At the beginning of the 1990s, I had a small bookshop in the Sarajevo Society of Writers, beside the stairs leading to the upper floor and the garden behind the building. I sometimes went there with you, when you were seven or eight, your interest in the space and the people who gathered there didn’t last long and you would begin to get bored. If my friend Dario happened to be in the building, he would take you to the video shop in Kralj Tomislav Street and you would rent some videocassettes. You would stay in his apartment near the military hospital, watching films, while he came back to keep me company in the bookshop. Later, in the war, the video shop ceased to exist, an acquaintance of ours opened a restaurant on the premises, a very attractive and agreeable place, with old sofas and comfortable armchairs. There were some forgotten videocassettes there, and they were used as decorations in the restaurant. Someone else occupied Dario’s apartment during the war, and he tried for years to get back into his room. When he finally succeeded, he died. The bookshop, too, ceased to exist. In the early summer of 1992, I went there to see what state the books were in, but the writers who were supposedly taking care of the building had thrown them out, into the rain. My books in the rain.

Do you remember, once we were going to a soccer field behind your secondary school in Falls Church and you asked me to let us out of the car in the big parking lot, just so that you could show me the place where an angry, armed high school pupil had killed a girl from your class? We found a few wilted flowers on the spot. We stood there, you spoke softly, still unsettled by the event, you raised your arm and pointed toward the school building in front of us and said: “I was at that window, and I saw everything.”

My PTSD, and your PTSD.