By ADMIR SKODO
After three outbursts of fury at work, my supervisor told me I had to see a counselor or face serious disciplinary action. Or worse. Worse, worse what? Lose my job? Police involvement? I don’t know, because it never got to that. “Lucky, you’re lucky. This time.”
The first time I snapped was in the breakroom. I have the whole scene in my mind. Jim’s opening and closing the microwave door trying to heat some nasty-smelling lasagna from Safeway. Open, thud, close, thud. Open, thud, close, thud. Like ten times. It gets to me how he slams that fucking door so violently (even though I know the microwave’s a piece of shit). Every time it startles me and I have to put down my tasty sandwich. It blasts a siren inside my brain. I hear the last slam now. I don’t think. There’s a heat in the air, and it’s coming from inside me. I tear the door off. It’s not difficult, surprisingly. Two jerks, one, two, the sound of plastic and thin metal ripping apart. I feel strong and powerful. And sure, crazy, a little—well, a lot. But untouchable too. Fuck with me now, whoever you are, and you’re the door. Jim and the others look at me like I’m an animal. They’re afraid of me. Good. I see pity in their eyes. I hate them for pitying me. It makes me even angrier, so I smash the microwave door on the ground with my boot. My chest feels like a small paper bag trying to contain a lot of things, but it has tears and holes everywhere so it can’t. My head is a balloon, popping, inflating, popping, inflating.
The second time happened this way: Selena was on the phone laughing like she always does, very obnoxious, laughing like a dolphin, the kind that’s been captured and forced to “clap” and “laugh” in front of fat Americans and their fat kids at SeaWorld. Fine, or, would have been fine had she not stood right in the middle of the sea of cubicles where people were working. A dolphin with a fucking megaphone for a voice and I her captive, trapped in my beige-walled work island. I was going through my lists for all the inspections I was scheduled to do that day. Needed quiet, expected quiet, excepting the normal background noise of people moving in chairs, tapping on keyboards, sneezing, what have you. I stormed from my cubicle straight up to Selena, got all up in her face, and yelled “Shut the fuck up with your loud fucking laugh, go the fuck outside or something, people are working here, fuck me!” I got very close, too close. “Inappropriate, inappropriate, molester, aaagh!” Selena yelled, started crying, and ran away.
I felt bad. Yes, I did apologize to Selena. And Jim.
The third time was the worst. It had to do with an overflowing trash can in the printer room, live electrical wiring, and a coworker’s ass, but I don’t want to get into that. His ass is fine. Well, more or less. The third time was when someone reported me to the supervisor.
. . .
I’ve been going to counseling for close to four months. It’s with this younger guy from some Asian country, though his name and speech are as American as can be: Lawrence Dinklewater, LCSW, MA. Dinklewater’s office is on College Avenue, close to the BART station. Nice area, really nice street. It’s really just a small room in a small and ugly and dark building behind a posh clothing store, but the room he calls his office has soft lighting in two corners. He put a nice lamp behind his cushy marine-blue chair where he sits facing me as I sit in a small cushy marine-blue sofa that always has a wool blanket on the backrest. On some days, he brings his big-ass dog, and the dog lies between us. I honestly can’t tell if the dog’s dead or asleep. “Haha, I can assure you Stokely is very much alive,” Dinklewater said when he saw me looking at Stokely with a he looks dead expression on my face. There’s also some kind of sweet smell in the room. There’s a brown cushy carpet, which smells of mold and dog. Idiot Americans: carpet everywhere inside, but no one ever takes their shoes off! Maybe that’s the reason for the other smells, oh what’s the word—incense! That’s what it’s called.
Dinklewater speaks in this odd low voice and he often enunciates words extra slow. Reee . . . press . . . ed [long pause, long look] tra . . . auuu . . . ma [nod pause nod pause smile]. Infuriating. Does he think I’m an idiot who doesn’t speak English well, or that I don’t know what his jerkoff psychology jargon means? I don’t know. Maybe he’s just weird.
