That wild beast, which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed, was now set free.

- Ivo Andric, Bridge on the Drina

Borders: what they are, what they represent. Not the same to all people, depending on your nationality. And then there are internal borders, the ones that no visa can get you across. For the traveller, borders are an integral and often inconvenient part of the journey, but they offer a kind of magic, too, a sense of transcendence, of going beyond what is familiar, of testing oneself against the barriers of the exotic.

Europe’s borders are dwindling. Scandinavia lost its border charm long ago: the only way you knew you had left Norway behind and entered Sweden was the sudden cluster of sex shops, and a flag. Now in the European Union you can enter the Schengen territory and travel through much of Western Europe without showing a passport.

And there was the Iron Curtain: the border between Greece and Bulgaria, for example, where in 1986 surly officials emptied the entire contents of my car onto surgical trolleys; or the Danube, that same year, between Bulgarian and Romania where, after waiting for an hour in an unmoving line, I was dissuaded by the East Germans’ gruesome tales of travel through Romania (”They’ll take the veels from your car!”) and gave up, left the line, turned around and drove back to Sofia: to my everlasting regret.

So over the years as the borders of countries have been changing or vanishing, some of my borders have moved within—passages of time, transitions in life, the invisible lines to cross which require no visas but a certain faith, or curiosity, or, some have told me, courage.

Bulgaria no longer requires visas for Americans; but on the way to Bulgaria, overland through the Balkans, there are new borders that are more than mere formalities, borders which open onto new landscapes beyond those the eye can see.

In 1989, say, you could board a train in Switzerland and not get off again until Sofia: the old Orient Express. It left Italy at Villa Opicina and did not cross a border again until it reached Dragoman in Bulgaria. Now the same journey requires two additional crossings and, in February 1998, three changes of train. But this is not an inconvenience, unless you are travelling for other reasons than exploration (in which case you should take a plane), because with an open mind, some discretion, and a great deal of humility you can discover your own limitations as far as travel is concerned, your capacity for compassion or fear. I decided to take the train from Zagreb to Sofia when I was invited to visit a friend there because I wanted to test my own reactions, and try to answer some of my own questions about what had happened here, in the former Yugoslavia, between 1991 and 1995, and what, perhaps, is still happening.

I am a small, somewhat shy person, who has neither the nerve nor the clout of a war correspondent, but I have discovered a certain ability to remain invisible, which enables me to observe others, gain their trust, and thus go where I like, where a group or more obvious foreigner might encounter problems. When I decided to travel from Zagreb to Sofia by rail through Serbia and across the Croatian-Serbian border rather than through Hungary (the usual route since 1991) it was a decision based on both American pragmatism and pig-headedness (Budapest is due north of Zagreb! Why make such a detour if they have repaired the lines and there are said to be trains running across the border!) When I first asked at Zagreb station about trains to Sofia the response was an emphatic “No!”; but when I asked if perhaps it might just be possible to go to Belgrade, the attendant answered curtly, “One train a day,” and gave me a handwritten schedule on a scrap of paper which indicated a first change in Vinkovci, on the Croatian side, and a second change in Šid, just over the border, in Serbia.

I left on an unseasonably warm day in February. The train to Vinkovci was full of quiet, tired Croats reading papers, dozing. Beyond the window, La Croatie profonde, the deep dormant fields of Slavonia. Seeking comfort in numbers, I wondered if any of my fellow passengers might be continuing to the other side but knew that very few, if any, would be rushing for the train to Šid. Only two weeks before, the UN had handed Eastern Slavonia back to Croatian administration and there was the possibility of unrest in the region. I felt strangely as if I had no business going there, as an individual without any endorsement from a government, humanitarian organization, or newspaper.

In Vinkovci when I asked for a ticket to Šid the sleepy attendant looked up at me from her cigarette as if I had asked for a ticket to Las Vegas. I felt guilty, as if buying a ticket to Serbia when one is a resident, however temporary, of Croatia were some sort of betrayal. But I also felt that I could not understand the one without the other, that to know Croatia I must know Serbia, however briefly. This was a first border to cross, a mental one, of my recently inculcated resistance to the very notion of Serbia—the aggressor in both Croatia and Bosnia, and the homeland to a sickening, misguided nationalism of heroic destiny.

The girl gave me a handwritten, international train ticket valid for two months, for the price of eighteen kuna, or three dollars. I had less than five minutes to find the train, and asked a conductor, unbelieving, if the small dirty wagons at the edge of the station were indeed this international train for Šid. As if I were bound for a destination where I would simply disappear, some sort of Balkan Bermuda triangle. The conductor was jovial, nodded and pointed me to the first carriage, less crowded.

