Welcome to Hell : At Ground Zero in the War in Yugoslavia, These Are the Rules: Never Go Into Open Places, Never Walk Easy and Always keep a Wall at the Back of Your Neck

I. ZAGREB, REPUBLIC OF CROATIA: Men in Uniform

ONE AUGUST DAY IN A PARK IN THE CENTER OF ZAGREB, IT WAS VERY HOT, AND the almost barkless state of the ocher-colored trees was like the paint peeling on the benches, like the ocher-colored leaves that scraped occasionally across the asphalt or just lay clutching with outstretched points. Across the street, a man in a blue-gray uniform lounged against a car. He called to another man who was dressed the same way. A third man in blue-gray came walking through the park rapidly with his walkie-talkie out and his hand on his holstered gun. Then he was gone. A man in camouflage fatigues passed more slowly, carrying a leather briefcase.

A girl rode her friend on the handlebars of her bike, round and round. People in their summer clothes entered the patch of bleached light at the middle of the square, and an old man bowed himself over a drinking fountain. The Serbs were no longer bombing Zagreb. The city was quite safe. You had to drive half an hour to get to the place where last week, a Croatian girl had been found raped with her throat cut. Zagreb was more of a staging area for men in uniform--some were police, some militia, some Cro Army and some in private militias.

I walked past a bookstore where I’d bought Communist-flavored children’s books 11 years ago, just after Tito, Yugoslavia’s former leader, died. I walked past quadruple-storied facades, one a bleached chlorine-green, the next pale yellow, the third chrome yellow, all as clean as if they’d been carved out of soap. Past a saber-pointing horseman long since petrified, I saw a campaign poster for the Croatian Party of Rights. Dobroslav Paraga, its leader, looked handsome, determined, effete. Paraga’s army was called HOS, the Croatian Defense Force. A man said to me: “Oh yes, they’re Nazis. Just like some Croats in World War II.” Another man said, “I like HOS very much because they fight well against the Serbs.” A Serb told me that HOS operated concentration camps for Serbs, but since I never saw one of those camps, I can’t say whether he was telling the truth.

It is true that some people were afraid of HOS. Its slogan was “Ready for the Homeland.” Another HOS poster two steps away showed brawny, tattooed men in black uniforms, their arms upraised in a Nazi salute. Of course, the Romans had saluted in the same way. But maybe I ought to make allowances, as I already had for the swastiskas I saw painted on the walls, for the T-shirts that said “God and Croatia.” Anyway, Paraga had lost the election.

I stayed with a young man named Adnan. He was very religious and hated the Serbs. His TV showed war as usual in Croatia: the shattered flowerpots and broken glass, the shelling. Adnan believed that the Serbs would bomb Zagreb again eventually. The TV showed Sarajevo, that nightmare city, in the country of nightmares called Bosnia-Herzegovina. Croatia was Catholic and Bosnia was in good part Muslim. They both hated Orthodox Serbia. On TV, I watched a man running, a bird flying, wounded people, a smashed roof. Sarajevo had been under Serbian siege for five months. I was afraid because I was going to Sarajevo.

There came happy trilling music on the TV. Croatian Army boys and girls were singing at attention, machine guns at the ready.

“Is this the Croatian national anthem or just an army song?” I asked Adnan.

“Some not important song,” he said, slightly embarrassed. “It says we are saving our home.”

Adnan took me to meet a blonde who sat with her hands clasped and her legs crossed. I’ll call her Nives. She said: “Well, I’m Serbian and Croatian. And I haven’t any problems with my job, with my friends in the town. I can tell them I am Serbian. I think it is not so difficult in the big towns. Maybe in a small town I might have problems. Many people say to me: I hate Serbs, but you are OK.”

I wasn’t sure what to ask for a moment. Then I remembered that Croats called extremist Serbs Chetniks , after the fiercely anti-Croat guerrillas of World War II. A Muslim in Sarajevo would tell me later: “There are no Serbs anymore, only Chetniks.”

“Do you know any Chetniks?”

Nives smiled. “My father is in the Yug Army. The Yug Army is the Serbian Army now. For all Croatian people, he is a Chetnik. But he does not agree.”

