Mama Leone

Here where squirrels die

That day a childhood story ended. His cough woke him up, his nose blocked, his cheeks and forehead on fire. He should have stayed in bed, just lain there and slept it off, but the devil wouldn’t let him be. He got dressed and went outside. It was raining, cold drops on hot skin, the bus taking forever to come. He thought about pneumonia and meningitis. He remembered every sickness he knew by name, and a few others he didn’t know anything about or his imagination had maybe dreamed up for the occasion. He was astonished to discover that he no longer feared a single disease in the world.

The bus was half empty. Where did all those people go, he thought, his head resting on the glass, banging against it the whole journey. He was reconciled to his fate for the day. Nobody was waiting for him, he wasn’t expecting anyone, and everything was like the first day, repeated for the thousandth time, just now he was more indifferent, sanguine even, the way a man should be who has never made any attempt to hold on to the things around him, never tried for any great happiness. To this very day he has been waiting on fortune’s call, which like the magnificent end of a war, with confetti, fireworks, and the dumbfounded embraces of lost loves, would return his life to its old rhythm, return to him these past six years spent in despair. This was how long Deda had lived in Ljubljana, a city he hadn’t actually chosen but had simply been the farthest he dared go, when at the beginning of April 1992, sensing the onset of war, he had left home. He’d packed a single suitcase, a handful of shirts, a few pairs of underwear, and a Walkman. He said his goodbyes to his mother, telling her that he’d be back in about two weeks, by which time he thought mobilization in the city would be over. At the station he bought a return ticket, sat down in the bus, opened a book, and started reading, never looking back. Two weeks later he was watching pictures of the city in flames on television. Mojca wiped her tears, he hugged her and told her Mocja, it’s nothing, it’ll all pass, and she collapsed in his arms, the inconsolable viewer of a cinematic melodrama. That summer Deda found a job in a planning office, and a few months after that he got Slovenian citizenship, but the whole time he lived in the belief that he’d be going home and that this transitional period would come and go like an annual vacation. Setting off to America, Canada, and Australia, friends passed through Ljubljana, he’d spend an evening with them and they’d all ask you planning on getting out of here? and Deda always answered no, I’ll go back. On parting he’d leave them his address and telephone number, and a letter or phone call would follow, but friends would inevitably disappear, some because Deda didn’t reply, others because they had gone forever and didn’t need anyone reminding them of what they had lost or left behind. Six years later Ljubljana wasn’t on the way to anywhere for anyone: those who had wanted to leave had left, those who had wanted to stay had stayed, and Deda was as distant to them as if he himself had gone to the ends of the earth. But he hadn’t gone anywhere or stayed anywhere; he wasn’t at home or abroad.

He exited the bus and headed for the duty pharmacy. He was fourth in line; his head spun a little, the fever holding him in a daze, shielding him from thoughts too serious; he smiled at the pharmacist, handing her colorful banknotes and taking the bag with his prescription, five drops three times daily, he repeated after her, the girl nodding confirmation, the corners of her mouth rising as if she were having a little laugh on Deda’s account, or as if once, in a former life, there had been something between them.

He was standing there on the sidewalk, his eyes peeled for a taxi, when a white Golf pulled up. Deda, what’s going on, what’re you doing here?. . I had to go to the pharmacy, now I’m off home. . You’re the right age for the pharmacy, bro. . Bite me, dude, it’s just a little cold. . Get in, bit of fresh air will do you good. Deda didn’t say yes or no, in fact he didn’t say anything, he just got in the car, not knowing where they were heading. He’d only wanted to sit down, even if it was crammed on the backseat next to Alma and Nuša, this fat Slovenian chick who was trying to tell Esad where to go, where he should turn and stuff, but you could see she suffered from that disease where no matter if you go left or right you’ve gone wrong, and so they kept ending up on one-way streets, Nuša waving her hand left, left, I said, that’s right, no, that’s left, right. Esad’s girlfriend Mirna, who was from Tuzla, clenched the handgrip in furious silence. She couldn’t stand Nuša and didn’t know why Alma always invited her when they headed out on Sundays, and this time the situation was even worse: They were going to Nuša’s cabin, so she’d have to be especially deferential.

I’ll catch pneumonia, Deda sneezed after half an hour of driving. It’s about time, bro, said Esad, tapping happily on the steering wheel. What an asshole, Mirna finally spoke up, only an asshole would get off on saying something like that, added Nuša in Slovenian. Mirna would get pissed when Nuša spoke in Slovenian, even when it was in jest, because she thought Nuša was rubbing it in that they were in Slovenia. Well, we are actually in Slovenia, Esad had just shrugged his shoulders when she’d once tried to explain this, only one of the hundred ways Nuša got on her nerves. Mirna didn’t reply, just let her mind wander; since they’d arrived in Ljubljana it really hadn’t occurred to her that they were in Slovenia and that in this Slovenia place they were supposed to live among Slovenes, not just any random people, people from Tuzla, for example, who Mirna felt were her own. If we’d gone to America we’d have already met a hundred Americans, and in two years we’ve only met Deda, and he’s a Bosnian too, she told Esad. He clammed shut and made like he was lost in thought. Like Deda, he hadn’t dared venture farther than Ljubljana.

I’ll make you some tea, said Nuša as soon as they arrived. Deda sat down in a dusty green armchair. The log cabin was something out of a second-rate American horror film. They just needed to get cozy, a couple start kissing, the hostess light the fire, and the next minute some jittery pubescent would be there with a chain saw cutting them all to pieces. Deda, you not feeling well? Alma blathered, putting her hand to his forehead. She was sweet on Deda, in fact you could say that she was secretly in love with him, but she blew hot and cold. Mirna had tried to explain to her that you can’t be like that with men, that you have to know what you want, and Alma would look at her all demure and say but Mirna, I’m not sure, and keep flitting about Deda, tugging at his beard, pinching his stomach, but the second he made a move, she vanished in the air. In the end it became clear to all that there would never be anything between the two, but in ten or fifteen years, when someday they met again, Alma was sure to confess, Deda, I was sweet on you.

They sat at a hard oak table and drank tea. Mirna was whispering a fight with Esad, Nuša and Alma took turns asking Deda how he was feeling, checking his temperature with their palms, smacking their lips worryingly, and then bursting out laughing. Deda mostly just sighed, fixed them with a stare, setting a stony expression on his face, which amused Nuša and Alma no end. You two’d die of boredom without a patient, Deda tried to sound sore but was actually reveling in being the center of attention and the girls laughing at him. He didn’t have to think about what he thought about every day, what was on his mind today when he woke up and hadn’t given him any peace until the white Golf pulled up. At long last he didn’t feel like he was in the wrong place or hanging out in some kind of waiting room before a long trip home. There was nothing much in his hands, his heart, or his head; not even in the log cabin. He didn’t feel any real closeness to these people, they certainly weren’t on the list of friends in whose hands he’d put his life, but maybe that was the very reason he felt such release from everything he had done over the past six years, every wrong step he’d made from the moment he said goodbye to his mother.

Esad pinched a wad of hashish out with a pair of tweezers, softening it above the flame of his lighter. The three of them almost religiously followed his every move; he took out a bag of tobacco, laid a paper on the table, plumping the tobacco between his thumb and index finger, every now and then licking invisible intoxicating granules from them. Their lungs were soon full of laughter, I died of a lung infection, whooped Deda, while Nuša snorted like a steam engine, fat scrubby Nuša. Mirna hugged her, how easy it is when you’re laughing, nothing’s a turn-off when you’re laughing. Deda, I think I’ve got something to say to you now, warbled Alma, no, no, then I’ll have to hunt you down in the forest, howled Esad. Nuša got up to put on some more water to boil for tea.

And so it went for hours: hashish, tea, hashish, tea, Deda slowly forgetting he was supposed to be sick. At some point Alma got up from the table and went to the toilet. Exhausted from laughing they just watched her go, Esad was about to say something but changed his mind and sighed, which was reason enough for another huzzah. Alma burst back in: there’s something in the toilet!. . What the fuck?. . I don’t know, there’s something in the bowl. . Someone forget to flush, huh?. . No, it’s not that, it’s something else, it’s alive, actually I don’t know if it’s alive, but it definitely was alive. Esad got up, stop, Deda raised his hand, you just sit down, bro.

There, lift the seat up, Alma peered from behind the door. In the bowl, down in the little pool of water, there really was something, something dead and furry; a rat, no, not a rat, something else, rats don’t look like that, this one’s got a pretty head and pointy ears; Deda looked down at the tiny head, prodding it with a pencil, not having the foggiest what was in the toilet bowl and where it had come from. The hashish happy buzz lingered on, fuzzying his thoughts and movements; he just stared at the head, repeating I don’t get it, I don’t get it, the three of them jostling above Deda’s head and waiting — maybe the creature would wake up, or Deda was about to reach his verdict. He’s the most serious here, he had a beard, and although he’d just turned thirty-two it was almost completely gray, he’s going to have to come up with something soon. Esad, get me something. . What?. . I don’t know, something to get this thing out with.

Nuša went into the kitchen and came back with a big spoon, this okay? There was a clang of metal and ceramic and then Deda finally got hold of the creature, it’s a squirrel folks. Alma covered her mouth with her hand, it’s not a squirrel, it can’t be a squirrel, where would a squirrel’ve come from. . I’m really sorry, but it’s a squirrel, I know a squirrel when I see one, Deda stood there holding the dead animal out on the spoon as if offering it to Alma, Mirna, Nuša, and Esad, but they didn’t want it, they just kept moving away, no, it’s not a squirrel. . listen to me, it is, as if their lives depended on something else being there on Deda’s spoon, something vile and worthless, a big black rat, anything, just not a squirrel.

Deda headed outside with the spoon, it was dark and there was a chill in the air, a wind blowing down from the snowy peaks, they didn’t follow him, just stayed there in the doorway, watching his back disappear between the trunks of the pines. He headed on not knowing what he was looking for or how to get rid of the dead animal, if only there were a river nearby, or a ravine, anyplace where you could make a squirrel disappear.

He’d already gone too far, he turned around and couldn’t see the light of the cabin, he couldn’t see anything, just the full moon shrouding the world in gray. Deda knelt down, placed the spoon on the dead pine needles, and started digging. He dug with his fingers, thousands of needles from this year and all the years gone by, thousands of thousands of dry, damp, and rotten needles, until he touched earth, a soft black earth that got up under his fingernails. He dug down, piling the dirt left and right until the hole was deep enough to fit the spoon and the squirrel. The end of its tail was still poking out a little, so he folded it over with his hand, touching the little creature for the first time, the dead fur comforting, as if it had never been alive. He then gathered a pile of dirt with his hands, first extending them as if before a hug, and then closing them as if in prayer, this ten times over, until all the dirt and needles were again in place.

He headed back to the cabin. The squirrel had drowned in the toilet bowl, but how it got there, how it made it under the seat and what it was after, Deda had no idea. He thought about lying to them, saying it wasn’t a squirrel at all, yeah, that’s the one, everything would then be okay again. But what was the point in lying; the squirrel wasn’t going to disappear if he just said it hadn’t been a squirrel, everything wasn’t going to be okay if he simply told them it’d been a rat after all. No, he wasn’t going to lie about anything. Deda’s not a kid, it was a squirrel, and now let’s try to forget it.

Away, I’d rather sail away

It was like it was the last day of summer; the sea calm and dark, the seafront almost deserted, barely ten people waiting for the ferry: a grandma with her grandchild, the kiosk lady waiting for today’s newspapers from the mainland, three fishermen with their bottles of beer, a handful of nondescript men and women — and Boris. He was leaning on the ticket booth, smoking, gazing out toward the edge of the bay around which the ferry would soon circle. It was fifteen minutes late, enough time to smoke two cigarettes, but no one was worried about the delay. The passengers didn’t appear in any hurry, the woman from the kiosk less than desperate to get back to work; the fishermen hadn’t even finished their beers. Boris was in a funk about the ferry’s arrival, and every delay gave him that much more time to pull himself together, to melt the ice cube in his stomach that had been there since he’d woken up and realized that today he was going to attend to what he had left undone for the past six years, something that might have changed his life had he, like a submissive Polish inmate in a concentration camp, said his farewells in an orderly and timely fashion.

He was thirty-three, and as his editor liked to say, already a few months older than Christ. He’d only come to the island to meet the ferry. He hadn’t been to the seaside in years, but something in that telephone conversation had drawn him into a lie: the desire to portray his life as being as normal as possible, which meant telling her that he’d be on Korčula on the thirty-first of August, to which she had replied hey, that’s great, what a coincidence, as fate would have it I’ll be showing my husband around the Adriatic then, and naturally it was an opportunity not to be missed, and why would they; after so many years they were to see each other again, to put to rest what had remained unsaid, what in the staging of a life no one can escape, not even those masterfully adept at hiding, those who always — even when it’s completely uncalled for — lie.

Boris had arrived from Sarajevo the night before and had rented a room for a couple of nights, planning to return the following day. He wore sandals on his feet and a straw hat on his head, disguising himself as a man on summer vacation — and oh boy, wasn’t he just resting up. He hadn’t tanned like people on summer vacation do, but that didn’t bother him. She knows, she remembers that he always stays in the shade or under the canopy of a café. His hair isn’t salty, he hasn’t gone in the water and has no intention of doing so, but this didn’t matter either, she wouldn’t be probing the saltiness of his skin.

He stubbed out his cigarette and licked his forearm. It seemed like the thing to do. In the midst of a real panic attack it’s best to have a completely imaginary one, something to heal you like those trusty childhood lies that return from time to time; they never harbored any ill intent, you never even told them to anyone. When you lie to yourself, it’s not actually a lie but a way to repair the irreparable, to create space for a new life, for a joy only otherwise possible by exhausting encounters with reality and a Tarzan-like flight from one dunghill of whatever gets you down to another. So it’s easier to lie, and in the end the result is the same, just so long as others never find out about it.

The ferry revealed its dull bow from behind the bay and began slowly gaining in size. Boris lit a new cigarette, hoping to ward off his fears, he ran his hand through his hair, and almost mechanically sucked in his stomach. The ferry needed ten minutes to reach the shore; it would be another two minutes for them to lower the gangplank, meaning he had another twelve minutes. It was like he had that long to live. He thought about the scandal with the American president, about his busted fridge, about the chair in his newsroom office that was too low for him and the computer he’d spilled Coke over so now it didn’t work; the only thing he didn’t think about was what was about to come.

A few people stood on deck. They started waving. The fishermen with their beers waved back. Not every boat’s the Titanic, he thought. He would protect himself by playing out of character, by smiling a smile that wasn’t his. He’d even bought a cigar, the first he would smoke in his life; he wouldn’t say anything that might allow her a way in. He’d sense it if she was on his trail, and that would make him vulnerable.

As soon as the passengers began disembarking he felt incredibly exposed. He should have waited somewhere out of the way. He recognized Maja as soon as she stepped on the footbridge, but from that distance she didn’t see him. Twice she accidentally glanced in his direction, her gaze then sliding on. This was good because it gave him more time. A tall, strong-looking man carried the bags; at that moment his height and strength were the only things Boris noticed, nothing else. Maja held a kid by the hand, a little kid probably no taller than the bollard to which the ferry was tied. Funny she didn’t mention the kid, he thought, coughed, put a smile on and fixed it there, walking the assured walk of a man who in that moment feared shame more than anything else.

Boriiiiiiiiiis! she called to him, nonchalantly passing the kid’s hand to Mr. Big.

They kissed in greeting; he felt the right corner of Maja’s lips, a bit too close, he thought, holding her in his embrace and waiting for hers to recede. He didn’t want the hug lasting too long — it wasn’t actually a real one — there, in full view of her man. Mr. Big smiled a smile of happiness and sympathy, that’s probably the best way to put it. He must have been happy to see his wife happy, while the sympathy might be accounted for by the fact she was visiting her homeland for the first time in six years, or actually her former homeland — because we are what is written in our passports — a country that had seen war come and go, and now she was meeting up with a dear friend.

Boris, let me introduce you! Mr. Big had a firm handshake, the kind of firmness you learn at a good preparatory school, where hands never tremble, show neither weakness nor excess familiarity — let alone your feelings, which just evaporate, as much a waste of time as this same lack of feeling. The kid was named after some pirate or avant-garde artist, a name definitely not pronounced the way it was written. We’ll skip the cynicism today, he thought, although in other circumstances and with other people he’d have asked them to spell it for him.

So, how are you? her whole face beaming a smile, I’m well, he had relaxed a little, and out of the corner of his eye caught Mr. Big nodding politely, though he didn’t understand a thing. Anyone watching the scene from the shadows would have thought Mr. Big was holding the kid like he was the nanny and not the father. The kid himself was silent and embarrassed.

Boris wasn’t sure about where to go. He didn’t even know how long the visit was going to last. The next ferry for Ploče was at five, when they were heading off for Dubrovnik; God, Dubrovnik — everyone who comes from abroad goes to Dubrovnik — but what to do until five, where to take them, what on earth she expected, he had no idea.

