The Fracture Zone Part 1

The Fracture Zone.

A Return to the Balkans.

by Simon Winchester.

Author's Note

THE BEWILDERING VARIETY of unfamiliar names that appear in any writing relating to the Balkans seems dramatically to inhibit any average reader's sympathetic understanding of the story. I have tried to help overcome this in three ways-by including as few personal names as possible; by omitting the confusing diacritical marks in the spelling of most of such names as I felt bound to include; and by appending a fairly full glossary of many of the terms-of people, places, concepts, and things-that have helped make the Balkans such a complicated and often confusing place. I must apply the conventional offer to admit responsibility for any errors or misjudgments to this glossary, just as I do to the main body of the story. It is difficult to keep strictly objective any Balkan word list-since it includes, as do most Balkan stories, many monstrous people and their deeds-and I hope I will be forgiven for not having tried to do so. of unfamiliar names that appear in any writing relating to the Balkans seems dramatically to inhibit any average reader's sympathetic understanding of the story. I have tried to help overcome this in three ways-by including as few personal names as possible; by omitting the confusing diacritical marks in the spelling of most of such names as I felt bound to include; and by appending a fairly full glossary of many of the terms-of people, places, concepts, and things-that have helped make the Balkans such a complicated and often confusing place. I must apply the conventional offer to admit responsibility for any errors or misjudgments to this glossary, just as I do to the main body of the story. It is difficult to keep strictly objective any Balkan word list-since it includes, as do most Balkan stories, many monstrous people and their deeds-and I hope I will be forgiven for not having tried to do so.

1.

Encounters at a Water Meadow.

SINCE THE B BALKAN P PENINSULA has for centuries been a place of mystery, paradox, and wild confusion, it may not be too out of place to recall that this narrative properly opens-in the late summer of 1977-at a place that did not then exist, next door to a country that had at the time not been created, and among a people who, though sentient human beings in every accepted sense, had in another then not even been born. has for centuries been a place of mystery, paradox, and wild confusion, it may not be too out of place to recall that this narrative properly opens-in the late summer of 1977-at a place that did not then exist, next door to a country that had at the time not been created, and among a people who, though sentient human beings in every accepted sense, had in another then not even been born.

In particular it started beside a water meadow of singular loveliness-all cypresses and lime trees, small olive groves, and cool and lush green gra.s.ses-that lies on the left bank of a prettily rus.h.i.+ng little stream known as the Lepenec River. The river, which ultimately flows into the Aegean Sea by way of a gulf between the sacred mountains Olympus and Athos, rises in the snows of a small north-south line of hills known as the Sar Range, which themselves are a mosaic part of that formidable swath of geological wreckage-that has helped foster all the long confusion of the Balkans-the high Dinaric Alps.

This one cool alpine meadow, which first caught my eye on a sweltering afternoon in mid-August, lies at the southern end of a deeply incised and, in theory, highly strategic mountain pa.s.s, a gateway through the karst ma.s.sifs of the Sar Range that is referred to by soldiers to this day (in memory of some long-forgotten hero) as the Kacanik Defile. Military maps published until very recently show that the defile and the water meadow at its lower end lie well inside the sprawling southern European ent.i.ty that was known after 1929 as Yugoslavia. Since when I first went there it lay within within the country's frontiers, it enjoyed no practical strategic role at all: it was merely a dramatic canyon, a place known only for occasional banditry and for the sighting of bears, wild birds, and at least six varieties of venomous snake. the country's frontiers, it enjoyed no practical strategic role at all: it was merely a dramatic canyon, a place known only for occasional banditry and for the sighting of bears, wild birds, and at least six varieties of venomous snake.

This is no longer the case. The Lepenec water meadow and the Kacanik Defile into and from which it leads, have lately come to play a crucial and terribly symbolic part in the awful human drama that has once again engulfed the wild and refractory peoples of the Balkans. What makes it especially remarkable, in a strictly personal sense, is what I discovered when I found myself at the meadow during the first of two crucial moments during 1999: that I had been there once before, and when it was in a very different state, in more ways than one.

Twenty-two years earlier I had been en route from Oxford, in my somewhat battered old Volvo, to take up a new job in India. It had seemed to me at the time that, rather than fly to Delhi, it might be more agreeable to drive there. A look at a good map swiftly shows that the Kacanik Defile is far from being on any obvious direct route between Oxford and New Delhi: The fact that on the journey to India I eventually arrived at this particular Balkan meadow was entirely due to the liverish mood of an American friend of mine, an archivist from Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., who had telephoned on the eve of my departure to ask if I could possibly give him a ride to Tehran.

Albert Meisel, who has since died, was to become an unwitting agent in this story because of a remark he made as we drove down a motorway in southern England. Up to that point all had been going flawlessly: As soon as I agreed to take him along he had flown across the Atlantic, made a perfectly scheduled rendezvous with us-I was traveling with my then wife and twelve-year-old son-outside the Guardian Guardian office in London at noon on the appointed day, and we had taken off promptly to catch the three o'clock Calais packet-boat. However, about an hour out of London, as we were speeding southeastward along the M2 in Kent, Albert suddenly glimpsed the towers of Canterbury Cathedral going past in a blur on the left, and asked, in what I thought an unnecessarily querulous tone, why we weren't stopping to have a look? office in London at noon on the appointed day, and we had taken off promptly to catch the three o'clock Calais packet-boat. However, about an hour out of London, as we were speeding southeastward along the M2 in Kent, Albert suddenly glimpsed the towers of Canterbury Cathedral going past in a blur on the left, and asked, in what I thought an unnecessarily querulous tone, why we weren't stopping to have a look?

I replied, with what was probably some asperity, to the effect that I was in no mood for tourism, that I was in a hurry, and that I wanted to catch the ferry and make Mons that night-for the simple reason that I planned to make India well before the middle of September. I knew that the roads in the Punjab would be tricky with postmonsoon mud; I planned to be at the Khyber Pa.s.s in three weeks' time. Albert grunted. This was not, he muttered, going to be the pleasure trip he had imagined.

It was much the same the next day in Germany, as we sped past the twin spires of Cologne Cathedral, and then again as a succession of ever prettier Bavarian villages vanished in the rearview mirror. Albert was sulking in the backseat, his mood becoming ever blacker. But I didn't care: I now had the bit between my teeth, and though the car was going well, the roads were said to be treacherous all through Afghanistan and there might well be delays. In my view there was simply no time for standing and staring, not in this early part of the trip.

