The Book of the Dead

And of course, there are the spirits of the dead, which hang for me like the low grey clouds that always float around Balkan cities, particularly in the winter. I see the dead everywhere I go: not just in the enormous cemeteries created out of football fields during the war, but in the cafes where I once sat, in the Holiday Inn where the windows were all smashed by explosions, in front of the parliament building, the library, the old beer factory. I see them everywhere.

Those lucky enough to exit the siege of Sarajevo alive fell into several categories. There were those who left physically intact, and could rejoice, on some level, that at least they were alive even if they had endured days of hell. There were the injured and maimed, who still navigate the streets on shaky prostheses or in wheelchairs. There are those who lost several, or all, members of their family. And there are those who may not show the scar of the shrapnel still lodged in the brain, or the thigh, or the shattered tibia or the jawbone shot off by a sniper, but those whose scars and wounds are deeper.

A psychiatrist in Kosevo Hospital, which stayed open during the siege and operated valiantly without electricity, even when the generators went off, once told me that at the height of the war the city was a walking insane asylum.

Another told me that 90 per cent of the war survivors in the city today had post-traumatic stress disorder.

Another told me to do myself a favour and move forward, forget the past. Say dovidenja, Bosna. Goodbye, Bosnia.

But I want to remember. I cannot help but remember. And so, coming back, flying from Ljubljana in the slick Slovenian jet cruising over Mount Igman – at one time the only exit route out of the siege – I looked down and tried to see the tunnel which had served as the sole route for supplies coming in and out of the city. I scanned the ground near the suburb Butmir, across from the landing strip of the airport, but could not see it.

I began to think of all I had lost, and all I had left behind, and I decided I must try to find – if he wanted to be found – Nusrat.