Serbia
Something was wrong with him, you could see it in his eyes. They were bloodshot and restless, but with a fine intelligence welling from under the long eyelashes. The first time we saw him, we were at the only grocery store in the area, where people who stayed in cottages or hotels on this slope of the mountain Tara in western Serbia came to do their shopping. It was June; we had just arrived and went to stock up on the staples. He came down the road in a hurry, his hooves clicking on the cracked asphalt; then turned abruptly into the pine trees on the side, his eyes wide with urgency. A man with a shovel held menacingly high in the air and striding squarely with a dark anger set on his face loomed up at the other end of the road and followed the horse into the forest. Then they disappeared and weren't seen again that afternoon.
We spent the rest of the day acquainting ourselves with our cabin. It was small but functional and cosy. The one sore spot was the washroom: there was no tub or a shower cabin -- only a detachable showerhead coming directly from the hot-water boiler which dripped and splashed the entire floor while you were having a shower, no matter how delicately you were trying to do it. But we adjusted quickly, as with any other daily imperfections for which life in Serbia trains you well: with a bit of fiddling with the showerhead, it was possible to angle it so as to keep the inundation of the tiles minimal. We designated a rag-cloth as the floor-drying towel, and afterwards, everything went smoothly in the washroom.
The next morning I opened the door and stepped into the moist morning air, thickly populated with chirping and twittering coming from everywhere. The cabin was sitting in the middle of an uncut meadow which emitted soft lushness, accentuated by a narrow trodden path meandering into the pine trees in the distance up a hill. When the sunrays were angled low, everything faded into a powdery daydream with an occasional glint of busy passing bugs.
Before a day trip, we stopped by the smallest post-office on the planet, which also has the shortest working hours in the world. This 2x2 room with one counter and one phone booth at the back of the grocery store is open from 8 to 11 am three days a week. The elderly dishevelled clerk behind the glass panel looked tired but courteous when we asked him for some stamps. I mentioned the horse from the day before. "Oh, that one," he waved his hand dismissively, like a person who has known too many sad stories to be able to care. "He's just an old horse, he is of no use to anyone so he wanders around; sometimes he goes into people's gardens... some don't like it."
Later in the afternoon, a few unattended horses showed up in the neighbouring meadow, grazing, oblivious of their own beauty in the tall grasses. Conspicuously on his own, down the road full of holes in the asphalt (probably laid in the 70s when these cottages and hotels were first built and then never renewed) came the old horse, stepping gingerly around the pot-holes, his hooves clicking in the deep open-air silence. It looked as if he were concentrating on the bad road in front of him, but he was probably scanning the sides of the road for his favourite grass stalks.
I followed him at a safe distance for a while, and he sensed I was there because he stopped a couple of times and half-turned his lowered head but never looked at me directly. His eyes were still bloodshot and troubled. Then he walked off the road into a grassy area between two cottages and was immediately busy grazing. I came up to him as close as I could, crouched, took out my camera, and started snapping photos. His mouth stopped chewing, he lifted his head and looked ahead for a few seconds, then turned his neck and looked at me, my eyes hidden somewhere behind the lens. He stood like that, still, not blinking, looking at my hidden eyes, until my fingers knew -- before I did -- that they should stop clicking the button. Slowly, I put the camera down, and there we were, this old horse and I, under a small stretch of the Serbian summer skies.
Bosnia
It was not the route we usually take when we travel from Belgrade in Serbia to Banja Luka in north-western Bosnia, but we wanted to drop by
teta Azra's house in central Bosnia to deliver a package so we had to make a detour. You know you are close to the town of Breza, about 20 km west of Sarajevo, when you've crossed the river Bosnia about half a dozen times, and the railroad tracks at least about as many times. I don't know if it's because the river and the railway meander, or the road, or all three.
We had a hard time finding Azra's house. No map was detailed enough, and the small bunch of houses where she lived was not on the GPS either. We had to stop several times and ask the locals if they knew "Azra the seamstress" and finally, the veiled woman from a grocery store just down the street from what turned out the be Azra's house knew her and pointed us up the street. Azra was not back from work yet but her sister-in-law who lived in the neighbouring house, saw us walking helplessly around the house, and came out to welcome and entertain us until Azra was back. She showed us into a wooden gazebo next to the house, made by Azra's late husband, then sat down with us to keep us company. We had never met before but she treated us as old friends, or family members; I was friends with Azra's daughter "out there" in the foreign world, so far from the strawberries and the potatoes in the little vegetable patch between the two houses, and somehow even just my name was a direct link to the daughter and niece who was away.
Then Azra was back, carrying bags, and then the full dinner was laid out onto the table in the gazebo for us, all home-made: the spinach pie (done in the "Bosnian way," with the sour-cream topping poured over the pie in the last 10 minutes of baking -- something which is omitted from Serbian spinach pies), the grilled kebab-like meat (with no addition of minced pork, another difference from the Serbian equivalent), the oven-baked beans, which Azra had prepared specially for us since she knew from her Serbian brother-in-law that this was a favorite Serbian dish.
While we were eating and talking, a petite white-and-gray cat was rubbing itself against our legs. Azra said the cat -- which was not exactly hers but she fed it -- had just had her second litter of kittens and was constantly looking for food scraps, on top of any field mice which she was seen chasing in the area.
