The Trigger (11 page)

Arnie and I drank our coffee eagerly. Coffee in Bosnia is served piping hot, prepared in the old Turkish style, with the coffee grinds swirling thickly inside the mixture as it is brought to the boil in a pan, before being poured unfiltered into cups. The trick is to let the grinds settle before taking your first silent whistle of a sip, or else risk a gritty mouthful. Some drinkers use a single drop of cold water from a spoon to draw the grinds to the bottom, but I prefer simply to wait. Never stir.

And never, in post-war Bosnia, make the mistake of calling it Turkish coffee. Just as the name of the local language has become loaded, so it is with coffee. When sitting with Bosnian Serbs, you drink Serbian coffee; with Bosnian Croats, Croatian coffee; and with Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian coffee. Such linguistic gymnastics feel unnecessary, obscuring as they do the historical roots of coffee. It was Ottoman traders who spread its magic from where it was first enjoyed in distant Yemen, at the south-east extreme of the empire. Camel trains slowly cast the beans across the Arab world, through Anatolia and eventually into Ottoman holdings in Europe. Much of the spread was driven by pure commerce, but occasional accidents added happily to its dispersal. When one of the Ottoman sieges of Vienna was broken, the story goes that sacks of coffee beans were discovered in abandoned Turkish positions. They were taken as war booty into the city by an enterprising Austrian – the origin of Vienna’s famous coffee-house culture.

Already thirsty from the morning’s efforts, while our ‘Serbian’ coffee cooled I helped myself to extra servings of drenjak, a drink I had never tried before. It was sweet without being sickly, perfect to rehydrate with. ‘Home-made,’ Sonja said proudly, swinging her arm in the direction of Tent Mountain. ‘We gather the berries up there in the hills. We have our own orchard for plum brandy, our own hives for honey and a big vegetable garden. We have to look after ourselves because the winters are hard. Last winter we had three metres of snow and could not get out of the valley for weeks.’

The self-sufficiency of local families was intriguing, although I found it double-edged. It might chime with modern theories of back-to-basics rural living, but I could not help thinking how it contributes to the turbulent history of this land. An atomistic society of individuals or small family groups provides a seedbed for ethnic rivalry – communities that see no virtue in coming together in the spirit of the modern nation state, defining themselves not by their similarity to the next community along the valley, but by their distinctiveness, their ability to survive alone.

Mile explained to Sonja that we were planning to walk to the top of Mount Šator, a venture she found a little strange, pointing out that there was a serviceable jeep track up to the lake that Mile had already mentioned. Mile said something about us wanting to travel on foot, as Princip had done, and Sonja beamed. Mention of the valley’s most famous son was something she clearly approved of. Their conversation drifted on, and after a polite interval I raised the question that weighed on my mind: could Sonja say if there were any landmines left over from the war on our route?

‘Oh yes, there are mines up there,’ she said. ‘But the trail through the forest is safe enough, if you see it has recently been walked on. Lower down in the meadows make sure you walk where the grass has been scythed. After the war we did not know for sure where the mines were, but every year we cut more and more ground for hay. Wherever you see the hay has been cut you will be safe.’ It is from the farming community of Bosnia that a dozen or so victims are killed each year.

The long walk ahead left us no time to dawdle, so after filling our water bottles in the kitchen – another room yeasty from energetic home-making – we said our goodbyes to Sonja and her family, her children nodding mutely at us from the balcony. We headed through the garden, past old car tyres that had been elegantly cut and tulipped inside-out to make flower pots. The footpath we were aiming for could be seen snaking up a hillside above an orchard of fruit trees. I was glad to see Sonja had a firm hold of Alba’s collar, but just to make sure, I kept half an eye looking back over my shoulder until we were safely through the orchard and off Aćamović land.

The gradient stiffened and we adopted the slow and steady method for hills: little steps, lots of them, without resting. In places the grassy hillside had been worn through to the gravel below, and the path grew so steep it scrunched into a concertina of hairpins. Soon we were too breathless to speak, climbing, climbing, climbing. After an hour Mile’s mobile phone rang and I was glad for the break as he took the call, turning round for what would be my last look at the plain of Pasić. It was the rural European idyll in snapshot, a fertile valley dogtooth-checked by fields, threaded by a single track used by farmers and fringed by mountains. It felt a peculiarly peaceful backwater for the epicentre of the First World War. With Mile’s mumbling in the background, I remembered a monumental map of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that I had seen on display at Artstetten Castle in Austria, the private estate of the assassinated Archduke, Franz Ferdinand. The map was enormous, a swaggering imperial inventory of the Habsburg project at its height, charting every feature then valued by the empire: cities, towns, churches, factories, bridges, rivers, mountains reaching right across land that we now know as Poland, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and beyond. But what it missed was the birthplace of the person who would bring it all crashing down. Obljaj was much too small to be marked.

