Dawn came slowly, the light diffusing through a pile of thick clouds, as Daniel crossed the Croatian border, driving through the morning and eating a greasy day-old burek with one hand while the car moved swiftly, straight along the autocesta. By afternoon he was in Republika Srpska.
There was no clear point at which he crossed the war's front line, because the front lines in this war had been everywhere, had run between the homes of every town, between brothers in a single family. But it was just before the Bosnian border that he began to see the gutted buildings, the smashed walls and the houses pocked with bullet holes, the remains of the cleansing. Abandoned gardens, overgrown among the wild flowers, where whole communities had gone up in flames.