The train is an ancient diesel, noisy, slow and stinking: the overhead lines for electric trains were destroyed during the war. The tracks are new, fresh grey gravel beneath the rails. This is an intimate train ride, almost a tram; we move slowly through back gardens and fields and torn trees into a no-man’s land. There are few passengers: an old woman with a twisted face, a younger one with dark hair and glasses, cheerful and talkative; some teenage girls, platinum hair and chewing gum, lots of luggage; two schoolboys who look over the driver’s shoulder, down the line leading east. The train stops in every village, I will clock the names: Mirkovci, Jankovci, Deletovci, Tovarnik. A few miles to the north is Vukovar. We cross a field of crows, through villages red, brown, grey. Deep puddles melt by the embankment. The sunlight is rich and strong, like Greek summer light. Now a row of trees is reminiscent of provincial roads in France; between the trees are conical hayricks. Now a destroyed village, houses mere walls, roofless, gutted. Slakovci: nothing here, only a bullet-shattered sign on the shelter that was once the station. A few geese wander along the platform. A village abandoned to the war; we cross an invisible latitude of hostility and history.

The journey takes ninety minutes to cover forty kilometers. In Šid the customs and border officials are courteous, if somewhat bemused: where am I going? As I say Bulgaria it sounds almost fraudulent; now I realize that Bulgaria has been the pretext all along. The way to explore these strange borders.

On the train from Šid to Belgrade a small girl offers me candy. I understand her mother—young, dark, sharp-featured—telling another passenger that the child’s daddy is a soldier, on duty in Kosovo. He usually has leave on Friday, but not this week.

In Belgrade I find the old train station buffet, unchanged. Smoky, run-down, congenial. I was here 25 years ago; they still serve Turkish coffee from small individual brass pots. I would have one, but it is too late for coffee, so I order a beer and sit observing the people around me. An older, intellectual type with glasses and a thick grey mustache stares blankly at his tiny plastic coffee spoon, twisting it before him. A long-haired bearded man, a character from a Dostoyevsky novel, circulates among the tables, selling religious pictures and calendars. I buy a Saint-George, which I will keep in my wallet. From a neighboring table they ask me the time: tongue-tied, I raise my wrist to show them my watch, and they laugh. They are handsome people, and they are having a good, leisurely time over their coffees; I wish I could join them.

For the journey from Belgrade to Sofia I have a couchette compartment all to myself. As we pull out of Belgrade the ceiling lamp fixture takes a sudden plunge towards the floor, but apart from this near encounter with a vicious piece of plastic the journey to Sofia is uneventful.

In the morning when we reach the Bulgarian border there is a thick, whorled layer of ice inside the window.

To return from Sofia I had three options, and plenty of time, but I wanted to visit Sarajevo on the way back to Zagreb, and that would involve new borders. I could go to Skopje in Macedonia, over the mountains, and catch a bus through Macedonia, Kosovo and Serbia to Bosnia, a trip which, ten years ago, would have been both feasible and safe, if somewhat uncomfortable. But there was snow in the mountains, closing the roads, and there was unrest in Kosovo. I could go back to Zagreb, perhaps somewhat more quickly: during my train change in Belgrade I had discovered that there were regular and frequent buses to Zagreb. And there were two buses a day from Zagreb to Sarajevo. That would mean losing a day, however, besides being somewhat like the Budapest option: safe and out of the way and more expensive.

The final option involved more borders, mental as well as physical and might, like the Kosovo option, involve some risk. On the board at the Belgrade bus station I had seen that there was a bus for “Srpsko Sarajevo.” For ten days in Bulgaria I had pondered the practical meaning—not the ideological one, that was clear—of this destination, Serbian Sarajevo. Obviously, the bus would go through the Bosnia Serb Republic (Republika Srpska), the ethnically cleansed pariah entity which with the Muslim-Croat Federation makes up the country of Bosnia-Herzegovina. For ten days I had surfed the net: even the Republika Srpska’s own web page gave no clue as to where the bus from Belgrade would drop me off. Contacts in Sarajevo had told me I could not get to Sarajevo from the East, that I must come in from Croatia. But the bus schedule in Belgrade station did list this strange destination. It’s Pale, people in Bulgaria told me, Radovan Karadzic’s former stronghold; the bus will go to Pale, and then how will you get to Sarajevo from there, how will you cross from Srpska? An American journalist suggested I would be able to get a ride with the UNHCR, which ran a shuttle (sic) from Pale to Sarajevo—an attempt to show that the Dayton Agreement was working, that people could circulate freely. I imagined that the UNHCR had better things to do than ferry tourists from Srpska to Sarajevo. Taxis won’t cross, I was told; it was all too obvious from their license plates who were the Serbs, who were the Muslims and who were the Croats. Bosnia had three different national license plates, issued according to the reigning ethnicity of the location.

