"Crystal Bell" by Mirko Božić - English sample translation

A Crystal Bell Mirko Božić trans. Rachael Daum

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Apple Cake -

4 egg yolks 10 tsp. sugar 10 tsp. oil 10 tsp. milk 12 tsp. flour ½ packet baking powder 1 packet vanilla sugar

Peel 2 kg apples, chop and stew with 5 cups sugar and 1 packet vanilla sugar. Chill and mix into the batter.

Icing: whisk four egg whites with 4 tsp sugar. Boil 1 cup sugar and 1 cup water.

This story begins in Šemovac, a little hamlet where the old town starts in Mostar, the Ottoman aerie on the estuary of the Radobolja and Neretva rivers, cloven by bridges and canals covered in cobblestones dredged from the two rivers. You can’t escape water in this town, the river is always there somewhere in the distance, and the sound of water follows you day and night. My house was at Onešćukovoj 33. The one with the tall, green wooden gate that opened on the long narrow path boxed in by two houses. The one on the right side was mine, and at the end of the path was my uncle’s place. From there you get into the courtyard paved with stone and enclosed with low concrete walls, my mother’s hortensia shrubs growing underneath. At the bottom were stairs that offered what was probably the best view of Kriva Ćuprija, the Sloping Bridge. Though Mostar was a city so marked by bridges that it practically sprang from one, the smaller bridge had always been my favorite, even if there were bigger and more famous ones along the Neretva. Not just because I lived above it, but also because that part of the old city always seemed more intimate and alive.

Back then in Šemovac a house could be built from wood, where today, when tourism has taken up every inch of space, that isn’t possible anymore. My houses don’t exist there anymore, but the gate is still there, made of wrought-iron now, the new kitsch of a new owner who has nothing to do with me or my memories at number 33. I don’t live there anymore, only memories stayed, like the grounds left in a coffee cup. But at least the street kept its name. Onešćuk is one of the few that are left now, though no one knows anything about it.

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The bridge below Šemovac was built in the sixteenth century by Ćejvan-Ćehaja and was, up until the Mostar railroad was built in 1884, a part of the main road. After that it fell out of memory, hidden as it was deep in the tissue of the city, above the Radobolja. The bridge, left to hikers and chance wanderers and dogs, was somehow bypassed by the wars during the nineties, which only one of Mostar’s bridges managed to survive just to collapse at the end of the nineties after a strong flood on the Radobolja. The river took it, already worn down and damaged, along the confluence with the Neretva where Hajrud’s bridge still lay, crumbled to bits like the apple cakes my mother knew how to make. My mother isn’t here anymore, and neither are her cakes. All that’s left of them is a shabby diary filled with recipes for cakes, soups, and sauces. And the memories of the woman who, just like the Sloping Bridge, would turn into a metaphor for something that had never been, that doesn’t exist today, and will never exist again.

From the top, that small stone bridge surrounded by old water mills acted as a theater I had the privilege of watching every day from the best box in that metaphysical atrium. The mornings were the most beautiful. Those white mornings when it seemed the city lit up like crystal. Never mind how everything changed in the meantime, the people who came and went, the buildings that disappeared and the stories we forgot, those mornings and that light stayed. The only thing that could be compared to that morning light was the view at night over the city from up high, say, from the parking lot over the stadium on the Bijeli Brijeg, or when you’re driving down Kobilovača Mountain, down the old snake-like road that makes the drive into the city seem like diving into a huge, luminous galaxy full of twinkling lights. Here and there, the spectacle of tacky red neon advertisements for air conditioning units and Turkish banks, and perhaps the aggressive concrete tower of the unfinished Franciscan belfry, the tallest in all the Balkans, whose tall, illuminated copper hat always reminded me a little at night of the Kremlin in Moscow. What does unfinished even mean? Cities are always unfinished things.

But this isn’t a story about that, rather about something that came before it, in that little courtyard at Onešćukovoj 33. Down in front of the house stood a round, white table and some yellow plastic chairs around it. There was a lot of drinking around that table, a lot of eating, and a lot of studying that has since evaporated from my head. The blessing of childhood is that it’s made up of oblivion. Oblivion to everything bad, but good, too. That’s why photo albums are so important, because without them I’d be left without a past, like someone without a CV. In those bad times twenty-odd years ago, when everything you’d built up over years was abandoned overnight,

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abandoning your whole old life and old self, one of the few things you’d bring with you before the last time you turned the key in the lock and went into the unknown were those albums. In my dining room, at a different address, there’s an oak cabinet from our house in Šemovac. At the top on the right-hand side, you can see shrapnel damage from the war, like a scar on its brow. Inside on the shelf, the crystal glasses and tea service made from Chinese and Russian porcelain, put there by my mother, are still arranged neatly. Unlike her and other people who had been close to me, the porcelain is still there, tougher and longer-lasting than the people it reminds me of every time I look at it. It occurs to me, and I bitterly laugh every time I realize, that this one cobalt tea service managed to make it through the hell of the nineties without a scratch, while the people it reminds me of are deep underground. That petit bourgeois mise-en-scène for solemn occasions rarely leaves the shadow of the cabinet, I can’t remember the last time I drank from these cups. They’re napping now in the warm oak as through nothing has happened and nothing, absolutely nothing, will ever happen. Time is irrelevant in the memory of a porcelain cup.

