With my friends I found myself defending him, Mira continued softly. They’d give their pseudo-psychological diagnoses. Then I’d be with him, we’d argue, inevitably, and I’d find myself agreeing with my friends.
Luke came slowly back toward the table, looking warily from Mira to me. The sky was darkening as if for rain.
You must be tired from driving, she told him. I only want a coffee but you two should try something, they have an excellent pastry chef.
She insisted on paying for the meal, since we’d driven out of our way to see her, and then, once she’d paid, suggested in her irresistible way we come with her after to her parents’. They would be overjoyed to see me, she said. Surely Luke would not want to drive all the way so late. The roads, as he must know by now, were lethal and it would get properly dark very soon. It wasn’t an easy drive by day. He must’ve noticed not many companies would insure us. Why not spend the night in the upstairs apartment her parents kept for holiday lets?
I wished I could sound so self-assured when I wanted Luke to stay with me. He looked too tired to argue anyway and I was eager to further delay the drive. I called my sister from Mira’s phone to tell her we’d now be there by tomorrow evening, not tonight. I could hear her daughter crying in the background which always took me by surprise – I had a niece.
Fine, was all she said.
7
The sun was setting as we tailed Mira. Luke pointed out the horizon of motionless cranes. Most buildings seemed to be under construction or arrested construction. Unclad, unfinished storeys of brick and concrete balconies without railings, already trailing black vines. Every other yard was littered with mounds of soil and sand, blocks of concrete, pallets, rubber coils, and every so often an old woman stood still as a statue among them, as if lost in her own front garden.
Spooky, he said.
What is?
This mania for building. With no one really here and nothing finished. It’s like some great sickness hit.
We parked and stood waiting for Mira, who was reorganising items in her boot. The sky had turned a queasy orange, too warm for October.
It’s like last week, I said to Luke. Do you think it’s the same thing?
The week before we’d flown to Split, people stopped in the street and took photos of the sky. Storm Ophelia had brought dust from the Sahara and smoke from European wildfires. The sun was an apocalyptic red. The news reported birds swirling mysteriously. In Lancashire, where Michael’s family came from, an entire town was covered in foam. In Cornwall, Anne told us, there had been beach invasions by Portuguese man-o’-war – also known as floating terrors. They looked like blue plastic bags on the sand, sometimes pink or orange. Rather than propelling themselves, they used their gas-filled bladders as sails. The high winds had blown them out of the water.
Extremely poisonous, Anne had captioned the photo she sent to their family thread. Can’t walk the dog!
In Scotland, aged nine or ten, I remember taking part in a disaster relief mission on a beach somewhere when all the children came together on the sand to save a swarm of stranded jellyfish. A teenage boy, who did not help but stood around and watched as we dug a channel to the sea, told us in poetic terms all the information he had somehow learned about them. These milky, almost invisible creatures had no bones, no heart, no brain. They were 98% water in fact. This kind couldn’t even pulse. They were at the mercy of the ocean, or they were the ocean, depending on how you looked at it.
Up until that moment I’d been taking part in the rescue mainly because of the sense of occasion, the urgent solidarity among the children. I hated jellyfish, ranking them alongside wasps, maybe worse for being inconspicuous. I’d imagined their sting to be vindictive – less a defence mechanism than a calculated marking of territory where happy children dared to swim. But listening to that boy, I’d felt my animosity draining. In that moment they were the most vulnerable creatures I could think of, entrusting their lives to total uncertainty in exchange for locomotion, moving wherever the moon, the wind, the water drove them. Venom was their one protection, the only thing they could control.
Luke studied the orange colour of the sky for a long time without responding to my question. Then, as we walked from the car park, Mira explained to him that construction work was not allowed in high season. It was all condensed into these months, when there was often bad weather.
The other thing, she said, letting Luke take her heaviest bag, is if they don’t finish they don’t have to pay tax. There’s a whole Russian village up on that hill, completely empty. They just build these fake castles then leave off the roof.
We took back alleys, ducking under washing lines heavy with carpets and towels, before coming to a yard. One wall had been sprayed with two words. FUCK LOGIC. In English.
This is the back entrance, Mira said. Safer. In case we’re being followed.
She guided us past an improvised trellis with the fruitless remains of a vine.
Then again, as my friend Neda says, safety is a trap!
She laughed to herself and began coughing, a hacking smoker’s cough, guiding us between two leopard-print towels and a number of real pelts, strung up beside her parents’ door. Her father liked to hunt, she said. Luke would have to excuse them as their English was limited.
He stooped nervously in the low-ceilinged kitchen while the rest of us embraced. They’d aged since the funeral but said I had not changed. We sat at the yellow Formica table where the two of them had been eating, and Mira’s mother passed black plums round with a bottle of slivovitz – the plum brandy, which, unlike the fruit, I liked.
Her father wore a green gilet with a hospital logo, though in my memory he’d worked for a tobacco company. He talked about moving to Montenegro partly because of more religious people who’d come to Sarajevo. They were more traditional, not socialist, he said. They feel about Erdog˘an the way Serbs do about Putin. Like he’s looking out for them.