Are you hungry? he asked, though it wasn’t yet noon. She turned to Mr. Big, talking fast, Boris trying not to hear or understand anything, particularly whatever it was Mr. Big had to say, but he couldn’t avoid hearing a single word repeated three times over: dear, dear, my dear. Like in those films where it’s repeated over and over by couples that start fighting the second they’re left on their own. Nothing’s like it is in a film, he thought and now nodded his head. They’d grab something to eat after all. Mr. Big has to try Adriatic fish. You don’t get that stuff in the north. They only eat those gigantic Japanese monsters, tuna and herring, their whole lives they never see anything fish-shaped on their plates.

The restaurant was called The Long Line. There were three chairs on each side of the table. Boris sat down, Maja, the kid, and Mr. Big across from him. It was just like at the theater, only you didn’t know which side the audience was on. Boris gave his all in making conversation, and she, not noticing anything or noticing everything — that’s not for the telling here — babbled on and on, one minute about what they did yesterday, the next remembering her time with Boris, everything always shot through with laughter and happiness. There was no sadness for her, and you could see she was happy about their reunion. Mr. Big spoke softly to the kid, raising his head and silently smiling every now and then, not a trace of unease. He was one of those people you could spend twenty years with, head off to war with, travel and live with, without ever catching him off-balance, or wanting to tell you where it hurt. When this sort of guy asks you how you are, you’ve got to tell him you’re great because if you say anything else, you start bullshitting or admitting you’re not well or something, he’ll think you a lower being or just plain rude, horrified at the thought he might have to help you out.

Maja hadn’t aged. You’d never guess you’ve had a kid! he said and already knew he should have said something else. For a flicker of a second she seemed sad and afraid. She knew him well enough to know he never said things like that, and that if he did, there was a kind of darkness there, a darkness from which she’d escaped in the nick of time, so maybe the fear and sorrow never actually reached her, maybe her nerves didn’t transmit the message to her brain, it had all just hung there on her face. No, really, you look great, he healed the damage, and she kicked off about childbirth there in the north, about their exercises and routines (like we don’t have that stuff), the psychologists to relieve every fear, their pain-free delivery methods (God, like she lived here in the last century) that sent a woman home brand new. It was a completely new and miraculous experience for me. . We’re not thinking about repeating it for the time being. . But who knows what time might bring. . Boris took a cigar out and lit up. He wanted to delete everything he’d heard. The content didn’t matter, that was all extraneous and easily forgettable. It was the syntax that got him, it wasn’t her own; it wasn’t even the syntax of their mother tongue. Hers were translated English sentences, where everything that should have been in the middle had unerringly been pushed to the end. He didn’t actually know whom he was talking to: Maja, with whom he had spent three years, whose murmurs, intonation, faulty accents, and syntax he knew and loved, or a person resembling her, actually, a replica who had stolen Maja’s life experience and appearance, translating her words from a foreign tongue, a language in which everything important came at the end, after every sentence and every story was over.

The waiter brought the fish, a giant oval silver platter laden with whole fried fish. Whooaaaaaa!!! Mr. Big rumbled like a hurricane. The kid looked on in fear at food he had never seen in his life, probably thinking that someone had hurt the fish terribly and that it was wrong they now eat them. Maja clasped her hands together and mouthed the kind of pathetic sentence typical of people on their first brief visit home in years, seeing in dead fried fish their homeland incarnate. This sort of shit made Boris sick and for the first time he felt like a man who hadn’t gotten over a woman. He didn’t care about Mr. Big or the kid, but that messed-up syntax was like watching his girl making love to another man and her going to town on it.

He just wanted Maja to shut up, to speak in their language, to eat the fish, take the bones out, feed the kid, smile at Mr. Big, smile at him, smile at whoever she wanted, anything but those insufferable sentences. His love, somehow, had finished up as language instruction.

What kind of fish is it? she asked. It was orada, but how do you say orada in English, because she wants to translate it for Mr. Big. But does she really think orada exists in English? Maybe Latin would help, but who knows how you say orada in Latin, we’re not ichthyologists, no one here’s an ichthyologist, just let it be orada, a nameless fish hidden in a lost language. It’s not that important, you don’t have to know everything, some things can be forgotten, and language, well, today it’s a faithful reflection of experience, what doesn’t exist in life doesn’t exist in experience, you don’t get orada in the north, so it doesn’t have to exist in words.

Boris ordered a bottle of wine, they don’t want any, but he does. He’s dying for a drink. He empties a glass, stretching his bottom lip over his top one, smiling at Mr. Big who was frowning for the first time, pricked by a fish bone, ha, what do you expect from a savage country and language. Maja was feeding the kid, murmuring strange words, all of them finishing with an o. She didn’t pay the men any mind. She was a mother now, fully concentrated on a role that had absolutely no connection with Boris’s life. The scene was one free of pain, so foreign that had it occurred at some other time, he could have even tried to enjoy it.

He made no attempt at conversation with Mr. Big, and he, who knows why, didn’t ask any questions. God knows who she told him I was, thought Boris, if I’m just a good friend it’s weird he’s not asking me anything, and if I’m what I am or once was, what’s with the dumb grinning innocent act? Actually, Boris couldn’t care less. Nothing life-changing was going to happen, and any awkwardness had been avoided. He watched Mr. Big, the pinkish hairy fingers struggling with the fish skeleton, the hair on his fingers blond at the base and brown at the tips, God, how did she get used to that, to skin devoid of pigment, which no matter the weather could only go red, a red-white color combo its only possibility, like the Red Star Belgrade flag, like scampi, like beetroot. Had she gotten used to this stuff before she started messing up her syntax, or was it the other way around, so she didn’t need to get used to it, love had just blossomed overnight, one love for each life, one after every war, one in every peace, because then you could say you had been completely faithful, like you had lived in some old catechism, like in a fairy tale, until death, language, or fate did you part. The hairy fingers were fish-clumsy, mashing its skeleton, pulverizing it until all that remained were tiny piles of dead bones you would never guess had once been a fish. It could have been something else, tiny icicles, the twigs of an arctic tree, something Boris didn’t recognize was born beneath those fingers. The imagined tendernesses with the body he once knew now belonged to those fingers, and even they seemed like Chinese symbols, outside any experience. If he’d seen those fingers on video, touching Maja’s body, he wouldn’t have recognized the scene, wouldn’t have known what he was watching, what those fingers did with the fish so impossibly foreign.

Boris and Maja lost touch when the war started. He had stayed in Sarajevo, and she’d gone north. The last time they saw each other, they’d been a couple, their love beyond question. However pathetic it might sound, they parted because the war was men’s business and women were better off out of it. Boris had Maja’s phone number but never dialed it. Maja sent Boris a letter through the Red Cross asking him why he hadn’t been in touch. Boris never sent a reply. There was no real explaining his silence, maybe it was because he feared for his life, maybe he didn’t think he’d survive the war, and maybe he was jealous of her life or it was because Mr. Big had begun appearing to him even before he appeared for real in her life. A few more months passed and Maja moved farther north, Boris no longer knew her address or telephone number. Three years later he bumped into a friend of hers who wrote Maja’s number on the back of a business card, without him having asked or her having said anything. One night he lay in bed, and when sleep wouldn’t come he dialed the number. The voice at the other end burst with joy, breathlessly telling him she was married and expecting. Boris called again a month after the birth. And then again three months after that, until the seventh time they spoke she told him she would soon be visiting the Adriatic.

He got up from the table, gave Maja and Mr. Big the need-to-pee grin, and headed for the bathroom. The urinal was filthy, the tiles chipped, his stream of urine washing away the blue traces of a long-crusted detergent, the whole thing reeking like an abandoned barrack latrine where a whole company had pissed before heading off to the front. He tried to remember whether Mr. Big had gone to the bathroom and seen this, our local disgrace, but maybe it didn’t bother him. The north is too far away for our tourist specialities to offend anyone way up there. In any case, for a second it comforted him to think he was the host and Mr. Big the tourist.

He stopped by the bar, the bill thanks, the waiter smiled, I’ll be over in a second, expecting Boris to return to the table, no, I’d like to settle up here, the waiter made like he understood and smiled consolingly in total accord with the cardinal rule of his profession: accept the weirdest things as normal lest they disturb the general ambience.

He sat back down, rubbing his hands and looking at his watch. It was already past four. This has been a long lunch! Maja said. The kid was sleeping in his father’s lap. There was no more disturbing the fish bones’ peace. I’ve loved it, I’ve loved it, she repeated, me too, me too, he worried that he might sound cynical so said it twice, making it sound funny. Mr. Big already had that ready-to-go look on his face, the one he had arrived with.

Now they only needed to perform the farewell act, which was certainly less an emotional problem than one of convention. Saying your goodbyes to a person you haven’t seen for six years and maybe won’t ever see again isn’t easy. Maja didn’t have any experience with this sort of thing, such farewells obviously at odds with the philosophy of her new life. There were no dramatic farewells in the north nor could there be, there people’s goodbyes are temporary, or death or hate parts them. Of course we’ll catch up again in the next few days, she said, it’s not far for you to pop over to Dubrovnik, and we can always come back. Boris opened his arms like this so completely went without saying that nothing more needed to be said. So they didn’t say anything. Mr. Big held the kid to his chest.

They stood on the ferry gateway. We’re in Hotel Argentina, she said, not quite yet free of the unease of their parting. Great, I’ve got the number! The lie was a transparent one, but Boris wasn’t aware of it and Maja didn’t notice. Why would he have the number for Hotel Argentina, doesn’t matter, the ferry drew nearer. An elderly ensemble was playing on deck, dressed for a ball from the end of the last century, the singer on the podium not much younger than this century, his black tails looking from a distance like moths had celebrated the sinking of the Titanic on them. The singer had the gestures of old photographs, as if posing for someone or something at his death, the merry apocalypse that might just emerge as the bridge lowered toward the shore. In a soft voice, as gentle as if wiping a dust cloth over a piano, he sang away, I’d rather sail away, like a swan that’s here and gone, a man gets tied up to the ground, he gives the world its saddest sound, its saddest sound.

Mr. Big jumped in excitedly: whoa, El condor passa. Maja and Boris laughed simultaneously, their pupils catching a chance square glance. Their pupils stilled, they shared a moment of intimacy free of any other thoughts or feelings, one they would never share again. They kissed and hugged, no mention of seeing each other again, in a few days, in Dubrovnik, or on Hvar. Maja and entourage crossed the footbridge, the bridge was drawn up, the ferry set off, Maja waved from the deck, the kid waved, Mr. Big waved, his waves like signals sent to illegal aviators high in the sky. Boris held his arm in the air, moving it to the rhythm of the farewell song, left and right, away, I’d rather sail away, like a swan that’s here and gone. The ferry became smaller, Maja and her waving hand too, until she was as tiny as the brown tips of pine needles. Just before the boat disappeared behind the bay, Boris saw she had lowered her arm and turned around, or maybe that’s just what he thought he saw. He punched his hand in the air, extending his arm as far as he could. He liked that. It looked ridiculous and cooled his sweating skin.

Ho freddo, ho molto freddo

The commotion in the train on the Trieste — Mestre line lasted half an hour. First the conductor came down the corridor, then immediately scuttled back, then a pair of carabinieri turned up, and then the conductor flew past again, returning from the dining car with a girl holding a glass of water. In Monfalcone a plump bald man with a doctor’s bag got on and was followed down the corridor by the taller of the two carabinieri, and then all was quiet. When the train pulled into Mestre an ambulance was waiting on the platform. Two paramedics entered the nonsmoking car in second class and remained there until the train was empty. Then they went back to fetch a stretcher. On the stretcher lay a black plastic bag. They exited the train ten minutes later. The bag on the stretcher was no longer empty.

At that moment a full three hours had passed since Barbara Veronesse, a retired piano teacher from the music school in Sarajevo; her seven-year-old granddaughter, Azra; and Gianni, Aldo, and Marco, senior-high students from Trieste heading to Venice for a Black Uhuru concert, had all entered the compartment. Nana Barbara sat next to the window, across from her sat Azra, look here, Nana said, this is where my grandma and grandpa were born, and Azra looked and saw nothing but grass and stone houses, look here, Nana pointed, your grandpa fought here, and Azra looked and saw nothing but grass and the odd pine tree. She watched Gianni, Aldo, and Marco out of the corner of her eye, shouting, laughing, and clapping in a completely incomprehensible language. Azra knew the whole world didn’t speak the same language, didn’t even speak English, but she had never imagined that laughter and clapping in a foreign language might sound so strange.

Nana sighed and closed her eyes. Azra watched a lock of hair fall on her forehead, the wheels of the train banging away, taram-taramtaram, the lock falling lower and lower, now just above the eyebrow, with the next taram-taramtaram it’ll be almost in her eye, no it won’t, it’ll take one more taram-taramtaram, there we go, it’s fallen. Nana’s asleep and doesn’t notice, the foreign boys holler away, what’s wrong with them, can’t they see Nana’s asleep? Azra closed her eyes, if they see she’s sleeping too maybe they’ll quiet down.

Barbara Veronesse had lived with her granddaughter in Poreč for two years. They had made it out of Sarajevo in the fall of 1992, a month after Azra’s father was killed. Her mother, Eva Veronesse-Teskeredžić, had been dead for exactly how long Azra had been alive. She died two days after giving birth, eaten up by a tumor that had grown inside her for nine months, maybe a little longer; the doctors had told her she must abort to save her own life, a childless one for sure but a life all the same; she didn’t want to, the doctor, Srećko, asked her whether she believed in God, and not waiting for her answer said even Christ would forgive you, don’t kill yourself, please, to which Eva looked at him sadly and said but doctor, I don’t believe in him and I know there is no God. Azra’s mother only saw her once in her life. She was given her first dose of morphine shortly after, and the next day she was already dead.

Nana Barbara had wanted to show Azra Venice, believing the child would remember her by the city for the rest of her life. In seven days she was to see Azra off on an airplane that would take her to Boston, where her uncle Mehmed, a computer scientist, lived, with whom Azra would live too, with him and his wife, Nevzeta, in a big house with a yard full of cats and dogs. The truth was that Nana had only heard about the one dog, but she had told Azra there were at least ten to make the leaving easier on the child, and so she wouldn’t cry because Barbara Veronesse couldn’t stand tears. Tears were all that remained of her own daughter and she wanted to avoid them, even if she had to make up all the cats and dogs in the world. With her granddaughter leaving, she would return to Sarajevo, and then what would be, would be; if we have to die, let us die where we belong, where we’ve lived our whole lives.

Aldo tapped the old woman on the shoulder, who opened her eyes to see Azra bent over the seat throwing up. My child, she searched her handbag for a tissue, the Italians had squashed into their corner, palely looking on, Azra was crying, the conductor came in and asked Grandma something, she replied, and Azra choked Grandma, don’t leave me, she squeezed her hand, I won’t, sweetheart, I’d never leave you, just relax, Azra threw up again, it’s nothing sweetheart, you just had a bad dream, the girl with the water came, trying to catch Azra’s eye and make her smile, yet the child didn’t see her, but Grandma, I don’t want cats and dogs, Barbara Veronesse struggled to breathe, the child threw up again, who knows where she’s getting it all from, the doctor came in mumbling something in a foreign language and pinched Azra’s cheek, Grandma, don’t let me go, Barbara Veronesse started to get dizzy, God, just not now, don’t kill me now, she closed her eyes, she just had to close her eyes a little, Azra cried, the doctor murmured, someone held Barbara’s hand, someone held both of Azra’s hands, Azra screamed and lost her voice, let’s go home, please Grandma, let’s go home to Bistrik, Barbara Veronesse remembered her piano, the brothers would open the monastery windows when she played, when Brother Ivan died she had played Eine kleine Nachtmusik the whole night through. Don’t cease God’s work, a young seminarian had told her, and she had played until five in the morning when Brother Ivan’s soul expired; she felt someone trying to take her pulse, she couldn’t hear Azra anymore, the child must have stopped crying, must have calmed down, a silence grew from all sides, as big as Trebević and as wide as Sarajevo, she tried to open her eyes but couldn’t, Barbara Veronesse’s eyelids were as heavy as the big red curtains at the National Theater and didn’t want to rise. Mi aiuti, per favore, his voice was shaking, she felt someone grab her feet, someone grab her shoulders, she was lying down, signora, signora, somebody had undone the buttons on her blouse, someone was slapping her face, someone’s hands were pressing violently on Barbara’s chest, they must have taken the child out of the compartment, signora, signora, there was a humming in her ears, she remembered the Bistrik stream and how it flowed when she was a little girl, she could tell apart every stone at its bottom, the hands pressed her chest in the same rhythm as the Bistrik’s flow, and with each press the stones would jump from the bottom, just look how light they are, like they aren’t stones at all but full of air, before sinking again, the water so deep you could drown in there in the fall, who had drowned? Barbara Veronesse was afraid, she was so terribly afraid that she opened her eyes and saw a big sweaty forehead with glasses. Azra wasn’t beside the window anymore and the water was gone. That calmed her, it calmed her so much she no longer even needed to sigh. Signora, signora, come sta, come va, signora, the bald face shouted. Barbara opened her mouth, smiled, and said ho freddo, ho molto freddo and closed her eyes. The doctor took Marco’s coat and covered her with it. For some time he held the wrist of Barbara Veronesse, the retired piano teacher from Sarajevo, and then he slowly laid her hand on her chest and with his fingertips, as if he was scared of waking her, placed the coat over her face. His eyes were full of tears. At that moment all the doctors in the world detested him, him, the doctor who cried.

