For Valour (21 page)

I passed the Monument of Gratitude to France and scanned the benches to its left, spaced around a bronze fountain whose centre-piece was a fisherman strangling a snake. Pasha had told me this statue was known as
The Struggle
, and it was where the imam would meet me at the end of the day.

Two teenage girls rocketed past me on their rollerblades, following the promenade that fringed the western battlements. The citadel itself dominated the skyline ahead of me, a haphazard collection of weathered red brick and crenellated stone fortifications commanding the high ground above the point at which the Danube and Sava rivers met.

I turned right towards a white clock tower and skirted the first of a series of moats, which now housed a tennis club, and another with a floodlit basketball court. I followed a bunch of lads in running kit and headphones through two heavily defended archways then went right again, dropping down into a third defensive trench.

This one was filled with a ramshackle assortment of First and Second World War howitzers and armoured fighting vehicles that were fighting a losing battle against hordes of advancing dandelions. A Yugoslav Heavy Tank, based on the Soviet T34, stood on a concrete stand, turret closed and barrel threatening a nearby tree. It had a drab green paint job, and didn’t look as though it was having nearly as much fun as its cousin in Bermondsey.

The display led up to Marshal Tito’s mausoleum in the House of Flowers. Tito was quite a guy. He awarded himself the Order of the People’s Hero three times over. He probably deserved it. He managed to hold Yugoslavia together for forty years.

Something made me glance back up at the parapet above the arch behind me, where a uniformed figure, weapon at the hip, was silhouetted against the winter sky.

3

The trench curved to my left, between bulging stone battlements and a huge red-brick wall punctuated at regular intervals by barred windows and arched metal gates. The display of weaponry ran out after about a hundred metres, at an ancient motor patrol boat filled with plastic carrier-bags and discarded Coke bottles. Veins of rust crisscrossed its dull grey paintwork, like spiders’ webs.

The crazy paving petered out and a rough gravel path snaked through the weeds and clumps of coarse grass towards two massive stone towers that stood guard at the north-east corner of the complex. When I reached the archway at their base, the running team had disappeared.

I tabbed past a deserted café and down a set of steps to the two small garrison chapels. In one – the Rose Church, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin – a bearded Orthodox priest presided over a baptism, surrounded by ranks of burning candles, gold-framed religious icons and a tight-knit group of warm, friendly participants and onlookers. This was the first place I’d been in Belgrade, apart from the airport, where only the wicks were smoking.

The hillside beneath the churches dropped a hundred metres or so to the Danube. I turned back and took the walkway into that corner of the fortress. I made my way towards the exit beneath the clock tower, then circled back to the Audi. It was time to hit the road south.

The very polite satnav voice sounded like a Harry Enfield impression of a wartime BBC radio announcer as he invited me to prepare myself for every twist and turn through the centre of the city. He didn’t warn me about the tramlines, though, and made no mention of the bomb damage.

I’d heard a lot about the NATO strikes against Milošević during the Kosovo crisis in 1999, but this was the first time I’d seen what had happened at the sharp end. The Ministry of Defence and General Staff HQ on Kneza Miloša Street had taken direct hits, and the scars still showed. No light shone from the interior of the building, and a tangle of rusting steel rods and crumbled concrete hung out of a gaping hole in its side, like guts oozing from a shrapnel wound.

Satnav guided me onto the main to Čačak via Lazarevac and Ljig and a few other seriously unpronounceable places and got quite worried when I turned and doubled back a few times then went down a one-way street in the wrong direction to see if I’d picked up a tail. Once I’d cleared the suburbs I was pretty sure I hadn’t.

The odd brightly painted show home stood out among the skeletal ruins that now gathered from time to time at the edge of the potholed tarmac. Some of the half-built structures looked like they were preparing for a brighter future; others had just given up hope, and one or two were so heavily coated in graffiti they could barely stand up.

These places weren’t teeming metropolises. They seemed to be inhabited mostly by old men playing cards and drinking Lav, a few younger men in tracksuits or hi-vis jackets standing by big holes at the side of the road, skinny girls in stone-washed jeans, and bold women with dyed crimson hair who kept everything going.

