barns. The daubings once more—“Cetniki brigade”—showed who was responsible. These had been the houses of Muslims, burned out and cleared by Serbs to make this region pure. By now I was becoming inured to it, but Rose fell silent, stunned.
Whole village house rows were empty—lines upon lines of houses destroyed, not randomly but with concentrated deliberation. I think that is what dismayed us most. This was not a countryside devastated by conventional fighting, in which an army had smashed its way across an urban landscape and laid waste anything in its path. This was selective, spiteful fighting, in which soldiers and civilians with pure hatred in their hearts set about the destruction of personal enemies, the settling of old scores. This was evidence of an abscesslike welling up of years of poison, and its sudden release, with dreadful, impassioned result.
The only houses that were untouched were those once owned by Serb farmers, back in those times when villagers ignored their differences—such as they were: Everyone here was a Slav, it needs to be said again and again—and just got on with the harvesting or the sowing or the raising of barns. But even these intact houses were empty, their owners quite understandably opting not to live on in a village of ghosts. That wasone difference about the desertion: The Serbian houses had their windows boarded up; the Muslim houses had no windows.
A Bailey bridge—built by Royal Engineers a couple of years before—took us across a rushing gray river that formed the entity frontier itself, the ruins of the old bridge standing like broken teeth beside it. And then a few more miles of wreckage, before we rounded a bend, passed a Turkish army jeep and a white Land Rover, both with SFOR stenciled on their sides, and found ourselves in a settlement of modern houses, all intact. There was a café, and we bought two beers. The owner was a Muslim. There was a wall calendar in Arabic. “Yes, Muslim but Bosniak,” he grinned. “I drink beer. Is okay.”
Suddenly there came a furious barking from below the lip of a hill beside the bar, and four breathless men in army fatigues clambered up beside us. They each had a huge dog, restrained by heavy chain leashes, and each had a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder. “Pigs!” one shouted, “Wild pigs!” pointing down to the bottom of the valley. “And we have a wolf. Caught him yesterday.”
Rose and I slithered down the grassy bank to a hastily built barbed-wire cage. Inside, and chained by a back foot, was a gray wolf with yellow eyes and teeth an inch long. It jumped up wildly when it spied us, and began a deep growling, like far-off thunder. But when we knelt down next to its cage it fell mute, and sat gazing up at me with what seemed an expression of terrible misery, caught and pinioned like this away from its forest lair. The men who had caught it waved their guns and cheered. “Serbian wolf!” one shouted. And they laughed drunkenly, kicked their dogs up into a cage behind the car, and, waving their guns out of the windows, skidded off down the mountainside.
There was an increasing number of minarets now, as we passed town after bustling Federation town. We stopped for a while in Travnik, a town with a classical Balkan look—squeezed and squashed by geology and topography into an inconveniently narrow valley, hemmed in by steep hills and connectedto the outside only by winding switchback roads. My principal Balkan hero, the Nobel Prize-winner Ivo Andric had been born here: He wrote the novel that I have long thought of as the most important Balkan book, The Bridge on the Drina; a book that, though it appears to offer high regard for the Serb, was written by what Ivo Andric was invariably forgotten to be, a Croat. * There was a museum to his memory, but as so often happens it was locked, and a bored attendant who might well have been schooled in China offered only the memorably Oriental excuse, heard without cease
Whole village house rows were empty—lines upon lines of houses destroyed, not randomly but with concentrated deliberation. I think that is what dismayed us most. This was not a countryside devastated by conventional fighting, in which an army had smashed its way across an urban landscape and laid waste anything in its path. This was selective, spiteful fighting, in which soldiers and civilians with pure hatred in their hearts set about the destruction of personal enemies, the settling of old scores. This was evidence of an abscesslike welling up of years of poison, and its sudden release, with dreadful, impassioned result.
The only houses that were untouched were those once owned by Serb farmers, back in those times when villagers ignored their differences—such as they were: Everyone here was a Slav, it needs to be said again and again—and just got on with the harvesting or the sowing or the raising of barns. But even these intact houses were empty, their owners quite understandably opting not to live on in a village of ghosts. That wasone difference about the desertion: The Serbian houses had their windows boarded up; the Muslim houses had no windows.
A Bailey bridge—built by Royal Engineers a couple of years before—took us across a rushing gray river that formed the entity frontier itself, the ruins of the old bridge standing like broken teeth beside it. And then a few more miles of wreckage, before we rounded a bend, passed a Turkish army jeep and a white Land Rover, both with SFOR stenciled on their sides, and found ourselves in a settlement of modern houses, all intact. There was a café, and we bought two beers. The owner was a Muslim. There was a wall calendar in Arabic. “Yes, Muslim but Bosniak,” he grinned. “I drink beer. Is okay.”
Suddenly there came a furious barking from below the lip of a hill beside the bar, and four breathless men in army fatigues clambered up beside us. They each had a huge dog, restrained by heavy chain leashes, and each had a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder. “Pigs!” one shouted, “Wild pigs!” pointing down to the bottom of the valley. “And we have a wolf. Caught him yesterday.”
Rose and I slithered down the grassy bank to a hastily built barbed-wire cage. Inside, and chained by a back foot, was a gray wolf with yellow eyes and teeth an inch long. It jumped up wildly when it spied us, and began a deep growling, like far-off thunder. But when we knelt down next to its cage it fell mute, and sat gazing up at me with what seemed an expression of terrible misery, caught and pinioned like this away from its forest lair. The men who had caught it waved their guns and cheered. “Serbian wolf!” one shouted. And they laughed drunkenly, kicked their dogs up into a cage behind the car, and, waving their guns out of the windows, skidded off down the mountainside.
There was an increasing number of minarets now, as we passed town after bustling Federation town. We stopped for a while in Travnik, a town with a classical Balkan look—squeezed and squashed by geology and topography into an inconveniently narrow valley, hemmed in by steep hills and connectedto the outside only by winding switchback roads. My principal Balkan hero, the Nobel Prize-winner Ivo Andric had been born here: He wrote the novel that I have long thought of as the most important Balkan book, The Bridge on the Drina; a book that, though it appears to offer high regard for the Serb, was written by what Ivo Andric was invariably forgotten to be, a Croat. * There was a museum to his memory, but as so often happens it was locked, and a bored attendant who might well have been schooled in China offered only the memorably Oriental excuse, heard without cease
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