In the next compartment Aldo and Marco tried to laugh, Gianni performed a pantomime for Azra. He played a man building a house, but the bricks kept falling down, then a man trying to change a light-bulb, then a man doing something else, he tried everything, but Azra just watched him, the nausea had passed and she didn’t want to cry, she was in wonder at this mute world, seemingly at peace with it. In this mute world there was no Nana and no Bistrik, but neither were there people who lived their whole lives in foreign languages.

Like a little girl and an old dog

The sky above Surčin is low and heavy. Drunken angels have installed themselves on the clouds somewhere high above and are now celebrating, oblivious that they’re sinking lower and lower, that they’re about to hit the ground, among the plowed fields, where the Vojvodina plain begins and forgotten pumpkins freeze. The plane has just broken through the clouds, and here it is, growing, bigger and more real than when the story began. In a few seconds it’ll touch down, the landing gear has long been extended, and the captain just needs to say those few words of signing off, of welcome and the weather, the hoping we’ll see you again.

Marina is sitting in a fourteenth-row window seat looking out. Her gaze is empty; she can’t see what she was wanting to see, nor can she even remember what it was she’d wanted. Marina is on her way home for the first time in three years. Actually it’s not home, it’s just where her parents live and where her things are, things she doesn’t need anymore or perhaps never needed, things not for junking because wherever they are means you’re home. She’s never lived in Belgrade apart from the several months between their leaving Sarajevo and her leaving for Canada. But still she tries to recognize the ground beneath her, the runway expanding like it might swallow the plane, the screech of the wheels as they touch ground; she searches for the code to a former world, to which, as the story goes, she belongs.

It’s cold outside, she inhales, catching on the air the faint scent of petrol and a hint of frozen winter grass, but this is all. Nothing she knows, nothing that after so much time would make you say hello again, I’m back, take me in again for a little while.

They don’t know her time of arrival. She couldn’t bring herself to tell them; who could have handled a meeting in the airport terminal, voices echoing to eternity, thousands of eyes rubbernecking at scenes that are none of their business, a situation where you have to stand, hug, wave your arms, wipe away tears, swallow pounding hearts, no sitting or lying down, no way, no cushioning your head, because it’s an airport, people spit on the floor, you can’t sit or lie down, crying’s no good in a place like this, what would everyone think, each with his own opinion and explanation of the spectacle. When in the hour of greatest weakness and vulnerability, in the midst of sorrowful joy, people find themselves under a stranger’s gaze, in a stranger’s imagination, they risk spilling like water, their fates draining down into whatever strangers have dreamed up for them.

On the bus she closed her eyes, wanting to sleep the exact duration of the journey. She opened her eyes every few minutes, in fear of a stranger’s touch or that someone might think her unwell and want to help her the way people do here when you’re unwell — with a series of kindnesses and offers of assistance that make you feel even more unwell. Every time she opened her eyes she’d see something different. Apartment towers at the city’s edge, women at an improvised market, one of them holding a box of matches and smiling, yellowed buildings and a poplar, young guys smoking in front of a movie theater, a house with a sign saying “Kolobara.” It wasn’t necessarily a single city. It could have been ten different cities, one for each opening of her eyes. Each was equally unfamiliar and unknown and only a queasy childhood premonition told you that in some way, distant but real, you belong to this scene; this same premonition reminded Marina of her anxiety when she used to go into a supermarket where a bitchy check-out woman, without asking, would give her a piece of bubble gum in place of her small change, at least until Marina was old enough to fire back lady, what do you think, is this appropriate behavior, but the premonition might have easily reminded her of something else, not that it mattered; Marina just didn’t want anyone touching her or talking to her. Ideally your entrance into such worlds would be invisible, and you would stay that way, not uttering a word until you had established possible connections to your past. Spoken in such places, words disappear into dark spaces where you’ve never been in your life, or where you were once but have since departed, and then those words return when you want them least, to a world where you really are, and wound you.

She got off the bus and still hadn’t said a word, but she would have to speak to the taxi driver. He’s a little guy, stumpy and greasy-haired. Marina said Senjak and showed him a piece of paper with the name of the street written on it. She coughed, surprised by the tone of her own voice. The taxi driver was silent, a city full of people passed by, strangely making their way through the dust clouds, as if they were the clouds upon which those drunken angels sat perched over Surčin. In the coming days Marina will watch the dust, turbid and impenetrable, and when they speak on the phone, she’ll tell Him that covered in dust Belgrade looked like Macondo in the final chapter.

Before the taxi gets to Senjak, it’s probably a good time to explain who He is. She hasn’t seen Him since leaving Sarajevo, and at the time, He was her boyfriend. Today she doesn’t know what He is to her, but they are in touch from time to time, presumably because they never said their goodbyes and so have endured like baffling chronic illnesses endure, the ones that don’t kill you or cause you pain but hang around until you’re dead all the same. They could meet, but probably won’t — although they want to — they’ll probably never see each other again. If they passed each other in the street they wouldn’t recognize each other. Marina doesn’t know why things are the way they are, perhaps because sometimes people can become destroyed cities to each other.

Her father’s name was written on the door. She raised her finger to the bell and then paused. Between her finger and the round red button was a space barely wide enough for a piece of paper, but she didn’t press down. How does this go, she used to say aloud when she had an unsolvable math exercise, easy as pie, said a voice she was no longer sure was her father’s. She heard footsteps inside, and what she thought was the clattering of plates, she could have been standing there for hours, her index finger pointing at something, if only that would have been the end of the matter, if only something painful or deathly hadn’t clattered from the other side of the door, beckoning her back into a life she had sloughed off.

The bell didn’t sound like a bell. It squealed like a little computer with an empty battery, the doors burst open; her mother, wrinkles, wrinkles, wrinkles, a face that had fallen like a sail at half-mast, the voice still the same, her words ones that once annoyed Marina, arms enfolding, arms holding tight, Marina says wait and smiles, her smile broad and painful, her father white and gray, her father huge like the tallest tower of cards, his face firm like the face of a father should be, always firm, that’s how he thought he should be. Just don’t talk about yourself, just ask stuff, smother and drown them in questions, admit nothing because anything you say will hurt them. They’ll talk, they talk in stops and starts, they don’t know how to talk to a daughter after three years, you don’t learn that sort of thing anywhere, who would’ve thought they’d need to know something like that, if they’d known they would have learned, there must be a way to do it, there must be a manual somewhere, people know about this stuff, they have to, why are you so skinny, her mother’ll ask her, there she goes, leave her alone, her father says, he’s proud of his young daughter as if she were a son, because he doesn’t have a son, hence the leave her alone.

Where’s Astor? she asked, heading to the living room. A black cocker spaniel lay in an armchair, already a fourteen-year-old, watching this strange woman on her approach with her grimace ever shriller, who is she and what does she want, strangers never grimace at him like this, he took a long look at Marina, she looked at him and knew he didn’t recognize her. At that moment she wasn’t hurt Astor didn’t recognize her, nor was she when she was telling Him about it later, but she couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t one day hurt, so she tried not to give it much thought, just said her dog hadn’t recognized her, not a hint of sadness in her voice, but it brought a sadness out in Him.

She had been fourteen when Astor came into her life. Today she is twice as old, making her as old as a little girl plus an old dog. That’s about how she had felt in Belgrade at her parents’ side, in a different life, one neither frenetic nor euphoric, but gentle and slow, so you felt the pain all the more acutely the second it drew near. Astor had been the end result of the deepest grief, perhaps still the deepest she keeps. The grief ’s name was Hefest, a brown cocker spaniel that had been hit by a car in Grbavica and had spent the night dying in her room, in her lap. It was then she made a wish that she would never again get close to death, that she might run from everything precious and dear before it disappeared. Her father buried Hefest in the yard of the Viktor Bubanj barracks, and it was then for the first and only time in her life she saw her father cry.

I’m going to take him for a walk today, she said, grabbing Astor’s collar and leash, noticing they were new, and leading him out in front of their building. It was something she’d done a thousand times in her life, and now she had to do it again, to feel like it was no big deal and that she could live without it, that it was something she didn’t need to remember, something she had to forget, and the only way she could do so was to again, after so much time, take a dog that no longer recognizes her, because it’s already much older than her life, for a walk in the park, which isn’t actually the same park, but that doesn’t matter. The park too was so full of dust you had to sneeze it out, to give yourself a good shake before boarding the plane, shake loose all excess; dust, walking the dog, whatever. Astor, she shouted, the dog didn’t turn around, Astor, he waddled on like an old man, one leg in front of the other, but still fast enough that she had to break into a jog to catch him. Astor, Marina screamed, fuming mid-park that not only did the dog not recognize her, he held her in contempt. It was a sudden strange reflex from a former time, Astor was again her business, again her dog, and he shouldn’t behave like this because what good is a dog like this, what’s the point taking such a dog for a walk if this is how it’s all going to end. In that instant Astor shot a random glance back, saw Marina’s scowl and furious waving, turned around, and again, slowly, step by step, like a good little doggie, returned to her knee.

Uff, I forgot to tell you he’s stone-deaf, it’s been more than a year now, said her mother, busy fixing a lunch that would today nourish Marina’s skinny limbs, and together with the next five to come would be a message to the world where her daughter was returning. Astor was again in his armchair, his head resting on his paws, looking at Marina with that senile sadness, one full of miscomprehension of those who would so constantly and so animatedly explain something. She could still feel traces of rage; in fact it seemed that this time her anger was moving slower than its source. She needed to change something urgently but didn’t know what. It would be best to go now, to get on a plane today and disappear. But of course she won’t. It’s only right to stay another five days, and then take off among the angels and onward to a world where she wasn’t beholden to anything, anything good or anything evil, where not a single one of her deaths existed.

Marina lived in Vancouver. She had gotten her Canadian passport a month ago and could now travel wherever she wanted. The process of becoming a Canadian citizen had lasted three years. As the Canadian authorities see it, that’s how long you need to forget everything you might call home and accept that home no longer exists or at least that home isn’t where you were born.

She worked in a shoe shop and once a month had an appointment with the caseworker responsible for her resettlement and integration, a Vietnamese woman who repeated over and over how she knew life under communism was tough, offering only a handful of rice a day. Marina would nod her head, smile in confirmation, yes, a handful of rice and nothing more besides. The Vietnamese woman was quickly convinced that Marina’s integration and socialization would be perfect, and that soon she wouldn’t even remember the many a horror of a system that forced everyone to wear the same uniforms.

She lived alone, she tried falling in love three times, every time she said I love you, I love you, I love you, it was like she was saying oh, that’s so great at a dozy rest-home tea party. Not obliging her to anything, that’s about what it sounded like. Then she would take off with barely an explanation, leaving behind confused young men lifting pairs of foggy glasses with their index fingers as if it were a rainy day.

In the free world you can live completely alone and never feel like something’s missing. And so Marina ended up alone in Vancouver, surrounded by a mountain of shoes, like a Cinderella who after midnight had realized that not even a prince was much of a win in life, at least not in this country.

A few nights before the trip to Belgrade she’d had a dream in which someone was missing; one of the three, Astor, her mother, or her father, was absent, but in her dream she couldn’t work out who. One moment Astor and her father were there, the next her mother and Astor, the next her father and mother, the next Astor, her father and mother, but as a pair, not as a threesome. She desperately tried to account for all household members, but there was always someone missing. She phoned her sister in Los Angeles and tried to tell her about the dream; she didn’t understand it, she said my kid has a cold and I gotta go to work. Marina put the receiver down guiltily and looked at the clock, in Zagreb it’s four in the morning, she wanted to call Him, but how do you call someone in Zagreb at that hour to tell them about a dream from Vancouver.

Since arriving she’d heard her parents’ breathing, seen the age spots on her father’s hands and his choking at lunch. Her mother’s face had an unhealthy complexion, or that’s just how it seemed to her; do you have any prescriptions, she asked, sweetheart, what’s with that, we’re not sick, her father replied, surprised. Astor was still lying there, his head again resting on his paws, looking sadly ahead, his eyes only flickering when someone made a sudden movement.

That morning they had breakfast together. Her father brought three soft-boiled eggs in porcelain eggcups. It was snowing outside. They sat at the table, covered with a cheery and colorful tablecloth decorated with motifs of harvest scenes. They lifted their spoons almost simultaneously, tapping the tips of their eggs. Three taps was enough to break the shell. Nine taps in a gentle morning snow that would blanket all the dust. They remained there in silence like people who from here on in would always, every morning, sit in silence together around the same table. All three were relieved to have quit their thinking, each for his own reason. Saying their goodbyes at the airport in Surčin, they will remember this breakfast. Maybe they should have talked after all. When the plane finally takes off, her father will hug her mother, wiping her tears away with his left arm, waving to Marina, who won’t see a thing, with his right. He’ll be waving to the plane that is Marina. In that instant Marina will think how Astor was missing from the breakfast scene, a sign and an explanation of the dream. She knew she’d never see him again.

That’s how it will be when she goes. Now she’s still here, looking at the veins popping out of her father’s neck as he tries to slurp up the contents of the egg. Only living creatures, precious creatures, could endure such torture while doing the ostensibly simplest things. He could smash the egg, be done with it, and eat in peace, a spoonful at a time, all the white and yellow. Later he would have forgotten all about it, but this way he’ll definitely remember, he definitely won’t forget slurping at the egg and the egg not wanting to come out. It could have all been so much simpler, done with so much less humor for those looking on. Marina wanted to laugh but didn’t want to break the silence of the morning. Both sky and clouds are gone now. Outside everything is snow-white like under the wing of a drunken angel.

Bethlehem isn’t far

Nana Erika is sleeping poorly. It’s almost Christmas, their first since coming to Zagreb, but she can’t go out to the market to buy butter for the cake, codfish, baking chocolate, a three-month-old suckling, dates, almonds, walnuts, tinsel, rose oil, that transparent plastic wrapping, and all the things she used to buy that meant winter was upon us, the snow quieting every voice, and a celebration was in order because we were still alive, we and all our loved ones, in the house in Bistrik, in Sarajevo, and all over the world wherever Potkubovšeks and their children might be. Nana can’t remember exactly when that time ended; the festivities and preparations, the fingers freezing under the weight of shopping bags, but it seemed to her long past, maybe a few lifetimes ago, because in this life, one she still remembers well, the war continued apace, and there was no market, no Christmas, no festivities, nor would there have been any today had they not moved to Zagreb, to this apartment from which Nana has never ventured out because her legs can no longer carry her, even the journey to the bathroom she can’t make alone.

It’s a big world out there and there are many Christians in it, too many for one to ever meet them all. Nana Erika had always known this, but how could a regular three-room apartment be so big that she doesn’t even know all the Christians within its walls? A strange girl brings her coffee and asks do you need anything, Nana? Then a kid, probably a high-school junior, pinches her cheek, puts his cold nose to her forehead, and says I’m frozen, Nana, it’s a thousand degrees below zero outside. Nana Erika just smiles, giving them the ready answer she gives everyone: yes, yes, my child, it’s all misery and woe. And then the girl, playing angry, says I didn’t ask you for the state of the nation, but if you needed anything.

Uncivilized are these young folk: You don’t who they are, let alone what they are, yet they pinch and tease you, talk to you when the mood strikes them, not even introducing themselves. It wasn’t like this in Nana Erika’s day. You knew the rules and your place. The first rule was that strangers — young, old, doesn’t matter — weren’t welcome in her house, and if you came knocking, you had to introduce yourself, announce your purpose, say whether you were a guest, the postman, or after a particular number or street. And now look; her Zagreb apartment is full of them. Maybe that’s the custom, the done thing here, she won’t protest if it is, but then they should tell her so, not leave her to linger alone among so many strangers.

Only Lujo’s her own. Sometimes late at night he comes to her, takes her hand and caresses it, like back when they locked eyes as kids at the source of the Bosna’s waters, and at such times Nana Erika discreetly, so no one hears, asks Lujo, for the life of me, who are all these people, all these young folk? Instead of telling her the truth, Lujo’s eyes well with tears and he grips her hand and starts fumbling. Nana Erika knows Lujo’s fumbling, they’ve been sixty years together, and she doesn’t miss a beat, but she doesn’t interrupt. She lets him go, every sentence leading him ever further into a lie: Rika dear, they’re our children and grandchildren, your Tvrtko and Katarina, and Klara and Josip. Don’t you remember: a big snow had fallen when Klara was born, and you and I had been in Teslić and were on our way home. The train was stuck the whole night and the telegram just said “Katarina’s given birth,” so we didn’t even know if it was a boy or girl. Do you remember us waiting the whole night through and the conductor bringing us tea and saying, “Fear not, madam, every train arrives sometime, and so shall this one too.”

