The Fracture Zone Part 6

The eastern sky began to lighten at about half past four, and although the columns of soldiers remained quiet, unmoving, or just begin to stir uneasily, I thought I heard the distant thud of helicopters from behind the eastern hills. Later on it turned out that a small number of aircraft had indeed had set out, an hour or so before the deadline: A single squadron of men from the British Special Air Service and a thirty-strong team of paratroopers known as a Pathfinder Group crossed the border under cover of dark. They stationed themselves on hilltops, building a half dozen or so small observation posts from which they could see and direct the movement of the invasion force to come.

We knew none of this at the time; and in strict legal terms by moving before the designated deadline the NATO side may well have breached the so-called Military Technical Agreement that had been signed three days before, by General Mike Jackson on one side, and the Yugoslav Colonel-General Svetozar Marjanovic on the other. But if this was so there was certainly no one on hand to complain: and none of the Chinook helicopters that took off from the Macedonian airfield at k.u.manovo, nor any of the fifty-odd fighters they disgorged, made any contact with an enemy. If there had been Serbian soldiers in this corner of southern Kosovo, they had clearly slipped well away during the night.

By 5:00 it was fully light, and all the soldiers were waking-at the side of most Land Rovers troops had lit small Sterno stoves and were brewing tea. Men were checking their weapons, stowing their sleeping bags into their rucksacks, tuning their radios. There was an air of quiet deliberation about them all; a few made rather feeble attempts at gallows humor; for the rest it was more comfortable to be quiet.

Ahead loomed the chimneys of the old cement factory at the improbably named Serbian community of General Jankovic. Near it, in the middle distance, were some houses-all of them roofless, burned, and empty, all the visible evidence of the local Serbs' apparently systematic emptying twelve weeks before of the Albanian border villages. The water meadow, where I had stopped in 1977 and where, just three months ago, tens of thousands of wretched refugees had tried to camp, was almost pristine now. The mud had gone, and there was thick gra.s.s in its place, and except for a few huts put there by the aid agencies, there was little now to show for the brief period when it had enjoyed such notoriety as the squalid first resting place for the people driven from their Kosovo homes.

Then, at 5:05, a sudden burst of activity. A smallish, sprightly British officer, a brigadier named Adrian Freer, detached himself from the throng and marched quickly toward the Macedonian border guards. His own sentries, tough young blades from the Parachute Regiment, made sure that these guards-men who had never behaved well toward the refugees, nor toward the press, and who even now were angrily trying to keep everyone away from the frontier-fell away; within seconds he was at the line itself, demanding through an interpreter to speak to his Yugoslav army opposite number with whom, as he put it, "I believe have an appointment." He was looking for the brigadier commanding the 243rd Mechanized Brigade of the Yugoslav army, the man who had been ordered to tell the incoming Britons where any minefields might be, how safe it was to proceed along the road ahead.

But the commander was nowhere to be found. The minutes ticked past. No one came. A few sentries on the far side could be seen talking urgently to one another, and then leaving their post on the double, pa.s.sing out of sight. On this side the brigadier was joined by a strange-looking officer in a tricorn hat that was covered with what looked like gold-thread curtain ta.s.sels. He turned out to be a Dutch brigadier, the holder of some important staff job at NATO, and was known universally as Haen the Hat. But even his arrival did nothing to scare up the Yugoslavs, and at 5:10 a coldly exasperated Adrian Freer shrugged, turned smartly around, and marched back toward us and his men.

He a.s.sembled us in a small group, and said quite simply, and with a graceful courtesy perhaps known only in a British-managed invasion: "I have attempted to make contact with my opposite number on the Yugoslav side, but as you can see I have failed to do so.

"My orders are now to clear and secure the Kacanik Defile and to open the Kacanik Corridor. So, gentlemen and ladies-if you would be so kind as to step to one side, I now propose to carry out my orders. Would you kindly let my convoy pa.s.s?"

And he gestured with a prearranged signal to Capt. Fraser Rea on the leading Gurkha Land Rover Defender, while at the same time another radioman mouthed a coded one-word order into his microphone.

There was a cry from the column: "Attack! Attack!" and in the one unforgettable moment that followed, two entire brigades of the British army, the Fifth Airborne and the Fourth Armoured, which together make a terrifying monster when roused, got formally and majestically under way. A hundred engines started and began to roar, and from tents and lairs beside the road columns of Gurkhas materialized and began marching swiftly alongside the vehicles that started grinding steadily north.

The Macedonians melted to one side, one of them pausing long enough to raise, rather theatrically, the orange-and-white pole that marked the entrance to no-man's land. And then in the soldiers streamed-mortar carriers and machine-gunners, engineers and bomb-disposal teams, spotters and radiomen, mine clearance specialists and explosives experts, sharpshooters, ant.i.tank snipers, military policemen, and hundreds upon hundreds of tough, fit, menacing-looking members of the infantry. Captain Rea had the distinction of being the first to cross the line: The two thousand men of the forward element of Operation Joint Guardian were just moments behind.

As they moved in, so at the same time came what remains in my memory the most dramatic moment of the morning. There was a tremendous roar from behind and then, rising in unison from behind the southern hills, a wave of helicopters that dipped their noses together and, flying fast and true, streamed in toward us at the frontier. The first was an Apache, perhaps one of those we had seen refueling on the Albanian border two days before. As it steadied itself in the crosswinds a hundred yards or so before crossing, it dropped a package that briefly flashed in the sky beneath it, and from which drifted down a myriad fragments of silvery foil-chaff to deceive any radars ahead or perhaps merely to impress the cameras.

Whatever its function, the tiny explosion in the sky was the signal for the other machines to move in-and this they did, fourteen heavy-lift helicopters, eight Chinooks and six Pumas, with six Apaches swooping and curving, riding shotgun alongside them. "I've never seen anything so beautiful," said a paratrooper, marching fast underneath them. "Just so long as they don't shoot at us," said another private, well aware of the Apaches' mixed reputation.

The Chinooks, great double-rotored monsters, were all carrying vehicles slung by wire cables underneath their bellies. There were light tanks, artillery pieces, armored cars, ambulances-and they swung far out into the sky as the machines banked at each curve in the Lepenec River valley. They roared into the distance, settling down their cargoes hurriedly on the far hillsides and by the distant bridges, and then they thundered back for more. Within half an hour more than a thousand troops had been hoisted up into the high ground above the Kacanik Defile, the men joining the observers who had been prepositioned during the night. Now, with machine-gun nests set up and the portable radar stations and antiaircraft installations fully functioning, the oncoming convoy could swish smoothly north and up toward the Kosovan capital of Pristina, fifty miles away. That, we all a.s.sumed, was the target for the day: Indeed, when I had had a beer with Mike Jackson the day before, he had said I would be a "sissy" if I didn't meet him in Pristina by sunset on Sat.u.r.day.