As Mile continued speaking on the phone, I wondered if Princip had also turned and taken a last glance at the valley as he and his father had trudged through these hills – the bibliophile teenager with a highlander’s pedigree and a feeling for the underdog. Could he have had any idea of the changes that his horizons would undergo?

The man who today proudly keeps alive his name, Gavrilo Mile Princip, finished his call and announced a change of plan. ‘I am sorry, but I really have to leave you now,’ he said. ‘My son, Vuk, is only four, and Nikola tells me he won’t stop crying for me back in Obljaj. Good luck with the rest of the walk and, if you get to the top of Šator, say hello to Milan. He is a friend of mine and is looking after the old bear-hunting lodge up there. Tell him you know me and he might give you some help.’

It was a disappointment to be losing Mile, but at least he had started us safely on our way. We shook hands warmly and I urged him to thank his family for their hospitality, before he turned and skittered down the hill at a speed that belied his age. The last I saw of our Princip guide was Mile waving his walking stick and shouting, ‘Remember the mines – stick to the path.’ Arnie and I turned back up the slope.

After six more exhausting hours of climbing along a track that wormed through thick forest, we reached the lodge Mile had told us about. An A-framed structure from the late communist era, it commanded the view across the lake below the peak of Mount Šator. We had not seen a soul on the path and, as we dumped our gear on benches in front of the building, there was no sign of Mile’s friend, Milan. I left Arnie recovering from the day’s exertions and walked by myself down to the water’s edge, delighted to be free at last of my rucksack. There was no wind to disturb the surface of the lake, set in a dell beneath the rocky summit of the mountain. Scree slopes protecting the peak reflected in its green water as I approached and, with nobody around, I took off my filthy hiking gear and waded in. The lake was bath-warm, the dark motionless water heated by the long summer day’s sun. I kicked out, happily plunging my face into the murk, unable to see the bottom.

The aches of the day’s hike were flushed away by the time the first tickles from underwater weeds indicated that I had reached the far side. I turned over and floated slowly back towards my clothes, all sound muffled by the water in my ears, my skyward view framed by rock fields frozen overhead in mid-cascade. By the time I had dried and returned to the lodge, the hike’s exertions had been forgotten.

‘Milan has turned up,’ Arnie said when I got back. A compact, capable-looking man in his early forties stepped forward to shake my hand. He wore military camouflage trousers and a khaki vest. ‘Milan’s an ex-soldier from the war. He looks after this place in the summer and there is nobody else here but his son, Stefan.’ A teenager emerged from within, as Arnie went on. ‘When I told him we had met Mile, he said we are welcome to stay. We can camp outside or sleep indoors on the floor.’

I went inside and found the lodge to be little more than the shell of a building. Outside stood Milan’s van, a rusty wreck from the 1980s parked facing down the slope of the gravel track. The ignition did not work properly and gravity was needed to roll it to a bump-start. Inside the building was a long wooden counter that would once have served as a fancy bar, but all the cupboards and surfaces had no stock now, apart from a few waxy jam jars carrying stubs of candles and a generous sprinkling of mice droppings. A loaded shotgun was leaning up against the fireplace, proof that we were definitely in bear country. On the wall there were patches where pictures had once hung. ‘There’s no power here, but Milan uses one room out the back to sleep in and keeps a fire lit in a stove in another room. He says we can cook there if we want to.’

Arnie had followed me inside, sharing what he had found out. ‘It used to be a smart lodge for hunting parties coming after bears. But now it is used only from time to time. The last big group to come here was a bunch of bikers from the Czech Republic. They rode huge motorbikes laden with crates and crates of booze and had a wild time. But Milan says nobody has come this season, so he just keeps it ticking over.’

