Igor Klikovac

I’d often seen the runway kissed by refugees and bought-out hostages, an odd drunk and those renouncing the flying for good, and thought that surely there must be worse places to touch freedom. Between the tailfins and the gray town in the distance, gravity cropped up only at a newsstand, and fizzled out with the first bite of the octane damp, the view of the parking bunkers and stacked hovels by the motorway. Everything else, before and after, could have fitted into half a cigarette, the sickly sunshine and endless nights, the flags and oaths (the very language I wanted to forget), the Celts, the Saxons, the housebroken Vikings in crowded trains, hopping frozen behind stalls selling tat to tourists. Not enough time for loving because of other loves, nor codebooks nor guides except the perennial A to Z of not giving offense. The words were always there, smooth like pebbles (soap on the tongue), and sometimes the mockery of a commonplace, like that time when we put up a blackened Union Jack instead of curtains between us and the Poles on the scaffolding across the road. On occasions it seemed good enough to be happy or scared with the rest, to bring home from the terraces and parades that sly acceptance, to sit in the shadow of atavism as under a palm tree, and chew blissfully on the sweet dirt, the taste of the crowd. Or for an evening make a shortcut through someone else’s work, an incomer’s story of a homeland gained not lost, a fat compendium of patriotic verse; in essence, cheat again. In other words — never spend too much on a suit rarely worn    ...    if there had been loyalty at all, it fell on faces and disappeared with them, on promises and smiles, crazy schemes for finding undiscovered shores. The world, I thought, could be unfolded anywhere, if only you could fit it into a travel bag, into a clear, irrevocable word. It is strange perhaps that even today I think the same, still in the same place, buried firmly like a rock in a graveyard, as heavy, and as pointlessly decorated by lightness. The vows of yesterday skim the heights like animal shapes we recognize in passing clouds; postcards sleep in the unread books. Just like the nomadic tribes used to, I learn of myself only with my feet now, from the single map that remained. And when streets bring the shortened future a bit nearer, with open palm I seek the roughness of the facades, and in the friendly pain I find the coarse, unperfected truth of things. This, I think then, must be what it’s like in the bellies of gigantic animals: wet and quiet, almost pleasant, once you get used to the smell of those who passed through before you, and the immutable truth that there is no going forward or anywhere else    ... Translated from the Bosnian