The Fracture Zone Part 4

I blinked in disbelief, but the strangely beguiling Dr. Suurkula went on. I asked a question: How many people might be needed to make up this so-called critical ma.s.s. He was, it turned out, just coming to that.

The number of people required to have a measurable effect on a population varies directly with the size of the population that needs to be affected. Measurements made over the last thirty years, in a variety of towns and cities and countries around the world, had shown incontrovertibly that, by chance-or in fact probably not by chance-a perfect mathematical device invariably comes into play. For the critical ma.s.s seems always to be reached when the number of people a.s.sembled in one place, all of them manifesting the same vibrations at the same time, is equal to the square root of 1 percent of the population that is to be affected.

This curiously satisfying mathematical coincidence was noticed first of all in the mid-seventies, in Providence, Rhode Island. The town used to be a wayward place, the car-theft capital of the United States, a place of murder and burglary and enough crime to make the local police chief throw up his hands in despair. But then Dr. Suurkula's friends-people whose names are familiar in this world: John Hagelin, Matti Pitkanen, Neil Phillips, Paolo Menoni-decided to become involved, trying to see if they could direct the powers they believed they had, in a way that they thought might help. They a.s.sembled enough of their like-minded colleagues to reach the number that equaled the square root of 1 percent of the Providence population-which, since it stood at 160,000, was the neat and precise number 40-and put them in a local hotel room and then-well, that, Dr. Suurkula said, was the part that a rationalist, as he a.s.sumed me to be, might well choose not to believe.

Too true, I retorted. I had not believed overmuch of what I had heard so far. Fair enough, he replied, and continued anyway. What these forty people in Providence then did, he said, was to indulge in several powerful minutes of simultaneous yogic flying. simultaneous yogic flying.

Of course, I said to myself: Transcendental meditation. I might have known. My cynicism went into immediate overdrive. These people, I said to myself, were completely nuts. These here were part of a pathetic troupe of disciples of the now fabulously rich and probably totally cynical confidence trickster (as I saw him and his like) known as the Maharis.h.i.+ Mahesh Yogi, who had been the spiritual adviser to some of the Beatles and now lived as a wealthy recluse somewhere near Amsterdam.

Like so many others I had come across elsewhere over the years, and like the disciples of the Baghwan Rajneesh and Sai Baba and a woman called Maya whom half of social Hong Kong seemed to be following, they had been gulled into handing over huge sums of their own savings to be taught the nonsense that mental-energies-can-be-harnessed-and-made-to-bring-about-universal-peace, and were now performing in the Balkans, of all places, the same stupefying rituals-which culminated in something so perfectly silly, not to say unattractive, as managing to lift (for several continuous seconds) their backsides off cus.h.i.+ons while sitting in the lotus position-that had made them a global laughing-stock. And now they were here trying to persuade innocents like me that by such madness lay the road to peace, that I might perhaps join them, or give them money, or write laudable things about them and so help them to win ever more credibility. The exploiting of a such a tragedy as this-it was all too shabby, too cynical, too tasteless.

Dr. Suurkula clearly saw the antic.i.p.ated doubt on my face and tried to dispel it with a barrage of statistics. The forty people who performed simultaneous yogic flying in Providence, he said, had achieved great success. The number of car thefts and robberies in the city had dropped by 42 percent over the next week, he said, and has remained lower ever since. Had I heard any further discussion of Providence being the car-stealing capital of the United States? No, I said, I had not. "Well, that was all to do with us!" smiled the man, and launched into a barrage of facts and figures.

"Look at what we did in Jerusalem in 1979," he said: 230 people-the Israeli population is 5.3 million-performed yogic flying on the eve of the Camp David talks, and a peace agreement was signed. Then again, and most ambitiously, seven thousand people met and performed the rituals in a gymnasium outside Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., and, their power being harnessed to improve the lot of the then 4.9 million people of the planet, the Cold War ended, the Berlin Wall fell, and the atomic stalemate, which had dogged the global population for half a century, was ended.

His conversation then veered into areas I could not possible understand-the nature of the five sub-atomic particles, the coincidence of the five levels of Vedic-inspired consciousness, the overlapping circles of energy, the works of Niels Bohr and Erwin Schrodinger and Albert Einstein, the role of the mantra in stimulating internal vibration. And then, on the verge of losing me, he wondered whether I might not come down to the congress and see the preparations under way to bring peace to the Balkans.

The Dubrovnik Peace Project was being held in an airy resort hotel, the Mincenta, at the north end of town. There were no tourists in sight, just scores of the earnest-looking and friendly people-Germans, Israelis, Britons, Italians, Americans-who were delegates to the conference and who seemed to spend much of their time languidly strolling from workshop to workshop, or intently reading the messages (for cheap flights home, for organic food shops in town, for phone cards) posted on a bulletin board outside the conference office. It might have been a low-key trade show, or a book festival, and the delegates all sales representatives for health-food manufacturers, or sandals, or Peruvian sweaters. There seemed to be no leaders, as such-just instructors and lecturers, and once in a while, men who were so well-known in the field that the crowds parted before them, and there was a quiet collective gasp of awe.

Dr. Paolo Menoni, whose pair of impeccably made business cards p.r.o.nounced him to be Avvocato Avvocato and and Insegnante di Meditazione Trascendentale, Insegnante di Meditazione Trascendentale, was one such, and he broke off what he was doing-which seemed princ.i.p.ally to be talking to a group of excited middle-aged ladies-and sat down to talk of the urgency of the mission, the crisis it had now reached, the need for everyone to come and a.s.semble so that peace might be brought into being. was one such, and he broke off what he was doing-which seemed princ.i.p.ally to be talking to a group of excited middle-aged ladies-and sat down to talk of the urgency of the mission, the crisis it had now reached, the need for everyone to come and a.s.semble so that peace might be brought into being.

"You may be skeptical," he said, "and I would understand that. But you should know there are now no fewer than fifty-seven proven cases in which what we do-meditating, yogic hopping, skywalking, yogic flying-has truly brought about peace. Read the paper in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Conflict Resolution, back in 1988: It showed without a doubt how this really works. back in 1988: It showed without a doubt how this really works.

