Free Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival by Anderson Cooper

inappropriate for me to stay sealed off. I wanted them to tell me their stories, risk exposing themselves to me. I couldn’t ask that of someone if I wasn’t willing to expose myself as well. Without the vest, I could feel the breeze on my chest, the closeness of another person, the sense of loss in everyone’s embrace.
    I met a young woman named Eldina when she was fetching water one morning at a local pump, a chore she had to do five or six times a day, shifting heavy plastic containers from hand to hand. She invited me to her home, a small walk-up apartment where she lived with her father and grandmother.
    We sat in one room of their three-room apartment. The windows, covered in heavy plastic, buckled with the wind trying to rip through the high floor. The grandmother tended a fire in the stove.
    On their windowsill, Eldina had placed a tomato. I remarked how beautiful it was. Plump and red, a startling sight amid Sarajevo’s gray stones and rusted steel.
    “Paradise is a tomato,” her grandmother said, delicately picking up the ripe fruit. “Paradise is a tomato.” Her eyes twinkled with the reflection of the wood burning in her small stove.
    Eldina’s father was slim, haggard, with a look I saw on many men’s faces in the city that year. His hair was silver, oily, his index fingers stained from months of smoking at the front. He smiled only briefly, just long enough to show his teeth, then inhaled deeply on one of the cigarettes he always kept lit. Eldina’s mother and sister had left Sarajevo. Eldina believed that they were somewhere in Europe with relatives, but she’d not heard anything from them in several months.
    “It’s not easy to raise a family,” her father said, sounding defensive. “I’m trying to take care of food and electricity. I’m trying the best in the situation.”
    He was a driver before the war, and showed me a scrapbook with pictures from better days: family outings to the beach, a dinner party with candles and wine.
    Eldina and her grandmother seemed strong. I felt they would survive. The father, I was not so sure about. He had a look I remembered seeing in my father the one time I was allowed to visit him in the hospital after his heart attack.
    “The other day I saw my best friend on the Serb lines,” Eldina’s father told me. “I could have shot him.”
    “Did you?”
    “No.” He paused, a little embarrassed by the admission. “I was so shocked to see him there.”
    Eldina had dressed up for my visit. She’d taken off the speckled gray overcoat she was wearing when I met her and put on a sweater and a colorful scarf. She was wearing makeup, trying to hide the freckles on her face. She was pretty, and I imagined her laying out her good clothes before going to sleep the night before. She watched me while her father spoke, attentive to filling my cup, making sure I was comfortable. I tried not to look at her too often. There was a hope in her eyes that made me sad.
    Eldina’s boyfriend was a soldier. She showed me his picture; a stocky boy posing with a friend. Both were wearing heavy wool uniforms and pointing their guns at the camera.
    “He’s been missing for almost a year,” she said as she looked at the photo. “Sometimes I dream he’s a prisoner held captive in a camp.”
    “He’s dead,” her father told me later, with Eldina still in earshot. “People saw him die. They just never got his body back. He’s probably still lying in a field somewhere near the front.”
    Eldina brought her baby over from his crib near the stove. Her boyfriend never saw his son. The thought kept going through my mind as I cradled the sleeping infant.
    I wondered what my own little family would have done in Sarajevo. Would my mother have been able to survive selling possessions piecemeal in the marketplace like so many women had to do as the war dragged on? Would I have been able to provide for her and take care of myself?
    While I was getting ready to leave, I noticed that