“What would happen to you if you went to HOS and said to them: ‘I am one-half Serbian?’ ”

“They will say: ‘So what? So what you want?’ ”

“They would never hurt you?”

“I think not. Never in Zagreb.”

“Some people tell me they commit atrocities on Serbs near Zagreb.”

Adnan interrupted, shouting: “It’s not true!”

“Well, maybe it’s possible,” Nives said.

Adnan stared at her. “You don’t write good!” he said to me. “Maybe it’s true, but I have not experienced it and she has not experienced it.”

A blue tram rounded the bend slowly, glowing yellow inside. When it passed, a street light left its cool gleam on the track and then I could see the building block laced with darkness that used to be the artists’ institute but was now HOS. A man in a camouflage stood vigil in the doorway beneath a flag.

Tito

AT MIDNIGHT THE CROATIAN FLAG WAVED ENDLESSLY ON TV. AND I SAT, THINKing about the last time I was here, when there was no barbed wire between Croatia and Bosnia and Serbia.

“I’m sad about Yugoslavia,” I said. “Because I remember that when I was here before, there was no fighting. I would be sad if my country broke up into so many countries.”

“But your country has no history!” said Adnan. “Here we have always had separate countries. It was only the Serbs trying to dominate us who forced us into one country.”

“I’d say it wasn’t the Serbs; it was the Communists.”

“No! No!” he said impatiently. “Tito was not well-educated; he was not a real Communist. He only set up the Serbs to dominate the non-Serbs.”

“But, Adnan, wasn’t Tito half Croatian?”

“So they say. But I don’t believe. They have his birthplace in Croatia. But I don’t believe.”

“So you honestly think Tito was a Serb?”

“I think so, yes. There were never any Communists here.”

“But when I was here 11 years ago, I stayed in the youth hostel with seven other boys. And they were all Communists--Stalinists!”

He looked at me in disgust. “They were stupid! They were liars! I don’t believe!”

“I speak from my experience,” I said.

“Then they were Serbs.”

‘Life Put Me Here’

EAST OF ADNAN’S HOUSE, BEHIND THE DROP OF GOODNESS HOMELESS SHELter, a boy sat drinking, pursing his lips out into a snout. An old man was drinking, too. His breath stank of slivovitz. The boy was his son.

“I have to live in this place because life is hard,” the old man said to me. “Life put me here.”

His narrow, greenish-brown eyes were shelved by pinkish underlids. His mustache, thicker than grass, was black and silver.

“My son uses drugs,” he said. “But I never use drugs.”

“Then what are those abscesses on your arms?”

“I worked for five years in a small town near Rijeka doing metal etching. Those are acid burns. It was illegal labor so they gave me no gloves.”

“Are you sad that Yugoslavia is dead?” I asked him.

“For me it’s completely the same. I have 16 years working. In Yugoslavia I had nothing. In Croatia I have nothing.”

“What’s your opinion of the Serbs?”

“The Serbian people are not so bad. I had many Serbian friends before. I believe they’re still my friends. I remember the start of war in one town called Delnice. I took a few boys from here to fight. I had an old gun, and the boys had some sticks. The police stopped us and sent us back. They said they didn’t need us. About the Serbs I don’t really care. About the war I don’t care. Nobody cares except the people who are getting rich.”

The boy heard this, looked at his father and spat on the dirt.

“My son, of course, really wanted a weapon so much,” said the old man. “He bought a machine gun from the gypsies for 1,500 deutsche marks. I don’t know where he got the money. Maybe from selling heroin. Then he went to Bosnia and joined up. Since he was only 16, I was able to get him out. I am his father. He must do as I say until he’s 18. Now he’s angry, as you see. As soon as he finishes school he’ll be free to enlist, and I can’t stop him. He’ll go. He’s a wild one. I expect he’ll lose his life.”

“Are people different in Zagreb since the war?” I asked.

“Yes, so much. Never before would they always ask: Where are you from? Who was your mother? Before the war, someone might help you. Now your best friend won’t help you. Tomorrow maybe I’ll help my best friend. But my best friend won’t help me today.”