I arrive in Belgrade an hour late from Sofia with the night train—in itself an experience I would have liked to prolong: coal-heated, warm, comfortable, “first class” compartment (for the equivalent of $12.00??) all to myself, bed made up with fresh starched sheets, beer in the evening and hot coffee in the morning, gallant Bulgarian conductor named Valentine who kisses my hand goodbye on the platform—and still I have not decided between Srpska and Zagreb. I will let fate decide, at the last minute.

According to the schedule posted outside the bus station, I have missed the only bus of the day to Sarajevo. So it looks like Zagreb, after all. I realize, bleakly, that I am disappointed, that I was actually prepared to go through Srpska. But this is the Balkans, and one shouldn’t trust anything without double, or triple-checking. And I learn that there is a bus for Sarajevo after all, in twenty minutes, which is sooner than I’d hoped—I wanted to get that Turkish coffee at the train station. But the fact that there is a bus is the nudge from fate I have been waiting for, and five minutes later I am sitting in the last window seat at the very back of a very old Yugoslav bus, and I don’t know if I’m absolutely mad or even have the right to be on the bus (I feel I should invent a Serbian grandmother, just in case), but I also feel somehow triumphant, because I have just crossed another decisive border, my own indecision.

The bus sets off down the old “Brotherhood and Unity” highway; signs still indicate the distance to Ljubljana, to Zagreb. To either side of the highway is a thick trail of litter. The driver suddenly pulls onto the shoulder and starts to back up, down the highway. As if my own reticence had whispered to him, Keep going to Zagreb; he has just missed his turn-off, for Bosnia.

Americans do not need visas for Bosnia. I keep repeating this to myself, whenever my doubt recurs; but nevertheless I feel as if I am headed for some black hole. The Serb Republic: State Department Travel Advisories warn Americans to “pay close attention to their personal security,” because a Bosnian Serb war criminal was seized by American SFOR troops two or three weeks previously, and “the potential exists for retaliation.” In fact, the State Department warns Americans not to travel to Bosnia at all, because of land mines. I reason that if this Serbian driver is any sort of normal human being, he will not try to blow himself up by taking a short-cut through a mine field, even if he is not very good at driving down the freeway. I could, however, if I fall on the wrong sort of people, run into unpleasant situations, but I also reason that the Serb Republic has been making some grudging concessions to Western pressure, that they are said to be impoverished and eager for foreign aid, and besides, there are supposed to be thousands of American troops protecting the very region we will be crossing. The people around me on the bus look incredibly, frighteningly normal: middle-aged women travelling on their own, young men engrossed in the sports results in their newspapers or striking up conversations with each other; some elderly couples. No foreigners, all Serbs, Bosnian or Yugoslav. Just before the border a middle-aged couple gets on, reeking of early-morning alcohol; they sit right in front of me and they will regularly offer a shot of rakija to everyone around them (except me: I am indeed invisible—or, perhaps, obviously foreign after all…). The woman (long black hair, extravagant laughter) alternately covers the man (thick mustache, dark wavy hair) with kisses and caresses or sleeps in his lap. Perhaps they are gypsies. From time to time the man tosses tangerine peel out the window.

The border is the Drina river, between Loznica on the Yugoslav side and Zvornik in Bosnia. The bus stops first on the Yugoslav side: the policeman merely glances at my passport. The bus stops again on the far side of the bridge: a red-white-and-blue Serbian flag is flying, no sign of the new and “neutral” Bosnian flag which, I had heard, had recently been agreed upon. The Bosnian Serb policeman moves quickly through the bus, checking passports, identity cards. All Serbs together, I think. I am the last passenger: now he signals to me, mimes the gesture of stamping a passport. Reluctantly, I get up to follow him. My invisibility has failed me, and I can only guess how many people are staring at me, the wretched Amerikanka, holding up the bus, as I climb off and follow the policeman into a small guard-house.

He leaves me with a fellow officer, a young man in a dark blue uniform who is viciously, depressingly handsome. The office is practically barren—two chairs, a table, no cupboards or fax machines or computers. Only a poster of a naked kneeling blonde on the wall, her breasts inflated like two giant canteloupes.

Never has the word Amerikanka caused me to cringe—yet hope—more than it does now; the Serb looks through my passport, he will see my transit visa for Yugoslavia but also my residence permit for Croatia; perhaps he will begin to give me a hard time, and yet I am so innocent in these matters I have no idea what to do, but sit calmly staring out the window at the river and at the dirty old bus, hoping it will not drive off without me and with my luggage filled with rare tapes of Bulgarian music. The Serb asks me where I am going, then asks where my visa is.

I look at him blankly, as guilelessly as possible. Have they changed the law in the last two weeks? I should have called the Bosnian embassy in Sofia. A visa for Bosnia? I ask stupidly in ungrammatical Serbo-Croatian which he will correct, both grammatically and politically: he puffs himself up with pride, and with a deep bass and an intonation I have never heard anywhere on earth—it would sound comic had so many lives not been lost, he believes what he is saying, he is defying the world—as he looks at this ridiculous American woman and says, defiantly, proudly, even triumphantly, Za Srpsku Republiku! For the Serb Republic!