"Your William Hague, leader of Mrs. Thatcher's Conservatives, he believes in meditation, in the benefits of what we do. So does the president of Mozambique, Dr. Chissano. Believe me, this is catching on."

And Dr. Menoni took me through the back of the hotel to what had once evidently been the large socialist-style dining hall where happy Slavic vacationers took their gruel and goulash. In it were hundreds of mattresses, readied for the evening flying session. There was a chart on one wall, showing the numbers taking part each day. Two weeks before the numbers had been low, 75, 90, 56. Then, after an appeal went out on the Internet, and concerned would-be fliers heard about the critical need to reach the super-radiance number, people started drifting in, and the figures crept up: 130, 178, 203, 217. Now, according to Dr. Menoni, two figures were vitally necessary: 254, which was to stop the war in Croatia and Bosnia, and 345, which was to bring peace to Yugoslavia.

I pointed out that there was actually no war going on in either Croatia and Bosnia, which perplexed him a little. But the figure of 345-that was indeed the square root of 11.9 million, which was more or less the population of Yugoslavia (more or less: The official figure appears to be 10.59 million). If perhaps the pleas and telephone calls and telexes that were then being sent out from the Mincenta did lure the faithful in sufficient numbers, then perhaps-just perhaps-peace might break out. perhaps-peace might break out.

I left them just as they were beginning a session. Scores of earnest-looking and very friendly middle-aged men and women-there seemed rather few youngsters in the group-were taking off their shoes, signing up for the coming attempt, and taking up positions on their various mattresses. An instructor mounted the podium, muttered a few words of Sanskrit by way of universal greeting, and told everyone to begin mouthing their mantras. And then another pair of instructors looked at me, to suggest that I might leave, and drew shut the curtains. As I walked away a low, rhythmic chanting was beginning, a humming and a thumping and the sound of a growing ecstasy. And then I turned the corner, and there was the Adriatic, and in place of human ecstasy, the sound of waves cras.h.i.+ng on the sh.o.r.e two hundred feet below.

Later, when I returned to the United States, I asked the editor of the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Bruce Russett, if he thought there was any merit in the ideas of transcendental meditation, and of the Dubrovnik Peace Project-whether there was any sense behind the notion of harmonic vibrations and super-radiance numbers and the power to influence unified fields and to bring about peace by means of human electronics. Yale University's Dean Acheson Professor of Political Science, for such was his other t.i.tle, was acerbic in his reply, which came in the form of a long E-mail: Bruce Russett, if he thought there was any merit in the ideas of transcendental meditation, and of the Dubrovnik Peace Project-whether there was any sense behind the notion of harmonic vibrations and super-radiance numbers and the power to influence unified fields and to bring about peace by means of human electronics. Yale University's Dean Acheson Professor of Political Science, for such was his other t.i.tle, was acerbic in his reply, which came in the form of a long E-mail: My considered opinion is that what the TM folks are peddling is snake oil. The premise that TM can help its pract.i.tioners reduce their own conflicts is reasonable; the premise that it can reduce conflict among nearby nonpract.i.tioners is absurd.It is true that JCR, JCR, which I edit, did long ago publish an article by the TM folks purporting to show big effects in the Jerusalem area. Even then I regarded the premise as absurd, but after a lot of internal debate decided that the empirical work should be judged on its own merits, separately from the plausibility of its chief a.s.sumption, and let it see daylight. That was in the December 1988 issue. A critic took a stab at demolis.h.i.+ng their statistical a.n.a.lysis in the December 1990 issue, but in my judgment just missed driving his stake through the heart. Nonetheless, I have seen nothing since that persuades me that they have any general capability to do what they say; to the degree their Jerusalem experience does fit it is almost certainly a lucky coincidence, and they don't tell us about all the tries elsewhere that didn't work. I much regret having gone out on a limb for this, and would advise extreme caution to anyone else. which I edit, did long ago publish an article by the TM folks purporting to show big effects in the Jerusalem area. Even then I regarded the premise as absurd, but after a lot of internal debate decided that the empirical work should be judged on its own merits, separately from the plausibility of its chief a.s.sumption, and let it see daylight. That was in the December 1988 issue. A critic took a stab at demolis.h.i.+ng their statistical a.n.a.lysis in the December 1990 issue, but in my judgment just missed driving his stake through the heart. Nonetheless, I have seen nothing since that persuades me that they have any general capability to do what they say; to the degree their Jerusalem experience does fit it is almost certainly a lucky coincidence, and they don't tell us about all the tries elsewhere that didn't work. I much regret having gone out on a limb for this, and would advise extreme caution to anyone else.

And yet. It so happens that the week during which Dr. Menoni was calling for new volunteers-the week when Dr. Suurkula arrived at the Mincenta Hotel, the week during which the numbers of those performing their various yogic feats was climbing up into the one hundreds and two hundreds-during that very week, the first week of June, there were significant moves toward peace being made in Belgrade, Moscow, London, Brussels, New York, and Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.

And on the very day that the group did manage to a.s.semble 345 yogic fliers, Slobodan Milosevic did accept the peace proposals from NATO. Peace of a sort was beginning to break out in the Balkans at precisely the moment that the Dubrovnik Peace Project was doing its hardest and most sustained work-when, as its leaders would claim, the vibrational forces were working at their maximum.

Maybe it is all absurd. Maybe what happened in the Balkans, like whatever happened in Jerusalem, can be dismissed as a lucky coincidence. Maybe there are those in the various great churches around the world who believe that their particular prayers or other spiritual intercessions did what was necessary. The possibility that human beings, harnessing some kind of invisible and indefinable energy, can on occasion influence external affairs with which they have no physical connection-the idea intrigues, and remains intriguing, long after the absurdity of the performance has vanished into memory. There is just a faint and lingering thought from Dubrovnik that says, all too quietly-Well, why not?

The frontier with Montenegro is half an hour's drive from the outskirts of Dubrovnik. From the main road it is possible to see-impossible to avoid, in fact-the zigzag track that was cut up the Dinaric hillside to where the American secretary of commerce, Ron Brown, was killed in a plane crash in the spring of 1996. He had been in a U.S. Air Force Hercules, and according to reports at the time, had flown into the most terrible sudden storm and the pilot, not having the benefit of any navigation aids at the primitive Dubrovnik airfield, had flown his aircraft straight into the mountainside. Brown, along with thirty-four other members of an American trade mission, was killed.