I realized I’d half expected Serbia to be entirely populated by unfriendly fuckers with tattooed necks and Dragunov rifles. I’d got some hard-eyed stares, but what I’d seen so far was a slightly sad country inhabited by people who were trying to make a go of things, and seemed happy to share what little they had after two decades or more of serious shit.

A father and son were turning a pig on a spit in their front yard while their next-door neighbour did his best to breathe some extra mileage into an ancient tractor with a welding torch. Most of the advertising hoardings seemed to be celebrating local beers and politicians up for re-election. A few featured sultry women inviting us to enjoy a night out at Belgrade’s Grand Casino, or to invest in skimpy Italian underwear. Fuck knew where you were supposed to buy it out here, though: most of the shops only sold fruit and veg, motor mowers or plastic chairs.

Rubbish spewed from every wheelie bin, but the polished marble roadside shrines shone in the sunlight and were covered with fresh flowers. Dogs appeared to roam at will, but they were well fed and didn’t look like they’d been bred to sink their teeth into the legs of passers-by or spread killer diseases. If Nicholai had been born in Serbia I’d have advised him to go into the headstone business or become a vet.

I couldn’t read most of the graffiti any more easily than the Cyrillic street signs, but as I drove on I noticed one slogan being regularly repeated. At first I saw ‘HH’, alongside a crude graphic of a sniper sight. Then ‘
HEAD HUNTERS
’, written in English. I had no idea who these lads were, but I was pretty sure they weren’t in the corporate recruitment game.

4

As I moved further south and west into the hills I got the sense that my surroundings were becoming more prosperous. There was the same random arrangement of fresh paint, collapsing roof beams and rust-eaten wriggly tin, but the more ragged smallholdings were now rubbing shoulders with huge plum orchards and vineyards. And the weather-beaten Ladas and Yugos and Zastavas shared parking space with one or two very shiny 4WD Mercs and BMWs.

The slopes steepened and the lush greenery gave way to sheer rock faces that soared upwards from each side of the road. I’d Googled this neck of the woods during my downtime at Istanbul airport, so I knew it had provided a refuge from the conflicts that had raged across the Balkans for at least the last seven hundred years. Catalan mercenaries, Ottoman Turks, you name it: if they were on your tail, one of the three hundred monasteries that once filled the Ovčar-Kablar Gorge was the safest place to be.

I drove beneath an iron bridge, which carried the rail line from one tunnel to the next. This was the point at which the Morava River carved its way most dramatically between the two neighbouring mountains – the Ovčar and the Kablar – and Aleksa had told Pasha that she’d pick me up from a waterside café just beyond the hydro-electric dam.

The Restoran Santa Maria was tethered to a jetty, with an off-road parking area above it. I got there about twenty-five minutes early, ordered a beer and a plate of homemade sausages, then sat and watched the ducks and herons doing the things that ducks and herons do when they’re a safe distance away from men with shotguns.

The very smiley waiter poured me a glass of Lav and reappeared with enough sausages and chips to feed a medium-size family. It was no hardship getting them down my neck: they were freshly grilled and tasted great. ‘Beautiful, eh?’ He beamed and spread his hands. I nodded enthusiastically. I wasn’t sure whether he was talking about the food or the view, but he was right about both.

A small boat with an outboard motor chugged across the river towards me with a woman at the tiller and a couple of mop-haired boys in the bow. It wasn’t until she’d tied up close by and the kids had piled out onto the pontoon that I realized this was my two o’clock appointment.

Aleksa was in her late thirties and had the slightly careworn look I’d come to expect in a country where everyone had a complicated past and nobody’s future was secure. Her light brown hair was drawn back in a loose plait and she wore no makeup. She shepherded her kids through the door and smiled as I got up to greet her.

‘Nick, you are so very welcome here.’ She gestured towards the boat. ‘I hope you don’t get seasick. Our home is just around the bend, on the other side of the river. I thought it would be easier to take you there in the boat. And the boys are very excited about having a British visitor.’

The boys looked a lot more excited about rocketing around the café like heat-seeking missiles, but I took her word for it. Close up, I could tell that many things haunted her, even in this picture-postcard setting, but she had a still centre. I had no difficulty seeing what the nineteen-year-old Pasha had found so inspiring about her.