II. SARAJEVO, REPUBLIC OF BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA: In the Morgue

THERE CAME A SHARP, LOW SNAPPING OF THE AIR, AND THEN ANother one at a distance, which briefly and metallically rippled. But these variants were incidental to the main sound, the weighty, unpleasant sound of earth falling on earth, as if for a burial. Granted, the sounds were all different in their unhappy way, like a chain of sobs. Now somebody was dropping things, slowly, with a nasty kind of weariness. Now something thudded down. Analyzing the sounds was the first step to not listening.

After three or four days I no longer felt a naked tenderness at the back of my head where I imagined a sniper taking aim. The sensation had been distracting. I could feel the nose of the bullet pointed at me just as you can feel eyes staring at your back. No matter which way I turned, the sniper who was going to kill me kept the back of my head in his sights. The spot of tenderness was small, centered where my skull rounded down, the farthest possible point from any place that I could ever see, the place where I used to shoot cows to be butchered.

This absurd and useless sensitivity persisted until my visit to the morgue in Sarajevo’s Kosevo Hospital. On that day, as always, I was in the back of the car, gripping the door handle as the militiaman beside the driver shouted to him to move his f---ing ass because we were in a dangerous open place and so we screeched around the corner and then the driver floored it; I saw the speedometer pass 120 k.p.h. Not too far away came a sound like a resinous twig bursting cozily in the fireplace. Then something ripped horribly.

Last week’s casualty list posted at the Holiday Inn, prepared by the Bosnian Institute for Public Health, had tallied up 218 killed and 1,406 wounded in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which included 90 deaths and 540 injuries in Sarajevo, which became intelligible to me when, as I said, I smelled death at the morgue and saw the dried blood on the floor. With no electricity and no water, a morgue is not very nice. I saw the body of an unidentified man whose legs had been blown off by a grenade. By law they had to keep him for 24 hours while he lay swelling and reeking on the table. Next to him lay a 25-year-old man with a bloody face (one wound was all that he had, a neat drilling from an anti-aircraft gun); he was covered with flies and his hand was clenched and his naked body was reddish-brown but blotched with a terrible white whose contrast with the extraordinary yellowness of the next corpse, a child’s corpse, seemed almost planned, aesthetic, unlike the child’s doll-face grinning.

From the child, as from the others, came a vinegar-vomit smell. It was unbearable to see how his head moved when the pathologist tried to unwrap the sheet, turning him round and round as his little skull shook; and in the end the pathologist could not do it because the child had been fossilized in his own dried blood, the sheet now hardened, brown and crackly, where the intestines had mushed out. Still the pathologist endeavored to remove the sheet in a professional manner, and the doll’s head jerked rhythmically back and forth.

“This next one was killed several days before,” said the pathologist. “Perhaps you don’t want to look.” It was a man. His head, tiny and black, was a ball of swarming insects that had not yet attacked the yellow bloatings below.

He took me into another room. “This young boy lived three days,” he said. “See how his stomach is open? They say he screamed day and night. But I think he’s an exception. My brother was wounded last month by a grenade. I asked him what he felt. He told me that he felt nothing. His arm was seriously injured. He said it was not until later that the pain started. So I believe that most of these people felt nothing.”

His words comforted me. I left the morgue, returning to the not-yet-dead outside the hospital, where a man sat flirting with the nurses, his hand-bandage sporting a blaze of autumn, and a smiling girl took the sun, offering to God deep scars just under knee and eye. When I got back into the car, I found that the tenderness at the back of my head had gone away. I wasn’t afraid of being shot there anymore. I feared only getting my stomach blown open.

A week later, when I was standing outside an apartment building near the Sarajevo front line waiting for my friend Sami to buy vodka, I felt a sharp impact on the crown of my head. Reaching up to explore the wound, I felt wetness. I took a deep breath. I brought my hand down, preparing myself to see blood. But the liquid was transparent. Eventually, I realized that the projectile had been merely a peach pit dropped from a 15th-floor window.

Cabbages

AT THE FRONT, THERE WAS A MULTISTORY CONCRETE BUILDING THAT USED TO be a university hostel. It stood alone and apart from the apartment towers whose ragged windows and round shell holes were a good three-minute sprint across a dangerous open place that used to be a busy street. Curtains hung out of the hostel’s broken windows. The roof of the portico was spattered with fragments of glass. The white walls were scorched. There was garbage on the grass, because in Sarajevo carrying the trash out was less necessary and no less dangerous than getting water. Some people in Sarajevo did empty their trash, of course. What would life be without the freedom to empty the trash whether or not it kills you? And perhaps it will not even kill you if that is your one indulgence, and your other rules of conduct are drafted more prudently.