Once the first airborne brigade was safely inside Kosovo, those of us who were being allowed in as civilians-a lot of press, some doctors, a handful of returning refugees working as translators went in next, in a ramshackle convoy of cars and vans.* There was some chaos, as had been predicted, with the press inevitably getting under the feet of the torrent of incoming soldiery. (Sometimes quite literally: A brigadier's armored car, its driver frustrated at not being able to squeeze past an Italian television van blocking the route, suddenly accelerated, tearing off the van's door and very nearly running over the irate producer's feet. But when the armor vanished over the horizon even the producer seemed amused: He'd get the car door repaired on expenses, he said, and the shoes he was wearing weren't exactly his Sunday best.) There was some chaos, as had been predicted, with the press inevitably getting under the feet of the torrent of incoming soldiery. (Sometimes quite literally: A brigadier's armored car, its driver frustrated at not being able to squeeze past an Italian television van blocking the route, suddenly accelerated, tearing off the van's door and very nearly running over the irate producer's feet. But when the armor vanished over the horizon even the producer seemed amused: He'd get the car door repaired on expenses, he said, and the shoes he was wearing weren't exactly his Sunday best.) There were some delays, as small suspect bombs were detonated, as a party of Yugoslav militia were disarmed and sent packing, as a group of Gurkhas got into a heated argument with some heavily armed members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, who wanted to be photographed linking arms with the small and wiry Nepalese who appeared to have liberated them. Forty members of the MUP, the dark-uniformed Yugoslav special police, were escorted north by another troop of Gurkhas; they said they were afraid for their own safety, scared that the Albanians might begin reprisals. One of them we spoke to was sweating profusely under his thick serge uniform. "Perhaps I'll never come back here-I just don't know," he said, before the Gurkhas dropped him off in a safer part of the countryside and told him to make himself scarce.

But by noon the convoy was moving well, the infantrymen and light armor going in first, the heavy tanks rumbling through some time later in the morning. Units of the Fourth Armoured Brigade, which included such stylish army formations as the Household Cavalry, most usually photographed changing the guard outside Buckingham Palace, as well as the Irish Guards and the tanks of the King's Royal Hussars, were pouring in by lunchtime. The lead vehicles had soon cleared the crags and canyons of the defile and were then out in the hayfields and meadows of Kosovo proper, speeding along without interruption, except at two or three junctions where other units, who had come across the border later and from different places, joined the main northbound torrent.

The roadway, which by now had been marked by black-and-yellow tac-signs of a dagger and a Gurkha knife, the kukri, kukri, and with a thin orange wire on each side of it marking the swept and mine-free corridor, had now been given a formal designation, just as had the routes in Bosnia: whereas we had driven down to Sarajevo on Route CLOG, this one had been marginally more attractively christened: The Blace-to-Pristina route was known as Route HAWK. And the soldiers were fast fanning out from it now, to the villages that lay to the left and right of the highway, their populations, such as remained, supposedly waiting for this day of liberation, which they must have feared might never come. and with a thin orange wire on each side of it marking the swept and mine-free corridor, had now been given a formal designation, just as had the routes in Bosnia: whereas we had driven down to Sarajevo on Route CLOG, this one had been marginally more attractively christened: The Blace-to-Pristina route was known as Route HAWK. And the soldiers were fast fanning out from it now, to the villages that lay to the left and right of the highway, their populations, such as remained, supposedly waiting for this day of liberation, which they must have feared might never come.

Those few refugees who came along on the convoy with us, to be the first to see the villages from which they had been expelled, were taking a very considerable risk. Just before throwing them out, the Serbs on the frontiers had confiscated many thousands of Kosovo Albanians' ident.i.ty papers and pa.s.sports. All they had now were flimsy temporary doc.u.ments, like the old Nansen pa.s.sports, that had been issued by the Macedonian authorities. Now these same authorities had warned them that if they made the choice to go back into Kosovo they would not be able to come back, no matter what they found at home.

A young Kosovo Albanian woman named Aferodite, whom we had met in Tetovo, had earlier tried to seize the chance of coming with us. She brought her mother and father and brother, all refugees from the latest pogroms, to see her off. But once she realized that she might discover terrible things, and would not be able to come back to her parents so long as they remained in Macedonia, she suddenly balked. She drew us a map of where her house had been, and the names of some neighbors we might try to find. She wanted to know, especially, about a baby boy who had been born in her village, a boy named Trim. But she wouldn't come herself to find out, not until she knew she still had an escape route.

"There might be Serbs still there," she said, trembling. "I might find that what they have done to our place is just too much for me to bear. I might want to come back-and then I find the border closed. I will stay. For now I stay."

From what we could see on that haunting, memorably awful journey north, not a few of the Albanians who came on the convoy-and many of those others who, like Aferodite, decided to return some days or weeks later, when the situation calmed down-did find and see things that were too much to bear. We could see from the roadside scenes of the most appalling ruin. We pa.s.sed villages-Kacanik itself, then Urosevac, then Gradimlje-where almost every house was gone, burned, wrecked, vandalized, covered with obscenities, the Serbian cross, Chetnik graffiti.

Such people as we could see were wandering around with a look of bedraggled bewilderment, gazing horrified at the devastation, as though for the first time. And then we spoke to them and found that this was in fact the case. They had been terrified by what had happened, frightened beyond belief when the mobs stormed in and began their long nights of pillage and force, of rapine and rape, and they had run away, vanis.h.i.+ng into the shelter of the deep woods on the mountainsides. They had lived by their wits, eating leaves, trapping animals, drinking from streams. It was only today, and when they saw the long trails of armor glinting on the distant road, and saw that the cars flew British flags or the blue-and-white NATO burgees, and had the letters KFOR stenciled on their flanks, that they knew it was safe to come home. And so, muddy and ragged and weary, they staggered down into Kacanik and Urosevac and Gradimlje, and stared open mouthed in shock at what had happened while they had been away.

Before long they, and other soldiers, other examiners, were finding terrible, terrible things. Graves, newly dug, with scores of ominously long and spongy lumps in the soft and giving ground. Rooms in bas.e.m.e.nts that-blood-spattered and with chairs and shackles and lengths of rusty chain, and with bullet holes in the plaster-had evidently been used as torture chambers or places of execution. Skeletons by the hundred. Detached bones, some with flesh and rags still adhering, which had been dragged away by dogs. The half-burned bodies of children. The bodies of old women raped and then hatefully mutilated. Men lying with their heads smashed in with sledgehammers, children cut in half with rusty scythes. And yet more graves, scores upon scores of crudely labeled memorials, fas.h.i.+oned not in one final moment of compa.s.sion and decency, but only to rid the area of the stench of death so that the killers could look more comfortably and without reminders for other ghastly deeds to perform. On all sides, almost everywhere you looked, there was evidence of the vandalism of the truly cruel, of the machinations of the appallingly vile.