The incident has been mired in argument ever since. Ron Brown was a black man, the highest-ranking of his race in the Clinton administration. He had been under investigation for supposed financial irregularities. And ever since his death there have been suggestions, or claims, that he might have been murdered. (Acting on a report from an air force pathologist that a wound at the top of Brown's head could have been caused by a gunshot, the NAACP launched an investigation into the circ.u.mstances of his death.) A rash of theories, suggesting various kinds of conspiracy, flared up about a year after his death, coincident with the more florid suggestions about President Clinton and his various political problems. But, as with the White House scandals, the suggestions about improprieties surrounding Brown's sad death quickly faded away. No one talks about the event much anymore, except in Croatia, where they have put up a memorial, and the shepherd who found the wreckage occasionally talks about the crash, and surprises listeners by saying that no, there was no storm, terrible or otherwise, on the March afternoon in question.

The most visible consequence of the tragedy, so far as Croatia itself was concerned, can be seen in the makeup of the fleet of the nation's small airline. Mr. Brown had hoped that the directors of Croatia Airlines would order Boeing aircraft, and the dispatch of his trade mission was in part to help them make up their minds to do so. But after the accident the line decided not to buy American at all, and if you fly these days from Dubrovnik to Zagreb, or to Rome, you will do so now in a smart new A-340 Airbus, built by a consortium of European manufacturers, in France.

The flag with the red-and-white checkered s.h.i.+eld of Croatia, the once-notorious sahovnica sahovnica that was also the wartime symbol of the Ustas.h.i.+, fluttered over the little shack that housed the border control point south of Dubrovnik. There was no southbound traffic on the road at all-a road that still bore the scars of the fighting of the early nineties-and the skeleton staff at the checkpoint were surprised to see anyone venturing into Montenegro. The senior immigration officer was a woman, and she grinned uneasily. that was also the wartime symbol of the Ustas.h.i.+, fluttered over the little shack that housed the border control point south of Dubrovnik. There was no southbound traffic on the road at all-a road that still bore the scars of the fighting of the early nineties-and the skeleton staff at the checkpoint were surprised to see anyone venturing into Montenegro. The senior immigration officer was a woman, and she grinned uneasily.

"Are you sure you are wanting to go on?" she asked, with genuine concern. "Dangerous people ahead."

But we said yes, she hastily stamped our pa.s.sports, and ordered her a.s.sistant to raise the barrier. We edged ahead into the no-man's land and rounded a corner beyond which stood a cl.u.s.ter of temporary shacks with the red-white-and-blue flag of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia snapping in the breeze above them. There was a thick steel pole across the road here, too, and behind it a group of heavily armed and camouflaged policemen and a big artillery piece that was pointed not toward us and any possible enemies back in Croatia-but back down the hill into Montenegro. For if these men perceived any threat at this frontier, was likely to come not from outside the country, but from within.

6.

Western Approaches

A BLACK BLACK M MERCEDES was waiting on the Montenegrin side of frontier, with two tough young Yugoslav women inside. They were called Dali and Vesna, they were university students from Belgrade, and they were known in the trade as fixers-members of an elite corps of unsung heroes who operate in all distant wars, the local helpmeets without whom almost no foreign correspondent could ever ply the craft. was waiting on the Montenegrin side of frontier, with two tough young Yugoslav women inside. They were called Dali and Vesna, they were university students from Belgrade, and they were known in the trade as fixers-members of an elite corps of unsung heroes who operate in all distant wars, the local helpmeets without whom almost no foreign correspondent could ever ply the craft.

I was delighted to see them. A friend at the BBC had organized their arrival, since it was said that they knew the least troublesome way to travel into the interior. It was for this kind of local knowledge that the fixers prove so invaluable-the best of them being legendarily undaunted by the most arcane of requests, and by the risks that are frequently involved.

An editor in London or New York might send an urgent message to his correspondent on the ground: Find me a young and attractive Albanian refugee who speaks serviceable English, who is pregnant after being raped by a Serb paramilitary, and find her in the next hour. The correspondent without a fixer would have little idea which way to turn. The correspondent with one, on the other hand, would turn immediately to the fixer to arrange everything, and in all probability it could and would be done.

The fortunate journalist would then make the broadcast or write the article, and in due course get all the glory, receive the "herograms." But the fixer would receive none of this-no recognition for him or her other than the daily fee that had been agreed beforehand. The going rate in the Balkans, at least from the British and American networks and newspapers, was two hundred German marks a day.

Economic distress is most often the reason that fixers take the work. The kind of circ.u.mstances where fixers are needed-such as here, the outbreak of a complicated war in a difficult and unfamiliar part of the world-rarely embrace periods of economic contentment and social harmony. And such circ.u.mstances thus have a way of driving into the fixer corps numbers of extremely well-educated and overqualified young men and women who, because of the situation that the reporters have come to cover, are temporarily down on their luck. There was a twenty-five-year-old doctor working in the Balkans as a cameraman's a.s.sistant; and Dali and Vesna here in Montenegro were both highly intelligent women, one taking a graduate degree in political science, the other studying to be a pharmacist. They didn't much like the drudge work-but they needed the money. The four hundred marks that Vesna received for two days' acting as gofer for a visiting correspondent was more than her father earned in a month.

Besides doing work they didn't much like, and for reasons they didn't care to reveal, and rarely winning credit for the tasks they performed, the fixers not infrequently got into trouble. While we were in the region a Kosovo Albanian fixer working for a British journalist was killed by a NATO bomb fragment, and a Macedonian fixer was murdered by Serb soldiers, along with the two German reporters who had hired him. There were long news reports noting the deaths or injuries to the correspondents, but no initial mention of the locally hired helpmeets. Their fate was reported only much later, in the laconic list of the unfortunate also-rans.

Dali and Vesna needed to have a particular skill on the day we met-and it was for this specific reason that they had been asked to meet us. They were get us into the Montenegrin capital past the very hostile and rather dangerous Yugoslav army checkpoints. They had devised a simple and probably foolproof scheme for doing so.