But the next day, under the emollient persuasions of my wife, I backed down. I apologized for behaving like a tyrant and, once I had looked at the maps, offered a compromise: Instead of barreling down the main trunk highway from Vienna to Belgrade and then on to Sofia-along a series of roads of insufferable tedium, jammed with long-distance trucks and littered with speed traps-I would go to Istanbul along the scenic route.

We would, if all agreed, drive through the Tauern Mountains of western Austria, go through Kitzbuhel and Spittal to Villach, and thence to the Carinthian capital of Klagenfurt, reputed home to more ex-n.a.z.is than anywhere else in the Teutonic world.

Here, I would gather later-but not back then-a careful and observant visitor could discern some vague and shrouded outlines of the coming Balkan miseries: The Austrians of Klagenfurt are said to display on occasion a deep distaste for their neighbor Slavs-for the Slovenes to their south are ethnically so-and demanded only a few years ago (in vain, as it happens) that their school system be segregated, since not a few Slav children had been osmotically seeded among them.

But in those days the subtleties of the Balkans were quite beyond me, and all I planned was that we press on and cross the Iron Curtain-for it still existed in 1977, complete with watchtowers and barbed wire, armed guards, and attack dogs, deep in the dark forests of the eastern Tyrol-and spend our first night in the northern Yugoslavian town that was the spiritual capital of the Slovenes, Ljubljana.

After that we would follow the line of the Dinaric Alps, join the Adriatic Highway at Rijeka* and then travel at a leisurely pace down to Diocletian's old retirement city of Split; on to the great fortress of Dubrovnik; turn inland around the spectacularly enchanting Gulf of Kotor up to Montenegro's old hill capital, Cetinje, and its present one, t.i.tograd; before arriving in Skopje and eventually journeying, by way of the Vardar River valley, to a small Slavic border town called Gevgelija; after which, emerging from under the sentries' baleful stares, we would pa.s.s into the sun-baked playground (and popularly elected democracy) of Greece. We would thus make the entire one thousand miles from the Austrian frontier to the northern border of Greece within the once great country of Yugoslavia, with neither a frontier to cross nor a dinar to exchange: And what's more, I told Albert, the Dalmatian Coast Highway, as the Yugoslavs then called it and as I preferred to think of it, was one of the most remarkably engineered and spectacular roads in the world. and then travel at a leisurely pace down to Diocletian's old retirement city of Split; on to the great fortress of Dubrovnik; turn inland around the spectacularly enchanting Gulf of Kotor up to Montenegro's old hill capital, Cetinje, and its present one, t.i.tograd; before arriving in Skopje and eventually journeying, by way of the Vardar River valley, to a small Slavic border town called Gevgelija; after which, emerging from under the sentries' baleful stares, we would pa.s.s into the sun-baked playground (and popularly elected democracy) of Greece. We would thus make the entire one thousand miles from the Austrian frontier to the northern border of Greece within the once great country of Yugoslavia, with neither a frontier to cross nor a dinar to exchange: And what's more, I told Albert, the Dalmatian Coast Highway, as the Yugoslavs then called it and as I preferred to think of it, was one of the most remarkably engineered and spectacular roads in the world.

That was the clincher: He agreed in a snap. So I promptly turned the car southeast for Kitzbuhel, and after a fortifying break at a cafe in which mountains of Schlag Schlag (whipped cream) seemed to have been piled onto almost everything in sight, I set off with as contented a group of pa.s.sengers as I can ever remember ferrying anywhere. (whipped cream) seemed to have been piled onto almost everything in sight, I set off with as contented a group of pa.s.sengers as I can ever remember ferrying anywhere.

It took two pleasing Dalmatian days for us to reach Montenegro, after which we pa.s.sed down from the wild and barren hillsides-the locals like to say that G.o.d had shaken out his last bag of rocks at the conclusion of his seven days of world-creating genesis, and where they fell, lo! there stood Montenegro-and onto a low and level plain. It was then that matters suddenly became, as I can still vividly remember from those decades past, rather more sinister, rather more strange.

It was only an aside, really. We had crossed out of Montenegro on a side road, a winding mountain switchback on which there were few other vehicles, and dozens of unantic.i.p.ated donkey carts loaded with piles of late-summer hay, the early harvests from the higher fields, which swayed precariously down into the villages. Their drivers were invariably men with rather narrow, dark, pinched faces: A few of them, usually the older ones, wore white and smoothly thimble-shaped hats.

We were making first for the old town of Pec, where I had read there was a collection of stupendous Orthodox churches and monasteries, some of them six hundred years old and more, and with frescoes on their walls that dated from the fifteenth century and presented the wild pantheon of saints* and kings and G.o.dly scenes that make the canons of Orthodoxy seem to the western mind so very strange. and kings and G.o.dly scenes that make the canons of Orthodoxy seem to the western mind so very strange.

The long and chessboard-flat plain that stretched s.h.i.+mmering for mile after scorching mile ahead, and that looked so very much like the holy flatlands of northern France near Chartres, was, by coincidence, a religious heartland as well. This was what once was called Old Serbia, and crosses were everywhere, and beards were as long and metropolitans as grand and ponderously venerable as in any sacred place. But they were not so numerous as I felt they should have been, and that was the first puzzle.

For it just seemed odd, to a stranger who had read that this plain was the holy heartland of old Orthodox Serbia, that rising from the Pec old town like a forest of needles, there were just so many minarets as well, and that there were these men, scores of them like the peasants hauling the harvests home, who were wearing the white caps of Islam, and whose women scurried beneath the modest concealments of veils and thick scarves. If this was Old Serbia, and if these surrounding wheatfields were as precious to Serbian Orthodoxy as the fields around Canterbury were precious to Anglicanism and those around Chartres to the idea of Catholicism-then why, I wondered, was this particular and holy town so self-evidently Muslim?

It was a question born out of ignorance, and one that would not be asked today-for this part of Old Serbia is Kosovo now, and the fact that so sacred an Orthodox heartland supports a vast majority of men and women for whom Mecca and the kaaba kaaba are the religious lodestone is one source of all the terrible mayhem to which, in twenty-odd years' time, I would return. I had more than a hint of it that summer's day, however. It came when I was filling the Volvo with gas: The attendant who was topping off the tank was a slow, genial sort of man who spoke a little English and who had asked me a few questions-where I was from, where bound? He spoke Serbian-after a number of days on the road I could recognize some of the basics-and so I remember a.s.suming that he was indeed a Serb. are the religious lodestone is one source of all the terrible mayhem to which, in twenty-odd years' time, I would return. I had more than a hint of it that summer's day, however. It came when I was filling the Volvo with gas: The attendant who was topping off the tank was a slow, genial sort of man who spoke a little English and who had asked me a few questions-where I was from, where bound? He spoke Serbian-after a number of days on the road I could recognize some of the basics-and so I remember a.s.suming that he was indeed a Serb.