A man named Darko told me his rules: “When I walk, I am very careful in some crossroads. I never go in open places. You always have to find some kind of shelter, some wall or building behind your neck. And always run. Never walk easy. If you hear some kind of shooting, don’t move. Try to walk in the shadows.”

The hostel was definitely one of the places to and from which you always ran, because it was only 200 meters from the Chetniks’ guns. In the lobby, in a wilderness of shattered chairs and planks, soldiers from the Blue Thunderbolt special unit of the Bosnian Muslim militia sat in darkness, smoking cigarettes with their rifles ready beside them.

I remember the first time I went up the stairs and crossed to the wing where no one lived anymore. The hall was black because a tank shell had come smashing in. The hall terrified me because I had to run past sunny, shattered doorways. Maybe a Chetnik was playing his binoculars across the doorways. He could be calculating my speed as I ran. He’d take aim at the doorway ahead, waiting for me to pass into its lethal openness. Or he could wait, knowing that I would be running back this way. That was the worst, that every doorway would see me twice.

At one of the landings, a round window broken long ago looked out at the Chetniks. The soldiers told me that there were about 20 of the enemy in the red-roofed white building that used to be an institute for the blind. To look out this porthole, you sat to one side, holding a cracked mirror at a 45-degree angle. You could see the Chetniks, and they could see your reflected face, but they could not shoot you. When I tried this, a soldier looked down at my knees, and then I looked down and saw that they were trembling. The soldier smiled.

“How do you feel now?” he said.

“Afraid.”

The soldiers all laughed. “Try to spend 24 hours here,” one said.

THE STUDENTS SLEPT IN AN A-BOMB SHELTER IN THE BASEMENT. SOME HAD FLED at the beginning of the war. Those who’d remained were now as trapped as everyone else. There were about 80 of them, some from foreign countries.

“The shelling is almost continuous,” a student said. “From April we’ve slept underground since our rooms are too dangerous. It’s very cold. Food is a great problem for us.”

On their cots they lay still, some smiling shyly in the light of the white walls. Their pale faces were transected by blue-gray shadows.

In the ventilation room, they took turns for 15 minutes every hour turning a crank that kept air circulating. This job was strenuous; it used to be done by electricity. Some students were stronger than others. The strong ones cranked for half an hour. It was concrete-gray in there in the beam of my flashlight--they themselves turned the crank in the dark--and the sand floor was gray. “We have eyes in the dark,” a student said.

There were three students who did not sleep in the shelter. It was too dark and crowded, they said. They had beds set up on the second-floor landing in front of the elevators. That was the safest place except for the shelter.

Sami, skinny and brown, lay on one side of the candle. The two girls and I were on the other. The flame caught warring crab’s claws and crescent moons on the edges of their hair and faces, the rest of their heads silhouetted against the wall. I told them about California and Sami talked about the Sudan and Suzy began to say something about Kuwait, but then she began to think about her parents, who didn’t know whether she was dead or alive, and grew silent. Mica never said anything. She was a Serbian girl from Visegrad.

After Suzy blew the candle out, the wind groaned terrifyingly through the shattered corridors, chilling our faces, toppling barricades with sickening crashes. The sky flickered white and black, then suddenly red from a distant shell. Mica moaned in her sleep. I had taken off my bulletproof vest because I could not bear to lie next to them with more protection than they had, but then I kept waking up, wondering when a shell or a bullet would discover me.

At six in the morning, a soldier woke us. Six was the time to leave open places, because it was getting light and snipers would be able to see in. The girls got up, rolling their sheets and carrying them away. I could see the white of the cotton fading down the dark hall as Mica vanished. By 6:30, dawn was well-established, the sky gray, raindrops tinking down against glass shards on the floor, and the Chetniks were beginning to fire once again with the anti-aircraft gun.

