Nothing occurred to Mark to say to any of these people. He allowed them to put their hands on him, he felt their goodwill and concern. He probably kept nodding, and probably said thank you. He stopped hearing whatever they were saying. A psychosomatic deafness had come over him. Then he and Goran were back on the sidewalk, back in the car, and Goran was heading southwest out of the city, toward the round-topped mountain the helicopter had flown over on the way in. Mark returned to watching ruined buildings go by.
Susan had never been much of a correspondent. Over the years Mark got a letter every four or five months. “Dashed off” was probably the way to describe them. He always imagined her borrowing someone else’s back to write them on, out on some dusty tarmac, a chance courier waiting. She sent only two letters to the family from Yugoslavia, or “ex-Yugoslavia,” as everyone seemed to call it now—one to his parents and one to him. His had been written in Mostar, eight days before she died.
Hey little brother—
This place! Wild! They need everything—the kids break your heart. Some adults can drive you crazy—but not all. I hate the attitude of reporters and some UN people here—“these Balkan savages.” Ignorance hiding behind condescension. Turns out my Bosnian sucks—Mostar dialect is different, a lot of Turkish loanwords. But I don’t think I’m wasting space. Mainly translating, but also doing anything that needs doing. Found ten typewriters in a building the Serbs bombed and spent all day yesterday cleaning them. Also helping a local engineer, a sweetheart of a guy, who’s repairing waterlines on the east side (Serbs again). For example. Maybe you already read somewhere, fighting has broken out between Croats and Muslims in some villages in central Bosnia. People here are scared. I’m counting on the city being different from villages. Civilization, I tell people—invented by cities! Hope your work’s going well. If you want to write, the return address on the envelope should work.
Love Susan
“What’s that?” Goran asked.
Mark folded the letter and put it back in his pocket. “Nothing.”
The car was climbing the mountain. No houses now, just yellow rocks and vegetation gray with dust. They swung around a hairpin curve, and Mostar was spread out below them on the left. It looked like Dresden, circa March 1945. “It’s a letter Susan wrote to me,” Mark admitted. “April thirtieth.”
Goran clucked his tongue. They went around another hairpin and passed a retaining wall black with graffiti. “What does ‘ne, nikad, nikako’ mean?” Mark asked.
“Where did you hear that?”
“It was on the wall back there. The deputy mayor kept saying something similar.”
“It means ‘No, never, not in any way.’”
Mark thought for a few seconds about whether there was any comment worth making. “Many things are impossible with people like that,” he finally came up with.
The car cleared the steep lip of the slope and entered a saddle between two rises. This was the landscape they’d flown over, where snipers shot at helicopters.
“That population chart the deputy mayor showed,” Goran said. “You should not believe it.”
“I didn’t.”
“The Croats love to show census figures, which they say prove most Muslims came to Mostar after 1961. But the reason the Muslim numbers go up after 1961 is because that was the first year they were allowed to choose ‘Muslim’ as their ethnicity on the census.”
Mark didn’t say anything. He didn’t want Goran to think he was judging all Yugoslavs. Instead, he said, “May I ask what your ethnic background is?”
“My father is Croat, my mother is Muslim. But here—” he gestured to the land going by—“this is West Herzegovina. Croats here are very strong Croats, very Catholic. So it is lucky for me that my name, Goran Galić, is a good Croatian name. I don’t tell anyone here that my mother is Muslim.”
“Mm.”
“‘Goran’ means ‘mountain man.’ Maybe I’ll go up into the mountains to escape all this stupid ethnic shit.”
“The in-group/out-group obsession does seem particularly strong here,” Mark ventured.
Goran winced. “The question is why. Even some Yugoslavs say we have this, what do you call it, a predisposition for ethnic hatred. But I reject this.”
“I didn’t mean to imply—”
“This war is the result of deliberate planning by certain political parties to enhance their power. Their use of propaganda—have you seen what the Croatian and Serbian media broadcast in this country?”
“No.”
“Lies, every day. People watch these lies and believe them. There is a deliberate creation of fear. I am telling you, Mark, if people in the United States had this same kind of media propaganda, after five years you would have a civil war, too.”
Mark was silent for a while. “National cultures differ,” people liked to say, but what did that mean? Few things meant much at all when framed in such general terms. He forced himself to really look at Goran. He found this hard to do with new acquaintances. The man was quite handsome. Thick brown hair, regular features, olive skin, notably light gray eyes. Against his skin, the eyes seemed to glow. Susan had probably liked him, perhaps been attracted to him. “How did you learn such good English?”
“I majored in American literature,” Goran said. “I wrote my thesis on Dos Passos.”
Who? Mark thought, but didn’t say. Since he was American, his ignorance of this writer might be interpreted by Goran as a judgment that he or she was not important. And for all Mark knew, Dos Passos was the most celebrated writer of . . . whatever time period he or she had written in.
By this time they were driving through a mostly level upland area. Low dry hills were visible here and there in
