On the other side of town was a Catholic church — and nearby a mosque. As if by some tradition, the Orthodox people didn’t live in the Colony, nor did they go down the mines. Communism barely affected the lives of the miners. The pits were too dark to foster any rethinking of ideological views. Decades passed, and the organized diplomatic tours avoided the Colony. The inhabitants weren’t affected by the passage of time or by other worldly fashions. And so they continued to be ignorant of such things as traffic pollution, neon lights and synthesized muzak. Only the thick layers of dust, which turned into mud during the autumn, and the increasingly dirty façades suggested that life was about to change — or perhaps it was just returning full circle: the young folk looked back to a period when their grandfathers roamed up and down Bosnia looking for mines, but they also looked forward to the day in the not too distant future when the pits and the Colony would cease to exist.
As soon as war broke out, nobody went down the mines any more. People carrying weapons and flags marched through Kakanj. Some of the inhabitants left, never to return. Others wasted a lot of time in bars, cursing too loudly. In other words, fear entered the Colony — mostly fear of other people, of strangers, of spies, of messengers bringing bad news, but also fear of the night. At daybreak somebody would start shooting, and of course there would be a response from the hills. With the dawn chorus many frightened and tired faces would look out of the houses. Now, every night was like those nights in the past when the siren broke the news of a mining accident.
On such a morning Rudo L. packed his things in a case, locked the front door and the gate, left the keys with his neighbor and, without much explanation, set off toward Vareš on foot. When he reached the church he crossed himself and swore that he would never tell anybody what had happened that night, in his thoughts or his dreams, to induce him to leave Kakanj. Vows seldom have any rational basis. Often they are just ridiculous and pointless, but they can seriously burden a person. Sometimes a vow ends up costing a life. But as the folk in this part of the country are obstinate by nature and thus, in an odd way, rather devout, they seldom break their vows. All around Bosnia people cautiously tell one another stories about horrors that befall those who break their promises. The commitment of a Bosnian who has made a vow can be glimpsed in his face or read in his eyes. It often makes you want to question him or to put temptation in his way or to subject him to other kinds of torture. His persistence makes him appear unstable in other people’s eyes.
When the people in Vareš asked Rudo L. what had occurred that night to make him leave, he refused to say, and so everybody concluded that it must have been something terrible. But as the imagination is always provoked by secrecy, the questioning just intensified; it became more probing and more organized, until it was taken up by those in authority. The police questioned Rudo L. for days, but he stubbornly remained silent. He didn’t even attempt to lie, but nevertheless objected repeatedly to the idea that he was suffering from amnesia as a result of the horrors he had witnessed. Rudo L. no longer knew which was worse: being pressured to break a vow or perhaps being certified insane. In any case, he regretted ever having left Kakanj. Yet it was too late to return. He didn’t worry that he would probably be killed if he ever went back. He was more disturbed by the idea that, in a manner of speaking, his return would be tantamount to breaking his vow. Such a move would only revive the horrors that played on his mind the morning he left the Colony.
One day the authorities in Vareš put him in the back of a truck full of people from Kakanj and told him to go to Croatia. The policeman gave him a cynical smile and remarked that “They have superior methods over there,” and that they would inevitably force him to divulge what he had been through. He was afraid of being harassed at Serb checkpoints, or being stopped and threatened or searched, but he was even more afraid when he stepped off the lorry in Čapljina and was approached by a television reporter who stuck a microphone under his nose and turned a spotlight on him. He asked the very same question that had come up again and again in Vareˇs, but on this occasion it was asked in such a confident voice that Rudo L. imagined the reporter already knew the answer. But who is privy to a vow? The person who makes it, the Lord, and perhaps the devil, too. Who cares if the reporter knew the secret? Rudo L. made up his mind to to surrender his soul to the journalist. He told him that the Chetniks had stopped the lorry on the way to Croatia, and the disappointed reporter immediately vanished. Rudo L. interpreted the episode as a divine omen, a reward for his silence.
The next day he saw the sea for the first time and took his first boat trip. The water was deeper than any water Rudo L. had ever imagined, and the boat was larger and more crowded than anything he had seen on tv. Rudo L. couldn’t understand why the boat didn’t sink and how it floated gently on the surface like a walnut shell. It was a sign — real tangible proof — that miracles exist and that a long time ago St. Francis really did walk on water, unsinkably like a boat packed with hundreds of people. Even though he was a long way from the Colony, Rudo L. was a happy man again.
His daughter met him in Rijeka, and he told her, if only by way of a sign or a hint, something of what he’d been through and what temptations he had endured. Her eyes filled with tears as she listened to him. She didn’t ask him why he’d left Kakanj, but he told her anyway that he had made a vow.
It was a coincidence that not very far from Rijeka was a mining town called Labin. Perhaps it had a colony too — or perhaps not. It wasn’t as though Rudo L. needed to know anyway. He was ninety years old, and it was too late, even for a Bosnian, to pretend to be alive.
Declension
Hypnotized by the rhythm, the young boy had been declining the Latin word terra for the last fifteen minutes. He gently swayed in the middle of the room, happy and vacant, and just as handsome as a Buddhist monk.
His stepfather was chain-smoking cigarettes and rewinding the videotape of a massacre he had filmed in central Bosnia. The speededup images of suffering and tears played on your nerves, dispelling the memory of emotion. He had to think of a commentary in a hurry in order to dispatch the report to the United States the next day. Briefly he thought it would be a good idea just to record the sound of the boy declining terra, terra, terram, terrae. . and blood.
“Dino, why don’t you go and study in your room?”
“Can’t you see, Zoka, that I’m doing my Latin?”
“Can’t you go to your room and do something else?”
“I’ve done everything else.”
“Hey, kid, unless you push off to your room to study, I’ll play you a video of Tudjman’s speech in Sisak.”