Fred Pelka About Jadranka That wartime summer she was my guide and translator, the search for particular words rippling across her face as refugee torture genocide were pulled through the surface of troubled waters. And when they wouldn’t rise— Jesus Christ what is the word?— laughing in embarrassment, her smile also multi-lingual. But then there are riddles that travel a thousand years before finding their proper home. Like how, every morning, I saw my neighbors across the courtyard greet each other, the one asking some question I never understood the other laughing as he drew his index finger across his Adam’s apple. I ask Jadranka the meaning of this and she tells me— It’s old Croatian custom, also Bosnian, also Serb. You ask your neighbor, ‘How did you sleep last night?’ and he answers ‘Like my throat was slit.’” There was the scent of UN peacekeepers on Vlaska Street trying to pick up girls, and how at Dugo Selo this one child—maybe ten, maybe twelve— cowered when I entered the room. She’s like that with all men, Jadranka told me, not having to tell me why. On Sundays she took me sightseeing— I don’t want you to remember only sad things about my country— once to the cobblestones of the Strossmayer Promenade, once to a cafe near Zagreb center Where in peacetime all the poets used to sit.
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