He first tried this “RAIN” method on me. RAIN stands for Recognize Allow Investigate and I forget what the N stands for. I told him it was bullshit. Because it was. It wasn’t for real people, real life, because nothing in life can be neatly arranged into four stages. Nothing in life can be reduced to a fucking acronym. He respected that, he even laughed, and I respected him for respecting my bullshit detector. This Dinklewater’s alright.
The RAIN method having failed, Dinklewater then suggested that I keep a diary and write in it at least once a day. In it, he said, write about whatever comes to mind. Anything? [This was me.] Anything [this was him]. As I sniffed fake pineapple and cinnamon through the doggy-infused mold, he said this: “Lucky, if I can be frank and somewhat vulgar with you, and I sense I can. If you think about pussy [he whispered this and lowered his head], write about pussy [whisper again], if you think about dicks write about dicks, if you think about what happened in the war write about what happened in the war, if you get a violent impulse write about the impulse, anything, poetry, even what you feel about these sessions, me, you, seriously what . . . ev . . . er. That’s how you slowly sort of let your guard down, let the inhibitions loosen up real nice, and it has the knock-on benefit that it’s safe, because you know, it’s on paper. Then bring up whatever feels right in the sessions.”
Dinklewater says I’m very closed in some ways, very anxious, and with my history of trauma it’s perfectly understandable, and in some ways quite natural, why I acted the way I did. He sent me a letter after he had conducted some tests:
To get a little technical, on the Beck Depression and Anxiety Inventories you scored well over 40 on each. This is a strong indication of severe clinical depression as well as anxiety. On the PTSD, you’re off the charts. You’re literally off the charts and I’m considering suggesting they expand the parameters, with your documented consent of course. At any rate, this quantitative information, which I in my practice view not without a large measure of skepticism, is mainly for your employer, insurance purposes and such, though I thought you should know. Listen. Do the diary thing. I feel that is where the real work of understanding and healing will be done. Yours sincerely: Lawrence Dinklewater, LCSW, MA.
Like I give two fucks about these so-called scientific scores. But Dinklewater’s diary suggestion sounded doable. So here I am, this is how it started.
. . .
I have an interest in words. I’ve had this interest since I was young. It started when I read Mak Dizdar’s Kameni spavač. He used very unusual words for common things. Someone once called him a miner of words, digging up buried and long-forgotten words of our language from archives, memories of people, stećak inscriptions, like an archaeologist of the imagination, or maybe a necromancer of dead expressions. He used the word dažd for rain. From one of his most beautiful and profound poems:
Trebalo bi opet naučiti
da slušamo kako dažd pada pada
Trebalo bi se odkameniti
i poći bez osvrtanja kroz kamenu kapiju ovog kamenog grada…
Dizdar made up words like “unstone” (odkameniti) and wrote things like we can unstone ourselves by just listening to the rain falling on stones, the word for “falling” (pada) sounding like raindrops falling on stones: pad, pad, pad. I sometimes wish I had studied literature instead of engineering, but following my stern father’s advice, I saw it as too risky from a career standpoint. I don’t know if I understand Dizdar correctly.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how you can use the word “kill” or “killing” in English in ways that aren’t about actual killing. There are so many examples. “I have some time to kill.” Clearly, I’m no Dizdar with words.
. . .
Lucky is what they call me here in the US, the big US of A. Why is this? It’s because I was lucky in sales when I first got here in ’92 and worked as a salesman in electronics stores. This was in San Francisco, when I lived in the Tenderloin but worked in a mall farther south. I had to take BART to and from work. I sold a lot of stuff. Mostly televisions. After televisions it was computers, and after computers it was cellular telephones. This was the first time I heard “killing” used to describe something positive. “You’re killing it, Lucky, keep it up my man!” my store supervisor at Best Buy said. He was an idiot, and I hated him, freckle-faced little fucker. Sometimes I fantasized about strangling him in the chilly stock room, right between the tower of Sony TVs and the tower of Hewlett Packard printers. I hated wearing the stupid blue shirt for that job. Freckle-face also gave me the nickname Lucky. I hated it so much. Too bad for me, the nickname stuck. “Kill me now” is something you could say here I think, but I’ve mostly heard it in teenage movies from the eighties, so it seems a little too old of an expression.
