'THESE BASTARDS GIVE US SOMETHING'

Kenneth Roberts suddenly sees the bright

side of being bombarded by Bosnian Serb heavy artillery

Zenica WHEN THE first shell landed my instinct was to leave the table, but Fouad's voice broke rhythm only to permit a sip of cof- fee. After a year and more of war and blockade, I suppose his nerve had strengthened, or else his coffee stocks had declined to the point where explosions were no longer sufficient cause for flight.

We had been sitting together for over an hour, nibbling baklava with tiny cups of Turkish coffee in the dying warmth of the Bosnian summer sun. Fouad, head of the Muslim SDA Party in the central Bosnian city of Zenica, had suggested this outing to the newly finished winter garden of the Hotel International. Winter garden was, in truth, an ambitious title — we sat at plastic tables on a concrete patio overlooking a potholed road and a polluted river. But it was the closest thing to horticulture in Zenica, a brutally industrial city built atop three coal-mines and home to Yugoslavia's largest steel mill. And at the time it seemed a small triumph to enjoy a facility planned and constructed despite the surrounding savagery of the Bosnian war.

Anyway, whatever the aesthetics of the situation, I was glad to see Fouad. I had driven up from the coast that day on the convoy roads — ten hours of choking dust and crashing potholes, stopping only to appease with cigarettes and ingratiating smiles the armed hoodlums who manned the many checkpoints. In Prozor, a half- gutted Croat town of poisoned atmo- sphere, a brick had shattered the rear window of the Land-rover. And as we slowed to negotiate the junction east of Travnik, a line of automatic fire lashed 'Heaven. . I'm in heaven. . . down between our vehicles, the tracers seen long before the vicious cracks hunched our shoulders and spurred the escorting armoured car into turret-swinging aggression.

They were always tense, these journeys, and I always greeted the sight of Zenica's rusted flues and concrete boxes with unfeigned pleasure. There was no electrici- ty nor running water here, but a wash under a jerrycan, a clean shirt and a smug- gled whisky helped restore some feeling of humanity.

Fouad was an especial delight. His crack- ling blue eyes relayed a life and humour which I never saw dimmed. Muslim in name, he chain-smoked and downed his slivovitz with the gusto that typified his approach to life in general. Before the war he had been a professor — of 'political phi- losophy', as he told me when first we met. I remember I questioned the possibility of such a discipline under communist rule.

'Oh, yes,' he replied firmly. 'Political phi- losophy was most popular subject under communists.'

A long pause.

'Of course in those days we called it Marxism.' And a shout of sudden laughter doubled him up.

His office in the SDA headquarters was a poky room hung with Bosnian flags to hide the pitted concrete. It was a depress- ing cell, and on my visits we had got into the habit of moving to the Café Horse, a subterranean grotto whose basic entry requirement seemed to be carriage of a weapon capable of automatic fire. The clientele consisted, for the most part, of black-marketeers. Drink flowed and even at the height of the blockade the menu fea- tured squid. The school next door was stuffed with refugees from burned villages. Across the street Turkish and Iranian mujaheddin had their headquarters in a music school, sandbagged and draped with Islamic banners. Occasional stability was provided by the arrival of Colonel Bob or his officers from Vitez, who would colonise a corner and eat a noisy dinner with their pistols on their hips. But mostly it was a pretty desperate place.

So, on this warm evening, Fouad had suggested we take coffee outdoors — a moment of gentleness in the anarchy of Bosnia. But now the anarchy was seeking us out again, the shells stalking the city centre with that terrible impersonality which only artillery can achieve. The streets, momentarily filled with rushing, stumbling figures, were now dead. A hand- cranked siren howled up the scale from a nearby roof-top, its warning too late for the family under the first shell. Fouad talked on. I cannot remember his gist — my mind was joining the dots between the explo- sions, and the line projected straight through our winter garden. Some misbe- gotten pride prevented me from heading for the cellars independently. We seemed the only living beings not under cover. A jet of turf shot into the air from the park across the river, and the gut-gripping thud of the impact reached us with worrying speed. Fouad gestured, grinning, at the deserted city.

'Good time for thiefs, eh?'

I don't recall replying.

There was a count of 12 between the shells, and the next one landed in the river, less than 200 yards away. As the water fell back in sheets, Fouad pushed his cup away and rose. I struggled to prevent my legs rushing me past him as he headed deliber- ately for the hotel_ Disdaining the cellars and sandbags, he took stately cover stand- ing behind one of the pillars at the entrance. I slid behind the neighbouring upright Peering warily around the com- forting concrete, I felt a nervous snigger build up inside me. In an otherwise squat and ugly construction, these slender pillars had been the architect's only concession to gracefulness. But Fouad's maker had not achieved a similar grace, and from behind his supposed refuge a generous belly pro- truded northwards, while a counterbalanc- ing rear jutted to the south. My sniggering grew louder, and soon the shaking of the protruding tummy indicated Fouad had caught the spirit of the moment When the next, and last, shell landed in the car park and whipped the hotel front with shrapnel, our giggling rose to idiot proportions_ In the deep dead silence that followed, we had to grip each other's shaking shoulders to totter back to the table.

'You see,' said Fouad, wiping his eyes, 'these bastards give us something.'

'Which bastards?'

His arm waved around the horizon of dose hills.

`Chetniks. Serbs. Croats. Ustasha. Who- ever shoots the shells. Each time they fail with killing us we live a little more. We all live more in war. What was I before this war? A teacher. Now I talk to my Presi- dent every day over satellites. Some peo- ple go to hell in this war. But some have their highest time, I tell you. It brings out high and low, extreme things, but always it brings out something. Not like Europe. What is there to struggle for in Europe now? SeIfs? Country? Beliefs? Money? Nothing. All over Europe is fat and grey and middle-class. I was in England once, you know, before the war. I took a trip round your Westminster. You know what the Mother of Parliaments did that day? Talking and talking about seat-belts in cars!' He would have spat had he not been smoking. 'Grey and fat_ No nerves no longer.'

From some long-forgotten classroom, Chesterton's lines came back to me:

They have given us into the hands of the new unhappy lords, Lords without anger and honour, who dare not carry their swords_ They light by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes; They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.

And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs, Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs_

Fouad clapped his hands and blew smoke excitedly. 'That's it!' he cried. 'That's it! No struggle, no anger, no hon- our. Tired men catching flies. I think we have more fortune than you.'

I left early the next morning for Tuzla and I never saw Fouad again. I heard he had been taken to work in Sarajevo, though I did not fmd him there. When finally I came home I spent a day in the bookshops of Charing Cross Road and I found a col- lection of Chesterton for him and wrapped it and committed it to the UN system. I do not know if ever it reached him. As well as The Secret People', I marked out two lines from 'The Last Hero':

That hour when death is IIHre a light and blood is like a rose, —

You never loved your friends, my friend, as I shall love my foes.