The fact that such a problem existed at all says much about the curiously ambiguous situation of the mountainous, geologically chaotic and astonis.h.i.+ngly beautiful state of Montenegro-home, it is said, to the tallest people in Europe, and probably also to the toughest. Officially it is a part of Yugoslavia, one of the country's two const.i.tuent republics, Serbia being the other.* There is a const.i.tutionally guaranteed equivalence: both Serbia and Montenegro send twenty deputies to the federal upper house of the parliament, both Serbia and Montenegro have their own governments and their own presidents, and both maintain armed police forces. But there the similarity ends. Whereas in Serbia the interests of the dominantly Serbian federal administration can be said to coincide almost perfectly with those of the local people, almost the very opposite holds true in Montenegro. There is a const.i.tutionally guaranteed equivalence: both Serbia and Montenegro send twenty deputies to the federal upper house of the parliament, both Serbia and Montenegro have their own governments and their own presidents, and both maintain armed police forces. But there the similarity ends. Whereas in Serbia the interests of the dominantly Serbian federal administration can be said to coincide almost perfectly with those of the local people, almost the very opposite holds true in Montenegro.

The Montenegrins in the main may be Orthodox Christians, like most of the Serbs; but they are fiercely independent, they have a fiery reputation, and they are a people of the sea and the mountains and not the rivers and the plains. They would never, they insist today as they always have, accept subjugation by anyone. They got rid of the Turks-just the only Balkan people ever to do so. They had employed the simplest but most effective of guerrilla methods for doing so-methods that would be duplicated hundreds of years later, half a world away, by such strategists as Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, and Mao Zedong in China.

The men-vastly tall, utterly impressive-were extraordinary snipers, and they used guns ten feet long against the invaders. When the Turks first invaded the capital of Cetinje, as they did three times, the defenders of the local monastery touched off their powder magazine, destroying the place, killing themselves-but driving all the terrified Turks away. On other occasions the Montenegrin women would trigger landslides, and avalanches in winter, and create all kinds of havoc among the Turks' supply lines. The children were involved in the fighting too-setting fires, firing catapults, ferrying ammunition and water to the men in the firing lines. The entire country, knitted together by family, by blood, and by loyalty to the very idea of Montenegro, became fully involved if anyone ever dared set foot inside their hallowed territory. The people knew little other than G.o.d and war, and it was the gravest of insults for one Montenegrin to sneer at another: "I know your people-all your ancestors died in their beds."

They had gotten rid of the Turks; and, I was to be told almost every day that I was inside this happy little former kingdom, that if they had to get rid of the Serbs as well, then they would do so without any hesitation at all. A man walking beneath the cathedral walls in Kotor was the first to say about Belgrade's Mr. Milosevic, "Let him try it-just let him try it. He'll have the bloodiest fight he's ever known."

All across Montenegro there seemed a sudden eruption of anger toward the Serbs. "Every evil in the Balkans has come from them," a cafe owner was quoted as saying. "They are sc.u.m," said a painter. They had "stolen" the Montenegrin language (which has four more letters in its alphabet than plain Serbian), they were "genocidal cowards," they "lacked a civilization," they were of (the greatest insult of all) "Turkish descent."

Which is why the Montenegrin police force and the Yugoslav army, both of which have const.i.tutional responsibility for the territorial serenity and integrity of the five thousand square miles of Montenegrin territory, are at perpetual and often dangerous odds with each other. The Montenegrin police are, first, loyal to their president, a dapper young matinee idol named Milo Djukanovic; the Yugoslav army is loyal to the federal president, who at the time of writing is Slobodan Milosevic. The two men (despite Milosevic having been the Montenegrin president's political patron) glare at each other with ill-concealed distaste.

Djukanovic eyes Milosevic with suspicion, wary of his long-term intentions, openly challenging him to dare to try to tinker with, or worse still, try to annex, his rumbustious little republic. His ministers talk openly of declaring independence: There is already a Montenegrin airline, there is talk of Montenegrin pa.s.sports, and a currency tied, like Bosnia's, to the German mark.

Milosevic in turn rails back at Djukanovic, reminding him (with some accuracy) that he and the federal army he commands could crush him and his insignificant nation in a heartbeat, if he chose to. But the Montenegrin president has managed so far to remain st.u.r.dily-some would say cheekily-independent of Belgrade: He has astutely given himself two guarantees that this interesting situation may last.

First, the young president has worked hard, via a series of foreign expeditions and state visits and countless amba.s.sadorial soirees, to ensure that he retains the sympathetic interest of as much of the international community as possible. It has been a strategy that has seemed to work-for during the Kosovo war all of those capitals, from Was.h.i.+ngton to London, from Helsinki to Canberra, which condemned the policies of the Yugoslav government were invariably careful to add "except, of course, for Montenegro." They recognized President Djukanovic as somehow different, not a man to be tarred with the same brush as the leader in Belgrade.

Then again, and in tandem with his courts.h.i.+p of foreign governments, President Djukanovic has spent much time and energy courting the attentions of the foreign press. He has appeared to believe that the generals in faraway Belgrade, however much they might wish to rid themselves of his turbulent presence, would simply never dare to touch him with the whole world looking on. (But of course Milosevic did just that in Kosovo and Bosnia, quite careless of world opinion-meaning that Montenegro's present optimism may turn out to be ill-placed.) Whatever Djukanovic's chances of ultimate success, whatever his chances of long-term survival, he was certainly extraordinarily popular with the access-demanding foreign press. Even at the height of the war it was perfectly easy for a foreign corespondent to gain entry into what, it has to be remembered, was and at the time of writing still is, an integral part of Yugoslavia. The bureaucrats in Podgorica, the country's dull little modern capital, saw to it that anyone who wished to come in, could-in sharp contrast to the situation in Belgrade, where correspondents were turned away in their droves, and those who were allowed in had to function under the most controlled of conditions.

In Montenegro reporters and photographers were given an essentially free rein, and they received all the care and attention and interested help that a sympathetic government is able to give. This, considering that there was a war going on, was almost a correspondent's heaven. It was most unusual, and all who went to Montenegro during the war reveled in the freedoms-but at the same time wondered just how long they could last.