How did the nickname stick? From one job to the next, my job references would tell new potential employers how “Lucky is so and so,” and the new employers would assuredly start thinking in their heads Lucky = nickname, and start calling me Lucky after they hired me. Then they would introduce me as Lucky to all of my coworkers, and by then it was too late to do anything about it.
. . .
Eighties movies. I watch a lot of them. Why? I don’t know. They remind me of a different time. They have a neon-tinted Pepsi-flavored burger-and-fries-tasting optimism to them. They don’t hurt at all. The counselor said that it’s good to have something like that, but that it’s good to think a little deeper about this, because it can be an unhealthy thing called eee . . . sca . . . pism, which makes you run away from emotions you really should let yourself feel.
I like Sixteen Candles, Roadhouse, Red Dawn, Robo Cop, Beverly Hills Cop, Blues Brothers, When Harry Met Sally, Dead Poets Society, Running Man, Top Gun, Back to the Future, for example. How many times have I seen them? Many.
Probably my favorite actor from the eighties is Swayze, but of the men, I also like Eddie Murphy. Of the women I like Meg Ryan. I guess they’re pretty fucking meaningless, these movies. Just surfaces of situations, sounds, and people that look like human life. But Majda too liked them, she’s the one who got me into them, so there’s that, there’s that.
Majda.
Majda.
Majda pada
Pada Majda
Majda pala
Pala Majda
Od nje ništa više za odkameniti
Na Majdin kamen pada samo pada
dažd na grobu tamne šume okružene
protjeran od daline daleko odavde
. . .
“Kill with kindness.” My friend Zia said this when I asked him if he knew of any expressions in English with the word “kill.”
Zia’s dead. Motorcycle accident. I miss him dearly. I miss having him over for dinner and long conversations about Bosnia, Afghanistan, life, friendship, love, loss, for Zia has lost, like me. And I envy him. But how strange is that, to miss a dead friend and to be jealous of his deadness.
. . .
People have called me Lucky for so long now that probably only the IRS knows or cares about my real first name. It’s almost been erased from the mouths of the living.
My first name is Lazar. My last name is Magarac. Back home it means “donkey.” Here it means nothing except the last name of Lucky, which means, luckily, no jokes of how I’m donkey this, donkey that.
. . .
I’m a Building Safety Inspector II in Oakland. After a while I got fed up with being a salesman. When this occurred, I got myself a degree in construction technology from a community college. It wasn’t too difficult, since I was an engineer back home. Most of the students were much younger than I and, well, not white. Many were very radical politically, or so they fancied themselves, but having lived in Yugoslavia, to me many of their radical ideas didn’t seem radical at all. Many had all kinds of piercings, sometimes in places I would not imagine it’s comfortable at all to have an earring. Some wore all black and pretended they didn’t care about anything, but I could tell they pointed their ears when I spoke about my grandfather who was a Partisan. All in all, I very much enjoyed being among these young misfits.
This degree allowed me to become a Building Safety Inspector I in Oakland. It was then that I moved to Oakland from the Tenderloin. This was in ’96. After a year I was promoted to Building Safety Inspector II.
I drive a City of Oakland van around town, inspecting buildings, both commercial and residential. I mainly cover the Lake Merritt and Adam’s Point neighborhoods, but also wherever else I happen to be assigned. I live close to the lake. It’s so much nicer than the Tenderloin.
. . .
People would be surprised, and probably horrified, if they knew everything I’ve seen in basements, attics, laundry rooms, closets, living rooms. Much of it has to do with guns, perverse objects of the sexual sort, strange religious items, things like that. Don’t get me started on the electrical wiring, and certainly don’t get me started on the pipes, because these are cities within cities, carrying secrets within secrets.
