Sandstealers

Watching him in full flow, Rachel decided his age added to his aura. Most of the others were in their twenties, but he was more than a decade older. He’d been there from day one, living and breathing the battles of Bosnia Herzegovina and, before that, Croatia. UN spokesmen, NATO generals, EU diplomats—they all came and went, but Danny was a constant, rarely taking holidays or retreating into comfort zones. He had written the seminal book on the war even before it was over, and his reports were required reading in the White House and Downing Street. He was everything Rachel admired in a journalist: smart and funny, ethical and angry. She decided to forget his disparaging remark about desperadoes: she must have misinterpreted it.

‘It’s like all wars,’ Danny thundered on, rampaging from one subject to another, ‘it’s about good and evil, and it’s also about religion.’

Rachel would discover later he said things like this to provoke Edwin, knowing this loyal English Catholic resented the idea that his God should be blamed for all the troubles of the world.

Edwin came to His defence as always. ‘Oh yeah, it’s always God’s fault, isn’t it, never man’s.’

‘They’re a lethal combination,’ shrugged Danny.

‘You know what I find strange, though, Danny; you think you’re this great atheist—what is it you call yourself, an atheist fundamentalist?—but even you need someone watching over you.’

‘Meaning?’

‘All that superstition, those magic bloody boots. You seriously believe you’ll die if you ever take them off. Okay, admittedly I sometimes hang out in churches with incense and relics, but I don’t think it’s too much weirder.’

Danny appeared to find this territory treacherous so he moved to firmer ground.

‘The point is, history is littered with religious wars. Islamist expansion in the seventh century, the Crusades in the eleventh, the Thirty Years’ War…the list goes on and on and on. And what the hell is Israel and the Palestinians, if it’s not religious?’

Edwin gave up. There was no point in arguing with Danny when he was at full throttle. He represented not a soul on earth, except his paper and some of his readers, and yet he always had to be right. He’d only end an argument when he’d won it. He pummelled away at people, grinding them down.

As the debate petered out, Danny looked up and caught Rachel’s eye. Perhaps she should get up and thank him again for the helmet, or make a joke about how big it was on her and kept slipping off. She tried to give him a half-smile of acknowledgement, yet if he saw it, he didn’t reciprocate. In fact, was that a scowl that was spreading slowly across his face, the beginnings of a thunderstorm that destroys a perfect sky? She was probably mistaken; he was just tired and irritable.

At her end of the table, the conversation was less erudite. It ebbed and flowed before settling, for no discernible reason, around Woody Allen and whether or not he could be called a good director, and Madonna, and whether or not she could be called a good musician. Compare and contrast. Rachel, however, wanted to escape America and her flawed celebrities, not spend all night discussing them. She pretended to listen to the gossipy chatter around her, while filtering it out and concentrating on Danny’s words instead.

After a while she slipped away to the toilet and, having peed, took a long look in the mirror and congratulated herself on a first day of achievement. Not bad, Miss Kelly. Not bad at all.

It was only as she was starting to make her way back towards the dining room that she heard Danny’s voice rising above the hubbub, as impassioned as it had been when she first walked in. It hit her like a sudden gust of wind.

‘But, Jesus, how could she? Does she have any idea, any fucking idea, how much pleasure she’ll have given him? Even his wife doesn’t do that. I mean, hell, she’s not exactly a world statesman. She’s a hack, and a pretty minor one at that, but he’ll have loved it even so. She’s an American, after all. He’ll milk it, you can bet your life he will.’

A pretty minor one at that. The words were rushing around her head at horrible velocity, a fairground ride spinning out of control.

‘Oh, don’t be so hard on her,’ someone said; a man’s voice, she thought. Kaps, the guy from Reuters. Yes, it was definitely that distinctive Afrikaner accent. ‘Look, it’s her first day, eh? So what if she shook his hand and he gave her a kiss? He was trying it on, the old bull. You can’t blame him, he doesn’t get to see too many pretty girls up there in his lair. So she made a mistake, didn’t get out of his way in time. Well, it’s not exactly going to change the war. And anyway, she’s a rookie. Wet behind the ears. Give her a break, will you, Dan?’

‘And what if she’d kissed Hitler? Or Stalin? Would you still be giving her a break?’

