The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans - By Simon Winchester Page 0,4

lurked what was then Enver Hoxha’s wildly xenophobic and aberrantly Maoist state of Albania.

When planning this trip I had very much wanted to get permission to go there: After all, I said in my letter to the nearest embassy, it seemed that Albania’s internal situation was already changing, and there had been some softening of the Maoist line in Tirana that very year. (The Chinese, themselves changing at the time, and becoming more friendly with the West, were growing exasperated with their small cheerleading section in the Balkans, and were dropping them from their dance card. The warped ideals of “revolutionary self-sufficiency,” which the Albanians seemed to have copied directly from Kim II Sung’s monstrous Juche—his insanely xenophobic plan for socialist self-sufficiency—in North Korea, were now being tried out on the Albanian masses.)

My plea went unheard, or at least unanswered, and so the most I could hope for was the vicarious thrill of knowing that these hills formed the frontier, and that there must be impenetrable fences and guard dogs lining the summits. Besides, there were Albanians here in Old Serbia, and I could tell something of what the people were like—if indeed they were at all similar to those in the home country. I supposed only that the Kosovo Albanians were different in one respect—that they at least had the comforts of Islam: Behind those distant ranges were only the exactions of Enver Hoxha and his unvarying strangeness. I was not to learn for many years that the Kosovo Albanians had exactions of their own, every bit as trying.

That day, as I scanned the horizons, it seemed that Albania was the only foreign state in evidence: Ahead, for another two hundred miles or more, ran the vastness of Yugoslavia. Only the scattering of softly gnarled old olive trees gave a clue to the fact that Greece lay beyond and far away. There was no marking here, no fence, no line on the road, no customs post or police checkpoint, to suggest that this mountain pass and the meadow at its end owed their significance to anything more than their being so pretty a place. We stayed for half an hour or so: I seem to recall we got out a tartan blanket and had our lunch beside the river. But my son tells me I was mistaken, and says he doesn’t remember the field at all.

We pressed on: That night we spent in the southern Yugoslavian town of Skopje, and we crossed the old Turkish bridge and watched the old men smoking pensively as they gazed down into the river. We saw the ruins from the earthquake that had ruined the city in 1963. We drank sweet coffee and ate kebabs. And then we took off, emerging from behind the Iron Curtain, and headed for Thessaloníki and Alexandropolis, then for Istanbul and, by ferry in those days (the two huge suspension bridges had not then been built), we lurched across the Bosporus into Asia. After another two weeks, by way of Tabriz and Tehran, Herat and Kandahar, and the Khyber and Peshawar and the frontier at Wagah, we were in India. The troubles in India were wild and manifest, too, and for years the Balkans faded into our collective memories. No one ever said: “Remember the man who filled up the car in Pec?” or, “Remember the field by that cement factory called General Jankovic?”—because the Balkans were peaceful in those times, and we had no compelling reason to think of them.

But twenty-two years later I was to come back quite unexpectedly, and under decidedly different circumstances. Whatever vague suggestions of misery and hatred may have remained as wisps of memory from that first journey were impossibly and unimaginably compounded on the second—and never more so than when I saw that water meadow again, with a gasp of realization. It was all so terribly different a situation, the worst one could imagine, when I rounded a curve in a road and said to my companions, “My God! I’ve been here once before!”

It was late March 1999, and I had just been on a peculiar journey in Ireland. I had been summoned back from the United States by lawyers for the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, which had been reopened by the British government in tacit recognition that there had been shortcomings in the earlier investigation into killings by soldiers of the British army’s Parachute Regiment on the streets of Londonderry in 1971. It was when I was leaving that one of