Those of us who were allowed to come in were handed a prettily-produced booklet about Montenegro, attached to which was an open letter, one of the more remarkable I can remember receiving. It was from the presidential palace, above the signature of the Montenegrin Secretary for Information, and was dated April 24, 1999: Respected Ladies and Gentlemen and Dear Colleagues,As never before in it's [sic] [sic] history, Montenegro has become host to many media representatives, reporters, photographers and cameramen from all corners of the world. history, Montenegro has become host to many media representatives, reporters, photographers and cameramen from all corners of the world.Unfortunately, at this time Montenegro has not attracted you here because of its exquisite beauty, or for you to escape from "the realities of the world." Montenegro itself has become "a center of tensions and crises." That is why all the citizens of Montenegro watch over and guard their peace. This is why we feel free to ask you, as friends of this country and its people, to cooperate with us and help us in the preservation of the stability of the country.In the performance of your regular, daily, professional duties do not ever forget that peace, liberty and the independence of our country is preserved by the Yugoslav Army and the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Montenegro-together. The Yugoslav Army in the performance of its duties as the exclusive Yugoslav Defense Force respects the decision of the federal Government to declare a State of War. In this sense, the Yugoslav Army undertakes all necessary measures that are under its authority.We sincerely request that you do not do anything that would not follow in accordance with the legal regulations of our country. Bear in mind that photographing or filming of uniformed soldiers, military formations and facilities, as well as trespa.s.sing within areas under Military security are forbidden.Concerning the organization of your daily a.s.signments, you should consult the Republic Secretariat for Information so that we can supply you with the necessary instructions.You should take special care during your departure from your temporary residence and when working on locations you should consult their security representatives, as to whether or not filming on the site is permissible.We are certain that by doing so and in working together, we will eliminate all possible future disagreements. This will contribute to your personal safety and also the preservation of peace within the Republic.Yours sincerely, BOZIDAR J JAREDIC.

Montenegro was indeed a nervous country, living on a razor's edge, hoping neither to be seen to be supportive of the Belgrade regime, nor wanting to incur its wrath. The writers and cameramen who had come to Montenegro were skittish and nervous, too-and never more so than when any one of them encountered a patrol or a roadblock of the Yugoslav army.

It was because there was a good chance that on our journey from the Croatian frontier to Podgorica we might well come across the army that we had asked for an escort by this pair of Amazonian fixers.

They could make sure that if were stopped by any soldiers from the VJ-the Vojska Jugoslavije, the force that was the successor of the Yugoslav Federal Army-we would not be arrested, fined, our possessions stolen, our clothes stripped from our back, or ourselves beaten, tortured, or worse. This had already happened to other reporters in Montenegro: We didn't want it happening to us.

As if to underline the schism between the army and police, the plan that Dali and Vesna had hatched required the cooperation of the constabulary itself. They had arranged that a police car would be made available to us in the town of Herceg-Novi, five miles in from the border. A VJ checkpoint was known to be sited on the sh.o.r.e of the Gulf of Kotor, about three miles farther on. The idea was that we would drive in the Mercedes to the police station, we would transfer to the police van and hide under blankets on the floor while the women remained in the car, and then the two vehicles, with an extra police jeep for security "in case things get rough," would drive toward Podgorica. It should be, said Dali, exercising the colloquialisms of her last employer, "a piece of cake."

And indeed it was. We drove through Igalo, past where Marshal t.i.to once had a lavish villa, and down to the edge of the gulf-surely one of the loveliest inlets of water on any coast anywhere, with the bluest of seas surrounded by meadows draped with forests, and by an infinity of hyacinth-pale mountains and white cliffs laced with waterfalls. We stopped in a cafe at Herceg-Novi, and drank a couple of reinforcing beers. A boy offered me a piece of candy, which I noticed was called, for no apparent reason, a Negro.*

Three policemen came up and shook our hands. They spoke little English, but offered their view that the Serbs were up to no good. I held my tongue: Some opinions were best kept to oneself, even at risk of seeming stupid, as all foreigners everywhere are naturally a.s.sumed to be. They motioned to a large white van and showed us some sacks we could lie beneath. On top they piled guns, and as we set off I had the stock of a very large machine gun jammed into my stomach. The women, we a.s.sumed, were behind us, the escort vehicle ahead.

We sped along the road for five minutes or so, and then we slowed to a crawl. I heard the window open, and one of the policemen hushed us to make sure we didn't move. I held my breath. Someone opened the front door, there were some guttural exchanges: "Dobre din. Zdravo." "Dobre din. Zdravo." Check? Check? "Niz naiu. Hvala." "Niz naiu. Hvala." And then the door was slammed. And then the door was slammed.

"Pravo," one of the soldiers said-drive on. We accelerated again. The car went around a right-hand bend, and then one of the young policemen whooped with delight. "Is okay now. You safe." The policeman added that he knew a quick and easy way to tell a Montenegrin reservist from a regular Yugoslav soldier-the reservists were able to go home at night and wash, while the regulars could not, and so always smelled. "And those boys on the barricade-they smelled, I can tell you!" one of the soldiers said-drive on. We accelerated again. The car went around a right-hand bend, and then one of the young policemen whooped with delight. "Is okay now. You safe." The policeman added that he knew a quick and easy way to tell a Montenegrin reservist from a regular Yugoslav soldier-the reservists were able to go home at night and wash, while the regulars could not, and so always smelled. "And those boys on the barricade-they smelled, I can tell you!"