Americans are weird. They’re extremely religious in this superficially fanatical way. They’re obsessed with perverse sex. They’re violent in this simmering way which is liable to explode any time.
I’m kind of comfortable around this kind of violence, to be honest. I said this to Dinklewater. He said that it likely has to do with a need to normalize my trauma from the war and everything I’ve lived through. Also, he said maybe it has to do with feeling like I didn’t deserve to survive when so many I loved died. Sur . . . viv . . . or’s gu . . . i . . . lt he called it. I don’t know, but for sure it’s not how I’ve thought of it before. Dinklewater said I had the outbursts because the trauma isn’t processed, and because it’s not processed it builds up, and up and up, and then it goes boom. I understood this, because it sounded like an issue with regulating excess pressure.
. . .
“I had a night to kill.” My colleague Ron, also a Building Safety Inspector II, said this to me about a night he had to spend in Pleasanton after his car broke down in the evening and he had to get a motel room. “How did you kill the night? How do you kill a night” I asked. He laughed. But I was kind of serious, because I took it literally. I thought: killing a night seems not the worst thing to do sometimes. Bad things happen at night. Very bad things. And nightmares. Many, many nightmares.
. . .
I know the woman who does the safety inspection assignments. Her name is Rachel Ledesma. She’s thirty-five. She just had her birthday. I took her to a nice Italian restaurant just off Market, close to Powell station. Gave her a rare Thelonious Monk vinyl record. She’s the only one who was neither afraid nor pitying after the outbursts.
We had sex once, and then a few more times, and we still actually have sex, but I don’t want to describe the sex, not even here, out of respect. We meet pretty often. I listen to her, or so she tells me. Well, I do listen to her, because I think she’s very interesting. For example, I like listening to her speak about music. She knows a lot about music. She loves jazz, but also this kind of weird experimental new music. She smiles and gets really happy when we listen to jazz together. Monk, Coltrane, and so on. Sometimes we dance, even though I don’t really like to dance, but she does, so I do it for her. It’s nice to feel her body pressed against mine, her warm breath on my neck.
She wants to be together. Like boyfriend and girlfriend. I don’t. Even though I like her, and maybe even love her. I have this desire to know more about her, but I constantly keep myself from asking her about her past, her desires, her fears.
She assigns me to the good areas because she likes me, maybe even loves me.
. . .
Sometimes I go into my bathroom. I get naked and I just look at myself in the mirror. I don’t know why, other than that it feels comforting. I don’t recognize the body I see. It feels like I’m looking at someone else’s body. I imagine: Medium-tall man, normal body mostly except big forearms, a little hair on the chest. Straight black hair but with a lot of white like powdered sugar, short. Brown eyes, very sad-looking, and a somewhat large nose. He has a wife and kids. Works to take care of them. Likes to play chess. Lives in Hayward. And so on.
I think I’m not normal. I mentioned this to the counselor. He said he doesn’t like the word normal. He thinks my negative thoughts are a manifestation of a lot of things:
—Not accepting myself.
—Wanting to be in another body is because the pain this body carries is too heavy.
—Feeling like a family life was taken from me.
—Feeling like a history was taken from me.
—Everything in life I thought I could count on, turns out I can’t count on. It all broke like cheap glass.
Dinklewater asked if I feel disgust about my body and my feelings and thoughts. Yeah, I do, I said. I didn’t know I had felt that until I said it.
. . .
“Kill two birds with one stone.” I read this in some magazine in the dentist’s waiting room. Where does this country’s obsession with “killing” things come from?
. . .
I enjoy having Rachel over and watching eighties movies with her. She’s amazed at how many I’ve watched and know almost by heart. Last night we watched Rain Man. Then we had sex. I had nightmares, again. I woke up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat. Woke up Rachel with the screaming. She just hugged me until I melted into her arms. “Let’s change your shirt,” she said. Her voice was like a glass of warm milk with honey.