During the day, the students stayed in their rooms. Sami’s old room had been destroyed. In his new room, the window was shattered, the wood splintered on the sill. Blue sky was cracked with greenish glass lines, tracked and sectored by translucent tape. Sami told me that he’d been lying on his bed a week before when the bomb came in. Shrapnel had shot up over his head and gone into a corner of the ceiling. He was knocked to the floor. “Thanks for God I tell you because until now I live!” Now he took an ice cold shower in the room’s dark bathroom, brushed his teeth and smoked a cigarette. Proudly, he showed me a fresh cabbage. It was the first vegetable I had seen in Sarajevo. I asked him where he had gotten it, and he smiled and said: “Wait until tonight. At 8 I show you!”

“And what do we do right now?”

“We gonna make some tea. So nice for you!”

He took me upstairs to the ruined hall, past the open doorways. This time I was not quite so afraid, and I looked in the rooms. Bullet holes, shell holes--these the abandoned spaces wore for makeup, their faces splintered into ugly terraces. All over the floor lay rumpled clothing, shoes, photos, identity cards, even coins. “You want sweater?” said Sami. “Always the girls go shopping here.”

We entered another door. The room had many holes in the wall. “Sniper,” said Sami. “If you stand there, you will die.” From a ruined dresser he broke off scraps of wood as quickly as he could. Then we ran back downstairs. At a landing where the concrete wall was scorched black, Sami started a fire with the dresser wood and some sheets of old physics exercises. He put on a black cast-iron pot. The dresser wood crackled and flared. The landing filled with smoke. A soldier stationed at the window peered out at the Chetniks, yawning and gripping his Kalashnikov. He rubbed smoke out of his eyes. He squatted on the stairs, leaning on the butt of the gun. “If he see, he must shoot,” said Sami. “If no see sniper, he must not shoot. Because they always shoot back again. We must shoot only for control, to make them afraid.”

The water was boiling now. The Chetniks were shooting from a house behind a parking garage. We had tea.

TO SHOOT CHETNIKS YOU GO UPSTAIRS AND WALK QUICKLY DOWN ABANDONED halls until you reach the porthole of your choice, where there will be a couple of chairs and many, many 30.06 and 7.62 NATO shells golden and black on the floor. You turn a chair backward and straddle it, leaning against the back of it as you fit the rifle against your shoulder and line up your sights on one of the windows of the red-roofed building or the white houses nearby, and then you wait for movement. The soldier who’s pointed out the apartment house where he used to live with his mother and sister and where a Chetnik shell struck when his mother and sister happened to be there (they survived) takes aim. He fires five careful shots. He says: “I prefer to wait, you know. I can stay like this two days. I wait. I prefer to see someone dying.”

You each fire. The Chetniks do nothing. You fire again. The Chetniks send machine-gun bullets against the walls. You wait until they stop and you fire again. The soldier whose mother and sister survived says: “All Chetniks have beards. They never wash. When I come home, I wash. They, never. They stink. They are dirty.”

“They killed three of our men here,” another soldier says, “two from snipers and one from a shell.”

THE MORNING WAS CLEAR AND COLD, WITH SHOTS, DRUMLIKE MACHINE GUNS now, extremely loud and nasty. Mica had taken a cold shower and washed her hair, which was as black as the soot-galaxies that powdered the corner of Sami’s white ceiling where the shell had exploded. In the cold shadows of distant buildings, people ran, carrying splinters of wood as something smashed fiercely and repeatedly. The students played Ping-Pong. A girl named Tzeta was presented with a white rose from the old gardener outside and everyone teased Tzeta’s boyfriend. Mica carried a teapot back to her room, filled it from the bathroom, and the war continued as the girls laughed and smiled.

I was happy to see them enjoying themselves. However, their most important job ought to have been preparing for winter. Whenever I discussed the future with the students, they would say only: We will die.

Suzy, Sami and Mica talked about escaping, but no one could come up with a plan, so Suzy sighed and fell silent, her face like coagulated misery. Of the three of them, I worried the most about Mica. Sami was an organizer. Whatever was possible he would do. Suzy, for all her depression, seemed extroverted. She had friends. Mica, however, was shy and quiet. Even now she continued to study her subject, which was forestry. She seemed so often to be terrified and silent. And she was a Serb.

I called UNPROFOR, the United Nations Protection Force headquarters, to ask about the students. A woman told me: “I wouldn’t worry about them if I were you. Nobody wants to feed them in the winter. In a few days we’ll evacuate them.”

