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one of the more secular places on Earth, and it still seemed a whole lot less religious than the good old USA. It didn’t matter. Despite all their similarities, each side had found plenty of reasons to hate and slaughter the other two.
   Postwar Bosnia was a stable place only because stability had been forced upon it by thousands of NATO troops. Without them it would have fragmented in weeks. People paid lip service to Bosnia being a single indivisible nation, but it was effectively partitioned into the Republika Srpska and the Bosnia-Herzegovina Federation, which in turn seemed to be subdivided into the largely Muslim Bosnian Federation and Croat-dominated Herzegovina. Sarajevo itself seemed a quasi-independent entity. My Lonely Planet guide claimed that the presidency rotated between the three ethnicities every six months, and the ruling cabinet was equally divided among them, which meant that it never reached any decisions at all because each side vetoed all propositions brought by either of the other two, which was fine because in practice NATO completely ignored the cabinet and made all the country’s important decisions and would for the foreseeable future. Like everything else in Bosnia, half tragedy and half farce.
   At least the bus station was halfway civilized; snack shops selling various configurations of meat and starch, kiosks of junk food and newspapers, computer-printed bus tickets. We boarded the 8:40 bus to Mostar, off to visit Saskia, Talena’s half-sister.
   The bus was more comfortable than I expected. I dozed through most of the three-hour ride. During my periods of waking I saw to my surprise that Bosnia was an achingly pretty country. The road followed a rushing river, its water a deep pure blue, along breathtaking gorges and canyons, up and down high rocky hills covered with thick wild forest, past lazy scenic postcard vistas where the river grew fat and slow for a few miles before narrowing into whitewater cataracts. The hills were as craggy and rugged as any I had ever seen. Geography alone explained why Bosnia had been the poorest, most backward, least developed part of Yugoslavia. Sarajevo had been a thoroughly modern and cosmopolitan city. It still was, albeit a crippled one. But most of the rest of Bosnia was rough and wild. A natural haven for mystics, misfits, outlaws and smugglers.
   Or, as the nineties had shown, a haven for slavering hatred, concentration camps, mass rape, mass murder, torture, slaughter and genocide. A natural home for war and for warlords.
   “I’m nervous,” Talena said, when we were about half an hour away.
   “About what?”
   “Seeing Saskia again. I know it’s stupid. But I’m nervous.”
   “That she’ll be different? Or that you’ve become different?”
   “Of course we’ll be different,” she said impatiently. “We’ve had eight very different years since I last saw her. I think we’ll still get along fine. I’m nervous that she’s miserable.”
   “What does she say in her emails?”
   “She always says things are fine…but the way she says it…It always follows a list of things that are definitely not fine. And she hardly ever writes about her husband, and when she does it’s just a really quick thing about how he’s really a good man after all, always winds up sounding like she’s trying to convince herself. But, you know, email, no context, no nuance, maybe I’m reading too much into it.”
   “Is she jealous that you went to America?”
   She nodded. “Sure. Everyone was jealous. Most of my friends applied for that scholarship, and I was the only one who got it. Saskia was the only one who had enough space left over after being jealous to be happy for me too. I tried to bring her over, you know. In 1997. Two years after I came to America. She wasn’t married yet, and she had this temporary breakup with Dragan. I tried to sponsor her as an immigrant. It’s supposed to be easier for family