The airport was far outside the city, so I handed my bag to a man in an official-looking reflective vest and boarded a bus marked ZAGREB CENTAR. I realized it was a mistake as soon as the driver requested twenty kunas, too much for a regular bus ride. It was probably a private company designed to scam tourists, but I hadn’t seen any other public transport in the lot, and my suitcase was already in the belly of the bus.
“I haven’t changed any money yet,” I said to the driver in English, suspecting he’d take the news better that way.
“Two-zero kuna to Autobus Station Zagreb,” he said, palm out. I handed him a five-dollar bill, which he pocketed without issuing me a ticket.
After a stint on the new highway between the airport and city, I exited Autobusni Kolodvor and walked into the city center. Zagreb seemed both smaller and more beautiful than the simulacrum I’d constructed in my head. Red and yellow tulips bloomed in beds across the city, and the cobblestone walkways, soaked in summer sun, looked cleaner than I remembered. While people on the street were clothed in fashions long passed in America, they looked well fed, with no outward signs of distress. Only the occasional shelling damage in the building fa?ades gave any confirmation that a war had taken place.
I continued down Branimirova, a street that had become unrecognizably commercial. Boutiques peddling jewelry, jeans, and cellphones had cropped up to create an unbroken, mall-like storefront. I thought of the gifts I’d brought for Luka and Petar and Marina—things I’d found new and exciting in America when I’d first arrived—and felt embarrassed. From the looks of it, they’d imported everything already.
Hotels, big international ones, stood behind the market. I knew the city must have had hotels when I was young, but I could neither remember them nor imagine who would have wanted to stay in them. On the left Glavni Kolodvor came into view—Zagreb’s Grand Central, everyone joked, though in reality it was older than the New York terminal.
Until this point I’d been walking straight, avoiding the question of an exact destination, but soon I’d have to turn off if I wanted to go to Luka’s parents’ house. Property usually only changed hands via inheritance, so it was unlikely that they had moved. Luka would be there, too; students lived at home with their families while attending university. Was it better to go and get it over with, or stop at the hostel first and try to wash up? Should I try to find a pay phone with a phone book to see if his family was even still listed? I decided it was best to go look for him right away—chances were slim that a hostel shower would put me in a clearer state of mind. But the weight of whatever I might find there was slowing my steps. The prospects of having lost or coming face-to-face with the person who’d known me best were equally terrifying.
By the time I reached Luka’s front stoop I was so nervous it was all I could do not to run away. What if he’d been killed by some back-alley sniper, or burned beyond all recognition by a mine in the park? What if he was angry with me for getting out? What if we didn’t like each other anymore? I rang the doorbell and listened for footsteps. There weren’t any that I could hear, but then the lock clicked and the door opened to reveal the foyer through which I’d tracked mud countless times, and a tiny woman in fuzzy slippers and a housecoat. It was Luka’s grandmother. Luka and I had visited her flat down the street occasionally after school. Even in the darkest months of rationing she’d managed to slip us something sweet. But now she looked much older, more hunched. Beneath the open robe she wore a black blouse and a woolen skirt hiked up to her flaccid breasts. Her hair was tied in a dark scarf. She was in mourning.
“Baka,” I breathed, not meaning to say it aloud. She looked me over, her eyebrows raised at my use of a familial term.
“Who are you?”
“I’m, uh—”
“No soliciting.” She closed the door in my face and I retreated to the bottom of the stoop, where I sat sweating and trying not to panic. In Bosnian villages, where Luka’s grandparents were from, once you went into mourning for a close family member, it could go on for years; for a particularly troubling death one might never wear color again. I allowed myself to fall into an antifantasy of what had happened to Luka—death by land mine, malnutrition. I envisioned his funeral, a small stone marking his remains up on Mirogoj.
The morbid string of daydreams made Luka’s appearance on the sidewalk before me even more startling. I shot up when I caught sight of him farther down Ilica, and felt him look me over, first with the general curiosity that one directs at a person lingering in front of his home, then with the more exacting gaze of trying to place someone.
Luka was tall and broad-shouldered, a departure from the scrawniness we’d once shared, but he was recognizable in other ways—his hair still thick and stiff, the same serious, close-lipped smile. I caught in his eyes the exact moment he recognized me.