The jeeps disgorged the party near the place where a famous stone bridge had once stood. Now there was a temporary footbridge slung from steel cables that swayed and bounced as they crossed it. The opaque green river below boiled and seethed. Roberta said something about the tragedy of this destruction of a UNESCO world heritage cultural something or other, bridges being hopeful symbols of connection, etc. Everyone nodded except Mark, who surprised himself by saying, “It’s only stone. It can be rebuilt.” He felt himself blushing.
The reporters were being shepherded to a building on the west side, and Mark went along because he’d been told he would meet his interpreter there. It turned out that this young man, Goran, had a prior agreement to translate for the reporters’ interview with the deputy mayor of West Mostar, so Mark sat with the rest of them in a low-ceilinged room and listened. The deputy mayor, whose name Mark never caught, was a small man with black thinning hair whose face glistened with sweat in the hot space. He gave long responses to the questions, in gradual crescendos. The one that really set him off was a request by Roberta that he explain why Croats and Muslims could not go back to peacefully cohabiting in the city, as they had done for many years. The man’s answer, as interpreted by Goran, sounded to Mark like mush-brained nonsense about the Ottoman Empire and the clash of civilizations, that the thing to understand about the Turks and therefore the Bosnian Muslims was that they had never had an Enlightenment, while Croatia had been part of the Austrian empire, where there was rule of law, universities, Beethoven, table linen etc. Then he claimed that all Bosnian Muslims were really Croats, anyway, and that’s why all of this region should be run by Croats, and the proof of their ethnic identity was that there was a certain dialect of Croatian that only Croats spoke, and the Muslims of Bosnia spoke that dialect.
Mark had been getting angry—the social metastasis of this lizard-brain idiocy had killed his sister—and now he shot up his hand and blurted out, “Wait a minute.” The deputy mayor stopped babbling and everyone looked at him. Mark said to Goran, “That last thing he said—it’s circular reasoning. Is he really so stupid that he doesn’t understand that?” No one said anything, so Mark elaborated. “He said that Muslims are really Croats because Muslims speak a dialect that only Croats speak. But one can only claim that only Croats speak that dialect if one has previously assumed that Muslims are Croats.”
More silence. Then Goran said, “Is that a question?”
“It’s a refutation. Tell him that.”
“Hey, man,” Jeff interjected, “I don’t think—”
“Just tell him. He shouldn’t be allowed—”
“You’re wasting your time, pal,” Jeff was saying. “These people say twelve kinds of stupid before morning coffee.”
“Just tell him! It’s unbearable that he can sit there and spout such nonsense.”
“Uh, sure,” Goran said. He and the reporters were looking at Mark with frowns of sympathy. They all knew why he was here. “So . . .” Goran went on tentatively, “what was it again you wanted me to say?”
At this moment, Mark caught up with the rest of the room. Yes, he was wasting everyone’s time. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Forget it.” He said to the room at large, “Ignore me,” and made it easier for everyone to do that by leaving. Goran met up with him in the corridor twenty minutes later. “I’m sorry,” Mark said again.
Goran held up his hand. “No need.” Then he put his hand forward. “It is good to meet you, though of course very sad.” They shook hands. “Your sister was a wonderful person. Everyone loved her.”
Mark nodded. They left the building. Goran led him around a corner to where a battered dark green Zastava was parked. He reached through the open passenger window to unlatch the door from the inside and gestured, “Please.” They drove south along damaged streets. After a few minutes, Goran stopped at a two-story concrete box surrounded by sandbags piled twelve feet high. “Spanish battalion local HQ,” he said.
They walked through a gap in the sandbags and made a right angle turn to get around a baffle wall. A memory stirred in Mark concerning his father, something about Chinese demons. Inside the building were soldiers, desks, a conference table, a coffee machine. All the glass in all the windows had been removed, or maybe blown out, and replaced with plastic sheeting. Goran asked around, using what sounded like simple Spanish, until a man with some sort of insignia on his shoulders introduced himself as Major so-and-so, and took Mark’s hand, putting his other hand on Mark’s shoulder. He said in English, “Everyone loved your sister. She helped the people here very much. It is a terrible thing that happened.”
Presumably, Mark replied. The major called out something and other soldiers converged. They spoke mainly in Spanish, fragments in English, and several of them put their hands on Mark’s shoulders and arms. They all agreed: everyone had loved Susan, her death was a tragedy. There was nothing to say in response that wasn’t so obvious as to be unnecessary, so Mark didn’t say anything. He didn’t know precisely when she had arrived in Mostar, but she couldn’t have been here more than three weeks. He wondered how well any of these people really had known her. But she was dead, and therefore had been lovable.
One of the soldiers was handing him a three-by-five photograph, a shot of a sunny street, two figures standing next to an armored personnel carrier. One