They took the jobs too, his wife added before Mira chided her.
It’s all changing.
But not enough, Mira said.
There are now new shopping malls everywhere, he continued. Shopping, only shopping. Like America.
You’re obsessed with America, she groaned.
We discussed Trump, the pro-Trump fake-news sites set up by Balkan teenagers as a way of making money, and then Croatia’s rising nationalism, with the opposite nostalgia in Sarajevo. When he asked how my father was I said it sounded like he spent most of his time, when he wasn’t looking after my mother, in a Tito-themed cafe. He said he knew the one. Near that ICAR statue they had erected. A monument to canned beef with a little EU flag – an ironic gesture by the Bosnians to show their gratitude for what the international community had done for them during the siege. I looked at Luke, wanting to explain the joke in English, but I saw that he was looking at his phone.
Mira began helping her mother make a stew she told us we could have later if we got hungry, slicing mushrooms against her thumb, a motion which made me wince but somehow compelled me to watch her too, then she excused herself. A few moments later, from the hall, there was a strangled sound and then a cry.
I wondered if one of us should leave the table and go to her, but her parents sat still, as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening.
When she returned, her eyes were watery and unfocused, her hands shaking as she lit a cigarette. She spoke so fast I barely caught what was being said. Luke looked from me to her, as she paced the tiny kitchen before sliding to the floor and weeping as freely as if her tears were laughter.
I think, I said quietly, leaning my head toward his, Mira’s author’s dead.
Long after her parents went to bed, the three of us remained around the table. We sat there until my eyes were raw from smoke. Luke’s became narrow slits, but he did not seem to want to go to the upstairs apartment unless I came with him, and I did not want to leave Mira.
It was unclear whether the journalist’s death was a suici
de or only staged as one. Mira was at first sure of the latter, but then went back and forth. I couldn’t stop looking at her hands. They moved as if possessed, making it difficult to put the cigarettes between her lips.
Sometimes I wonder what good it actually does to bear witness, I remember her saying. That the whole world was fixated on us and all we got was Vietnam leftovers. Canned beef. We’re supposed to be grateful they tuned in to watch us dying?
At some point I got up to get some water and as I moved my vision blurred. I stayed a while at the sink to steady myself, letting my glass overflow, pouring it out, refilling, listening to the low murmur of Mira’s monologue. Coming back, I saw a framed cross-stitch I remembered from their old apartment, which at the time I could not read. Now I saw it said, in English NO PLACE LIKE HOME.
I returned to my chair, turning these words over like I’d never heard them before in my life. Mira was telling Luke, now sunk deep into the sofa, why she’d really left Sarajevo. Ash flaked from her cigarette. I felt my eyelids shudder from the effort of keeping open.
They don’t see a future, many of my old friends. I don’t know what to say when I see them. I have this guilt, so now I try not to come back much. People like you though – she pointed her cigarette at me – I mean, I guess if you left as a kid, watched it on TV and not in person, only came back every couple of years, then everything reminds you of it.
This stung. I didn’t say anything. It was true. But I’d been thinking how much this evening reminded me of being together with the others in our old basement.
The last time I went there was winter and the air was so toxic I could barely leave the house. I know your parents won’t leave – but Daria could. She has a baby.
I nodded silently.
My mother wants me to have one. She says we should be replenishing the population. They’re just as nostalgic as yours by the way. It’s a kind of collective psychosis. I’m always saying what about press censorship? What about gay people? What about Goli Otok?
Luke frowned and mumbled something. Mira didn’t seem to require anything more from her audience; her eyes wouldn’t focus and she carried on, her words unstoppable as if it might kill her to fall silent. I felt hot. Excruciatingly hot all of a sudden. I pinched my earlobe. Her eyes finally locked on me and her hands dropped to her lap, still at last, silent, shoulders limp, the frantic energy now spent.
I think of him constantly, she said.
In my dream, I woke in the back of my parents’ car still under my duvet but now across my sister’s lap, my brother in the front where my mother usually sat, my mother in the driver’s seat. No Dad. She rarely drove after dark and claimed to have poor night vision. As it was pitch-black on the road, I assumed we were on a mission to find my father and shame one of his girlfriends. No one would say what was going on except that we were going to grandma’s to sleep over. When I woke a war had started. Shots fired on a wedding party that had been waving flags after the referendum. I remember this shocked me most because it involved a wedding and I could not connect that idea with death.
Early the next morning we said sober goodbyes, and Mira promised to be in touch when she next came to London. We picked our way back through the ghostly fairground of cranes and abandoned diggers, a greenhouse with weeds pressing against the ceiling, plastic chairs and low-hanging laundry lines. Luke kept looking over his shoulder. He seemed more vigilant.
Christopher says if you have to have a difficult conversation, walking or driving works well. That is to say side by side, in motion with a changing view. Luke found it easier for any conversation. For our relationship in general, sitting face to face across a table induced a hostile charge. But as we drove inland, I felt a new tension between us. I stayed silent and kept my eyes on the landscape, devoid of people, where life had apparently stopped.