Her Lujo is dear to her, but even so she can no longer forgive his not telling her the truth (what kind of truth might she dare not be told?), and as he moves to kiss her good night, she turns her cheek to him, like she has never done before, and he knows something’s not right with his Rika, he knows Rika doesn’t like it when they fumble their lies, least of all when they’re Lujo’s lies. What children, what grandchildren, who knows who they belong to and what they’re doing in her apartment, if this is indeed her apartment, and if you are allowed to have two apartments in your old age: one torched in the war, and a second here in Zagreb, a city she’s never even seen, yet where she now has an apartment. She would need to plumb the depths of her brain, not to mention her morality, to figure out whether this might be possible or allowed, or whether it’s something else. Maybe this isn’t her apartment, maybe she and Lujo are just staying with these young folk and their parents until the war is over, until they go home, draw down a loan, and roll up their sleeves to rebuild what is given to be rebuilt, starting life over from the beginning. But then why didn’t he just tell her this, that they were among strangers, she could deal with that, she’s dealt with worse things in life, but she can’t stand a lie.

All shall be revealed on Christmas Day, and that’s the day after tomorrow. Everyone will gather around the tree, it’s already decorated, when Nana Erika will ask them who they are and whose are they, and if she’s in their apartment or they’re in hers. They won’t be able to lie, there’ll be too many of them, and people don’t know how to all suddenly lie the same lie, and how would they dare lie beside a tree so decorated, on this a holy day when every dishonesty and hypocrisy, every dirty look and vile thought count a hundred times more and are entered somewhere in heaven’s ledger.

Nana Erika is sitting in the armchair in front of the television, her legs covered with a big Russian shawl. The shawl is black, scattered with whopping red roses, as whopping as her Lujo’s lies. She runs her hand slowly over the roses, caressing them, imagining they are the night sky above Treskavica light-years ago, the flowers in place of stars, the sky reflected in two mountain lakes as if in two eyes in which everything might drown. Nana Erika hasn’t forgotten anything; she remembers the roses instead of stars and the lakes on Treskavica, and if she thought of Lujo’s words now, she’d burst into tears. You’ve forgotten this, you’ve forgotten that — she hasn’t forgotten anything under the sun, nothing worth remembering, not even those things it would have been better had never happened.

A boy stands in the doorway looking over at Nana Erika. She doesn’t let herself be thrown, though she knows the look he’s giving her, she just strokes her roses. Nana, let’s go have dinner, everyone’s at the table. Nana Erika lifts her head; her glasses on the tip of her nose, a whippet of anger would be enough for them to fall into her lap. But Nana Erika doesn’t get riled, she lets the boy take her hand and help her from the armchair; her legs feel the weight of her body, every bone bending, every muscle trembling, every vein trying to hold it all together. She had never been conscious of her body, hadn’t been aware of it carrying or moving her, but now she knows it well; Nana Erika and her body have finally become one, and she’s happy, because life’s not easy with your soul on one side and your flesh and bones on the other, always out of kilter. The boy led her step by step to the dining room; her shawl had slid to the floor, left lying in front of the armchair; how careless and sloppy, he’s not going to pick it up, that’s all right, someone will take care of it, someone will teach these children how to behave, even this one walking at her side; she’s not one for worrying the worries of others.

A grand long table covered with a white tablecloth. At its head sit Nana Erika and her Lujo, around the sides the strangers. There are more of them than usual. All look to the two of them; Lujo has rested his hand on hers, as if afraid of something, perhaps all these unfamiliar faces. It’s okay, Lujo, it’s okay, it’s our turn now, she whispers to him, and he squeezes her hand.

How far is it to Bethlehem? Not very far, sang Nana Erika. They should listen; they need to learn the song and how to sing. Tonight there shall be no lies, tonight, after the song it shall be known, who is father to whom, who son to whom, and what she and Lujo are doing there in Zagreb with this crowd. They all close their eyes and start singing, but they don’t know the words, and some of them don’t even know how to sing. Nana Erika picks up on that immediately; she’s got an ear for these sorts of things, for thirty years she sang in the Sarajevo Opera choir and from a hundred harmonic voices she knows who’s messing things up.

The song at an end, Nana Erika gently laid her head to her chest. Lujo shook her arm, but she didn’t wake. She hasn’t had enough sleep, he whispered as if apologizing. Everyone began nodding their heads to an invisible rhythm, staring at Nana with the same look she used to stare at her roses. It’s a shame Nana Erika couldn’t see this, because if she had, she would have recognized their eyes and maybe come around to the idea that Lujo hadn’t been lying after all, that everyone here really was a child or grandchild.

Merry Christmas, Nana, the girl was sitting on her bed offering her her hand. Christmas? What do you mean Christmas? We haven’t even had Christmas Eve. The girl laughed aloud: we have, we have, but you slept through it. . Slept through it? Child, you don’t know me. Erika Potkubovšek never sleeps through Christmas Eve and don’t you be cheeky with me. We haven’t had Christmas Eve, and there’s no Christmas without Christmas Eve. The girl looked sheepish — and so she should have, caught lying like that — and left the room.

Rika, Merry Christmas, Lujo came over to her, the devil peeking out from behind his every word. Have you no shame, man? Nana Erika turned her back to him. She looked at the wall and waited for him to go. He said something else, but she wasn’t listening. Sometimes you have to forgive people the unforgivable. But they’re not just any old folk, they’re Rika and Lujo. In the thirties all Sarajevo turned its head when they walked the riverbank, there had never been such a couple, or so people said, and that’s no small thing; when you’re with someone for sixty years, there’s no suffering you haven’t endured together, no sin you haven’t forgiven them. In a marriage like this people become similar to God: mercy and forgiveness embodied and only thus can they be happy. Nana will forgive Lujo this lie too. How could she not forgive him his lies when he’s so certain he’s protecting her from what she is to discover on Christmas Day inquiring of everyone who and what they are.

That day and the entire night, and then the whole of the next day, Nana Erika kept her back turned to the world. She looked at the wall, sometimes she would fall asleep and doze for an hour or two until someone came by, but she wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t say a word. She was punishing Lujo and knew well how long the punishment must last. Long enough for Lujo to think she would never look at him again and he would forever see only her back.

Promise me something, Lujo, she finally spoke, having checked that they were alone. Promise me that tomorrow we’ll celebrate Christmas Eve, and that the day after tomorrow we’ll celebrate Christmas, and that all these people won’t addle our minds and muddle our feast days. . Rika, all this I promise you, just don’t ever switch off again, and don’t ever turn your back to me. What a wretch I’d be without you, he said, framing her face in his hands and kissing her lips.

Nana Erika slept poorly because she spent the whole night worrying about butter for the cake, chocolate, codfish, decorating paper, and the suckling; who knows if there’ll still be young sucklings at the market or whether they’ll already be sold out, she thought, tossing and turning. And who’ll fetch everything when she can’t stand on her own two feet, and Lujo, well you know Lujo, he can’t even buy mincemeat at the butcher’s, let alone a suckling. She finally dozed a little in the dawn, but a girl woke her: Nana, it’s Christmas Eve today, isn’t it? Nana Erika caught a glimpse of mischief in her eyes. As if she were making sure that Nana knew about Christmas Eve and Christmas.

Nana Erika sits in her armchair in front of the television caressing the roses in their black sky. It’s a summer night above Treskavica, Lujo’s asleep in the cabin, but she can’t sleep because he kissed her for the first time today. Roses had appeared in the sky in place of stars and no one would ever see them except her. Warm, soft, and tender roses on a black sky blanketing her legs, warming them like it never had before.

The boy leads her step by step to the dining room. At the head of the table sit Nana Erika and Lujo, around the table the strangers. Lujo dear, do you know how many Christmas Eves this makes for us? But he just shrugs his shoulders, turns the ring on her finger with his thumb and index finger, and lets his gaze wander as if afraid the strangers might notice something; that they might see that even after so many years the two of them are still in love, and try and destroy or trample what they have. Nana Erika won’t let them though. She’ll ask them whose they are and who they are, and on Christmas Day they’ll have to tell her the truth because whoever dares lie on Christmas Day will burn in the eternal fires of hell.

How far is it to Bethlehem? Nana Erika begins the song, just Lujo accompanies her, the strangers remaining silent. They’re probably ashamed when they hear the song and it’s better they shut up and try to feel God’s voice in their hearts, a voice to kill every lie, cleanse them of every doubt and hatred and return to them the hope that not a single truth is ever spoken in vain, not even the truth they shall soon speak of themselves and their intentions toward Nana Erika and her Lujo.

The last verses of the song disappeared in that first phase of deep sleep. When her chin touched her chest, Lujo shouted Rika, wake up, Rika, it’s Christmas Eve, but sound asleep she didn’t hear him. She slept the sleep of the just, the sleep of children and those who have endured great suffering but haven’t done others the least harm.

Today is Christmas Day, isn’t that right, Rika? Lujo sounded lost; his voice was pleading, but Nana Erika couldn’t understand why, unless he’d forgotten you couldn’t have Christmas Day without Christmas Eve. People forget all kinds of things, but how could he forget Christmas Eve; it doesn’t matter, she’s here to remind him and protect him from wild thoughts and those who would take advantage of him; naïve is her Lujo, that’s how he’s been all these years and if it weren’t for her, who knows what would have become of him and what they, these people whose names she doesn’t know, might have done to him. The world is full of Christians; she’ll think that every Christmas, but you don’t know their names.

No, Lujo dear, it’s Christmas Eve today, it’s not Christmas Day until tomorrow. Have you forgotten that they go in that order? said Nana Erika. Lujo lowered his head and let tears fall. What’s wrong old fella? she worried. It’s nothing. I just want to know if this is ever going to end. . It will, it’ll end when we go back home, to our house, she smiled, putting her hand on his chest. Strong is her Lujo, he’s always been strong, so strong he could move a mountain if he wanted. It can’t end before then? Can’t it just end before then?. . Of course it can’t, but you know what they say: sabur efendi, sabur, patience, good sir, patience, have patience and God shall have it too. We’ll go home. . And if we don’t?. . It can’t be that we don’t go home. Haven’t you noticed how they look at us here? How could we stay among these people, their names unknown to us. Yes, I know, you’re going to start saying they’re our children and grandchildren. I know why you say that. You say it to make it easier on me, that my heart endure and not break from the waiting, but your Rika’s heart won’t break before we go back to Sarajevo. Don’t you be afraid of a thing. With hope of home, the heart is strong and endures all. And quit that rubbish about our children and grandchildren. We don’t have any, we never had any. Really, who would have children in such times, who would live in fear of their son being killed by someone else’s son or having to pick him up off the sidewalk like you pick up tomatoes at the market because the plastic bag broke. We don’t have children or grandchildren and that’s a good thing too, because our suffering would be a hundred times greater if we did, and this way our only concern is going home and starting over, from the beginning. Fine, I know we won’t be starting over, we’re already old, but at least we’ll die in our own home, said Nana Erika, the tears frozen on Lujo’s face. He must know life isn’t easy, but that’s no reason for us to lie to each other and invent some other world where nothing is difficult. It’s a fine world, Nana Erika doesn’t think it’s not, but such a world has only one failing, a lone error, a single downside; it simply doesn’t exist. We can imagine one, but that doesn’t make it real.

But why won’t you accept these children as your own, as your kin, at least you could do that, Lujo tried. I like them, the same as I like anyone, but they can’t be my children because they’re not like me. Do you hear how they speak? Do think your children would speak like that, in that language? That, Lujo, is not our language, and they are not our words, just as this is not our home, but it is theirs. That’s how it is. I can’t accept others’ children as my own because these children are staying here, here on their wooden floors, in their country, and we’ll be going back to our home. What would I want with such children when I got home? And what do I want with these children if I never go home? Be reasonable, they’re no replacement for one’s home.

Lujo clasped his hands together as if about to beg her for something important, and then he slowly opened his fingers, one by one falling away and into the abyss. They intertwined under Lujo’s chin, and Nana Erika was sure he would never again ask her for something she couldn’t do for him, nor would he ever lie to her again. Lujo, promise me something, please. We’re already old, and I can barely walk and who knows what else awaits us. So promise me that every year we’ll celebrate Christmas and that you’ll never trick me and pretend you’ve forgotten.

That evening at the head of table sat Nana Erika and her Lujo. Around them were strangers. Nana Erika looked at her Lujo, and the strangers looked at their full plates. Nothing was forgotten and nothing was missing. Not even the tinsel. She knew her Lujo would be there to support her when she asked them who and what they were and why they keep saying they’re her children and grandchildren when they well know that Erika and Lujo don’t have any children because who would bring children into the world in such times. She was so happy, singing in full voice How far is it to Bethlehem? Not that far, filling with holiness the festive hour.

It was then I longed for Babylonian women

A black car pulled up in front of Mary Kentucky’s house. A man in a bellboy uniform got out of the car, glanced around nervously, whispered something to the driver, who we can’t see from here, and ran across the lawn. He skipped along on his tiptoes, as if a lover were chasing him across a meadow or the ground beneath his feet were a minefield. He pressed the buzzer, holding his finger there until Mary Kentucky appeared at the door, and then almost slid under her armpit and scampered inside. He sat down on a small three-legged stool, took a hankie from his pocket, wiped his forehead, and let out a sigh of relief. Mary Kentucky rolled her eyes, clicked her tongue twice, and walked her walk into the kitchen.

A guy came out in a vest and boxer shorts decorated with little blue saxophones, hundreds of little blue saxophones. Omer! he was surprised, what are you doing here, you’ll lose your job. Omer raised his hand like he was stopping a train: wait!. . Wait what, I busted my balls getting you that job! Omer looked up, and calmly, as if in slow motion, got up from the stool, straightened, the whole time looking the guy in his boxers straight in the eye: Osman, I have to inform you that our father is dying. Osman leaned on the doorjamb like someone choosing between apathy and surprise: where’s he dying, bro?. . What do you mean where’s he dying, in the hospital in Crkvice. . In Crkvice, Osman repeated, although he knew well where it was, they had grown up a hundred meters from the hospital, but it had been so long since he had thought of either Crkvice or the local hospital that it was as if something precious and personal had surfaced from a great depth, bathing him in light, leaving the story about his father completely to the side. Later he would come to believe that his father had sent him the word, Crkvice, as his last bequest.

Omer skipped back over the lawn the same way he came, climbed into the car, and left Osman to try and convince Mary Kentucky that their father really was dying and that he needed a thousand dollars to fly to Bosnia and see him for the last time, to bury him and lay chrysanthemums on his grave. The chrysanthemums were the critical detail because they might just soften Mary up; they’ll seem more real to her than the death of a man she didn’t know existed, and she’ll hand over the money, the last thousand dollars of her savings, which had practically melted since Osman appeared in her life two years ago. Mary Kentucky was a checkout girl at the supermarket and all her life had dreamed of becoming a country singer. She’d scraped the money together to record her first album, written her own songs, and dreamed of getting out of that small Alabama town for someplace better, someplace where she would forget her past life and finally become someone who only shops at the supermarket.

Osman gave Mary a hug, they were standing there on the lawn and she was crying, he tried to comfort her, at his feet two suitcases, in his pocket a round-trip plane ticket for Europe. A month at the most, he told her, but she wasn’t sure whether to believe him. Somewhere deep inside, Mary Kentucky sensed that Osman didn’t actually love her and was only with her because of her money and her house, and that some day he simply wouldn’t come home. He’d vanish without saying goodbye, he’d return to his Europe, because sooner or later the war would be over, or he’d find some other girl who’ll also have money and a house, but the house will be bigger and she’ll have more money, or, as opposed to Mary, he’ll actually be in love with her. The mere thought of all this made Mary Kentucky weep. While Osman slept, she’d clean his white socks, his precious white socks that he wore when he went to play soccer with other Europeans, and afterward they’d be so dirty you couldn’t put them in the washing machine, so she’d scour them forever with a brush and she’d weep, because one day these socks wouldn’t be here, and neither would Osman. Afterward she’d kiss his sleeping forehead, and he’d frown, smack his sleeping lips, and turn over. Standing there on the lawn, all this raced through the heart and mind of Mary Kentucky, and she couldn’t stop her weeping. Osman was anxious; he was in a hurry and still had to stop by the hotel and say goodbye to his brother, but he can’t go until she’s stopped her crying. He can’t leave her like this.

