TE20 Migrant Mosaics

The Fig Tree

‘Love’s always at the heart of everything. Everything except for love itself.’

XIV Vesna arrived unannounced. After not having visited them for almost two years, she got in the car after work and drove to Momjan.

You’re on the other side of the border, you two, were her first words as she came through the door.

It’s like someone’s drawn a border through me. They’ve drawn borders through us, through all of us. They’ve drawn borders between me, my mother and my father. It’s now up to someone else to decide if I can see my parents. Jana and Aleksandar listened to her, as if she were a teenager again, talking to them about punk, about Children of Socialism and Via Ofenziva, about a world which they’d been too old to understand for many years now. They couldn’t imagine a border crossing there, where there had never been one before; their minds couldn’t conjure the image of Slovene and Croatian border guards, each stopping cars on their own bank of the Dragonja river. Vesna was talking like a person scared of silence, and it was impossible to establish at which point her story of the border crossing turned into the story of her missing husband. She 61