What did you think of Mira? I asked finally.
Interesting, he said after a long pause. Very interesting woman.
Interesting, I repeated. OK.
Forthright, he added. She had opinions. Seemed very sure of herself.
I said nothing this time.
Very direct. Not like this route you’re taking.
We’d chosen a winding one to avoid the motorway the satnav kept insisting we join every few kilometres. Mira had told us there was an old road through the mountains, tracing with her red fingernail the line on Luke’s satellite image. You’ll just have to watch out for landmines, she deadpanned, pinching the screen and handing it back to him.
The old road lived up to its name, moving us back in time and becoming increasingly pockmarked, passing abandoned homes with cows that wandered in front of us, disappearing again into ruins whose remaining walls still bore anti-NATO graffiti. There were no other cars, and as the road climbed swiftly higher, white mist occasionally surrounded us, blotting out all visibility. The houses became fewer and further, their aspects more hermitic. Occasionally we’d spot a miserable-looking donkey or dog chained up, or a lone figure would appear at the window. I had the feeling they could see something we couldn’t – invisible but right in front of us.
We carried on past them until, up ahead, I could see what looked like a stone in the road. Slowly I realised it was moving.
I shrieked. Something prehistoric maybe. It was a tortoise creeping across the tarmac. Luke swerved, just missing it. The road had abraded as we’d climbed and where the brown shell edged along, veins of scrubby grass grew from fissures. He whistled slowly.
No car’s come this way in a while.
A dog chained to a dilapidated building began to bark and then a man came out and stared at us as we passed him.
Do you feel like we’re not supposed to be here? I said quietly.
For fuck’s sake Anya, how am I supposed to know? You’re supposed to be navigating.
We carried on for several minutes in silence. I could see the pulse in his neck. I told myself he was in a mood because he’d missed his run, but soon something else, black shapes just visible beyond another band of mist, stretched out across the road ahead.
What are they?
I shook my head.
He slowed our speed to a crawl and I sat upright in my seat, gripping the door.
Several tyres were strewn across the middle of the road, rainwater collecting in their cavities.
He clenched his jaw but made no comment. I thought of asking whether he thought we should turn around then but I didn’t want to be responsible for any resulting decision.
The car made a strange whine, weaving between the tyres until the road was clear again and we reached the next ridge where Luke sped up, clearly desperate for the journey to be over. I pulled up the other route on his phone again but the dot pulsed frantically on white, the markings of the map wiped clear.
No reception up here.
Great.
I think if –
Jesus Christ
I lurched forward in my seat with the force of the brake but managed not to scream this time. Luke shot out his arm, too late to stop me flying forward.
I was expecting another animal or strange object, but only a few metres ahead the road ended.
Just stopped and disappeared. It fell away into thin air.
Don’t move, he said, his voice shaking.
I’d never heard him be afraid.
We sat in stillness for a few seconds. Then Luke turned the engine off and gently opened his door, as though trying not to wake something.
Look that way, don’t look forward, he said.
He climbed very slowly out. I followed, terrified the car would roll, moving my eyes in spite of his warning from the chasm where the road vanished – to the stub that remained on the opposite side. There was no sound except a distant roar of the motorway miles below.
Safely back from the precipice, Luke put his hands through his hair.
Why the fuck didn’t one of those village idiots say something?
Maybe they thought we knew what we were doing. Our plate’
s Croatian, remember?
Where was the fucking warning saying the road literally cracks up and falls away?
I guess the tyres were the warning.
He kicked a rock over the edge. It fell soundlessly.
Well I’m not going back that way. No chance. I don’t want to see those bastards gawping at us again.
I saw his hands were trembling now, as well as his voice, whether with rage or fear I wasn’t sure but it was certainly emotion.
There was a dirt track back there, self-control returning as if aware of what I’d been thinking, we’ll see where that takes us.
He got back into the car carefully, reversed a little way to let me in, then drove too fast down the steep dirt track as the tunnel of branches whipped against my window.
8
We parked near the Latin Bridge and Luke sent a photo to his family thread of the stone marking Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. The result of their driver taking the wrong turn, or the right turn according to the original route.
With Luke beside me now I saw everything in high definition. Like the time I’d put on my first pair of glasses and looked up at a tree. The scars on the facades stood out more, as did the darker patches where they had been rendered over. I saw his gaze rest on the pockmarks concentrated around most windows and so I noticed them again as if they were new.
He wanted to get presents, including for my parents, and we wandered through the narrow streets of the bazaar. Pazite, Snajper!
Luke pointed silently to the rusting sign turned fridge magnet, waiting for my translation.
Sniper, I said flatly.
Who’s this for? I wanted to snap at him, amid rows of souvenirs outside a shop called NOSTALGIJA.
He eyed up a pepper pot made from shrapnel, then settled on a copper serving dish.
The call to prayer sounded. It was getting late. We returned to the car and drove up the steep hillside. I noticed I was sweating.
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