Excerpts

I’d shut down my modest Washington, DC, law practice representing indigent clients in various capacities, both criminal and civil, before the DC Superior Court. I’d rented out my centrally located condominium for eighteen months. I had no pressing personal attachments holding me back. I was nearly old enough to be the father to the American Gen Xers that packed the city center, and leaving for Prague had been a bit more involved than just hopping on a plane. Nevertheless, after several years of dreaming and scheming, I was excited to be here, thrilled to have finally committed myself to something, though I knew not exactly what.”

“After the occupation Jana’s father returned to Dečin, but wasn’t able to live in the home where he had been brought up because he was single at the time and the communists reassigned what they deemed a proper family- sized home to another family. All that remained was a mid-sized piece of property bought by Jana’s grandfather where he’d intended to build a home one day, before the war interrupted those plans. Sixty years later there was still no money to build a home on the property, but Jana’s father walked, or, on the days his arthritis was acting up, took the bus the three kilometers to work the simple garden that gave him such delight and remains the legacy of Jana’s father’s father to this day.

Like so many of his generation, clearly whipsawed by the compound disasters of both the Nazis and communists in the most personal and brutal fashion, Jana’s father evinced no sign of lasting bitterness or self- pity. On the contrary, he made the best of things. Among other subjects, Jana’s father ended up teaching the language of the first occupiers, while Jana’s mother ended up teaching the language of the second. Jana’s family received no compensation of any kind for their ill-treatment, nor would it ever occur to them that they had been shortchanged. An American sense of entitlement found little solace here.”

“When I first met Jana her hair was still long, worn frequently up or in a ponytail, with bangs down to her eyebrows, a sort of Czech girl-next-door, Beach Blanket Bingo look. She wore a touch of henna in her hair, and each time it was applied it came out slightly differently. It never came out lurid pink or garish purple, as was so often the case among the middle aged or older henna-hooked Czech set, but at times it did come out a surprisingly punky gothic black. Usually it came out more subdued, just a reddish tint to what I imagined to be her natural medium-dark brown hair. I confess I wondered what color her hair really was, and was somewhat surprised to learn years later, just before her hair fell out from chemotherapy treatment, that there wasn’t a gray hair on her head.

Jana had brown eyes that matched her brown hair, so she was by no means the prototypical blue eyed blond girl-woman that middle aged foreigners typically hope to hook up with. That’s not to say she wasn’t beautiful, but beautiful in a real world way. As Nancy, my friend from CDFE and a youngish looking forty-year-old herself, said to me on more than one occasion, “You’re one of the few middle-aged American men I know in Prague who ended up with an actual adult.”

“On the outskirts of town there was a particularly horrible building that lay in ruin, pieces of cement clinging to rebar dangling in improbable, seemingly impossible, contortion. It was simply achingly hideous. I passed it on my way into town and felt the lump in my throat well up that never completely went away. Now as I looked at it again, I glanced over at the woman and her husband. They both looked over at the building. How could they not? Everyone in the bus looked at the building. But, in near unison, they all quickly turned away, and determinedly stared straight ahead.

I’m not quite sure why I felt compelled to come to Bosnia in the first place. But just when I’d given up trying to understand anything at all of what really transpired here, I realized I’d stumbled onto something only in my urgency to escape. The pockmarked landscape and buildings spoke of battles past, but the scars of the Sarajevo soul were well disguised, all but hidden to me, until I happened upon this particular Sarajevo bus.”

“It’s not just communism and totalitarianism that have been misread and kept alive well into the twenty-first century. In the spring of 2014, 40,000 Russian troops stood at the ready on the Ukrainian border, after already taking Crimea. By mid-summer Ukraine was out of the headlines, but only because seemingly more ominous events in the Mideast at least temporarily emerged, and then in the fall we were told to brace ourselves for a long drawn out war. Suddenly the Cold War appeared to be back, or did it ever really go away? Was the Cold War solely a clash of incompatible politics as widely perceived, or was politics in large part a pretext for old-fashioned, clashing nationalist ambitions?

The Ukrainian situation is presented by the American media as some madness that appeared out of the blue, but nothing could be further from the truth. This day has been twenty-five years in the making.”