Omer looked at his watch for the third time. His brother had said he was on his way forty minutes ago, and he still hadn’t arrived. Whenever Osman was late or vanished for a few hours or days, Omer would nearly have a panic attack. If it hadn’t been for his brother, he would have never made it to America. He would have probably stayed on in Sarajevo until he got killed or some great force had lifted him from where he stood, but he would never have gone this far, never all the way to Alabama. You have the heart of a hawk, he the heart of a pigeon. You’re twins, but it’s as if you’re not brothers, that’s what his father had said back when they were fifteen-year-olds off to school in Sarajevo, and ever since, Omer had been an eternal burden for Osman, a precious piece of cargo borne on the road to happiness, a reason for everyone to forgive his stronger brother his idiocies and incivility, because to have Omer in your life was like having four hands instead of two and two heads instead of one, and all the while two hands twiddled their thumbs and only a single head did the thinking. Osman’s every trait was reflected in Omer like in a mirror, a copied image, but turned the other way around. Osman was decisive about succeeding in life, Omer eternally scared that nothing would roll his way; Osman believed everyone had their uses, Omer scared that everyone had it in for him; when they went to the movies, scenes Osman found funny would bring Omer to tears; Osman loved women, Omer preferred men. . And of course, Osman had found Mary Kentucky, and Mary Kentucky had got Omer the job at the hotel.

Osman left his things in the taxi and ran inside the hotel. Omer opened the doors of the elevator and Osman stepped in, the hotel had six floors, a minute to the top and the same back down to the bottom, they hugged, everything okay? Osman nodded, I’ll miss you, Omer looked at him angrily, say hi to father for me if you see him alive, and the elevator was again on the ground floor.

His brother was at the exit when Omer broke hotel rules and hollered: bring me back something from Zenica. The reception clerk roused himself as if pricked by a needle, the gentleman reading the paper in a leather armchair glanced up at the bellboy, the little boy playing with a model Volkswagen Bug froze. . The sounds they heard from the liveried young man formed words they would never be capable of repeating or recognizing, not even on a quiz show for the million-dollar question. Osman pretended he didn’t hear anything and got into the taxi, the gentleman in the armchair returned to his paper, the little boy to his car, only the reception clerk kept his eyes pinned on Omer whose own eyes shone like glycerin, as if angels with cameras were clicking away with their flashes right in front of him.

The plane flew to Chicago, then Osman changed for Paris, then again for Zagreb. He sat in the empty airport hall, looking out through the glass at airplanes in the rain and tiny blond stewardesses, their umbrellas plastered in advertising slogans. He had no need for words of comfort, but had he sought them, he wouldn’t have found words more consoling than those written on the yellow, blue, and red umbrellas: a little white birdie boasted — it’s quiet and warm under her wings, Colibri Airlines. Osman was sleepy but afraid of closing his eyes in an empty hall that could suddenly fill with people whose every eye would be on him. He thought about his brother and about Mary Kentucky. The two of them would be lost if he didn’t come back. It’s weird to be so important to someone in life, yet not feel the slightest responsibility, not be in the least proud that you’re their first and last hope. Omer was Osman’s twin brother, but you couldn’t say the same in the other direction. The stronger brother had been born so the eldest would have someone to guide him in life, just as the war had only erupted so Osman would go to America and save Mary Kentucky, who if it hadn’t been for the war would have remained a lost soul, even if she had realized her dream and become a singer. Her singing was damn awful, but in the whole of Alabama there wasn’t a soul who would tell her that because there wasn’t anyone willing to listen to her until Osman came along and became her shoulder to cry on and ear to burn. He bitterly regretted being the one who could fill hearts and guarantee a peaceful sleep, and wished that at least sometime he might get to be a Mary or an Omer to someone, to be loved, powerless, and pathetic, someone who is helped because he knows how help is sought.

Two hours passed before the first passengers for Sarajevo started arriving. Osman didn’t want to look at them. He didn’t want to recognize anyone, or anyone to recognize him. It pays to remain anonymous when you’re on an unwanted journey; it’s not a return home anyway, and he’s not going to Sarajevo to establish just how much he isn’t from there anymore, he’s going because his father is dying, sick and old, and you can’t let yourself get too cut up, but he is dying and a son should see his father one last time, bury him as God commands, and then leave again, the same way he’d arrived, as a foreigner. He reached into his jacket pocket for his passport, a compact American passport in which not even his family name was written how he had written it his whole life, from the time he had gone to school. This family name was proof he didn’t have to recognize anyone here and that no one should recognize him. The Croatian customs officer bowed to him courteously, and it was then he remembered how once, long ago, at the entrance to Maksimir Stadium before a Dinamo—Čelik game, a cop had sucker punched him just because he had a Čelik scarf on. That couldn’t happen now. They don’t beat up Americans around here, thought Osman, and he doesn’t even have that Čelik scarf anymore. He can hardly remember what it looked like, just that it was black and red.

On the seat across from him there was a girl with a Walkman on, next to her a bright green carry-on with Benetton written on it. She closed her eyes, rocking discreetly to the rhythm of the invisible music. The music wasn’t inaudible though, a distant melody made its way to Osman’s ears, but apart from what you could see on her face it definitely was invisible. She had short red hair and one of those noses you would say was ugly if you looked at it in isolation from the whole, too wide and totally masculine, by no stretch the nose of a beauty. Her lips were also a bit big, and her auricles uneven, but Osman thought he was looking at the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He stared at her, trying to catch every movement on her face, like a man who had made a long journey north wanting to see a deer, though a deer hadn’t appeared for years, and he’d set up camp there in the north, and one day a deer appeared, but by that time he had already headed south, reconciled to the fact he was never going to see one.

The loudspeaker announced a half-hour delay on the flight to Sarajevo and Osman heaved a sigh of relief because the redhead didn’t open her eyes. If she’d opened them he’d have had to stop staring. The corners of her mouth twitched, invisible muscles in her cheeks playing with her, and she frowned in rhythm, God only knows what rhythm, but it definitely wasn’t country. Osman again remembered Mary Kentucky, good old Mary, who was sure to be sitting at the kitchen table weeping. She would never see this because she doesn’t have the right eyes, doesn’t matter that she’s a woman, she doesn’t have eyes that could see a redhead about to set off for Sarajevo, a woman who would today be the most beautiful in the city, and tomorrow and every other day too, maybe forever, the redhead in Sarajevo, beneath the white roofs of a city that was in flames the last time he saw it, and beneath which he, Osman, would never again set foot, not even today because he’d take a bus straight to Zenica, or ever again because that’s the way he wanted it, such was his fate and his passport, American, and he needed to act accordingly, his loyalties clear when the government recommended American citizens not travel someplace because of a war. He was already sure the redhead was from Sarajevo and was going home. The beautiful and irregular face isn’t one for other cities, that’s how it seemed to Osman; such a face can only be Sarajevan.

The voice from the loudspeaker announced the flight and Osman thought: time to go, beautiful. The redhead opened her eyes, catching his glance with her green eyes and reaching for her little suitcase. If she’d only known what he was thinking she’d have said something reproving, but she didn’t say anything, she just left. Though he didn’t need it anymore Osman took out his passport, and then his plane ticket; the most important stage in his journey was over. Everything that happened from now on would be just the orderly closure of duties life had set down for him.

His dead father was waiting for him in Zenica. He was laid out on the red floor of the house, surrounded by women with their heads covered, all kneeling, quietly speaking the words of a prayer. Osman stopped and immediately wanted to take a step backward, but he thought: hey, c’mon, that’s my father, I’m his son, and he moved forward. The women didn’t interrupt their prayer, I can’t go in now, he stepped back, banging into the door, a whispered sorry escaping his lips. Luckily there was no one there except his dead father and the women at prayer, and perhaps God.

Without tears he buried his father. He lowered the coffin into the grave with the hand closest to his heart, trying to remain as invisible as possible as the priest bade farewell to the deceased. Later a few people he didn’t know offered him their hands and left without having looked him in the eye. He returned again to his father’s house, which smelled of winter, old shoes, and Preference cards. He sat on the sofa, held his face in his hands, and long and slow dragged his fingers down toward his chin. When his middle fingers made it to the jawline, it was all over.

He locked the house and left the keys with a neighbor. The house needed to be sold, but he didn’t know how you went about this sort of thing anymore, and didn’t actually care about the money. He couldn’t go back to Alabama with money in his pocket. If he’d already renounced his former life, he couldn’t now return to his new one with earnings from his father’s death. Hamid, the neighbor, asked what he was supposed to be guarding the house from, and until when. Osman said he didn’t know, Hamid shrugged his shoulders. There was nothing much to be said or debated; silence is probably best when you don’t know what more to say.

Passing by the stadium Osman heard the voices from the bingo hall. There was a time when the Zenica bingo hall was the biggest in Yugoslavia. Every first of the month the miners and railway workers would come and burn through their pay packets in a matter of hours. Osman went in and bought three cards: one for him, one for the redhead, and one for fate. He ordered a double rakia, sat at a table, took out a pen, and rolled up the sleeves of his suit jacket. If one of the three cards comes up trumps, he’ll tear up his plane ticket, throw his passport in the Bosna, and go back to Sarajevo and find the redhead. He’ll never think of his brother and Mary Kentucky again. That’s what he decided, convinced it was his human and divine right, that no one could stop him and that he wasn’t doing anything wrong because it was all up to chance, and chance is neither good nor evil, chance can’t put you in the dock, just like no one can indict a man who accidentally gets in the way of a bullet, leaving behind a widow and three kids.

The fatso caller drew the balls from the barrel and read out the numbers. Osman’s own card and the card of fate remained unmarked, but the redhead’s numbers kept coming up. Osman felt a booming in his head, the kind of excitement you feel before a final spectacular jump, he was already in love, the redhead wasn’t only the most beautiful woman in the airport waiting area, now she was his. He imagined his arrival in Sarajevo, knocking on her door and their embrace, one she would welcome as perfectly normal, because without a word or a memory she would know who he was, why he had come, and what he was meant to be in her life. He’d crossed all the numbers on her card bar one, but the caller didn’t call it out. The next one wasn’t hers either, nor the one after that, nor the third, fourth, fifth, six, or seventh. . Osman reconciled himself to his bad luck as fast as he had accepted the good, the excitement disappearing from his stomach, which was already stone cold, like it had been over his father’s grave. He waited for someone to finally shout bingo!

Bingo! shouted an old man in a beret who looked like Zaim Muzaferija and got up to meet fatso, the caller. Congratulations Mustafa, with a hearty swing fatso shook the old man’s hand. The old man smiled sheepishly as if his luck had all been a set-up. Osman crumpled the card up and stuffed it in his jacket pocket.

Darkness had already fallen over Zenica. He headed toward the bus station kicking a can in front of him. The can rang hollow on the asphalt, and Osman felt like a fifteen-year-old who still believed it was possible to cheat his own life but couldn’t remember how. Maybe a man needs to be careful not to let life cheat him. What would happen, for example, if tomorrow — actually, the day after tomorrow — he turned up at Mary Kentucky’s house and caught her in bed with Omer.

If it were possible to believe something like that, if only for a moment, a moment as fleeting as the flap of a hummingbird’s wings, Osman would never return to Alabama. But as things stood, his brother’s present was going to be a marked card from the Zenica bingo hall with just one number missing, an inconspicuous seven that Osman will remember for just a short time, before it disappears along with the flame that burns and leaves no trace.

Look at me, Anadolka

Vukota remembers his grandma Rina only vaguely, if he indeed remembers her at all and his memories aren’t just from his mother’s stories. The first image is of Grandma warming herself in front of a grand wood burner, her palms outstretched toward the fire, a glimmering white cap on her head, the kind he had only seen in cartoons, on Olive Oyl’s head from the Popeye cartoon when she went to bed. In the second Grandma Rina is holding a candlestick holder, wiping the dust from it, her fingers trembling, flitting about as if each were soon to turn into a sparrow and disappear beneath the high ceiling of the living room. In the third Grandma is furious, her little cap now crooked, and she’s yelling, barely audibly, if as someone has muffled her every word with a mountain of feathers. In my time a man and woman met under a canopy, not under the covers. That was it, that was the sum of what he knew about his grandma Rina, she had died when he was three, and he had almost never thought of her until the summer of 1992, when the first Jewish convoys left the city, and Vukota remembered that Grandma Rina had been a Jew, and so that made him a Jew too, and under the terms of a new agreement he could leave this war behind.

His mother looked at him, pale and empty, and said you’ve got to be kidding, what do you know about all that. His father, Savo, just shrugged his shoulders, lit one cigarette after the other, and shut up, nothing to say since the first grenades had weaned him off the habit of starting every sentence with “we Serbs.” I don’t know anything, but I’m going to Israel, Vukota replied, his thoughts wandering back to the three images of Grandma Rina, now certain he’d be able to see something, decipher something that had hitherto remained hidden, something that would turn him — who had never been anything — into a Jew.

I am the grandson of Rina Mantova, he said, holding up a yellowed card with his grandma’s picture on it. In different circumstances a membership card for La Benevolencija wouldn’t have cut it as proof of Vukota’s ancestry, but in the mayhem of the present, the people at the Jewish Community offices weren’t particularly interested in who was a Jew and who wasn’t. They put everyone who registered on their lists. As soon as they got out of the city, people would have to settle questions of their Jewishness on their own, there could be no harm done. They had saved lives, and there’s no deception involved there.

When the bus arrived in Makarska, Vukota asked and how are we going to get to Israel? Mr. Levi was surprised: you really want to go to Israel?. . Well, I don’t know where else I’d go. Vukota didn’t want to go to America or Canada; he was afraid of a life among strangers, and if Grandma Rina had been a Jew, then presumably there was something Jewish in him, something that might burgeon and bloom in Israel, magically making a real Jew of him, at home in his own skin among the locals. When you leave home, you have to be something, you need a document and a name on it to protect you. At home you could be Nothing, now you have to become Something. Vukota was worried he lacked the talent for being Something. If alongside his father, Savo, he didn’t know how to be a Serb, perhaps he was incapable of being anything except Vukota, and if he was just Vukota, then it was curtains for him.

He arrived in Israel two months later. At the airport a pair in uniform came out to meet him, escorting him to a third uniform who interrogated him and certified he wasn’t dangerous. This uniform passed him over to a fourth who gave Vukota a five-minute lecture on the State of Israel, handed him a key, an ID card, and a check to get him through the next month or so. Welcome, get yourself sorted, he said, placed his hand on Vukota’s shoulder, and sent him out into the world.

I can sing and play a bit of guitar, he told Albert, who on the second day after his arrival had already asked when Vukota intended to get a job. Albert was from Zrenjanin and had been there three months. Vukota had been assigned to him as a roommate and Albert was supposed to assist with his socialization in their free time. That won’t help you none here. You know how to do anything else?. . Maybe I’d be okay as a waiter. . Be a waiter then, but get down to it on the double. That’s my advice to you. Otherwise it’s curtains for you.

Vukota spent weeks trying to find a job waiting tables, but at the time no one seemed to need staff. Albert grinned, ha, you Bosnians, making life even tougher. When Albert was around, Vukota couldn’t forget for a minute that he was on the edge of destitution, that little by little the ground was being pulled out from under him, the day not far off when he wouldn’t even be able to buy food. He wasn’t capable of becoming a waiter, but worse still, he hadn’t even become a Jew, or he had never been that for longer than the moment it had first occurred to him that Grandma Rina might save his neck. In any case, Albert’s ha, you Bosnians, already sounded like a grenade exploding in the distance, and with every new ha, you Bosnians, it drew ever closer and louder. One day it would go off right here, beside him, and that ha, you Bosnians, would then require an appropriate response. And what might an appropriate response be? Vukota didn’t know, except that if there wasn’t one, he increasingly had the feeling he’d rather smack Albert’s ears than find a million dollars in the street.

This could be something for you, Albert put the newspaper down in front of him. It was open to the Help Wanted page, there was an ad, something about a musical comedy, a film studio looking for young men and women who could sing, preferably from Eastern Europe. Vukota silently took down the number, making out like he didn’t care, while in reality his every muscle was dancing with joy. He hadn’t even called and was already imagining himself pulling up in front of the Hilton in a sporty Mercedes, making his way through a cordon of chicks who were passing out all over the place, like young birches felled by Jehovah’s breeze. Then he’d come visit Albert in this dank room, take a fat wad of dollar bills from his pocket, slap him on the forehead with it, and say, ha, we Bosnians.

The voice at the other end of the line had already picked up, and Vukota hadn’t even got around to being surprised with himself because, hell, for the first time in his life he’d become something, and it was because of Albert; in a fleeting flight of fancy he’d become the worst a man anywhere on the face of the earth could be — he’d become a Bosnian, he’d become we Bosnians. Luckily he wasn’t aware of it, and calmly answered their questions: yes, he’s from Eastern Europe, from Bosnia and Herzegovina, you know, a country in Eastern Europe; yes, he was an excellent singer, he used to have his own band, what do you mean where did he have a band? Eastern Europe of course; it was a punk band, but he knows how to sing Bosnian songs too, no problem at all. .

A few hundred guys and girls were there waiting outside this upholstered green door. Everyone was given a number and got called in according to some system, at first one at a time, and then someone worked it out that the audition would never end, so they started going in five at a time. Listen to those numbers will you, the number 676 surreal to Vukota, all of a sudden everything seemed different from how he had imagined. Instead of hustling his way to becoming a Jew, he had hustled his way to a number.

