At the bus station she warned me about a former soldier in this town who had acquired a white UN van for his personal use. He had mounted a skull on the hood and he drove around drunk threatening people through his open window. She pointed him out to me. The night of the second day, after dinner, as we walked through the dusk toward our little hotel, out of nowhere the white van drove by, honked at us, and the soldier shouted Edina’s name. When he was past us, Edina said, I wonder if that is my father’s skull.

I never got used to her ragged thought. There were things in her life that she could not make normal and when they erupted they tormented her. She preferred to tell jokes or to play chess. She said that when she used to tell Merima stories she always began, Do you know the old fairy tales?

Before the war.

Foča, Sarajevo

The Sarajevo Clock Tower stands beside the tallest minaret in the city, where it has marked lunar time for five centuries since the age of Gazi Husrev-beg. The gilded clock hands set the moment of the coppery call to prayer. They have been reset every three days by the same man for the past sixty years. This man has attended to the ceaseless and uneven turning of earth and moon and sun, and only once during the siege did he fail to climb the tower’s seventy-six steps to set the time for prayers. Time is no healer, and in the clock, storytelling and history have become one.

Edina began, Do you know the old fairy tales? There was once a golden time in our small villages in the mountains when people listened to stories of djinn and witches and evil lords and angels who sit on the left and right shoulders.

In those days, Edina said, my mother kept a small shop where she sold tinned and dry goods, soaps and stamps and pens, and listened to the gossip of our town. She grew up on a small farm with goats near the main road to the village, and my grandmother still lived there alone after her husband’s passing. My father was a woodworker who built furniture during the days and whittled wooden birds in the evenings. I had no brothers or sisters and I played on a bend in the river with friends from the Lepa Brena apartment where we all lived. My mother’s shop was nearby and across the road was the Women’s Anti-Fascist Club. We used to play ringe-ringe-raja, falling with great drama to the sidewalks from the imaginary smell of Uncle Paja’s rotten egg in front of the old women. We could not imagine how these stiff creatures with swollen ankles and varicose veins had ever been revolutionaries. Over the river was a restaurant with a wide open-air balcony where our family gathered with our neighbours to celebrate birthdays and holidays, Kurban Bayram and Christmas Eve and Prvi Maj. On Sundays we walked to my grandmother’s farm past tall sweet-smelling haystacks packed loosely, like soft mountains, to help my grandmother churn butter and stir and press her famous goat cheeses.