Activity

I met Muhamed D. for the first time in 1991, at a café called Dom pisaca, or Writers’ Club, adjacent to the offices of the Bosnian Writers’ Association. He was short and stocky, suddenly balding in his mid-forties, his expression frozen in an ugly permanent frown. I shook his hand limply, barely co…

The same day, Mother washed the denim pants I had worn in Murska Sobota, with the pill in the change pocket disintegrating—nothing was left except a nugget of foil and plastic. The freezer chest arrived after seventeen days. We filled it to the brim: veal and pork, lamb and beef, chicken and pepper…

She shut the door and locked it twice. Clearly, I had not said the right word; I was very drunk and had not considered this outcome. I thought that we had connected, that the electricity had started flowing between our trembling bodies. Swaying before the cruelly and unnecessarily closed door, I ra…

I wanted to kiss her, I wanted her to leave her stertorous husband, deflower me, and cultivate me in the garden of my youth.

It was in Murska Sobota that I truly confronted the ineluctable sadness of hotel rooms: a psyche with a notepad nobody had ever used to write; the bed cover with infernally purple flowers; a black-and-white picture of a soulless seaside resort; a garbage basket lined with crumpled paper tissues sug…