I scoffed my last sausage, handed the waiter fifteen euros and told him to keep the change. He couldn’t believe his luck. In the nineties there were times when you’d have needed a wheelbarrow full of dinars to pay even the smallest bill here. The local currency was stronger now, but you knew where you were with a pocketful of Western notes.

The boys calmed down for long enough to introduce themselves. The six-year-old was Goran and his younger brother was Novak. I asked Aleksa if they got tennis gear for every birthday. She smiled and shook her head. ‘Mladen – my husband – plays whenever he gets the chance, but they couldn’t care less about tennis, I’m afraid. Only football. They’re mad keen Manchester United fans.’

We stepped into the boat and Aleksa sparked up the outboard. A heron left his perch at the far end of the pontoon and took off across the river with a slow beat of its massive wings. A group of wood-and stone-built houses clung to the far shore but, apart from one old boy busy doing boaty things, I couldn’t see any sign of life.

Aleksa steered us expertly across the murky but mirror-still water, following the river as it zigzagged left and right. The boys asked in halting English if Wayne Rooney was a friend of mine. I told them I’d seen a few Millwall games, but didn’t know much about football. They watched me with saucer eyes and wondered what kind of lunatic didn’t want to share the Man U magic.

Maybe half a K later we pulled up alongside a dark-stained wooden jetty. I climbed out and tied up, then hoisted the boys onto dry land.

The four of us walked up a path that led between two strips of lawn to a small white-painted, terracotta-roofed family house. Aleksa threw open the door and apologized for the fact that her husband would not be able to join us. Mladen was on a trip north, to Novi Sad. ‘He’s an engineer. He and his team rebuilt the Liberty Bridge after the bombing, and he goes up there from time to time to make sure it’s not falling down again.’

She got a brew on and offered me some more homemade sausages. The boys were definitely up for it, but I was already stuffed.

When I’d exhausted my Man U knowledge, which pretty much began and ended with a couple of stupid stories about George Best and Eric Cantona, Aleksa suggested that they went to their room and played. I said I’d catch up with them later.

We took the brews into a sun room that looked out over the river, and I heard myself giving her a much clearer account of my difficulties with the Leathermen than I’d intended. After Pasha’s emotional account of their Goražde experience, I thought it would be insulting not to. I didn’t mention Sam Callard or the CQB link, but gave her the basics about Trev and my Bermondsey adventures.

Aleksa warmed her hands on her steaming mug of tea and thought about where to begin.

‘The most important thing for you to bear in mind is that the Crvena Davo are a little bit like your Provisional IRA. They began as an offshoot of a politically motivated, revolutionary movement, but swiftly became criminals. Now they are more interested in profit than ideology.’

‘And in vengeance?’

‘Of course. They dress it up as a matter of honour, but there is no dignity in it. And, like many people in this … complicated part of the world, they have long memories.’

I asked her if she minded me asking her some really bone questions. She smiled and told me I should go straight ahead, and be sure that she’d tell me if she wasn’t in the mood to answer.

For starters, I wanted to get my head around how she now fitted into this landscape. ‘You’re a Bosnian Catholic, am I right?’

She nodded. ‘Though I don’t go to church much, these days. My faith has been quite severely tested over the past few years.’

‘And yet you live a hundred Ks
this
side of the border, and just a hundred and fifty from Goražde. That can’t be easy. Pasha told me about the little Muslim girl on the bridge …’

‘Where do
you
live, Nick?’

I’d been asking myself that for longer than I could remember, but I gave her the simple answer. ‘London, mostly. South London.’

‘So, only a few miles from where your fellow countrymen killed their king a little over three hundred and fifty years ago, and where four of your own extremists murdered fifty-two people in 2005.’

Fair one. Shit happened everywhere. No one was immune.

‘I do have a simpler answer, though. Mladen is a Serb. I first met him when he was constructing water wheels along the Drina. They only generated enough power to run a radio and one forty-watt bulb, but we should never underestimate the importance of a friendly voice and a single beam of light in a world of darkness. His family come from here. And you can see how beautiful it is.’