“That fine house,” you say, “the one I photographed last month, has burned down.”

“What happened?”

“Vandals set fire to it . . .”

I understand your liking for abandoned places. A photograph of a starry sky above unpopulated houses has a magnetic beauty. But when destructiveness overwhelms that state of abandonment and absence, such a place loses all its appeal. We roamed with flashlights through the derelict town, looking for subjects suitable for the cameras. But we found nothing. It’s not worth taking pictures here, we’ll have to wait for nature’s power once again to cover over the traces of human presence.

You gaze at the sky through your camera lens, while I can just make out in the darkness in front of me the ruined wall of a building, and I think of Fred, a fireman who turned up in Sarajevo during the war. He carried out various humanitarian tasks, he was useful, he used to leave the city, travel back to America, and keep coming back to our besieged city. After Sarajevo, in 1995, he went to Chechnya, and all trace of him was lost. He vanished. And in the eighties, somewhere in Latin America, he had fallen asleep, weary, in a hotel. In the morning he woke, looked out the window, and saw destroyed buildings as far as the eye could see. He opened his door and realized that he was on the edge of an abyss, because the corridor and stairs had collapsed. He had slept through an earthquake that had turned the whole town into a ruin. It had vanished.

From our hotel room I see airport lights, planes like fireflies take off and land.

“What airport is that?” I ask.

“Military! Beyond the runway is Area 51.”

I stand at the window and watch. For more than thirty years, on various continents, we have lived within reach of an airport. The apartment where I now live is some two hundred yards as the crow flies from the runway of a Washington airport (DCA). On my way to work, I like to stop in there and have a morning coffee surrounded by travelers, I find their passenger tension soothing, and perhaps I’m also encouraging myself with the thought that one morning instead of carrying on to work, I’ll buy a ticket and fly off out of my life. Our first airport was the one in Sarajevo. We moved there in the early 1980s. There was a restaurant called Kula near the eastern end of the runway. It was an unusual restaurant, as it was staffed by prisoners. On the whole, petty criminals, or at least that was the word in public, although I always suspected that there were murderers among them. Beside the restaurant building there was a tidily maintained plot where the prisoners tended vegetables, fruit, and domestic animals . . . We went there from time to time. And once, in the early summer, instead of a leisurely stroll to the restaurant, we went by a roundabout route and then a shortcut across a field of tall grasses. When we reached the restaurant garden Sanja’s face was swollen and red, her breathing difficult—we didn’t know what had happened to begin with, but we were to discover in the course of the day in the emergency room that she had had a violent allergic attack. For the following seven or eight years, she was seriously ill, but she coped bravely with her allergy. When the siege of Sarajevo began, at the end of April 1992, we moved to within reach of the hospital, because of her illness, so as to be closer to the doctors. But, interestingly, during the war her allergy almost completely disappeared and she had almost no need for medication. My acquaintance and colleague the poet Radovan Karadžić turned the restaurant into a concentration camp. Many of my friends were among the prisoners there. On the whole good people. In the world there is a rule that great suffering happens to the good people. Then, during the siege, I left the city several times through a tunnel under the runway, and came back, and in the end I left, crossing that same runway, perhaps forever.