Rock and Hard Places (18 page)

“Iz zer a problem?” he asks.

There’s no answer to that.

Travelling does this: you reach a point at which it dawns on you with crystal clarity that you are a fool, that through your own choice, you are not at home, comfortable and content, but out in the middle of nowhere, miserable, exhausted, bored and annoyed, and you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Often, provoked by an amusingly-named foreign snack food, you will do both. Then, it’s like yawning: one person starts, everyone else follows.

There’s no stopping us now. Everything is hysterically, convulsingly funny. Trees. Roads. The Slovenian border. Hills. Rivers.
Monopoly
. The ritual that has developed for getting back onto the truck after getting off at a stop—on climbing aboard, you must now shout, “Morning, Fawlty!” to which everyone else on the bus replies, “Morning, Major!” to which you, in turn, enquire, “Have you seen my paper?” to which the bus choruses, “It’s under your arm,” whereupon you say, “Ah, so it is,” and sit down, and await the next person, who climbs on and shouts, “Morning, Fawlty!” et cetera et cetera.

“The time has come,” intones Dave as solemnly as a hopelessly giggling man can manage, “for . . . Billy Duffy! Ian Astbury! Ladies and gentlemen . . . The Cult!”

He loads the tape. The effect is devastating. The Cult’s collected videos would probably provoke a fair degree of mirth at a toddler’s funeral. In our current state, it’s like pumping the truck full of nitrous oxide. As the screen fills with Astbury preening and prancing through
“Love Removal Machine” and “Wildflower” like some satin-wrapped heavy metal morris dancer, most of us can no longer breathe properly.

“LOVE REMOVAL!”

We sing along, punching the air on the downbeat.

“LOVE REMOVAL MACHEE-EEE-INE!”

Another running joke is born: at every stop from here on, someone will announce, unnecessarily, that they’re “just going to buy a Coke from the drinks MACHEE-EEE-INE,” or “getting some tabs from the cigarette MACHEE-EEE-INE.” Random exclamatory shrieks of “LAWD have MERCY!” also become popular.

The guards at the Croatian border don’t delay us much—a surprise, given that customs officers generally react to the approach of musicians much like hungry lions do to an elderly wildebeest that has lost its way home, and that Croatian customs officers are hard work even by the standards of their profession. We make Karlovac by dinnertime. Adam has been reading the “Welcome To Croatia” leaflet we’ve been given at the border.

“Can we stop at Mrs. Migginsovic’s cevapcici shop?” he asks.

We find lodgings above a restaurant.

 

THE MORNING DRIVE through Karlovac takes place in near total silence. Of the eleven of us on the bus, only myself and Max have spent any time in the former Yugoslavia. The rest would only have seen things like this on the news, or in films. Karlovac has taken a bit of a caning.

The only things you can possibly say about the sight of a recently ruined neighbourhood, deserted by all life but weeds, are insufferably banal. A couple of people say them anyway, and nobody responds. I was in Karlovac about a year ago, and it looks now like it looked then, like it had just gone a dozen rounds with a much larger opponent. The sorry truth is that Karlovac, compared to many towns in the region, got off fairly lightly.

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. “Bugger 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 shifting 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 cafés 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 pass a hill into which the word “TITO” has been mown in letters several storeys high. The homage is overgrown, but still readable. It was in Jajce, in 1943, that Josip Broz Tito was officially declared head of a new Yugoslavia according to a constitution 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 passes through the entity known as Republika Srpska, the Serb-controlled portion of this effectively partitioned 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 passports, 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
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 fucking 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
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 fuck 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 scrapes.

“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 passenger seat up front opens the side door and lets us all out.

“Stupid bitch,” 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 pass 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 bloody 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
,
Pet
and
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 circumstances, 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 Lancashires 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 fuck 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
-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 Lancashires, 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 shelled their own city in a bid to elicit western sympathy (this argument collapses beneath the slightest weight of logic: the Bosnian government, given the circumstances at the time, had neither the ammunition to spare nor the need to manufacture supplementary atrocity).