The cabinet originally stood on the ground floor of our house in Šemovac, which had consisted of a dining room, kitchen, living room, and an improvised bathroom under the staircase that twisted down from the outside of the house. The ground floor walls had been covered with wallpaper with a vertical floral pattern. White curtains with a red trim hung over the entrance to the kitchen, like a theater curtain. Our house really had been a sort of little everyday theater, scenes depicting the precious and insignificant, trifles living in a balloon of carefully designed intimacy, whose internal laws are only known to those who thought them up. Today, when I look at the oak cabinet and all of the bits left from our house, I get disoriented and sad, like it’s a scene that’s been left without its stage and is now trying to find its purpose in a new, unfamiliar space. The inside area of the ground floor had been just as important to our lives as the outside courtyard, and these two spaces flowed into the first and then the second seasons that passed the little bridge by, climbing up to the house at Onešćukovoj 33. Mostar is the hottest city in the Balkans, that’s why it was possible for us sit out in the courtyard long into autumn. They usually make the winter frosts take the last train into the city, and even then they’re rarely cruel, so that except when the tempests blow, winter doesn’t feel like it does elsewhere in the north. It was only in 2012 that it felt like a proper white winter, when a fat layer of snow covered and paralyzed the city for two whole weeks, and that white Andrić sun replaced the deafening silence of snow. It smelled a little like the sweet white glaze, from my mother’s recipe, that iced her apple cake. Just, unlike the cake, it didn’t leave a trace of

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comfort behind on my tongue, just a pile of broken limbs on the icy streets and hard loaves of white bread trapped in bakers’ storerooms. It was a memory that forever would be iced in place.

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Lemon Bars -

four eggs 250g sugar 4 tsp. water 250g flour 1 tsp. bicarbonate soda

Mix into a large pan and bake.

Filling: - 250g butter - 200g sugar - 1 egg - 1 lemon and lemon peel Glaze: -

100g chocolate 50g butter 2 tsp. water 2 tsp. sugar

In the garden in front of my late grandfather’s house there stood, until recently, the trunk of a lemon tree, planted with a stake that was fixed to a tall lattice with a dense grapevine in front of the house. The courtyard along the wall looked onto the vegetable garden under it, flush with the Mostar mud and the church parish whose belfry always gently revolved on the evening horizon like a tailor’s thin bodkin, melted into the silhouettes of the houses far off in the background. The sharp freshness of lemon has always attracted me. Not as a synonym for winter tea and a cold, but for summer, sultry afternoons in the orchard and long evenings when the day gradually affects the evening in a spectrum of warm colors that bleed over the horizon like old oil on a skillet. In my grandfather’s courtyard then, as there is today, there was a round concrete table, not far from where the old lemon trunk used to stand. Unlike that table in Šemovac, this table was always in the same spot, and just like the little bridge, managed to survive the war. My grandmother’s brother Marko, who lived in Dubrovnik and who I don’t remember, made it. I just remember one of his houses in the village, Villa Serdar, which had been hidden deep in the woods on the hill over the meadow.

That house, like the man, was a part of the well-kept and cherished myth of the Martinovićes, which followed me my whole life. The myth of my mother, the educated beauty who made a career in the city (“Let the girl finish school so she can work better in the store!” my late grandmother knew to

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snap when women from the village would ask about it), the myth of their color television, library, and furniture made of light-polished wood in the socialist art-deco style, my grandmother’s tapestry with the Kennedy brothers, framed photographs on the wall from some distant past, people in white suits and girls in pressed collars and pullovers, a huge kitschy mausoleum in a village cemetery…

This was all gathered together, fit almost for a museum exhibition about one provincial family that spread a Glembayan, grandiose petit bourgeois aura around it.

My late grandmother hadn’t known much about contemporary celebrity culture or Hollywood, but she’d known everything about the Kennedys. She knew the names of all their children and everything about Jakleen, as she called her. I loved to listen when she talked about them, since it acted as a sort of window into the world of a woman who had only finished fourth grade, but had a stylishness not typical of a woman in her years. She hung the tapestry in her bedroom on the ground floor, which showed JFK and Bobby Kennedy gazing into the middle distance in front of an American flag waving in the background. My grandfather’s brother got it for her in Germany, and nowhere else would it have looked as good as it did there, in my grandmother’s bedroom. One of the three windows in the room actually looked out onto the courtyard and the round table under the lattice in front of the house. I sat at that table much more than I did at the one at Onešćukovoj, and as is the tradition of the people who live in that house, it was treated like the altar in a church. Almost everything that happened there, since the uncle from Dubrovnik made it, happened around it. When my grandfather got married in the nineties, it became the kids’ table while the grown-ups danced in the tent over it to live music. That was before the renaissance of wedding salons, when everything still seemed good. When it hadn’t all gone to evil and worse yet. I’m not a child anymore, but still, every time I sit at that table, memories cross my mind of the time when I was still too small to see over the wall, along to the horizon past the mud.

