Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergovic

Author:Miljenko Jergovic [Jergovic, Miljenko]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Short Stories (Single Author)
ISBN: 9780972869225
Google: cqyQ5bntxY8C
Amazon: 0972869220
Barnesnoble: 0972869220
Publisher: Archipelago
Published: 2003-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

The Gravedigger

Know why you should never bury people in a valley? Because a graveyard needs to be located on a hill somewhere above town. Just imagine you’re climbing up the slope because you want to rest your eyes perhaps, or walk among the tombs flicking through the album of headstone photographs. Let’s say you meet a stranger idling through the deep grass and he expressed an interest in the life story of a person buried up there – well, there you have it! At least if you’re on a hillside, you don’t have to regurgitate the story. You can actually map out the life history of the deceased as it moved through the downtown area, from shop to bar toward the grave. You climb on Alifakovac and meet an Italian, say, who’d like to hear Rasim’s life story, so you recall that Rasim was born in Kovac – you point with your index finger so the visitor can see. He went to school over there by the bridge, you add, gesturing with your other hand. When he was seventeen he fell in love with the beautiful Mara who lived in Bjelave – look! You can see Bjelave from Alifakovac – but his father wouldn’t allow him to marry her, so he ran away from home and moved into Mara’s house. They hid on Ilidža for three months – Ilidža, by the way, is the mountain you can vaguely see in the fog. Sooner or later his father discovered where Rasim was living and begged him to return to Kovači. Rasim told his father that he would only return if Mara accompanied him. At last, it seems, the old man began to understand that the love affair was serious, and so he brought Rasim and Mara back to Kovači. Except she was not permitted to leave the house in case the neighbors saw her. Hoping to make things up to her, Rasim used to take Mara at night to the rocks above the Jajce barracks. As soon as her eyes grew accustomed to the light she was able to see Bjelave from the rocks. Or perhaps she just imagined that she could see the town. Often she used to cry – and her bout of self-pity lasted for up to a year until Rasim’s father built a house for the young couple in Bistrik – over there, see? That’s Bistrik with the mosque and the brewery and the army camp. Soon after Rasim and Mara moved into the house, the couple were married – but just when you imagined that here was love’s young dream, Mara got ill and died suddenly. She was buried above Širokača – that’s Širokača in the distance, to the left. Her grave lies a few yards apart from the others, possibly because nobody knew whether Mara had in fact remained Mara, or had become Fatima. They couldn’t ask Rasim because he had been struck dumb with grief. He said that he blamed each of the local

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