12 Years A Slav
In 1980, just divorced, and consequently a free man, Hardy Willis, misses his flight out of Belgrade due to inadvertently picking up the wrong briefcase at the airport. Crossing the road on his way back to his hotel he looks right instead of left and is hit by a truck. He suffers facial injuries so severe that it was hard to see any familiarity with the photo in his passport.
Disoriented, Hardy agrees that surgeons reconstruct his face so that he once again looks like his passport photo. The procedure is a success but Hardy falls into a coma. For the next 12 years Marko Spenza (Hardy's Slav name) lies blissfully unaware of the tender care his apparent wife, Azda, administers to him, and also of the fact that the real Marko Spenza suffered similar injuries to himself in another accident and is lying in another ward looking like the passport photo of Hardy Willis.
1n 1993, Hardy/Marko awakes to find himself not in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, but Belgrade, Bosnia, unaware that for 12 of the last 13 years he has been a Slav.
To be continued....