Serbia and charged with spying. His mission not unnaturally fascinated Australia, and there were four journalists from Sydney and Melbourne in the hotel, covering the story.One of them turned out to be a man with whom I had shared a house in Washington a quarter of a century before, and whom I had not seen since. We spent our last evening in Christendom with him, and he assured us that the most prudent place to cross the Sava was via a half-ruined bridge a hundred miles east of Zagreb, at a place called Gradiska.
And so the next morning we drove there, and under a blazing sun crossed the iron Bailey bridge, our progress monitored by the crew of Hungarian army sappers who had helped to build it. It took half an hour of paperwork and fee paying and delay, but by lunch we were properly stamped—in Cyrillic, naturally—into what was notionally the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, BiH for short, or the Federation.
Except not quite. We had in fact come across the border, across the Sava River, not directly into the Federation, but into that part of Bosnia that is almost wholly occupied by Serbs, rather than by the Croats or Bosnian Muslims—Slavs all, it has to be remembered—for whom the Federation is their supposed home. We were driving, and would be driving for a couple of hours more, through that half-legal entity that was won out of the cliff-hanging negotiations at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, and is known as the Republika Srpska—a place where no one, quite frankly, is very welcome. Certainly not two foreigners driving a Fiat that sported license plates showing it was registered in Croatia. It was perhaps not wholly surprising, then, that like Alexander Kinglake all those years before, we passed under the barrels of the sentries’ guns with just a frisson of apprehension.
4
Looking for a Sarajevo Rose
I WAS TOLD THAT I should see a Sarajevo rose. I had heard a lot about them—not exactly what they were, mind you, but that they were well worth seeing. I asked the Rose with whom I was traveling: She had heard of them, too, but wasn’t quite sure either.
Rose knew a good deal about Sarajevo, and like so many who had lived in Europe during its years of siege and near destruction, had followed the downward spiral of the city’s fortunes with a grim fascination. In the United States there wasn’t the same degree of interest, and I was less prepared than was Rose for what lay ahead. I had heard several people say that after its five years of ruination and despair the city was now in an optimistic mood, and that it thought of itself as the fastest-changing place on earth. On the other hand, some Cassandras I had spoken to back in Vienna and Zagreb said this was fanciful nonsense, and that the city would eventually turn out to be much the same as it always was—a cauldron of all Balkan races and religions but one perpetually on the verge of boiling over. Just see a Sarajevo rose, one of them said, and then you’ll have a better idea of whether or not things will ever really change.
In ordinary circumstances it should be about a three-hour drive to the Bosnian capital from the Sava River. But neither Sarajevo nor the Bosnian Republic have known ordinary circumstances for a long time now, and I supposed it would take rather longer to get there. Especially in a car registered in Croatia. (Though one of the Serb border guards who was in a friendly mood said that, since my car was registered in the Istrian seaport of Rijeka, and there was little historic animosity between the average Serb and the average Istrian, I would quite probably “get away with it.”)
The first few miles proved amiable enough. For maybe two or three miles, close to the frontier, there were some ruined houses, relics of the shelling from the Croatian guns. But when we turned into the Taxi-Bar café that the frontier sentries had recommended, it had been newly rebuilt and was filled with free-spending patrons, and no
And so the next morning we drove there, and under a blazing sun crossed the iron Bailey bridge, our progress monitored by the crew of Hungarian army sappers who had helped to build it. It took half an hour of paperwork and fee paying and delay, but by lunch we were properly stamped—in Cyrillic, naturally—into what was notionally the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, BiH for short, or the Federation.
Except not quite. We had in fact come across the border, across the Sava River, not directly into the Federation, but into that part of Bosnia that is almost wholly occupied by Serbs, rather than by the Croats or Bosnian Muslims—Slavs all, it has to be remembered—for whom the Federation is their supposed home. We were driving, and would be driving for a couple of hours more, through that half-legal entity that was won out of the cliff-hanging negotiations at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, and is known as the Republika Srpska—a place where no one, quite frankly, is very welcome. Certainly not two foreigners driving a Fiat that sported license plates showing it was registered in Croatia. It was perhaps not wholly surprising, then, that like Alexander Kinglake all those years before, we passed under the barrels of the sentries’ guns with just a frisson of apprehension.
4
Looking for a Sarajevo Rose
I WAS TOLD THAT I should see a Sarajevo rose. I had heard a lot about them—not exactly what they were, mind you, but that they were well worth seeing. I asked the Rose with whom I was traveling: She had heard of them, too, but wasn’t quite sure either.
Rose knew a good deal about Sarajevo, and like so many who had lived in Europe during its years of siege and near destruction, had followed the downward spiral of the city’s fortunes with a grim fascination. In the United States there wasn’t the same degree of interest, and I was less prepared than was Rose for what lay ahead. I had heard several people say that after its five years of ruination and despair the city was now in an optimistic mood, and that it thought of itself as the fastest-changing place on earth. On the other hand, some Cassandras I had spoken to back in Vienna and Zagreb said this was fanciful nonsense, and that the city would eventually turn out to be much the same as it always was—a cauldron of all Balkan races and religions but one perpetually on the verge of boiling over. Just see a Sarajevo rose, one of them said, and then you’ll have a better idea of whether or not things will ever really change.
In ordinary circumstances it should be about a three-hour drive to the Bosnian capital from the Sava River. But neither Sarajevo nor the Bosnian Republic have known ordinary circumstances for a long time now, and I supposed it would take rather longer to get there. Especially in a car registered in Croatia. (Though one of the Serb border guards who was in a friendly mood said that, since my car was registered in the Istrian seaport of Rijeka, and there was little historic animosity between the average Serb and the average Istrian, I would quite probably “get away with it.”)
The first few miles proved amiable enough. For maybe two or three miles, close to the frontier, there were some ruined houses, relics of the shelling from the Croatian guns. But when we turned into the Taxi-Bar café that the frontier sentries had recommended, it had been newly rebuilt and was filled with free-spending patrons, and no
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