Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? Page 41

  The rain had stopped.

  A car drove up behind us, slowed down. I looked at Carl. He looked at me. The car braked, swung in front of us so its headlights went into our eyes, somebody got out, walked toward us. He shouted at us in Faroese, and I only half-understood him.

  “Sorry, do you speak Danish?” I yelled back.

  He walked close up to the car.

  “Do you need help?”

  We needed all the help we could get. But not the kind he could offer.

  “No thanks, we’re just resting for a bit,” I answered, rather bewildered and uneasy. “We’ll drive on soon.” He smiled and stretched out a hand. We shook hands and nodded. Almost overwhelming.

  “Great. I was just worried something might be wrong. Wanted to make sure nothing was up.” He studied us for a moment, as though he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. “Tourists?”

  “Yes,” I lied, pretending to be embarrassed.

  “Take care then, when you drive on. This is a dangerous road, when it’s as dark as this. You should take the other road back.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “No problem.”

  He walked back to his car, we heard him exchange words with his passenger, then laughter. He pointed at us, started the car and continued down the slope.

  I rolled up the window feeling troubled.

  “Maybe we ought to go home,” I suggested. “Back to Havstein.”

  “Forgotten places, Mattias,” Carl went on, not taking in what had just happened. “There are forgotten places, just as there are forgotten people. Barely anybody thinks about Srebrenica now, most people haven’t ever heard of Gorazde, and few know what happened in Visegrád, on the bridge over the Drina. In these places you find the people that were forgotten before anyone noticed them. That’s where you find those who never became famous, whom nobody heard from, or knew about, the people who stayed behind. This is the real no man’s land. There are no past heroes here, no astronauts who have grown old and been forgotten, only people you never thought existed at the outset. And it was in this no man’s land I met William D. Haglund, early in the summer of 1996. Bill was the forensic expert to the War Crimes Tribunal in Bosnia, and the man in charge of the excavation of mass graves in Cerska, as well as half a dozen other places. It was here that the men who disappeared from Srebenica resurfaced. He’d just come from the excavations in Rwanda when I met him, and I can tell you right now, Mattias, I’ve never met a finer man than Bill Haglund, and it upsets me to think he’s remembered by so few people, that his honor was in tatters by the time he’d finished and traveled back to his wife and family in Seattle.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I first met Bill, he was a person with humor, who could laugh at himself, a little eccentric perhaps, yet absolutely focused on his task. And while everybody else wore blue UN uniforms, Bill always made a point of working at the graves in a shirt and tie, and a distinctive broad-brimmed, brown hat. He had enormous respect for the people he dug up, often referred to the corpses as gentlemen. When the work with the graves in Bosnia began, he knew from the start that every minute had to be used to the maximum, because the Bosnian summer is short and it’s only possible to dig from April until some way into October. He also had to be prepared for the corpses to be tangled up in deep graves, rather than lying in systematic rows under the surface, as they were in the old days. I remember how Bill stood for hours at the foot of the grave in the morning, just looking, as if he was trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle, trying to work out, for example, which arm belonged to which foot, one couldn’t just wrench at an arm, the body belonging to it might lie much farther down and the arm would simply come loose if he pulled too hard.”

  “Was that awful, seeing all that?”

  “It was appalling, Mattias. And the sound when they got them up. I’ll never forget the sound, a huge damp sigh from the wet earth as it released the bodies. They found one hundred and fifty people in the grave at Cerska. But that wasn’t the worst.”

  “No?”