Fourteen hours later, a fat black-haired secretary squawked in English: 675 to 679, if you don’t get in here now, you’ve missed your chance. He pushed his way to the door, holding his number victoriously above his head. Three guys went in with Vukota, two of them were Russians, no doubt about it, the other one looked like a Romanian, and then there was a girl who was really tall, blond hair and blue eyes like in that story by Isak Samokovlija. At a table sat three men, the one in the middle looked like the director because he was wearing glasses like Steven Spielberg’s, at least that’s how it seemed to Vukota. The director pointed to five chairs, they sat down, he looked at them, rolled his eyes, the fat secretary squawked break time! Vukota started to stand up, sit down! Vukota sat back down. The director and his assistants headed out the back door. The fat secretary followed them.

For half an hour the five of them didn’t budge from their chairs. The girl held her hands in her lap, looking at the floor. She didn’t move, she almost didn’t breathe, she was tense and looked like she was remembering a song she had heard long ago, one she’d start singing the second she remembered it, she’d just start singing, out loud, not concerned with who was around or where she was. The two Russians really were Russians, and motormouth Russians at that; first they whispered stuff to each other, past Vukota who was sitting between them, then they started laughing and talking real loud, one second Vukota was taking spray on the right cheek, the next on the left. He stared straight ahead, as lost as he would ever be in his life, as far from home as anyone had ever been. He thought how perhaps it would’ve been better if he’d never remembered Grandma Rina, if Grandma Rina had never even existed, and that if it had occurred to him to leave couldn’t he at least have done it the way other people did? How did other people leave? He didn’t want to think about it, but he was sure they must’ve left better than he did, because if they’d left like him, no one would have gone anywhere, everyone would’ve remained in the city waiting for their grenade or bullet.

To keep from bursting into tears at the terror of his fate, Vukota did what was always helpful and healing in these kinds of situations: Out of the corner of his eye he started spying on the girl; you know, the standard drill — I’m a man and I’m looking at a girl. She really was beautiful, one of those ones you didn’t have the guts to fall in love with, but you never got the chance anyhow, because you only ever met them in passing and never got to introduce yourself, but you would see them and ache, that real deep-seated ache somewhere in your chest. You try thinking about them and you always think, they can’t be someone’s girlfriend, because you only see them when they’re on their own, and you can’t imagine anyone who’s deserving of such a girl.

It was like she couldn’t hear the Russians; she focused on her spot, trying to remember her song, wound tight as a string on a guitar — not on a guitar! — maybe on some other instrument, one Vukota had never laid his hands on, maybe a string on a zither. Yeah, she was as tight as a string on a zither, and under a spray of Russian spit Vukota tried to work out what country she was from, but God help him it was really like there was no such country in the whole of Eastern Europe. Frankly, there was no such country in all the Europes of this world, eastern, western, whatever. Christ, what kind of country lets a girl like her end up number 678 in some distant Israel.

He stopped thinking about his fate, in fact, he was ashamed his own fate had even crossed his mind. From the get-go he should’ve been playing the role of the hero, saving this blond beauty — this daughter of Samokovlija’s imagination, this one-off blond Jewess — from general servitude, not to mention this audition. He thought how good it would be were he to get up right now, go over to her, take her by the hand, and lead her out, but in his head there was this pathetic little Vukota, a little scared monster, all panicked, telling him for God’s sake don’t do it, you don’t go up to any woman like that, she won’t stand up, you don’t pull her by the arm like you want to rip it out of her shoulder, like you’d pluck a star from the ceiling of a kid’s room that’s not your own. Vukota understood what the little monster inside was telling him: You go up to that girl and grab her by the arm — you’ll end up in the nuthouse. Crazy, and not even a Jew.

He tried to look away from her. The Russians kept the spray coming and he faced the other direction, hey, the little Romanian, he’d completely forgotten about him. The Romanian had his mouth open like he was a bit retarded, gazing transfixed at the beauty. Have a good gawk, numb nuts, said Vukota. His own voice gave him a fright, but no one had heard it. The Romanian definitely hadn’t, he was in a daze, zoned out to everything happening around him. Thank God we didn’t have that kind of socialism, thought Vukota, and thus comforted, turned back to the girl. Left and right it rained and thundered, the Russians not quitting for a second, but it was like in those songs from after the Second World War, rain or thunder couldn’t stop Vukota: He stood there in a drenched raincoat in the middle of a destroyed city, a city of which there was nothing left, the rain just poured down on Brest that day, as it once had, and Vukota wanted to know her name, to speak it right now, and hell, loud! He wanted her to finally turn around, he wanted to know where she was from, and to tell her: you got it, sweetheart, that’s where we’re going. I’ll tear up my number, you’ll tear up yours, and we’re off to your whatthehellwasthenameofit country. There in your hometown, we’ll meet again as total strangers.

The fat secretary came in squawking silence over there! The Russian precipitation cleared, and the director and assistants took their places. Number 675, said the assistant on the left. The little Romanian jumped up and finally closed his mouth. Where are you from? the assistant asked. From Albania, replied the little Romanian, who, no shit, wasn’t even Romanian. From Albania, the three of them were surprised, Vukota too. They’ve got Jews in Albania nowadays? It didn’t matter anyhow, the kid didn’t know the first thing about singing and ten seconds later the director had cut him off and the secretary showed him the door, soft-soaping him with we’ll call you if we need you.

It was Vukota’s turn. Bosnia and Herzegovina, he replied to the assistant on the left. Take it away, the secretary squawked. Not thinking too much about it Vukota started singing the first folk song that popped into his head. Look at me, Anadolka, I offer my heart, with almonds that you may smell so sweet, with sherbet that you may long for me, he looked in her direction, she looked back, gripping her chair, oh my, your locks so red aglow, do they fill you with such sorrow so, she kept watching him, her eyes shining as if someone had mistakenly let the ocean into the room, were I to suffer such sorrow so, I’d never let you see such woe, Christ, she knows the song, she’s opening her mouth like she’s singing, but so that no one else sees her, so they think she’s just yawning a bit, it’s easy to hide words, every word can be hidden, remain unspoken, but when you sing — that’s hard to hide. . Oh my, your face so white, is it sorrow or is it fright, no, it’s not possible, he would’ve seen her, he would’ve seen her in Sarajevo, but he hadn’t seen her, no way, the ocean flowed from her eyes and rushed down her face and over the whole room, it washed over Vukota and everyone else, but they didn’t notice, they didn’t have the eyes to see, they didn’t know what it meant when an ocean gushed over deserts of dust and thick foreign tongues. Enough, said the director, Vukota wanted to sit down, no, you’re done, someone will call you tomorrow, you’re through, the fat secretary signaled toward the door. Vukota turned around, wanted to say something, but what could he say now he was on his way?

Hello, he looked at her for the last time. Hello, she said quietly in their language, but so that Vukota didn’t hear her voice. He wanted to turn around just once more, to tell her we don’t have time to talk, we gotta get out of here right now, but he didn’t turn around, and he didn’t say anything, because if a man were so quick as to in every moment do what he knows he must, he would never have left, nor would he have anywhere to return. There were still a dozen or so guys and girls in the waiting room. Vukota leaned against the wall. Russian numbers 677 and 679 were quickly out the door. The fat secretary called the next group in, but the girl didn’t appear. Vukota kept waiting anyway; he waited until the last group came out, and then worked it out that for some reason the girl had gone out the back door, the one for the directors and the secretary.

He went back to the apartment, it was hot, definitely way hotter than it could ever have been in Sarajevo. Time dragged by so slowly, much slower than his footsteps. Vukota roamed Tel Aviv like in those pictures where there’s no one except a kid rolling a steel wheel between high buildings where nobody lives. Maybe the streets were in fact full of people, and he didn’t notice, because she, who he believed was of his tribe and thus his destiny, she’d gone out the wrong door, the one that led out to the other end of the world, out into a reality Vukota would never set foot in.

I want you to go, now

He was nineteen when he came home from soccer one Sunday; his mother put her hand to his forehead, Nešo, you’re sick, she said. He put his pajamas on and lay down, from the bathroom he heard the gurgle of water; his mother was cleaning his soccer cleats; he closed his eyes, fell asleep, and dreamed hot feverish dreams.

The doctor came the next day, the fever hadn’t gone down, he listened to Nešo’s heart and looked him long in the eye. I don’t know, he said, we’re going to have to run some tests. Later his mother brought him some chicken soup. The soup had the taste of illness; Nešo will remember it, and more than anything else the soup will remind him of 1967, the year he was supposed to have died. Its comforting mild taste will irritate him and sometimes induce rage; how is one to understand healthy people eating chicken soup, eyeing each other empathetically, like they belong to a society of local pedophiles who meet once a week around a pot of dead naked birds, all gleaming white.

The waiting room at the clinic was full. Nešo and his father got the only two free chairs left. It was to be the last stroke of luck for the next six months. Everything that happened next would be a long mute nightmare.

The nurse came by and gathered the health-insurance booklets. Hours went by, Nešo closed his eyes and dozed; every now and then he fell forward in his sleep, his father catching his shoulders. I’m not in any pain, he told the doctor, who sat behind a big black desk. Sit yourself down, the nurse came over, the bed covered in a green rubber sheet; she set a rubber tape around Nešo’s upper arm and tapped him on the veins with two fingers; everything looked like it was made out of rubber, the doctor not getting up from his chair; the jab was unpleasant, dark blood flowed, Nešo took a look and his head began to spin, he thought he was going to tip over onto his back and the needle stay sticking in his veins.

The results weren’t ready for another three days. His temperature stayed up around 100.4 degrees. His father went to collect the results and returned ashen-faced. Everything’s fine, he said to Nešo. That night his father and mother sat in the kitchen, smoking in silence until the morning. The results showed their son had leukemia and only a few months to live.

For days he looked at his ashen father and his mother’s swollen eyes. Am I dying here? he asked the doctor. You don’t die when you’re nineteen, he lied. Once a week the nurse came and took Nešo’s blood. Now he would look at the ceiling. He had learned his lesson. Accustomed to his sickness and the muddle in his head lasting the whole day through, his temperature never below 99.5, already he had a score of experience. Nature has seen to it that those suffering from serious illness have no fear of death, he thought, believing that when the moment came he would greet it with serene indifference.

And then, after three months, the fever disappeared. He still felt weak, and his blood count was catastrophic, but his mind had completely cleared, his appetite had returned, and with it all those human fears, not least the fear of death. His father’s face retained its ashen hue, but his mother had stopped crying, the red gone from her eyes. To her, that Nešo’s temperature had dropped was more important and far stronger than the word leukemia. She thought that sometimes you shouldn’t put too much stock in obvious truths, results, and diagnoses, it was better to just outrun them, behave like everything was normal and everyone happy, and then at a given moment everything would indeed be normal again, and besides, happiness comes of its own accord, when no one expects it but everyone is ready to welcome it with open hearts.

When the weakness began to recede from his muscles and bones, Nešo got up out of bed. Is he allowed to walk, his father asked the doctor. He can if he’s able. It was another Sunday, now in the early spring, when Nešo left the house for the first time. The news about his leukemia had spread all over town, everyone knew he was going to die; friends smiled at him overenthusiastically, their girlfriends hugging him, hugs that made their skin crawl, as if their hugs were comforting death itself. Nešo sat down on a bench and watched the match with the girls. In a few weeks you’ll be playing too, he heard them say. They were lying, and he felt like a fraud. It was a feeling he would never forget and that would haunt him for the rest of his life. He knew he wasn’t going to die, but he couldn’t tell anyone. They knew he was going to die, but they couldn’t tell him. They could only sit there in silence, smiling at each other, people on different sides of the same wall: them, beauties in a sun-baked city, and him, a dead man walking, whom you hung out with out of a particular sense of social obligation. Not knowing it, they tried to buy their own deaths from Nešo.

At the beginning of summer, sitting again behind the big black desk, the doctor said to his father: it wasn’t leukemia. We don’t know what it was. The main thing is that your son is healthy now. His father ran out of the doctor’s office as if he had lost his head, as happy as a man whom they had told nothing else bad would ever happen to him in life. Nešo played soccer again.

Twenty-five years later, on Sunday, March 30, 1992, he invited a couple of friends and their wives over for fish and hot-pepper stew. Outside the war was about to fire up, inside the smell of fish, hot peppers, and tomato filled the air. No one wanted silence that day; let’s just talk about everything, except the war; we’ll forget about that, pretend it’s not here, like patients with a sudden interest in astronomy and linguistics, in everything they ever overlooked in life, now beautiful because it doesn’t remind them of their illness. The men laughed, the women planned their summer vacations, nonstop they spoke the names of days and months to come as if doing so would obliterate the war, that the tanks would cease to exist the second their steel ears heard the women’s voices, imposing and insistent, giving the order that August is for going to the seaside. Their stories annoyed Nešo, as he was the only one with no need of them. The war hadn’t registered in his head or heart; he was going steady with Magda, and this was all that held his interest and was the only reason he had invited guests over for lunch. He was just biding his time to cut loose. I killed a carp this morning, he said, it was no easy thing, I had to really stick it to him. Thank Christ pike and perch are always dead. The women fell silent and looked down at their plates. They took Nešo’s story about dead fish as an insult, as if he were saying to them: Yeah, you’re scared of the war, you should be ashamed, you don’t want to admit to yourselves that maybe you’ll never go to the seaside again, that maybe tomorrow your men will be holding machine guns in some ditch somewhere, pissing their drawers out of blind fear. They didn’t like Nešo, and that’s why they hadn’t worked out that the war hadn’t yet reached him, and they didn’t like him because Nešo loved playing the he-man, the kind who didn’t wash the dishes and didn’t iron his shirts because these kinds of chores were invented solely for husbands to humiliate their wives. Magda couldn’t care less; she smiled and calmly ate her food. He couldn’t stand that; it was for her that he was playing the he-man. Though they’d been married for years, Magda loved him as much as he did her, and admired him to an extent that would have made any husband happy. But Nešo wouldn’t quit, whenever someone came around, or as soon as he met someone at the bar, he couldn’t overcome this obsessive need to start talking the kind of shit that would make the stomach of any woman within earshot churn; any woman except Magda. She was either completely indifferent or accepted what he said as something definitive, which one needn’t pay any mind, much less fight about. Nešo’s were just words without substance, and it had never crossed his mind to try and put them into practice.

My wife always cleaned my soccer cleats after a game, she’d clean them and I’d lie down for a snooze. That’s the way things should be. He peered over at Magda, happily slurping his stew, flushed from the hot peppers and a kind of internal warmth that washed over him every time Magda sent apologetic glances to the women at the table. Magda didn’t give a thought to revealing that she’d never even laid eyes on those damn cleats, because then she’d ruin their game, and the game was more important to her than Nešo’s friends and their wives, who were as wild as two lynxes, kicking their husbands under the table. At the door, one of them, Nataša, said we’re never coming here again! Her husband bit his tongue; showing your anger like this was bad form. Nešo was his friend, and besides, he had a different take on the story about the cleats. It’s just what people are like: They court their lovers in all kinds of ways, and Nešo courted his with chauvinistic he-man stories.

But Nataša was right about one thing: They never came over to the apartment again because soon the apartment was no more. It went up in flames in one of the first bombardments of the city. Friendships got caught in the flames too, the remnants rare late-night telephone conversations, unreliable snippets of news traversing seas and oceans, news that contained but one verifiable fact: Everyone who had eaten fish and hot-pepper stew at Nešo’s that last Sunday before the war was still alive. Once they had lived within a forty-five-minute tram ride of each other, but today, even the fastest supersonic jet couldn’t round them up in that time.

Nešo lived with Magda in Toronto. He worked for an Italian in a little place that made spaghetti and fanatically tried to make new friends. He wanted people whom he could show himself and Magda off to, for someone in the big wide world to notice and say, look, those two are together; he wanted their love recorded the way it was in some of those burned books in their abandoned city. If you’ve already lost your life, at least you don’t have to lose your love, he thought, huddling down under the duvet, gripping Magda’s ankles with his feet, and speaking words that he later claimed he couldn’t remember because as Nešo would have it, you only uttered true words of love in your sleep. One Sunday he invited three work colleagues and their wives over for fish and hot-pepper stew. They were taken aback by the invitation but accepted it all the same. Having lunch at someone else’s place seemed a good way to save some money, and they had the feeling Nešo was inviting them to a kind of exotic ritual from some distant land, a ritual one really had to experience for oneself, like going off on a package tour somewhere.

A pack of deep-frozen fillets didn’t exactly amount to fish and hot-pepper stew, but Nešo didn’t care. He tried the steaming broth, huffing and puffing, slurping up his noodles, oblivious to Magda clinking her spoon on the edge of her plate in admonishment. She frowned, her heart pounding like crazy; God, just as long as he doesn’t start, just as long as he doesn’t speak, she thought. The women were eating quietly and smiling broadly, the men chatting away, Nešo lying in wait for his moment. Magda said Nešo!. . What? He looked up, she shook her head, don’t!. . What don’t?. . Don’t, please. . What?. . Don’t, just be quiet. The others fell silent; they didn’t understand the language but sensed it didn’t bode well.

