Double Vision

Thirteen

Stephen spent the second week of February at The Hague, covering the Milosevic trial at the war-crimes tribunal.

Whole days dragged past while he stared at Milosevic through the bullet-proof glass that divided the exdictator from the public gallery. There was a flaw in the glass, and, as Stephen moved his head from side to side, the pudgy, truculent features rippled and reformed like a reflection on water.

Milosevic also appeared on a small wall-mounted screen to Stephen’s right, much of the time in brutal close-up. You could see the small patch of shaving rash he’d developed on the left side of his chin. Screen, reality, screen, reality, Stephen switched between the two, the screen image always more informative and in one sense more accurate, since it lacked the distortion of that flaw in the glass.

At intervals the drone of speeches and translations was interrupted as a photograph was displayed on the screens, or a short video recording played. A young, brown-haired, vigorous Milosevic, surrounded by security guards, made an impassioned speech. The grey-haired old man in the dock stared at his younger self and smiled a little ruefully, and for a moment a murmur of fellow feeling ran along the public benches. Everybody had done that. Everybody had been confronted unexpectedly by a younger version of themselves and had thought, My God, where did it all go?

But then the screens filled with other images and there were no more smiles.

‘This,’ said the prosecuting counsel, ‘is a corpse exhumed from a mass grave in Kosovo.’

The decomposing head of a young man appeared on the screen, blindfolded, his mouth open in what was difficult not to identify as a scream. It might well have been a scream. Some of the men had been castrated before they died. Blindfolded, not because he might identify his tormentors — they were going to kill him anyway — but because it’s easier to torture a man whose eyes you can’t see.

‘And this,’ said Milosevic the next day, embarking with some enthusiasm on a gruesome game of Snap, ‘is the severed head of a Serbian child lying on a pavement in Belgrade.’

You had to take the child’s nationality on trust, though it might equally well have been the head of a Bosnian child lying in the market place in Sarajevo. It wouldn’t be the first time the dead had been made to work overtime, appearing as victims in the propaganda of both sides.

The child’s eyes stared up from the pavement. People shuffled their papers, coughed, turned pens round and round in their fingers, ashamed of their inability to go on feeling. Then the child vanished and was replaced by carbonized corpses in a railway carriage, baked faces set in lipless grins, leaning towards the windows as if waving goodbye to friends and family on the platform.

None of this had been visible at the time. Not even to the pilots who dropped the bombs, still less to the audience watching Pentagon briefings on television in their living rooms. On the screen set up in the briefing room, and on the television screens, puffs of brown smoke appeared underneath the cross-hairs of the precision sights. Doubly screened from reality, the audience watched, yawned, scratched and finally switched channels. Who could blame them? War had gone back to being sepia tinted. Sanitized. Nothing as vulgar as blood was ever allowed to appear.

And all the while, under the little spurts of brown dust, this. A child torn to pieces. Human bodies baked like dog turds in the sun.

In the bar that evening, Stephen glanced up from his newspaper and saw his old friend Ian Brodie, wearing his trademark black trench, come in through the swing doors — a silhouette as unmistakable as a stealth bomber’s. Stephen jumped up, greeted him, offered him a drink, and got two pints from the bar while Ian took off his coat.

They managed to find a small, relatively quiet table in the corner. On the sofa directly opposite a Serbian politician was being interviewed on camera. From the next table, where a young man was editing another interview, came the chipmunk chattering of voices on fast-rewind. Stephen looked round, wondering if he missed all this. How much he missed it.

Ian sat down, his bullet head covered with hair so thin it looked like gosling down, bringing a smell of clean air in on his clothes. They spent the next hour swopping gossip: who was here and for how long. Pity the poor sods who’d landed this as a long-term assignment, Ian said, because it was going to run and run. ‘Slobo’ll die of old age or a stroke,’ he said, ‘before we get a verdict.’

They all called him Slobo — it sounded affectionate but wasn’t.

‘At least they’ve nailed the sod,’ Stephen said.

‘Victors’ justice.’

‘Is it?’

A gleeful cackle. ‘Well, he sure as hell wouldn’t be here if he’d won.’

‘Yeah, OK. Yeah, I know. But it still matters that he’s here. Raison d’état? No, sorry, mate, you’re a crook.’ Stephen leant forward. ‘I love it.’

