The passengers were crammed together uncomfortably on narrow canvas seats arranged in a long line. Most were aid workers or officials from UNPROFOR, UNHCR and various other acronyms from the UN’s bewildering myriad of agencies. Most soon had their eyes shut, but from the moment she first clambered aboard Rachel had never felt more wide awake. She tried to peer through the tiny porthole behind her, but only briefly could she glimpse the Balkan hills and valleys down below, wondering what they had in store for her. As the Hercules reached its cruising altitude, she shivered, coveting Becky’s unglamorous woolly hat.
At the end of its journey, the Hercules plunged into a sudden, suicidal nosedive. Rachel’s stomach flung itself from her body. She’d always suspected this plane was just too damned big for its own good.
Becky stirred slowly, and bellowed into Rachel’s ear.
‘Don’t worry, it’s just in case anyone wants to take a shot at us. Like I told you—Maybe Airlines.’
The plane levelled off at the last minute, and Rachel swung around once more, just in time to see a blur of blackened, roofless houses and the jagged ruins of mutilated tower blocks.
‘Hello, war,’ she mumbled to herself beneath the engines’ roar.
Snow was falling steadily on Sarajevo, trying to hide its horrors from the world.
‘Where now?’ asked Rachel.
‘Oh, I’m getting a ride into town,’ said Becky. ‘We’re getting a ride.’
There was a tedious, 25 minute wait before finally he strode in.
‘And about time too.’ Becky gave him a brief embrace. ‘This is Rachel, one of your fellow countrymen. You have to be very nice to her, it’s her first time—so to speak. Rachel, meet Daniel L. Lowenstein, award-winning reporter and our cabbie for the day.’
Rachel shook his hand, surprised Becky hadn’t mentioned he’d be meeting them when they’d discussed him earlier. She couldn’t help compare the face in front of her with the immaculately lit, carefully posed picture on the dust jacket. He looked rougher in the flesh, unshaven and uncombed, and the familiar dimple in his chin was largely buried beneath stubble. Now that she could see him in colour, she realised his eyes were a rich chocolate brown. They were good eyes, but they didn’t look at her for very long; they didn’t seem interested and flitted around elsewhere.
She was in awe of him but quite determined that wouldn’t mean developing any kind of crush on him. It would be so adolescent, and above all she needed people to take her seriously. She hoped they’d become friends and close colleagues, though it was quite possible that, as an aristocrat of the press corps, he wouldn’t waste his time on an apprentice like her.
‘Hi,’ he said casually.
From nowhere, a mortar exploded—not far away, though not close either by Sarajevo’s stringent standards: perhaps 200 yards. Rachel flinched instinctively. No one else moved a muscle.
‘They’ll come at you a lot closer than that,’ said Danny. ‘People say it’s the one you don’t hear that kills you.’
‘Yeah, don’t worry,’ said Becky. ‘Just the Serbs’ way of saying hello. Letting you know you’re very welcome, Rachel. A few months and you’ll be able to bore us with whether it’s incoming or outgoing, a shell or a mortar, Russian made or Chinese.’
Rachel nodded. Even if it were only a stray round, here was her first snort on the drug of war and she was hooked already. She climbed eagerly into the passenger seat of Danny’s armoured Land Rover.
‘This is unbelievable,’ she whispered as they eased their way through the butchered buildings of downtown Sarajevo: tower blocks reduced to blackened stumps; happy homes now useless, their walls pockmarked by an acne rash of bullet holes, charred rafters where roofs had been, children’s bedroom curtains fluttering like flags of surrender in the snowy breeze. A cosmopolitan city that had once glowed with pride as host of the winter Olympics—demolished, almost at a stroke.
‘It gets worse,’ Danny promised, as he sat hunched over the wheel, the wipers working frantically to clear the windscreen of snow.
‘Worse? It already looks like Berlin in 1945.’
‘Half a century on and plus ça change’ His voice was husky. It said to her New York, Yale, Democrat. ‘It’s like all the hatreds way back then went into deep freeze, and now they’ve thawed out and come back to life.’
As she looked around, she could see what he meant: everything flickered in the black and white of jerky, scratchy newsreel footage. The faces she saw were of the past yet catapulted into the modernity of late 20th-century Europe. What could these people possibly know of mobile phones or U2 or REM? They didn’t belong here.
‘This is a prison rather than a city,’ Danny went on, sounding like one of his articles or a chapter from his book. ‘Three hundred thousand inmates with no chance of escape—and who knows when their sentence will end? The best they can hope for is to survive here. Watch them: they’re just scavenging around. Existing, really.’
She studied the Sarajevans they drove past. Some were pushing wheelbarrows with the firewood they had collected from chopping down trees by the Miljacka River or smashing up furniture. Others dragged sledges loaded with bottles and plastic containers as they went in search of water. She had read stories of how people were surviving on snails and nettles and fir-tree juice. He was right: I’m still alive, they seemed to say to each other with silent shrugs, as if it were an achievement in itself.
‘You know the real difference between us and them, Rachel? We can come and go; we’ve got our UN accreditation and a ride pretty much any time we want on Maybe Airlines, but they can’t leave until the war is over.’
Rachel thought it best not to tell him what was running through her head: that she didn’t ever want to leave.
‘And here we are on Snipers’ Alley.’ Danny was playing the tour guide on the ultimate holiday-from-hell. ‘See those blocks of flats? There are Serbs up there who’ll shoot at anything that moves, faceless, nameless bastards that they are.’
She saw people walk nervously behind the cover of buildings, then gather in small clusters where they peered across the Miljacka as if they might be able to see the snipers who terrorised them every time they ventured out. Suddenly, they would take their chance and dart across exposed ground until they reached the next block and its temporary sanctuary. She watched an old man willing his weary legs to run as fast as they had when he was young, and a mother trying to zigzag across the open street, dragging her child behind her.
Becky started strapping on her helmet and Rachel wondered whether she should have brought one as well as her flak jacket. Still, Danny wasn’t wearing any body armour at all. Later Rachel would learn this was his moral stand: if the ordinary people of Sarajevo had to survive without Kevlar to cover their heads and hearts, then so would he.
‘So this is where I turn into the king of drag-racing.’
Like the good, law-abiding citizen that she was, Rachel fastened her seat belt, while Danny stabbed his boot down on to the accelerator and crashed up and down through the gears. Swerving and sometimes skidding, he dodged craters, fallen lampposts, wrecked buses and trams, and the burnt-out, bullet-ridden vehicles of all those racing drivers who hadn’t quite made it to the chequered flag. Black ice lay in wait beneath freshly fallen snow, ready to pick them off, just like the Serbs.
‘You know what?’ he shouted over the groaning gears. ‘My greatest fear is to die here stupidly.’
‘As opposed to what—heroically?’ said Becky from the back.
‘Yeah, heroically. A sniper’s bullet or a mortar. I want you guys to put up an epitaph for me that says what a brave reporter I’ve been, not what a goddamned awful driver.’
Rachel was beginning to wish he’d talk