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came the reply, ‘I don’t give a... ’ from one of the death
row inmates working that day.
The uniformed guy with a moustache, who had taken my
petrol money, seemed to have hated himself that
morning, but graduated to hating the whole world in the
afternoon. His spontaneous reaction to my question
about Brčko, a town which history had consigned to his
outrage because it had not ended up in Croatian hands
at the war’s end, did provoke something in the same
phylum as a smile. This was probably just to give me the
false sense that he was joking, rather than intending to
terrorize all passengers
en route
to the Serbian Entity.
I was fed up, and I had only just started.
Twenty minutes later, I was sipping undrinkable coffee at
the restaurant next door, wondering why this unspoken,
projected accusation could still make me feel like shit. I
put on the boil my hate for moustache guy, and it
bubbled into an imaginary biography, in which he was a
smuggler of stoves and washing machines stolen from
Serbian houses. I could picture Mr. Moustache carrying
Gorenje appliances up and down the village, after his
shift at the petrol station ended, offering them to
neighbours, claiming that they all came from his nice
Swedish son-in-law, who had just bought brand new
Electrolux appliances for his holiday home and didn’t
need them anymore. But when Mr. Moustache vanished