The bar was filling up. Stephen could put a name to everybody in the room. One or two had that curiously rubbery look of people seen mainly on television. Others were old friends. It was a travelling village.

‘You know I’ve resigned?’

‘Yeah. Finishing a book? How’s it going?’

‘Slowly. It’s taking a bit longer than I thought it would.’

‘They always do. But you’ll come back?’

‘I don’t know.’

Ian raised a yellow-palmed hand — somewhere on the long road from Glasgow to Wapping he’d picked up the old soldier’s habit of smoking with a fag concealed in his fist — to attract the barman’s attention. ‘Why’s that?’

‘I’ve had enough.’

‘Couldn’t you just take a year off?’

‘No, I think it’s decision time. I’m forty this year. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life trotting off to other people’s wars till I’m only fit for the knackers’ yard.’

Ian bent to lick the head off his pint with a grey and felted tongue. ‘Like me, you mean?’

Stephen said awkwardly, ‘You know I don’t.’

They left it there. Ian began reminiscing about the time they’d spent in Sarajevo during the siege. Stephen ordered another round of drinks. They laughed a lot, drank a lot and ended up talking about Ben.

‘I saw him,’ Stephen said, ‘in London the day before he left. I was going out a week later. He had a bad feeling about it. Almost a premonition. I’ve gone over that conversation so many times — I wish I’d said, “Look, if it doesn’t feel right, don’t go. Let somebody else go.” Because if you’ve been in the game as long as he had you do develop an instinct.’

‘Definitely.’

‘You know that little amulet thing he used to wear? He kept fiddling with it. The catch was loose and he wasn’t going to have time to get it mended. And that really bothered him.’

Ian nodded. ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference if you had said something. He’d have gone anyway.’

‘Yes, I know. But I still wish I’d said it.’

Around midnight, still to all outward appearances sober, Ian glided to the door, keeping his head very still, like a bride who fears her tiara may not make it down the aisle.

They stood together on the wet pavement. Stephen put a hand on Ian’s shoulder. ‘Well, good night.’

‘You stay in touch now.’

‘Next time I’m in London — I’ll give you a ring.’

Ian set off to his hotel. After a few yards, he turned and, walking backwards, called, ‘You couldn’t have saved him. He’d have gone whatever you said.’

Stephen raised his hand. ‘’Night, Ian.’

He walked slowly upstairs to the first floor, struggled to turn the key in the lock and then flopped down on the bed. He closed his eyes and saw the photograph of the young man exhumed from a mass grave in Kosovo. He’d been there when that was taken, pressing a handkerchief over his nose. Summer. Dusty trees. Chequered light and shade. They followed the smell up the valley, plagued by flies that zigzagged above the narrow path between the trees. Drunk on sweat and the smell of decay, one kept settling on his upper lip. Flies settled on the blindfolded man too, but he didn’t try to brush them away. Stephen watched a fly zoom into the gaping hole of his mouth.

You couldn’t have saved him.

Jerking awake, he realized the bedside lamp was still on, thought about getting up, undressing, pouring a glass of water, but couldn’t in the end be bothered to do any of those things.

Instead, he groped for the switch and turned off the light.

Over breakfast he read the article he’d written the day before. At the last moment Ted had rung to say they’d got a terrific photograph of Milosevic entering the tribunal, so could the story start with that? Reluctantly, he’d rewritten the first paragraph — with difficulty, since, like most people, he hadn’t seen Milosevic come in.

The photo — it had pride of place at the head of the page — showed the chief prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, laughing in triumph as the ex-dictator, a shadowy figure with bowed shoulders, was escorted to his seat.

Ted was right, it was a terrific photograph. A dramatic moment. Unfortunately, it had never happened. He’d been watching Carla del Ponte, her helmet of blonde hair gleaming under the lights, sharing a joke with the other prosecuting attorneys, wholly absorbed in that conversation. Not only had she not laughed in triumph at Milosevic’s downfall — she hadn’t even noticed him.

So much for photography as the guarantor of reality. It pissed him off. He kept telling himself it didn’t matter, but all the time he knew it did. Image before words every single time. And yet the images never explain anything and often, even unintentionally, mislead.

*

That afternoon, he played truant from the tribunal and went to the Mauritshuis, where he spent a long time in front of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring.

Enormous eyes, blackness all around her, a dazzle of pain and tears. She reminded him a little of Justine, and the time he spent with her did more than anything else to rinse his mind clean.