The Montenegrins, according to my now-dog-eared 1918 National Geographic, National Geographic, are "of tall, large and erect figure. Their characteristics are those of liberty-loving mountaineers who have lived apart and distrust strangers. Their women are brave, loyal and as implacable as themselves. The word of a Montenegrin is never broken." are "of tall, large and erect figure. Their characteristics are those of liberty-loving mountaineers who have lived apart and distrust strangers. Their women are brave, loyal and as implacable as themselves. The word of a Montenegrin is never broken."*

The first man we met in Montenegro, though he may well never have broken his word, was in all other ways very different from the Geographic' Geographic's confident description. He was short and stooped, had interestingly protruding eyes, lived in a household swarming with people, adored strangers, and-unlike most Montenegrins, who belong to the Orthodox Church-was a Roman Catholic priest and-very unlike most Montenegrins, who are steadfastly loyal to their genes and their hormones-was unashamedly flamboyant. He was called Don Branco Sbutega, and I was given his name in European cities from London to the Golden Horn as one of the most agreeable of people one could ever want to meet. A Pole I knew in Zagreb had insisted that I have tea with Father Sbutega, though cautioned that I would find he was "not a friend of this reality," whatever that was likely to mean. unlike most Montenegrins, who are steadfastly loyal to their genes and their hormones-was unashamedly flamboyant. He was called Don Branco Sbutega, and I was given his name in European cities from London to the Golden Horn as one of the most agreeable of people one could ever want to meet. A Pole I knew in Zagreb had insisted that I have tea with Father Sbutega, though cautioned that I would find he was "not a friend of this reality," whatever that was likely to mean.

He lives beside his church in a small waterfront town called Dobrota three miles north of Kotor itself. An aged housekeeper and an immense Airedale terrier named Hook live with him-the latter, he explained, was the son of the resident dog at the Russian emba.s.sy in Belgrade. When we called, in midafternoon, his housekeeper insisted he was asleep. But there came a roaring from an upstairs bedroom, a demand to know who we might be, and, on hearing we were British, he came partly dressed to the window and bellowed down: "Come up immediately. I worked for the BBC. I will give you strawberry jelly." We could hear him chortling, "This is too wonderful, too wonderful."

He was extravagantly theatrical, not at all priestly, and once were we a.s.sembled in his living room, seemed a little tipsy. He reminded me of Anthony Blanche, or at least the Nickolas Grace version of him, in Brideshead Revisited; Brideshead Revisited; I thought he might stutter and roll his eyes, and refer to the Serbs as "wuffians" or "hobbledehoys." He certainly called me "dear boy," and praised Rose's beauty endlessly. He was somewhat suspicious of Dali and Vesna, because they were from Belgrade, but warmed to Vesna when she admitted to being Montenegrin. "Then you are most beautiful, too," he said. I thought he might stutter and roll his eyes, and refer to the Serbs as "wuffians" or "hobbledehoys." He certainly called me "dear boy," and praised Rose's beauty endlessly. He was somewhat suspicious of Dali and Vesna, because they were from Belgrade, but warmed to Vesna when she admitted to being Montenegrin. "Then you are most beautiful, too," he said.

His father had been a Croat, and he himself, he said, was descended from the Montenegrin royal family. "So I cannot be anti-Serb really-for it was Serbs who largely peopled this place. But anyone who might be an ally of that madman in Belgrade-he or she I could not abide."

He clapped his hands for the old black-clad woman who had been his housekeeper for twenty years, and she brought out a dish of dew-fresh strawberries, a bowl of red gelatin dessert, a large number of bottles of beer, and a young man with whom Father Sbutega had been spending the afternoon. He was tall, handsome, dark-haired, and muscular-very much the Montenegrin-and in his late thirties. The two spent much of their time with us continuing an earlier conversation in Montenegrin about various foods and the degree to which Turkey had influenced their making. It was possible, both agreed, to buy good halvah and baklava in Montenegro, as well as a divine cevapcici cevapcici-the perfect blend of East and West, North and South, and all in a place that had never been subjugated by any outsider.

His interests in the current war, he said, were only humanitarian-and indeed, some days before when I had tried to telephone him, he had been off helping French aid workers take a convoy of food to the refugee camps that had been opened just over the Albanian border. "But they are inside Montenegro," he said. "Isn't that too strange? People are coming in as refugees from Kosovo to Montenegro-in the same country. We're a part of Yugoslavia, for heaven's sake!-and yet other Yugoslavs are asking us to take them in and look after them. But there are VJ units everywhere here, and lots of the people here are Serbs. How can they feel safe?" He harrumphed with disbelief.

"I guess they know we're Montenegrins first, and we won't put up with any nonsense. But it makes this war seem even crazier than it is."

He positively loathed loathed the war, he said. He would rather talk instead of civilized things. Like London, for example. How was his old friend Cardinal Hume? (Not good, I had to tell him-and three weeks after I left Basil Hume died, which left Don Branco "devastated," as he put it.) He had come to know him when he filled in at a small church in Brixton, at a time when he was doubling working for the BBC Russian Service at Bush House in London. "Tell my friends there. They will remember me." He still listened to the BBC faithfully, every day. Except that he was very busy. "I have eighty paris.h.i.+oners," he said. "Very demanding people. I have far too much to do." And he waved his hand wildly and put on a panic-stricken expression. the war, he said. He would rather talk instead of civilized things. Like London, for example. How was his old friend Cardinal Hume? (Not good, I had to tell him-and three weeks after I left Basil Hume died, which left Don Branco "devastated," as he put it.) He had come to know him when he filled in at a small church in Brixton, at a time when he was doubling working for the BBC Russian Service at Bush House in London. "Tell my friends there. They will remember me." He still listened to the BBC faithfully, every day. Except that he was very busy. "I have eighty paris.h.i.+oners," he said. "Very demanding people. I have far too much to do." And he waved his hand wildly and put on a panic-stricken expression.

Then he brightened. Would we care to come and look at his chapel, to see the work he had done? And so, joined by Hook, who bounded along merrily ahead of us, we trooped through a low door into an immense Aladdin's cave of wild mosaics and gold trim and rich red carpeting: the new Chapel of Dobrota, Don Branco Sbutega's legacy for the Catholic people of the Montenegrin coast. It was an extraordinary place, bizarre, vulgar in the extreme, a fantasy chapel that might have been in Las Vegas, or at Portmeirion, or on the set of a Hammer film. Don Branco sat and happily played the organ-"The Wedding March," "Silent Night"-while we stood, awestruck, looking up at ornate single eye under the apex of the dome, which gazed down coldly at the congregation below.

Outside, on a bus shelter, was the Serbian cross, and a vulgarism denouncing the Catholic Church. Beside it was a swath of graffiti, the reminder that this territory, like Kosovo, was "Serbia forever."

