She remembered what Alice had told her, that beyond the judge’s head was the sea. That she should find the sea, and focus on that if she was nervous. Although Bosnia was almost completely landlocked, when Lucija was growing up it was in the middle of Yugoslavia’s geographical grandeur, which stretched from the plains to the forests and down to the coast. Even Sarajevo itself, with its river and mountains, had let them feel nature’s wildness. Here in the chilly archipelago there was lots of wildness but it was wisest to forget about natural warmth. The utter relaxation of summer on the Dalmatian coast. Those warm evenings in Sarajevo’s Spanish cemetery, where they congregated with their bottles of beer, and greasy paper bags of pies, and their music, on Friday and Saturday nights just above the graveyard gates.

As the judge asks Lucija a question, an image forms in her head of her schoolfriend, Omer Mevludin, meeting her cousin, Tanja, for the first time – I had no idea what was about to happen, Omer told Lucija later – and then I knelt down and unbuttoned his fly, Tanja said, as Lucija gasped in horror, and he gasped out in amazement and fright and whaaoooo! he cried—For very soon Tanja was drawing back to spit and grimace, and to take a swig from a bottle of beer, and Omer was staring up at the moon through the leaves of the trees. It was the most amazing thing that had ever happened. As it exploded, an image formed: three women, dressed up in high caps with huge fringed scarves enveloping their bodies from the crown of the heads down to their knees. I puzzled about it, Omer went on, until the next morning I woke up and remembered: Grandpa’s photograph from 1912.

It was the first print to go missing from the collection. Omer’s mother, crazy with grief and worry, took down the prints which hung in the dining room, and sold them while his father was out – she lived in fear of starving; the price of food on Sarajevo’s black market.

LUCIJA: Sorry? Yes, it told me of what my country had been. That my memories weren’t wrong. That the war was an aberration. That there is hope. I typed out an extract for you—

SOLICITOR: Thank you. Submission 21a.

From Beyond Illyria by Eva Levi [pub. 1969: pp. 72–3]

I had long known of Mevludin’s work, of course, and since moving to Sarajevo, I had been coming across it continually. I saw his photographs in the Museum of Sarajevo down by the river. I noticed a beautiful print of the city taken from the hills to the south, which hangs in the atrium of the National Library. I saw them in private houses; people were always very glad to show off their Mevludins to strangers. Then, after a year of travel and research, I rang the photographer and made an appointment to see him.