Across The River

BEFORE THE WAR you actually had to ask people’s names to know who they were. Now you can just observe what side of the river they live on. On the east side are the Bosniaks — Muslim citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina. On the west are Croats, Catholic by faith. The two groups split my hometown of Mostar down the middle like an overripe pomegranate.

The Eastern Orthodox Serbs — who prior to the war made up one quarter of the town’s population — have all but disappeared. I am one of them.

“I’LL ONLY BE AN HOUR or two,” I tell my aunt as I skip down the steep white stairs.

“Be careful, please,” Aunt Jasna says. She would prefer that I just believe her when she tells me that the Neretva is now polluted and no longer the beautiful river I remember, but I can’t. It’s my last day in Mostar after an eight-year absence, and visiting the river is part of my long-cultivated fantasy of return.

I walk through what was once the thriving Kulidžan family compound and is now a partly destroyed and abandoned set of buildings sitting on a neglected plot of land. I cross a desolate courtyard, pass my grandparents’ demolished home, and skirt the house of one of my uncles, where another family now lives. Only the fig, pomegranate, and cherry trees look the same as they did before the war, ready to bear sweet, succulent fruit.

I leave the residential neighborhoods behind, cross the railroad tracks, and descend into a meadow where my girlfriends and I used to spend hours watching boys play soccer and making our own feeble attempts at gymnastics. Without kids the once-teeming meadow feels forlorn. Across the highway I follow a trail that veers off toward the river. Strolling down streets I have not seen since I was twelve, I feel as if I were sleepwalking.

MY HOMETOWN WAS MY FIRST TRUE LOVE. The smells of blooming linden trees and roasted chestnuts, the sounds of rambling railroad cars and rushing water, and the touch of the warm Mediterranean breeze all helped shape my senses and carve out in me a sense of identity. And when my family fled the fast-spreading civil war just before the spring cherries ripened in 1992, losing Mostar became my first heartbreak.

The war reached my hometown on April 3, 1992. A thirty-ton trailer full of explosives detonated directly across the street from my building, eradicating its entire western side. (My brother later joked that the explosion had transformed our three-bedroom, one-balcony condo into a place that had three balconies and only one bedroom.) We left soon after.

For the first few months following our departure, as we moved from one no-longer-safe town to the next, I wrote long letters to my friends, telling them how eagerly I awaited our impending reunion: the craziness the adults had stirred up could not go on much longer. When, a few months later, my family finally found shelter in a dinky studio apartment in Belgrade, Serbia, I spent most of my time barricaded in a window alcove just large enough for a chair and me, channeling my anger into thousands of words that all boiled down to a single idea: I would rather die than live anywhere but Mostar. Over the first few years I also never failed to inform my Belgrade hosts of all the ways in which their city was inferior to the town of my birth. By the time I turned fifteen, I had changed my strategy: I began to bargain with the invisible forces that seemed to govern my life. If only I could see Mostar one more time, I promised, I would become an upstanding citizen. As the years went by, my anger subsided, and I gradually became a Belgrade party girl. When, at the age of eighteen, I came to the United States as an exchange student, it was Belgrade I missed, not my quaint hometown. Yet now, in the summer of 2000, on my first visit back to the old country, nothing could have stopped me from visiting Mostar.

I ARRIVE AT THE SPOT on the river where perfectly vertical cliffs widen to reveal a few wading pools and rocky islands. And I see the Neretva, the beautiful river of my childhood. It’s still as green as emeralds and brilliant with sunshine. This is where, having dived off a rock that many boys thought too high, I first tasted self-satisfaction. This is where, having swum across when Dad wasn’t watching, I first tested my nerve.

As my aunt predicted, the riverbanks are deserted, but contrary to her warnings the water is clear and clean. Turning north, I walk deeper into the canyon. I hop from one rock to the next, the soles of my feet warmed by smooth stone. Finally I find what I am looking for: a sheltered spot at the edge of the glimmering river.

I spread my towel, take out a book, and lie down to soak up the sun. When the water becomes too tantalizing to resist, I lay the book down, walk to the edge of the rock, and splash my head and shoulders with water the way my dad always did. The cold drops trickle down my back and make me shiver. I count to three and leap into the shimmering greenness. When I open my eyes underwater, the rays of sun piercing the surface reveal endless shades of dark pine and lucid emerald and deep jade. With each breast stroke I glide farther through this explosion of color. You don’t so much swim in the Neretva as fight against the current for as long as you can stand the water’s temperature. Then you get out, rejuvenated and triumphant.

I have barely settled back on my towel when the sound of voices startles me, and a group of teenage boys rounds a large rock. My slight annoyance at their intrusion quickly passes. I am glad to know that this beautiful place hasn’t been entirely forgotten by those who live here.

After a brief stare-down the most daring among the boys asks, “Where are you from?” He assumes — correctly, perhaps — that no local woman in her right mind would come to the river alone.

“From here,” I say.

“Yes, but where do you live now?” The boy is clearly familiar with summer birds who return to their former nests only on vacation. I tell them about myself, then ask them about their lives. Their families stayed through the war, so, unlike mine, their childhood memories are of the death, destruction, and division. After Serbian forces retreated from Mostar in June 1992, Croats and Bosniaks divvied up the city, fighting for every street and corner. Bosniaks took the east side of town; Croats the west. Families on both sides found shelter in homes abandoned by those who had fled.

“So,” the leader of the boys asks, “have you been on the other side?”

“I have,” I say. The segregation of the town, I’ve come to realize, does not apply to us “foreigners.”

“What’s it like?” he asks, as if the neighborhood across the river were a distant, exotic land where chocolate flowed from the faucets.

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