The other two windows in my grandmother’s room looked out onto the other side, onto the mulberry tree by the vegetable garden that, instead of a gate, had the headboard from the old iron bed. I never particularly liked that mulberry tree, because it reminded me of the neighbor’s courtyard in Šemovac. There was a tall mulberry tree in that courtyard, too, that always had berries falling to the ground. Their dog would trample them on the pavement, and then the whole place would reek of crushed mulberries mixed with the stale urine of our neighbor Mediha, who lived in the house next to ours, right behind the wall with the hortensia. Memories are olfactory, and not just the good-smelling ones, the Proustian Phenomenon. But Mediha wasn’t the only one living behind

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that wall. Little Seid was there too, a little dark-skinned boy, her grandson. Sometimes, for fun, we’d build a bunker from wooden planks at the bottom of his courtyard that also looked out over the Radobolja. We pretended we were grown-ups, and in our heads grown-ups were brave soldiers on some far-off warfront, fighting abstract, made-up enemies. We couldn’t have known that soon enemies would no longer be made up, but so tangible, close-by. Not just close—right behind the wall. Grown-ups, just like in our childish minds, transformed into soldiers, with real guns. But there was no bravery there, just blood and cowards. Many years would pass till the first time I saw that red-haired boy again after the war, but we never looked over the courtyard wall again. He wasn’t there anymore, because his house stood right on the line where the wall with my mother’s hortensia once went. They weren’t there anymore either, time took them away. Just like her, my house, and that stupid bunker made of planks in little Seid’s courtyard.

In the kitchen at number 33 we had a lemon squeezer. It was a normal plastic squeezer, orange and white. We still have it, it squeezed through all the chaos of the move just like the oak cabinet that patiently waited for everything to blow over so it could end up in my grandfather’s study. One of the armchairs from that room is in my living room now, refurbished and restored. One of four, the only one that survived. I often like to sit in it while I read or drink coffee, to remind myself that the things in our houses have memories, too. Primordial, material. Sometime long ago, on the right-hand side of that chair was the label of the Maglaj furniture factory, half-torn.

Somewhat naively, I hope that the outline of my body will stay pressed into it like dough for lemon bars in a pan. Just as, like Andrić says, every person has to be born someplace, every object has to be produced someplace. Someone’s hands have to assemble, paint, design, before they can come to our apartments and houses where they’ll suffer the burden of excessive human weight, nighttime murmurs, humid rooms, and hypochondriac obsession. And we ourselves have squeezed through all that, through the huge megasqueezer of time, some with more and others fewer scars. Scars on houses are easy to patch up. Moisture and rain ate up what they could, but what we could save, we saved, like my grandfather’s armchair. We won’t cover up the scars on everything we left behind and unsaid, because you can’t cover that up. It doesn’t matter, some things stay to keep you up during sleepless summer nights, when the crickets outside the window won’t let you sleep.

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Baklava -

½ kg walnuts, half crushed and half finely ground with a handful of sugar 1 stick butter and a little oil so that a half-liter pot is nearly full

First place four sheets of dough (each buttered), then sprinkle with walnuts. Place two more sheets of dough, spread butter and walnuts, and on the top four sheets of dough. As soon as it settles, cut the baklava into slices.

Syrup: 80 dkg sugar into 2-liter pot. Pour water until the pot is almost full, and boil thoroughly.

Cook 45-60 mins. Pour it on hot, place it in a warm spot and cover with a cloth.

There likely is no more traditional or commonplace dessert from this region than baklava, a rather sweet dessert from Ottoman times that now is a customary item on today’s menus in our restaurants, sweet shops, and holiday tables decked with plaid tablecloths. My mother made baklava, but her taste dissolved into the fog that envelopes the things that disappear too early from your life. Half a kilo of walnuts goes into the baklava, plants with exceedingly poetic symbolism that were planted in Herzegovina on special occasions. My uncle, the one from the pink villa in my grandfather’s photographs, planted one when he got married, which blossomed and grew like the oak tree outside my grandmother’s house, the one my father grew up in. My grandmother’s oak, my other grandmother’s, had something sculptural and subtle inside itself, like a sheer black hand that reached from the other end of the courtyard along the terrace outside the house. The area around the house had something expressive about it, everything that she herself did not have. The tall, thin woman had always had her face wrapped in a veil, dressed in modest and unassuming clothes. Her grey hair would always peek out a little a little from under her scarf. Unlike the traditions on my mother’s side, it wasn’t a house that had a lot of talking. Not a lot and not too loud. It wasn’t that it was a megalomaniac’s theater there like in other places, they were just simple and sincere, traditional people who couldn’t do better simply because they didn’t know anything else. There was only stone around the house, a pile from the old houses they had once lived in. It was a complete hovel, but they set their things down and starting drying meat. Everything itself stone, cold as the people who lived there.

