The Best American Travel Writing 2014 by Paul Theroux Page A

meat from a humanitarian-aid box—an American cameraman of Armenian descent named Yervant Der Parthogh told me about the toilets. “Find an empty room and follow your nose,” he said, passing me a bottle of Tabasco sauce, standard issue in war zones, where the bland diet of rice cried out for a little seasoning. (ABC, the BBC, and other TV-news organizations bought the condiment in bulk, and it was often shared.)
    What exactly did he mean about the toilets? Yervant explained that certain rooms were always vacant, since their walls had been partially blown away, exposing the interior to sniper fire. But in the attached bathrooms, the toilets remained—unflushable, full, and stinking. “Find one and make it your own,” he advised.
    The window in my room had been destroyed by a rocket and replaced with plastic by the UN’s refugee agency. The shelling was continuous. I unpacked my gear, propped my flashlight against a cup, brushed my teeth with the mineral water I had brought from Zagreb, laid out the St. Jude medallion my mother had given me, and unrolled my sleeping bag on top of an orange polyester blanket left over from the glory days of 1984, when Sarajevo was an Olympic city and the gruesome Soviet-style structure of the Holiday Inn had been built.
    As I discovered the next day, the press corps consisted of a bunch of men with cameras or notebooks in a standard uniform: jeans, Timberland boots, and ugly zip-front fluorescent fleeces. The sole exception was a tall, thin Frenchman named Paul Marchand, a radio reporter, whose outfit consisted of a pressed white shirt, creased black trousers, and shiny dress shoes.
    There were, I was relieved to see, other women. I recognized Amanpour, young, glamorous, and more visible than ever after her coverage two years earlier of the Gulf War. I also encountered a few French female reporters, all of whom violated the masculine dress code: a reporter from
Le Parisien
who wore cashmere sweaters; the petite radio reporter Ariane Quentier, who favored a Russian fur hat; and Alexandra Boulat, a photographer with a mane of long blond hair (she died after suffering a brain aneurysm in Ramallah, in 2007, at the age of 45).
    I also met Kurt Schork, who had a room near mine on the fourth floor. He was a legendary Reuters correspondent who had become a war reporter at the age of 40 after working for New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Schork brought me to the Reuters office and showed me how to file my copy on a satellite phone for $50 a minute. There was a generator in the next room, which reeked of gasoline, and if it was running, one dialed the London office, then read the copy to a distant, frenetic typist, spelling out all the Serbo-Croatian words. It was very World War II. Carrier pigeons would have been faster.
    Over the next few weeks, Schork patiently told me where and where not to go. He showed me how to rig up a hose as a kind of makeshift shower. On Christmas Eve, we went to midnight mass together at St. Josip’s Catholic church on Snipers’ Alley (though not at midnight, since that would have been an invitation to the Serbs to shell us); Christian soldiers, who made up perhaps a quarter of Bosnia’s largely Muslim defense force, came down from the frontline at the outskirts of the city to receive communion.
    Room 437 would be my home, on and off, for the next three years: the mangy orange blanket, the plywood desk with cigarette burns, the empty minibar, the telephone on the bedside table that never rang because the lines were cut. And through the plastic sheeting of my window, I had a view of the city, with its 35,000 destroyed buildings and its courageous populace that refused to bend to its oppressors.
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    The 2012 reunion in Sarajevo was to take place over the first week of April, Holy Week. This had some resonance for me, since during the siege I often went to mass with other Catholic reporters in the battered