Nešo put his spoon down, wiped his face and hands, and not taking his eyes off Magda for a second started with the story about his soccer cleats. Completely still, Magda returned his gaze, not paying the guests any mind. They ate, never looking up from their plates. The women raised their eyebrows pointedly, certain they would never be coming back here.

One of us has to go, said Magda. Why?. . Because this life isn’t the same as the one where you could roll out your soccer-cleats story. . Why isn’t it the same?. . If you don’t know that yourself, I’m not telling you. I want you to go, or else I’ll go. . Where would you go?. . Nešo, I want you to go, and I want you to go right now. . Where would I go?. . I don’t know, you’re the he-man aren’t you?

She shouldn’t have said that; he went straight to their room, took a suitcase from the wardrobe, and half an hour later slammed the door behind him without saying goodbye. He didn’t think for a second where he was going, or even where he could go in a city in which he had no family, where friendships developed so slowly that there was no hope of a saving grace, of a bed even for just the night. He walked for a time, and then rested his suitcase on the sidewalk and sat down, making like he was waiting for someone. He was angry and hurt; he didn’t know what had just happened or where the exit was that might get him out of this story. He felt so awfully betrayed that his joints were going to jump out of their sockets, every bone racing in its own direction. Once he had been afraid of catching Magda with another man or that one day he would come home to a letter on the kitchen table, but those fears paled in significance compared to what had actually happened. Instead of just taking herself from him, Magda had taken everything he had left in his life. The how and why didn’t matter, nor the where and when; to him it seemed she had taken everything except the suitcase on which he had parked his rear. There was one thing he was sure of: He would never go back home, he would never knock on Magda’s door, and he would never see her again. Maybe Nešo would change his mind by the morning, but how and where to live until the morning? He thought about the friends he’d cheated when he didn’t die of leukemia: Sitting here on the suitcase was the price of that distant betrayal.

It was comforting that the news of what had happened to him would reach them, his sitting down on a suitcase in the middle of Toronto and waiting. Nešo couldn’t imagine what it might end up sounding like, but it gave him some release and he already felt a little better. He closed his eyes and wished that everything would come to pass as soon as possible and that he would find out from them what had happened.

A Little Joke

After A. P. Chekhov

Brane Konstantinović works in construction for a boss named Zeytinoglu. He hauls bags of cement on his back and sings two brothers born on the death wall, you wouldn’t believe your own eyes. The bricklayers and laborers, mainly Turks and Germans, think he’s a bit of a doofus because he sings while hauling cement, and always the same song, and always in a foreign language, but because he’s a hard worker and never complains, they like Brane. They don’t know anything about him, except that he’s a Bosnian and that he once studied architecture, but not everyone believes that one; there are those who doubt studying could turn so sour you’d end up hauling bags of cement.

Brane doesn’t work Sundays. Saturday night he trawls the precinct around the Hauptbahnhof, doing the rounds of the nudie bars, catching a peep show. For five German marks he watches the beautiful Emina who is now called Susanna, and he always meets someone he knows and they go to Serbez’s bistro for a beer. At half past one the girls stop by after their shifts, tall blond sex-shop assistants and gloomy Balkan pickpockets with permanently shot nerves. Brane thinks them all good people, and really they are, because at Serbez’s they never do anyone any harm, they never fight, they don’t even cuss like other people. In the wee hours they try to be like angels to each other, to make Serbez’s bistro a place they can transport themselves from the harshness of their lives back to the dreams of their childhoods. Every man and woman on earth can fall asleep like a child, but it’s not easy for a whore, or a pimp, to every day become a child.

Everyone needs Brane and a Saturday without him would be too much to bear, because he’s the only one who doesn’t belong to their world, he comes from someplace far away, from a life they all believe is better, one they all know about, though none have lived. But how can one not believe there is a life where mothers send their children to the store for bread and milk, where days begin with the morning and end with the evening, where postmen bring letters and packages, and where flags everyone believes in flap in the wind, just as one believes in the good fortune of others.

The story Brane tells for the tenth time is set in his former life. It’s one they have all already heard but request anyhow, translating it for each other into all the languages of their world: I’d always loved motorbikes. When I was seven my old man asked me what I wanted to be in life, and I told him a Kawasaki, what do you mean a Kawasaki, kid, his cigarette almost falling out of his mouth, easy, Dad, if there’s any way I can be, I’ll be a Kawasaki, and if I can’t, then I’m going to ride a Kawasaki. The old man said, fine, kid, so long as you’re happy and healthy, you can be a donkey for all I care. I bought my first bike in my first year of college, an ancient Bugatti, it didn’t last six months before falling apart. Then during the summer break I went to Germany for the first time, as if I knew it would one day have its payoff. I got a job in construction and earned the money for a good bike. It wasn’t a Kawasaki but a Honda; I drove it nights from one end of the city to the other, giving it hell, and I thought nothing in life could ever be as great as sheer speed, nor anything ever more beautiful than when you become the wind, no longer a body or a soul, just pure air, like a storm wind on the sea. And there was this girl, Lejla, a wholesome blonde, barely eighteen, a normal kid from a good home, a kid who when she heads out the front door looks to you like a nurse who got lost down a mine and got herself all dirty, but she doesn’t see it because she doesn’t know anything about any kind of filth. So this Lejla girl says to me: oh, Brane, I’m so scared of motorbikes, I could never do that. I shrug my shoulders, and I’m like, fine, you shouldn’t then, who cares, and head on my way. But then she’s there again the next day, we talk about some stuff, and I ask her: so, Lejla, how’re things at school, and she says: they’re good, how else should they be, and I ask her if she’s doing her homework, and she says: yeah, of course, and even when I haven’t, I just pretend I have, and I tell her: lucky for you, Lejla, when I haven’t studied enough for an exam, it’s as if everything I don’t know is written on my forehead, and that’s the stuff the professor always asks me. That’s because you don’t know how to hide it, she says. How would I know when I’m always scared. But you’re not scared on a motorbike. No, I’m not, otherwise I wouldn’t ride one, I tell her. Then her again: oh, Brane, I’m so scared of motorbikes, I could never do that. And nothing. A week goes by, and there she is again, just after there’d been that earthquake in Montenegro. I say to her, those people jumping out their windows, nothing would have happened to them if they hadn’t jumped. I’m not scared of earthquakes, says Lejla. C’mon, how come you’re not scared of earthquakes, everyone’s scared of earthquakes, everyone normal. I’m not. I wouldn’t jump, but when I see you, my heart stops. And again: oh, Brane, I’m so scared of motorbikes, I could never do that. And something clicked in me, that little bad guy who tickles you when a chick is scared of something, so I ask her: you know, Lejla, do you want to go for a little ride, we won’t go fast, I’ll take good care of you. Jesus, no way, I’d die. Every time when I’d see her after that, I’d say, c’mon, Lejla, just one time, just a lap, and she’d shake her head like a kid when mom tries to get a spoonful of spinach in his mouth. The more she refused, the more I wanted to see her and talk her into it. This went on for I don’t know how long, half a year at least, then the spring came and everything was green and sweet-smelling, and girls who back in the winter were still kids hit the streets, one more beautiful than the next, and the most beautiful of them all was little Lejla. I’m sitting on the bike out in front of Café Promenade, and there she is, always one foot in front of the other, she doesn’t see me, she doesn’t see anyone, she’s taking her beauty out for a walk, conscious of it for the first time in her life, and nothing else matters. I call out to her: c’mon, Lejla, let’s take a ride. She stops, bowing her head a little, like a kid who’s embarrassed. It’s hard to know what she is anymore, or who she is, but I think she’s funny, like little girls in bloom often are, in the season of their lives when just this once they are neither woman nor child. C’mon, Lejla, don’t be like that, I try and persuade her, and she just stares down at the bike’s wheels, then at my shoes, and says: fine, but just one lap. I tell her, sit close behind me and hold tight. She doesn’t want to, she’s scared she’ll fall off. Fine, sit in front of me then, and lo and behold, Lejla sits down. We scoot down Ðure Ðaković, then off toward Bare, as fast as the bike will go. I can feel her trembling like a bird, her heart pounding like it’s going to stop, and it’s like she’s somehow shrinking there in my arms, like she’ll soon be a doll. And when we hit top speed, I whisper to her: I love you, Lejla. We stop, she looks at me, like she wants to ask me something, she opens her mouth, wants to say something, but nothing comes out. I think it’s funny, I see her all messed up, not knowing if I really said what I said or if that’s just what the fear was telling her. She’s there again the next day and says: c’mon, Brane, just one more lap, but slowly, please. I know what she wants, she wants to check that thing from yesterday, and I like that. I sit her on the bike, fire up the Honda like it’s a plane, she trembles and shrinks, I think it’s worse than yesterday, and again when we hit top speed I joke: I love you, Lejla. You know the rest, we stop, she looks over, like she wants to ask, like she doesn’t want to ask, but nothing happens, we go our own ways. I don’t need to tell you what happened the next day or the one after that, Lejla found me or I’d find her, I’d smile and say nothing because I knew what she’s going to say. And we’d do it all again. At top speed I’d tell her: I love you, Lejla. This went on the whole summer long, through the fall too, right up until the winter. A day didn’t go by that I didn’t take Lejla for a ride and whisper to her that I loved her, and she just trembled every time like it was the first time, her heart pounded, her soul wanting to escape out of blind fear, and when we’d stop, she never knew whether I’d said what I’d said. In February I saw the war was on its way and thought to myself, c’mon, Brane, Germany calls, save your head, show them your back. Your back can haul cement, but your head, hell your head can’t take a bullet. So I left, and Lejla stayed. I locked the bike in a garage, an idiot thinking the war would pass and that I’d ride again, but the war didn’t pass, and I didn’t ride again, and Lejla never asked me for another lap.

Four years went by, and there I was in Sarajevo for the first time. No garage, no bike, my mother and father aged a good twenty years each, no one I know in the city, and no one who knows me. And I think, fine, that’s that then, it’s all over, you’ll be here for a couple of weeks, then back to Germanostan. It was a beautiful spring. I spent the day sitting in those cafés, one minute the sun burning down, the next a cool breeze, I was looking at the façades of the buildings, spotting the bumps in the asphalt, bidding a peaceful farewell to a city still mine, though I’m not hers, when all of a sudden I see someone I know coming from the cathedral, Lejla as beautiful as ever, leading a little girl of about three by the hand, the little one just like her, I’m about to call out to her, I open my mouth, our eyes meet, and she passes by. She doesn’t even recognize me. I stay openmouthed like that, an ambulance needed to come close it, Lejla goes by, and here we are, and to this day there’s one thing that’s not clear to me, and I can’t sleep when I think about it, and that is why I was joking when we rode around on the bike. If anyone can answer that question for me, I’ll do any job for them. I will, I swear it Emina, if you can tell me why I joked like that, tomorrow I’ll be Susanna instead of you.

Nora, like Ibsen’s

It was the beginning of January, the year the war ended, and Mahir Kubat found himself at Zagreb’s Central Station with no papers and fifty German marks in his pocket. The story of how he got to Zagreb, and why Zagreb and not someplace else, would take too long, it’s enough to know that Mahir Kubat had left for good and that he had no particular country in mind, but was pretty set on not hanging around anyplace too close.

A fine snow was falling, you couldn’t actually tell whether it was snow or mist, people were waiting for the tram in front of the station, Mahir had a white Adidas bag with his spare sneakers tucked under his arm and was looking at the king on the horse, who appeared to have especially positioned himself to look right in his direction, as if Mahir and the king formed part of a larger whole, having waited for God knows how long to stand here together on an early-winter evening, one across from the other, both with pretty much no show of riding off somewhere, or at least for there to be any point in doing so.

Mahir Kubat wasn’t easily panicked; he had these two Clint Eastwood frown lines on his face, and he was well aware of them, it could even be said that he relied on them; a man with these kind of furrows isn’t easily rattled, he doesn’t surrender to despair, even when as night falls he finds himself in a city without a single number he might dial.

One foot in front of the other, he headed off toward the underground shopping center to the left of the station. Down below the advertising neon blazed, from the sound system the jabbering voice of Oliver Mlakar, kids with shaved heads drank beer in front of the supermarket, and Jehovah’s Witnesses sold magazines with apocalyptic headlines. “Find Jesus Before the Catastrophe,” that’s what it said under the face of some penitent crone. She tried to look Mahir Kubat right in the eye so he might see the face of God in hers. Mahir gave her a wink and a smile. He was on the lookout for a bar where he could have a beer and not piss the whole fifty marks up against the wall. If he were someone else, and not Mahir Kubat, he would have already figured out there’s no such bar anywhere in the world.

An Ožujsko if you will, he tried it on like a local, but it came out bearing that excess courtesy characteristic of people who walk the world without papers, bereft of a single document bearing their name and photo, anything to prove their existence. He poured his beer, folded his arms on his chest, stretched out on his stool a little, and just sat there watching the people rushing by the glass window. The melody of a song from the mid-eighties floated around his head, something like I can’t explain the feeling of a slant-eyed girl in the snow. He’ll hang around in here long enough for something to happen. Mahir Kubat thinks it’s like he’s in a film and that there isn’t a film where resolution doesn’t come of its own accord. The trick is to not leave the theater before the film ends, because then you just roam the streets like a deaf whore, going from one film to the next, and then finally the panic wears you down.

Around nine there was barely a stool free. Only Mahir sat on his own, surrounded by three of them. Some whiny little homo came over, may I sit here, then nothing happened for ages, until a shaven-headed kid and a girl with a mohawk came in, both in leather jackets and high boots painted with British flags. You’re not waiting for someone? the kid asked, sit down, said Kubat through clenched teeth, sharpening those frown lines of his as much as he could.

He held his gaze on the passersby and just waited, not paying the kid and his girl any mind. Sorry, the girl took him by the elbow, do you maybe have a loosey?. . Do I maybe have a what?. . A loosey, you got a cigarette?. . No. . You’re not from Zagreb?. . Why’s that, that bother you?. . No, it’s just you don’t sound like it. . No, I’m not from Zagreb. . And where are you from, if I may ask, and it won’t cause offense, the girl chuckled sweetly, and Mahir Kubat thought she was okay. The crew-cut kid was okay too. He kept quiet and let the girl do the talking. I was from Zenica, and now I’m not from anywhere. . Aha, Mister Nobody. . No, my name is Kubat, Mahir Kubat, he said, offering the girl his hand. Nancy, she said, crooking her head, Sid, said the kid, aren’t you two supposed to be dead? said Kubat grinning. Why do you keep looking out the window, the kid asked. I’m watching out for someone. . Someone important?. . Yeah, he has to come by, ’cause if he doesn’t I’ve got problems. . If it’s not indiscreet, may I ask who that might be? The girl leaned across the table to catch Mahir’s gaze. No idea, but someone has to come by. . But you must know why you’re waiting for him. . That I know. . How long are you going to wait?. . Until he comes by. . Do you know anyone in Zagreb?. . No, but I know maybe a million people who’ve been in Zagreb, so maybe they’ll come by tonight. . Well, now you know us too, the kid banged his hand on the table. Mahir Kubat turned away from the window and looked at him, icy as he could, straight in the eye. Sid had these childlike green eyes that turned yellow just before the pupil. And you, little man, what would you know about all that?. . Nothing, just what I see. . What do you see then, wise guy?. . I see James Bond who doesn’t have anywhere to sleep and probably left his checkbook at home, so he’s a little anxious. . I’m not anxious, I am never anxious, Kubat turned toward the window again and folded his arms. Whatever, but if you want you can come with us, we’ve got a place where we all crash.

The night tram was heading toward Novi Zagreb. Sid was laughing like crazy, Nancy sitting in Mahir Kubat’s lap. You’re so cute and grumpy, a real stooge. At that moment Mahir felt like crying.

They arrived at a tower block in Sopot and took the lift to the eleventh floor. Whose apartment is it, asked Mahir, Nora’s. . Who’s Nora? What’s she going to say. . Nothing, she’s probably asleep, and when she wakes up, just tell her my name is Kubat, Mahir Kubat, she’ll like that. The kid took a key out of his pocket, Mahir had no idea what was going on anymore, he took off shoes in the hall, you don’t do that here, so what, they’re already off, he tiptoed, the two of them were being a bit loud, like no one was asleep, they snuck a glance into the living room where a girl was asleep on the three-seater, we’ll crash here, said Sid, you’ll have to crash on our sleepodrome, Nancy took Mahir by the hand, fuck this is like Hansel and Gretel, and led him to a big bedroom where almost the whole floor was taken up by the bed, the biggest bed Mahir Kubat had ever seen in his life. A chick with long blond hair was asleep at one end, and in the middle, almost a meter away, there was another one, the same long blond hair; now Mahir Kubat really had no idea what was going on. There were two and a half meters of empty bed, but it seemed more appropriate for him to go back out in the hall and lie down on the floor. But he can’t do that, they’ve told him it’s normal to sleep here, so presumably that’s what he needs to do, he must be cold as ice, a man who heads out into the world with fifty marks in his pocket has to be cold as ice, otherwise he’s finished at the outset; he thought of Mahatma Gandhi who slept surrounded by women to prove the resolve of his abstinence, or maybe he slept like that for some other reason, it doesn’t matter.

