the radio girl who kept the morale of the front-line troops during the endless nights in the trenches. She would run a kind of radio quiz, singing them songs, making them guess the titles as well as guessing the color of her dress, what she did last night, what was in her fridge, and whatever else. She embraced the war fully and it embraced her in return. In her apartment she keeps her lover's helmet, pierced by the fatal bullet.
In that top-floor apartment -- its walls covered with writing in Cyrillic, quotations from poems, sentences like "God is Dead. Nietzsche," "Nietzsche's dead. God," portraits of famous Serbian writers -- you find leftovers of the war: a rocket launcher with a single dried flower issuing from it, pictures of men in uniform, abutted with images clipped from fashion magazines. Barely 30, she thinks she is finished. She does not understand her fate. She thinks that the Serbs were the winners of the war and yet they have to leave. She does not know where she is going, but she knows she has to go -- not so much because of her past in the army as because she is a Serbian language teacher. She explains how the language, which used to be one in the old Yugoslavia, Serbo-Croatian, is now slowly dividing into three languages that each seek their individuality and their difference. So now that Bosnian Croats and Serbs no longer call coffee by the same word, she thinks she would have no place in Sarajevo.
Like most who are leaving she loves Sarajevo. She dreams from a distance of taking the tramway again, going to the coffee shop, seeing her old friends. The future brings her only visions of an exile among the peasants in the marshes of Serbdom in some remote small town of eastern Bosnia, "ethnically cleansed" from its Muslim inhabitants. She drinks, and as she drinks she candidly lets her feelings and her despair rip out.
Looking for her a few weeks later we discover that she had left Vogosca to take refuge in a ski station in the mountains near Pale. The snow was two meters high where she lived surrounded by screaming children parked inside single-occupancy rooms. Ratko Mladic, the caudillo of the Bosnian Serb army, was skiing outside for the cameras.
