Being There

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.