Sandstealers. Ben Brown
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‘Hey there! Look, I’m sorry to bother you, but I just wondered if you guys are heading up to Boz?’
Boz? No one who’d ever been to Bosnia would dream of calling it that, and it sounded even worse in a happy-go-lucky American accent. Boz, for Christ’s sake! They inspected her for a moment, this new girl, so breathlessly enthusiastic: she was pretty, with conventionally straight, shoulder-length brown hair parted on the left and a flurry of freckles that had fallen on the slopes of a ski-jump nose. No doubt they should have faded years ago, but they’d decided, stubbornly, to stick around.
‘Boz?’ said the lone female. She wore no make-up and was wearing a black woolly hat and a torn, blue Gore-Tex jacket. It tried to hide a body which was heavier than Rachel’s and not flattered by comparison. ‘Oh, I see. You mean Bosnia?’
Rachel had rather much too much going on in her head to detect the irony.
‘Yeah, I’m hoping to get on the flight, only the UN guys said we’re low priority.’
‘’Course we are!’ The accent was wild Australian, honed somewhere in the outback. ‘We’re the parasites, scum of the earth. Then again, not too many people are mad enough to want a plane ride into Sarajevo—that’s if the plane ever makes it. They don’t call it Maybe Airlines for nothing.’
‘That’s what they stamped in my passport.’
‘Maybe they give you a seat, maybe they don’t. Maybe it takes off, maybe it gets shot down…’
‘I’ll take my chances,’ Rachel said with a cool determination the Australian rather liked. She remembered her own first flight into Sarajevo two years earlier.
‘I’m Becky. Becky Cooper. I was just heading over to that shitty little café. Can I get you something? Whatever they put in your cup, they’ll add about half a sack of sugar. If that doesn’t get you going, you’re probably dead already.’
She let out the little laugh which, Rachel would discover, was the culmination of almost everything she said. She used laughter like bad punctuation—randomly, even when she wasn’t happy or when what she said wasn’t funny. Her face was round and lit up by a big white smile that never seemed to leave her. In time, Rachel would come to see the sadness that lay beneath it.
Becky stepped away from the others, who’d already lost interest in Rachel, or pretended they had, and the two women shook hands firmly, like men do.
That’d be great, thanks. Rachel Kelly, by the way. So who are you working for?’
‘Sigma. They sell my stuff on. Usually Newsweek in America, or Stern in Germany. Basically anyone who’ll pay.’
Rachel was impressed. Newsweek had been her weekly bible for years. She’d curled up in bed with it when her friends were reading teenage magazines about pop and puppy love and first-time sex.
Becky handed over a stash of damp, dog-eared notes for two small coffees. As they found a table, she yanked the woolly hat off her head. Balkan sun, fighting its way through grubby airport windows, appeared to backlight her. A tangle of curls tumbled down, flame-red in unexpected contrast to pale white skin. Rachel’s immediate thought was Queen Elizabeth the First, the Warrior Queen. A few days later, when she mentioned the comparison, Becky was unusually downcast. Virgin Queen more like, she said.
‘Anyway, good to meet you, Rachel Kelly. So who are you with then?’
‘No one, to be honest. It’s my first foreign assignment. And when I say assignment, I guess the truth is I’ve assigned myself.’
‘My God, that’s brave.’
‘It’s just something I’ve wanted to do…’ She paused, then mumbled, half hoping Becky wouldn’t hear the rest, ‘…for so long.’
Becky was disarmed. She was warming to this young American. It was what she liked about the war: you could meet someone and be their friend within days, or even hours. Spinoza, one of the other photographers, called it fast-food friendship.
‘Well, stick with me and I’ll show you the ropes.’
Rachel felt the tension slip away from her. As she sipped the thick, syrupy Turkish coffee, she explained how she’d abandoned her local paper in Arlington (‘a tedious little rag’) and got a portfolio of strings with some bigger ones, plus an obscure monthly magazine about foreign affairs. It would be just about enough.
‘So then, Sarajevo? Quite a place to do your apprenticeship.’
‘The truth is I’m lazy. I just can’t face crawling up the ladder—all those training courses and job applications and interviews, I’m just not cut out for it. I hate to sound pushy, but why wait ten or twenty years for your guys on Newsweek or the Post to make me a foreign correspondent when I can appoint myself one—right here, right now.’
‘Mmm. And you hate to sound pushy! Well, it all seems deliciously simple.’ Becky gave her coffee a sceptical stir but she recognised in Rachel’s eyes the same yearning to see Sarajevo that she’d once had. ‘As a matter of fact, I do think it’s pretty simple.’ Becky unleashed a gust of can-do Australian enthusiasm. ‘You make your own luck in this business. If you’ve got an ounce of talent, Sarajevo will help you shine. The whole world is watching, after all. Watching that city, but watching it through us.’
Rachel’s mouth widened into a grin. For so long people had doubted her. Now here was a pro, and a Bosnia pro at that, who seemed to believe in her. Perhaps her fantasies weren’t so crazy.
Becky noticed the wad of photocopied cuttings Rachel had stuffed into a transparent plastic folder. They were tatty from constant reading and re-reading, and when Becky started leafing through them, Rachel felt not only like the new girl but the swot, caught in possession of homework it was most uncool to have.
‘You’ve only got the collected works of Danny Lowenstein in here!’
‘I really like his stuff. I find it so…you know…emotional.’
‘Yeah, emotional. Fictional, too, sometimes.’
‘Really?’
‘No, not really. I’m just being a jealous bitch. It can get like that in Sarajevo.’
‘D’you know him then—Daniel Lowenstein, I mean?’
‘It’s Danny, not Daniel. And yes, of course I do. All the girls adore him.’
They both steeled themselves for a last sip. All the girls adore him. In the long years of pain and pleasure that lay before her, Rachel would find it to be a statement not of opinion but undisputed fact.
When the flight was called, Becky and Rachel were the only journalists allowed on—to the consternation of the other photographers. ‘Ladies first,’ Becky grinned at them.
Rachel crossed the runway to the plane like an old lady with curvature of the spine; she was bent double beneath her rucksack, which contained not only Danny’s epic, 423-page account of the break up of the Balkans but all the clothes she could cram in, including a bulk supply of underwear in case laundry was impossible. There were industrial quantities of soap, deodorant, make-up, perfume and tampons, and—for bribes—cigarettes and chocolate (even if the temptation to eat it herself might well prove overwhelming). There were half a dozen notebooks, a box of pens, her laptop with all its assorted cables, a torch and batteries and a short-wave radio—her lifeline to the world.
Becky put an arm round her as the loadmaster helped them squeeze through the plane’s narrow door. The engines were revving louder and louder, and Rachel could no longer make herself heard, but she beamed Becky one of her made-in-Heaven smiles, which said ‘thanks’ and ‘this is going to be fun’ at the same time.
‘Next stop Sarajevo!’ the loadmaster shouted as they taxied for take-off. Next stop your new life, Rachel Kelly. He gave her some squashy yellow earplugs and helped