It was as he was closing the gas cap that we both noticed a group of the same darkish, thin-faced men pa.s.sing along the road, two or three of the older ones in white skullcaps, the rest with long, light-brown hair. These were the people by whom this part of the world seemed to be largely populated: Though this was Serbia, according to the maps and the history books, the Serbs were clearly outnumbered by these others, these darker Muslims. The gas station owner gestured toward them, then looked at me-and suddenly spat with a twisted smirk of contempt and disdain, which he was not at all shy of demonstrating to me.

"Albani," he said, and then, to underline the point for me, he said, and then, to underline the point for me, "Albanians!" "Albanians!" He spat again, and without the group being able to see him, shook his fist from behind the car with what to me was astonis.h.i.+ngly unrestrained pa.s.sion. "Absolute b.a.s.t.a.r.ds! I hate them. Crooks, all of them. b.l.o.o.d.y b.a.s.t.a.r.d He spat again, and without the group being able to see him, shook his fist from behind the car with what to me was astonis.h.i.+ngly unrestrained pa.s.sion. "Absolute b.a.s.t.a.r.ds! I hate them. Crooks, all of them. b.l.o.o.d.y b.a.s.t.a.r.d Albani!" Albani!" His venom was extraordinary, I thought-too impa.s.sioned for a languorous summer day of hay wains and the creak of wooden cartwheels and sunflowers nodding in the heat. I paid and hurried away. I never asked him to explain, and for many years, whenever I looked back at this incident that lingered powerfully in my mind, I imagined merely that the hatred was reflective of some private problem suffered by this man alone. Perhaps the men had stolen money from him or seduced his daughter. That's what it must have been: a private feud. His venom was extraordinary, I thought-too impa.s.sioned for a languorous summer day of hay wains and the creak of wooden cartwheels and sunflowers nodding in the heat. I paid and hurried away. I never asked him to explain, and for many years, whenever I looked back at this incident that lingered powerfully in my mind, I imagined merely that the hatred was reflective of some private problem suffered by this man alone. Perhaps the men had stolen money from him or seduced his daughter. That's what it must have been: a private feud.

It was many years before I came to understand that this view-"Albanians-all b.a.s.t.a.r.ds! I hate them"-was in fact the collective view of many tens of thousands of the Serbs who lived on these wide plains. I worked for the Guardian Guardian in those days, and I recall reading, sometime in the late eighties, reports of impa.s.sioned speeches being made in towns in this region called Kosovo, to which I reacted with interest, because I had once been there. The speeches seemed to be inflaming local tensions between such men as this, and such as those others who walked beside my car that afternoon, and whose mutual loathings had evidently been festering and fermenting for many years. in those days, and I recall reading, sometime in the late eighties, reports of impa.s.sioned speeches being made in towns in this region called Kosovo, to which I reacted with interest, because I had once been there. The speeches seemed to be inflaming local tensions between such men as this, and such as those others who walked beside my car that afternoon, and whose mutual loathings had evidently been festering and fermenting for many years.

Later than evening we pa.s.sed, almost unknowingly, through a town called Kosovo Polje, and drove by a bare expanse called Gazimestan. This was a place that became recognizable in the newspaper reports of a decade or so later-the infamous place where on June 28, 1989, in commemoration of a battle that had been fought (and lost) there against the Turks six hundred years before, a little-known Serbian leader named Slobodan Milosevic flew down from Belgrade to address a rally of more than a million of his Serbian brothers and sisters in which he warned of-indeed, say many historians, instigated-the violence that was then simmering and that would very soon erupt across the Balkans. His most inflammatory comment was this: "Six centuries later again we are in battles and quarrels. They are not armed battles, though such things should not be excluded yet though such things should not be excluded yet [emphasis added]." I have always thought for so historically significant a piece of rhetoric, this was rather poor, ba.n.a.l in the extreme. Milosevic, a puffy-faced man who had hitherto been head of the national gas company, was clearly no Lincoln, no Churchill. Perhaps, to be charitable, it was simply the translation. And anyway, it clearly got results. [emphasis added]." I have always thought for so historically significant a piece of rhetoric, this was rather poor, ba.n.a.l in the extreme. Milosevic, a puffy-faced man who had hitherto been head of the national gas company, was clearly no Lincoln, no Churchill. Perhaps, to be charitable, it was simply the translation. And anyway, it clearly got results.

But no, I remember little of pa.s.sing through Kosovo Polje, or the battlefield of Gazimestan, except for the name; and I remember almost nothing of the drearily utilitarian city of Pristina we came to a few miles farther on, other than it being a place of cinderblock apartments and shabby shacks and smoky factories, to which I imagined I would never return-but to which in fact I was fated to come back, more than twenty years later in very different, very much more dramatic circ.u.mstances.

I may not remember much of the place they called the Field of the Blackbirds, nor of Pristina town, nor of the four of us swinging south in the car once more onto the fast and wide road that had a European highway designation: E-65. But I do remember noticing that the these great plains were barred to the south and the west by ranges of impressive limestone mountains that s.h.i.+mmered blue in the afternoon heat; I do remember climbing into the southern range and pa.s.sing through a spectacular gorge. I remember dark and smoky tunnels, lit only by a few fly-specked bulbs.

There was a railway track to the right, and small steam trains would chuff happily along the valley, letting off villagers at country stops that smelled of creosote and roses. Beside the tracks, kept in check by its steep banks, was the Lepenec River. It was all so very pretty-which made more shocking the sudden appearance, once we rounded a bend as we were coming out of the canyon, of a grim-looking factory, all chimneys and gus.h.i.+ng yellow smoke. The road signs declared this to be the settlement-there was a scattering of small red-roofed houses for the workers-of General Jankovic, and I remember thinking that he could have done precious little of note in battle if he had only this obscure and smoky cement factory named for him.

I remember all that, and, most of all, I remember the water meadow that I saw quite suddenly appear in front of me, spread out invitingly, an obvious place to stop, to rest, to take in the view. This, I thought as I slowed the car, was a magnificent place.

It was quite silent, except for the soughing of the wind through the cypress trees. The gra.s.s was tall and waved invitingly in the eddies of breeze. The stream chuckled and bubbled southward, and large brown hawks whirled in the thermals above us. I spread the map out on the ground to check just where we were: I identified the river as the Lepenec, and the hills behind us on the west as the Sar Range, and the much grander mountain chain off to the southwest-very high peaks indeed, some of them still capped with tired and dirty-looking snow-seemed to be the Rudoka Mountains, behind which lurked what was then Enver Hoxha's wildly xenophobic and aberrantly Maoist state of Albania.