I spent many holiday dinners with that baklava and tablecloth with them, but the conversation rarely strayed from sports, politics, complaining about communists, Muslims, and the

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gays. The chauvinistic affectation was like a side dish with the holiday meal, the verbal equivalent of the traditional Russian salad. While my grandmother was still alive, it was always held at her place on the ground floor looking out at the great canopy of the walnut tree. The children sat to the side, and when we drank Turkish coffee we’d have it with milk, in cups of white porcelain. I still drink it, but in other, stranger cups. Somewhere far away, far from the walnut tree, which is also gone just like my grandmother. She died in 2001 like old people usually do: quietly, no drama. In her sleep. As though she’d known what was coming, she put on her nicest clothes and just went in her sleep, like a candle. Anything else would not have been in keeping with the character of this modest woman, who laughed less than she should have but louder than many others around her.

Perhaps the most fitting death of all, one that comes naturally and without drama, which one surrenders to because one knows it’s time. It was a strange season, a lot of old people from the neighbors’ houses died in a relatively short amount of time and a whole section of the village turned into a ghost town. It’s the section up over the road climbing up a gentle slope along the forest and hill, and the old houses close off a sort of square in the middle. One of them burned down many years ago as though it were made of straw, when little Ico threw a sparkler inside. It never got rebuilt because no one ever came back, like the ones around it. Everyone either died or went away to other cities, near and far. So a cluster of small houses on the hillside stay and wait for someone or something to happen. Whether it’s a sparkler, or some bigwig that’ll turn their poor past into a lie of a greater lore wrapped up in the comfort of rural tourism.

Past my grandmother’s house, buried in the greenery, was the house of a neighbor who usually listened to mass over the radio, turned up so loud that it could be heard in my grandmother’s courtyard. I don’t know anything about that woman, just that she loved her radio. I’m a bit afraid of the moment when the broadcasts of mass fall silent in the greenery past my grandmother’s house, because then one more window in the village will close. Earlier I’d go and walk up that way into the oak forest that my father called Zukanuša. For him it was always a metaphor for everything backwards, Balkan. Whenever someone would do something he didn’t approve of, a verbal expatriation to Zukanuša would follow: “You’re not fit for the city, you’re only good for Zukanuša!”

“There’s a place for people like you in Zukanuša!”

In those woods the bottoms of the tall tree trunks got lost in the mossy ground, and up above the canopy was intertwined in dense crowns. In Slavic mythology, the oak tree is the dwelling-place

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for dead souls. It was believed that the deep woods were places for witchcraft and that the hand you used to cut an old oak would fall off. A natural hypostyle hall. That’s why every time I go to the graveyard, the same graveyard at the edge of the church you can see from my grandmother’s courtyard, I never bring flowers but oak leaves, one for each of them. A little piece of the myth for those that left myths behind. In Islam, the word for “cemetery” is harem, which we translate as “safe space.” I haven’t heard a better translation than that, because that’s what a cemetery really is.

Those I leave there each time I move on further will never go anywhere. They’re there, under the black marble, safe. The only thing that isn’t safe is us, the living. Those who get up from our beds every day to new uncertainties, as tantalizing as they are terrifying. Who needs something as boring and fixed as a safe space?

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Uštipci - 3 eggs - ½ packet of baking powder - scramble ½ slab of white cheese - 2 handful flour Mix with milk.

Uštipci, fritters, are a common item in the culinary repertoire of most Herzegovian kitchens.

So they were in my mother’s black diary. The recipe is written in her curly script, she wasn’t one to write in print, with separated letters. In her handwriting every letter was connected with the ones before and after it. The letters lean forward diagonally, as though in a rush to get to some indeterminate place at the end of the line. They’re controlled by the linear structure of the page, leaping and cascading, there’s no sterile calligraphy here—sometimes the line between numbers and letters gets lost. Her handwriting was a graphological portrait of a personality that vanished. When I opened the little diary for the first time, I felt joy. Recipes, old photos, childhood drawings were in it. The first two pages were car maps of Yugoslavia in color: Zagreb, Belgrade, Ljubljana, Sarajevo, Skopje. Neighboring countries, fuzzy shapes in orange: Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Greece, Austria. The Adriatic Sea, of course, colored in blue. In the back, on the inside cover, was a map of Titograd, from before it was called Podgorica. The map of the city is crisscrossed with Lenin Boulevard, Brotherhood and Unity Street, Freedom Street. Streets are collateral damage in any conflict, so these streets changed their names in the nineties, just as Skopje decided to transform into a postwar case study of modernism in a pseudo-Baroque lie that everyone was ready to believe, that their identity got its white-wished historical framework that it hadn’t had when it needed it, which is now compensated for in Styrofoam stucco.

