad raised his arm and caught the barmaid’s attention.

Milena came over to where they sat. Brad thought she looked somehow older than when they had met earlier in the week. She certainly looked more self-assured. She had come to the Chamber Theatre, to the room at the top of the building where Sanela and Zlatko had lived since the start of the siege. Sanela had arranged the meeting; she said Milena could tell Brad what it was like in Foča at the start of the war. ‘She saw everything,’ Sanela said. ‘You can do an eyewitness story.’ Foča had split down the middle; neighbours turned on neighbours; well-armed paramilitaries arrived from outside and for several days in the early summer there was an orgy of arson and murder.

But the interview didn’t go the way Sanela had hoped. Milena kept coming back to what life was like before things fell apart. She was vague about the mayhem (‘There were terrible scenes!’ ‘Such crimes were committed!’ ‘Men behaved with wickedness!’). She shook her head and looked into the middle distance with an expression of infinite sadness, but when Brad asked for details, she stuck doggedly to generalities, and then she returned to how nice things were in Foča before the war, and when she spoke about that she smiled and it was as if her entire personality was transformed by the memory.

Brad would have pressed Milena more, but his interest in the events of the summer was not as great as Sanela had assumed. He was happy to write a feature story based on the account of a refugee, but he was more interested in what he hoped Milena could tell him about current events in Sarajevo. He’d learned that she was the girlfriend of one of the top commanders and that was the real reason he wanted to meet her. He was looking for inside information.

The interview at the theatre was the closest Sanela and Brad had come to having a quarrel. When he tried to ask Milena about Jusuf, Sanela stopped translating. ‘We’re not here for that!’ she said in a low angry voice. ‘I fixed this so you could ask her about Foča! She won’t tell you anything about what’s going on in the city. She doesn’t know anything!’

It was a wasted hour. Milena wouldn’t talk about the horror she had witnessed, just about what a wonderful place Foča was before the paramilitaries came, and Sanela wouldn’t translate questions about whether the government troops were getting the weapons and provisions they required. But at least there was a stove in Sanela’s room, and Milena had brought coffee which she produced from the corner of a paper bag. They sat in the warmth and drank coffee and smoked Brad’s cigarettes.

Now, as Milena walked through the crowd, she responded to the shouted drinks orders; she soothed away impatience and complaints, firm and familiar. She laughed a lot; she looked as though she was having the time of her life.

‘ Bred !’ she said when she reached their table. His name sounded better, he thought, the way she pronounced it. ‘ How are you ?’

She laughed and then looked at him expectantly. Brad said he was well, and Sanela translated for him.

It occurred to Brad that the two things he could usefully have got from this woman, an eyewitness refugee story and some inside information on the thoughts of a government commander, she had declined to provide. Yet he wanted to know more about her. The violence around them didn’t just wreak havoc and destruction on physical things; it imposed itself on the stories of people’s lives. Brad wanted to know about Milena’s life beyond the war.

Sanela said something and Milena nodded happily and looked at Brad.

‘I told her you haven’t written your piece about Foča yet but you will,’ Sanela said.

‘Tell her the interview was very useful,’ Brad lied.

Sanela translated.

Milena seemed pleased. Then, with a seamless transition to business that was part of her trade, she asked them what they would like to drink.

In their language, Brad ordered three more beers. Sanela and Zlatko gave ironic cheers. Milena grinned, and spoke very fast in reply. It was part of the joke. She knew that he wouldn’t understand the words but he would understand the meaning. She was accepting his order. He nodded and grinned.

‘So!’ Zlatko said, slapping Brad’s knee. ‘What news?’ He laughed. When he was with Sanela he had the habit of laughing after even the simplest statements. She made him feel euphoric.

Milena returned with drinks on a tray.

A popular rock song had just begun, drenching the packed room with a succession of chords and connecting arpeggios. The effect, Brad thought, was to slow time down. When he gave Milena a note for twenty German marks, it was as though they occupied a space in the crowd where there were just two people.

She smiled and said, ‘ Thank you !’

‘Sanela,’ Brad said, looking at Milena, ‘tell her the interview was really useful but I think I was asking the wrong questions. Perhaps she would talk to me one day about Foča before the war. Perhaps I could write a story about what it was like when there was peace.’