Part 7 (2/2)

My flesh starts crawling properly when we get to Slunj. I've been here before, as well, but it couldn't look more different. A little less than a year ago, I came this way out of the Bosnian town of Cazin with two employees of Feed the Children-”Bill” and ”Ted” from a previous visit, described elsewhere in this volume-with whom I'd just travelled to the Bihac Pocket in the days after Croatia's offensive against the Serbian population of Krajina. Bill and Ted were giving me a lift back to Zagreb.

Slunj was deserted that afternoon. Its largely ethnically Serb population had decamped about a week previously, rather than take their chances with the advancing Croatian army. There was some evidence of fighting-the occasional shot-away shopfront, the odd rocket-propelled-grenade hole punched through a wall, footpaths chewed up by tank tracks, buckled bridges on the outskirts of the city, blown by the fleeing inhabitants-but Slunj was mostly overwhelmingly silent. Our Landcruiser was the only traffic.

As we drove through Slunj, devilment seized Bill. ”b.u.g.g.e.r this creeping about,” he said. ”I'm going home.” As we drove through side streets at crawling speed, watching for mines on the road, he explained that his organisation had a house in Slunj, in which Bill had lived for much of the last couple of years. We found the house, opened the front door-very, very slowly-walked in and found ourselves face to face with half a dozen Croatian soldiers in the process of looting the place.

Looking back, I have to say that Bill's command of the situation was admirable. My own instincts, on the grounds that the blokes in khaki had guns and were less than sober, would have been to say, ”Sorry to bother you, chaps, carry on, and let me know if you need a hand s.h.i.+fting anything-I'll be outside chewing my fist and praying.” Not Bill. He strode up to the soldier nearest us, indicated the box of books and clothes the hapless private was removing, and said, ”That's all mine.” He took the box from the astonished soldier and gave it to me. ”Put this in the truck, then come and help me with the rest.”

Upstairs, in what had been Bill's room, the windows were gone and there were bullets in the walls, one of which he souvenired with his pocketknife. We loaded more books, more clothes and other bits and pieces into more boxes and piled them into the Landcruiser. The soldiers, who regarded us throughout with a bafflement that suggested they thought we were some kind of slivovitz-induced mirage, said and did nothing to stop us.

”Right,” Bill said, back in the car. ”Let's get out of here before they change their minds.”

Slunj today is unrecognisable.

”Seems quite a cheerful place,” someone says, and they're right, it does. The streets bustle, the cafes are full, the bullet holes have been plastered over, the windows replaced. I just wonder how many of the people doing the bustling, coffee-drinking, plastering and glazing today lived here a year ago. Slunj, for centuries a mixed city of Serbs and Croats, is now liberally sprayed with Croat nationalist graffiti, and the Croatian checkerboard flies from every flagpole and many windows. Slunj has been ethnically cleansed to positively clinical standards.

The Bosnian border is no problem-we are, surely, going to pay for this luck somewhere down the line. We pause at a petrol station south of Bihac for a kickabout, which evolves into another attempt to recreate the key moment from the England vs. Scotland game of Euro '96. We get further this time, mostly because Max grudgingly agrees to be Garry MacAllister, and I decide I can cope with the Colin Hendry role, on the grounds that it only involves standing still and gawping up into the sky like some woad-smeared peasant terrified by an eclipse, as Paul Gascoigne (played by Stealth) flicks the ball over me.

It occurs to me to wonder why Stealth is called Stealth.

”He was in a band himself,” explains Adam. ”And it bombed.”

Near Jajce, we pa.s.s a hill into which the word ”t.i.tO” has been mown in letters several storeys high. The homage is overgrown, but still readable. It was in Jajce, in 1943, that Josip Broz t.i.to was officially declared head of a new Yugoslavia according to a const.i.tution drawn up by something grandly (and, all things since considered, ironically) called the Antifascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia. Part of this road through central Bosnia and Herzegovina pa.s.ses through the ent.i.ty known as Republika Srpska, the Serb-controlled portion of this effectively part.i.tioned country. Under the terms of the Dayton Peace Accords, at least as we've been led to understand it, troops of the Bosnian Serb Army may stop vehicles and inspect pa.s.sports, but no more. All the same, we're happy to get through this stretch without seeing any.

