This short story was originally published as a part of wider selection of literary competition "Save the travelogue 2021", organized by The travel club
As I race through Bosnian villages guided by my navigation’s “shortcuts”, meadows, forests, houses and people pass me by. I am rushing because I have to get to the border and I don’t know what awaits me there. Will I get stuck in an endless column of trucks and cars, full of cargo and passengers attempting to get back home, just like me? Or perhaps I’ll be crammed into some kind of quarantine, God knows where. This is not the only reason for my haste of course. I am racing because I’m loving it. Not for the speed, but for the drive. To look, to smell, to soak in. So as I blaze for the border, with a haze of smoke in my wake. And at this point I don’t think anymore about what’s awaiting me there, I look and I look. I look at meadows, forests, villages and houses and people next to them. I inhale deep through my nostrils and taste the air. I look and I eat those pictures that swoosh by me. People and their lives, flashes that pass by my car. After several villages the scenery changes. I entered one of those abandoned areas. Houses empty, demolished, burned, no roofs, only walls. Often, they are so entrenched by undergrowth, thick undergrowth, that I am sure you could only get through with the assistance of a chainsaw. I’m roaring ahead as ruins replace one another beside of me. I look through their hollow windows, lonely chimneys with no roofs. Even demolished as they are, they are different from one other, each telling its own story. They look so sad now. It would be less sad if they were razed to the ground. This way they seem like hollow shells. I could imagine everything that is missing, windows, doors, people, smoke coming out of the chimneys. And yet they are dead. Cracked bottles whose precious liquid evaporated long ago. It would be merciful to level them with the ground. In the center of village, the church of course, fully renovated of course, pristine condition. New church for empty village, with no houses, no people. At the exiting point, an unusual site. Some kind of sculpture. Something that reminded me of that vanguard Babylonian tower. I stopped to take a better look. Geometrical shapes, welded metal, that reminded me of buildings. Empty buildings, no walls, no windows, slanted, demolished. Around me I could smell the grass and the fertilizer, spring was coming. In the distance I could see the church tower. I took my phone and made a photo of the sculpture.
Click, a picture.
Navigation took me further. I raced. New images flashed, meadows, villages, houses. My gritted advance slowed by nothing other than a crawling tractor in one of the approaching villages. It was slugging along in front of me as if it had all the time in the world. It probably did, or at least a good chunk of it. I didn’t. I hit the gas and drove around it in a cloud of dust. When the tarmac ended and the road turned to dirt track, I felt concerned but I raced on regardless. I swooshed next to a family that was having lunch in their front yard. Their confused glares followed me and soon I understood why. In my haste to go around the tractor, I missed a turn. At the end of the road, I drove into somebody’s fence-less yard. I was welcomed only by Rover and his barking. There was no further, no way to go, dead end. I had to turn back. - Crap.- A quick turn. I buzzed by the family again, whose stares were just as bewildered and judging, as they’d been moments before. As I found the right turn, I met the tractor and his driver that I had driven around twenty minutes ago. I waved at him. - Excellent, an extra twenty minutes late – I thought to myself. In most cases these villages I passed were in a process of slow death. In most of them you could only see old people, or as one of my also fairly old cousins would say “living graves”. If you could see anyone, you could see these old folks dragging themselves with their canes, hunkered down from the burden of the passed years, moving at soul crushing slow pace.
I stepped on the gas. Unusually, the very next village I entered looked pretty lively. The houses were freshly painted, you could see lots of people strolling on the streets, even kids. Even though it was late afternoon, the day became sunnier all of a sudden. It looked as if on this place even the sun was shining brighter. I opened the window, the smell of the upcoming spring.
As I proceeded into the village, I discovered a commonly encountered scene. At the center there was a monument with a five-end star. A big stone with a marble plate, engraved with names of people who gave their life in battle. I decided to make a stop. I approached it. It was nowhere near some great boulder. Just a piece of stone ripped away from the mountains, bitten off, sharp in its edges, raw. I stood there gazing at it for a little while. I heard voices behind me, coming from the municipal building across the road. A nice new flag was hanging above the door, bright in its colors and its crest. Uula and I have seen lots of these monuments on the road. As now, I would often pause for a little while. These structures were scattered not just in village centers but next to roads, in the mountains, places of events, battles, big and small.
All these monuments at these important sights, looked displaced now. Displaced not in terms of their physical location, as though many were destroyed or neglected, most still stood in their original place, but displaced they were in the minds of the people who inherited them. I could imagine their first presentation to the public. Old, bald, fat people cutting the red rope with a bunch of kids performing folk dances in traditional attire. Suits shaking hands, smiles stretched over fat glossy cheeks. I could somewhat even imagine the people who died and earned their name on it. But now, as I was standing there, at this very moment, it all seemed surreal. Monument looked as a sharp piece of rock, not just ripped out the mountains but out of its own timeline. An archeological relic of a past that today seemed as if it has never happened. Travelled from a different world, that seemed it have never existed. A world in which even the border I was racing to cross, did not exist. I felt almost like a gorilla from Space Odyssey, standing in front of the black monolith. No bone in my hands however. Only a cellphone. Click. A picture.
I looked around a little bit more. Next to the monument, a concrete bench, a few trees, one was starting to sprout leaves. The smell of grass, the sun. My mother’s banged up car glistening. From far away children were yelling. Whatever fatigue or tiredness I had, I knew the road would shake it off. The day is sunny, there would be more light to come and more to see along the road. I returned to the car and checked the navigation. Couldn’t risk missing the road again. I pointed my phone at the dusty road ahead and looked down at it, all the way to the imagined border in my mind. The border that cuts the tiny line of my road on the map. By the time I got there it would be night. Lazily I crawled behind the wheel, looked back one more time, turned the key and went down the dusty road again.