The Pillars of Hercules

He was an Australian, traveling with his American wife, who was also an aid worker. She had a neighborly manner, and he was upright, mustached, and had a military bearing—he later told me he had been a soldier in South Africa. He was in his mid-forties, with the charity World Vision. His name was David Jennings. He and Theresa were making their first-ever visit to Italy, as a break from their aid project in Bosnia.

They asked me what I did for a living.

“I’m a writer.”

“Journalists are a pain,” David said.

“They all cover the same story—four guys in four separate cars go to the same place,” Theresa said.

“They come for the big stories, when they can get their face on the camera, with shooting behind them,” David said.

“I’m not a journalist,” I said. “I don’t work for anyone. I’m just looking around.”

“I went back to Australia for about ten days last January,” David said. “I looked at the paper, flipping the pages, and there was nothing about the war—nothing. I called the editor. I said, ‘Hey, mate. I’ve just come back from Bosnia, and I’ve got some news for you—the war’s still on!’ ”

“What sort of thing do you do?”

“I’m a logistician,” he said. “But I do everything. I mean, we all do. We have heart specialists driving ambulances.”

“Isn’t logistics about making things happen?”

“Yes. I coordinate shipments of food and equipment. My military background is useful for that. It takes patience, though. I mean, like waiting for six hours at a checkpoint because some jumped little guy pretends there’s something wrong with my papers.”

The problem was that all the borders were so blurred. Serb, Croat and Bosnian lines were close and continually shifting.

“Because I’m working in Bosnia they see my work as helping the enemy,” he said. “And they’re fussy too. In my office I have a Bosnian Muslim, a Croat and a Serb. They get along fine. But my interpreter was dealing with a freight forwarder in Zagreb over the phone. After a few minutes my interpreter handed the phone to me. ‘She doesn’t want to talk to me.’ The woman in Zagreb suspected—from the interpreter’s Serbo-Croatian accent—that he might be a Muslim. I asked the Zagreb woman for a reason. She says, ‘He is not speaking my language.’ ”

“I was thinking of going to Mostar,” I said. “But I was warned that it was dangerous.”

“You might have hit it on a bad day,” he said. “Hey, I was standing talking with some U.N. Protective Force (UNPROFOR) guys at Tuzla airport the other day. I felt a tug in my chest—a hard poke—and heard a bang and saw a slug spinning on the floor. Someone had fired at me.”

“But it bounced off?”

“I was wearing a flak jacket.”

“Who was the sniper?”

“Might have been anyone,” he said. “Probably thought I was UNPROFOR. They all hate them. They suspect them of helping the enemy, whoever that might be.”

Theresa said, “They try to demoralize people. That’s how they think they’ll win.”

“Who is ‘they’?”

“Each side,” she said.

“Demoralizing” took the form of being beastly and unreasonable in uniquely horrible ways.

Later, in my cabin on the Ivan Krajc at midnight, twiddling my radio, I found an FM station broadcasting from Split in English, for the benefit of aid workers and U.N. soldiers. It was a war report, and it sounded as bland as a stock market update.

—and three artillery shells fell just outside the city of Tuzla today. There were no casualties. Small-arms provocation was reported in Bihac lasting thirty-five minutes this afternoon. Twenty-five people are still listed as missing in Sarajevo. Two shells struck a house in Gorazde—demolishing it. No one was injured. Two mortar bombs exploded in Travnik. It was agreed that the left bank of the Neretva River in Mostar be officially reopened after six P.M. tomorrow. One member of UNPROFOR was critically injured by sniper fire in—

The soporific drone of the ferry’s engines mercifully eased me to sleep. I slumbered all the way across the Adriatic, and in the morning I was back in Italy, looking for a way by ship to Albania.

12

The Ferry Venezia to Albania