The soldiers who went in to these first villages, gingerly wary of the b.o.o.by traps and mines that the retreating soldiers and police had left behind, and who were advising in vain the villagers not to come until all was perfectly safe, were more stunned and shocked than most of them had ever been.

"Fifteen years I've been a para," said one sergeant, holding up a chain saw and a bloodstained hammer, and opening for view a box of crudely homemade knuckle-dusters, "and I've never seen anything as dreadful as this. How can people behave to one another like this? What kind of hatred makes a man behave so terribly?" I had known this soldier since Ireland days, and we both knew well that the hatreds of Ireland are deep and dire. "But never like this," said the soldier. "Never anything so bad."

A pattern soon became obvious: It was always the big houses, those of the wealthier Albanians, the merchants and the contractors and the successful farmers, that had borne the brunt of the destruction. Envy had clearly played a part in the victimization-the same envy that once made Nigerian Hausas turn on the Ibo, or makes some Gentiles turn on the Jews, an envy that is familiar around the world and has been forever, and which is born of economic discord, of imagined exploitation, a blind revenge on anyone who manages life better, who makes for himself and his family something that others in the community have never managed to do.

The reasons behind the murderous behavior of the Balkans are legion, and they are legendary. It is now thought quite improper to dismiss all that has happened and that will continue to happen as the consequence merely of "ancient ethnic hatreds." Economics, it is said, is in fact by far the more potent reason for the violence. And here, it seemed, was ample concrete evidence to back this theory up. Those who perpetrated the attacks in the villages we pa.s.sed, where the big houses, the houses of the local squires and of what the Australians call the squatocracy, were fired first. The attacks were motivated, without a doubt, by an envy that came from the economic disparities that coincidentally overlay the ethnic dissimilarities. It so happened that the Albanians here had evidently worked harder, had made more money, had managed to succeed where their neighbor Serbian Lumpenproletariat Lumpenproletariat had not-and the Serbs had struck back at them, evening the economic score, demonstrating that equality was entirely possible, provided that one reduced everyone else to a similar level of ruin. The attacks and the atrocities were perpetrated not so much on the Albanians as Albanians but as a people generally, who, unfairly and in part had not-and the Serbs had struck back at them, evening the economic score, demonstrating that equality was entirely possible, provided that one reduced everyone else to a similar level of ruin. The attacks and the atrocities were perpetrated not so much on the Albanians as Albanians but as a people generally, who, unfairly and in part because because they were Albanians, had done so much better than the local Serbs. they were Albanians, had done so much better than the local Serbs.

And yet. It was not so much the scale of the attacks-the razing of house after house after house after house-but the vicious, venomous nature of the attacks that gave the lie to the idea that economics was the sole or even the main motive. The terrible things that were done-the deliberate maiming of children, the live evisceration of elderly women, the castrations with razors, the battering with mallets, the sawing off of heads, the use of blunt trowels to gouge out eyes, the rapes, the rapes, the rapes-these were acts of inhumanity done out of hatred and revenge, and that drew down on the appalling memories of generations and generations past.

It was the nature of these acts that had nothing to do with money, or land, or territory, or with the manipulative cynicism of politicians or criminals. It had to do instead with revenge, pure and simple. For academics to remark dryly that ancient ethnic loathings had little or nothing to do with what has been happening in villages like those we saw that warm summer afternoon, were denying a simple and awful truth: that there can be no imagining the horrors that can be born from the white heat of pure and unalloyed hatred. The Serbs here in Kosovo were getting back at the Albanians, as they saw it, for what the Turks had done to them. History, at least as it had been taught to them, should leave no Serbs in doubt that they, if as intolerant and unforgiving as most in the Balkans so sadly are, had more than ample cause for doing so.*

A dozen miles before we came to Pristina there was a junction to a town called Lipljan on the left, and the column of soldiers, signposted by a man standing on top of a Challenger tank, all took the turn. There was a small crowd of Albanians here, and they cheering wildly as the column slowed and ponderously swung off the main road. Where the troops were going we weren't exactly sure; the three of us, however, decided we should go straight on. It seemed symbolically important that we first visit the capital of Kosovo. It would mean going without the comforting presence of the KFOR armor, true, but a city and its population would tend, I was sure, to offer some kind of protection, some kind of safety in numbers. It nearly turned out to have been a ghastly mistake.

The first sign that all was not well came just on the outskirts of town, when our way was blocked by a long line of tractors, piled high with people and their possessions, heading for the north. It took only a moment to reason that these were Serbs-peasant farmers who were themselves now frightened that the returning Albanians would wreak vengeance on them. So they were off toward Belgrade and Mother Serbia; and if the incoming NATO troops were trying to offer them sufficient rea.s.surance to stay, these people were not listening. They were angry, terrified, hostile to all who had put them in this position. NATO was the villain, every bit much as were the Albanians and the guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army (which we called the KLA, but which people of all persuasions in the region called by the initials of the army's real name, the UCK).

All of a sudden our accreditation badges, for which we had lined up for six hours the day before, seemed more dangerous than protective. They had the acronyms NATO and KFOR emblazoned in blue on white: To anyone who might carry a grudge, they now bore the mark of Cain. We unclipped them, hid them in our jackets, hoping that no one had seen. A group of Yugoslav army soldiers were escorting the villagers to the main Belgrade road, and they came across and looked at our car with hostile curiosity-they must have suspected we were in the NATO van, and they looked for a moment distinctly as if they were having second thoughts about how to deal with us. But after a cursory look they grunted and moved back to their own refugees, scowling, pointing, looking back at us.

Pristina was an ugly town, by turns poor and pompous, grim and grandiloquent. It smelled of coal smoke, ash, and cabbage. There were huge and tottering brown tenements, an immense and gaudy marble university littered with broken gla.s.s and piles of smoldering garbage, a soccer stadium gifted by t.i.to as a demonstration of the benevolence of his regime toward all, Albanian and Serb alike. Its gates stood open, the field inside gray cracked mud. It was barely used, except that on Thursdays during the soccer season it was said to be ringed with Serbian riot police who would give the Albanian soccer fans a good crack on the head if they dared so much as to raise a finger.