It was a balmy June day. Just behind the gazebo was the lively little river Stavinja which we could hear but couldn't quite see as it was hidden by a concrete wall running along the bank; Azra's husband had built it years before, to protect their land from being flooded in the spring when the Stavinja rose and spilled over the banks. This is also "the scene of the crime" where some years before, according to a family legend, Azra's mother's false teeth ended, by mistake, being thrown over the wall into the river, which led to an impromptu search party combing the shallows for the teeth. They were never found.
One of the numerous times Azra got up to go bring something from the kitchen, she started talking to someone invisible by the river, who, it turned out, was fishing. " Hi neighbour, how is it going? Any fish today? Yes? Oh, great -- if you have some extra, toss it over." The man mumbled something in reply -- this must have been a frequent scenario. A couple of minutes later as we were finishing the freshly picked strawberries, there was an unidentifiable noise beyond the wall and something landed with a splash on the land by the gazebo. The cat was there in seconds, and made off even more quickly with a small fish in her mouth. "Ah, wonderful, so he did have some to spare -- I often ask him to throw one or two over, for the cat," Azra explained as she was coming back from the kitchen with a tray of cookies.
I delivered a small package to Azra from her daughter and a couple of hours later, everyone (including the cat) full and content, we took our leave and were on our way. Being a small part of that day's "social" ecosystem in the heart of Bosnia, we drove on in silence, smiles spread across our faces. The mountains, high and formidable, towered above us all with what looked like parental protectiveness. And forgiveness.
The Drina
The river was green, like late June grass; like the Colorado, glimpsed from the top of the Canyon, and greener. It was also quiet, with only us in the boat, cutting smoothly through the milky greenness with the prow, and my left foot hanging over one side. The rubber of the boat got scorching hot whenever the sun rose up behind the clouds, but the water was cold and sent icy pulsations up my big toe submerged in it.
I was on the Drina, gliding in a green dream in the no man's land between Serbia on the right bank and Bosnia on the left.
Zeljko, our skipper, had met us about a kilometer downstream from the Hydroelectric Dam "Perucac," where the river, resigned after making its way through the canyon and over the elephantine dam, flows broad and translucent, its volume almost visible, like honey in the sun. Zeljko, a Serbian who spoke with a trace of the Bosnian accent as everyone else in this frontier region, was a chatterbox. While his nephew, a boy of about 15 who was learning the trade, sat quietly at the back of the boat listening to his uncle's stories and keeping a watchful eye on the river, occasionally answering to his uncle's curt navigational commands, Zeljko spoke amply about his grandfather who was the original skipper in the family and operated a real wooden raft; about the changing times and crazy drunk tourists who flocked to the Drina each July for the Regatta when hundreds of packed rubber boats floated down the river, with music and booze overflowing; about his small boat-house a few kilometers upstream from the dam where he went to fish, breathe, and think on the weekends.
Meanwhile, the green beauty was just ours this early in the season. Smooth, with a few small whirlpools forming here and there with a foamy crown on the edges, the river carried us effortlessly. Small patches of cultivated land alternated with woody stretches and isolated back yards on the Serbian side; three goats looked up curiously from behind some bushes where they were grazing. The Bosnian side on the left was wilder, less accessible; a dog was barking somewhere in the depths of a tree grove. After a gentle curve in the river, there was a steady noise of a working machine coming from the right bank: it was a sort of a water pump, humming in a monotone. Next to it was a child of about 5 years, crouching, with her hands over her ears, watching us motionless as we glided by.
Twelve kilometers later, we reached our final destination, Bajina Basta, where a couple of Zeljko's friends were waiting to help take the boat out and load it onto a trailer. Zeljko was supposed to drive us back to where we left our car so we waited for him in a little park, filled with shade, and memorial plaques: three or four young people, who must have jumped into the river and were fished out somewhere here by the bridge. Then Zeljko came to get us in his car, a Lada at least twenty years old, all the windows rolled down and letting in the dust from the road freely. We went by his house to pick up his wife, a big-toothed woman with a smiling face, who carried a bag with a huge pot in it: their food for the weekend which they were going to spend in the boat-house.
As we chit-chatted, Zeljko pulled up in front of a store with an open door, and without leaving the car yelled through the open window, his elbow protruding outside: "Hey, Joko, do you have any BB Kleka left? I have a customer here who is looking for it." My father had asked earlier about this type of plum brandy, originally made in Bajina Basta, mostly for the old times' sake, when he and my uncle used to drink it in the 80s and when the Bosnian and the Serbian branches of our family spent their vacation times together. Once, when we arrived at the vacation house a few days after my uncle's family, we found his "sign" that we were in the right place by the road-side: two empty BB Kleka bottles mounted on each side of a horizontal pole, attached with wire to a perpendicular one, creating a strange kind of a cross. The brand had been discontinued for some time but certain stores still had remains of the old stock. The woman wearing a white overall said something and waved negatively from inside the store so we drove on, empty-handed.
We reached our car, paid Zeljko (who gave us a somewhat higher price for the ride back than the tourist agency had quoted), and started the drive back up the mountain. With the radio reception coming on and off following the rise and fall of the mountain cliffs, I put both hands over my ears and watched in silence as the green river and its two banks grew smaller and sharper below us.
Hydroelectric Station "Perucac," viewed from the Serbian side. Bosnia on the other side.