When planning this trip I had very much wanted to get permission to go there: After all, I said in my letter to the nearest emba.s.sy, it seemed that Albania's internal situation was already changing, and there had been some softening of the Maoist line in Tirana that very year. (The Chinese, themselves changing at the time, and becoming more friendly with the West, were growing exasperated with their small cheerleading section in the Balkans, and were dropping them from their dance card. The warped ideals of "revolutionary self-sufficiency," which the Albanians seemed to have copied directly from Kim II Sung's monstrous Juche Juche-his insanely xenophobic plan for socialist self-sufficiency-in North Korea, were now being tried out on the Albanian ma.s.ses.) My plea went unheard, or at least unanswered, and so the most I could hope for was the vicarious thrill of knowing that these hills formed the frontier, and that there must be impenetrable fences and guard dogs lining the summits. Besides, there were Albanians here in Old Serbia, and I could tell something of what the people were like-if indeed they were at all similar to those in the home country. I supposed only that the Kosovo Albanians were different in one respect-that they at least had the comforts of Islam: Behind those distant ranges were only the exactions of Enver Hoxha and his unvarying strangeness. I was not to learn for many years that the Kosovo Albanians had exactions of their own, every bit as trying.

That day, as I scanned the horizons, it seemed that Albania was the only foreign state in evidence: Ahead, for another two hundred miles or more, ran the vastness of Yugoslavia. Only the scattering of softly gnarled old olive trees gave a clue to the fact that Greece lay beyond and far away. There was no marking here, no fence, no line on the road, no customs post or police checkpoint, to suggest that this mountain pa.s.s and the meadow at its end owed their significance to anything more than their being so pretty a place. We stayed for half an hour or so: I seem to recall we got out a tartan blanket and had our lunch beside the river. But my son tells me I was mistaken, and says he doesn't remember the field at all.

We pressed on: That night we spent in the southern Yugoslavian town of Skopje, and we crossed the old Turkish bridge and watched the old men smoking pensively as they gazed down into the river. We saw the ruins from the earthquake that had ruined the city in 1963. We drank sweet coffee and ate kebabs. And then we took off, emerging from behind the Iron Curtain, and headed for Thessaloniki and Alexandropolis, then for Istanbul and, by ferry in those days (the two huge suspension bridges had not then been built), we lurched across the Bosporus into Asia. After another two weeks, by way of Tabriz and Tehran, Herat and Kandahar, and the Khyber and Peshawar and the frontier at Wagah, we were in India. The troubles in India were wild and manifest, too, and for years the Balkans faded into our collective memories. No one ever said: "Remember the man who filled up the car in Pec?" or, "Remember the field by that cement factory called General Jankovic?"-because the Balkans were peaceful in those times, and we had no compelling reason to think of them.

But twenty-two years later I was to come back quite unexpectedly, and under decidedly different circ.u.mstances. Whatever vague suggestions of misery and hatred may have remained as wisps of memory from that first journey were impossibly and unimaginably compounded on the second-and never more so than when I saw that water meadow again, with a gasp of realization. It was all so terribly different a situation, the worst one could imagine, when I rounded a curve in a road and said to my companions, "My G.o.d! I've been here once before!"

It was late March 1999, and I had just been on a peculiar journey in Ireland. I had been summoned back from the United States by lawyers for the b.l.o.o.d.y Sunday Inquiry, which had been reopened by the British government in tacit recognition that there had been shortcomings in the earlier investigation into killings by soldiers of the British army's Parachute Regiment on the streets of Londonderry in 1971. It was when I was leaving that one of lawyers with whom I walked through the Bogside on that showery spring afternoon made one of those isn't-it-a-small-world remarks, whose significance I wouldn't appreciate for a few more days: Did I realize, he asked, that the young captain who at the time of the tragedy been the adjutant of the First Battalion-and who would be, as would I, a witness at the public inquiry-was now a lieutenant general, and was in command of the NATO rapid-reaction force then waiting on the borders of Kosovo? (The Ram-bouillet Peace Conference on Kosovo had just ended; Milosevic and his Belgrade government had just rejected its proposals, and talk of war was in the air.) Mike Jackson, he said. Sir Michael Jackson, in fact.

I said yes, I had known Mike all those years ago: We always used to joke about his name-not least since he, unlike the pretty singer, had a most spectacularly craggy and weatherbeaten face and was in no imaginable way like his peculiar namesake. What a shame, I said; what a pity that I had no plans to go to Kosovo, and that I was going home to New York in a day or so. It would have been good to see him again.

I should have known better. The life of a foreign correspondent can be a confusion of caprices, and three days later I found myself in Mike Jackson's helicopter, scudding through the unlit nighttime skies of Macedonia a mile south of the Kosovo border.

A newspaper editor had found me in Ireland, and had wondered, in that polite and oh-so-British way, whether instead of rus.h.i.+ng back to America, I might like to pop over to Macedonia, as he put it, just for a day or so. The NATO High Command had just given the unprecedented order to begin bombing Slobodan Milosevic into submission, and the warplanes had begun to attack Belgrade. There were reports that, in part as a consequence of the bombing, and of the Kosovo Serbs' reaction to it, uncontrollable numbers of refugees were beginning to flood out of the province, and in particular into Macedonia, a country I wasn't too sure even existed. Might I like to go down, take a look, and write a piece for the Sunday paper?

The editor was persuasive, though in truth he didn't have to be: This was by all accounts a tremendous story, a tragedy of historic dimensions that even without a commission I would have given my eyeteeth to see. I called a fast motorcycle taxi service* and zoomed over to Heathrow: Six hours later (I had to fly by way of Thessaloniki, take a taxi to the Macedonian frontier, and zoomed over to Heathrow: Six hours later (I had to fly by way of Thessaloniki, take a taxi to the Macedonian frontier, and then-having penetrated the fastness of what still had a slight if rather rusted feel of Iron Curtain about it-another taxi farther north) I was promptly in the Macedonian capital of Skopje, and an hour later still had telephoned Mike Jackson to ask if he might remember me from all those years ago in Ireland. Evidently he hadn't forgotten, but he was in no-nonsense mood. "Those b.l.o.o.d.y lawyers been onto you, too?" was the first thing he said. "Come and have a whiskey-and then let's go for a ride." and then-having penetrated the fastness of what still had a slight if rather rusted feel of Iron Curtain about it-another taxi farther north) I was promptly in the Macedonian capital of Skopje, and an hour later still had telephoned Mike Jackson to ask if he might remember me from all those years ago in Ireland. Evidently he hadn't forgotten, but he was in no-nonsense mood. "Those b.l.o.o.d.y lawyers been onto you, too?" was the first thing he said. "Come and have a whiskey-and then let's go for a ride."

