Christ­mas Eve at Notre-Dame Cathedral

“When this is over” I said to George, “I am going to Paris.”

We were on the bus to Prisht­ina, Kosovo. It was a 450 Km trip, what would have been about seven hours in North Amer­ica. In Balkan Time, this meant four­teen hours of bor­dom. The bus left at Mid­night. Every­one seemed to be eat­ing burek, a lamb filled pastry, and soon the bus, with win­dows sealed shut, was hot and smelly. They guy behind us, drunk on brandy, was mak­ing a futile pass at his young seat mate. He had got on last, some­where a little out­side of Sara­jevo in the Repub­lika Srpska. It was going to be a long trip.

We had our own bottle of apricot brandy, given to us by our Hun­grian friend Josef. It was home made, and smelled potent. George and I debated down­ing a couple shots each to kill the time, but with no real idea where we were going in Prisht­ina, and not a word of Albanian between us, we decided against nav­ig­at­ing with a hangover.

The bus stopped at the bor­der between Bos­nia and Ser­bia, and two burly Bos­nian bor­der guards took our pass­ports. A few men were called into the sta­tion. Every­one on board smoked by the side of the road in silence. George, who would nor­mally smoke con­stantly, stayed on the bus with me. An hour passed until the men got back on and our pass­ports were returned. The whole pro­cess was then repeated on the Ser­bian side of the border.

Finally we were rolling again. We stopped at a dingy, fluor­es­cent lit, all-night res­taur­ant in a tiny Ser­bian town. Everything was green from the bare light bulbs, except for the melamine tables and the wait­ress that were the same weathered orange. There were two filthy lat­rines. The res­taur­ant seemed to serve only four things: cof­fee, beer, brandy, and cold hard boiled eggs. Back on the bus, the fresh air that had entered at the bor­der was soon replaced by the dense smell of sulfur.

We stopped in the middle of the night at Novi Pazar, a waste­land of Soviet apart­ment blocks, row upon row. The city is a Koso­var enclave, hours inside Ser­bia, tense with the atmo­sphere of isol­a­tion and fore­bod­ing. We were head­ing to Kosovo for the Uni­lat­eral Declar­a­tion of Inde­pend­ence. Novi Pazar could not fare well.

I finally fell asleep. The bor­der at Kosovo woke me up again. This time it was admin­istered by the UN. I got up to stretch and peered over the side of the very steep cliff below the road. We were in the middle of nowhere. Along the way we stopped to pick up a man in a fur hat; he had appeared out of the fog like an appar­i­tion. I remem­ber a tank rolling by on the other side of the road, but maybe like the man it was a ghost too. The road fol­lowed a misty river val­ley, green with a wind­ing grey river. The sun was just com­ing up. It reminded me of driv­ing home from Lac St-Jean through Maur­icie National Park. Every now and then we’d pass a small town, des­ol­ate and seem­ingly half inhab­ited. I felt tired, but the world was beautiful.

Soon we were in Prisht­ina. In the cab I looked around at the new city. I think George saw it first — the huge sneer­ing face peer­ing down at us; 50 Cent was com­ing to town. The air was filled with the acrid smell of burn­ing garbage. The power was out. At the hostel we shut the cur­tains, crawled into our beds, and slept the rest of the day. Paris would have to wait.