  “No. After Cerska we moved on to a grave near the football field in Nova Kasaba, and that was when I noticed Bill getting tired. He’d spent months just getting all the equipment in place before starting work. The War Crimes Tribunal in Bosnia who’d commissioned the excavation had forgotten to put money aside for the project, and the UN couldn’t provide funding. There was so much equipment missing to begin with, a mortuary, a cold room, digging machines, X-ray machines, bags, shovels, they didn’t even have cars to get around in. And there were ninety of them, pathologists, radiologists, archaeologists, and anthropologists, experts from all over the world. So they were forced to scrape together equipment from any source, outdated military stuff, friends and acquaintances, every contact they had, they even dug in their own pockets, until eventually the organization Bill represented, Physicians for Human Rights, came to the rescue and paid for the excavation, while they waited for more money from the US government. Meanwhile the Norsk Folkehjelp turned up and loaned Haglund a dog team to sniff out mines, to make the graves safe before they started digging. Most of the graves lay deep in Serbian territory, you see, and Haglund’s team were terrified somebody might sabotage the excavations to cover the evidence, it would only have taken one grenade, Mattias. So Bill tried to convince NATO and the UN that they needed to guard the place at night, but they refused, they didn’t want to get involved like that, they were only prepared to go as far as escorting the team in and out of the area and to watch over them while they worked. In the end, Bill and some of the others took turns sleeping by the mass graves, because that was the only way to get the NATO soldiers to stick around. I ended up doing it too, I figured it was easier, it meant I didn’t have to go back and forth, so I slept out in the field alongside the pathologists and forensic experts, and what fabulous nights they were, you should have been there, I’ve never seen such clear starry nights, you totally forgot where you were once it was dark. All your concentration would be taken by the sound of the stream burbling past, the birds twittering in the big trees and the balmy air that surrounded you as you lay there dozing. But it wasn’t doing Bill any good, not in the long run. He’d get up before anybody else, start work, and they’d work for twelve hours a day, first they’d prod the earth with long steel prongs to gauge its resistance, then they’d pull them up and sniff them, it’s the only way. After a while, as the graves are located and opened, each body is examined, registered as evidence, measured and marked with a little red flag. There were so many flags after a while. Far too many flags. And Bill showed me stuff, how he could tell when people had had their hands tied behind their backs, had been murdered, and these men weren’t soldiers, no way, I saw so much ordinary clothing, sneakers, Adidas, Levi’s, and I watched all of this start to take its toll on Bill too. He grew edgier, he’d answer abruptly when people asked him things, he’d bark his orders, he became impatient and lost his sense of humor, with each body they pulled up, more just kept coming, it was endless. Bill had promised to oversee an excavation in Croatia too, so he began making the hundred and fifty mile journey back and forth regularly between the two sites, and then when the boss of the temporary mortuary had to travel back to the United States, Bill took that job on too, he slept in his car, traveling between three places, just pulled to the side of the road at night and slept for a few hours before driving on. He was supposed to have a week’s vacation with his wife of twenty years, but he cut it down to three days, people said he’d started falling asleep in interviews, and every time I saw him the rings under his eyes had grown bigger, his mood was a bit worse, like the calendar was beating him up.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Things only got worse. That fall the rain came. We transferred to Pilica, where they thought there might be up to a thousand dead in the grave, it was probably the most important site for the War Crimes Tribunal. But it was a complete mess, Mattias, the rain turned the grave into a swimming pool, the water had to be pumped out ever
y morning before they started. It was the ghastliest thing I’ve ever seen, I couldn’t even photograph it. The water ruined everything, Christ, it was just an enormous pool of semi-decomposed people. Then one night, I’m sleeping outside with Bill, it’s one of our last nights, and I wake up and hear a sort of noise through the rain, I get up and climb out of the tent, but it’s so dark I can see barely three feet ahead, I find a flashlight and pistol next to Bill and take them out with me, and then I hear a dog barking, and, and, well, sometimes there’d be dogs coming at night, to the graves, and they, well, you can imagine, so I, I just wanted to get the dog away before it spoiled things for us, see, so I move to the grave, step by step, and it’s raining so much I can barely see the ground ahead, even though I’ve got the flashlight, I go to the very edge of the grave, stand there shining the flashlight, but I can’t see a thing and everything’s quiet, it’s as if, I don’t know, but the damn dog’s gone, it’s damn well hiding or something, or it’s run home again, and I’m about to turn back, but as I do the dog jumps at me from behind, so I panic and lose my foothold and my feet slip from under me, and I’m pulled backward and land on my face, in the grave—”

  Carl stared straight ahead of him now, saying nothing. I stretched a hand out again to put it on his shoulder, but he shoved it off and I had to pull it back.

  “Carl, maybe we should, we should just—”

  “And I scream, I scream like never before, I yell for Bill and I have my eyes closed, because I can’t bear to look around me, but I can feel where I am, and even though my eyes are shut I can see stuff, right, you wouldn’t want to know what I see, and it’s like being in quicksand, I start being dragged down, when I reach my hands out, my fingers glide through wet, rotten flesh and it’s the worst stench imaginable, and I shout out for Bill, but it feels like a lifetime before he comes, in his underwear, and he grabs my arm, as hard as he can, pulls me up, and he’s angry, livid, I try to tell him what happened, but he’s just furious, and next morning I’ve had enough and leave, I go back to Sarajevo and check into a hotel, and I stand in the shower for days before it has any effect, then I sleep for a week before taking a flight to London. By which time I’ve decided I’ll never take another photograph as long as I live.”