In the late afternoon, as we head through the hills towards Vitez, I'm sitting at the table in the rear, facing backwards, trying to read while keeping half an eye on the Monopoly Monopoly game in progress. The mood on board has settled into wearied, silent torpor. game in progress. The mood on board has settled into wearied, silent torpor.

The truck is rumbling up a gentle hill when Andy, in the driver's seat behind me, yelps, ”Jesus f.u.c.king Christ!” There's a squealing of tyres and deafening crash from somewhere to my right. I look up from my book: we've stopped very abruptly, but everything inside the truck-bags, bottles, suitcases, guitars, the Monopoly Monopoly set-is still moving, and most of it towards me. It all seems to happen very slowly and very quietly, and then very quickly and very noisily. set-is still moving, and most of it towards me. It all seems to happen very slowly and very quietly, and then very quickly and very noisily.

”What the f.u.c.k was that? What's happened?”

Everyone is shouting at once.

”Are you okay? Is everyone all right?”

Everyone seems to be, aside from a few sc.r.a.pes.

”Are you okay? I'm okay. He's okay. We're okay.”

Shaken, adrenalised, we must sound like a support group for recovering caffeine addicts. We've had an accident, obviously, though I can guess what everyone's first thoughts had been, on stopping suddenly on a road in Bosnia after hearing a loud bang.

The roadie who was sitting in the pa.s.senger seat up front opens the side door and lets us all out.

”Stupid b.i.t.c.h,” he says, gesturing at a red Renault sedan parked sideways across the road in front of us. It's not hard to figure out what's happened. The woman driving the car has tried to pa.s.s us going uphill on a blind corner-Bosnians have a tendency to drive like they're still being shot at-seen a truck coming the other way, and cut across in front of our truck, clipping the front left corner as she went. I feel suddenly quite ill as I realise what a close call we've had. That Andy, driving a right-hand-drive vehicle in a left-hand-drive country, even saw the Renault, is amazing. That he saw it in time to hit the anchors is miraculous. If he hadn't, and she'd clobbered us harder, there's nowhere we could have gone but off the road and down a steep incline before coming to rest, if we were lucky, in countryside which is as likely mined as not.

”No problems,” grunts Andy, but he's gone very pale. The woman in the Renault, meanwhile, isn't happy.

”She's got a baby in the car,” says Max, who understands some of the language. ”So she's angry with us.”

”She's angry with us?” snorts Andy. ”She'd be well advised to get out of here before I show her what angry really b.l.o.o.d.y means.”

”Should we wait for the police?” asks Phil.

”Christ, no,” says Max. ”We'll be filling in forms for days.”

He's right: it's a rule of third world travel that bureaucracy grows in inverse proportion to functioning infrastructure-the less that works, the more things you have to sign and stamp to get it to happen. The woman in the Renault seems to appreciate this herself and, after letting fly with another torrent of invective, which Max declines to translate, drives off.

We have a problem, however. Our plunge from 80 kilometres an hour to standstill in two yards flat has seized the brakes. The truck will not move, forward or backward.

”It's Daffy Ducked,” diagnoses Bill, in his doleful, treacle-thick Geordie accent. Our expedition has turned into a cross between Auf Wiedersehen Auf Wiedersehen, Pet Pet and and Gilligan's Island Gilligan's Island.

”It could be worse,” offers Dave. ”I mean, we could be broken down on a blind corner miles from anywhere in the middle of a mined battlefield just as it's starting to get dark.”

Someone hits him, and a contemplative silence descends.

”I'll pay for the pizza if someone else goes,” says Adam.

Someone hits him.

We do a fair bit of that thing blokes do when confronted by a malfunctioning motor vehicle, which is to say we stand around next to it scratching our chins and nodding sagely and discussing engine parts like we've got the first idea what any of them do. Someone rummages in the wreckage in the back and discovers an unbroached-and, amazingly, unbroken-crate of beer we've been carrying since Munich. It is warm but, in the circ.u.mstances, not unpleasant.

”So,” says Phil, asking the unanswerable. ”What are we going to do?”

