“On Krvavi Uskrs. The cops who got killed.”
“God, I forgot about that. Is this too close for comfort?”
“The whole country is too close for comfort,” I said. I’d meant it to sound like a joke, but it came out wobbly and Luka didn’t laugh. “Let’s just go look at the water. Surely there’s a reason all these Germans are wandering around a sad little battlefield.”
“He didn’t know the guy,” Luka said. “I think he was from Zagora.”
We arrived at the edge of a bluff and peered down at the lakes, the water a shocking turquoise. The shallows were bridged by wooden-slat walking paths, and the sound of the falls overwhelmed the garble of foreign languages. The place was so obviously beautiful it was almost disturbing—perhaps people had drowned here because they’d wanted to, or at least allowed themselves to succumb to that unfathomable blue. Its beauty was completely unmarred by the bloodshed, and it was easy to see how tourists could push all that history from their minds.
We found a secluded place at the bottom of the canyon to put our feet in the water. Touching the water wasn’t allowed, a sign in several languages warned, but Luka didn’t seem worried about the rules, and I was emboldened by the ticket woman at the gate, who’d called the place mine. The water was clear and warm, and I watched a fish brush against Luka’s ankle. He flinched, then faked a cough to pretend he hadn’t noticed. I laughed and switched on my camera.
The camera was a Polaroid, the pop-up kind, which I’d bought at a garage sale before I’d gone to college. I’d purchased it out of a desire to be interesting—Gardenville could bring out that kind of desperation in a person. The camera gears whirred, and Luka looked startled by the mechanical grinding amid the white noise of rushing water.
“What is that?” he said, right as I snapped a picture. The camera churned the photo square from its front slot. A specter of Luka materialized, mouth agape and eyes wide and black against the brilliant blue background. I held the photo up, and he scoffed. “That’s so…American.” It wasn’t the response I’d been expecting, and I knew he didn’t mean it in a good way.
“It’s not!” I said, defensive. “It’s old. People had Polaroids here, too.”
“Seriously, what’s more ‘instant gratification’ than this?” He flicked the photo. “You can be nostalgic within three minutes.”
“It’s not like that. This photo’s one-of-a-kind. Impossible to copy. It’s like art.”
“Art, eh?” Luka said, taking the photo and shaking it.
“That actually doesn’t work. Shaking it. It’s a myth.”
He stopped and handed me the photo. We drew our feet from the water and let them dry on the cracked wood. Then I stood and slipped the Polaroid into my pocket. I thought of Sebald and his photos—maybe they were his way of bypassing the slipperiness of memory. “Anyway, they’re for Rahela,” I said. We trekked up out of the valley and back toward the car and the road and the coast.
—
Luka’s mind was a cavernous place I couldn’t navigate, though the ambling course of our conversations was familiar. I was both fascinated and annoyed by his willingness to pull apart things I would have left in one piece, just like he had when we were small.
“Communism is fascism, in all practical applications,” he was saying now. “Can you think of a Communist country sans dictator?” But I was thinking of Rebecca West, of how the people she’d met in Yugoslavia were all killed or enslaved, tangled up in this same debate at the start of the Second World War. Croatia had been on the wrong side of history then—a puppet state of the Germans and Italians—and had killed its share of innocents. I hated this most of all, that my anger could not be righteous against such a murky backdrop.
“True,” Luka said, when I mentioned the fascist faction in the forties. “But before that they were starving us out; we couldn’t even own land. We’ve been fighting for thousands of years. And most of those guys got executed when Tito came into power. That’s just how it is.”
He spoke with some finality, and I was relieved when the conversation swelled past the ghosts of ex-governments and into a broader sweep of ethics. We began with Voltaire (Luka loved the witty attack on religious dogma, it being the driving force behind our ethnic tensions as far as he was concerned) and pushed up through Foucault (whose amoral take on power infuriated him), I all the while feeling that my American education had left me remarkably ill-equipped for a discussion of philosophy. Luka seemed to have read at least chunks of the seminal texts in high school, while I kept up by regurgitating lines from the single critical theory course I’d taken my freshman year, until I saw a sign that marked the impending road split. I pulled over and reached for the map in the glove compartment.