The Grand Hotel, five stars beside the crooked neon letters of its name, rose from the center of town as a grisly beacon to Marxist realism. It was filled with angry Serbs, all smoking, most drinking heavily, all wondering what to do next, when the soldiers arrived. The lights were off, the elevators were stopped, the telephones were not working, and there were no rooms. But I had agreed to write a story of the NATO "liberation" of Kosovo for a Sunday newspaper in London, and the deadline was now ninety minutes away. For the following hour I hid myself behind a column at the back of a washroom, and typed frantically away, praying that the battery of my laptop would last. As to how I could transmit the copy, with no power and so no cell phone service, and the only satellite phone that I knew of still stuck with the convoy back at the turnoff-well, Write now! is the general rule in situations like this, and worry about transmitting the story later.

There was just one interruption. A pair of burly and unfriendly-looking Serb policemen, both with machine guns, were making a search of the hotel, found me lurking behind the column and asked me the Serbian equivalent of what the devil did I think I was doing, before going off in search of a manager, who they seemed not to be able to find. I wrote ever more furiously, well aware that they would be coming back. I managed, typing the last line with a flourish and then, presto! the power came back on, my cell phone came back to life, and I was able to telephone London and be put through to a copy-taking center nearby, and dictate those two thousand hurriedly written, ill-thought-out words. The first draft of history, as teachers have been known to call journalism, can be a sketchy thing indeed.

But then I found myself dictating the piece to a copy taker who, after taking down the first few paragraphs, confessed that he was more interested than usual, on that rainy English afternoon, to be hearing firsthand what was going on in the capital of Kosovo. The exchanges I had with that unknown man in a faraway town-the piece took perhaps twenty minutes to dictate, while I kept checking the hall for the two policemen, and my watch to make certain that I had met the deadline-added a rare moment of pleasure, I thought, to what had otherwise been a fairly wrenching day. Newspaper copy takers are a hard-bitten breed: men and women who, eternally unfazed, have quite literally heard it all, and from everywhere. They are infamous for uttering deep sighs, usually while the reporter is in the middle of dictating his or her purplest pa.s.sages, and asking impatiently: "Is there much more of this?" But my man today was enthusiastic, eager to hear more; and when I told him that I had to go, as the two Serb policemen were now most certainly on their way back, cradling their machine guns in their arms, he said he was truly sorry, and I think I believed him.

"But you take good care," he added, and seemed to mean it. Moving as quickly as I dared, I cut the line, gathered up my computer, and fled back out into the open air. The day had been hot and oppressive, but now it was thundering, and within moments of my emerging, hailstones the size of cherries began clattering out of the sky. The policemen, who had followed me into the lobby, took a look up at the towering thunderheads, pointed at the carpet of mothb.a.l.l.s gathering on the ground, shook their heads, and vanished back into the gloom. I got into the Fiat, pried it carefully out of its parking s.p.a.ce and headed away. There were still no NATO soldiers in Pristina, and suddenly it seemed a jumpy, nervous, and rather less than welcoming place. And besides, the story of the afternoon, we gathered from our colleagues, was unfolding ten miles away, at the Pristina airport.

To the embarra.s.sment and annoyance of the NATO planners, a small contingent of Russian troops had flown in to the airport the day before. No one in NATO wanted the Russians in Kosovo at all. The Kremlin had furiously opposed NATO's bombing campaign, not least because the Russians, as Slavs, had long been in broad sympathy with the aims and aspirations of their ethnically similar Serb cousins. Any Russian involvement in a Kosovo peace would, from the point of view of the West, and also of the Albanians, be highly suspect. They were bound to be, at least emotionally, rather less than wholly disinterested. In a firefight between the Serbian MUPs and the Albanian UCK, for example, at least some of a troop of Russian soldiers would be certain to take sides.

Diplomatically the situation was rather worse: The Kremlin made no secret at all of wanting to have Kosovo divided, with a Russian zone policed by Russian soldiers, and a NATO zone policed by soldiers from beyond. But that, said NATO, would effectively mean the part.i.tion of Kosovo. And that, as well as further Balkanizing a region that had suffered from all too much Balkanization in the last decade-three thousand miles of extra frontiers since 1991, and endless outbreaks of warfare and bloodshed in consequence-would reward with land, with extra territory, those very Serbs who had indulged in the vile practice of ethnic purging in the first place.

No, said NATO very firmly, all soldiers sent to Kosovo to keep the peace should be under NATO control-answerable in the first instance to General Jackson, and then via an American general in Brussels to the NATO Political Council. Equally firmly the Russian government then told NATO it would do no such thing-and just twelve hours before Captain Rea and the thousands of men and heavy armor moved in across the Macedonian frontier, so two hundred Russian airborne troops and a handful of armored cars were flown in to Pristina airport, from which they refused to budge.

We drove over to see them. I first wanted to drive to the field by way of what one might call the usual route, through Kosovo Polje and past the famous battleground of the Blackbird Field where, more than six hundred years before, the Turks had defeated the Serbs-a defeat every Serb remembered still, and vowed to avenge. The hail had turned to rain, which was stopping as I crossed an overpa.s.s beside an old army base that had been bombed by NATO jets some days before and lay in still-smoldering ruins. A roadblock of MUP forces were waiting on top of the bridge, fingering their weapons. "Go away," is all they would say. "Turn around."

We decided to make the airport via the southern route, the way that the NATO forces appeared to have gone when they made the turn from the main road some hours earlier. We sped south, came to a turn and were confronted by a huge column of armor moving out of the area, back the way we had come. It was the Yugoslav army, beating a retreat as the Technical Agreement insisted it had to do, and its men were in no mood to let us pa.s.s. "Get out of the way," they cried, and pointed rifles and machine guns at us. "Go away."

I looked at the map, and tried another approach-pa.s.sing through back streets of villages that displayed the dismaying contrasts of this strange and spiteful war. We could tell which were the Albanian villages-they were in ruins, charred and broken and deserted. And we could tell which were the Serbian towns-untouched, still alive with people-and angry, disaffected people at that, who shook their fists at us as we pa.s.sed-where young men with guns moved toward us if we stopped.

I made the mistake of asking for directions in such a place, from a group of young men and soldiers manning a barricade of razor wire and burned-out cars. One of them-a tall and gangly youth with acne, his hand on the stock of his machine pistol-came toward us. He made the three-fingered gesture of Serb supremacy, and shouted with fury at us. "Get out! Get out! You have three minutes. Then your forces take over. Until then this is Serbia! Get out quickly! Three minutes-or else!"

It was uncomfortable, unsettling. At one stage we fell in behind a column of British armor, and a drunken, angry Serb, shouting at us incomprehensibly, tried to wrench my door open and made as if to pull us out. I shot forward, past the last Challenger tank, and asked its driver if I could sneak in between him and a Warrior armored car ahead. "Sure, mate!" he said, with a broad c.o.c.kney grin. "Anything for a fellow Brit. What are you mugs doing here anyway?"

