one, not even a group of four enormous and bare-chested Serbian men who sat at the next table, appeared unduly interested in my foreign car. I ordered beer and cevapcici, a dish of lamb and beef rolls, with freshly chopped chives and red-hot peppers, and which owes much to Bosnia’s Turkish culinary influence.
We ordered coffee. “Bosnian?” asked the waitress, matter-of-factly, and when we agreed brought us what back home we always called Turkish coffee, two tiny cups on a brass stand, and poured the thick brown liquid from a dzezva, a Turkish brass coffee jug. As we paid the bill—in German marks, the most widely accepted currency in the Balkans—one of the men from the next table came across and promptly turned the coffee cup over, dumping out the remaining coffee, claiming loudly to be able to read our futures from the grounds left behind.
“I see, I forecast, you will have good time here,” he said, in fractured English. His companions, contentedly drunk, giggled and gave the two-finger-and-thumb Serb salute—a gesture I was to see in much more threatening circumstances some weeks ahead.
We sped as fast as was legal through the ugly crossroads town of Banja Luka, forty miles from the frontier. There had once been more than a dozen mosques in the town, but so militant were the Serbs who flocked here during the war—as refugees from the Krajina in Croatia, and from those parts of Bosnia that were awarded to the Federation—that every one of them had been knocked down, including the famous Ferhadija Mosque, which was built in the sixteenth century with the ransom money paid to recover akidnapped Austrian count. These days the town is the epicenter of nationalist Serbdom for what is called the RS—the Republika Srpska—and for those who care to demonize the Serbs, not a place in which to linger. But I got lost, and everyone I stopped to ask—each of whom glanced automatically at my license plates to guess at my persuasions—was helpful, and displayed not a trace of hostility. That was to come a good while later.
To get to Sarajevo there was a choice: either the main road due south, or a smaller country road that wound up and over a range of hills. I had an army map that is customarily given to drivers of SFOR, the thirty-thousand-strong NATO Stabilization Force that tries to keep the Bosnian peace: It marked the country lane in red, as what armies call a Theater-Controlled Route, and even gave it a code-name, albeit an unlovely one: CLOG. * And sure enough, below the main sign that said SARAJEVO was a small yellow tac-sign (a tactical sign) with CLOG in a military stencil. We swung left onto the convoy route and climbed up into the high country.
Here at last was the geology of the Balkans writ large. The hills reared and plunged like the backs of a million mustangs. Villages were tucked away in the deep and forested folds of the ranges. There were waterfalls and tiny lakes, meadows and cliffs and precipitous ridges. There were dozens of churches too, each with the cross of the Eastern Orthodox faith, the tilted crosspiece at the base reminding worshipers that one of the men crucified beside Christ was destined for heaven, the othernot. No Catholic spires here, or minarets. We were deep inside the Serbian Republic, in a landscape that, however cruelly, had been cleansed of all alien callings, and that, like it or not, basked in the temporary peace of its newfound purity.
And then we heard a faraway deep-throated rumble, and high above us were the contrails again: a big bomber this time, an American B-52 dispatched from its forward base in East Anglia, with four fighters from a U.S. base in Italy escorting it, on the way to drop hot iron onto Serbia.
As we came ever closer to what the SFOR map defined with a thick black line and a set of warning symbols as the “inter-entity boundary,” there was ruin again—mile after mile of shattered houses, the burned-out shells of what had been homes and farms and
We ordered coffee. “Bosnian?” asked the waitress, matter-of-factly, and when we agreed brought us what back home we always called Turkish coffee, two tiny cups on a brass stand, and poured the thick brown liquid from a dzezva, a Turkish brass coffee jug. As we paid the bill—in German marks, the most widely accepted currency in the Balkans—one of the men from the next table came across and promptly turned the coffee cup over, dumping out the remaining coffee, claiming loudly to be able to read our futures from the grounds left behind.
“I see, I forecast, you will have good time here,” he said, in fractured English. His companions, contentedly drunk, giggled and gave the two-finger-and-thumb Serb salute—a gesture I was to see in much more threatening circumstances some weeks ahead.
We sped as fast as was legal through the ugly crossroads town of Banja Luka, forty miles from the frontier. There had once been more than a dozen mosques in the town, but so militant were the Serbs who flocked here during the war—as refugees from the Krajina in Croatia, and from those parts of Bosnia that were awarded to the Federation—that every one of them had been knocked down, including the famous Ferhadija Mosque, which was built in the sixteenth century with the ransom money paid to recover akidnapped Austrian count. These days the town is the epicenter of nationalist Serbdom for what is called the RS—the Republika Srpska—and for those who care to demonize the Serbs, not a place in which to linger. But I got lost, and everyone I stopped to ask—each of whom glanced automatically at my license plates to guess at my persuasions—was helpful, and displayed not a trace of hostility. That was to come a good while later.
To get to Sarajevo there was a choice: either the main road due south, or a smaller country road that wound up and over a range of hills. I had an army map that is customarily given to drivers of SFOR, the thirty-thousand-strong NATO Stabilization Force that tries to keep the Bosnian peace: It marked the country lane in red, as what armies call a Theater-Controlled Route, and even gave it a code-name, albeit an unlovely one: CLOG. * And sure enough, below the main sign that said SARAJEVO was a small yellow tac-sign (a tactical sign) with CLOG in a military stencil. We swung left onto the convoy route and climbed up into the high country.
Here at last was the geology of the Balkans writ large. The hills reared and plunged like the backs of a million mustangs. Villages were tucked away in the deep and forested folds of the ranges. There were waterfalls and tiny lakes, meadows and cliffs and precipitous ridges. There were dozens of churches too, each with the cross of the Eastern Orthodox faith, the tilted crosspiece at the base reminding worshipers that one of the men crucified beside Christ was destined for heaven, the othernot. No Catholic spires here, or minarets. We were deep inside the Serbian Republic, in a landscape that, however cruelly, had been cleansed of all alien callings, and that, like it or not, basked in the temporary peace of its newfound purity.
And then we heard a faraway deep-throated rumble, and high above us were the contrails again: a big bomber this time, an American B-52 dispatched from its forward base in East Anglia, with four fighters from a U.S. base in Italy escorting it, on the way to drop hot iron onto Serbia.
As we came ever closer to what the SFOR map defined with a thick black line and a set of warning symbols as the “inter-entity boundary,” there was ruin again—mile after mile of shattered houses, the burned-out shells of what had been homes and farms and
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