Next to the map of Titograd a section of a map of another city remained, which there was nothing left of except a corner with the word “Airport,” some mysterious Yugoslav airport by a river whose name would remain hidden, because maybe by now it’s moved, maybe that city lost its name too, its boulevards, swings, and clouds. Just like the country it was once in. Same shit, different name. On the other side of the airport by a river was some fuzzy greenery that maybe by today had been turned into a parking lot, like in other places. There has to be space for new people, for their stories, lives, and cars. The other side of that section was a map of Kosovo. I remember Priština, and Mutnjaković’s library, one of the most beautiful in the former Yugoslavia. Next to the 12

building, from which the dynamic structure of connected glass cupolas penetrated the horizontal mass, Milošević had given orders to build an Orthodox church on the great green space. This powerful gesture had clearly shown the spirit of a new era that had turned a secular society into a hysterical theological-nationalistic circus. Miraculously, Mutnjaković’s library survived it all. We stayed overnight in a small hotel in the middle of the Priština bazaar, which had had something of the original Ottoman in it, in that it was still divided into sections that sold very certain sorts of things. There had been a sanitary shop next to the hotel, a load of tubes for showers and mixers on display, like a knot of silver snakes glistening in the sun that broke through the clouds over the bazaar. For no reason at all, I remembered the episode of Seinfeld with Kramer’s Serbian shower heads for circus elephants.

The calendar in the diary was interesting: in 1980, February had had twenty-nine days. It was a leap year, and afterwards the following years had really leapt off a ledge. I came along two years later, in 1982, and my brother in 1983. In those years siječanj, the Bosnian word for January, had still been called januar, as the Serbs called it. After the calendar was a list of official holidays as they had been before: 7. 7. Independence Day in Serbia 13. 7. Independence Day in Montenegro 22. 7. Independence Day in Slovenia 27. 7. Independence Day in Croatia & Bosnia and Herzegovina 2. 8. Elijah’s Day 11. 10. Independence Day in Macedonia This independence day isn’t officially celebrated anymore in my country, like many holidays from the SFRJ. The uprisings, coups, relay races, and others are stored away in a proverbial closet with the other skeletons, where all those things that people forget about overnight are, like memberships with the communist party, and the Pioniri oath. I took my own oath at what was then the Youth Center that had been a backdrop of the Nazi headquarters in Bulajić’s film Battle of Neretva.

Recently, before the elections in Bosnia, I passed an election stand in Sarajevo for a political party called The Communist Party whose slogan was “A Return to the Future.” They were set up in front of the cathedral, in front of the statue of John Paul II. Everything had gone to hell anyway, and there

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was nothing left but laughter, side-splitting laughter where nothing pours out but a lack of tears. I watched to see how many people would stop at the stand. Mostly it was older people with a sticky memory for those times, more to remember their youth than for communism. Like the elderly people I sometimes bump into at the statue of Bogdanović in Mostar when the weather is good, who walk between all the smashed and broken bottles that bleed onto the disgraced gravestones, an eternity of them. Or maybe they’re happy, since their own names are not on those stones. Still early for them, perhaps. And when their time comes, they’ll be buried elsewhere, and nothing will be written on their headstones besides two dates and their names, without a Yugoslav star. Instead, a cross, a new star.

My mother’s birthday is on the feast day of Saint Elijah, celebrated on 20 July, and is the main feast day in the village she came from. For us, then children, it was more a day when our uncle from Germany brought us a load of Kinder eggs that were rare then and would melt in the sun as soon as you peeled off the silver foil. The recipe for uštipci itself is short, obviously for something so simple and commonplace there was no need for further guidance. Uštipci are a bit like death: banal and remarkable at the same time. A handful flour for a handful of death.

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Burek -

60dkg ground meat ½ kg layers of filo dough 5 eggs 1 dcl oil 3 dcl mineral water

Stew meat and add one egg.

Arrange dough, do not butter. Place two rows meat, slice into cubes.

Burek and I haven’t always seen eye to eye, mostly because I don’t like ground meat in leafy dough. What I like about burek is how it looks like a round, rugged river bend. A sort of edible dead end, turning in a circle that inevitably ends in futility. A pathway that, with every bite, disappears more and more. It was like my street in Šemovac that disappeared in the nineties into the dust of the clashing hordes. It had been one of the rare permanently-inhabited parts of the old city, before the war everything else had already turned into war-torn walls, into a tourist attraction. And then what happened, happened. Everyone ran away, the houses burned down, and the stores, and the little wooden cottages, they moved up to the clouds along with the dust of all that was left of that street. Today the Square of Surviving Defenders is near my street, and next to the square is a little mosque that Muslim goatherds built in the sixteenth century. It stands on an offshoot of the Radobolja, the only mosque like it in all of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Inside, the soft, colorful rugs in front of the mihrab silence the sound of the water below the building, which the separates the qibla from the prayer room. In front of the mosque, the square with the fountain and palm tree. It’s not a great palm tree: it’s short and has sparse leaves, it doesn’t offer shade or coconuts in the summer, it just stands there, like a lonely man waiting for the tram at the bus stop.

