Fiona Smith's Blog › Waiting to be…

Waiting to be Heroes by Alan Mackay

13 October 1993

It is colder now. I sometimes wonder how we keep going. We can light fires, but the Serb snipers just pick us off, and sometimes they call down the big guns. But we have to light fires now, because of the cold. Last night I walked to the edge of the wood and looked out across the valley to where my home used to be. I felt nothing. I felt no sense of loss, I felt no sense of anger. I only felt the cold and knew that the winter this year would be longer and more bitter than any winter I had ever known. I walked back to where the others were curled against the cold by the fire and lit a cigarette.

******

Peter hates openings, private views, I know he does. Oh, sometimes he’s very brave and stands around clenching his glass of cheap white wine, being buffeted by all around him; but really, he would rather be anywhere else. I try not to take him, but sometimes I have no alternative. Sometimes I simply have to have someone on my arm at the door. He is very brave, though. Sometimes he will even speak to my friends, tell them how much he is enjoying himself and what a good exhibition it all is, and then drift away to the quietest corner he can find and clench his glass.

Fydor Dbrozny’s exhibition at the Contact Gallery was last Wednesday.

“I don’t like photographs,” Peter said when I phoned him. “Its bad enough the sort of art you usually take me to see, but photographs aren’t even art. They’re just photographs.” He wasn’t sulking or anything, he was being absolutely genuine.

“Please Peter, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it more than you expect to. Dbronzy’s just back from Bosnia, the photographs are supposed to be superb. Diana helped hang the exhibition, she was very impressed.”

“Diana was impressed by the stuff two chimpanzees did until she found out they were by chimps,” he said.

“It was a simple mistake, they were very talented chimpanzees. Do say you’ll come.”

He came. He came wearing his disgusting duffel-coat and a long suffering expression, but he came. The Contact was stiff with people, of course, and I nearly lost Peter before we were inside.

“Its too crowded. You won’t be able to see a fucking thing. The precious ones will be too busy missing each other’s cheeks to give a damn about what’s on the walls and the wine will be piss. I’m off.”

I told him not to be childish and propelled him inside.

“Coat sir?” the girl behind a counter said.

“I’ve got a fucking coat,” Peter side-mouthed at me, “Is she fucking blind?”

I told her we’d just keep them on, we weren’t staying long. That seemed to cheer Peter up and he asked about dinner. We made for the bar.

******

20 October 1993

It snowed today. No one here can remember it snowing so early in the year before. Then none of us have been so high into the mountains before. We are town people, not mountain people. It snowed today and we killed ten Serbs.

It was in the morning. It was just before the sun rose above the mountains when we saw them working their way down the hill, through the trees, towards their lines. They were below the snow line and stood out because they were wearing camouflage whites. We fired five mortar shells at them and watched as the blossoms of the explosions marched towards them. The third shell had reached them before we heard the sound of the first. It was very strange. The fourth and the fifth finished them off.

We were elated. We danced around the mortars and hugged each other, laughing and cheering as if we had done something more important than killing ten human beings. But then again, to us the Serbs are no longer human, nor us to them. We let their comrades take the bodies away under a white flag.

******

Through the hubbub, through the milling, shifting crowd, the laughter, the idle, empty chatter, my eyes were drawn to a single photograph, stark black and white, framed large upon the wall. I moved away from the group that Marianne was with, her gallery crowd, and tried to ease myself closer to the photograph between the wine glasses and the crumbing canapés, held insecure between relaxing fingers until they fell like obscene dandruff upon the floor.

“Peter, how are you?” a voice said in my ear. Was I the Peter she was talking to? I glanced and nodded a hello. We engaged in conversation, my eyes constantly shifting from her glazed expression to the photograph on the wall. I excused myself and she drifted away, ebbing on a tide of indifference.

There were five men in the photograph, arranged in a perfect composition around a fire in some snowy Bosnian wood. On the left, one man sat on an upturned ammunition box, a cigarette loosely held in his right hand, dangled between his knees. He looks straight at the camera, straight at the photographer as if he were not there, as if for him the photographer did not exist at all. To this man’s right two others stand facing each other, side on to the camera, talking. One holds an automatic rifle in the crook of his left arm as if it was just a blanket, casual. Between them a fourth figure sits looking into the depths of the fire, his eyes are open and he appears to be watching every flame as it darts out and back again. His cigarette droops from the corner of his mouth, a faint wisp of smoke curling away over his shoulder. The fifth figure crouches by the fire, half turned away from the camera, a belt of machine-gun cartridges crossed over his shoulders like a winter scarf. There was a stillness in the photograph that stopped me breathing.

