Thursday, July 10th 2008

I got a tram from near Haris's place to Sarajevo train station. It was in the newer, less fantastic part of town, with a large quiet square in front of it called "Srebrenica Massacre Square". So often in Bosnia it was easy to begin to forget what had gone on during the 1990s, but there were always reminders.

The train to Mostar was a few hours late. It arrived in Sarajevo at the same time as a train heading for Zagreb, and neither station nor train seemed to indicate which one was which. I got on the one that had come into the platform I was on, stood by the door in case I felt the need to jump out suddenly, watched the station recede and then uncertainly decided to take a seat. If I'd accidentally got the Zagreb train, then I would just go to Zagreb. Why not? There was only me and one other person in my compartment and I asked him, in a patronising traveller-style gesturing sort of way, if this was the Mostar train. He replied in normal English that it was.

We started talking. He was called Sasha, and he was a Bosnian Serb, about the same age as Haris. He was a metaller, bearded, long-haired and dressed in black. He told me of the constant grief anyone who looks a bit alternative gets from the police in Bosnia. He said all the police were uneducated country boys and would stop and search him at pretty much every opportunity.

A native of Herzegovina, he said it bothered him a bit that everyone calls the country "Bosnia" when really it's "Bosnia and Herzegovina". But his Herzegovina nationalism was not particularly serious and he was generally more concerned with enjoying being a student in Mostar. We talked a bit about the war, and he said he thought Bosnia was healing, slowly. But I remembered Haris saying he just didn't know if he could ever be friends with a Serb, after all the horrors he'd lived through. I wondered what would happen if these two good people ever met. Would they get on, or would the legacy of the brutality be too great?

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