Fountains are a commonplace thing in old Ottoman towns. It was believed that those who built bridges or fountains would go to heaven. That’s why there are so many fountains, everyone wanted to get to heaven, the line in front of its gates must have been longer than for a sale in a shopping center. This thought was probably also in the head of whoever built the fountain in the Square of Surviving Defenders. I like that square, because it’s a counterpoint to Bogdanović’s partisan statue. A square for the living instead of a city for the dead. A space for those it’s still too early for yet for heaven or for hell, except if they’re already there. To the dead end that the country sent them, with no more use for them after they’d managed to squeeze through the grindstone of the 15

ethnic cleansing as survivors. They didn’t count on that. They thought, they’ll all be killed, the naïve fools. Instead of lifelong disability and privilege, just put some memorial plaques in some prominent spot and you won’t have to do anything else with them. Just like in this spot, fuck it.

They got away. Now they’d have to give these poor fools some rewards, pension, medals. Instead of that, they opened betting halls, burek shops, cafes to sit every day without work from eight to four, and from four to midnight at the bar, drink till you fall off your feet, do yourself in since you’ve already had the luck of surviving The Great Fuck-Up. A whole army of the living dead on a foreign bill and their own torment. Like burek, torment has an end. An end in loaded guns and pistols from poorly-secured basements, in car accidents on the outskirts, in hunger strikes in front of government buildings. Survive? What for?

Today on the square tourists take photos and souvenirs made in China and Turkey get sold.

Those who live visiting those who survived. Stop by for some ćevapi in a warm bun, local beer, and picture-taking in front of Hajrud’s Bridge. It’s all a bit tasteless, but that’s tourism. The city is like a museum exhibition. Women sell knitted tablecloths, Roma perfume and sunglasses, stands with pashmina scarves and hats with Bosnia and Herzegovina flags, the funny yellow triangle on the blue background. In the air, the smell of burek, the kind in greasy paper, and the grill in the ćevapi shop.

Behind the palm tree, the hamam from the seventeenth century, with its arrangement of domes in the air, like the foam on top of a beer. The doors to the hamam are locked, neither the dead nor the surviving can go in. Those two worlds, the world of the tourists and the locals, the living and the dead, are divided by some invisible, but palpable crust. Like the kind in the recipe. After all these guests leave, the square will remain like a de-Chiricovian painting in which the shadows of the passers-by and the useless palm move, and instead of girls with hula-hoops, here and there there’ll be rockers on the way to Zlaja’s pub, one of the few left with a jukebox in town.

You don’t have to make burek at home anymore, and if my mother were alive, she’d for sure have bought it in a bakery or from one of the women who huddle away in their homes filled with burek, pita, and homemade cakes. It’s like with umbrellas, shirts, and other cheap things. The deals have gotten so good that it doesn’t pay to fix things, everything gets thrown out after it’s broken. In future flea markets there will be very few things from our time, because they’re so rarely kept. These times don’t know supply shortages, just money shortages. That’s why indecisive people take so long to choose a bottle of shampoo from a line of available ones, or to break out from between the aisles of the mastadonian marketplace you sometimes need a map to find where you

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even are in it. When I was small, marketplaces like that were like magical lands where those shelves were towers overflowing with bounty of all kinds, just waiting for me to touch them, try them, taste them. Everything was interesting, I couldn’t concentrate on just one thing, even today I can’t. But super markets are very logically organized, like burek: crust, filling, crust, filling, crust, filling until you get to the end of the burek. Only hunger waits for you at the end of the burek, and the cashier and the infinite parking lot at the end of the super market, and you’ve forgotten again where you parked your car.

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Chocolate ½ kg sugar, ½ cup water, add one stick of margarine and remove from heat. ¼ kg powdered milk, 10 dkg cocoa or chocolate powder. Optional: chop up walnuts or raisins, coat in oil and pour into pan.

I don’t remember if my mother ever made chocolate from this recipe. Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. In the early eighties there was already enough chocolate in the market places— Kraš, Zvečevo, Takovo, and the rest. The cocoa in the recipe could only be Kraš Express, in that red packaging that hasn’t changed to this day. There was usually a little plastic train, usually a wagon car, in the package, and the lucky ones were able to assemble the whole locomotive pictured on the box. For a long time that was my only experience with trains, but later when I became a traveler I met some trains in their natural size, and some remain as a special memory.

In 2012 I was waiting for the train to Barcelona in Alcover, a Catalonian village lurking way back in the hinterland that, besides a street, a hill, and some historical ruins, had nothing left in it.

That sort of place only has two sorts of people living there—those for whom the big cities are too expensive, and those who have no choice. But Alcover says much more and more bluntly about Spain than Madrid or Barcelona with their cacophonous luxuries, music, and crowds of tourists.