  Carl was quiet now. Completely quiet. He sat crying, his hands in front of his face and I couldn’t help him, I could only wait for the worst to pass and then calmly ask him to swap seats with me, before I drove the rest of Oyggjarvegur and continued toward Kollafjør∂ur, the long way home. We were already one and a half hours late as I parked outside the Factory at about nine, Havstein came out pointing at his watch and looking angry, I took a step out of the car and he stood in my path.

  “What have you two been doing?” he asked. I looked at Carl who stood there helpless, eyes blank, seeing nothing.

  “We broke down,” I answered. “The car’s not quite right. And we had to take the Oyggjarvegur too.”

  “Why?”

  “Road work in the tunnel.”

  “And you broke down too?”

  “Yes, but it went fine. We used the jumper cables and stopped another car.”

  Havstein looked at me skeptically. I didn’t feel comfortable.

  “There aren’t jumper cables in the car.”

  “Damn. Well, that explains why it took so long!” I answered, trying to smile.

  Havstein snorted, and changed the subject.

  “Did you get to see the pilot whale slaughter today?”

  I couldn’t bear to start on that.

  “No. Must have passed us by.”

  “Oh well. There’s some hour-and-a-half-old dinner waiting for you. Come on.” Havstein waved us in and I heard him saying something or other about trust between people, but couldn’t hear what.

  We had to eat alone that evening, the others had finished ages ago, but that suited us perfectly. It was hardly the night for big discussions, and when everybody went to bed relatively early, one by one, there were no protests from either me or Carl. We stayed up, sat on the sofas, and almost felt normal again.

  “Do you feel better now?”

  Carl nodded slowly. “Yes. Thank you. For saying nothing to Havstein, I mean.” He shot a sudden, sharp glance in my direction. “And all this stuff I’ve told you today, you’re not to tell a soul, understand? Not a soul.”

  I understood.

  “But what have you told Havstein about all this?”

  “Nothing. Or, rather, I just said I was in Bosnia for a year, with the KFOR. That nothing particular had happened, but that I have fragile nerves. And that I’ve got a wrecked marriage behind me.”

  “And do you?”

  “Yeah. And I’ve got kids, too.”