But he must know that Bosnia is, as far as foreigners are concerned at least, all one country, that I do not need a visa, he knows this and he is just trying to see if, perhaps, I will try to bribe him, but my very guilelessness has quickly discouraged him, he knows he is wasting his time and he is stamping my passport, content with the fact that he has made his political point, puffed out his chest, and his eyes as he looks at me, handing me my passport, are not quite right, there is something wrong with this handsome man’s gaze, something drunken, crooked, warped, just enough for me to know that there was, perhaps, reason to be nervous, but now he is saying, in English, All right, thank you very much, and I answer in his language, grammatically this time—a point of honor—Thank you and Goodbye.

The bus is still there, resting, as if it knows it has a hard climb ahead, over Bosnia’s mountains, past snow-covered fields dotted with small wooden chalets. Achingly, desperately lovely country, like the Cévennes in France or the Jura mountains in Switzerland, only wilder, and more deserted, vivid with the sun on the snowfields and the knowledge of what happened here like a jagged prism, refracting vision.

Yet the scenes are bucolic, timeless: the long valley of the Drina, fjord-like; more hayricks in the snow, old women chopping wood; men driving horse-drawn carts. Only twice do I see SFOR vehicles, indolently parked at the edge of a town or village. There are isolated farmhouses, gutted by fire and weathered white by five winters; here and there graffiti in Cyrillic characters invoke the names of known war criminals, or of parties and politicians in recent elections.

The bus stops in a small town draped against a mountainside. Blankly, I watch the bus driver filling a water bottle: the engine has been overheating during the long climb to the town, and clouds of smoke have been rising from the floor of the bus. Then with a shock I realize that this town is Vlasenica: in California I had friends—Muslim refugees—from here. They often spoke to me not of the war but of the sweetness of their life here; there was no bitterness, only nostalgia. California could not compare.

The sun has warmed the bus; snow melts by the roadside where we stop for a break. I order a coffee and a sandwich. A small poster behind the bar proclaims the friendship of the Serbian and Greek peoples. Around me people drink coffees or brandies. No one talks to me.

Some time later the bus heads the opposite way from a sign posted Sarajevo and I have a moment’s uneasiness, and think my fears may have been confirmed when we enter a cheerful sunny ski resort and stop outside a small station, marked Pale. Some passengers begin climbing off, retrieving luggage. But after a few minutes the bus pulls away from the curb again. The streets are full of slush; women sit selling alcohol and cigarettes from tables on the sidewalk. I look in vain for either SFOR soldiers or Radovan Karadzic. According to the latest rumor circulating in Zagreb, he is in Moscow.

The bus enters a deep sunless gorge. By the sides of the road the earth is mangled, as if it had been worked by a giant angry hoe. Again I feel I am entering a no-man’s land, more a passage than a border; long tunnels reinforce the impression. And at the end of just such a tunnel there is again sunlight, and in the afternoon haze emerges the unreal vision of a lovely city in a valley, steaming in the sun, minarets climbing towards the sky. Sarajevo, at last. The bus winds along the gorge towards the town, along a hilltop past small homes with gardens, hens, then through a surreal landscape of destruction, then abruptly away again up a steep narrow road, as if struggling to leave the city. It is clear we are not headed for any central bus station. I observe the cars and taxis in the street: on the left-hand side of their license plates is the fleur-de-lys of the Muslim-Croat Federation. A line of taxis waits at the top of the hill; slightly further along is another row of taxis, this time with license plates bearing the shield of the Serb Republic and Cyrillic characters. We have crossed another, invisible border, marked only by taxis’ license plates. This then is the granica, the border within the country which cannot be crossed by those who would go home, those who would try to live together in peace. The border is within them, within their memories and pain; I can cross over this geographical border, but they cannot.

The bus crests the hill, dips down into farmland—you would not know there was a great city behind you—then pulls over to the side of the road, and we all climb out, retrieve our luggage. Some go to waiting cars or taxis; I follow a small group who begin to climb back up the hill. We cut across a muddy garden, past the Serbian taxis. There is a roadsign behind me, Kanton Sarajevo, with a red line through it, marking the actual demarcation between the two entities. I choose a big Mercedes taxi with a blue fleur-de-lys license plate and sit in front with the driver, as is customary. I feel relief, exhilaration; we chat briefly about the unseasonably warm weather as the taxi plunges again down the hill towards the river, towards the minarets. The driver is handsome and reminds me of my Bosnian friend in California.

During my stay in Sarajevo I will learn, among other things, that new license plates with no indication of ethnic or regional origin will be compulsory within six months for all of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

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