Maybe because there isn’t all that cultural hubbub. Everything is bare, sincere, and simple. The train station there is a little single-storey house with a platform and a board with the train schedule. But like everything else in this country, train schedule is a very relative notion. I got to the station a little before the train was due to arrive and looked around, panicked. There was not even one other traveler there, the little ticket booth was closed. Siesta. On a bench on the platform sat a shabby older man with a big bottle of beer, and as I checked the train schedule he tossed at me: “Hey man, forget the damn schedule. It’s always late here.”

“Excuse me? Are you here instead of an information desk?”

He took a good swig and turned to me again.

“No, but I’m here a lot, it’s my siesta.”

He took another gulp. Right in front of us, past the train tracks, extended the dry, listless underbrush and the highway behind it, from which the morning swelter evaporated into the air. He ended up being right, the train was late by exactly twenty-three minutes, and then it slid up to the

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platform like the Titanic not knowing that this trip could be its last. I went up to the door of the wagon car that hadn’t opened yet. I tried to open it, but it wouldn’t work, on the second go either.

Or the third. Through the dirty window of the car I could see travelers in the compartments, meaning the doors had worked that day as they should, I just had my usual bad luck. Knowing that I wouldn’t be able to expect the next train so soon, I knocked on the window of a traveler who opened up the emergency exit for me, and the journey could begin. Or so I thought. A few stations later, in Reus, all the travelers were asked over the speakers to get onto another train if they wanted to make it to Barcelona that day. Luckily I speak Spanish just well enough to get what the voice of the speakers had wanted to say. Eventually we all managed to make our destination, Sants Station, a huge train station where it’s easy to get lost and where no one at the information desks speak any foreign languages, and lunch breaks seem to last longer than the hours of operation.

Taking the train from Mostar to Sarajevo is, more than anything else, a visual experience.

The gorges in the Neretva canyon, the train tracks wandering along them over the water, without a single tree or bush because there’s no room. Sitting in a compartment you look out the window, the huge vertical cliffs mutate into imaginary Gothic cathedrals and fortresses, and over them the trapeze wires, and the triangles of mountains above. In autumn, when soft fog billows down the cliffs over the water, this strip looks even more dramatic. And as you slip along towards Bosnia, closer and closer to Sarajevo, the scenery changes. Plains and depressing little places with betting shops, bakeries, cafes, and the rest of the Austro-Hungarian attempts at urbanization in the form of train stations and surrounding buildings devastated by the nineties. One of those places is Tarčin, which my train passed through on the way to Sarajevo. No one on the train had been prepared for what happened there.

There was a dull, far-off sound that didn’t indicate anything in particular, and then the whole train stopped. Compartments in a train are like drawers in a wardrobe, separate cells lined up in the same frame. Every one of them is a short story, a spontaneous narrative on the move without a fixed storyteller, who always appears when you least expect it. The door of the compartment opened, and a worker in a railroad uniform entered.

“There’s been an accident on the tracks. We’ll have to remain stopped until the police finish their investigation.”

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“Do you know how long that’ll take? Some of us are in a hurry,” said a middle-aged blonde woman in a grey suit, obviously in a rush to get to a work meeting. It materialized before my eyes: a hotel with many rooms in cold colors and a large seminar room with no windows, but equipped with machines for coffee, projectors, and Wi-Fi. It’s a strange sort of oasis where people come for boring weekend company workshops, or to meet up with a mistress frantically kept away from the wife and kids.

“The police are on their way from Sarajevo. We won’t be able to move for at least an hour, ma’am.”

“Miss, please.”

“Please be patient. We can’t move because the police line is over the track.”

The worker was telling the truth. Through the smudged glass of the compartment a green swath could be seen, under which were houses and buildings. The rain drummed against the windows faster and faster, until you couldn’t hear your own thoughts anymore. How I’d found myself on a strange train journey again, I had no idea. Luckily I wasn’t in a hurry at all, so I stayed in my seat and leafed through the book I’d brought with me. You should always have a book with you, you never know when you’ll wait for the next train that won’t arrive on time. So we waited, those of us in compartments, until the news reached us of the woman who had thrown herself under our train and halted rail traffic. It kept raining, and right then Sarajevo seemed indescribably far away. Even further than Barcelona from that little station in Alcover. And in that moment the little colorful plastic train from the Kraš Express box seemed perfect to me, because there was no rain, no suicide on its tracks. Just cocoa.

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Risotto with Eggs -

30 dkg rice 30 dkg frozen peas 3 pair horseradish roots 1 whole onion parsley red pepper 4 eggs oil

Sprinkle chopped onions in oil, grate a little red pepper, and add in chopped horseradish and rice.

When the rice becomes transparent, add the peas, pour in water, simmer on low heat. Add the chopped green parsley to the finished dish, level the surface, pour the eggs onto it, and put it in the oven to bake. Top the eggs with salt.

