The discussion in the little room lasted for over an hour. The window was closed – indeed, it looked to be sealed – and it was not long before they started to sweat and grow irritable. Emil, his beard shaved to the contour of his jaw, delivered a concise though thoroughly partisan analysis of Balkan politics, while the young woman, with her narrow skull, her high cheekbones, her face sloping back to the eyes, where the skin was slightly puffy and discoloured as if she were not quite well, a chronic insomniac perhaps, confined herself to asides about the international conspiracy of indifference that ignored those disasters it found unprofitable to address: the ‘no oil’ argument. László played devil’s advocate. When Emil asserted that the Albanian people, in the guise of the ancient Illyrians, had been the true first inhabitants of Kosovo, he pointed out that there was no real evidence for this, no monuments or reliable texts, nothing but a few fragile linguistic coincidences. Was it not the case that the independence movement in Kosovo was another scheme for the old ambition of a Greater Albania? And what of the legality of it? Why should the Serbs give it away?

‘You defend Miloševi?’ asked the young woman. She could barely keep her seat.

‘Milošević,’ said László, ‘is a cynical and dangerous man. In fact I believe he is mentally ill. But is this about Milošević? It feels like a tribal matter. A blood feud.’

He thought she might slap him for this, but Emil laid a hand on her arm and switched the talk to Bosnia. He spoke of the massacre at Srebrenica, the camps at Omarska and Manjaca, of killers like Arkan and Mirko Jović, and the systematic rape of women and girls by men who masked their faces because they were neighbours.

‘This will happen in Kosovo too,’ he said. ‘Trust me. It will all happen again. At least the Bosnians had an army of sorts. They could fight back.’

‘And you have exhausted all peaceful means?’ asked László. He glanced at the young woman, from whose slender limbs there seemed to emanate a convincing shimmer of violence. ‘Ibrahim Rugova seems a genuinely good man.’