The city stretched east to west along a narrow valley surrounded by mountains, and once the Serbs took the high ground—which they did almost immediately—it was close to indefensible. Tanks could drill buildings with flat-trajectory shots that easily punched through exterior walls, and mortars shrieked down into places, like courtyards, that seemed otherwise protected. Snipers took up positions on the steep hillsides south of the Miljacka and around the nearly encircled suburb of Dobrinja and dropped civilians at will. It was not uncommon to see the body of an older person crumpled in the street with a bullet in their forehead and the contents of a shopping bag spilled out over the pavement. A public spectacle until dark, when someone could run out and pull the body off the street.
The Serbs controlled every road out of the city and most of the mountaintops around it and allowed just enough food in to keep people alive. The Serb mafia did business across the front lines with the Sarajevo mafia—who also fought to defend the city—and both made an enormous amount of money. A main road that ran the length of the city was so exposed to gunfire that it became known as Sniper Alley. The few people with cars drove at seventy miles an hour on gas that cost fifty dollars a gallon, and still, many of them didn’t make it. A year into the siege the Bosnians dug a tunnel under no-man’s-land at the airport, but until then, the only way out of the city was to sprint across the runway past Serb machine-gun positions. A lot of those people didn’t make it, either. Every morning, French UN troops at the airport would drive out in armored personnel carriers to pick up the bodies.
Over the course of the three-year siege almost 70,000 people were killed or wounded by Serb forces shooting into the city—roughly 20 percent of the population. The United Nations estimated that half of the children in the city had seen someone killed in front of them, and about one in five had lost a family member in the war. People intentionally exposed themselves to snipers just to be put out of their misery. One year into the siege, just before I got to the city, a teenage couple walked into no-man’s-land along the Miljacka River, trying to cross into a Serb-held area. They were quickly gunned down, the young man falling first and the woman crawling over to him as she died. He was a Serb and she was a Muslim, and they had been in love all through high school. They lay there for days because the area was too dangerous for anyone to retrieve their bodies.
I saw a lot of strange things in that city, the kinds of contortions that only war can bring to a people, but maybe the most startling was this: a middle-aged man in a business suit crouched over some small project in the courtyard of a modern high-rise. The building could have been any bank or insurance company in Europe, except that the windows were blown out and the walls were scarred with shrapnel. I looked closer and saw that the man was arranging dead twigs into a pile. When he was done, he positioned an aluminum pot on top of the pile and lit the twigs with a cigarette lighter. Then he stood up and looked at me.
If there’s an image of the Apocalypse, I thought, it might be a man in a business suit building a fire in the courtyard of an abandoned high-rise. In different circumstances it could be any of us, anywhere, but it had happened to him here, and there wasn’t much I could do about it. I nodded to him and he nodded back and then I left him in peace.
The one thing that might be said for societal collapse is that—for a while at least—everyone is equal. In 1915 an earthquake killed 30,000 people in Avezzano, Italy, in less than a minute. The worst-hit areas had a mortality rate of 96 percent. The rich were killed along with the poor, and virtually everyone who survived was immediately thrust into the most basic struggle for survival: they needed food, they needed water, they needed shelter, and they needed to rescue the living and bury the dead. In that sense, plate tectonics under the town of Avezzano managed to re-create the communal conditions of our evolutionary past quite well. “An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain,” one of the survivors wrote. “The equality of all men.”