A Q & A with Dan Fesperman

Q: How did you get the experience to write this book?

A: I traveled to Bosnia about a dozen times to cover the war between the spring of '93 and the late summer of '96, usually for a few weeks at a time, and on about half those trips I spent time in Sarajevo. It was one of those places where you always had your notebook out because of the surreal atmosphere, the odd sights--some of them horrible and some of them quite moving. It's a beautiful country, lots of wooded hills and mountains, rushing streams, a little bit like driving through West Virginia. You still saw ox carts and mule carts in some places, pulling high loads of hay in the fall. Men and boys carrying handmade wooden pitchforks. Then you'd come across some trench between farm villages where a few of the men would be manning the line, either with Kalashnikovs or with old guns they'd laid aside back in World War II. The people in the next village would be the enemy, after having lived right next door in peace for the previous fifty years. Sarajevo was a different story, a cosmopolitan place with a lot of cafŽs and a lot of young people. But in both places you had the same surreal mix--bullets and shells flying around at times, and people trying to act as if they could still lead a normal life. You couldn't help but absorb a lot of this, and even when I wasn't writing about it for the newspaper I found myself wanting to describe it, the whole sense of the place, through some of the more telling details. So by the time I sat down to start on the book, this stuff was oozing out of my pores. It's not like I had to keep looking at a notebook, you just soak it up.

As for the writing preparation, I've been working with words for years. And while I've written a few short stories and had the ideas for a couple of novels percolating in my head for a while, this was the first time I'd sat down and actually tried to put one together. The odd thing was that it felt do-able from the beginning. Once I had a first chapter and had sketched out Vlado as the main character I knew where I wanted to take him and that I'd be able to finish. There was never a sense of a false start to the effort, which made it easier to keep going despite some long interruptions, usually for further travels for the newspaper.

Q: Were you ever caught in a war zone yourself?

A: I was fortunate enough to never be caught in the middle of a firefight in Bosnia. That tended to happen more out in the countryside if you drove into a smaller town without pausing first to see what might be going on. In Sarajevo you were always in the middle of things, although the intensity of the shooting seemed to vary by the hour, sometimes by the minute. On heavy days a few thousands shells would fall, which sounds like a lot but spreads out pretty thin in the course of 24 hours, and ends up being background noise as long as nothing is landing close. The Holiday Inn, where I stayed (and so do the journalists in the book) took a few hits one night while everyone was sleepingÑhuge roars that shook the entire building, hitting about four floors below my room. You could see some strange sights out your window at nightÑtracer fire, that kind of stuff. One night, quite late, a machine gun kept going off, so I finally took a peak from my fifth floor window and saw a muzzle flash from somewhere across the road out in front of the hotel. It was toward the "No Man's Land" area between the two front lines, and a Serb soldier must have sneaked across from his line. He was firing at every armored UN vehicle that drove by.

I also covered the Gulf War in '91, and to avoid the press restrictions a colleague and I got military haircuts and khaki uniforms so we could make it past the checkpoints during the big advance on the first day of the ground war. We eventually hooked up with an Egyptian armored division that was attacking but meeting very little resistance. They didn't seem to mind us tagging along (the brigadier general at the front of the column even let us in his armored vehicle during a pause to check his maps, which were far better than ours). That took us past the Iraqi front lines, where thousands of troops were surrendering. We interviewed a few of them and peeled off on our own across a desert highway toward Kuwait City. Along the way we picked up 10 unarmed Iraqi soldiers who were wandering around with a white flagÑa t-shirt on a stickÑand no food, looking for someone to surrender to. Two of them spoke pretty good English, so they piled in and on top of our vehicle and we drove them back to a Saudi Arabian infantry column we'd passed a few miles before. It was that kind of a war, moving so fast that it became sort of an unlikely joyride, when at the beginning we'd been pretty terrified at the prospect of advancing at all. Had the Iraqis been putting up much of a fight I doubt we'd have had the stomach to have gone so far so fast.

Q: How much liberty did you take in terms of character and plot when turning fact to fiction?

A: Pretty much every character in the book is entirely from imagination. I didn't model any of them after anyone in particular with the exception of the gypsy woman who has killed her husband, who has a minor role in the second. It's the setting that sticks to the facts, because the facts of daily life were so bizarre and compelling. I was always fascinated by the little things people did to get by, not just their survival techniques for getting food and water but also the small rituals and routines they adopted to try and convince themselves that life could still have a certain rhythm, a semblance of normalcy. As for plot, some of the background--the tyranny of the smugglers and the black marketers, the attempted crackdown by the authorities and its predictable dubious results--was drawn from what I saw and heard, with some of my own embellishments and twists to suit the story or to suit the characters. There was a certain level of funny business going on with art works, too, and while nothing like the smuggling scheme I described was apparently going on (to my knowledge) I did run it by a Council of Europe art preservation person who described it as "quite plausible." And there was a genuine element of "culturecide" being committed by all sides in the war--a conscious effort to wipe out certain churches, icons, artworks, etc.--an effort to bury the enemy's culture along with its people.

Q: Where did you get your inspiration for Investigator Petric?

A: No one in particular, really. He did share the circumstances of quite a few men of his age--alone, family evacuated to safety, trying to hold down the fort and last out the war as best he could. I wanted to make him a loner, a man who hadn't really taken sides and who'd begun to play things a bit too safely. And, yes, it's possible to do that even in a war zone. You ran across a lot of people there who, like Vlado, were trying to strike that difficult balance between being careful and living with some gusto, of trying not to lose either hope or sanity.

Q: Can we expect a sequel?

A: I'm working on one. It opens in Berlin, with Vlado living with his family about four years later. He ends up back in Bosnia, trying to hunt down a war criminal. He'll be out and about a lot more in this one. And by easing some of the claustrophobia of a siege, he'll open up some, too. Enough said for now, I suppose.

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