‘I doubt she’s into necrophilia.’

‘It’s not funny.’

‘Yes it is! Lighten up, you sanctimonious bastard.’ It was Becky. Good old Becky, thought Rachel, paralysed in her hiding place. ‘Loads of people shake his hand. I saw that guy from the BBC doing it the other day.’

‘We don’t,’ said Danny, categorically. We, the Something Must Be Done Brigade, who despise the Serbs and demand that the world should act against them. We, the gang that Rachel wanted to be part of. Not now, though. Club rules broken. Membership denied. ‘And we certainly don’t kiss him.’

‘Now you kissing Karadzic!’ Kaps shouted out. ‘What a pretty picture!’

It was another valiant attempt to puncture Danny’s righteous indignation. Rachel heard the whole table laugh. She silently thanked Kaps for defending her, she thanked him from the bottom of her aching heart.

Still, she had made a mistake. Everyone conceded that much, her defenders as well as her detractors. Fuck, Rachel said, almost aloud. I’ve only just got here and already I’ve screwed up. Not an inaccurately reported fact, not a missed scoop, but an error of judgement that would offend and alienate those she most wanted to be close to. She should return to her meal, but all she wanted to do was to scurry back to the sanctuary of the toilet and lock the door. She did neither, staring at a curled-up, dried-out piece of wallpaper that seemed to resemble her career.

A pretty minor one at that.

Maybe that’s all she would ever, could ever, be. Maybe Billy Kelly was right and she should have stayed with him, where she belonged. Maybe Maybe Airlines would have to fly her straight back to Arlington and that box bedroom she never should have left. Thoughts of home made her want to go upstairs, curl into a foetal ball and fall asleep, but somehow she had to carry on: it had been almost five minutes and she had to go back in. Later, she would think it took more guts to walk back to the table than on to any battlefield.

By the time she got there, the conversation had moved on. Only Becky saw the dewy glint of tears she was trying to hold back.

In her room that night, Rachel read more of Danny’s book. She didn’t much feel like it, but she needed to have her faith in him restored. It was towards the end of the chapter on Sarajevo.

The only reason I paid any attention at all to Ljubica was because she was a little girl with no front teeth and her hair in pigtails. I guessed she was six or seven, and when I walked past her, near the Unis towers, she was skipping in the snow and laughing hard. In Sarajevo, laughter had become something out of the ordinary, enough to get you noticed. I smiled at her and she smiled back.

I had just turned the corner when I heard the mortar’s impact, and part of me knew who its victim had to be. I ran back the way I had come and she was already in the arms of a heavily bearded man—her father, I assumed, though I dared not ask. He was screaming at the sky, accusing it of this atrocity. He shook a fist at whatever gods up there he thought had done this. Ljubica’s little body had been torn apart, her pigtails were wet with blood. Somewhere in her dying face, I thought I could see a trace of that same smile she had given me, that laughter that got her noticed.

It was the Lowenstein technique again. She doubted she’d ever have the confidence to write about laughter being ‘enough to get you noticed’, but whereas the day before, she’d have admired its audacity, now she thought it might just be corny. She asked herself if it was all entirely true. Had Ljubica really smiled at him, or was that just poetic licence? Had he embellished his story, as he embellished his well-worn anecdotes at the table? What was it Becky had called his writing? Fictional. For a moment she wondered whether Ljubica even existed, or Nermina either, for that matter.

Becky knocked on Rachel’s door again, with more Vranac.

‘I brought something to cheer you up.’

‘But I’m absolutely…’

‘I know you heard. That man’s just so far up himself sometimes.’

Rachel gulped down the dry red wine and soon it was working its wicked magic. Becky drank in sympathy. Rachel was grateful for her company. She might have been suspicious why this perpetually cheerful stranger had latched on to her quite so fast, but on a night like tonight Rachel realised that if Becky needed a friend in Sarajevo, then so did she. Becky had stood up to Danny for her, and she couldn’t ask for more than that.

‘You need to learn to ignore him. And anyway, it was our fault. We should have held you back from snogging the crazy doctor.’

‘It was a peck not a snog,’ protested Rachel.

‘Well anyway, I find him quite attractive in an older-man kind of way. Don’t tell Danny.’