“What about the Serbian students? I understand that there are seven.”

“This is only my opinion, but I don’t think they’ll be evacuated.”

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AFTERNOON, MICA AND A BOY NAMED HAZIM WERE SITting on Sami’s bed playing a Bosnian game similar to Go, with dark stones and pale corn kernels, trying to get threes and cut each other off and diminish each other like armies. There came a terrible noise of shooting, and looking out we saw sparks and smoke boiling from the windows of the apartment house next door. Suzy, who was sitting beside Sami on the other bed, folded her hands across her breasts and let her head sink down into emptiness. I thought how many thousands of people there were like her in Sarajevo on that rainy day.

Consider the red streetcar full of passengers who knew that at any time the Chetniks might send them a shell, but they were tired and hungry and their feet hurt, so they took the streetcar anyway. They had to ascend 10 or 15 flights of pitch dark stairs, past people carrying their jugs of water wearily. At every landing, people squatted and begged for cigarettes. The people the old ladies visited all lived the same life as Suzy. They could never sit out in the sun because if they did someone would shoot them. If they stayed in their rooms, someone might shoot them right through their curtained windows.

Consider the three men who went to a restaurant to eat but found it closed. They tried a second restaurant, which was also closed, and then a third, inside which it was sepia-dark and people sat at empty white-clothed tables. After a long time a waitress came. Because the men knew the owner, they were able to order a bowl of soup apiece and two plates of meat for the three of them. The other people watched them with hopeless envy.

Equally trapped were the patients in the French Hospital, which had been so heavily shelled that half the windows were raggedly black; equally trapped was the teenager who’d drawn a skull and crossbones on the side of his apartment building and written “Welcome to Hell”; equally trapped was the soldier, another crew-cut Muslim fighter who wore a patterned handkerchief over his skull. His black vest bulged with pockets for pistol and rifle magazines.

“I have only 20 years, and I don’t want to die,” he said. “I hate this gun. I want to be drinking and f---ing. My girlfriend is a Serb in Belgrade. I have not seen her for half a year. But I must fight. For my mother and for my sister.”

AT 7 O’CLOCK, IT WAS GETTING COLD. IN THE DARK LANDING BY THE FIRE, SUZY and Mica were fanning smoke away, laughing, jumping a little, Suzy biting her lip when the noises came too close, Mica hunched over the fire. The smoke got worse. Sami fanned himself with cardboard, coughing and laughing. He wore a scarf over his head. I looked out to the right at the still apartments and the hills behind them. The sky echoed with cannonades. Something jackhammered. Something unyielding and echoing went off as steadily as target practice; and there was a rocket, and then Suzy and Mica brought the little plate of halvah and set it before us on a makeshift table. I saw people running.

“Tonight we will go out to the garden,” Sami said. “We will make a great salad. It will be dark. For our organism, you know. To stay healthy.”

At 8, we went down to the lobby. Sami sprinted outside, low to the dark ground, crunching broken glass under the balls of his feet until he could fade into the night-darkness, crouching, embracing the dirt, clutching and gripping for cabbages. A shell exploded far away, fixing us in light for a forever second of terror like some slice of tissue stained in eosin on the microscope slide of God, and then we heard an anti-aircraft gun and Sami was running to another place and coughing. “I smoke cigarettes too much, you know,” he said. I heard him digging again. “Ah, now I find the last two cabbages,” he whispered gleefully. “We gonna have too nice a salad, you know!”

When we came back in, he talked quickly, wet with fear-sweat. “I tell you, we gonna make a nice food, a nice salad,” he kept saying. “Too nice, you know!”

Mica stood with her wrist curved against her hip, looking down at Sami, smiling patiently, saying: “I know, I know, I know.”

Sami scooped tinned meat into a bowl of soaking rice, added some tomato paste and vinegar while Suzy mixed everything up slowly and carefully. Outside the howitzers boomed sullenly and Sami lit another cigarette, Mica sitting next to me on the bed, cutting cabbage slowly and carefully with a big knife.

