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turned pale with incipient dawn. Then I went into our room, sat on the chair, and watched Talena sleep, peaceful and beautiful, her slender body curled up like she was cold, her face half-obscured by her long dark hair. I loved her. I wondered if she still loved me. I knew she had at one point, very much, but I also knew that she could not love someone she did not respect, not for very long.
   I knew it was too late to save what we had. Much too late.
   Unless something extraordinary happened.

Chapter 4 Mostar Tigers
    “Paul? Are you okay?”
   I opened my eyes. Talena was sitting on the bed, looking at me, concerned. I had fallen asleep sitting on the chair.
“Sure,” I said slowly, still slightly dazed.
   “What…why did you sleep on the chair?” Her voice half-incredulous, half-accusatory.
   “I didn’t sleep much. I was up most of the night.”
   “Why? What happened?”
   “I’ll tell you over breakfast,” I said.
   We dressed and had bread and sliced meat and yoghurt and Turkish coffee in one of the many cafes in the nearby Bascarsija district, a cobblestoned warren straight out of the Ottoman Empire. I told her about my encounter with the little boy and the smugglers. I tried to make the story into a lighthearted anecdote, but her expression as she listened was grim. She let me finish but I could tell she wanted to interrupt and chastise me on several occasions.
   “You make them sound charming,” she said when I was finished. “You and your friendly neighbourhood gangsters. Jesus, Paul, how could you have been so stupid? They’re monsters. You understand that? They’re rapists and murderers and…and…and I can’t believe you’re sitting here cheerfully talking about it like you had a fun little adventure and you saved a child and you’re all proud of it now. Those people are practically going to be slaves, you know. Those women will all be raped. Every one of them. And you, you should never have gotten involved. You should have just kept walking. You don’t know how lucky you are you walked away. If they weren’t in a good mood, if you weren’t a foreigner, they would have beaten you to a pulp just to teach you to keep your nose out of their business, you might never have walked again, that’s the way this country works, you understand? And then you went and told this Sinisa where you were staying, told him the truth, maybe your little adventure it isn’t even over yet, maybe they’ll change your mind and come find you, find us, wouldn’t that be fun? I can’t – I just can’t believe you. I would never have imagined that you would do something so reckless and stupid and then act like this. Like you’re so fucking proud of it.”
   “I’m sorry,” I mumbled, wilting in the face of her righteous wrath, looking down at the table, away from her icy blue eyes. “I’m sorry.”
   But that was a lie. Lack of sleep had caught up with me despite the jet-fuel Turkish coffee, and I was too tired to argue, but I wasn’t sorry for what I had done. I was sorry that I had upset Talena, I appreciated that what I had done was foolish and reckless, but she was right when she said I was proud.
   After the silent remainder of our breakfast we gathered our packs and took a streetcar to the bus station. The Croat/Muslim station. Postwar Sarajevo had two bus stations, at opposite ends of the city, one for the Serb-controlled part of the country – the Republika Srpska, a name which always reminded me of the satirical Onion article “Clinton Deploys Vowels To Bosnia” – and one for everywhere else. A typically crazy consequence of the ethnic fault lines that had cracked Bosnia open like an egg.
   ‘Ethnic’ isn’t really the right word. Serbs, Croats, and Muslims are physically indistinguishable and their spoken language differs only in accent if at all. Religion was the theoretical dividing line, Orthodox vs Catholic vs Islam, but prewar Bosnia had been