Page 254 - James Caan - The Real Deal

The Real Deal

and I was reading the paper. I looked up for a second and Yusuf
had gone. It was only when I put the paper down to look for him
that I saw he was on the floor. He’d taken a prayer mat out of his
briefcase and was on his knees. Most people would ask if there
was a prayer room, but he just prayed in the middle of a departure
lounge. I was quite taken aback.
We talked about his conversion and his spirituality for much of
the flight, and when we changed planes in Vienna we passed a
record shop in the terminal building: his greatest hits compilation
was number one in the Austrian album chart! I couldn’t believe it.
I was very impressed, but Yusuf was clearly used to it.
A few hours later, we arrived in Montenegro and as soon as we
were out of the terminal building I was shocked by the devasta-
tion. It was all rubble: bombed-out buildings lined the roads and
everything was dusty. The roads were sandy and dusty, the
buildings were sandy and dusty, the skin of people’s faces was
dusty and my overall sensation was one of sadness.
Yusuf had arranged for us to be met by an interpreter and a
driver who could take us over the border to a couple of villages he
had read about in the papers. Most of the vehicles on the road
were military ones, and it was unnerving to see so many soldiers.
The previous night I had slept in my own bed in my lovely house;
now I was travelling through some of the poorest neighbourhoods
in Europe. It was quite surreal, extremely frightening and incred-
ibly moving.
The interpreter gave me his perspective on the conflict: Kosovo
was a predominantly Muslim province within Serbia, one of the
states that made up Yugoslavia. As civil wars in Bosnia, Croatia
and other states saw the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s,
Kosovo also sought independence from Serbia. A decade or so
earlier, the Balkans had been a melting pot where Christians and
Muslims had lived peacefully side by side, but the fight for
independence had seen the appearance of an ethnic divide – almost

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