When Mica had finished grating the cabbage, I put in my last tin of sardines, and Suzy added oil, salt and pepper. Sami took out a packet of vitamin-added Cheddar cheese spread from UNPROFOR, kneaded it, tore it open and slowly extruded the cheese as Suzy mixed with a big spoon. We were all very happy. Afterward we sat drinking Special Balkan Vodka, my treat (the man I’d paid had run through sniper fire to get it). Mica and Suzy had one glass apiece, to be polite. Sami and I got drunk. He laughed and said: “Bill, what do you feel? I start to fly, I tell you!”

Later, soldiers joined us. The room smelled of cigarettes, as always, cigarette-ends the only light, trembling and jerking with the gestures of the dark figures against the white darkness outside the windows. A soldier said: “You know, we used to drink with the Serbs. And now all Serbs are Chetniks.”

A thud and a thunder roll echoed outside. I heard the high heels of the two girls coming down the stairs. I heard the sound of something crashing into echoing depths. A thud, an echo with many reverberations, and then a sharp echoing crack ached in our bones, but the soldiers began to sing. They told me: “This is a song about a dead girl, very religious.”

At midnight there were no lights in the city, nothing but grimy darkness made more hideous by a reddish-orange moon.

A bullet struck somewhere, and a window shattered.

“I miss something,” Sami said. “I don’t know what. I feel so bad, I tell you.”

MAYBE THE NON-SERBIAN STUDENTS would be evacuated and maybe they wouldn’t. Because I couldn’t bear to think about Mica being left behind, the next day I went to UNPROFOR, a few dangerous blocks away. A soldier and a British journalist had both suggested bribing the guards at the Serbian checkpoints that ring the city. The problem was that this would deposit her in Kiseljak, in Croatian territory. There was a good chance that she would be raped or killed. But I had to try something. Maybe someone at UNPROFOR could help.

Past the first line of concertina wire and sandbags, a blue-helmeted soldier took my passport. I heard the smash of a shell not far away.

A German journalist had told me to ask at a certain office about bribing the Serbs. The staff had been very helpful, he said. I got a pass and went there. A soldier escorted me and opened the door for me. I had no hope.

The lady in charge frowned, scratched her nose, and said: “This case has nothing to do with me.”

“We’re talking about someone’s life,” I said.

“You are proposing something illegal,” she said. “I cannot advise you.”

I went to the Serbian official, who said that he would be happy to evacuate Mica if the Bosnian official would agree. I went to the Bosnian official, who shouted: “Who told you that Serbs would not be evacuated? We help everyone! We are not like the Serbs. You must tell me who gave you this information. I must have this name immediately.”

I went back to the Serbian official’s office. This time there was somebody different behind the desk, a man whose face was patient and whose voice was kind. He promised me that he would try to help Mica.

Later, when Sami and I brought her into his office, he spoke with her calmly, gently. She began to get very agitated. He spread his hands.

“He says he can take her out anytime,” Sami told me. “She must only contact him when she is ready.”

“So she is happy?” I said to him.

“Yes.” Mica sat staring at the wall.

“Do you believe him?”

“I don’t know,” said Sami, and I saw that he was very tense.

“If you and Suzy are evacuated, will Mica be all right?”

“I prefer not to be here, you know,” Sami said.

When I finally left Sarajevo in a BBC armored car, trying not to think about the weird injustice of life, that I could go where I pleased and they could not, I felt an awful sinking of my soul, and I wondered how many of the students and the soldiers would be alive at the end of the winter.

Dear Friends

THE STUDENTS IN THE HOSTEL WROTE this letter to America:

We are students from different parts of former Yugoslavia. We were studying in Sarajevo and we spent here all the time of war. There is approximately 80 of us, and we are in rather desperate position. There is little food and no electricity. Winter is coming and it’s usually very cold here. We haven’t any money and telephone net is not working. We haven’t any news from our homes for months. We are under constant shelling and most of our time are spending in shelter in darkness, wetness and coldness. All that we want is to leave Sarajevo and go to our homes. Please, help us to leave before winter, or, at least, send us food.

Sami’s signature was first; Suzy’s was number 28; Mica’s number 29.

III. SERBIAN KRAJINA REPUBLIC: Someone of the People

SOUTH OF ZAGREB, IN WHAT WAS once undisputed Croatian territory, Serbian forces have established what they call the Serbian Krajina Republic. The police chief in one Krajina town was a huge man in camouflage uniform with a deep voice. As he talked, he sliced the air with his forearm.

