The Best American Travel Writing 2014 by Paul Theroux Page B

Catholic church. It had given me solace, and seeing the old ladies bent over their rosary beads reassured me in some way that wherever I went in the world I could find a common community bound by religion.
    Shortly after I arrived for the reunion, I ran into Emma Daly, who had been a reporter for the British
Independent
during the war and now worked for Human Rights Watch. She had married the war photographer Santiago Lyon, now a senior AP boss, and was the mother of two children. In those days, I don’t think either one of us projected much into the future or could have imagined ourselves married, with children, living more or less normal lives.
    â€œHave you seen the chairs yet?” she asked.
    Emma explained that a kind of temporary memorial had been set up on Marshal Tito Street, in the center of the city: 11,541 empty red chairs, one for every resident killed during the siege. Walking downtown, we approached the Presidency Building, where we had risked sniper fire and stray mortar rounds during the war to interview President Alija Izetbegović or Vice President Ejup Ganić, who always let journalists into his office and sometimes offered us hot coffee. “If you’re brave enough to come to this building,” Ganić once told me, “then I am going to talk to you.”
    The rows of red chairs, some of them scaled down to represent children, stretched far into the distance. Later there would be some grumbling over the fact that the chairs had been made in a Serbian factory. Yet the amount of destruction they represented was overwhelming—every one of these people might still be alive if a sniper had failed to pull the trigger, if a mortar shell had landed 20 feet to the east or west.
    That night, at the refurbished Holiday Inn, we all got horribly drunk. Then we started taking group pictures. All of us were a little rounder in the face, the men with less hair and bigger bellies. The women, though, looked remarkably good.
    The Holiday Inn now offers Wi-Fi, working toilets, a few restaurants (the food still bad), and clean sheets. We gathered in the bar, a group of veteran reporters and photographers who hadn’t seen one another in 20 years. There was Morten Hvaal, a Norwegian photographer who once had driven me around the city in the AP’s armored car, pointing out landmarks; Shane (“Shaney”) McDonald, an Australian cameraman who had sat in my room one night with Keith “Chuck” Tayman and Robbie Wright, watching falling stars from an open window; and there, in a corner, Jon Jones, the photographer who had scared me so on my first ride from the airport. Now he was nice. We had all grown up.
    But some people were missing from the Holiday Inn lounge where we had spent years living on whiskey, cigarettes, and chocolate bars. Shouldn’t Kurt Schork have been sitting on a barstool, drinking a cranberry juice? Kurt was killed by rebel soldiers in Sierra Leone in May 2000, the morning after we ate dinner together in a restaurant overlooking the sea. And where was Paul Marchand, with his black shoes and white shirt? (He had once called me in the middle of the night to shout, “The water is running and she is hot!”) After the war he wrote novels, started drinking, and, one night in 2009, hanged himself. Juan Carlos Gumucio was gone, too. A bear of a man—and the second husband of
Sunday Times
reporter Marie Colvin, also gone, killed in Homs, Syria, in February 2012—he had introduced himself to me in central Bosnia by exclaiming, “Call me JC! Like Jesus Christ. Or like King Juan Carlos.” We used to go to Sunday mass together in Sarajevo—and in London, too, but then out afterward for bloody marys. In 2002 he shot himself in the heart after, in Colvin’s words, “seeing too much war.” I was in Somalia at the time, on a hotel rooftop, and someone phoned to tell me. There were gunshots all around me, and over that din I began to cry