With the sun now low in the sky, the altitude was such that the temperature began to dip quickly. From my pack I retrieved warm clothes, food and cooking gear, leaving Arnie to debrief Milan further. My nose led me to the ‘kitchen’ where a cast-iron, enamel wood-burning stove belted out heat inside a cell of a room with a dingy window and no running water. A roasting tray of chicken pieces was already sizzling temptingly for Milan, so I set about mixing up our own meal, a broth of soup and pasta. Arnie had forgotten to bring a bowl, but I retrieved an old yoghurt tub from a dusty cupboard, rinsed it clean and served my companion. There were some grumbles about it being too salty, but I could tell from his smirks that he was teasing. After such a tough opening day it was a relief simply to recharge our energy levels.

‘Milan was telling me that the path over the mountain goes across that big patch of rocks.’ The last sunlight of the day rouged the rocky flanks of the upper mountain, its lower reaches already in darkness, and I could just make out the scree field that Arnie was pointing to on the far side of the lake. ‘He says the path is easy enough to follow, but that most people have a car to pick them up on the other side. If we are going to make it all the way to the next town, it will take all day.’

Milan’s advice tallied with what my map suggested. After crossing the mountain we would be dropping down onto the plain of Glamoč, the next of Herzegovina’s wide valley floors, and to reach the small town of Glamoč itself the map indicated a hike of close to twenty-five miles. The lodge was now in total darkness, disturbed only by traces from our head-torches as I made a round of tea for everyone and we chatted. I asked Stefan if he had ever heard of Princip.

‘Sure,’ the young boy said. ‘He was the man who killed the Archduke. We learned that at school. The teachers called him a terrorist.’

Milan piped up. ‘When I was at school, things were different,’ he said. ‘That was back in the time of communism, and we were taught Princip was a national hero.’ I found the malleability of history intriguing, as I scribbled away in my notebook.

I was tired, struggling to keep up with the conversation, and fell back on watching Arnie chatting by candlelight with our hosts – something that a few years ago would have been impossible. Arnie is a Bosnian Muslim, transformed by Milošević’s 1990s nationalism into the mortal enemy of a Bosnian Serb soldier like Milan. But instead of power politics they talked of trophy bears that were once hunted in the forest through which we had walked, of how Milan as a boy had climbed up to an eagle’s nest on Mount Dinara to kidnap a chick that he then reared as a pet, and a whole stream of other tall mountain tales. As the stories grew, I went inside and unrolled my sleeping bag. The sound of scurrying mice could not keep me from sleep.

It proved impossible to kick-start Arnie the following morning, so I decided to begin without him. I fancied climbing to the top of Tent Mountain, a challenge that Arnie was happy to miss. His new boots had blistered him cruelly during the climb to the lake, so I left him with a packet of anti-rub plasters and the agreement that he would follow me after exactly two hours. From Milan’s description, the path sounded clear enough and we settled on a rendezvous at its highest point, just where it crossed the shoulder below the peak before beginning its long descent towards Glamoč. Working with Arnie years before had taught me he was not a morning person, so this seemed a better plan than fretting about him emerging from his sleeping bag. After breakfasting on dried fruit, peanuts and tea, I left him to rest some more.

A cuckoo sounded from within the forest as I loaded up on the porch of the lodge, the mountain peak barely visible through the chill, early mist. Cloud had built up overnight, dark enough to threaten rain but thin enough to deliver, so far, only the flimsiest of showers. I put on my rain jacket, jiggled my stiff shoulders to settle my pack and swung my hazel stick for the first of that day’s many iterations.

The path cut up and across the scree field. Scree is never the easiest surface to hike on, small gravelly stones giving the impression that each step loosely slides back down as far as it has just reached up. Fortunately rain had washed most of the looser stones away and my progress was quicker than I expected. Catching my breath for the first time, I turned round to take what I had hoped would be a fine photograph of the lodge reflecting in the lake, but the mist had closed in. I hiked on, wondering if splitting up from Arnie on a cloudy day was such a good idea, only for the visibility to improve all of a sudden at the shoulder. Breaking right from the main path, I followed a fainter trail up the ridge, which my map promised would lead me to the summit. With historical irony, painted markings left on rocks to guide hikers were red squares with a white strip across the middle, a rather good impression of the flag of Austria. The foreign country that had ruled Bosnia in the run-up to Princip’s assassination of Franz Ferdinand is today memorialised countless times along the country’s hiking trails.