The drink helped turn Rachel’s shame to anger. How dare Daniel Lowenstein—or Danny or whatever the fuck he called himself—who barely knew her, by the way—judge and condemn her, and on the very first story of her on-the-road career? Well, fuck him, the wine said; fuck him and his sanctimonious bullshit.

‘He was my hero, you know.’ Rachel might as well have been confessing to a sordid fantasy.

‘Who, Karadzic or Lowenstein?’

‘Lowenstein, you idiot.’

‘We noticed. Listen, he still can be. He’s a great guy and a fabulous journo. We love him to death. We go back a long way.’

Becky started talking about how they had all met three years earlier during the Serbs’ other war, against the Croats. Edwin had just left the army in 1991, knowing plenty about war but nothing about journalism. Kaps was the opposite, an experienced wire reporter but new to the battlefield. Danny had taken both of them under his wing. Becky had been there at the same time, with another photographer called Frederique.

‘Freddie, we called her. She was only 20, and way more talented than me. We were all driving in a convoy to Vukovar one day, the five of us. The Serbs had flattened it, as only they know how. We were in soft-skins and a round came through the window. Took off half of her face, that lovely, lovely face. The worst thing was her eyes, though. Her agency in Paris paid for the best eye surgeon in the world. She couldn’t lose the gift of sight, the gift of taking pictures. She couldn’t; but she did. The operation failed.’

‘I’m so sorry. What happened to her?’

‘Freddie? Oh she’s alive and kicking, but her world’s a darkroom otherwise she’d be out here with us now.’

Rachel wondered if she’d been lined up as a replacement and it sent a shiver through her, but Becky was moving on, so fast it was hard to keep up.

‘Just take it as a warning. Anyway, d’you want to know how to really piss him off—Danny, I mean? When we were up there—in Pale—this really seedy guy offered me a kind of facility, to go and see some Serbs in action. I told him I didn’t want just any soldier, I wanted a sniper. I want to know what it’s like to be on the other end of that high-powered rifle. I want that picture of him looking down on his victims, to see his finger on the trigger, his eye gazing through the telescopic sights. Picture of the bloody year. Well guess what? The guy agreed.’

‘You’re kidding?’

‘Nope. Said they’re going to line up Sarajevo’s kingpin sniper for us.’

‘Us?’

‘Of course. I do the pics, you do the words.’

Becky explained how they would cross over the front line into Grbavica. It was only a stone’s throw from the Holiday Inn, but they would have to go the long way round, across the airport and back into the city from the Serb side, stopping off at Lukavica barracks for Republika Srpska paperwork and a minder.

‘In peacetime, we’d be there in five minutes, but it could take us three hours. Still, I guarantee it’ll be a story. They say he kills half a dozen Muslims every day. Most of them babies in their prams, probably.’

‘So why would he want to talk about it to us?’

‘Because he’s a cocky little shit, I expect. Pleased as punch he’s top of the league and wants the whole world to read all about it. It’s the whole Serb propaganda thing.’

‘And we’re playing along with it? I’m not so sure I want to be part of that.’

‘Oooh, so we’ve decided we’re not covering the Serb side of this war, have we? Fresh into town, and we’ve already worked out who’s in white and who’s in black?’

‘Ain’t exactly rocket science.’

‘Ain’t exactly objective, either. I think you’ve been listening to Mr Lowenstein after all. Look, the point is, we crucify this sniper prick. Let him hang himself. Whatever he says, your readers end up hating him.’

The prospect of a good old-fashioned exclusive—her first in Sarajevo—started to appeal to her. She didn’t want to let Becky down, not after she’d shown such solidarity, and if she lost more of Danny’s respect—well, he didn’t seem to have too much for her in the first place. Before she knew it, she could feel the moral high ground collapsing beneath her feet as if there’d been a landslide.

‘Okay, deal’

They performed a drunken high-five in which their hands very nearly missed each other and set about planning their day out on the Serb side of town, a day that would haunt them both for the rest of their lives.

