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‘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.