His pilots were wearing night-vision goggles, and we were talked down by ground controllers using tiny infrared needle lanterns called Fireflies. We settled down in the pitch dark of a parking lot behind a warehouse. A posse of sentries with machine guns and wearing Kevlar helmets rushed us across to a tent where, under the low glow of red lights, a clutch of colonels and majors were poring over a sheaf of large-scale maps. Whatever was going on, there was a crackling tension in the air, the feeling that something dire was happening, or was about to.

The business in the tents turned out to be-or seemed at first to be-quite unremarkably mundane. It was about chickens. How many, one colonel asked, were available? How quickly, interrupted the general, could they be brought here, to this very parking lot, a mile from the Kosovo border, to a village that, if it appeared on maps at all, was called Blace? Were the chickens whole or in parts? Were they boned or otherwise? Frozen or fresh? Were any of them halal? halal?

It was that last question-an inquiry by a British army officer as to whether any of a supply of chickens had been prepared according to the rites of Islam, with the hapless birds' heads turned at least in the general direction of Mecca as the slaughtering blades bore down-that made me realize: This was a planning meeting to get food to the refugees. Refugees who, if they were the expected Albanians from Kosovo, were of course almost certainly by and large Muslim. I now remembered from twenty years ago the men in their thimble hats, the women in veils, and the minarets, the minarets. Now that I was clear about the soldiers' business I broke into the conversation: Were there that many refugees? Was it that bad a crisis?

The officers, Mike Jackson included, looked across at me silently, their leathery faces weary, grim, and set. Then the general spoke. "You've never seen anything like it, old man," he said quietly. "You get up to the border at first light. You'll never forget what you see. I guarantee it."

I heard them first-a huge collective murmur that rolled from somewhere up close ahead. The road from Skopje ran north along a shallow river valley, and the driver remarked that the low green hills being limned by early sunlight on my left were in Yugoslav territory, and the dark-uniformed men we could see patrolling them were MUPs, Serbs, Yugoslav Special Police, and were to be avoided at all costs. But however unpleasant the prospect of ever encountering such men-and I wasn't to know then how close I would come to them in so short a while-it was the noise that most astonished me: a deep and m.u.f.fled roaring that, as we came closer to its source, separated into comprehensible const.i.tuent parts.

There were cries, some of anger, some of pain, some of utter misery. There was conversation, some urgent, some idle, some peppered with argument, with disagreement and shouting. There were barked orders, dismissive responses. There was sobbing, and wailing, and the hum of prayer, and as alto continuo, the electric wailings of thousands of unfed, unwashed children. All this vast and terrifying sound was clear from a hundred yards away, while budding trees and yellow gorse thickets and ridges of limestone kept me from seeing whoever, whatever, was making it. And then the road climbed a few more feet, the gorse thinned out, and in an instant the extent of this terrible business was at last in sight.

There was a wide field, the size of a large county cricket ground or a baseball field, lined with trees and hemmed in by a river and a railway track on the far side, and this road on its levee on the other. And on the field, cramming every square inch of its muddy gra.s.s, was what looked at first like a surreal infestation of insects, like a plague of giant locusts, a s.h.i.+fting, pulsating, ululating ma.s.s of the most pathetic European people I think I had ever seen.

I stood and watched, transfixed, for an hour or more, s.h.i.+vering in the early morning cold-though not s.h.i.+vering half so much as these people, who had had no benefit of sleep or warmth or food to prepare them. Macedonian police, ugly men in dark blue uniforms and with guns, reinforced after a while with Special Forces teams, their men in helmets and with clubs and gas guns, ringed the ragged edges of the mob. They were there to keep the Albanians from reaching the road and making their way down into the city. They didn't seem to mind too much when I went down into the sea of liquid mud and worse, to see firsthand some definable figures from this Bosch-like scene of ma.s.s misery.

A score of small and wretched European tragedies could be seen with any glance.

There was a young man, nineteen or so, I'd guess, clearly from his face quite mentally ill, gibbering, drooling, and he was being led by two ragged friends down a muddy slope toward a communal bucket of drinking water. He had no shoes or socks, and his feet were bleeding from the long walk of the night, and yet now his friends had mistakenly led him over a patch of wire-hard brambles, and he was crying, shrieking with the pain of the needles in his soles.

More horribly still, there was a woman, newly miscarried, who was sitting, weeping in a mess of blood, the remains of a dead infant in her arms. Other women, villagers, friends, relations-I'll never know-were trying to drag the stillborn bundle away, but she whimpered wildly, as if she was wanting to cling to one part of herself, one small token of security that she insanely believed in, through a fog, when everything else around her seemed to be going mad.

Then, the image that has remained most firmly in my mind, there was the old man, wizened, hunched, arthritic, who was being wheeled by a younger man, his son, probably, along the railway track. Each time the flat and worn iron wheel of the barrow hit a tie, so the man's insensate form was jolted, hard, and his legs and arms flailed wildly, like those of a flung corpse. But still, stubbornly, he kept his toothless jaw clenched tight, bracing his head for the next b.u.mp, the next crash, the next a.s.sault on his dignity and peace-and, no doubt, to ensure that he did not once cry out. All through it he remained mute, cringing against each battering, like a silent torture victim. He must have suffered so for hours, as his boy brought him down from Kosovo along the railway, though in a manner meant for the dead, and in a conveyance meant for dirt.

There were beautiful faces in the crowd as well. There were handsome men, it is true; but I was more drawn to some of the Albanian women, whose images might have been taken from a canvas by Modigliani or Botticelli-long intelligent faces, high cheekbones, olive skin, aquiline noses, bright eyes. I looked over the shoulder of a photographer who was sitting on the hillside and transmitting pictures-this being 1999 he had a digital camera, a small computer, a cellular telephone (there was no truck with film or developing tanks, and no wire connections)-to London. He showed me one picture of a young woman of staggering beauty, her arms around her two small fair-haired boys. Her eyes were bright and s.h.i.+ning, despite the long night, and the longer march from whatever village had been chosen for what the Serbs had called the cis cenje terena cis cenje terena-the cleansing, the ridding of the vermin, like this young family, that contaminated hallowed ground. It all seemed so monstrously wrong: that this young woman, who in other circ.u.mstances could have been a poster child for motherhood and goodness and sheer human loveliness, should in these strange and feral Balkan circ.u.mstances have been forced from her home at gunpoint, made to walk through nights and days of terror, and end up here hopeless and homeless and friendless, in an alien land, on this forlorn and infamous Golgotha, this field of bones-a place where already a dozen people, including the bloodied stillborn child I had seen, had died in the hours since it had first been settled.

