She returned to Belgrade a somewhat different person than she had been before January 26. The differences were physical — the limp, the twisted spine, the body that had been rebuilt from severe damage. They were also, in ways she did not often discuss in detail, psychological. She had survived something that had killed twenty-seven other people. She had been unconscious for a month. She had been told about her own experience by doctors and parents and newspaper accounts. She had undergone multiple surgeries and months of rehabilitation. She had been decorated by the president of the country she worked for.
She had also, in the course of all of this, turned twenty-three, and then twenty-four. She was a young woman in her early twenties when she emerged from the hospital. The rest of her twenties, which in the normal course of a life in the early 1970s would have been occupied by the ordinary business of establishing oneself in a career and a life, were instead occupied by the long shadow of January 26, 1972, and by the need to build a life that could accommodate that shadow without being wholly defined by it.
She joined JAT’s cargo division. She negotiated freight contracts. She went to work each day in the administrative building of the airline whose aircraft had exploded around her. She did not fly. The work was competent — she had language skills and professional competence — but it was not what she had been doing when the bomb went off.