Goos and I slept in both days over the weekend. I dug through more e-mails, read more Fowles—I was now on The French Lieutenant’s Woman—and poked around Tuzla. Also, to be polite, I e-mailed Narawanda to advise her about my schedule, which I thought would bring us back early next week. After some thought, I added, “I hope your trip to New York went well and has made you feel better.” I got a one-word reply: “Not.”
On Sunday, I decided to venture out for a run. Overall I looked worse than I felt. Except for temperature sensation from my tooth, which shot unexpected streaks of pain through my nose and forehead, I was not in much discomfort. There was still a lump in my lip with the black line of a scab in the middle of it, and a colorful bruise had emerged along my jawline where it had met the rifle stock, and there was a welt on my forehead, which had collided with the top iron rung of the ladder. The broken front tooth made me look to myself like an unruly teenager. But as happens once you get accustomed to running, I felt a physical craving for the endorphin rush. One of the NATO MPs agreed to drive along beside me.
Tuzla was pretty, the old center mostly low bright stucco buildings decorated with white architectural details, like plaster medallions. The population was no greater than Peoria, but the city had a far more urban feel, with skyscrapers and minarets visible when I looked south.
The main square, through which I jogged, was marked by a geometric arrangement of multicolored tiles and an Ottoman well, centuries old, from which fresh water still burbled out of a copper nipple. I headed toward Lake Pannonica, the man-made seashore in the center of town, circling it several times.
Like the local police lieutenant, NATO recon were also convinced that we were under surveillance. Some guy had spent twelve hours at the cevapi place across the street, at a table on the front porch, pretending to read the paper, only to be replaced on Saturday and Sunday by a younger fellow doing the same thing at the little café on the corner, where he nursed countless cups of coffee while maintaining a direct line of sight to the hotel door. My bodyguards had been advised to look for a red Yugo, and it was occasionally visible now when I looked back while I was running. So long as we continued to give the impression that we believed it was Ferko, not Kajevic, who was watching us, the Arkan Tiger surveillance team had no reason to be discreet. A menacing presence, in fact, might hasten our departure.
I managed to enjoy myself anyway. The sun was bright and it looked like every person in Tuzla was on the sand in their skimpy European bathing suits, the little kids in sun hats dashing back and forth to the water with their buckets. I picked up a brochure about the lake and was astonished to learn that the ersatz seawater in the network of ponds was pumped in from the same tanks where Goos and I were supposed to die, although diluted many times. I struggled with the thought that if things had gone differently, these people might be splashing around amid indistinguishable little molecules of our remains, but it was almost like thinking about getting hit by oncoming traffic as you’re driving: It just didn’t happen.
For me, the terror was starting to recede, leaving aside a couple of throttling nightmares. As I trotted along, it was nice to feel under my own power again, less dominated by the shadow of trauma and fear. It dawned on me, however, that I had now visited the true Bosnia, sharing a little bit of the abiding national experience.
Monday morning, Goos said, “If you don’t mind being a tad impromptu, might be we could start back to The Hague tomorrow. Won’t quite be tickety-boo, but I think I can stand it. Know for sure in the a.m. Perhaps you can give the good general a tingle and let her know duty calls.”
When I got back to the hotel in the late afternoon following another run, there was a message on my cell from General Moen. I reached her aide-de-camp, who asked if we could come to Sarajevo to meet with the general at 2:00 p.m. tomorrow. The MP bodyguards would drive.
As soon as I relayed the message, I could see Goos was on the verge of saying no. He wanted to go home.
“Any idea what this will be about?” he asked.
“He—the aide—just said the general felt it was important to speak to us again.”
“‘Important?’ Christ the Savior, I don’t want to be important.” He seemed to give his remark some thought. “All right, let’s give it a burl.”
“We’ll go?”
He nodded.
Sarajevo, which had gone from Olympic city to the site of a harrowing siege, was by appearance, like much of Bosnia, seemingly returned to its former self. The military escort who was driving, a young Norwegian named Andersen, seemed to have developed deep affection for the city in his time here and stopped on an overlook, where, in a postcard shot, Sarajevo reposed beside the spangled Miljacka River, with the southern Alps majestic in the distance. From here, my eye went to the minarets and skyscrapers, the tile roofs, and, most striking, the ranks of stark white tombstones that occupied far more mid-city real estate than in any other urban center I’d visited. Andersen pointed to a large building in the heart of town, an old palace that was a bombed roofless wreck but which, he said, would appear lovely from ground level. He was not the kind of kid who would have said the the state of the building was a metaphor, but I think that was why it was so significant to him.
He drove us down into the old section, Bascarsija, where worn paths and walls of stone surrounded the sites rebuilt in the familiar white stucco with brown terra-cotta roofs. The hotel where we were headed was a couple hundred feet from the national war memorial, dedicated to the dead of World War II. Walking through the pedestrian way, Goos and I stopped to observe the evergreen wreaths with ribbons piled beside an eternal flame. In this country there was no end of carnage to recall. Here, where the population had been besieged because of their faith, there were more women in hijab than I’d noticed in Tuzla.
While the soldiers positioned themselves at the door, Goos and I went to the reception counter. Our cover was that we’d arrived for a business meeting with the same construction company whose logo the NATO folks had sported on their pickup trucks the other night. The clerk, a diffident young man who spoke excellent English, gave us keys and ran down the hotel rules, which included serving no alcohol. At that news, I felt Goos tense instinctively, even though we had no plans to spend the night.
On the third floor, the room keys opened a conference room in which the general and six other soldiers sat, all in civvies. A map had been fastened to a portable bulletin board. Everyone stood as we entered, a show of respect I immediately registered as a forbidding sign.
“You seem better,” said the general to Goos.
He answered that he was fine, which was obviously untrue. He was still limping to protect his right side, and the drive had been painful.
“Let us brief you on what we have found,” said General Moen. “The good news is the subject does not seem to have departed.”
She turned things over to an intelligence officer, an intense Hungarian, long and crew cut, a captain named Ferenc. He referred repeatedly to ‘assets,’ which made me think much of the allied intelligence apparatus had been called into play, although some of the information he was relaying had been obtained by sending two officers into Madovic to pose as German tourists.
For roughly a year and a half, Ferenc said, the three monks had been appearing in town at noon on weekdays, moving in slow procession to the hospital, where they prayed over the bedridden. Through the centuries, it had been a rarity for monks to leave the monastery, and the change had been the subject of much initial local conversation. The abbot, in his casual dealings with some townspeople, had explained that the three had been displaced by the war and had arrived in Madovic seeking shelter and the opportunity to help heal the sick. Although the three monks were called to a different vocation than the regime of reclusive prayer and contemplation at the monastery, the abbot had granted them refuge indefinitely.