They find him on the fifteenth floor of a boarded-up apartment block, hiding out in a child’s bedroom. A doll’s house lies broken on the carpet, its roof smashed in. Little plastic people are scattered around it, dead or horribly wounded. Schoolbooks are littered everywhere, an empty satchel nearby. It is as if the child has had a tantrum, hurling her belongings from the shelves, but she has gone: it is the Serbs who have ransacked her room, of course, looking to loot money or jewellery, but finding only dolls and toys and fairy stories. And in place of the pretty schoolgirl who used to live here, the room has a new occupant: a man with a bandana round his head and a tattoo on his left forearm depicting the symbol of Greater Serbian unity—four Cs back to back, ‘their version of the swastika’, as Danny called it. By his side there is a bottle of slivovitz—homemade brandy. It is full. Perhaps he does not drink until he has something to celebrate.

His name is Dragan and he lurks between the girl’s Disney curtains that show not emblems of Serbian nationhood but scenes from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. He is gazing out across the Miljacka River, looking for a kill. He is a god, dispensing life and death as he sees fit.

‘Zdravo,’ mutters the sniper when they come in: hello. He turns round briefly to check them out before hauling his eyes back to the streets below, the eagle in search of prey. He only has four hits that day, two of them kills for sure. So far the pickings have been slim. His masters in Pale will be disappointed. Productivity must be increased. The dream of Greater Serbia must come true.

‘Zdravo’, say Becky and Rachel in reply. They have come with Alija, Edwin’s translator who is not long out of college but already, with his small spectacles and an impeccably groomed beard, bears the permanently quizzical look of a university professor. He’s half Serb—on his father’s side—and when he’s in this bit of town, he changes his name to Bosko. He enjoys his alter ego as though he’s creating one of the characters in the books he reads.

But what are they doing here, exchanging pleasantries with a man who is gratuitous Serbian cruelty personified? It seemed such a good idea when they were knocking back the Vranac, basking in their defiance of Danny Lowenstein, but now they have entered the sniper’s lair, they can scarcely believe they are in his presence: it’s a journalistic scoop but an ethical abomination. Kissing Karadzic—even having sex with him—could hardly compare. Rachel dares not even imagine what Danny would say if he could see them now.

A face at last for the anonymous marksman who is terrorising this part of Sarajevo. He turns to them briefly. He is young, probably no more than 25. Green eyes, electric green. Becky supposes he works with them in the same way she does: looking through the sights of a gun, looking through the lens of a camera—the sniper and the snapper are perhaps not so very different. Both have their victims.

Most of the time, he stays hunched over his gun and with his back to them. He is reluctant to leave his work, even for a minute. He has a stilted conversation with Alija, two such different products of the same crumbling country: trained killer and trained intellectual. A redness is spreading across Alija’s erudite face. His eyes are watering.

‘What is it? What did he say to you?’ asks Becky.

‘Nothing, just chit-chat.’

‘Come on—what? You look upset.’

‘No, really, I…’

‘You’re here to translate for us, not choose the bits we’re allowed to hear.’

‘All right, all right. I told him I’m half Serb and he asked me which half. I said from my father’s side. He said in that case, he’d like to fuck the cunt of my mother and after he’d finished, to slice it open with his sharpest hunting knife, and carry on cutting up through her body until he reached her throat, and then he’d put his cock in there as well. Satisfied?’

‘Shit, I’m sorry.’

The sniper talks some more and this time Alija translates simultaneously, lest anyone accuse him of holding back.

‘His name is Dragan. Don’t be afraid, he says. Come up and join him here. He says it’s his window on the world.’

Becky and Rachel creep forward nervously, worried a rival sniper from the Bosnian government might pick them off, and already trying to think through their potential complicity in the assassin’s work. Still, it is why they have come, isn’t it? To get Sarajevo’s other story. And to get the picture. Picture of the bloody year.

They stand either side of him, peering down into the streets on the Muslim side of town, their side of town. Only a few hundred yards away is the nauseating yellow of the Holiday Inn itself. They can’t help watching the city as the sniper does, scanning it, scouring it for signs of life, for potential targets. Every now and then matchstick figures dash from their cover, waiting for the crack and the whistle and—if their luck is out this chilly morning—the sudden, catastrophic explosion of pain.