The ensuing miles were anything but amusing, a worrying miasma of threats and mud, armor, and guns. But eventually we found ourselves at the airport main gate-among the very small number of civilians who had managed to get past what we were told were Serb checkpoints. What we found there was a scene of near-total farce. The Russian armored cars, eight-wheeled and noisy, were churning back and forth up the main runway, doing their best to provoke the British paratroopers, whose job, they had supposed, had been to take and secure the airport from the departing Serbs. The British soldiers stood in the rain looking perplexed, and every five minutes or so a loud voice would sound from a speaker mounted on a Russian vehicle: "Get out of way! Russians coming!" and the drivers would gun their engines and drive the ma.s.sive machines almost directly at the waiting platoons, or at the gaggle of reporters waiting disconsolately, and equally puzzled, beside them.

General Jackson was by now supposed to be in Pristina, giving a triumphalist press conference in a suitably public building, telling the world that NATO had now officially liberated Kosovo, that freedom and democracy had triumphed over tyranny and violence, and that those forced out of their homes and their country would soon be free to come back and live in peace. But General Jackson is not a triumphalist figure, and he no doubt would have had some difficulty putting the right amount of sincerity in a statement of this kind-which is why I thought he was actually marginally more comfortable when we saw him, at a moment when the Russians briefly interrupted their own triumphal bl.u.s.ter and let him speak to the a.s.sembled microphones.

It was a dismally stage-managed affair, as it and everything to do with NATO's conduct of the propaganda war was bound to be. A press officer from No. 10 Downing Street, the official home of the British prime minister, was on hand to ch.o.r.eograph things. As that windswept and rain-soaked old warhorse, General Jackson, stepped briskly down from his helicopter she strode behind him, her army fatigues only barely disguising her and not fooling at all the Fleet Street men who knew her. Then, as the rain lanced down, so Mike Jackson, flanked by a phalanx of machine-gun-carrying sentries, offered the world NATO's prepared statement. The Russians in the background promptly stepped on their accelerators, attempting as ordered to drown out his words with the roar of their ill-tuned engines, and torrents of smoke lifted in the background, as if half the field were suddenly on fire. The world may have been watching the pictures, but on this occasion it most certainly wasn't listening to the words.

And in any case the wind soon whipped the general's rain-sodden papers into a porridge of papier-mache, so that by the time he reached the pa.s.sage about the refugees soon being able to return home, he had to dispense with it totally and rely on memory and a few nudges and whispers from the woman behind him. Then he strode away, the Russians quieting their engines. Keith Graves, that most determined of television reporters, shouted out the only question that the general deigned to answer. "Was the presence of the Russians here an embarra.s.sment?"

The general didn't miss a beat. "Not at all. We welcome them as part of the KFOR. I look forward to discussing practical matters with them directly."

And off he strode-not knowing, perhaps, that so pleased had President Yeltsin been with the execution of the Russians' cheeky move that he had promoted the commander of the airport force. The man with whom Lieutenant General Sir Michael Jackson was now off to parley had begun the day as a mere major, commanding a force of a mere two hundred men. Now he had been made into a lieutenant general, too, and Mike Jackson would have to treat with him as a military equal.

Getting away from the airport was for us was even more difficult than finding it in the first place. Night was falling, and the rain was helping to make what was sinister begin to look and feel downright frightening. As soon as were past the airport perimeter, and had left behind the friendly invigilation of the British paratroopers, we felt very much on our own, very alone.

We took many wrong turns, and twice we came across gangs of Serb youths, heavily armed, forming themselves into impromptu roadblocks, menacing anyone trying to pa.s.s through. At one stage as I was speeding along a muddy track we pa.s.sed two militiamen with rifles, and by accident I sprayed them with water as I crashed through a large pothole. They shouted, and raised their weapons and began to run-and then a hundred yards or so ahead I swore I saw the swinging red lantern of a roadblock, demanding that we stop. I a.s.sumed, for a brief moment, that our number was up. But the flas.h.i.+ng light was simply a flag flapping in front of a lighted barn; there was no-one there to stop us, and the two running militiamen fell back and turned away, brus.h.i.+ng the thick mud from their uniforms.

It took us a miserable hour to get back to the main road-our last direction given by a young soldier from Yorks.h.i.+re, who came out from his tent and stood in the driving rain, showing us where to go on a laminated plastic map. The engine of the tank standing beside us throbbed warmly: I could, for a moment, feel something of the relief that many Albanians must be feeling right now, that at last they had some measure of security in their lives, that no one could take them away from their homes and torture and shoot them again. There was someone here to help.

But for how long? The question haunted us for the hours it then took us to drive back down the main highway to Macedonia. We weaved in and out of road blocks, watched yet more convoys churning past us, heading north where we were going south. One of the convoys was Dutch, and at nighttime its movement was even more impressive than the other convoys had been during the daytime. I was enthralled by the sight, and said so to a young woman who was standing by the road, taking pictures.

Oh yes, she said-an entire armored brigade, with light tanks and artillery pieces and self-propelled guns. Impressive, don't you think?

I remarked on her knowledge, with a fine display of patronizing clumsiness. Wasn't it odd, I said, that perhaps not even as lately as two days ago, phrases like "armored brigade" and "artillery pieces" and "self-propelled guns" had never even pa.s.sed her pretty lips?

She grinned. "Oh yes they have," she replied. "This is all most familiar to me. Actually, I am a lieutenant in the Dutch Army. Do let me give you my card."

And with a broad smile she clambered up and onto a pa.s.sing troop carrier, and waved farewell. Rose, proud feminist and scourge of old white males, had overheard it all. As she came toward me, I winced.

But yes, I continued as the Dutch faded from view-how long would soldiers such as these be detained here? And was all this, I wondered, indeed a real liberation? Was Operation Joint Guardian truly what General Jackson's speech suggested that it should and would be-an unarguably powerful means, underwritten by the international community, of guaranteeing the safety and security of Kosovo, of helping to make it a place where all the ethnic groups who had been forced by history, accident and imperial fiat, to live together from now on, and to do so in peace?

I have to say that I doubted it. A military policy like this was just as unlikely to work here in the Balkans as it had been unlikely to work in Northern Ireland-another tiny province in which, in the aftermath of other more major decisions, the similarly ancient struggles for territory and power and influence, afflicted by similarly deep divisions of religion and culture, had set communities implacably and unforgivably at each others' throats, and seemingly so for ever. No, I felt certain-only if the foreign governments could decree, as none of them could, that their soldiers would remain on the ground for years, decades even, only then might enough pressure be brought to bear so that some kind of apparent peace might take hold.

