Mostar's Scars

Evening, and the city stirs from its afternoon slumber. Chairs and chess sets are moved into place, dogs trot out of cool hibernation, and I’m hungry. The woman presiding over my hired room wrote an address on a scrap of paper, rubbed her belly, pointed to the scrawl with furious insistence. I know where to go.

The old town is twists of alley and clothes line and the occasional dead end alive with children hopscotching. The sun melts over the turret-tops and catches the city walls as it goes. I touch them on my way, tracing the pockmarks left by old bullets. Shadows are patching them up, and by the time darkness falls, they’ll be healed to bruises.

He greets everybody at his door with a handquake and a shot of slivovitz. The place couldn’t be called a restaurant: diners teeter on stools and arm chairs as if at a family feast, and trinkets decorate each table. War helmets, snow globes. Dead relatives peer disinterested from their frames as burek passes them by.

I try to sit but he shakes his head, beckons me towards a curtain at the back of the room. The terrace reveals the bridge that cuts the city in half, a second moon suspended in the darkness. His index and middle fingers mime a man, running and diving from the table’s edge. The city’s men jump from Stari Most once a year, 79 feet to the hard aqua below. I wince and he laughs, flexes fingers that have broken the river surface many times. “It is not so bad. When –” He pauses, becomes serious.

He lifts the bottom of his shirt to reveal two scars, puckered lumps of flesh pouting from his ribcage. The fingers that depicted the diving man join to form a gun, thumb cocked, pointing at my heart.

Cevapi breaks the stand-off. The chef plonks down delicate folds of pita, crackling beef soothed by sour cream. My host places his hand upon my shoulder – just a hand. “Hvala.” A word I know. He smiles, then, and deep trenches spread from his eyes, and I know that it is this smile that I will remember, and do still.