I give B. a call at 11:00 in the evening. We chat a little and I say, "It seems that the weather tonight will be fine. Lucky you, you can sleep well, I have to work," and we hang up. The meaning of the last sentence is: "They won't knock on your door tonight."

It's 1991 and the war in Croatia has just started. I live in Belgrade and have a Friday midnight radio show. The military police have been making night raids for some time. They pick people up with the excuse of regular training, but we have already heard the stories: for the first couple of days you stay in some of the military camps in Serbia, but on a third night, they tell you it's a night move, put you on a truck with the rest of the guys and in the morning you wake up on the front.

Officially, Serbia is not at war with Croatia, so everything is top secret. But rumours about collective mobilisation are circulating and every Friday evening before the show I get a call from my editor, Anica, to tell me if it was expected that night or not. There is a procedure I would have to follow and I have to be ready.

My friend B. and I have already decided not to take part in this war. We have everything prepared for a fast run across the border, and my calls to him are always coded. We have lived in Yugoslavia long enough not to trust the telephone lines.

All three of us live in Canada now: Anica was fired in 1993 for playing a Croatian song on Radio Belgrade and left the country when nationalists started threatening her children; B. left a year after that; I came in 1995.

It wasn't the series of big events that hit the front pages that made me leave. It was the small, almost invisible change that happen deep inside people you know and the traces it left on me. Old friends pull you to the right, or to the left, or just to plain old insanity, but they pull you all the time, with every new word. Finally, it becomes so strong that you can only join, or leave. The real storms never happen under the sky, they are deep inside us.

[An excerpt. Published in THIS magazine, October 1997]