Marianne touched me on my shoulder and I breathed again.

“You really do hate these things, don’t you?” she said. “We can go whenever you like, I’ve done my duties.”

“No, no, its okay,” I stuttered like a child caught at mischief. “Stay on if you like. Circulate.” I could barely keep my eyes off the photograph for long enough to speak to her.

“If you’re sure?”

“Yeah, I’ve got wine to finish.” I held my glass up to show her. We smile and she drifts off into the crowd, which swallowed her in one gulp. I returned to the photograph.

******

22 October 1993

All day yesterday the Serbs shelled us in retaliation. All day. We huddled in our fox-holes waiting for it to stop. They must have brought guns up overnight because it was not the usual mortar fire we get every day; this was special. They got our Captain and the radio operator, and one shell hit an ammunition dump, but really we were pretty lucky. They stopped at sunset and we crawled out to count each other. No one felt like celebrating today.

******

Peter just drifted off, I didn’t even see him go. One minute he was standing there at my shoulder, clenching his glass of wine and grinning that rictus he calls his gallery smile, and then he was gone. Diana had been telling us about the problems she had hanging the exhibition, and how the photographer had been so awkward and not at all understanding of how these things should be laid out; and I thought Peter might actually be interested in all this; and I turned around to find him gone. “Anyone see where Peter went,” I asked. But people are so used to him that some hadn’t even noticed him in the first place. I excused myself and went to look for him.

He was standing on the far side of the room, in front of some photograph, his glass poised halfway to his mouth, absolutely rigid and with a look on his face that I could not understand. I tapped him on the shoulder and he let out a long hiss of breath, as if he had been holding it in for an age.

“You really do hate these things, don’t you?” I said. “We can go whenever you like, I’ve done my duties.”

“No, no, its okay,” he muttered, “Stay on if you like. Circulate.” All the time he did not look at me, he did not turn his head, just stared at the picture.

“If you’re sure?” I said, not sure myself.

“Yeah, I’ve got wine to finish.” He held up his glass up to show me. I smiled at him and he finally turned towards me. He smiled back, but it was a smile from somewhere else, from someone else, almost. It was as if he was not actually aware that I was there, only that there was someone there to smile at and be rid off. It felt strange, but then Peter is quite strange sometimes. Anyway, I was quite glad really to be staying on, there were still some people I hadn’t seen and for once the wine was halfway drinkable.

******

27 October 1993

Something is going to happen soon. Today the western camera crews were here, filming us and filming the new Captain bending over a map and pointing fiercely at the middle of nowhere. There were reporters too and photographers. Some of them are going to stay with us till something happens. The new Captain has told them that is okay, but its their own risk. The reporters have brought some brandy with them, and tonight they sat with us around the fire talking to us about the war and we helped them drink their brandy.

******

Waiting to be heroes, the card said. “Waiting to be heroes - Outside Sarajevo, 4 November 1993”. And there, in the world on the wall five men arranged themselves around a fire, almost biblical in their composition, their dead unseeing eyes avoiding the penetrating gaze of the camera, their minds on their own uncertainties.

I could not take my gaze, my attention, away from those eyes. They held me, would not let me go. They demanded my attention. There was a world of weariness, of resignation; a bravery that went beyond courage. Not hopelessness, not defeat, not despair; only the knowledge that whatever they were about to do was just for them. It made me feel uncomfortable, it made me feel the limitations of my own cowardice, my own shiftless lack of involvement. Those men, those eyes, had a depth of conviction I could only dream about. I found the whole experience very disturbing.

“Hellish good, isn’t it. The photograph.” I looked to my left. A small man, slight rather than small I suppose, with balding hair and wearing a black suit. “Hellish good. Really says more about the hopelessness of the whole thing than any words can hope to.” He leaned forward and pointed at the figure on the left, the one looking at the camera. “See the eyes, see the way the eyes look through the camera as if heis the photographer, as if heis looking out at the world through the camera’s eye, not the other way around. Incredible”.

The slight man turned towards me and smiled. “Best thing in the exhibition, I’d say. Wouldn’t you?”

