"The Spark that Lit the Fuse..."
             IND AFF or Out of Love in Sarajevo tells the story of a young woman who travels to that city with Peter, her lover. There she ponders the morality of her affair, coming to the realization that the consequences of her actions are too high to justify the relationship. The purpose of the setting is to set a tone of historic regret, using the weather as well as history as backdrops to the woman's ruminations. In Sarajevo, the narrator retraces the steps taken by Bosnian terrorist Gavrillo Princip before he famously started the First World War by assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand. As she does so, she begins to see parallels between Princip's passionate decision and her own adulterous affair with the married professor.
             The tale begins with the narrator explaining "This is a sad story. It has to be. It rained in Sarajevo and we had expected fine weather" (Weldon 1). This sense of the glamorous reality failing to meet expectations is a prevalent motif for the narrator. She relates that although Peter and his swimming-coach wife have been married for twenty-four years, they have long since stopped loving each other. He has come to Sarajevo while in the process of deciding whether to divorce his wife for his mistress, but he seems permanently afflicted with bitterness and indecision. Everything is disappointing for him. He orders wild boar, but speculates it might be pork dyed in cabbage. When cucumber salad is served, he whines that there's not enough mange-tout in Yugoslavia. He then spends much of the rest of the meal loudly waiting for his boar. He behaves like the pampered Archduke might have, while others were contemplating weightier matters. He prefers the sanitized chlorination of a swimming pool to the more unpredictable water falling in a rainstorm.
             As the rain falls, obscuring for Peter the steps taken by Gavrillo Pri
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