It was a dangerous thing to do, of course: The driver was taking an icy road very fast, and the explosion of snow against his windshield must have made him jump right out of his skin. We didn’t think of that, though; we just watched in puzzlement as the truck bucked to a stop. And then the driver’s side door flew open and a man jumped out. And everyone started to run.
I don’t know why he picked me, but he did. My friends scattered into the forest, no one saying a word, and when I looked back, the man was after me. He was so angry that strange grunts were coming out of him. I had never seen an adult that enraged. I ran harder and harder, but to my amazement, he just kept coming. We were all alone in the forest now, way out of earshot of my friends; it was just a race between him and me. I knew I couldn’t afford to lose it; the man was too crazy, too determined, and there was no one around to intervene. I was on my own. Adventura—what must happen will happen.
Before I knew it, the man had drawn to within a few steps of me. Neither of us said a word; we just wallowed on through the snow, each engaged in our private agonies. It was a slow-motion race with unimaginable consequences. We struggled on for what seemed like miles but in reality was probably only a few hundred yards; the deep snow made it seem farther. In the end I outlasted him. He was a strong man, but he spent his days behind the wheel of a truck—smoking, no doubt—and he was no match for a terrified kid. With a groan of disgust he finally stopped and doubled over, swearing at me between breaths.
I kept running. I ran until his shouts had died out behind me and I couldn’t stand up anymore, and then I collapsed in the snow. It was completely dark and the only sounds were the heaving of the wind through the trees and the liquid slamming of my heart. I lay there until I was calm, and then I got up and slowly made my way back to the resort. It felt as if I’d been someplace very far away and had come back to a world of tremendous frivolity and innocence. It was all lit up, peals of laughter coming from the bar, adults hobbling back and forth in ski boots and brightly colored parkas. “I’ve just come back from some other place,” I thought. “I’ve just come back from some other place these people don’t even know exists.”
THE FORENSICS OF WAR
1999
Homo homini lupus. (Man is a wolf to man.)
No one knows who he was, but he almost got away. He broke and ran when the Serbs started shooting, and he made it to a thicket before the first bullet hit him in the left leg. It must have missed the bone, because he was able to keep going—along the edge of a hayfield and then into another swath of scrub oak and locust. There was a dry streambed in there, and he probably crouched in the shadows, listening to the bursts of machine-gun fire and trying to figure out a way to escape. The thicket stretched uphill, along the hayfield, to a stand of pine trees, and from there it was all woods and fields leading to the Albanian border. It didn’t offer much of a chance, and he must have known that.
He tied a sweater around the wound in his thigh and waited. Maybe he was too badly hurt to keep moving, or maybe he didn’t dare because the Serbs were already along the edge of the field. Either way, they eventually spotted him and shot him in the chest, and he fell backward into the streambed. His killers took his shoes, and—months later, after the war ended—a fellow Albanian took his belt buckle and brought it to the authorities in Gjakovë. It was the only distinctive thing on him, and there was a chance that someone might recognize it.
I saw the dead man in late June, two weeks after NATO had taken Kosovo from the Serbs. It was a hot day, and my photographer and I stood peering at his corpse, in the same mottled shade that the man had tried to hide in. His skull was broken open, and his jawbone was a short distance away. The sweater was still tied around his leg. I had walked into the thicket braced for the worst, but he wasn’t particularly hard to look at. He’d been killed two months earlier—on April 27, around midday—and he looked less like a person than a tipped-over hatrack draped in blue jeans and a cheap parka. The young man who had led us there leaned on a shepherd’s crook and told us that the dead man was in his early twenties and had probably come from a nearby village. The Serbs had swept the valley from Junik to Gjakovë in retaliation for an attack by the Kosovo Liberation Army, which for two years has fought for independence for Kosovo. They’d taken the men from more than half a dozen little villages and gunned them down in a field outside Meja. Then they came back in the middle of the night to bury them. They missed a few.
The shepherd identified himself as Bashkim; he was a handsome blond kid with a wispy goatee and a shy smile that never left his face. “They came at five A.M.—not shooting, just yelling,” Bashkim said. “They made two hundred people lie down against a compost heap, piled cornhusks on them, and then machine-gunned them. Then they set them on fire…. It was local militia from Gjakovë. They were wearing green camouflage and black ski masks. One of them was called Stari; all the women saw him. They recognized him from Gypsy Road, about five kilometers from here.”
Meja was just a scattering of tile-roofed farmhouses along a dirt road in the middle of a broad agricultural valley. Wheat and hayfields gave way to brush-covered hills and then the Koritnik Mountains, which run along the Albanian border. Bashkim had escaped the roundup of men in the valley because he was in an isolated house that the Serbs missed. While telling the story, he seemed undisturbed by the massacres, his own close call, or even the body at his feet. He just kept smiling and smoking the American cigarettes we offered him. After twenty minutes or so, he led us back into the hot sun of the hayfield and past the compost heap where the men had been shot. There was a human leg in the grass, and then another leg, and then more remains in a ditch. They were harder to identify. Stuck into the compost heap was an old umbrella. “Why is that there?” I asked.
“It was found near one of the bodies,” Bashkim said. “Maybe someone will recognize it and know who he was.”
The worst of the violence didn’t come to southwestern Kosovo until the evening of March 24, when NATO jets streaked overhead on their way to bomb command and control targets in Serbia. Within hours Serb special police, soldiers, and hastily deputized militia units were walking through the streets of nearby Gjakovë, pumping incendiary rounds, known locally as butterflies, into houses and storefronts in the Albanian part of town. When the buildings finished burning, the Serbs knocked the walls over with bulldozers and then used Gypsies to clear the rubble from the streets so that they were passable for tanks. Anyone who stood around and watched was shot.
There was little the KLA could do but hide in the hills and wait for it to be over. In two years of fighting, the KLA never won a battle or held a town for long, but it did know how to ambush. And in mid-April, just outside Meja, it pulled off an ambush that would bring the full wrath of the Serbs down on the valley.
Its target was a Serb commander named Milotin Prasović, who was particularly loathed by the local Albanians. A week or so earlier, Prasović had driven through Meja warning the residents that he was going to return to collect all the weapons in town, and if there weren’t any for him, he’d burn their houses down. True to his word, he came back in a brick-red Audi filled with police. They drove through town, shot into the air, turned around, and drove straight into a KLA ambush. The first rocket-propelled grenade blew the right rear door off. That was followed by another round and sheets of automatic-weapons fire. Everyone in the car was killed except for Prasović, who managed to dive out of his seat and start shooting back from the edge of the road. It was over within seconds; the KLA shot him down from their hiding place and then retreated into the hills above town.