Iva ANDRIC
247
I offered him a cigarette, but he said he did not smoke, and he said it
in haste, almost as if with fear and disgust. And while I lit one cigarette
after another, he talked with a sort of forced nonchalance, as if driving
away other, heavier thoughts: "So, the two of us made it to the first
mainline station and that means: we are holding on
to
the doorknob of
the door leading into the wide world . We are leaving Bosnia. I will never
come back, but you will."
"Who knows?" I interrupt pensively, urged by that particular conceit
with which young people like to see their destiny in faraway lands and
unusual paths.
"No, no, you will definitely come back," says my companion confi–
dently as if making a diagnosis, "and I will be struggling with memories
of Bosnia for the rest of my life, as with some Bosnian disease. What the
cause of it is, I do not even know myself-the fact that I was born and
grew up in Bosnia, or that I will never be coming back again.
It
doesn't
matter."
In an odd place, at an odd time, even the conversation becomes odd,
a little like a dream. I look sideways at the large, hunched silhouette of
my former friend next
to
me and wonder; I think how little he resem–
bles that young man who pounded with his fist and recited: "Cover thy
heavens! ... " I think about what will happen to us if life continues
to
change us so quickly and so deeply, I think that only the changes we
notice in ourselves are good and right. And while I think about all that,
I suddenly notice that my friend is speaking again. Roused from my
thoughts, I listen to him carefully. So carefully it seems to me that all
those station noises around me have died out and that only his voice
murmurs in the windy night.
"Yes, for the longest time I really thought that I would, just like my
father, spend my life treating children in Sarajevo and that my bones,
just like his, would rest at the cemetery in Kosovo. What I saw and
experienced in the Bosnian regiments during the war shook this convic–
tion, but when I left the army this summer and spent three months in
Sarajevo, it became clear to me that I wouldn't be able to stay and live
there. And the mere thought of living in Vienna, Trieste, or any other
Austrian city, revolts me, revolts me to the point of nausea. And that's
why I began thinking about South America."
"All right, but may one ask what it is that is making you run away
from Bosnia?" I asked with the recklessness at the time typical of people
my age asking questions.
