Sarajevo is a city of lovers - young lovers at that. It is as though everywhere you go, a young couple is nuzzling over their beer and cigarettes, tough in their love, unintimidated in their fancy jeans, confident in their own beauty. But most of them, the lovers, are an age that remembers. Those who are our age, 20 at least, have memory. We know they remember. They know we know but are too afraid to ask. The pockmarked faces of their buildings betray secrets that polite company wouldn't dare ask anyone to reveal.

It is a strange thing living in this city rebuilt of shiny facades and happy faces knowing that behind each are stories. As children, we watched their shame unfold on the 5 o'clock news. Life here balances precariously on the unsteady perch provided by the Dayton Accords, wedged awkwardly between Western Europe, the Middle East, and some notion of the Communist legacy of the Slavic East.

Each night, the muezzins chant their separate harmonies calling us to pray, and Sarajevo's lovers bid themselves goodnight, undoubtedly uttering their own intimate prayers among themselves.

And I wonder, do they tell each other their secrets?