But if not, if the soldiers were there for only a short while, and if there was no certain foreign policy exerted over Kosovo other than the short-sighted aim of enforcing some kind of stability-then a solution would probably never be found. If no solution was found then yet more trouble, and of a viciousness not even yet seen here, would break out again, somewhere, and soon. Perhaps it would erupt first in Macedonia, to where we were heading. Or perhaps in Montenegro, from where we had come some days before. Perhaps in Bulgaria. Or Greece. Or Turkey. Or even back up in Bosnia again.

Who knew? And when, and how? And what trigger? No one could know yet. But just one thing seemed to be clear, as the rain eased and the stars came out as we climbed back up the hills towards the Macedonian frontier. This had been no liberation, I thought-no matter how earnestly the press officer from London might have wanted it to be seen that way.

The foreign troops who were here and who would be coming in during the days and weeks to come, were becoming, as all outsiders were and have been for years, entrapped in the great swamp of the Balkans. This was for them indeed, more an entrapment that a liberation; and if there was any freedom in the air today, then it was, I rather thought, an illusory kind of freedom, a freedom that was ready to be whisked away with the slightest breath of the Balkan wind.

9.

A City So Sublime

THE B BULGARIA to which we drew up the next day in yet another black Mercedes, and into which were obliged to drive through yet another pool of muddy-water disinfectant and cleanse our wheels of acc.u.mulated Macedonian dirt, has long been a country in a state of difficult equipoise. Bulgaria is quite literally at a pivot point, a fulcrum-a buffer-state on a dividing line between Europe and Asia, between Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam, between the oppressions of the Russia lying across the Black Sea and the Turkey lying on its southern frontier, between the darkest kinds of Communism and the most rampant excesses of modern capitalism, between Ruritanian flamboyance and pretension and the high-tech modernity of the new Eurocracy. to which we drew up the next day in yet another black Mercedes, and into which were obliged to drive through yet another pool of muddy-water disinfectant and cleanse our wheels of acc.u.mulated Macedonian dirt, has long been a country in a state of difficult equipoise. Bulgaria is quite literally at a pivot point, a fulcrum-a buffer-state on a dividing line between Europe and Asia, between Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam, between the oppressions of the Russia lying across the Black Sea and the Turkey lying on its southern frontier, between the darkest kinds of Communism and the most rampant excesses of modern capitalism, between Ruritanian flamboyance and pretension and the high-tech modernity of the new Eurocracy.

What little it is known for more than amply ill.u.s.trates the point. Bulgaria is famous on the one hand for being the world's great source of attar of roses (the volatile and fragrant essence that comes from flowers grown in one of its deepest fault lines, for it is on a geological and tectonic crossing point, too), for horseradish (which grows on its railway embankments and was at one time bought liberally by Messrs. Cooper of Oxford, condiment makers to the gentry) and for yogurt, which was first made in the Rhodope Mountains from a culture created out of a milk-curdling ur-germ known as Bacillus bulgaricus. Bacillus bulgaricus.

Its people are renowned for being among the most agreeable in Europe, famous for their courtesy, civility, and learning. So it was perhaps not surprising that when the Turks, in the terminal decrepitude of their empire, lashed out savagely at a timid Bulgarian uprising in the late 1870s, the world's intelligentsia rushed to the victims' side, much as was to happen in the Spanish civil war half a century later. So William Ewart Gladstone, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Oscar Wilde, Ivan Turgenev, and Victor Hugo all pledged their support for the eminently decent Bulgarians. Suddenly Bulgaria and its people became the cause celebre of the more fas.h.i.+onable European salons-both because the Turks were so widely despised and because the poor Bulgarians the objects of such widespread affection.

And yet, and much more recently, it was a Bulgarian secret agency that tried to murder Pope John Paul II (using a Turk, Mehmet Ali Agca, to perform-and bungle-the deed). It was a Bulgarian agent for the Sigurnost who succeeded in murdering a BBC Bulgarian service employee and well-known dissident Georgi Markov, by stabbing him in the leg with an umbrella, its steel tip laced with ricin. It was Bulgarian secret police who used to force their way into the homes of the ethnic Turks who lived in villages in the south of the country and force them to sign papers changing their names-Mehmets becoming Mikhails, nearly a million such-on pain of torture or worse. And the word "b.u.g.g.e.r" also comes from here, from the word Bulgar, Bulgar, Bulgarian, and perhaps from Bogomil, and was first applied to a curious eleventh century sect that was born in what is now Bulgaria, and was infamous for its "abominable practices," which, if a Bogomil, included as well as b.u.g.g.e.ry, the eccentric and short-lived belief that Christ and Satan were the twin sons of G.o.d. Bulgarian, and perhaps from Bogomil, and was first applied to a curious eleventh century sect that was born in what is now Bulgaria, and was infamous for its "abominable practices," which, if a Bogomil, included as well as b.u.g.g.e.ry, the eccentric and short-lived belief that Christ and Satan were the twin sons of G.o.d.

So Bulgaria, a confused melange of attar of roses and abominable practices, seemed the perfect airlock, the crossroads, the pivot point, from which to pa.s.s from the insanity of the Balkans into the supposed serenity and sublimity of the city on the Bosporus that they once had called the Porte. We arrived on a sunny morning, with the grinding sound of the NATO tanks fading fast, and we left on a blistering afternoon three days later. We stayed in a hotel that was attached to the presidential palace, and so there were guards in high boots and shakos on sentry duty around by the back door and, in the courtyard, a churchly rotunda that had been built in the fourth century by the Romans and had frescoes a thousand years old. A presidential honor guard and a Roman rotunda attached to the back of our hotel! Sofia, it seemed to me, was a city with which it was easy to become enchanted and, in Rose's case, easy to become quite smitten.

For Rose had known a young Bulgarian man from some years back, when she lived in Venice, and here she had found him again. They had not been in contact since the time he drove all the way across to Croatia, and they had met for one sad last weekend in a village in Istria. It took some courage for Rose to look him up again when we arrived in Sofia, and for a while it took some ginger for him to breathe life back into a damaged friends.h.i.+p. But something did take place, and for all the while that I was in this quiet and dignified and flower-filled old city, I was left to my own devices, and I left them to theirs. In the end Rose decided that whatever had taken place was powerful enough that she would go back to Bulgaria from Turkey, and eventually she did. I would later receive letters telling of how she was sitting in a small apartment in a Sofia suburb, eating cherries and yogurt and drinking good Bulgarian red wines, and gazing silently into the middle distance with her Bulgarian beside her. He had the saddest eyes, she said, and she was smitten, and from what I could tell, quite happy too.

