read the comics, who gets to play with the Barbies they share. They have small red eyes today like they’ve been crying hard for hours, but it’s just because they’re tired. Mama says they crawl into bed with her and Papa every night and I secretly wish I could too; it’s hard to sleep with the new sounds outside, rumbling and booming and sirens and cars screeching around corners. But I’m too old now, Dušan would laugh.
Mama’s and Papa’s friends and colleagues are coming and going from our apartment all the time. They slouch on our couch for a few hours, or sit on the edge of chairs. They give each other the latest news, even though everyone knows it already, have a drink or six, get drunk, laugh hysterically, cry into their handkerchiefs, leave when the next shift arrives. Like waves, in and out, on a stormy coast, Baka says, timed around the curfew and the amount of shelling. Sometimes people stay over, but they never sleep. They’re exhausted but they just sit there and gab non-stop, or stare out of the window at the city.
“Can’t we please tell people not to come so much? Can’t we please have some normal time together as a family?” Mama asks. “I still have to practise, I still have to focus.”
“Normal?” Papa says. “
Normal?
People have to get together as much as possible now. Alone in our apartments, we lose courage. And then people just leave. People are leaving the cityby the thousands, sometimes in secret, without telling their friends. People are scared to stay, ashamed to go. This city’s glue is the best of human relationships, not family, not tribe or clan, friendship.
Friendship.
”
It’s true. Some apartments in the building are empty now, and neighbours have been asked to watch them. Pero and Mahmud and I want to break into one and just hang out there, to see what it feels like poking around in other people’s things. We wouldn’t take anything, at least not anything we didn’t really need.
‡ ‡ ‡
T HE CITY WAS A HUGE CARNIVAL LAID OUT between hills, that’s how I thought of it in my mind when I was a little boy. All kinds of sounds, songs, prayers rose from it like echoes close and distant. And the stones and domes and minarets and spires were many shapes, fitting together like a completed puzzle in colours of white, sand, orange, copper green. Trees were brown and black in winter and dark green puffs in summer. And the narrow, twisty streets of the old town flowed with strangers as familiar as friends. They gabbed, they joked, and birds flew in fluttering flocks around the Turkish Square. At night, a wash of lights like jewels filled the valley, and the river reflected moonlight when it was in the mood. Even the crappy parts were beautiful, because of the grandeur of our geography, Papa said, with hills and mountains on three sides, always visible no matter where you look, the frame to the picture. When I was little, delicious smells pulled you into bakeries and fishmongers and restaurants and the kitchensof friends’ mothers. Hookah, ?evap?i?i, pizza, burek. The bazaars, markets, souks had everything in them from all the countries of the world. And the city had many sneaky corners to be discovered when you became a teenager, like bars and discos where the punk bands played that Dušan told me about, the underground city painted black. And in Ilidža, there were nature walks by the wide river, the Roman Bridge, the waterfalls, Big Alley with the fat old trees on either side like giant living columns, the fields that Deda walked over in the autumn reciting poems about peasants. And there are other places that I will know about when I am a man. I’m vague about them, but they’re there, I know they are. I’ve already been to three concerts that Mama played, one in the National Opera House with the whole symphony. I had to wear a tie to that one.
Now it’s a small and dangerous cage, our city, completely surrounded by rocket launchers and maniacs, with all of us
Mama’s and Papa’s friends and colleagues are coming and going from our apartment all the time. They slouch on our couch for a few hours, or sit on the edge of chairs. They give each other the latest news, even though everyone knows it already, have a drink or six, get drunk, laugh hysterically, cry into their handkerchiefs, leave when the next shift arrives. Like waves, in and out, on a stormy coast, Baka says, timed around the curfew and the amount of shelling. Sometimes people stay over, but they never sleep. They’re exhausted but they just sit there and gab non-stop, or stare out of the window at the city.
“Can’t we please tell people not to come so much? Can’t we please have some normal time together as a family?” Mama asks. “I still have to practise, I still have to focus.”
“Normal?” Papa says. “
Normal?
People have to get together as much as possible now. Alone in our apartments, we lose courage. And then people just leave. People are leaving the cityby the thousands, sometimes in secret, without telling their friends. People are scared to stay, ashamed to go. This city’s glue is the best of human relationships, not family, not tribe or clan, friendship.
Friendship.
”
It’s true. Some apartments in the building are empty now, and neighbours have been asked to watch them. Pero and Mahmud and I want to break into one and just hang out there, to see what it feels like poking around in other people’s things. We wouldn’t take anything, at least not anything we didn’t really need.
‡ ‡ ‡
T HE CITY WAS A HUGE CARNIVAL LAID OUT between hills, that’s how I thought of it in my mind when I was a little boy. All kinds of sounds, songs, prayers rose from it like echoes close and distant. And the stones and domes and minarets and spires were many shapes, fitting together like a completed puzzle in colours of white, sand, orange, copper green. Trees were brown and black in winter and dark green puffs in summer. And the narrow, twisty streets of the old town flowed with strangers as familiar as friends. They gabbed, they joked, and birds flew in fluttering flocks around the Turkish Square. At night, a wash of lights like jewels filled the valley, and the river reflected moonlight when it was in the mood. Even the crappy parts were beautiful, because of the grandeur of our geography, Papa said, with hills and mountains on three sides, always visible no matter where you look, the frame to the picture. When I was little, delicious smells pulled you into bakeries and fishmongers and restaurants and the kitchensof friends’ mothers. Hookah, ?evap?i?i, pizza, burek. The bazaars, markets, souks had everything in them from all the countries of the world. And the city had many sneaky corners to be discovered when you became a teenager, like bars and discos where the punk bands played that Dušan told me about, the underground city painted black. And in Ilidža, there were nature walks by the wide river, the Roman Bridge, the waterfalls, Big Alley with the fat old trees on either side like giant living columns, the fields that Deda walked over in the autumn reciting poems about peasants. And there are other places that I will know about when I am a man. I’m vague about them, but they’re there, I know they are. I’ve already been to three concerts that Mama played, one in the National Opera House with the whole symphony. I had to wear a tie to that one.
Now it’s a small and dangerous cage, our city, completely surrounded by rocket launchers and maniacs, with all of us
Similar Books