The matchsticks need to make life-and-death decisions every minute of every day. Which route to take, whether to walk or run, whether to bear a fatalistic straight course down a street or to zigzag, duck and dive, in and out of alleyways. Anyone can be a target any time. The more vulnerable the victim, the keener the sniper is to select them for the kill, for it serves as proof to Bosnians that they can never expect even the most meagre drop of mercy from the Serbs, only ceaseless cruelty. An elderly pensioner here, queuing up for food, a mother and her baby there. Death has its eye on them, and death is a handsome young man called Dragan.

‘He says conditions are perfect. A cold clear day is the best. It means people wrap up with lots of clothes.’

‘Why’s that good, then?’ Rachel isn’t sure she even wants to know the answer.

‘He says because it makes them bigger targets. And if there’s no fog or mist or rain to obscure his vision…well, so much the better.’

‘Does he…enjoy it?’ she asks.

A pause. The sniper squinting hard into his sights, dozens of tiny facial muscles stretched hard in concentration. Eyeing up a kill, or just thinking about an answer?

‘He says it’s a job, like any soldier’s job. He’s good at it, he says, so there’s a certain satisfaction. But it’s not so different from an artillery gunner or an infantryman. In this war, he says, every Serb must play his part. Unity is strength.’

The answers sound like he’s been drilled in Serb propaganda slogans, taught them by rote just so they can be recited to Rachel and Becky.

‘So how many kills?’ Becky decides it’s time to cut to the chase.

‘He says today or altogether?’

‘Both.’

‘Two today, and maybe a couple of hundred altogether. He says he doesn’t keep count. Anyway, he doesn’t always go for the kill, he says. Sometimes you hit them in the knees, just to bring them down. It ties up enemy resources and manpower to look after a casualty, whereas if someone’s dead, they just have to be buried. Nice and quick, he says. Too quick.’

Rachel writes it all down in her notebook, scribbling furiously, cursing the fact that she’s never bothered to learn shorthand. While she scrawls away it is Becky who is thinking up the next question, reporting now rather than taking pictures. Her conviction is that to photograph people properly, you need to understand them.

‘But sometimes he goes straight for the kill, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘So how does he decide—you know, when to maim and when to kill?’

The question is translated and when Dragan hears it, he puts down the long, ungainly rifle. His voice falls to a hush and Alija has to ask him to repeat what he has said.

‘He says when the mood suits him.’

‘And what sort of mood is he in today?’

A long pause before he answers.

‘He says stick around and you’ll find out.’

‘Is he okay if I take his picture?’

‘Sure, but he wants to wear something over his face. And you mustn’t use his name. Not even just his first name.’

Why so jumpy, they wonder, when he’s so high up here, so invulnerable, doling out mercy or cruelty upon a whim, allowing life to carry on as normal or snatching it away in a fraction of a second?

Dragan pulls a purple handkerchief from his back pocket and ties it over his mouth and nose, cowboy style. He is hiding his face, just as he is hiding his body behind these Snow White curtains. As Rachel and Becky study him, it occurs to them this is a very personal style of soldiering: the crew who fire their shell or their mortar bomb have no idea who it is they kill, and neither does the humble infantryman who sprays machine-gun fire from the hip. The sniper, on the other hand, selects his victims with the coldest calculation. He knows what they cannot know, that they have been hand-picked for the kill, that they are about to die.

Bow down before the God of Sarajevo.

With the bandana round his head and the handkerchief covering the lower half of his face, there is little left to see now except the predator’s piercing green eyes. Becky, who’s been in a trance for a moment or two, starts to work at last. The long zoom hanging on her shoulder is unused; instead she selects the short zoom round her neck, for this is to be a close-up study of a killer. At first there is too much daylight streaming in, and his face ends up a silhouette. Then she gets it right: the perfect portrait. She’s even come up with a caption: ‘Eyes of a Sniper’. It will make cover for Newsweek, no question. She is so absorbed in her shot that she doesn’t realise he’s preparing for his.

An enormous crack, the window shaking.

The shutter clicks, again and again.

Another crack and then another in quick succession. A pure, clean sound, echoing slightly amid the boarded-up apartment blocks.

Before she knows it, Becky has burnt off a roll of Fujicolor film, and grabs another from the pouch around her waist.

Sniper and snapper at work together, in tandem.