As I grew older I went on hikes with my friends to the woods of Buk Bijela and along the road to Trebinje throwing pebbles and counting the roofs by their shapes. Serb farmers preferred the flattened line to the full triangle on the roofs of their Moslem neighbours. It was a relaxed life, with lots of visiting and coffee. During festivals, the women put on aprons and embroidered blouses for the kolo dance. We all knew it, though we young people laughed at it. We played soccer and I sang in the choir and I acted in plays at the Partizan Sports Hall. Once we even took our play to the neighbouring village of Miljevina near the railway hotel. I knew girls from many households, the Karamans, the Bogdanovićes, the Lazićes. Our families had lived there for generations.

In high school I used to sneak into the second-floor classrooms with my friends by running across the cement bridge over the gully, then up the fifteen steps to the back door. I smoked my first cigarette in the forest behind, and many of the girls had their first kisses there too. Not me. Ivan took me for a long walk along the river and he held my hand and he said, This river is our destiny and the history of our blood.

I liked how he wanted to talk like a poet and a soldier, and I knew he was gathering his courage to kiss me. I had chosen him already and I wanted to go with him to study at the university. More than anything else I wanted to become a lawyer ever since I saw the American program about the lawyer in a wheelchair called Ironside. My mother who did not complete high school was happy I would do more. When it was time for me to leave for the city, my father gave me his own old copy of The Damned Yard because he had always loved those stories. He embraced me and said, Do not look where the harvest is plentiful but where people are kind.

My parents approved of Ivan Pašić. In the evenings when I studied, he sat with my father and tinkered with radios and clocks. Our two families invited each other to our homes, and at Christmas, Ivo made sure that I was served the secret coin in the česnica cake and on the first day of Muharram, I served him and his parents my mother’s lamb ćevapi. I think that my parents hoped that Ivan would protect me in the city though they said nothing of this. Girls were freer than when they were young. I remember the night before we left on the bus, my father whittled a falcon from a piece of wood and he gave it to Ivan and said, I wish that my daughter might have someone to watch over her with vision as sharp as this wonderful mountain bird.

Ivo blushed.

The bus from Foča to town took about three hours, a journey of light and dark through tunnels carved into the mountains along the old Austro-Hungarian railway. There is a jutting orange rock that everyone from Foča looks for on the way to and from our small village. They call it Stari čovjek, Old Man. I used to look for him each time I returned from Sarajevo because when I saw him, I was almost home.