The plan was to be in Sarajevo before nightfall. This is obviously not going to happen-the sun is beginning to set, and driving on Bosnian roads after dark is a pastime only for the heavily armoured or the sensationally stupid, though most of us would agree at this point that we qualify handsomely on the latter count.

”Mr. Fawlty,” says Adam, addressing Phil in a Spanish accent, ”I no want to work here no more. I go home to Barcelona to my mother and six aunts.”

With the stage set for the cavalry to ride in and save the day, the next best thing appears: a truck belonging to the Queen's Lancas.h.i.+res regiment serving with IFOR. They are stationed about an hour down the road near Vitez. We explain our predicament, they respond with more sympathy than we deserve, and hitch up a tow rope. Our truck doesn't move.

”What the f.u.c.k have you done to this?” they ask.

They try again. They might as well be attempting to pull St. Paul's up Fleet Street.

”Wait there,” says the sergeant. ”We'll go and get a mechanic.”

We wait there. Every ten minutes or so, Andy has another crack at getting the truck to move. At the fifth or sixth attempt, it lurches crankily forwards. We climb aboard and leave before it thinks better of it. We head off the soldiers coming back for us about half an hour up the road.

”You won't make Sarajevo tonight,” they say. ”Come and stay with us.”

In a fit of Partridge Family Partridge Family-style hey-let's-do-the-show-right-here enthusiasm, China Drum offer to play in the barracks, but by the time we get in, it's decreed too late for such frivolity. We decide we'll settle for a cold beer.

”No you won't,” grins a young officer with, I feel, unnecessary glee. Deep and real is our grief on discovering that we have been rescued by the only dry regiment in the British Army. The Queen's Lancas.h.i.+res, a corporal explains, have been forbidden alcohol since an incident involving a couple of drunk squaddies, a Saxon armoured personnel carrier and a few parked cars belonging to annoyed Bosnians. This corporal is never going to cut it as a spy; he further regales us with tales of the money he's made unloading army petrol on the local black market. He also essays the disgraceful lie that, during the siege of Sarajevo, Bosnian forces deliberately sh.e.l.led their own city in a bid to elicit western sympathy (this argument collapses beneath the slightest weight of logic: the Bosnian government, given the circ.u.mstances at the time, had neither the ammunition to spare nor the need to manufacture supplementary atrocity).

Sensing our disappointment at the lack of freely-flowing lager, the soldiers take us on a tour of the barracks, letting us climb around inside their Saxon APCs and look up into the surrounding hills through the sights of their rifles. It's very sweet of them, but the novelty is lost on me: my father is in the army in Australia, and I grew up in military barracks. If I wanted to play with tanks, I'd have stayed at home, where I could at least have got a drink. Still, we can't complain: the Lancas.h.i.+res feed us in their canteen, buy us a round of c.o.kes in their bar, round up some mattresses for us to kip on in the guard room, and see us off with hot, sweet tea and handshakes just after dawn.

ONLY A DAY late, we're in Sarajevo for lunch. Our rendezvous is Kuk, the venerable Sarajevo club in which China Drum will play tonight and tomorrow night. A few people have gathered here, clearly wondering what's happened to us. I'm happy to catch up with several friends, including unfeasibly attractive translator Ida, to whom I present a photo of Robert Smith that I got him to sign for her last time I interviewed him; sadly, she doesn't seem any more disposed towards marrying an unshaven hack in a bad Hawaiian s.h.i.+rt than she was last time. I also see Jim, who'd shown me around the Sarajevo suburb of Grbavica a few months previously, on the day it was handed back to the Bosnian government by its departing Serb population. Jim has been saving a delightful snippet for me: in the three weeks after we'd been pratting about in the ruined district, IFOR mine clearance operatives had discovered and removed 11,000 devices.

Our day at Kuk begins with a press conference, at which reporters from Sarajevo radio stations and magazines ask China Drum what they're doing here. To China Drum's credit, their att.i.tude is devoid of any righteous, crusading aspect. They happily admit to being hazy on the details of Balkan politics, and explain that their rationale was always less ”Why?” and more ”Why not?” They name their influences (The Police, Stiff Little Fingers, The Undertones, Husker Du, not The Cult) and recite the band's history. ”We used to play Wakefield snooker club for 12.50,” mourns Bill, to general mystification.

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