First are the mountains. Dark, wolfish ripples, sprinkled with a trail of snow in the middle of April. There is still something evil in those sentinels who eagerly watch the bottom of the valley. Patient and attentive as if waiting for something and, For a moment you can almost understand ... then there is that fog that near the city with stubborn, And that will not give truce all day covering its streets with a gray vault. Above it is distinguished from time to time a pale sun that turns and turns around uselessly looking for a loophole to enter. The faces and coats ash leave the station and gradually lose in the drizzle. There are cities in which a walk is enough to start writing, others are simply beautiful. It's seven o'clock in the morning when I get lying on the bus and I take the first glance to Sarajevo.
There are cities in which a walk is enough to start writing, others are simply beautiful
The eight hours of infernal road from Zagreb evaporate with the first cold tongues. I choose a small tavern around the station for breakfast. At this time it is already full, Most customers are men. The youngest forgot the fifty a long time ago, They don't seem to have much to do. They divide their attention between the street and the waitress. She smiles and parades from Oversitorium in Vejetii. Inside there is also fog, This caused by the smoke of cigarettes that clients splican without pause. Everyone drinks beer, I ask for one and a sausage dish with fried potatoes for breakfast. From here Madrid seems as boring and civilized as a dentist's waiting room.
No one speaks English but for signs a boy explains how to go to the center. In Sarajevo you move on a tram that brows with difficulty between flagship avenues. The astonishment appears with the first buildings and mortar brands that still infect the facades with a youth acne. The city clears and starts working after coffee. I observe the occupants of the car; Ladies in the middle age, retirees, A couple of girls covered with handkerchief and a student concentrated on his iPad. The tram is flooded with posters that announce the Panini chromos for the World Cup. In the 94 I completed my second collection. This boy would be about seven years old, I wonder what he would be doing that summer.
Who murdered or betrayed? Did he tortured or was tortured?
Looking them is difficult not to do it, Do not imagine; Where were they? Who betrayed who? Who murdered or betrayed? Did he tortured or was tortured? What things were forced to do? Those things we thought we would never be capable. Your faces do not offer any response, Hermetic look out the window, yawn and check the boiler.
We continue the course of the river and get off at the Bascarsija, The Turkish neighborhood. I feel that I've been here before. Memory downloads a succession of American plans on the media newspaper. I can almost see Pérez Reverte with the pointed nut and the sad look, Telling us all the horror and misery of old Europe.
Today this place is tourist. A restaurant swirl, Postcards and Turkish silver stores among which the turquoise domes of the mosque and the smell of Kebab. Next to the emblematic kiosk that presides over the neighborhood there is an information panel with the main places of interest of the city. A group of Japanese takes pictures and lifts with each click pigeons of pigeons. They are the only visitors with whom I cross all day.
A painting love graffiti on bullets and puddles like bald asphalt
Then you leave this tiny amusement park, You lose between the streets that climb on their slopes. Fruit markets and some Starbucks, A painting love graffiti on bullets and puddles like bald asphalt. Miljacka continues its murky course by a bug of bridges of various styles. Also the Latin bridge, where the archduke Francisco Fernando was killed, Origin of another illustrious butcher shop. The Balkan Lobby. At noon the wasps already flood their streets of diversity. Two nuns and a priest jogging to a good step in front of the Gazi Husrev mosque, A few meters crossed the solemn beards of a rabbi, I distinguish some boys who kneel looking for the direction of Mecca. Spain could have been something like that, Someday it was. Here we also know how to organize unspeakable parties.
Skalfar. In the 91, approximately the 40% From the population of the city it was Muslim almost entirely belonged to the Bosnian ethnic group, The orthodox serbs were 34%, the rest, Catholics mostly Croats were limited to this neighborhood. Serbian troops reached the immediate vicinity and the cry of "sniper care" became the daily greeting of its streets.
If you look up from the bottom of the boiler where the mortars should shoot you can see the cemeteries. There are many, Leaded spots scattered on the slopes, From one of them you enjoy a privileged view of the city. White gravestones and tombstones sprout between the grass, perfectly aligned as rows of orange trees. Most sculpted with Arab letters and a crescent, all between him 91 and 94. I look at the ages, 37, 42, 21, 17,28, 19 years, A random combination of humid numbers between the mist. My guide indicates that in the cemetery near the yellow strong there will be about three thousand tombs. When I go the field is silent, Only a couple of men who listen to the radio are left and retouch a thread of grass that grows between marble.
What shudders from the war of ancient Yugoslavia are probably its absences
What shudders from the war of ancient Yugoslavia are probably its absences. There are no black and white photographs here, or drones bombing some specific objective in the desert, No trace of exotic faces, Nor African children who embrace a rifle that can barely load. The images do not have that greenish tone and blurred by the return of the signal in the style of the B series films, The reassuring tone of the distance. This happened here, In the Zaguán de Europa, twenty years ago when most were alive and doing anything else. Its protagonists are still in Sarajevo, victims and executioners, Taking rickety trams, Purchasing or smoking narguiles at dusk.
I go back to the Bascarsija while listening to the calls of the magnets. I visit the old library shattered by war, I try the cevapi, Typical Bosnian dish and bought two postcards from the city with beautiful sunsets in one of its dozens of souvenir stores. In another of them there are toys; plastic rifles next to dolls and a giant smurf.
My bus back to Zagreb leaves that same night and on the platform I know Christina, A Bosnian girl. Study in Croatia and tomorrow does its latest exam in Zagreb to finish biology. We talk about everything a little, I ask him about the coexistence of the different ethnicities in the city. The answer sounds like, I have heard it before, In people who came from Sierra Leone, Guatemala or the Chad.
«We do not like to talk about that, Only old people care about these things, The young people do not. It happened and we can't do anything, You have to look forward ».
Always forward.