He dropped his trousers, took his jersey and shirt off, and in his boxers and a UnisTours T-shirt with the slogan “East and West Kiss Best” on it crept over to the bed. He lay down, the girls didn’t flinch. In the darkness he saw the face of the one closest, so still, her lips closed, the face asleep as if dreaming of nothing or maybe she wasn’t even there. She’s not there, thought Mahir Kubat, I’ll never see her again because in the morning I’m gone. He didn’t feel anything in particular for the sleeping girl, but the idea of her and the image saddened him. It was an image far from his reach, in itself of no importance, but nonetheless an image he would never see again, from which he would soon be so far away that he would never know if how it remains etched in his memory is how it really was, or if someday it might just escape him altogether. At that moment, on that bed, Mahir Kubat felt like someone who leaves forever, leaving behind everything his eyes have ever seen, and more than anything else, things he has only seen once and can’t even recall anymore.

He turned onto his back and gazed at the ceiling, letting sleep slowly slip up on him, his thoughts imperceptibly sliding away, like the loved ones of a dead man after the janazah. He felt the tears rolling down his cheeks, dripping into his ears, flowing like the Buna and crashing down like the waterfall at Kravice; he was in the seventh grade when they went swimming there on a school trip, he stood beneath the waterfall, the water heavy and strong, and his tears fell, just like they are now, without a sob and without sense, for he knew the water would never again fall from such a height, hitting him straight in the head, in the seventh grade on a school trip to Kravice.

He opened his eyes and it was like someone in a film had drawn broken roller blinds and with a crash and bang introduced a new scene. Maybe he’d slept for just a minute, maybe he’d been asleep for hours. He lay on his side, the girl’s wide-open eyes right in front of him. Her face was as it had been while she was asleep, only now her eyes were open. You are. . he whispered, and remembered that he should have started with I am. . but now he didn’t know how to swap the words. His lips were stuck on the m, clasped shut like an aquarium fish when it catches sight of a soft kitty paw on the other side of the glass. I’m Nora, said the girl, Nora, like Ibsen’s Nora.

He didn’t dare move; she thinks she’s still asleep, he needs to wait for her to close her eyes and then quietly slip out, he needs to keep quiet and not be from this world. What do you want to do now? she said, very, very slowly. Nothing. . You want something, you want it, because you wouldn’t be here otherwise, that’s for sure. . No, I’m just about on my way. . Who kisses best?. . East and West. . I’m dreaming and I won’t remember. Please, you remember, please, please, please. . Nora closed her eyes and repeated please until her sad face fell back into a deep sleep. Mahir Kubat didn’t move a muscle. He waited until he was completely sure Nora was asleep, and he thought that maybe he’d stayed on in her dream, that maybe everything was not yet lost. Nora might dream of him even when he’s far away, even when he’s gone.

He slid off the bed, crouching he checked if Nora and the girl next to her were asleep, then he grabbed his clothes and tiptoed out into the hall. He closed the bedroom door, a door he’ll never open again, and immediately it ceased to exist. He got dressed, took his suitcase, and headed for the front door, and then he stopped, fixed his two Clint Eastwood furrows, scratched his head, and started rummaging through his jacket pockets. He took his keys out and tried to get the key ring off with his fingernails. There was a metal pendant on it, a black-and-red ball with the words “FK Čelik Zenica.”

He snuck into the living room, Nancy and Sid were asleep in a hug, her naked, her right leg straddling him; they looked like octopuses in a lover’s embrace, their tentacles inseparable. Mahir Kubat went over and put his pendant down beside Nancy’s head.

It was freezing outside, the dawn breaking behind four high tower blocks, on the other side the sky still in complete darkness. Mahir Kubat held his suitcase in his right hand, in his left the keys he’d taken off the key ring. He needed to toss them somewhere, but not on the street because someone might find them and think some kid lost them. Mahir Kubat looked for a trash can, but there wasn’t one in sight. When he finds one, nothing will stand between his life and his departure.

Death of the president’s dog

The second kiss of Gita Danon

I’m going to tell you about Lotar. You don’t have to remember the story, there’s no life wisdom to be had, it’ll be of no use to you, you’ll never meet such a man and then know how to handle him, I’m telling you about Lotar because of the woman who loved him, she’s real, maybe you’ll meet her, her or a woman like her, maybe you’ll fall in love with her, maybe she’ll stay with you for a lifetime, or maybe you’ll just pass by her, see her in the supermarket and say good morning, Gita, how are you, Gita, but she won’t answer, because Gita doesn’t answer, Gita is deaf to every greeting.

In those years Lotar was the strongest man in the city. That’s what people said, though no one ever really thought about testing it. He lived alone with his mother, Miss Edita, who had a shop where she pleated skirts. No one knew anything about his father. The story went that he had been a German officer, apparently his name was Otto, and that it had been a great love. He would secretly visit Miss Edita at night and stay until the dawn. No one ever saw him, as their love could only be in the time of the curfew. Otto, so the story goes, didn’t want to retreat with the rest of his army in April 1945, so he deserted and hid out in the forests above Sarajevo for two years. Every Saturday and Sunday Miss Edita would go and collect mushrooms, strawberries, raspberries, always returning with an empty basket. Dear God, you know I only go up there for the fresh air and the scenery, she told the neighborhood women, but they knew she went because of Otto. Lotar was born in the fall of 1946: it’s a child I wanted, not a husband, said Miss Edita, and no one ever inquired further. In an exception to the usual ugly custom, the neighborhood kept her secret and no one ever called Lotar a bastard. This was probably because he was an exceptionally placid and quiet child, always bigger and stronger than his classmates, but he never got into fights. It was as if every belligerence in his bloodline had been expended and exhausted before he was born.

One Sunday in the early summer of 1947,Miss Edita took the child into the hills. He needs to learn from a young age, she said to old Mrs. Džemidžić, who kissed her and the child: you just go, sweetie, and hold tight to what you’ve got while you’ve got it. They came back in the early evening. That was the last time Miss Edita went up into the hills, and people said that after that Otto had set off for Austria on foot, and then on to Germany. He’d waited to see his son, and then he’d gone home forever.

Lotar graduated high school and as a star student enrolled to study medicine, and right when you would have thought that everything in his life was going to be like it was in those stories about happy and healthy children, in his third year of college he met Gita Danon, a pharmacist’s daughter, two years older than him. Gita studied a little, but spent most of her time hanging out and breaking men’s hearts, all over Sarajevo, drunk and wild, as if she were breaking beer bottles until the morning came to clear her head. But the morning never did come for Gita, nor did she ever tire of her strange game. She would draw a man slowly to her, toy with him until the first kiss, and then she’d push him down the street, letting him roll to the end, to his shame and the horror of others who hadn’t yet felt Gita’s charms but knew their turn would come and that they too wouldn’t be able to resist her. The men would get over Gita after a time, wouldn’t mention her for a while, but sooner or later lips that had once tasted her kisses would say Gita was a whore. The only one who never got over Gita, who never spoke an ugly word about her, was Lotar, and both she and this reticence would change him and his life.

I’ll wait for you, it doesn’t matter how long, but I’ll wait for you, and you’ll come for me when you finally tire, he told her after their kiss, and she laughed, she laughed long strolling down Tito Street and on into the night, she laughed so hard the shop windows trembled and women came to the windows to see why someone was laughing so at this hour and in a world where nothing was that funny, where no one had a belly laugh like Gita, who wasn’t from this world in any case, and who not a single woman thought of as competition because she lived a life bestowed with a thousand lovers and a lone kiss, and come tomorrow she might be dead.

Lotar believed Gita would come back to him and that until her return he must defend her honor. In company, if anyone ventured to say something about her, Lotar would always cut in shut up, I’m here. And miraculously, everyone did shut up, even though no one really thought Lotar might use his terrifying strength. This is how things went until Gita chewed up Dino Krezo, a hothead and ex-jailbird who had marauded his way around Italy for years, returning to Sarajevo only to show off and spend a bit of money. So anyway, this Krezo was beside himself with rage, and to add insult to injury, someone told him about Lotar, probably warning him in jest about mouthing off about Gita in front of Lotar. Krezo immediately demanded you’re going to show me this guy and tore over to the medical school. They say he waited two or three hours, which only served to enrage him further, so when Lotar finally came out, Dino Krezo no longer registered the size and kind of man he was talking to but just went up to him, grabbed him by his coat collar, pressing himself up under Lotar’s face and saying in the quiet voice of a man who had a pistol tucked in his belt, fuck you and your fucking Kike whore.

What happened next is almost not for the telling, but they say Lotar grabbed Krezo by both ears and ripped them off, and the poor bastard collapsed, Lotar smacking his head in as he lay there on the ground. When the police arrived, there was nothing left of Krezo’s face. Four cops jumped Lotar, but he tossed them off, walked toward the street, sat down on a low wall, lit a cigarette, and from three or four meters away the cops cocked their pistols, not daring come any closer. It’s all over now, he said, I killed a man. It was then they hurled themselves on him, pounding him viciously with their fists, legs, and the butts of their pistols. Somehow they knew Lotar would never defend himself. Perhaps they had experience with this sort of thing, though I doubt they had ever come across a man like Lotar.

He was sentenced to fifteen years for a “particularly brutal murder.” Lotar sat a whole twelve years in the Zenica prison, just long enough for the city to forget him and for a new generation to appear on the streets, one that would never know anything about him or Dino Krezo. But Gita, no one could forget her. Through the years her beauty and laughter had not diminished in the slightest, nor had she quit driving men crazy with her lone kisses. Her lovers were now some fifteen years younger than her, but nothing had changed, and a man was yet to come along who could resist Gita giving him the eye, nor was there anyone in the whole city smart enough to work out that a story repeated for the hundredth time must always end the same way.

That summer when Lotar got out of prison, Miss Edita Burić, the owner of a workshop for pleating skirts, and Mr. Moni Danon, the oldest pharmacist in the city, both died on the same day. Two days later they were buried at the same time in the Bare Cemetery. One procession set off from the Catholic chapel, the other from the Jewish one. Lotar followed behind one coffin, Gita behind the other. The processions marched one beside the other, right up to the fork where the paths leading to the Catholic and Jewish plots veered off. Gita didn’t even look at Lotar, but instead of following his mother’s coffin, Lotar went after Gita. It was a terrible scandal. The crones in black made the sign of the cross, the priest said extra prayers, the Catholic procession appalled, the Jewish one afraid. Nobody knew what Lotar might do to Gita.

But he didn’t do anything to her, just said hello, Gita, yet she didn’t respond to his greeting, he said Gita, I’m waiting for you, and she looked at him as if she was going to smile, he said Gita, this is forever, and she took him by the hand and said sweetheart, that in front of me is forever, and pointed to the coffin.

After his release from prison Lotar started up his drinking. He drank with discipline and according to a set calendar, every seventh of the month, you could see his father was a Kraut, that’s what people in the neighborhood said, and not without respect. This is how it went: Lotar would find some dive and order a liter of rakia, the guests would start making tracks for the door, and Lotar’s husky no would stop them dead. They’d all fall silent and wait to see what would happen next, you could hear the buzzing of a fly and, every three minutes, the neck of the bottle touch the glass. Lotar needed exactly fifty-five minutes to drink a liter of rakia, not a minute more, not a minute less. Then he’d order another liter, dutifully pay the waiter and then thunder everyone out! and they’d leave all right, the owner and the waiters too, without even a word to Lotar. Fifteen minutes later the police would show up, Lotar would rise to his feet, and say hit me before I fuck you up, you, Tito, and the Party, and they’d give him a thrashing, he wouldn’t defend himself, and afterward they’d take him down to the station, he’d sleep it off in the pen, and wait again for the seventh of the month. For five years Lotar took a beating once a month, and tongues were already talking about how much longer he could survive, how many more sevenths of the month the police might need to kill him.

And then the war began, and one September morning during the first siege Lotar found a note under the door: “If you want to know. I’m in Madrid. Gita.” She’d probably been scared of the war and had left Lotar a message, anxious as to whether in Madrid too there would be someone to desire her lone kiss. Gita was already fifty years old, which Sarajevo eyes didn’t notice but maybe Spanish eyes would, and Gita wouldn’t be Gita without a kiss; she’d never make it alone in a world without her humiliated men.

So now, whether Lotar hoped his waiting was finally over, that Gita had tired and exhausted herself and was waiting for him in Madrid with her love, or he simply couldn’t imagine staying on in a city where Gita wasn’t, it’s hard to say, but from that day on Lotar began planning his escape from the city to Spain. He didn’t have any money, nor did he have a passport, and didn’t know how he might acquire one or the other either. A giant alone in his own city. He started to skip sevenths of the month, his kidneys and ribs hurt, and with every day that passed following Gita’s message, Lotar aged more and more. His hair turned white, his muscles no longer smooth and taut, more and more people would pass him by, blind to his strength. Only one thing remained as monumental as Trebević: his will to go to Madrid, to his Gita, for a second kiss.

Two and a half years after the war started, Lotar vanished from the city. Before leaving he’d tried to borrow money for the journey, but no one wanted to lend it to him; people were sure that there was no returning from such a journey. He tried to get a passport, but they didn’t want to give him one of those either, he was still strong enough to fight and his love held no sway with the authorities. No one was surprised that Lotar left in spite of all this. People knew that when it came to getting to her, what existed between he and Gita allowed no obstacle, even when she was as far away as Madrid.

No one ever found out how Lotar made it across Bosnia, how he made it across all the countries that stood in his way, the manner or mode of how he traveled, or how he never encountered a single customs officer or policeman. What is known is that he appeared like a ghost at a police station in suburban Madrid, skinny, barefoot, and covered in scabs. He took the first policeman by the hand and said Gita Danon, por favor, the man took fright, Lotar repeated Gita Danon, por favor, and the whole of the station gathered, and backup arrived too, as did an ambulance, and Lotar stubbornly repeated Gita Danon, por favor; it took the Spaniards half a day to work out that he didn’t know a word of Spanish, so they tried in different languages, in German, Italian, English, and French, one even tried to address him in Hungarian; Lotar shook his head, clasped his hands in prayer, or took people’s hands in his and repeated Gita Danon, por favor.

A man in a white hospital coat took him by the arm and led him out of the police station, Gita Danon, por favor, Lotar gazed out the window of the ambulance, the man held his hand, and he glided through Madrid as if in a film, as if in someone else’s life, Lotar hunted the faces of passersby, hoping he’d see Gita; instead he spotted a billboard for a charity event, on it a photograph of Sarajevo’s razed National Library. Sarajevo, said Lotar, Sarajevo? the man in the white coat gave a start, Sarajevo, Lotar confirmed, Gita Danon, por favor, and clasped his hands.

Lotar lay in a hospital bed. His heels poked out through the bars. So frail and with his bushy beard he looked like the long-dead branch of a magnificent tree. A kindly older gentleman approached his bed, behind him followed a policeman and a doctor, the man sat down next to Lotar, Lotar opened his eyes, Gita Danon, por favor, the gentleman put his hand on Lotar’s shoulder and said to him in their language are you from Sarajevo?. . I am. . When did you get here?. . Yesterday. . From where?. . From Sarajevo. The gentleman’s eyes began to glisten the way the eyes of Bosnians who’ve lived for twenty years someplace far away glisten when a dying man says that he has just arrived from Sarajevo. I’m looking for Gita Danon, Lotar tried to sit up, she’s from Sarajevo, and now she’s in Madrid, I have to find Gita Danon, she’s waiting for me, and I’ve been waiting twenty years and some for her. The gentleman nodded his head, we’ll turn Madrid upside down if we have to, Lotar didn’t believe him, but he was too tired to move.

That night in Madrid the strongest man of our city lay dying. This you have to know because you’ll never meet such a man again anywhere. There isn’t one anywhere in the whole world, not where you live, and not in Sarajevo were you to go looking for him. Yes, Lotar lay dying, the one and only Lotar, the Lotar who had ripped Dino Krezo’s ears off and beat him to a pulp on the cobblestones in front of the medical school, as well he should have, when it was for Gita’s honor.

In the morning he never regained consciousness. He didn’t even wake when the gentleman from the day before came in, nor when Gita Danon came in after him, crouched next to his bed, and placed her hands on Lotar’s enormous elbow, he didn’t even wake when she said my darling Lotar, I wore myself out, you don’t need to wait for me anymore, I’ve come to you, he didn’t even wake when she kissed him long on his gray lips. But listen well to what I’m telling you now, only Gita Danon knows whether Lotar’s lips moved back then, only she knows whether it was too late for love or whether it had remained forever. If you meet her, don’t ask her anything because she won’t say, she won’t say hello, Gita doesn’t respond to greetings, because she broke a thousand hearts for a single Lotar.