Meliha Nametak Long, Podhum, Bosnia & Herzegovina
Wounds of Podhum
Author: Meliha Nametak Long
Why did I choose that indicator, in particular? Because I live between two family-owned ruins in the neighbourhood of Podhum. Because for me, it is the most beautiful indicator of peace.
Every day I pass between the ruins of old homes, and I ask myself, “Where are those residents now?” Have they been accepted between their new, far away walls? Is sage able to grow in rice fields? Out of their broken hearts, do climbing roses grow? Are they happy there where the winters are not like in Mostar, where the sea is gray, the clouds sterile, and where the cicadas are silent?
I peer through the blind windows, I touch the stone and photograph the joyful, thirsty flowers which fight their way through the old bricks. From time to time I dare to enter into the ancient courtyards and I hear how the voices echo in the alleys. There, fruit ripens and the roses bloom… but no one eats them nor smells the roses.
Why is it like this after almost 30 years? Why is it a Russian roulette to walk through the streets when Mostar’s northern wind, the Bura, blows? One never knows when some brick or piece of mortar will crumble on us. Even after all this time, those objects aren’t properly secured. Why do inheritance discussions about these ruins remain for years in closed drawers? Because the number of cases are in the thousands, and they are slow to be resolved… because the heirs can’t come to an agreement, nor “come together”; the war scattered them to all parts of the world.
Yes, they are being torn down, and being rebuilt, but slowly. There are a few restorations that take care to keep the original look. In place of stone and wood, now it’s cement and brass. In place of small windows with wooden shutters due to the sun’s glare, now there are glass surfaces as if in Aspen. Building happens unprofessionally, because the trained experts have little chance here… and when some accident happens, no one is to blame.
Yes, building is happening, while the trees are being cut down mercilessly. What can a hundred-year-old tree that remembers my grandfather’s childhood mean? Someone said “if the trees provided wireless internet, it wouldn’t be like this… And like this, it provides only oxygen without which we cannot survive“…
Can a story have a sound? If the writer is skilled, it can.
Mine sounds like a grenade, a fire, the chirping of a bird from a Hornbeam growing out of someone’s living room. It also sounds like the sound of a bulldozer and the voices of bald workers with cigarettes on the tips of their lips, like a song when a shirt flutters on a new roof, like the voices of strangers from new guesthouses… Like a meow, like a moan, like a laugh… but most of all, it sounds like silence.
What does silence sound like?
It sounds like the hum of an old “transistor” next to the yellow armchair beside the window, which fell silent forever thirty years ago… from which you could once listen to broadcasts of matches on Sundays, Sevdalinkas, Tereza and Mišo, political speeches and the weather forecast… which saw the sea and the mountains and the rivers, on spread-out blankets it tried to override the ringing of children’s voices…
A muffled, deep silence, soothing and frightening at the same time… Silence that provokes a thought process: who were those people and where are they now… Did they manage to collect their pictures and dear letters, because… a transistor can be bought … but memories, tangible things, are another thing…