Sometime ago... in Croatia
As I walk under the hot sun in the walled city once called
Ragusa, I leave my passengers behind, get on the small side streets and find
Tina waiting for me by the restaurant’s door.
The blonde slim waiter to whom I once casually said “I will
be back” has become my weekly business contact point. After booking the tables
for the evening I sit outside in one of the alley tables. Today I want to
experience something new, so I order frog legs. The food order comes with
company.
My server sits across the table and before I realise she is
telling me all about hippies, musicians, girls wearing flowers in their hair
sitting at the beach and smoking funny things. She talks about this city, a
happy place where she spent her youth. She is talking about a time when several
nations were as one and how with the fall of the night all these teenagers that
were friends become adversaries in a war they didn’t start.
I wish to interrupt her, to freeze that moment right there,
it’s at the grasp of my hand, I could take a picture of Tina sitting opposite
me, with the thin walled alley full of empty tables. She stops for a moment and
smiles as if she read my mind, but through her eyes I can see it was only a
moment to breathe. She is smiling at me as if in the background there were
people walking living their life in 1990. She is looking at me as if behind me
the first bomb had just fallen and her neighbours are not going to be her
friends anymore.
This middle-aged woman, now a humble server at a restaurant,
as there are so many, is yet again giving me more than I had bargained for. She
is making the history I talk about every week real. It’s not something I read
on book, it’s not a bullet hole I once saw on a church wall, it’s something
behind her eyes. Something that teaches me
about that things you can’t find on internet, that you can’t find in the
mostly useful pages of guidebooks.
As she carries on telling more about the before and the
after, about that unusual day that followed a night like so many others, I
devour the newly experienced mythical chicken tasting frog legs. For a few
moments I get lost in time travel without having to undertake years of
experience to build an impossibly smart device.
When I finish the food Tina walks away with my plate, pulls
out a cigarette and gets back to her daily chores. I get up and as I walk back
through those Dalmatian streets I feel it’s the first time my feet actually
touch that ground.
I walk away with the most precious of souvenirs; the picture
I never took.
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