Sarajevo Marlboro Read Free Page A

you’d rather not stay in the bus on your own, so for once you disobey her and join the crowd that has gathered at the roadside, crawling between the legs of the onlookers in order to catch a glimpse of the mangled Fiat, a hand hanging out of the window. Angrily, you mother covers your eyes with her hand, and for that reason you don’t see anything else until she puts you back in your seat on the bus. The pale passengers also clamber back on board and return to their seats, but nobody utters a word, except perhaps for one of the blonde secretaries, who complains that seeing the car wreck has ruined the trip. But how? You don’t ask because you know it will sound like a stupid question. The young men in the Fiat are dead, but it seems as if you’re the only person who is unaffected by this. Why be sad now? After all, it’s not as if anybody knew the crash victims. And then Džemo starts telling stories about the many accidents he has witnessed and the hundreds of others he has merely heard about. To listen to Džemo, you’d think no journeyin the history of the world had ever ended without a crumpled Fiat lying at the side of the road. Perhaps it wouldn’t be a disaster after all, if your own bus or car or whatever were to become the object of morbid scrutiny by palefaced onlookers, in whose midst an unknown woman, somebody else’s mother, would hastily cover her young child’s eyes. Just imagine the thrill of being at the center of such a drama. You don’t know why the idea of being the focus of other people’s attention makes you so excited, but you no longer feel sick. Instead you feel a kind of ecstasy as pleasure floods through your body and your tiny penis stirs in your pants. Suddenly you’re wide awake and having a wonderful time. You quiz your mother and wave your legs in the air. Then you ask Džemo for the hip-flask, which gets a big laugh from everybody on the bus. In other words, you’re the life and soul of the party, and you couldn’t be happier even if you’d died in a car crash.
    Jajce is made of giant Lego, as if a mighty pair of hands had assembled the bricks after reading the instructions on the back of a toy packet. Nothing is real, except the waterfall perhaps, which is massive and terrifying. You spend the visit at a restaurant sitting outside on a terrace sheltered from the rain. Džemo tells a story about a lovesick young girl who jumped from the top of the waterfall on account of her boyfriend. As soon as he found out what had happened he climbed up and jumped off the waterfall too. Only it turned out that the girl had somehow miraculously survived her terrifying leapand so, making an appearance in Jajce the following day, she asked people if they had seen her boyfriend and they told her about his suicide. The poor girl’s despair was so great that she went and jumped off the waterfall again, killing herself this time.
    Nobody believes Džemo’s story about the star-crossed lovers. You ask him why the young man had not turned up alive and kicking after his jump. You simply can not understand how a woman, a member of the frailer sex, as it were, could survive an ordeal like that, while a strong young man perished. You challenge Džemo to jump off the waterfall in order to see which of you survive. He declines.
    Džemo refers to the labyrinth under Jajce. Once inside its network of corridors, he says, you can never get out again. Apparently it’s where they throw schoolboys who smoke in the toilets. How terrifying! You have never smoked a cigarette, but what if somebody jumped to the wrong conclusion and threw you into the underground dungeon anyway? Wouldn’t it be horrible to spend the rest of your life wandering in darkness?
    You visit a museum with portraits of national heroes. This is where Comrade Tito made Yugoslavia. You ask Džemo if Tito also made Jajce. The old man replies, “Yes and no – which