I was born in one of those countries where rice is not eaten with chopsticks, and risotto is sometimes so burnt and hard that you have to eat it with a knife and fork. At least that’s how it was during the time of the older generations, like my housekeeper Ruža, an older woman from Konjica who started working at our place while I was at college, when someone needed to look after my mother when we were away on campus or at work. Ruža was a woman with a thickset build and a mannish face, everything that my late mother was not. But then, my mother had had a good heart and an honest soul, without much of the pretentiousness and pompousness that’s so typical of urban careerists who, their whole lives, think they’re better than those like Ruža, who iron and cook for them because they don’t have the time for it.

Women like Ruža are a vital part of family events in wealthier homes today, because all those pastries, cakes, and pitas are kneaded and baked by a housekeeper who, with gastronomical freelancing, saves someone’s overworked spouse from disgrace in front of their guests, and themselves from poverty. It was a little strange after my mother’s death, because technically there was no need to look after anyone or cook anymore. My mother was gone, and I generally prefer to cook for myself, because Ruža’s cooking was certainly hearty and healthy, but monotonous as hell.

Some parents had the tradition of punishing their children by making them kneel on uncooked rice grains, but that had never happened to me, and I can’t remember anyone who had it happen to them,

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so maybe it was just an urban legend to scare kids, like the boogey man waiting behind wardrobes for disobedient children. I was one of the disobedient ones, but I was also one of the few who knew that, besides cobwebs and dead cockroaches, there was nothing behind the wardrobe. My relationship with cockroaches is, really, the one stable relationship in my life. All others fluctuate until they die off or take on another form. It’s only cockroaches that are completely dependable and predictable. In the winter they usually hibernate in a kitchen corner, in some underground hollow where it’s safe and warm enough. And then the days start to warm up they turn up again, first alone and then in droves, on the white tiles in the kitchen, under the table by the wooden crate with the potatoes. Of course, you can’t be polite with cockroaches, they won’t leave if you ask them nicely.

Hell, it’d be better if we were the ones doing the leaving. And the little parasitic shits will outlast us, just as they always have.

I can’t imagine what our houses and apartments must look like to a cockroach. Maybe like huge mechanisms of walls and openings, boxes riddled with canals in chewed-up, spongy barriers, mounted up onto pillars or lowered to the ground. For them, we are nothing more than mobile chewers of rice and all those other kinds of food they don’t understand or consume. They usually conduct their patrols at night, darkness is their realm. Like vampires that don’t suck blood, but frantically dash about, seemingly lost, just until they end up under someone’s well-aimed slipper.

I didn’t eat the risotto from this recipe all that often, but I did eat sutlijaš, rice pudding, or rice on milk as they call it these days. It would have cocoa powder on top, and be quite sweet, and the rice was moist and creamy. It was a real joy to eat when it was still fresh and warm, it melted on your tongue. My mother would, unlike the classic savory risotto, serve her sutlijaš in her Chinese porcelain cups, which had “Made in China” written on the bottom, under the decorative blue-andwhite pattern. Later it seemed to me that all those days with my mother were like grains of rice, numberless and endlessly undervalued, because I didn’t know then that they weren’t endless, that they would soon be numbered. Of course, she didn’t know either, like no one knows. If we knew those sorts of things ahead of time, life would be nothing more than a paranoid countdown to inevitability. You’re never ready for it, though a few years before her death I started thinking about it, and tried to prepare myself mentally for the departure that was rather delayed in relation to what the physicians had said and what anyone would have expected, even her.

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The day the ambulance came the first time, I didn’t think that it was the beginning of the end. An arrogant doctor in a red uniform arrived with a team of helpers and intervened. The second intervention ended when they took her by ambulance to the Old Hospital. She died on the way there, while my brother and I tried to get through traffic that, just as Murphy fucking says, always turns up when you need it least. By the time we go to the hospital, she’d already gone. In the meantime, the Old Hospital itself has gone too, the Austro-Hungarian military pavilion-style hospital from the nineteenth century. It was destroyed to make space for an enormous shopping center that looked like a Mesopotamian pyramid, that had a curtain wall façade in those times and neon signs with logos of multiplex cinemas and fast food chains. The Old Hospital had had a little park between the buildings with a few Lebanese cedars, which were cut down later to loud protests from civilians in the background. With the disappearance of our house in Šemovac, the building where my mother’s former office had been, and the hospital she died in, almost all the urban traces of her existence in this city were erased. The department stores where she’d gone shopping don’t exist anymore, and in some ways the city she’d once worked and lived doesn’t exist anymore either.

People have striven resolutely to destroy it to the point of unrecognizability, and the imitation that appeared afterwards never took on the characteristics of a living organism, but rather those of a wax museum. Wax is perhaps not the best metaphor because in the Mostar heat it would surely melt.

And a melting city would be a scene from one of Buñuel’s dreams. I haven’t eaten risotto with horseradish horns in years, sutlijaš, either. I usually eat rice in the Asian style now, with or without chopsticks. This is a different world, far from the one my late mother remembers. Cities change quicker than people.

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