"That's what they think," growled Don Branco Sbutega. "But let them ever dare to try and take on the Montenegrins. They have good reason to be scared. Not of people like me of course-I'd just run away. But the people up in the hills. All they know up there is guns and fighting. They've been doing it for hundreds of years. And they always win."

Before climbing up the hills to the desolate karst plateau, I had a small mission to undertake down on the Adriatic coast, at a seaside town called Petrovac. I had heard something of the place-a tidy little resort, though not quite so fas.h.i.+onable as the near-islet of Sveti Stefan, where film stars used to pay thousands of dollars a night to be housed in perfect Adriatic peace, in a jumble of houses and cypress trees on the sea five miles away. Petrovac was much less a.s.suming than that, a pleasing seaside mix of the acceptably new and the delightfully ancient. A friend in London, a well-known magazine editor, was married to an architectural writer who had come from Petrovac, and both he and his brother, now a lawyer in Scotland, wanted to know how their old family house was getting along, and how their neighbors were, from whom they hadn't heard all through the war, and about whom they now were a little worried.

Everyone in the dusty outskirts of Petrovac knew the family-"The boys did very well, went to England, you know," said one old man I met in the street, who was leading a donkey on a string. He gave directions, and we found the house, part of it now turned into a butcher shop, part a warehouse. It was built of limestone, weathered, substantial, and still in good shape. The neighbors lived behind it, and were sitting in a courtyard drinking Turkish coffee. They sat us down immediately, a.s.sured us they were fine-but that the telephones, run as they were by an administration in Belgrade, were not working too well. So I called Scotland on my cell phone, and within minutes there was a babel of Montenegrin pa.s.sing across the ether, and to celebrate the moment someone broke out a box of lok.u.m, lok.u.m, the gummy and flower-fragrant sweetmeat that elsewhere is known as Turkish delight. the gummy and flower-fragrant sweetmeat that elsewhere is known as Turkish delight.

The neighbors, grateful for the contact with the outside, then seemed to feel it their duty to tell us stories-did we know, for example, that there were families of black people living farther down the coast at Ulcinj? The coast had fallen to the Turks for a while, and back in the sixteenth century the bey of Algiers brought African slaves to the walled port city they built at Ulcinj and made them work with the corsairs, who, with the official blessing of Topkapi, were then trying to wreak havoc among the trading s.h.i.+ps of imperial Venice. The slaves had in time intermingled with the local Montenegrins. Part of Ulcinj town, they said, remained noticeably African in appearance, "rather like the souk souk in Djibouti." in Djibouti."

We whiled away the warm afternoon in the suns.h.i.+ne, listening to the stories, hearing waves cras.h.i.+ng on the pebble beach, idly watching the fishermen stocking their lobster pots or sorting through their hauls of oysters, and gazing up at the mountains we would soon have to climb. Both of the capitals of Montenegro were somewhere up there, in the sea of rocks of the karst lands.

One was the present capital, the unlovely socialist-realist city of Podgorica that had until the late eighties been known by its temporary honorific of t.i.tograd, and that spread out into a wide river valley at the southern edge of the mountains. The other, the old capital, was high in the mountains, remote and unreachable, and said by all to be one of the most curious capital cities in all the world.

It was called Cetinje, and it had been founded in the fifteenth century around a huge and isolated monastery. For nearly five centuries it was the seat of power of a series of regal (but popularly elected) Orthodox bishops-all of them, after 1697, coming from the same family, nephew-bishop succeeding nephew-bishop. In 1910 the then ruling bishop, Nicola Petrovic, declared himself King Nicholas, and reigned for eight years before the Austrians deposed and deported him. The capital itself, confused by war and turmoil, lived on as the administrative center of the tiny country-by then absorbed ignominiously into Serbia-until 1948, when the heads of state and government moved across to the duller and less romantic commercial center at Podgorica.

Cetinje stands in curious and glorious isolation in a basin of rocks just below the holy Black Mountain, Mount Levcen, where there is a mausoleum to one of the more revered of the bishop-princes, but which it is now impossible to visit because the Yugoslav army has a radio and radar station on its summit. But getting to the capital itself was interesting enough: You may go by road from Podgorica itself, or still by the old way, from behind the city walls of Kotor and up the cliff face via a dizzying switchback of a track, called the Ladder of Cattaro, that is more suited to mules than for the kind of pa.s.sengers-diplomats, bureaucrats, and the like-that a capital city ordinarily attracts. The track, though it has been widened and metaled in recent times, still has the capacity to scare.

I must make sure I went to Cetinje, Father Sbutega had said, for more than mere historical amus.e.m.e.nt. While there I might find the answer to a matter that had recently been intriguing him-but a matter in which he, as a Catholic, had no direct and vested interest. If, he said, the Montenegrin people were overwhelmingly of the Orthodox faith, then at which Orthodox church were they supposed to wors.h.i.+p? Because as he had heard on the ec.u.menical grapevine, there were now two two Eastern churches in Montenegro, both competing for saints and competing for sinners. And as he had heard tell, battle royal was currently breaking out between them. Eastern churches in Montenegro, both competing for saints and competing for sinners. And as he had heard tell, battle royal was currently breaking out between them.

The mountains around the old capital are bone dry, the limestone too porous to hold water after rain. The fields are tiny, crops do not thrive, the trees are stunted-there is a lunar bleakness to the place that makes one wonder why anyone lives there. In every fold of rock, they say, there are six kinds of snakes-the poisonous sharka sharka is the worst, but the is the worst, but the boskok, boskok, which according to improbable local lore leaps from trees and strangles pa.s.sersby, is also less than endearing. But nevertheless, and however harsh the landscape, there are small stone houses, patches of scrub, a wizened lemon tree, a donkey or two: Somehow people manage to eke out a living. which according to improbable local lore leaps from trees and strangles pa.s.sersby, is also less than endearing. But nevertheless, and however harsh the landscape, there are small stone houses, patches of scrub, a wizened lemon tree, a donkey or two: Somehow people manage to eke out a living.

And in the midst of it all, sheltered in a crater in this Montenegrin sea of tranquillity and slumbering in the eternal suns.h.i.+ne, is the tiny old city, a place of miniature palaces and churches and pavilions, with small squares and rows of little blue-and-white houses. It is like the capital of Toytown: You half expect the figures-a mayor, a fireman, a constable, a fishmonger, a baker, his excellency the amba.s.sador-to be made of plastic, and move from place to place only when the gigantic stubby fingers of a child reach down from the skies.