I feel no shame in confessing that it was as much as anything the evident Europeanness of the thousands on this field that struck me first: for while I have in a life of wandering just like this seen many thousands of refugees and displaced and dispossessed unfortunates in Africa and Cambodia and Bengal and Java and elsewhere, and have felt properly sorry and ashamed that such calamities should befall them, my instincts on that April day at Blace Camp were very much those of a European man, looking at men and women and children who could very well, from the simple fact of their appearance, be cousins or friends or acquaintances, in a way that no one in the refugee fields in Bengal or the Congo could ever really have been.

And so my visceral reaction was simply that: That this was Europe, Europe, this was this was now, now, and here we were at the close of the most civilizing century we have known, and yet here before us was the diabolical, grotesque, bizarre sight of tens upon tens of thousands of terrified, dog-weary, ragged and here we were at the close of the most civilizing century we have known, and yet here before us was the diabolical, grotesque, bizarre sight of tens upon tens of thousands of terrified, dog-weary, ragged European European people who were just like us, and who just a few short days before had been living out their lives more or less like us, yet who were now crammed insect-thick onto a carpet of squelching mud and litter and ordure and broken gla.s.s and dirt, while we climbed down from the kind of car in which they might have driven, after a breakfast of the kind that was customary for them to have as well, and watched and gaped and gawked down at them in uncomprehending horror and thought only, My G.o.d! This is too much. This is quite beyond belief. people who were just like us, and who just a few short days before had been living out their lives more or less like us, yet who were now crammed insect-thick onto a carpet of squelching mud and litter and ordure and broken gla.s.s and dirt, while we climbed down from the kind of car in which they might have driven, after a breakfast of the kind that was customary for them to have as well, and watched and gaped and gawked down at them in uncomprehending horror and thought only, My G.o.d! This is too much. This is quite beyond belief.

Except I had one additional moment of revelation: My G.o.d! I've been here once before.

I recognized it in an instant, just at the moment when I strolled up to the Macedonian frontier post and was shooed away by policemen who were busy dealing with the endless streams still pouring past them. I had joined the incoming flood for a second or two, walking back southward, back along the way I had come, trying to make sympathetic conversation with the newcomers in the column-when suddenly, looking over at the hills where we had seen the MUP militiamen at dawn, I realized that I was on familiar ground.

There was a stream over on the right, surely. There were high and snow-lined Albanian hills ahead, surely. There should be, on the right, a water meadow of singular loveliness. And then it dawned on me: that field of wildflowers and bending gra.s.ses that had seemed so idyllic a stopping place all those years ago was the very one that was now filled with mud and dirt and misery, and peopled with this sorry infestation. My "field of dreams" was here, right here-but it had become, in twenty years, a charnel house.

And then again-why so? True, there were dreadful crimes being committed back up along the road, and there were NATO bombs dropping, and in response, even more dreadful crimes being committed. This is what the refugees were saying-telling us about slaughter and rape and burning and terror. But that didn't answer the more basic question that pushed its way into my mind, and that related to my having stood on this field before, and that was not Why this? nor Why now? but more specifically-Why here? What had changed at this water meadow that had turned it, in twenty years, into the charnel house it had become?

There was, so far as I could see, just one simple difference, one act of change that had occurred in the years since I had first been here-and it struck me in an instant that this, in simple truth, was the primary reason for what was happening here: There was, a few yards behind me now, a border. a border.

Here, in the middle of what was once Yugoslavia, and through which in 1977 we had journeyed from the border of Austria to that of Greece without a single question being asked or a single fee being charged or a single policemen stepping onto the road to make demands, stood a border. Or, to be precise, two borders-the one to the north being that of the Kosovo Province of the Republic of Yugoslavia, Savezna Republika Jugoslavija, and the one to the south, where I was standing, that of a new country, since 1992 independent of its former Yugoslavian motherland, the Republika Makedonija, the Republic of Macedonia.

As was usual in border crossings between mutually hostile or less-than-friendly states, the two border stations were out of sight of each other, the flags of one being invisible to the citizenry of the other, and vice versa. Between them, through which the demarcation line was drawn, and where the white pillars that marked the frontier stood, was a no-man's land, a place of razor wire and minefields and the threatening arcs of fire from competing gun towers. This frontier, between Blace in Macedonia and Kosovo's General Jankovic-I remembered the name, and could even see from here the great man's cement factory, all now seemingly wrecked-was, without a doubt, a true, old-fas.h.i.+oned international frontier. It had border guards. Security police. Customs officials. Flags. Sentry towers. Searchlights. Pools of disinfectant, so that no bacillus might pa.s.s from one territory to another. Red-and-white striped poles, six inches thick and fas.h.i.+oned from heavy-gauge iron pipe that not even a speeding truck could breach, and which proclaimed STOP FOR INSPECTION, INTERROGATION, THE ISSUANCE OF VISA, AND PAYMENT OF ALL FEES REQUIRED STOP FOR INSPECTION, INTERROGATION, THE ISSUANCE OF VISA, AND PAYMENT OF ALL FEES REQUIRED and only then, and only then, PERMISSION PERMISSION.

A border had been made. Politicians and diplomats far away had waved their wands and had sent their surveyors and their cartographers and their global positioning devices and had created here a new frontier. (Though perhaps not too new: Many of what we think of as the new frontiers of the Balkans are only contemporary renderings of very ancient borderlines, and this, the line between Old Serbia and Macedonia, is probably, approximately, one of them.) The region had-in the purest and most cla.s.sic sense of the word: "to divide a region into a number of smaller and often mutually hostile units, as was done in the Balkan Peninsula in the late 19th and early 20th centuries" (according to the OED' OED's unimpeachable authority)-been Balkanized. Balkanized. And what has happened across almost all of the world's more recently created borders-across, for examples, those frontiers thrown between the two Germanys, or the two Koreas, or the Congo and Zaire, or Namibia and in the Sahara Desert-had happened here as well. This pathetically short and seemingly so unimportant a frontier had suddenly, and predictably, become a fulcrum across which, in due course, the human spirit-here of Balkan people, as had happened also to Africans and Koreans and Germans-was being savagely broken. Maybe, given the desperate history of this place, worse would before long happen here: Maybe, as has happened all too often before elsewhere, fights would break out across the line, wars would be declared. And what has happened across almost all of the world's more recently created borders-across, for examples, those frontiers thrown between the two Germanys, or the two Koreas, or the Congo and Zaire, or Namibia and in the Sahara Desert-had happened here as well. This pathetically short and seemingly so unimportant a frontier had suddenly, and predictably, become a fulcrum across which, in due course, the human spirit-here of Balkan people, as had happened also to Africans and Koreans and Germans-was being savagely broken. Maybe, given the desperate history of this place, worse would before long happen here: Maybe, as has happened all too often before elsewhere, fights would break out across the line, wars would be declared.

