Sydney and I often explored Sarajevo on foot. We wandered up steep hills and looked down on the valley below. The city centre stretched out along the banks of the Miljacka River. Minarets poked high above sloping terracotta-tiled roofs against a backdrop of rounded mountaintops. On other days we wandered through former front-line neighbourhoods, properties still strewn with rubble, mine tape everywhere.
So many people had been internally displaced during the war. Serbs in Sarajevo went to Republika Srpska; Muslims from Serb areas flocked into the city and other nearby towns; many Croats settled in Croatia. We passed by semi-collapsed apartment blocks now occupied by refugees and saw small mountains of garbage piled up outside the buildings. The occupants tossed empty food tins, potato peelings and glass bottles out the windows. Worried there might be rats in the garbage, we stood far away. These piles concealed another potential danger. Mines sometimes lay in land underneath. The garbage made it hard for crews to find the mines and clear the land.
We both grew accustomed to security alerts, but I remained wary of mines. I acquired facts about them through work. There were about a million scattered around Bosnia-Herzegovina, not as many as in Cambodia and Afghanistan, but the situation here was uniquely perilous, because cities were mined.
One afternoon we walked through the outskirts of Sarajevo past whitewashed houses with rust-coloured roofs so steeply sloped they looked like ski chalets. Children stood on wrought-iron balconies. They called out to us and we waved back. Gardens grew larger, and space between the houses, more spacious. We passed piles of bricks, not rubble, but neat collections and soon saw the source: stripped structures, once houses. All that remained of one was cement pillars — a few bricks still clung in small arches where the pillars joined the base of the house, perhaps for extra reinforcement so the structure did not collapse — and a cement frame that showed how the rooms had been divided. Next door stood a one-storey wreck, somewhat less looted. Beside that, an elderly couple loitered in front of a well-preserved house separated from the sidewalk by reams of mine tape. The woman looked wistfully at the front door.
We stopped to chat in pidgin Bosnian and learned that the elderly couple stood in front of their own home.
“The house is mined,” the man said. “We don’t know when they’ll be able to clear it.”
“Where do you live now?” I asked.
“In the garage,” the man said. “It wasn’t mined, but it’ll be cold in there in the winter. We have no heat.” He explained some of this through mime.
I often saw demining crews and wondered what sort of person would choose this career and how crews accomplished their task with haphazard wartime front lines and few records to indicate where mines lay. For a while I did not worry. I took shortcuts and strolled across the lawn in front of a building where a friend worked. One day when I arrived, yellow tape fenced off the lawn. A crew worked behind the tape to extract a mine. As the months passed, statisticians compiled data. Mines had killed or injured about fifty to eighty people each month in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
On weekends, Sydney and I often crossed into Republika Srpska and walked with friends in the mountains above Pale, a town about fifteen kilometres southeast of Sarajevo; the terrain had been challenging enough for use in the 1984 winter Olympics. As we ascended in the Land Cruiser early one Sunday from Sarajevo, mountain mist drifted across the road. It dulled all bright colours to a hazy, near uniform grey. We parked at the foot of the narrow stony road we would follow and saw the silhouettes of friends who had already arrived but not the mountains. They were shrouded in fog. Rocks covered part of the trail or spilled onto it from slopes nearby.
As the sun rose and the air warmed, the fog dissipated. I lagged behind with Gertrude, a new friend from Switzerland. Long shadows that stretched across straw-coloured grass and white rocks were our only company. When we paused during our conversation, we heard the crunch of gravel under our boots. The air was fresh, the sky a hopeful blue. I loved this peace and near solitude.
“We should move a bit faster now. I think we’ve fallen quite far behind,” Gertrude said. I did not want to, but sensing her unease, I picked up my pace. We marched up the slope and soon saw others in the group. Their red, yellow and green jackets stood out like traffic lights. Close enough now, we relaxed our pace and drifted back into conversation.
Sometime later when we paused and noticed our surroundings again, we realized that Gertrude’s friend Hans, who led the group, had veered off the path onto the scrubby hills and that we had followed. I stood still, imagining a mine under my feet. Then I ran.
“Wait,” Gertrude shouted, but I did not stop until I reached Hans.
“We should get back onto the path. There could be mines,” I said.
He laughed and said that he wanted to reach a bunker in the hills that had served as a military headquarters during the war. Then he walked away. The others followed. I did too, full of rage at myself for not going back but mostly rage directed at Hans, whose judgment I did not respect. If I was due for a brush with disaster, I did not want it to be that day, in the company of someone whom I now despised. As I trailed behind, silent and sullen at first, this dark mood passed as did my fear. I appreciated the barren beauty of the landscape and that first sense of freedom that came from walking again after so long across an open hillside, no pavement in sight. I had only been here for three months but realized much had changed already. For many years I had relied on my own judgment. Now, in Sarajevo, I learned to obey rules, even when I did not want to. But it felt good to take a risk again.
Near the end of August, not long after our walk in the hills above Pale, I drove to an event in Brčko, a city in a volatile, independent region of the country that linked the western and eastern parts of Republika Srpska, in northern Bosnia. I travelled with an American photographer named Louise. She would photograph the handover of vehicles from one of the international organizations to a local aid group. I was to participate in the ceremony. We meandered through the countryside, up steep hills covered in dense coniferous forests, the scent of pine wafting in when we rolled the windows down, along the banks of rushing rivers, whitecaps frothy, pools deep and aqua blue in more tranquil waters. It was always shocking when we rounded a bend and drove past the carcasses of burned-out houses in villages along the way. I diligently made radio contact with headquarters at each designated checkpoint. The farther into the countryside we travelled, the more troublesome this became. Soon we heard nothing but crackles. About halfway to Brčko we stopped near a bridge and persisted until finally a faint response came back.
“I’ll move forward to a new position and try again in a minute,” I shouted down the receiver. We climbed back into the Land Cruiser and rolled forward to an open space, where we hoped reception would improve. I heard a message with our call number and answered back. It was a colleague en route to the same event.
“Don’t go to Brčko if you can’t make it there by two o’clock,” she shouted.
“What! Why not? The ceremony doesn’t begin until three-thirty” I shouted back.
“It’s starting early. Just turn back if you can’t make it by two.”
Louise and I consulted and decided we would continue. I pressed on the accelerator and did not slow down until half an hour later when we passed a long convoy of SFOR vehicles, mostly very large, pulled onto the shoulder of the road. As we approached the last one, we saw many men in uniform, who stood in an orderly line that stretched along the edge of the road in front of the vehicles. Their backs faced passing traffic as they answered the call of nature in unison, obedient to mine rules that kept them all on the asphalt.