. . .
The counselor asked me why I don’t spend more time with other Bosnians. I’ll say this: sometimes fuck Dinklewater. If he only knew what it’s like to talk to Bosnians here and always their fucking negative shit, always their talk of how bad things are, bad, bad, bad, Social Security this, doctor that, bargain at Costco this, landlords are always some evil overlords, always how life’s just about making it and cashing in . . . if he knew all this, he’d know, and shut the hell up. But to tell you the truth, I’m afraid too. Of what? I wish I knew.
. . .
I just came back from a trip to Bosnia. I had to go. Rachel wanted to come with me. But I couldn’t, I just couldn’t bring her with me. She got really upset over this. Cried. I understand her, but I still couldn’t bring her with me.
I wrote nothing here while there.
I was there to visit Rudo. I stayed in Sarajevo, because there’s no hotel left in Rudo. I rented a car in Sarajevo and stopped on the way, in Rogatica, for lunch.
I had to go to visit my wife’s grave on her birthday. Majda would have been forty-two. I put a bouquet of daffodils, her favorite flowers, on the tombstone. If it was up to me, I wouldn’t have buried her there, no way. There wasn’t even much left to bury. The forensic team that analyzed her remains said that it’s most likely a match, at 96.4%, but what about the remaining 3.6%? They looked at me like I was an idiot. When I saw the remains in the white plastic bag, I didn’t know what I was looking at. I wouldn’t have buried her here had she not told me, long before the war broke out, that this was her home, this was where she had felt the happiest in her life, and that this was where she wanted to be buried. She made me promise. I buried her close to my parents so she at least has some familiar company.
I sat by her grave for a long time. Nobody else was there, in the Muslim cemetery, because there are hardly any Muslims left in Rudo. There’s a hodža who drives in from Goražde from time to time to tend to the mosque, the graves, and the living souls of the few remaining faithful, as best he can.
Rudo looked like a dump. The bridge was about ready to collapse. Like I said, there’s no hotel anymore. There are no restaurants, no factories, just one miserable little café. Just misery. They took down all the monuments to the Partisans and put up Chetnik ones. Congratulations on “winning the war” you Chetnik sons of bitches.
. . .
I had a very strange encounter in the miserable café in Rudo after I was done at the cemetery. I walked inside just to take a look, because the café used to be a small restaurant I frequented with Majda, so I have fond memories of it.
The place looked nothing like it used to. It had cheap plastic chairs and cheap plastic tables with cheap plastic tablecloths with images of coffee pots, coffee beans, and COFFEE printed in a repeated pattern, all in brown. A man was sitting in the corner. He was the only customer I noticed. He was drinking coffee. Before him, on the table, lay a high pile of books, maps, a thick notebook kept open with a fancy-looking fountain pen, and old-looking documents strewn here and there. He looked rather distinguished in his sleek black coat that ran the length of his slender body. His long hair was white. He had a wise face, sorrowful, intelligent, and curious at once. He called me over to his table by waving his hand.
“I have no one to talk to here, I could really use some company, and you look like someone who’s a bit of an outsider, like myself.”
I said, “Well, I’m from Rudo, but you’re right in a way, it’s been a long time since I’ve called this home.” I sat down. I ordered a Bosnian coffee from the fat, bald waiter. He looked at me, disgruntled. “Serbian coffee,” he said. “Bosnian,” I said, and shot him a look that said I’d kill him if he contradicted me again. The gentleman who had called me to his table said “Turkish?” The waiter and I looked at the customer in a way that said: Stay out of this! Then the waiter said: “Se . . . whatever. Just coffee. Fine.”
