Chapter 8: A Balkan Bus Ride

After what seemed about two minutes of sleep, Browder was awakened by his phone’s alarm. He had in fact missed the early bus and this was his second alarm. He could still catch the nine thirty bus. He stumbled into the shower and within twenty minutes made himself look presentable. He took his suitcases and backpack and went to find a cab.

The cabby was a pleasant, smiling middle-aged man who chatted him up.

- You are from Canada? You know, I remember about twenty years ago, my wife and I applied to immigrate to Canada. We both had the right job background. I even talked to a Canadian consul about it and he encouraged me to apply. When I filled out the form, there was one question that asked me to circle my level of English proficiency, and I circled the low proficiency option. It must have been that single question that caused our application to be rejected. And I could have simply lied about it? Sometimes I think about how my life would have been completely different now.

- That’s life for you. The smallest little details can completely change your course and your destiny. 

Browder got out to a bus station that harked back to the seventies Yugoslavia. The old state ticket counters still operated a quaint system of steel tokens and cut-off receipts. He walked into the restaurant where a middle-aged waiter dressed in a work suit served him a Turkish coffee. The tables had stained green covers topped with removable white cloths and copper ashtrays. A blonde making the drinks behind the counter wore a white button up shirt and a flowing silk tie as she lazily looked at Browder, then stared outside. The place looked very Soviet. Browder was considering ordering food, but he got a little intimidated: what if that was a stupid request? Coffee of course but maybe no one buys food there at this hour. He certainly didn’t see anyone eating food.

After the coffee he walked out and inserted his token into a turnstile and walked onto the bus terminal. The final destination of the bus was Sarajevo, and Browder could hear his people’s Bosnian accent. A two-meter-tall bus driver was taking people’s luggage and placing it in the undercarriage. When Browder’s turn came, he charged him an equivalent of a few bucks for the service. Browder wondered if that was legit, but he certainly wasn’t going to raise a fuss about it. He got onto the bus and slid into a seat in the very back, facing a large table for four. 

Soon after he settled in, he watched an elderly couple stroll to the back and sit at the table across the isle from him. The man was about two meters tall, and well over seventy years old. He walked with difficulty. He looked exactly like Sherlock Homes from the classic illustrations, and he dressed more or less like him too, only wearing an Irish cap instead of a deerstalker. He even had a haughty facial expression and dry humour one associates with the English. Their conversation revealed that he was a writer. His wife, a lady with elegant and pleasing appearance – must have been a beauty in her youth – helped him find his seat, and they chatted in an easy manner throughout the ride.

The easiness of the conversation, conducted in the warm and disarming Bosnian accent, again reminded Browder of the ones one would hear in a place like Canada. Serbian conversations tend to be more stressful. Well, guess being a writer must count for something. Or maybe it was a Sarajevo thing. Anyhow, in between dry jokes, the man threw in some nationalist remarks, indicating that after all he was a true native and a Serb to boot. However, he wasn’t obnoxious about it, so one could easily get over it.

They rode out of the city into the Pannonian plain. Ten years ago, when Browder drove out of Belgrade, there wasn’t much other than endless, flat crop fields surrounding the highway. This time around, he may as well have been driving out of Ottawa: on both sides the road was surrounded by modern warehouses, offices, and production facilities, many of which flew flags of international conglomerates. Remembering the economic hopelessness of the post-90s period, these buildings represented in his eyes thousands of decent jobs, relatively safe from vicissitudes of politics and corruption. Behind the businesses, the flat crop fields still stretched straight into the sunrise sky. Here Serbia looked like a big country.

There were also with two American kids seated a little ahead, in mid-twenties, taking a bus from Belgrade to Sarajevo as tourists. Their easy American conversation rang through the sleepy morning atmosphere. One of them was tall and had flowing hair, the other one was a ginger with sharp features. They dressed just as you would expect of American college kids living in Europe. When the novelist asked them, proudly showcasing his thickly accented English, where they were from, the tall kid answered with a smile and one word: “Texas”.

The Americans’ conversation was exotically mismatched with their surroundings, including topics such as entomology (“Lot of it has too much hard science for me, but I still read about it as a hobby”), how cats are only half-domesticated while dogs are fully domesticated (“Cats are not really part of the pack with you like dogs, they just don’t mind us”), and how if you are a statistics genius, you can do magic with numbers and data and make a lot of money. People in this part of the world don’t talk much about genius, thought Browder. He mostly heard it come up when middle aged engineers or children of immigrants talk about Nikola Tesla. To westerners on the other hand, genius as a concept has become a full-fledged idol, displacing the Biblical God as the object of hope and the expected source of general salvation.

Oozing their country’s liberal goodwill towards the rest of the world, the Americans kept on with their first-world musings, blissfully ignorant of the patriarchal struggle raging all around the country around them. Ultimately, Browder revealed his Canadian identity to them at a pit stop and they chatted about how they all ended up in Serbia. Browder ordered and ate a pljeskavica, which was a little too dry, as usual. The weather was grey with recently ceased rain.

In the latter part of the journey Browder napped. After three hours of travel the bus was driving along the Drina river, and soon municipality of Chapelton. Browder finally struck up a conversation with the old couple, mostly about the places they lived and visited. There was a mutual feeling of warmth and admiration, as though a grandson reunited with his grandparents after a long journey around the world. The conversation was still warm when the bus arrived to Chapelton bus station. Right before exiting the bus, the old couple exchanged mobile info with Browder. Aleksandar, the writer - even his name was cosmopolitan for a Serb his age - shouted as Browder walked down the aisle:

- When are you coming to Sarajevo? 

- I’ve never been, but I hope to one day!

The tall American kid then said to him in English:

- So now you have to cross back the river to go back to Serbia, right?

He must have assumed this because Browder told him he was Serbian.

- No, this is my place. This was my hometown until the age of thirteen.

The two American friends both smiled at him with incredulity, like they were about to see a stuntman jump off a cliff. Browder exited resolutely into the town.  

Once he got out of the bus station, he had no problem remembering how to find his grandma’s apartment. Only once for a moment did he have to stop and think at an intersection. He walked past the town mosque, and immediately recalled watching from his balcony with his dad, early in the war, how the Serbian army blew up the minaret of the old one. He was told that the muezzin calls from the minaret now. That was definitely not part of his childhood memories.