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.

“Area 51, you say?”