Bosnia is bomb-pocked and shell-shocked, fields of wreckage and crumpled towns. But, among the ruins, kids hike to school with bunny-rabbit book bags on their backs.
Stores may not be pretty, but shelves are full. Potholes deepen on the roads, but dentists fill molars. There are hairdressers, disco queens, pizza delivery boys, cabbies and dunk-shot artists.Music schools are reopening. Farmers harvest their cabbages and sort out seeds for spring planting. Trucks, demobilized, are hauling bricks and bedsprings. There is gas enough for joy rides.
The war killed perhaps 250,000 people and put millions more to flight with only the few things they could carry. Uncounted thousands suffered scars to their psyches that will never go away.
Even before NATO troops are in place to enforce a fresh peace, however, Bosnia is digging itself out of its nightmare.
Progress so far is relative. For most Bosnians, after 31/2 years of fighting for their lives, it is a question of whether the glass is a quarter full or three-quarters empty.
"Last night my daughter dreamed MTV was back, and when she put on the television, it was," said Mehmed Suljkanovic, an engineering professor in Tuzla. "She was so excited. Then the power went off."
Tuzla, south of Gradacac, bears its scars inside. The city escaped most of the fighting, but its 160,000 inhabitants - one-third of them refugees from elsewhere - still must rebuild their lives.
In places like Gradacac, where armies duked it out for months on end, the wreckage is impossible to miss: blackened, windowless hulks that used to be schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, factories.
The centuries-old hilltop fort and its ramparts took 10,000 hits.
On the former confrontation line, only the town swimming pool is recognizable for what it used to be. Guesswork identifies the gas station. Other buildings are down to bits of wall and foundations.
"During the war, people ran out to make repairs and restock their pantries whenever the guns paused," Deputy Mayor Fadil Muhic said. "No one is wasting any time now in getting back to work."
Muhic runs a state-owned plant that makes prestressed concrete, and he expects to be busy.
"We should make a TV commercial for our concrete," he said, chuckling. "Slabs of it protected the high school. Two Serb tanks fired 50 shells at them until our guys came and took out the tanks."
Now the city of 40,000 seems to be held together with wide tape marked "UNHCR," provided along with plastic sheets by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Humanitarian agencies give food and tools.
Muhic estimated that if outside loans are available, Gradacac should be able to put itself together within two years.
"No one can help us like we can help ourselves," he said.
From the early signs, it seems clear that Bosnia-Herzegovina will never recapture its old unique flavor. All over, lovely red roofing tiles and carved woodwork have been replaced with anything at hand.
Ancient landmarks, like the 16th-century bridge at Mostar and graceful Turkish mosques, were obliterated by shellfire.
Still, for families like the Kisics in Dobrnja, a village south of here, it is enough to have a solid roof and a few warm rooms to survive the winter until Bosnia's natural abundance returns with the spring.
For the first time in nearly four years, Husein Kisic left for the front with a happy heart. No one would shoot at him. Soon he would go back to his welding job, maybe, with a chunk of money from the army.
Sabina, 9, goes to school and music lessons. Samir, 7, plays with toy planes. His nightmares gone, he dreams of being a pilot. Sadika, their mother, finally has real food to cook for them.
"I did what I had to do, and now I think it is over," Husein said, sipping coffee by a cheery stove. "I don't bear anyone ill will. Life has to go on."
Surprisingly, much remains of a basic infrastructure - roads, telephones, power lines, public services, restaurants, businesses - on which to reconstruct the shattered country.
Years of horrifying images have left the outside world with a distorted picture. Much of Bosnia-Herzegovina is dramatically beautiful, with rich fields and forests and sweeping mountain vistas.
Notes of color and humor appear at every turn. Near Zenica, a man with yellow Buffalo Bill fringes sewn onto his camouflage pants joked outside the Caffe Lambada without an apparent care in the world.
At the same time, physical and psychic destruction was so vast that no one's life will be easy to put right again.
In Tuzla, at a makeshift market in the snow, Saban Smajic shivered behind his pathetic wares: rusty screws, broken locks and wire. He had to feed his family until his pension was approved.
Bahrija Kasumovic, a passer-by, snorted when he mentioned pensions. Hers amounted to $4 a month, and she had no other income.
Her husband died of illness. Her son was killed at the front. The jewelry and fraying suit she wore were all that remained of a comfortable upper middle-class life before the war.
"Do you know of any work?" she asked, her voice cracking with desperation. "Does anyone need a cleaning woman? Anything? I don't know how I am going to make it."
Still, the glass is one-quarter full. A businessman, well-fed and slick in a power tie, emerged from the mayor's office. He ran the Hotel Tuzla casino until authorities shut it down several years ago.
Things were looking up, he reported. With luck, peacetime Tuzla would soon be offering "American-style roulette" and black jack for anyone who had cash to gamble.
Tuzla is 70 percent Muslim, but 2,000 people mobbed the Catholic church for Christmas midnight Mass.
In restaurants, people no longer grow silent in pain when musicians sing "Nizamski Rastanak," meaning "A Soldier's Goodbye," a haunting old Turkish melody that is a theme song of the war.
Christmas was sunny and warm in Tuzla, and happy little kids in bright colors frolicked with their parents at the town zoo. A few crawled over the broken merry-go-round that someone would eventually fix.
Rusty bars held the zoo's few survivors: a small bear, two enormous wild pigs, a diseased and mud-blackened zebra, and, for unexplained reasons, a mongrel dog and a chicken.
Things seemed normal again. But only almost.
On the knoll above, families prayed at 72 graves. The dead, mostly kids, were hit by a Serb shell in May. In Tuzla park, as in the rest of Bosnia, there was life and death together, among the ruins.