When Dana returned to the reception room, it was full. I have to do something about this, she thought.
When Dana left the satellite office, she said to Jovan, “I’d like you to drive me around the city.”
He turned to look at her, then shrugged. “As you wish.” He started the car and began to race through the streets.
“A little slower, please. I need to get a feel of this place.”
Sarajevo was a city under siege. There was no running water or electricity, and more houses were being bombed every hour. The air raid alarm went on so frequently that people ignored it. A miasma of fatalism seemed to hang over the city. If the bullet had your name on it, there was nowhere to hide.
On almost every street corner, men, women, and children were peddling the few possessions they had left.
“They are refugees from Bosnia and Croatia,” Jovan explained, “trying to get enough money to buy food.”
Fires were raging everywhere. There were no firemen in sight.
“Isn’t there a fire department?” Dana asked.
He shrugged. “Yes, but they don’t dare come. They make too good a target for Serb snipers.”
In the beginning, the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina had made little sense to Dana. It was not until she had been in Sarajevo for a week that she realized that it made no sense at all. No one could explain it. Someone had mentioned a professor from the university, who was a well-known historian. He had been wounded and was confined to his home. Dana decided to have a talk with him.
Jovan drove her to one of the old neighborhoods in the city, where the professor lived. Professor Mladic Staka was a small, gray-haired man, almost ethereal in appearance. A bullet had shattered his spine and paralyzed him.
“Thank you for coming,” he said. “I do not get many visitors these days. You said you needed to talk to me.”
“Yes. I’m supposed to be covering this war,” Dana told him. “But to tell the truth, I’m having trouble understanding it.”
“The reason is very simple, my dear. This war in Bosnia and Herzegovina is beyond understanding. For decades, the Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, and Muslims lived together in peace, under Tito. They were friends and neighbors. They grew up together, worked together, went to the same schools, intermarried.”
“And now?”
“These same friends are torturing and murdering one another. Their hatred has made them do things so disgusting that I cannot even speak about them.”
“I’ve heard some of the stories,” Dana said. The stories she had heard were almost beyond belief: a well filled with bloody human testicles, babies raped and slaughtered, innocent villagers locked in churches that were then set on fire.
“Who started this?” Dana asked.
He shook his head. “It depends on whom you ask. During the Second World War, hundreds of thousand of Serbs, who were on the side of the Allies, were wiped out by the Croats, who were on the side of the Nazis. Now the Serbs are taking their bloody revenge. They are holding the country hostage, and they are merciless. More than two hundred thousand shells have fallen on Sarajevo alone. At least ten thousand people have been killed and more than sixty thousand injured. The Bosnians and Muslims must bear the responsibility for their share of the torture and killing. Those who do not want war are being forced into it. No one can trust anyone. The only thing they have left is hate. What we have is a conflagration that keeps feeding on itself, and what fuels the fires is the bodies of the innocent.”
When Dana returned to her hotel that afternoon, Benn Albertson was waiting there to tell her that he had received a message that a truck and satellite time would be available to them the following day at 6:00 P.M.
“I found the ideal place for us to shoot,” Wally Newman told her. “There’s a square with a Catholic church, a mosque, a Protestant church, and a synagogue, all within a block of one another. They’ve all been bombed out. You can write a story about equal-opportunity hatred, and what it has done to the people who live here, who don’t want anything to do with the war but are forced to be a part of it.”