The American amba.s.sador to Bulgaria was a friend of a friend: Avis Bohlen, daughter of the legendarily smooth American diplomat Chip Bohlen, a man who had been one of the great pundits on the more trying questions of the Cold War. She lived, as all American amba.s.sadors of necessity must these days, amid conditions of great and irksome security. Once past the heavily armed gorillas in her street and at her door, however, she was a delight-knowledgeable, well read, and exuberantly pleased with her discovery of Bulgaria's joys. Her role as one of the more involved diplomats during the lately ended war had been fascinating and educational: She was only frustrated that some of the key diplomatic bargainings-on such questions as whether Bulgaria would permit NATO warplanes the right to pa.s.s through its airs.p.a.ce-had been conducted not by the individual national emba.s.sies, not by officials such as she, but by the NATO amba.s.sadors themselves, and not in Sofia but in Brussels.

The amba.s.sador's experience was somehow symbolic, I thought. For while Bulgaria is and always had been a country that looked as though it should be central to the doings of southern Europe, it never quite has been. One might think that centrality, at least to the Balkan problem, should have been hardwired into the Bulgarian nature: After all, no less than the Balkan Mountains, from which the Balkans get their name, are entirely in Bulgaria, for example; and nowadays the national airline is Balkan Airlines, suggesting a Bulgarian impress on all matters Balkan.* But this centrality has never been the case. In terms of the doings and undoings of southern Europe, Bulgaria has played only marginal roles: a base from which the Ottomans made their predatory excursions into Europe; the Russians' zone of protection, to keep the Turks at bay; a place for overflights, for transit, for permissions. But little or no influence of its own-beyond the dreamy scent of rose petals, and the needle-sharp little bacillus that lives on in every container of Yoplait or Dannon. But this centrality has never been the case. In terms of the doings and undoings of southern Europe, Bulgaria has played only marginal roles: a base from which the Ottomans made their predatory excursions into Europe; the Russians' zone of protection, to keep the Turks at bay; a place for overflights, for transit, for permissions. But little or no influence of its own-beyond the dreamy scent of rose petals, and the needle-sharp little bacillus that lives on in every container of Yoplait or Dannon.

We drove away from Sofia with a young photographer named Boris, who wanted a lift to Turkey so that he might catch a plane from Istanbul and fly to see his parents, newly posted to Kazakhstan. He knew the best cafes en route, and we ended up among the cobbled streets of Philippopolis, now known rather less elegantly as Plovdiv, eating what was to become our favorite Balkan dish, a hotpot of cheese, eggs, and tomatoes baked in earthenware and known as sirene po shopski. sirene po shopski. He was also eager for us to try some of the scores of brands of plum and apricot brandies, or to choose from a list of wines so long that it suggested California, or Australia, or France (behind which come only Chile and Bulgaria, making up the leading five wine-exporting countries in the world). But I declined: The country road to the Turkish frontier was long and winding and dangerous, I had been told, and there were police with radar and breathalyzer kits behind every bush-just like Russia, and with penalties even more severe. He was also eager for us to try some of the scores of brands of plum and apricot brandies, or to choose from a list of wines so long that it suggested California, or Australia, or France (behind which come only Chile and Bulgaria, making up the leading five wine-exporting countries in the world). But I declined: The country road to the Turkish frontier was long and winding and dangerous, I had been told, and there were police with radar and breathalyzer kits behind every bush-just like Russia, and with penalties even more severe.

The first time I had come to Istanbul, in the spring of 1972, I had taken a stroll across a catwalk, a narrow ropeway, that stretched from Europe right into Asia. It was an extraordinary journey, and I believe I was the first person to do it-or maybe just the first Englishman. I duly wrote a piece about the venture, and in pa.s.sing made a rather feeble feline joke, calling it a Persian Cat-Walk, since I fancied that from it one could eventually make it all the way to Tehran and Isfahan. But the joke was not to be: A mirthless subeditor declared the word Persia Persia absent from the newspaper's then-current style book, and he changed the adjective to absent from the newspaper's then-current style book, and he changed the adjective to Iranian Iranian instead. instead.

Nonetheless it had been a most impressive walk. I had come to Turkey from Paris aboard the Orient Express, and was staying at the Pera Palas, in a room that overlooked the Galata Bridge and the Golden Horn to all the minarets and domes of a perfectly imagined Istanbul. Earlier in the day I had walked down the hill to Karakoy and taken a ferry across to look at Hay-darpasa railway station, in the event that I might take a train to Ankara.* On the way, looking out from the little boat's port-side windows, I could see through the haze two towers, slender as minarets but glinting in the sun. On the way, looking out from the little boat's port-side windows, I could see through the haze two towers, slender as minarets but glinting in the sun.

They were made not of stone, but of steel. They turned out to be not minarets but the twin support towers, one rising in Europe, the other in Asia, for the first of two suspension bridges that were being built across the Bosporus. An engineer I knew was in charge of the construction. I called him and he asked if I might like to walk across, along a cable than had been put up the day before. It would, he said, be a rather distinguished thing to do, rather Byronic: to be the first person to walk across the Bosporus, from one continent to another.

So, early the next morning, when it was still cool and when the mile-long steel cable was relatively tight and its catenary curve at its shallowest, I went up a rickety elevator to the top of the European tower. Down below me to the right was the long sh.o.r.eside sprawl of the Dolmabahce Palace, built by the Ottomans in their waning years in the hope that the structure might kindle more faith and optimism in their rule than had the Topkapi Serai, which they would now abandon. It looked magnificent, its pink and yellow colonnades and spires and minarets glowing richly in the sun that was now rising from behind the Asian hills. And even when I was three hundred feet up, and among the mystified crows and seagulls gliding on the thermals, it looked unforgettably lovely, a symbol of something that had once been grand, even if at the time of its building the empire's once vast powers were crumbling into nothing.

And then, in a moment I prefer not to remember in detail, I stepped out and onto the wires-one pair of thick cables below my feet, two more slender ones to hold onto, safety ropes and snap links securing me. The wires bounced and s.h.i.+mmied ahead of me as I stood on the takeoff platform. It curved dizzyingly down toward the Bosporus, the s.h.i.+pping lanes busy with cargo vessels, and ferries sneaking across their paths, to and from uskudar.

I took a step, carefully, my foot slipping on the condensation that had not yet been burned away by the sun. The engineer was behind me, rea.s.suring: "What could go wrong?" he asked. "The safety ropes will hold." And so off we marched, steadily, then more rapidly, the view unfolding before and behind as we made our way down toward the water, and to a central resting place made of planks that had been wired in place the day before. It took half an hour to get down; and only then could we stop, turn round, and admire a panorama of mosques and minarets and domes and palaces, the whole of what had once been the most awesome and powerful city in the world.