The charming absurdity of the place is hardly mitigated by learning that one of the princ.i.p.al episcopal palaces is known simple as Biljarda-Billiards. One of the heroic clergymen who ran the country, the Prince-Bishop Peter II,* had a billiard table hauled up the Ladder of Cattaro in the 1830s, presented it to his people as a great wonder of modern life, and named his palace after the game. In the same building there is a three-dimensional map of the entire kingdom, made a century ago by the Austrian generals for whom the chaotic mountainscapes meant utter bewilderment, and a two-dimensional map was not good enough. There is an opera house nearby, and the feat of building it up in this remote notch in the Dinaric Alps must have rivaled that of the German rubber baron who carried his own, ready-made, into the jungles of Brazil. had a billiard table hauled up the Ladder of Cattaro in the 1830s, presented it to his people as a great wonder of modern life, and named his palace after the game. In the same building there is a three-dimensional map of the entire kingdom, made a century ago by the Austrian generals for whom the chaotic mountainscapes meant utter bewilderment, and a two-dimensional map was not good enough. There is an opera house nearby, and the feat of building it up in this remote notch in the Dinaric Alps must have rivaled that of the German rubber baron who carried his own, ready-made, into the jungles of Brazil.*

The old royal palace is now a museum, from where His Royal Montenegrin Highness King Nicholas presided benignly over his people for sixty-eight years, fought five wars on their behalf, and turned Cetinje into a diplomatic clearinghouse for the Balkans and the glittering social center of the southern European world. The palace is a dollhouse version of what a fanciful monarchy should be like: There are flattering portraits and chased-silver guns, vast fireplaces, and a library of specially made and presented books, polar bear rugs and chairs with the monogrammed letter polar bear rugs and chairs with the monogrammed letter N, N, immense silver tureens given by brother emperors, a dinner service from Napoleon III, pictures of visitors who would go on to head the royal houses of Europe from Norway to Sicily, and endless arrays of medals, orders, ribbons, scrolls, and honors in gla.s.s cases everywhere. immense silver tureens given by brother emperors, a dinner service from Napoleon III, pictures of visitors who would go on to head the royal houses of Europe from Norway to Sicily, and endless arrays of medals, orders, ribbons, scrolls, and honors in gla.s.s cases everywhere.

And there are marriage certificates, too, and faded daguerreotypes from the more primitive lands into which his fecund majesty had dispatched the best of his three sons and nine daughters to be married and help create new dynasties of their own. Not for nothing was King Nicholas known as "Europe's father-in-law": one of his daughters married the king of Italy, another the king of Serbia, a third was the mother of the future king Alexander of Yugoslavia, and a fourth became a German princess.

Most notable of all was the cascade of events that followed the marriage of the his daughter Militsa to the Russian Grand Duke Peter. It was Militsa who, in common with many in the fevered court at St. Petersburg, became obsessively intrigued by the outer reaches of religion, by mysticism and the occult. And it was Militsa, this young Montenegrin woman, who in 1908 conspired with her sister-in-law Anastasia to introduce to the Russian czarina a vibrantly eccentric monk named Grigory Yefimovich Novykh, a wandering Siberian peasant who was generally known by a nickname meaning "the debauched one": Rasputin. The devastating influence that Rasputin was to have for the next eight years on the Russian imperial throne is only too well known-that the modest little royal palace of Montenegro played an unsung but profound role in the ruin of Russia is droll indeed.

Everyone, the Russians included, had emba.s.sies here, and most of the buildings remain. They are suitably small structures, but they all display an elegance and dignity appropriate for housing the representatives to a full-fledged if somewhat Ruritanian kingdom. Most are like small country mansions in the old Caribbean or Scotland, made of gray or red-and-white stone and with roofs of flattened tin. The British mission remains, with a bra.s.s plaque on the gate, and is now a music school. The French emba.s.sy is the grandest, not least because it was a building supposedly destined for the governor of Algiers, but got swapped, thanks to the efforts of a cunning Montenegrin in Paris: The office in North Africa is still said to be one of the dullest in French diplomatic hands. Court intrigue and amus.e.m.e.nt was rife in the landlocked declivity of Cetinje; the emba.s.sies vied with one another to give the best garden parties, to import the choicest wines, to have as guests the prettiest girls. Life there was said by diplomats to be comfortably pointless but enormous fun.*

The huge Orthodox monastery of Cetinje is next door to the royal palace, and I was just stepping across to it when I asked our guide if it was indeed true that there were now two rival Orthodox churches in Montenegro. He nodded and then looked rather sheepish, as if the rivalry were too unseemly to discuss. There was, he said, a new Montenegrin Orthodox Church; the old one, the Serbian Orthodox Church, had its headquarters in the monastery next door. It might be better, the guide warned, if I went to see the new one first-simply because if I admitted to seeing the established church first, then the patriarch of the new church, a touchy man, might well refuse to receive me. It sounded like William Boot's visits to the rival Ishmaelian emba.s.sies in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop: Scoop: I was intrigued, and so took directions to the house of His Beat.i.tude the Metropolitan of the Montenegrin Orthodox Church. I was intrigued, and so took directions to the house of His Beat.i.tude the Metropolitan of the Montenegrin Orthodox Church.

It turned out to be a small suburban house a mile from town, with net curtains and a lawn sprinkler. His Beat.i.tude was asleep, but a delicate and fussy little acolyte in a black surplice welcomed us in, offered us Turkish coffee, and gave us magazines to read, and suggested we might wait for a little while.

A brief minute later, with a flourish, the young man threw open a door and in walked a magnificent figure, who bowed and handed over a scarlet visiting card. In English on one side, Cyrillic Serbo-Croat on the other, was written the name and t.i.tle: HIS BEAt.i.tUDE THE MONTENEGRIN METROPOLITAN, THE REVEREND MIHAILO. HIS BEAt.i.tUDE THE MONTENEGRIN METROPOLITAN, THE REVEREND MIHAILO.