The learned-looking man introduced himself. “I am Seleb. I have been sent out by the Imperial Court to travel lands that were once great but that have now either fallen into the inevitable stage of decay or recently succumbed to it. I am to make and record thorough and comprehensive observations on geography, history, customs and mores, politics, beliefs, society, culture, and so on, so that our empire’s learned men may distill lessons to hopefully reverse the decline that seems to befall all great empires. It has been fifteen long years since I first set out on this arduous adventure.”
“Oh,” I said, thinking the man a lunatic. “And have you learned any lessons yet?”
He laughed. “I am only the chronicler, the observer. I am no Ibn Khaldun. It is for those most elevated minds of the empire to derive lessons from my true descriptions. But if you ask my personal opinion,” I did, “I will give it to you. There are no lessons to be drawn. The empire is run by idiots. Ambition steered by idiocy spells comedy and mostly harmless misfortunes. But ambition steered by idiots with real power who suffer under the delusion that they’re gods, now that spells ruin and disaster far and wide. In fact, their attempts at learning serve only to speed up the decay, as certain as death and taxes.” He raised his hands over his head, palms facing outward, as if to say, what can I do?
Sounded true enough, sort of.
We spoke for a long time, this Seleb and I. The waiter, who also turned out to be the owner, informed us it was closing time. At this, out of his coat pocket, Seleb pulled out a pouch made of the finest cloth. He threw it up, gently, for the waiter to catch.
The waiter opened it, greedily I may add, with his sausage fingers. He pulled out a fistful of thick gold coins with some strange script on them. He bit into one of the coins. His eyes widened, bulged. “The real deal. Ho ho. What do you want?” he asked Seleb.
“Let us stay in your fine establishment as long as we like. I promise to leave it as we found it.”
“Done.” The fat man waddled out, holding the pouch like a baby, mumbling something to himself.
Seleb and I spoke until I lost track of the hours and couldn’t tell what time it was. Seleb told me a great many things. He was from Edirne, but he hadn’t seen his home since his days as a young man. He had fond memories of Edirne, memories that occasionally ached in his soul, memories of sitting with his mother by the Maritsa River and of walking with his father, an archaeologist, amid the Roman ruins, speaking of life and its enigmas. He had travelled to Palestine, Ingushetia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Morocco, South Africa, Guatemala, Brazil, and “lands which exist in the unseen crevices of existing lands.” Now he was in Bosnia, and next he would go to northern Sweden, where the Sami live.
“How much have you written?” I asked. “Fifteen thousand pages, give or take. I have an assistant whose sole responsibility is to organize, annotate, copy, store, and haul these documents. An idiot, by and large, but efficient and good-natured.”
I could have asked where this empire of his was, but I believed that it would have foreclosed any meaningful discussion.
“Why are you in Rudo?” I asked.
“Why not? It’s as instructive an example as any other. The souls which have called it home, or which have crossed it, are as interesting as any others. There’s much to see here. You know Çelebi passed through here, and were you aware that Andrić wrote a story about Rudo? Oh yes, ‘Ruđanski begovi.’ I discuss it in the subsection on literature.”
“What have you seen?” That was me again. And no, I didn’t know Andrić had written that story.
Seleb now began a lecture that lasted many hours. I made us more coffee on the old stove in the back and served us some food, bread, tomatoes, ajvar, and cheese. I wish I’d had a recorder or notebook of my own, because I can remember only a small portion. And what I remember, I’m not sure I can render faithfully.
After we parted ways, in the late morning the following day, I bought six notepads and pens from the closest store. I sat down on a bench in the little park that lies on the slope just off the town square to write down as much as I could remember. I spent many childhood days in this park. It’s here, for example, that I had my first kiss. It’s here that my best friend Adis and I used to run around as toddlers under the watchful eyes of our chain-smoking mothers.
It was here that I first laid eyes on Majda, she in her mid-twenties and I not much older, not long after she arrived, fresh out of medical school, to take up a position as pediatrician in the hospital. I was visiting my parents from Sarajevo, where I intended to live out my days. Meeting Majda changed my life trajectory—she loved my hometown so much, and I loved her so much, that I moved back because of her.
