In Europe

you've ruined everything, even for your children and grandchildren? That kind of courage, that's what's missing here. But let me tell you: we've had the wars, and now nothing is moving any more, nothing changes, it's all just standing still!’
    It's been snowing for days, and now a cold, heavy fog has blown in as well. No planes are leaving. At a certain point, though, you notice that it
is
something after all, just to quietly watch the snowflakes fall outside the window of the To Be or Not to Be.
    Then suddenly, that same evening, I have the chance to get away. I catch a ride with Esad Mavrić through the winter night, to Split; don't ask me how he does it, but he does it. We go slipping into the mountains, weave around an avalanche, wait behind a bogged-down SFOR convoy. ‘Now we're thirty-five kilometres from Sarajevo,’ Esad says after three hours. It has stopped snowing.
    Esad was once a civil engineer and championship sharpshooter, butthat was in a past too distant to measure. He has two families to support. We talk about the siege, about what you could do with one plastic bottle full of water – make tea, brush your teeth, wash your shirt, even take your Sunday bath – and about the never-ending cold, about the thick pile of blankets under which you spent your days. ‘I had the loveliest dreams back in those days, I've never had dreams like that since,’ Esad sighs as he manoeuvres around a stranded bus. The moon is shining over the mountains. The villages are asleep beneath the thick layer of Balkan snow.
    He talks about the secret tunnel, the lifeline to the free zone, and the smuggling that went on. Water was extremely precious. ‘One time I saw an older man who had tapped too much water at the spring beside the brewery, two ten-litre jerry cans. They were so heavy that he couldn't move quickly any more. He was crossing a field and they got him right away. Two boys saw him go down. They took a gamble: one of them drew the sniper's fire, the other one risked his life by running to where the man lay, grabbing the jerry cans and then racing off. They left the man lying there.’
    Esad reminds me of the statistics: of the 400,000 inhabitants of Sarajevo, 11,000 were killed during the siege, including more than 1,100 children.
    Then suddenly we are out of the snow and approaching Mostar. Ruin after ruin looms up in the silvery night, one scorched and blasted housing block after the other. The river thunders past the world-famous remains of the sixteenth-century bridge. How lovely it must have been once, how impressive, how powerfully built. Those who blew that ancient span to rubble – and that must have been quite a chore – knew what they were doing: they were breaking down what had been built up. It is the same mentality which lay behind the destruction of Dubrovnik and the famous library at Sarajevo. ‘It was the farmers getting back at the city,’ Esad mumbles. ‘That's what happened everywhere during these wars. It was maybe even the heart of the matter.’
    The next morning there is the warm sun on the quayside in Split, the sparkling sea, the hissing of the waves rolling in from Italy. And that evening, as though it were the most normal thing in the world, I findmyself wandering around the Christmas market in Strasbourg again. African men are selling socks with little coloured lights on them. A busker is singing Yiddish songs. Turkish boys are sweeping the streets. For a handful of francs, a travel agency is offering a weekend in New York. The Alsatian gingerbread smells of Christmas, 1900.

Epilogue
    THESE FINAL LINES ARE BEING WRITTEN IN SUMMER 2006. IT WAS only six and a half years ago, on Friday, 31 December, 1999, that the headline in
De Telegraaf
, the Netherlands’ highest-circulation newspaper, crowed: ‘We're rolling in it! Party-going Holland smothered in luxury.’ The champagne was no longer sold by the bottle but by the crate, the Dutch were dressing ‘chicly and eccentrically’ for the party, and the traditional New Year's Eve beignet was steadily losing ground to ‘exclusive delicatessen products’. When I came home from my travels, everyone was talking about a television series in which one could follow, around the clock, the activities of a group of young people who had been locked up together in a house for three months, with no contact with the outside world. What the viewers saw was, above all, themselves: people hanging around in boredom on the couch, in the