But at this moment it was simply the border as the breaker of the human spirit that seemed most in evidence: Tens of thousands of innocent, modern European people had been driven from the state to the north, had fled across this. .h.i.therto invisible, politically dictated line on the ground, had poured over it past its guards and under its watchtowers, and had then collapsed, weary and wrecked, into the unfriendly and unwelcoming collective arms of the state to the south, their spirits broken, their hopes dashed from them, their dignity crushed. Why, the question seemed so pertinent, why create borders anymore?

After all, across the rest of Europe, in the North and South and even in much of the once Marxist East, there were everywhere the signs that life was about becoming so very much less complicated. Frontiers were coming down all over Europe. The pa.s.sport seemed every day less essential. The cry of "Papers!" or of "Doc.u.ments, please!" became less and less frequently heard. The borderless world seemed a concept well on its way to being born, and at least in Europe itself, there was also the probability, almost a reality now, of that elegant device to be known as the single currency.

But here in the Balkans, while elsewhere frontiers were coming down and currencies were becoming melded and melted down into one another, the very opposite was happening. Starting in early summer of 1991, no less than three thousand miles of brand-new European frontiers, de jure de jure and and de facto, de facto, had actually been drawn, surveyed, and created. By the end of 1992 there were whole new nation-states-Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Macedonia had actually been drawn, surveyed, and created. By the end of 1992 there were whole new nation-states-Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Macedonia*-and in due course, one must imagine, there may be more: The new nations of Montenegro and possibly Kosovo may one day be created, too. New moneys were being minted as well-the brand-new central banks housed within the brand-new frontiers (one of them, in Bosnia, being run by a New Zealander) saw to it that four entirely brand-new currencies (the Croats' version named after a small and fur-covered rodent, the kuna kuna) were actually sp.a.w.ned.

It had all been so much more stable and content-or at least had seemed so-when I was first here: When this narrative began I was at a place that did not exist, next to a country which had not then been created, among a people who, in the sense of being people with the national ident.i.ty to which they now belong, had not been born. And, at least superficially, it seemed to have worked: There was a certain prosperity, a certain satisfaction among the peoples of the Yugoslavia that had been hammered together earlier in the century. But now it had all changed, and the changes that had been brought about in just the last ten years seemed to have brought nothing but woe and misery and confusion. It had brought the specter of the old Balkans back among us, to terrify those who live there and threaten those who live beyond. It seemed the most wretched of situations, even though the doomsayers and Ca.s.sandras had long said, as they do with everything connected to the Balkans, that it was bound to be so.

But once again there arose the question that seemed so eternally asked and so perpetually appropriate here: Just why? Just why is there, and seemingly always has been, this dire inevitability about the Balkans being so fractious and unsettled a corner of the world? Just what was it that had marked out this particular peninsula, this particular gyre of mountains and plains, caves and streams, and had made it a byword, quite literally, for hostility and hate?

It was now well on in this early spring day, and it was getting dark, and some of the refugees had by now cut six-foot birch branches and stuck them in the mud, and had strung up flimsy sheets of black plastic from old garbage bags to act as windbreaks. A few of the more resourceful families now had little wood fires flickering and guttering in the chilly air, and occasionally there were blackened cooking pots sitting precariously on the logs, hissing with warming water. Here and there rusty tractors were being driven down into the mora.s.s by local Macedonian farmers, hauling a group of French aid workers who were standing on carts and tossing all they had into the crowds-small hands of green bananas, black plastic bags, bottles of Evian water-creating fierce tornadoes of stampeding, clawing, s.n.a.t.c.hing, punching, spitting people. I tramped back to the car, through a shower of bitterly cold needles of rain, wondering how the refugees, in what would turn rapidly into a freezing swampy field, would be putting up with the weather that night. The border guards had said there were thirty thousand there already, and another thousand coming in every hour. How would they put up with it? How would they cope?

Mike Jackson, who had rightly promised that I would never forget what I would see at Blace, had been angry the night before, on the juddering helicopter flight back to his forward base camp at Skopje. He had been outwardly angry, mainly because the international relief agencies-not the aid workers, but their agency bosses back in the comfort of their head offices-and who were supposed to have antic.i.p.ated this flood of humankind, had not done so. In consequence the world had been caught unawares by the exodus, had been unprepared for the extent and enormity of the crime that some could have foreseen would be perpetrated against these Albanians. The UN, in particular, had been caught wrong-footed, impotent, unable to bring more than a few bananas and garbage bags to the hundreds of thousands-here and elsewhere; there were ma.s.sive outpourings of terrified and hungry people elsewhere in Macedonia too, as well as at the crossing points into Albania and Montenegro-who were relying on the organization for help. General Jackson was angry too that his troops were having to fill the gap, were having to deal with such mundane matters as chickens and rice, and whether they were halal halal or not, when the real business of his force, which was grandly t.i.tled NATO's Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, was fighting. or not, when the real business of his force, which was grandly t.i.tled NATO's Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, was fighting.

"I'm a NATO general, and I'm up here flying in the dark, in secrecy, well within the range of Yugoslav artillery, just to organize meals meals for these people," he had kept saying. "That's surely not why I'm paid to be here." for these people," he had kept saying. "That's surely not why I'm paid to be here."

But he had been more angry still that the refugees should be here in the first place, and that made for a deeper and darker and bleaker mood. As we had stepped off the helicopter-and this was the night before I had seen the water meadow at Blace-he had muttered something about how dreadful it all was, but that he had it in his power to help. "They'll go back home, these people," he said. "They'll get their houses back, if I have anything to do with it. And we'll find the people who drove them out. A few weeks of bombing, believe me-that's all. A few weeks and the Serbs will cave in. Then we'll be taking these refugees back. By G.o.d, I hope so!"