There was a big walnut tree here that I used to sit under to get some shade from the hot summer days. I also used to marvel at this tree in the winter as the snow, thick as cotton, clothed its bare branches. I imagined it was a giant snowflake. Moments of bliss. That tree was destroyed in the war. Sitting with my notebooks, I saw only a sad-looking stump—the Chetniks must have been too lazy to dig up its deep roots. A tree can die and remain obstinately rooted.
Anyway, randomly from my notes (in the end, I filled five of the six thick notebooks):
In Sjeverin, Seleb said, there’s an old Chetnik by the name of Ratko Cvetković. He lives by himself in a house that’s been in his family for many generations. The house is rundown, missing several windows, and cut off from water and electricity. Ratko has, in his own words, renounced all that’s holy and unholy. He lives by the principle that a human isn’t allowed to harm any living being. Among living beings, he counts plants and insects. He’s a vegetarian, and eats so minimally that he resembles more a skeleton than a man. Each time he eats, he weeps and begs the food for forgiveness, thanks it for sustaining the race of humans, wicked as it is. People fear him.
Seleb had detailed descriptions of the Lim and its significance. Longest tributary of the Drina: 219 km long . . . Carves a long, sinuous gorge between the Lisa and Ozren mountains. Dammed north of Priboj . . . Elevations, progression, river system, and the history of settlements since the Illyrians . . . Seleb spoke at great length about what the Lim has borne witness to. Remarkably, he knew about every single person who had been killed and thrown into the river during the war: dates of birth and death; coordinates of execution; person who executed them, and the last words they uttered before the act of execution; the final thoughts of the victims, some of which still linger in the in-betweens of existences; exact coordinates where the bodies were dumped; the exact coordinates where bodies or what remained thereof were discovered . . . When Seleb spoke of this it sounded like he was reading from a book, recording deeds for judgment day. I don’t know what to believe. I’ll say this: a few names and events I can confirm from my own knowledge. Our five-year-old’s among them.
In Dorići there are three recent cases of vampirism. All three male. Two Orthodox and one Muslim, all three deceased during the last war under strange circumstances. Such cases, or stories, are an excellent entry point into the real traumas, personal and political conflicts, scars, customs, and deepest fears of the people here, said Seleb, but would divulge no more.
On culture and customs. There are many strange customs, as befitting such a remote area. Some of them I was familiar with, and just took for granted as whatever, normal, when I was growing up. Example: A mélange of pre-Islamic and Islamic beliefs and rituals (in the case of the Muslims) and pre-Christian and Christian beliefs and rituals (in the case of the Orthodox). The oddness of making such a separation, as when separating weather systems, or something.
Regardless of religion, there are a lot of fetishes—fears, hopes, desires, questions, tied to all kinds of objects. Example: miniature page with an especially powerful Qur’an verse carefully sewn into a miniature leather case. On the leather case is printed another verse, less powerful, as a kind of key to the verse inside, as well as a warning to unbelievers, to those who are not meant to have this object. Through the leather case, the devout Muslim (invariably an older woman) who made the object has sewn green thread in an intricate pattern that, however, does not touch the sacred document inside. Such leather cases are given to family and close friends as a means of protection against evil forces and as an embodied prayer, a shining light so that the bearer may see and follow the Path laid out for them by Allah.
Admir Skodo is a Bosnian-Swedish-American writer. He has been published by World Literature Today, Times Literary Supplement, The Independent, The Conversation, The New Paradigm, Parabol (in Swedish), Journal of Refugee Studies, Modern Intellectual History, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Research Methods, Journal of the Philosophy of History, and History of Political Thought. He holds a PhD in history from the European University Institute and has held various academic positions at the University of California (Berkeley), Lund University, Stanford University, and Mount Tamalpais College (formerly The Prison University Project at San Quentin Prison). He currently lives in Brussels, Belgium.
Read more from the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2026 Finalists.
