1991

was the year two things happened. My brother gave me three chestnuts in Banja Luka, and a cousin's neighbour opened the window in Belgrade and yelled out that the war had started. This was in Yugoslavia, when I left home, and just before it imploded and swallowed the previous 70 years. The year of the Big Shit, as I wrote (bitterly) on the first page of my brand new Merriam-Webster English dictionary, bought by my parents as a going-away university gift.


He gave me the three chestnuts instead of words, in a side street where we stopped the car to say goodbye. My father was driving me to Belgrade, and my brother was staying at home. There was nothing to say, I guess; a world was coming to an end, a childhood, two childhoods. It was late September, and the giant chestnut trees lining the streets of Banja Luka (a notorious city of trees) were scattering their perfectly round fruits generously. They were our old friends, those chestnuts; they meant that the summer was over and the school was starting again. This time they meant that I was leaving the only world we both knew, and that I might never be really back.

The offering --
three perfectly glossy,
perfectly fulfilled chestnuts
glinting in the broad sun
of the last and the first
day, smiling widely at our
blank futures that
splintered into two
that very moment --
said it all
with their silence,
snug in my palm.

Nothing was the same again, even though I kept the three sunny faces of what used to be. Nothing could ever be the same after that afternoon when I was with my cousin outside her apartment building in Belgrade and the second-floor neighbour, a young policeman, opened his window in a rush, half-lent towards us, and with a glimmer of a strange delirium in his eyes screamed out that a war had started. We looked up, digesting: the day continued to be bright, the sky was as spread out as ever, but it smelled already like the end of something,

like the beginning of
bread lines and
old women fights and
packs of dogs
in the street;
like nights darker
than power cuts,
like creased faces on trams,
and writing with
gloves on;
like not knowing
if you still have
a father,
(like not thinking);
like an autumn sky
narrower than
a cardboard box,
and chestnuts falling,
forgotten.
like not thinking.


Not much else happened that year - except the sunsets, that is. At the end of each day at university, I would walk slowly from the trolleybus station towards my grandmother's house, stop for a few seconds in the middle of the long street, facing the sun's inimitable exit performance -- and I knew (simply knew) -- that I would never again see such sunset splendour. I haven't, yet.