Trafika Europe 5 - Slovenian Interlude

‘Yeah. Long story.’ ‘I don’t get you.’ ‘Sorry.’

‘Yeah. Whatever. Call me.’

Nadia hung up and I got this irresistible urge to call her back and continue our conversation. I couldn’t put my phone down, but I also had no idea what else to say to her. She certainly didn’t deserve my lying to her from a parking lot in front of the Javori Restaurant about my supposedly deceased Aunt Mirosava, my only relative on my father’s side, who had unexpectedly passed away, aged ninety-two, while cutting down an apple tree in the garden of the only nursing home in eastern Bosnia. I had invented my aunt’s life story in such detail that, without any hesitation, I could have recounted stories of Milosava’s stuffed peppers that she used to pack, every winter, into vacuum containers and take to the bus station, along with a letter for my mother and twenty Deutschmarks for me, and give them to the driver of a bus destined for Ljubljana. I could have also told her about my aunt’s husband, Slavko, who had sadly died of stomach cancer, which she had always blamed on her unhealthy home cooking, resulting in her turning to organic food at the age of eighty-five, which led her Bosnian neighbours to assume she suffered from dementia, causing them to put her in a nursing home and take possession of her house.

52