Here, laid out across the horizon, were the three promontories-uskudar on the left, the Asian side, and Beyoglu and Old Istanbul, separated by the Golden Horn, both on the European side on the right. The Black Sea was behind me, the Sea of Marmara ahead-and I remember vividly as we were standing there a dark gray Russian destroyer from Odessa pa.s.sing by below, with sailors on the forepeak gazing up at the uncanny sight of two men suspended in the sky, and shouting to us in Russian exhortations that sounded very much like "Jump!"

The sight that unrolled before me-the domes and minarets of Old Stamboul, the universally recognizable silhouettes of the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, and the low palace in the green woods of Seraglio Point, the great Topkapi Serai itself-was barely believable, breathtaking in its beauty and a demonstration of such once-formidable power. A diamond between two emeralds, the city had been called. A jewel in the ring of the universal empire.

Gazing into the rising heat of that day, the images beginning to s.h.i.+mmer as the heat radiated up from the water, it was not too difficult to imagine what it must have been like when the Ottomans were in their ascendant days, when that immense tract of land from Budapest to Benghazi to Baghdad and the Caspian was helplessly under their rule and their administration, and the wealth of half the world flowed in and out of the sultans' dominions, through the gilded portals of Constantinople.

Dreamy, luxurious, abandoned, perfumed; tulips, carpets, marble, fountains; tobacco, coffee, opium, wine; divans, sofas, caftans, turbans; sultans, caliphs, viziers, muftis; idle, vicious, cruel, corrupt-the lexicon of the Ottomans is both very long and very specific. It is one that could apply to no other empire, for there has never been an empire like it. Nor any capital-for Constantinople, eclipsing all others for its jewel-like magnificence, was perhaps the only capital in the world as given up to pleasure as it was to ruling. The city over which I was gazing in rapture from the bridge-to-be that day had truly been, during the five centuries of the Ottoman dynasty, "the city of the world's desire."

We had arrived in the late afternoon, speeding into the maelstrom of modern Istanbul on the four-lane toll-road from Bulgaria, coming from a frontier that was still littered with the sagging remains of the old Iron Curtain watchtowers and rusted barbed-wire fences. Turks-even those who live in its European half-still talk of going to Europe, when they mean Bulgaria. The divide between the two neighbor countries is profound-but the more modern and sophisticated of the two is now Turkey, for when you leave the Bulgarian countryside you leave a place of narrow lanes and horse-drawn hay wagons; once into the flat plains of Turkey you emerge onto a four-lane highway with automatic toll-collection booths, and there is an atomic power station beside the road, steaming contentedly and providing all necessary power for the VCRs and cell phone networks of distant Istanbul.

The western sprawls of Istanbul, which we reached in little more than an hour, were vast, grubby, and vile. The pollution is dreadful, the noise terrific, the traffic as bad as in Bangkok, the dust as bad as in Cairo. But then we spotted a magical sign from the highway, TOPKAPI! TOPKAPI! as casually as if it had said as casually as if it had said PARADISE! PARADISE!, and we dropped off the road anyway, and into the anarchic Babel of the town, to spend the rest of the day exploring the nooks and crannies of this extraordinary palace-the storm center, some might say, of all that has happened in the Balkans for the last five hundred years.

Not all would agree with the phrase, of course-certainly not the sultan-caliphs themselves. They had a decided view on their vast empire, a self-satisfied a.s.sumption that what they had wrought was martial, tolerant, and civilized, and by and large and most happily Islamic. Those privileged-nay verily, blessed blessed-to be living within its laager laager inhabited the Dar ul-Islam, the Abode of Peace; those beyond it suffered from having to inhabit the Dar ul-Harb, the Abode of War. The distortions of an imperial view are many, and are by no means the monopoly of the Ottomans-the British, the French, the Dutch even, all fancied their subjects to live in conditions of unalloyed bliss. But the Ottomans, they had a certain additional and manic detachment from reality: a detachment born in no small measure from their sultans' grand isolation in the vastness and comfort of Topkapi-a palace now viewable every day but Tuesdays on payment of five dollars, and two extra for the harem. inhabited the Dar ul-Islam, the Abode of Peace; those beyond it suffered from having to inhabit the Dar ul-Harb, the Abode of War. The distortions of an imperial view are many, and are by no means the monopoly of the Ottomans-the British, the French, the Dutch even, all fancied their subjects to live in conditions of unalloyed bliss. But the Ottomans, they had a certain additional and manic detachment from reality: a detachment born in no small measure from their sultans' grand isolation in the vastness and comfort of Topkapi-a palace now viewable every day but Tuesdays on payment of five dollars, and two extra for the harem.

Thirty-one sultans ruled from Constantinople-the grandest of all being Suleyman I the Magnificent, who summarized his lofty position somewhat less than modestly as: "I who am Sultan of Sultans, the Sovereign of Sovereigns, the Distributor of Crowns to the Monarchs of the Globe, the Shadow of G.o.d upon the Earth, the Sultan and Padishah of the White Sea, the Black Sea, Rumelia, Anatolia, Karamania, Rum, Dulkadir, Diyarbekir, Kurdistan, Azerbaijan, Persia, Damascus, Aleppo, Cairo, Mekka, Medina, all Arabia, Yemen and those other countries which my n.o.ble ancestors-may G.o.d brighten their tombs!-conquered and my august majesty has likewise conquered with my flaming sword, Sultan Suleyman Khan, son of Sultan Selim, son of Sultan Bayezid." Court poets at Topkapi referred to the sultan as "the World Emperor and Messiah of the Last Age."

In their jeweled jungle of a palace the Ottoman sultans ruled from a position of absolute authority, a court arranged according to bewildering ziggurats of rank and with equally bewildering degrees of deference, all courtiers hemmed in by a system of unyielding and inflexible protocol-and in almost total silence. Officially the languages of the court were high-sounding Ottoman Turkish and, once so much of southern Europe had been bent to the Ottoman will, Serbo-Croat. But Suleyman the Magnificent cared little for talk, and decreed instead the use of a language of signs and signals, to be known as ixarette ixarette: It was taught to the court by mutes.

In many ways Topkapi is similar, in scale and complexity and secrecy, to the Forbidden City of Peking-though an atmosphere of luxury and fragrance still pervades these Ottoman structures, in sharp contrast to the air of intrigue and cruel decadence that hangs about the former court of China. There are in Istanbul, on the bluff overlooking the Bosporus, a cascading series of three courts, with hundreds of windows from which, it was said, the eyes of the empire would gaze out over all the citizenry and the subject peoples.