On my way out I made a small bet with one of his staff officers as to just how long it might be before Belgrade caved in, before the refugees were in fact permitted to go home. Eighty days, someone said. It was a figure that stuck in my mind. This war, one of General Jackson's senior planners had predicted, would go on for just eighty days. It would only be an air war: No soldiers would be fighting on the ground-the Americans in particular had no stomach for the notion of losing their boys in a battle here. But the persuasive might of the combined allied air forces would be enough, the officer said. Eighty days-he was just about sure of it.

Which meant that if matters went according to plan I could be back here in Blace, standing beside the water meadow for the third time. This time, however, I would be with a force of men and machines heading north, and behind us would come the refugees again, but this time going home.

Might it work? Could it take so short a time? The officer was confident. "Trust me," he said. "These bombers are d.a.m.n good."

With his words ringing in my ears I then hatched a modest plan. It came about as I was on my own ride back to Skopje through the rain the next evening, after I had seen the horror of the refugee field, and was concluding that of course I shared the general's hopes that all the homeless would be home again-but at the same time wondered whether there was much long-term wisdom and merit in the simple fact of taking all these people home and then employing international troops to guard them, for how long?-months, years, decades, maybe?-in the hope that they and the Serbs who had done all this to them might come to tolerate each another once again.

And then, as that thought duly flared and waxed and waned, so came its successor, the thought that invariably dogs anyone who is foolish enough to become interested, fascinated, or eventually obsessed with the quagmire of the Balkans. I wondered further, as the car b.u.mped through the outskirts of the old Turkish town, the castle walls glowing warmly through the drizzle, just what it might be that was, deep down, leading these unfortunates, and all their brothers and sisters over time, to be in such a terrible situation in the first place? What forces were really at work here? I didn't mean by that the obvious ones-the forces of today's Serbian brutes with their rifles and bayonets, their cudgels and their knuckle-dusters. Nor even the equally harsh forces of their official opposition, the UCK, the Kosovo Liberation Army, the men in dark uniforms who, fighting for the idea of a Greater Albania, had already committed crimes as vile, but against the Serbs.

I meant-or thought I meant-what basal forces, what innate characteristics, what elements of competing Balkan histories and cultures and ethnicities could ever have led to such a situation as this?

For there was nothing new in this. All that had changed since the last time the Balkans erupted in horror, back in the 1940s, was that these new events were taking place under the lights of television cameras, so that all the carnage and coercion and terror and torture were being brought directly into our living rooms, live, with the newly consequent power both to shock and stun us, and yet to bore and weary and anesthetize us too. What was actually happening here at Blace's swamp camp, and all the tales we were hearing from the refugees of what had been happening up in Kosovo, were merely-as if the word merely merely could really be used in so awful a context-more manifestations of what had been going on in the Balkans for a thousand years or more. They were further excrescences of that bloodcurdling intercourse between Serbs and Croats and Bosnians and Slovenes and Macedonians and Hungarians and Rumanians and Montenegrins and Albanians and Bulgarians and Greeks and Turks and Vlachs, and who had been acting either because of pressure from great powers, or grand alliances, and who had been doing so under the various orders of, or at the behest of, or led by an endless array of sultans and emperors, grand viziers and archdukes, metropolitans and pashas, janissaries and dragomans, and whole hosts of lesser mortals whose battery of names suggests something of the bewilderment of the places where they ruled. could really be used in so awful a context-more manifestations of what had been going on in the Balkans for a thousand years or more. They were further excrescences of that bloodcurdling intercourse between Serbs and Croats and Bosnians and Slovenes and Macedonians and Hungarians and Rumanians and Montenegrins and Albanians and Bulgarians and Greeks and Turks and Vlachs, and who had been acting either because of pressure from great powers, or grand alliances, and who had been doing so under the various orders of, or at the behest of, or led by an endless array of sultans and emperors, grand viziers and archdukes, metropolitans and pashas, janissaries and dragomans, and whole hosts of lesser mortals whose battery of names suggests something of the bewilderment of the places where they ruled.

There were among them, to name just a very few, hosts of competing and conflicting grandees of churches and districts and parties, with t.i.tles like aga, ajan, ban, beg aga, ajan, ban, beg or or bey, beylerbeyi, emir, gazi, gost, imam, kapetan, kadi, khan, mameluke, mullah, pan-dur, sancak-beg, starc, strojnik, vojnuk, voivode, bey, beylerbeyi, emir, gazi, gost, imam, kapetan, kadi, khan, mameluke, mullah, pan-dur, sancak-beg, starc, strojnik, vojnuk, voivode, and and zupan; zupan; or less grand but invariably more violent villains who were organized into terror bands like the White Eagles or the Black Legions, the wartime Ustas.h.i.+ and Chetniks, and today's Tigers. These groups were led by men like the dreaded but outwardly genial Arkan, a Serb named Zeljko Raznatovic, who once reputedly ordered all the men of one family to bite and gnaw the t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es off one another, or his compatriot and similarly steely zealot Vojislav Seselj, a Serb paramilitary who boasted publicly of scooping out the eyeb.a.l.l.s of his Croatian captives using only a rusty shoehorn. or less grand but invariably more violent villains who were organized into terror bands like the White Eagles or the Black Legions, the wartime Ustas.h.i.+ and Chetniks, and today's Tigers. These groups were led by men like the dreaded but outwardly genial Arkan, a Serb named Zeljko Raznatovic, who once reputedly ordered all the men of one family to bite and gnaw the t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es off one another, or his compatriot and similarly steely zealot Vojislav Seselj, a Serb paramilitary who boasted publicly of scooping out the eyeb.a.l.l.s of his Croatian captives using only a rusty shoehorn.

And in thinking about all this I suddenly realized that I, like a score of wanderers and wonderers before me, had all of a sudden become fascinated-enraptured even-by the savage mysteries of this wretched peninsula. I had no standing in these parts at all; from centuries back, I realized as I scanned the bibliographies of the books I had, clever men and women had come to these parts in an effort to learn. And now, driven by the same strange compulsion that had brought them here before, I very much wanted as well to try and learn a little more, to see a little more, to begin to understand a little more.

After all, I was here. I had some time on my hands. I had enough to survive on for a few weeks. And this war, by all accounts, would end in eighty days. Might I not stay in the Balkans for some or all of this time, looking the place over, looking at a place that was being convulsed by a war that I could hear as distant thunder all the while but in which I could not play a part?

It seemed a beguiling idea. It was now the beginning of April. If all went as the planners believed-and I had this curious faith that it well might-then the engagement between the West and Belgrade ought to be over, and some definable event-the retaking of Kosovo by the western forces, for example-should have taken place by the middle of June. So why not stay, and contrive some way to understand something of the context behind all that was happening?