******

1 November 1996

Nothing yet. Our patrols come back one or two less than they left, but the men tell us nothing. The new Captain just keeps pointing at his map for the film crews and even the reporters are beginning to get bored. There was more snow today too, little flurries in the early afternoon. One of the photographers spent the whole afternoon taking pictures of the snow. He kept saying how white it was, how white. We told him it was just cold and a bloody nuisance, but he kept taking photographs of it and us huddling around our fires trying to keep warm.

******

We walked home, or at least to my place. I’m not saying I had to drag Peter away, but for once he seemed reluctant to leave. It couldn’t have been the wine, I know that, because he hardly had any, but he stayed until the end and that is unheard of. He even went to the restaurant afterwards, with Diana and the people from the gallery. Mind you, he didn’t say much, spent most of his time talking to the little man with the dandruff on his shoulders. It was halfway through the meal before Diana actually told me that this was Fydor Dbrozny, the photographer himself. I tried to speak to him after that, but he and Peter were too deep in their conversation.

I asked Peter if he wanted a night-cap, or a coffee, I even asked him if he wanted to stay the night, but he was still preoccupied. He’d hardly spoken on the way back, just to say how glad he was that I had made him go to the gallery. I asked him if he had enjoyed himself, but he said enjoy was not the best word to describe it. I asked him what was, but he said he didn’t know. I know not to argue with him when he is like that. We agreed to meet at the weekend and then he kissed me goodnight. I watched him walk off down the street, his hands pushed into his duffel-coat pockets and his head hunched over. He looked like a small boy trying to avoid stepping on the lines between the paving slabs. He didn’t turn round to wave at the corner. I went upstairs and decided that I had discovered a new side to his strangeness, made myself some tea and went to bed.

******

4 November 1993

In the last hour we have been told that the offensive starts tonight. We have been expecting it for some time now, at least since we heard of the breakthrough in the next valley. It is, of course, good news, but I am scared none the less. There has been no sign of movement down in the valley since the sun rose, our imaginations play tricks with us. We sit around the fire and imagine that they know we are coming and that they are ready for us. We talk about dying and of being killed. We have killed since we came here, but somehow this will be different.

Just before nightfall the officers passed among us and gave us all brandy and cigarettes. We drank our courage and sat around the fire, smoking, until it was time to go.

******

Of course it wasn’t arrogance that made Fydor speak of his own photograph as being “hellish good”, it was honesty. At the restaurant afterwards he told me that he was really somewhat in awe of it. In fact he took no real responsibility for it at all. “The photograph was waiting to be taken.”

“You mean they were posing?”

“No, no, not that. They had no more control over it than I did.” He pursed his lips and looked up at the ceiling, “It was as if the men and I were put together at just the perfect moment,” he said. “Maybe I make too much of it.” His gaze returned to his salad and he pushed a piece of goats cheese across the plate.

“I don’t know,” I said, “There is probably the same inevitability about the photograph being taken as there was in everything else going on around there.”

“Sometimes people say that we are lucky, photographers, to be in the right place at the right time. Maybe it was as simple as that. I doubt I will be so lucky again.”

We talked throughout the meal. We came to no conclusions. At the end we agreed that it was unlikely that we would meet again, but that the conversation had been interesting. He said that it had helped him in his own understanding. I told him that I was flattered, but I really thought he was just being polite. He had told me nothing that could explain the feeling I had when I saw the photograph, he had told me only that he shared that feeling with me and hoped that others may feel the same way. He said that he was not proud of the photograph, only privileged that he had taken it. And it was then that I realised what it was that had affected me so; for it was privilege that I too felt at having shared that moment.

I tried to explain to Marianne as we walked back to her flat, but the words which had come so easily to me earlier froze in my mouth. She was more annoyed that I had monopolised the guest of honour all night and not shared him around, it was as if I had denied her a slice of some rich, cultural pie. Still, at least I had not been rude to her dreadful friends, that, I suppose, was something. I declined her offers, the were automatic anyway, and went home alone. I don’t suppose she will ever understand me and I don’t suppose I will ever really make the effort to help her to.

******

4 November 1993 (Continued)

We have been told to move at midnight. There are those among us who are eager to go and there are those whose minds are too full of the possibilities to be eager. I myself now have no feelings whatsoever. We will work our way down the hillside, between the trees until we reach the open country in the valley below. I curse the covering of snow, our camouflage is scant, we should have moved sooner. Always sooner. The new Captain is very nice, he offers encouragement with the brandy. I think he must be very brave, most of us now are silent.

5 November 1993

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6 Novemember 1993

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The End.

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