  Then he continued his story from where he’d left off on Oyggjarvegur, though he was a good deal calmer now. He told me more about Bill Haglund, Bill had returned to his family in Seattle in October 1996, by which time he’d been involved in the excavation of 1,200 bodies in a year, he’d met the deadline the War Crimes Tribunal had given him, yet within a week of coming home, he was informed that he’d been suspended from his position and that his work in Bosnia was to be placed under the microscope. There had been complaints about his leadership style, about the absence of security around the graves, the mislabeling of body parts, etc. Of course Haglund felt angry, hurt, and dejected, after all, he’d achieved the impossible, five mass graves in three months, with inadequate help and equipment, what more could you ask! He was cleared eventually of all accusations and it was agreed that nobody could have done differently, but it must still have hurt. Then the story returned to Carl, he’d gone to London with no plans, really, just to be back in the civilized world, and it was there, in a hotel bar in Kensington, that he’d met Stina, an Icelandic actress with the National Theater in Reykjavík. She’d been in London filming for a week, a small role in a British film, and because of her, Carl stayed on in London for her three remaining weeks of filming, and on the day she was leaving, she asked, almost for fun, if he’d like to come to Iceland with her, and he said yes. He had nobody waiting for him, nobody demanding that he should be here or there, the money from the sale of photographs to the press and Bosnian War Crimes Tribunal had finally given him some solid capital to live on, and he thought it might do him good to get as far away from Bosnia and Rwanda as possible. Stina had a little apartment on the outskirts of Reykjavík and they squeezed themselves in there for some months, celebrated Christmas and New Year, met her family, and maybe it was because the apartment was so small that she got pregnant so fast, then they discovered it was twins, they sold her apartment in town and bought a family-friendly house in Akranes. Stine continued to commute into the city, and Carl stayed at home like a caretaker, he fixed and repaired, cleaned and kept order, and was happy with that, a calm, quiet time. They got married in Reykjavík that July, when she was six months pregnant, a big wedding and everything, and when the twins arrived in October there was a genuine Love Boat atmosphere at home. Carl stayed at home with the kids, and it was then he started sleeping badly. The nightmares came with increased frequency, and he suffered more and more from hallucinations. His head scrambled the experiences he’d had in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Rwanda and mixed them into a mass that made it increasingly difficult to concentrate. He developed an anxiety that something might happen to the children. When he played with them in the sandpit, he became convinced there were corpses buried under the sand, he saw sneakers poking up, the smell of rot filled his nostrils, and in the end the kids were banned from playing in the sandpit altogether. Meanwhile his headaches worsened, migraine-like, and he thought that the kids seemed restless in his presence, that he made them insecure. He didn’t dare say anything to Stina, he’d only ever told her he was a photographer, not where he’d been and on the rare occasions she’d asked him, he’d told her about the United States, the years before he’d gone to Europe. Eventually she sensed it, that something was wrong, without knowing what, his behavior grew steadily stranger, un
til it couldn’t go on any longer. She grew frightened of leaving him with the children, sent them to day care, but not even that helped. Carl became more and more depressed, stopped talking, slept nearly all day, and gradually the barrier between reality and dream began to erode. And it’s around now that Carl gets out of bed, in the beginning of December, the store windows are decorated for Christmas in Reykjavík, and the lights are hanging over the street in Akranes. Carl eats his breakfast, puts on some warm clothes, goes out. He takes the bus into Reykjavík and then on to the airport in Keflavik. He puts himself on a flight going East to Ehilssta∂ir and from there takes a bus to the harbor in Sey∂isfjör∂ur. He walks to and fro until it’s dark, and then at night he sneaks on board one of the big boats. He carefully lowers an inflatable lifeboat onto the sea, and then lowers himself over the side of the ship after it. He tugs the straps, and the life boat blows up in seconds, cone-shaped, like a tent on the sea. He’s not completely conscious of what he’s doing, he’s somewhere between dream and waking, but all he can think is that he has to get away, now, he has to get away from the kids before he destroys them, and he has to get away from the corpses that might surface in the sandpit at any time, unveiling him to Stina. Then he takes the oar and paddles out beyond the breakers, out into the open sea, and he paddles until he can’t go on, until he collapses in the bottom of the boat, falls asleep, and for the first time in months he sleeps through an entire night, no nightmares, no harsh sounds waking him, no pounding headache. Next morning he wakes in a panic, his head is completely clear, and he sees he’s in the middle of the Atlantic in a rubber dinghy. He can’t breathe at first, can only feel the fear that’s grabbed him, squeezing him tight. He grows terrified of falling into the sea and seals the rubber exit, and with it the window, sits there in those few square feet inside the cone-shaped rubber tent for several days as the waves drag the dinghy up and down. He has no idea where he is, or where he’s going, but as the shock subsides and his reason returns, he concludes that he’s likely to be carried by the Gulf Stream to Norway or England, he’ll get there sooner or later as long as he can hold out. And the days pass, routines take over, he learns to know the dinghy, finds the little container with portions of drinking water in a side pocket, he has equipment for fishing, a flare, sunscreen, a navigational map. He manages to open the sluice in the bottom of the vessel so that the plastic keel fills with water to prevent it from turning over in the waves. He survives. The days pass. And for the first time since leaving Bosnia, he wishes he had a camera, so he could take pictures from the boat. But he hasn’t, and after another week in heavy seas and after being blown backward more than forward, he starts running out of drinking water, he hasn’t caught a fish for days, and there’s something wrong with the boat, it’s started leaning to one side in the last few days, maybe there’s a leak somewhere, but he can’t find it. So he closes all the openings again and waits, just waits, lying at an angle, for nearly two days, before he dares open up and look out again, and even though it’s dark, he can see that the waves are breaking against land far ahead, he sees land, is convinced that it’s Norway, and for the first time in weeks he takes out the oar, paddles frantically, because it is New Year’s Eve and the boat is lying low in the water, it’s leaking, it’s clearly leaking, and Carl paddles as hard as he can, but he can’t get beyond the breakers, the stream isn’t bringing him closer to land, but farther away, and he thinks he sees people on the beach, maybe he’s mistaken, but yes, there must be, and a moment later they send up a New Year’s rocket, and Carl’s pulse quickens, because there are people on the beach, and he fumbles about, finds the flare, sticks it out of the opening and sends it up, a red light above the ocean, and he knows they must have seen him, and he paddles against the stream trying to reach land, but it’s not happening, he’s not moving and the boat lies low in the water, it’s going to sink, and he sees two people get into an old wooden boat, they’re coming toward him, and he’s so happy, he yells, but nobody hears him because of the wind and rain or because he’s run out of strength, and he gathers some belongings and prepares to leave the boat, because a rowboat is coming, and the next thing he remembers he’s sitting in the kitchen wishing us all a happy New Year.