Srebrenica

Srebrenica enters the novel through Steef’s memories of service with Dutchbat, where survival and violence became experiences he could not leave behind. The place is not only part of his past: its return in flashbacks, fear, and altered decisions shows how the war continues to govern his life long after he has left it.

Steef’s memories of Srebrenica

In a conversation with Peter and Rebecca, Steef discloses that he served in Srebrenica and never properly processed what he experienced there. He recalls being in the line of fire as bullets passed overhead and a high-explosive shell burst beside him without injuring him. At the time, he continued running without recognizing that the rattling sound came from machine guns; only much later did he understand how close he had been to death.

That delayed recognition shapes the meaning he gives the place. Steef speaks of gratitude for having survived, set against the deaths of thousands of Muslim men. He turns the memory into an urgent appeal to live fully and break out of self-imposed confinement. Yet the force of his exhortation sits beside the evidence that he himself remains marked by what happened.

Trauma carried into civilian life

Rebecca describes the consequences as persistent rather than safely confined to the past. During a visit to her mother, Steef became overwhelmed by fear: he stopped sleeping, watched his surroundings like a hunted animal, thought people were speaking about him behind his back, and experienced flashbacks to the frightening situations he had faced as a Dutchbat soldier in Srebrenica. The episode helps explain why he refuses to repeat that experience.

The fear also constrains the couple’s plans. Rebecca would like to take a week-long holiday in the Caribbean or Ibiza, but does not feel able to leave Steef alone in case he has a post-traumatic stress attack. Although Peter and Eva offer to keep an eye on him, she does not trust herself to accept their help. Srebrenica thus remains present in the practical arrangements of their lives: it affects where Steef will go and who Rebecca feels must stay close to him.

A geography of safety and threat

Steef recasts staying in the Netherlands as a choice of freedom, praising its familiar beaches and open space. His conviction also changes Peter’s summer plans: Steef talks him out of a motorcycle trip to southern France, and the two couples remain in the neighborhood rather than going to a campsite. For Eva, staying nearby is preferable to spending two weeks alone in a tent with Peter. The domestic landscape offers proximity and routine, but that routine is organized around Steef’s fear.

The same fear can turn into a present-tense conviction that people from the former Yugoslavia are still pursuing him, even where no pursuers are visible. A companion checks the door and reassures him that nobody has come out and nobody is after him. The contrast between his certainty and the companion’s observable check makes clear how the danger of Srebrenica can recur as an immediate threat in civilian surroundings.

Violence, survival, and recurrence

Steef’s later actions echo the novel’s concern with how threat can be misread and how violence persists beyond its original setting. He tells Peter that, the previous year in Utrecht, he mistook a man for an armed drug dealer and believed the man was drawing a weapon; it was a mobile phone. Steef says that afterward he broke down and was unable to work for months. The novel does not equate this incident with his service in Srebrenica, but places both within the account of a man whose experience of danger has outlasted the circumstances that produced it.

Srebrenica therefore functions as both a remembered place and an ongoing measure of Steef’s relationship to survival. His call to enjoy life comes from having escaped death, while his fear limits the freedom he urges others to claim. The place’s significance lies in that unresolved contradiction: survival gives him a reason to insist on living, but does not by itself release him from the war.