“The misunderstanding between the Croats and Serbs is from the second World War and before,” he said. “We ourselves were fighting together with the English, fighting against Hitler. The Croats were slaves to Hitler. They were against our way of life. Many Serbs were killed in the second World War, many civilians. I can show you five places where Serbs were massacred, all within 30 kilometers.

“Well, as you know, we beat the Germans. We tried to put history out of our minds. Tito believed in equality for all nations. So we continued to live with one another. That was until the Croatian president, Franjo Tudjman, won the democratic election in 1990, if you can say democratic.

“Tudjman tried to clean Serbs from politics, from government, from law, school, hospitals and police. Because we were Serbs we must be dismissed. My wife got dismissed from her job. My colleagues got dismissed. Nowhere else in the world would policemen with 24 years of experience be forcibly pensioned off! Well, a new generation of police came in. They were literally criminals. I myself had arrested some of them before! That didn’t matter; all that mattered was that they were Croats.

“Meanwhile the Croatian government established a new flag, the same as in the second World War. Under this emblem, Serbs were killed. So, I came here together with my colleagues in the police force. We didn’t have to be under the control of the fascists.”

“What’s your solution to the war?”

“Look, I can tell you my opinion. The end of the war can be. Our people don’t want to live together with Croats. We want a border. We want to have relations with them as with any other country.

“Personally, I think Europe recognized Croatia too early. The Europeans don’t understand what kind of state Croatia wants to make--a Hitler state. It’s dangerous for all the world, especially with a united Germany pulling the strings.”

“May I use your name in my article?”

“Personally I have no problem, but, unfortunately, I do not have the authority to allow this. Just say you have talked with someone of the people.”

Where Are All the Pretty Girls?

BACK IN CROATIA, EMBOLDENED BY the pornographic magazine in the cellar where soldiers had tried unsuccessfully to shoot a hole through my bulletproof vest (I wasn’t in it), I had asked what Serbian girls were like.

“They stink,” one of them said. “They look ugly, and none of them ever wash. That’s because they have no water over there. But they have plenty of vodka; you can use it as a disinfectant!”

That was at the third and final Croatian checkpoint before Krajina. My translator and I had driven on down the road past the stop sign with bullets in it, the mines, the caltrops and the red and white pole as if for a railroad crossing. Around us loomed houses with sky-chinks glowing through their roofs, houses pimpled by nothingness; clouds oozing through the roof tiles that were missing in godlike patterns; roof frames and skeletons, a roof without a wall. Past the mines and the next stop sign there was a rusty fence in front of a house. This was the U.N. checkpoint. It was very quiet. “Where are all the pretty girls?” I had asked the U.N. soldier.

“In the cemetery,” he laughed. “Just bring your own shovel. You can do whatever you want to them there.”

I sat in an armchair at the side of the road, drinking Sarajevo water. A Serbian militiaman sat next to me. He said: “Everything they say about Serbs conquering is a lie. We’re only defending ourselves. We accept the Croatian government. I worked in a firm in Karlovac and I got kicked out because I was a Serb. There are Croats living on this side, but we don’t touch them. We get along with everyone. We don’t attack children. We feed them.”

We drove past destroyed houses and gradually came into another place--hills of ferns, brown cornfields, some houses untouched, more and more of them, their shutters down. There were hedges, geese on the grass, hills, red-roofed white houses. We had left the war.

Across from the police station, a black flag flew from a house where lives had been lost. Then came a cafe with dark walls open to the light, an almost Bavarian-looking place. Three Serbs, two in police uniform, one in checked shirt, sat drinking. The waitress, 17 and beautiful, would not marry me because I was too old.

“Well,” I said, “can you find me a nice Serbian girl like you?”

I liked the way she laughed.

The police translator started talking about pretty Zagreb girls, but the waitress made a face and said that no Croatian girls could possibly be pretty. The Croatian people were all wicked. She could never go there. If she did, the soldiers would kill her.

“And how about this country? What’s the best thing about this country?”

“It’s a good country!” she smiled, raising her arm. “It is a very, very good country.” The police were watching her.

“Can you give me a souvenir of your country?”

She reached into the cash register and handed me something golden. “Maybe this bullet,” she said.