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Damir Uzunovic 
Maja Starcevic, Translator
Translated from the Bosnian by Maja Starcevic
Bare Cemetery, Sarajevo
It is March. Fragrant wisps of smoke rise from the houses on Mare´s Head, mingling with the spring breeze like coffee-drinking women with all the time in the world, confiding to one another about the Bairam delicacies they have been making in their kitchens all morning. Colorful as bright Latin American flags a few men, wary of the Bairam ceasefire, are hurrying down the road leading to Bare, a Sarajevo cemetery.
I raise my binoculars. It makes no difference if I track a hawk´s flight, a coil of clouds, a flick of a horse´s tail, or the district of Mare´s Head (which is at its loveliest in those foggy days when it seems to be fading away--when rooftiles and bricks bleed their color into the earth and all that moves flies toward the fog in the sky)--all these seem a series of deepening layers. Every visible object--be it a flying bird, a pear tree, a discarded shovel, a stream, a hill, or a sweaty man in the field--has its own plane, in and of itself. The sum of their solitudes becomes the world visible to the naked eye.
I look at the cemetery. There may be more living than dead there. Making the most of the Bairam ceasefire both the Catholics and the Orthodox are scuttling around. Everyone is truly confused because the graveyard looks the same everywhere now that the birches and weeping willows, poplars and pines, even benches have been cut down and used as kindling, and without such pointers all graves look alike. The people would like to stop one another and ask, "Excuse me, do you know where I..." or "How do I get to...," but who would think of other people´s dead, when you can´t even find your own.
But what draws my father to the grave of his mother and father, and which memory, what sort of sign will point his way to his brother´s grave, now that the beautiful weeping willow, whose stump had for years shown him the way to their graves, is gone? He has never approached them any other way. There he is, reading: Hasan Uzunoviae (1892-1960) and Hasmeta Uzunoviae, born Softiae (1906-1968).
He takes off his jacket. After hanging it on his father´s tombstone, he bends and begins to tidy up the grave, thinking about who knows what. Perhaps about his father who is not really buried where it says he is, but on the other hill at the Bakije Cemetery, his grave unrecognizable by now. Every so often he pauses in his work, as if Hasmeta was talking to him from down below, "Not like that, son! Like this!" Hasmeta--when she walked the earth she had named me Damir instead of the family-favored Hasan, which means "beautiful", while Damir means nothing at all, though I sometimes jokingly translate it into English as "Yespeace." In the year she gave birth to her elder son Vahid she´d announced he would become a poet because Rilke had died the same year. From her son Fadil, who perished in 1966 in his thirty-sixth year suffocated by exhaust fumes in the garage and now buried close by, she took a name, as if picking a beautiful flower, and gave it to a newly born grandson, who was later killed by a grenade that turned his heart into a piece of shrapnel in June of 1992. For a long time now, the Uzunoviae family will be without a Fadila--a name that means "industrious."
I leave my father, brought closer and made larger by the binoculars, and search the Bare cemetery for a silver pine. Not the pine, actually, but my Nana, my mother´s mother, Nura Telegrafeiae, born Muftiae (1905-1971). Had I had more than the few six years I´d shared with her, I could picture her more vividly now. As it is, all I can remember is her goodness, great as the world, descending on me like an eiderdown, and me running under the bed, peeking out at her. But instead of the silver pine, who do I see but Dobrila. She takes a Muslim prayerbook from her handbag, puts on a kerchief, sits and reads out loud, moving her lips as she does when praying at mass in the Catholic church on Sundays. Born in Vrisnik, a Dalmatian village above Jelsa on the island of Hvar, she will for some reason love Nura for as long as she lives, and not a single Bairam goes by without Dobrila coming to pray for Nura, always bringing her a white rose.
That rose comes and goes, its thorns disappear with its flowers, but the rose on the grave of Nura´s son from her first marriage, Sulejman Gabela--who died of leukemia a year after Nura--that particular rose is all thorns in bloom, bursting from the grave like a flame. Every time I tried to trim it and calm its frenzy, it would sting my thumb, though perhaps going straight for the heart. Days went by before the thorn would come out. All that time I´d dream of the empty diamond-shaped flower bed in the gravel on his grave, the bed that was the source of the rose´s frenzy. I won´t say anything else about Sulejman, except that his clamp, which I´ve been using for years, sometimes pinches me.
Most of his carpentry tools are at his brother´s house, a certain Dervi/ Gabela, who was buried in January of 1992, somewhere near the very top of the cemetery, where not even binoculars can reach. We used to think he was rich. I can´t remember why anymore.
Suddenly, several rounds of machine-gun fire hits the cemetery. The Bairam ceasefire is shattered. People start and duck behind statues, crosses, headstones. The living are taking cover behind the dead. "Even though he´s dead, he takes good care of me," said one soldier´s mother upon receiving state benefits.
The shooting soon stops. People revive and come out from behind their covers as if peace had suddenly returned. No one ever thinks about peacetime; people just go on, trying to disengage themselves and forget. One man spits on two fingers and irons the crease in his trousers, others shake off the dust from their sleeves. Beautiful bouquets wrapped in celophane glitter in the sun.
And there they are--stopping each other again, pointing, very likely showing where the departed birches, weeping willows, and poplars had been; they keep turning around, noting this and that, and looking in vain for their dead. Many of them are disappointed, feeling so disoriented for the first time in their lives, and are leaving the cemetery, placing their glittering bouquets randomly on graves entirely alien to them. When visiting their dead and remembering them, they had in fact been thinking of the birches, weeping willows, pines, and poplars now gone from the Bare cemetery.
On almost every house in Mare´s Head, a chimney is smoking. 
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