1.

He found himself on a wide and boundless road. The reality struck him, sitting there in seat number 32 on the Čazmatrans bus, so intensely that he gripped his seat, as though he were on an airplane nose-diving to what was called “meripe,” giving death a name without knowing anything about it, just as he knew nothing about where or to whom he was going. With nervous jerks of his head, he tried to latch onto anything in his vicinity that might orient him. The seat beside him was empty. Its worn brown slipcover gave off a stench that cast an ethereal being out of disgust and nausea, so familiar that they would fraternize if they shared a language or other common ground that brought two people closer. On the sticky floor near his feet, in the center aisle, in the overhead compartment, not a suitcase, not a bag, nothing. Only later did he notice a few blades of dry grass wedged into the recesses of his thin jacket. Finally, some link to the night he’d spent in the bushes behind the bus station, sweaty and exhausted like an animal after a hunt. That night now belonged to a past life, severed by a nap on a bus akin to a small meripe of its own and chased by a chaotic resurrection. He was tempted to ask the bus driver if moving at this speed of ninety kilometers per hour on a highway that stretched from Zagreb to Banja Luka would suffice in leaving that life behind. This journey made no sense otherwise, not for him or the bus in which he was the sole passenger. He felt a rush of air weighed down by the smell of the worn rubber trim around the two wings of the front door that was now yawning. His chest heaved as he fully realized his harrowing defeat. The burden of centuries of battles lost, on that seat, inside an ostensibly calm body, the palms only just sweaty. Asphalt, road, macadam; untold attempts to stay, to anchor himself, to skirt paths with empty promises. Untold efforts to slow within himself the damned red wheel of fortune on its blue and green backdrop that grinds destinies with its meaningless churning of distances. Untold reversions to a preconceived precipice for embodying an eternal foreigner and intruder, with a single strategy at his disposal: to live humbly, to endure, but to stay, above all else to stay, maybe in time he would blend in. And here he was, on the road, with nothing of permanence but two fears: of the wrathful persecutors on one side of that road and the unfeeling protectors on the other. The wheel on the flag was turning again, its anthem whistled by a reed of air coming through the drafty door. A wire fence stretched along the road. It was riddled with thin stalks that resembled the arms of prisoners reaching out from a concentration camp, which made him shudder as though he’d come upon another landmine inlaid in his genetic code. Disregarding imposed limitations and electing to break through to the other side, the vegetation was punished by a thick layer of dust. That rigid cover had embalmed the plants in their foolish attempts at flight. In the distance were houses without windows, like ghosts without faces. He looked more closely, but the houses flew past. He waited patiently for the next, though straining his eyes aggravated his nausea. He realized that the windows on the houses were boarded up. Could he have already traveled that far? A burst of yellow flashed alongside the road, a vision that sheer disbelief prevented from storing in memory. A yellow streak, a yellow square, a plaque, letters, yes, it read “Zagreb.” The sign was crossed out with a black diagonal. Goodbye. Doviđenja. Auf Wiedersehen. Dikhamen. After sixteen years of walking with his head down, speaking in a low voice, looking away, or smiling dully by way of showing obedience, it had all come to an end that morning when he glanced over his shoulder as he entered the bus. Fugitives don’t have the luxury of prolonged farewells. For the first time, he’d felt something besides mere indifference toward his persecutors. They had cut short his sinister smirk as he observed the station where a dozen buses were puking up all those people in patched coats hauling nylon bags. Beneath the veneer of a well-lit façade and flowers planted geometrically, the place reflected the soul of the city. Quelled differences, marginalized newcomers, a crude mass pouring in too hastily and too suddenly, clogging the bloodstream, threatening to surge out of glutted nearby streets and insulated neighborhoods, to spill across the well-maintained belly of the town’s core. Jek Rom majcra, one Rom less, he shifted in his seat so he could sink more comfortably into that pleasant thought. And here was a horde of new intruders. The worst kind. His own. A couple hundred people, just that morning, and only him headed in the opposite direction. In that natural exchange of genetic material, it was clear that the city he was leaving behind had gotten the short end of the stick. That city of a million was a frightful mass of bodies tangled together in the morning and afternoon rush. And yet he hadn’t managed to disappear into the crowd. It was one thing to digest the failure to make something of yourself, be someone, stand out. But how was he to swallow his failure to become no one—ordinary, faceless, invisible? The city was to blame, of course, since he had nothing else to wash down the bitterness. A city which vehemently insisted on sameness, and in which he’d never encountered two similar faces, let alone identical ones. But his allegations were pointless, unable to yield even a small handful of rage. Rage required an excess of strength and willpower. At the end of the day, it was a purely physiological, mechanical reaction orchestrated by an organism’s need to maintain equilibrium within. A flood of foreign bodies that failed to be digested, absorbed, or dealt with would activate a tightening of the intestines, increased acid secretion, and an excretion of excess. Nothing personal there. He was an undigested clot, an unwanted morsel. Although he’d spent sixteen years in that city, and those close to him along with others like him had been there three times as long, an organism undergoing a convulsive struggle for survival lost its sense for nuance. If the theory ultimately didn’t hold water, it would do in the interim. Now he had no strength for anger, nor peace to fall sleep in his seat. At every moment and in every situation, it was clear where he belonged. Everyone around him knew, and he’d come to realize it for himself now that he’d left the city. Plinarsko Naselje. A settlement of dilapidated wooden shacks that leaked light, wind, and water; tin sheets patched together with no rhyme or reason; marginally better constructed one-story homes embellished with scrapped goods; all of it hemmed in by a windowless wall and the three hushed rear walls of the adjacent facilities, situated between two major thoroughfares. Nothing malicious, nothing planned, a natural barrier akin to a river dividing two countries. In that cauldron of helplessness and indignation, the smell of traditional dishes like cicvara and popara, made of cornmeal or old bread, bubbled to the surface together with curses, threats, laughter, and the occasional malediction. Everything became compressed together like the damned leftover popara on your plate the next day. Always lively and warm from the sheer number of makeshift chimneys, tin pipes that directed some of the soot upward while letting the rest seep through poorly fitted flat roofs. This entire network of pipes, tangled given the overly dense assemblage of shanties, maintained the timeless flow of misery materialized in the soot. To feed the fire in the range because of humidity, because of bare feet, because of clothes being steamed on the hot plate, because of pests creeping in through cracks, to never stop feeding the fire, even in spring and summer, as though the entire settlement would be extinguished were a single pipe clogged. In those days, when he was forced to spend the night in one of the hovels, which he never learned to call home, or čher by another name, the same maggot wormed into his nightmares. On that patch of saturated earth, where human waste spilled out of bungled septic tanks, exposed cables perpetually sparked, sodden paths snaked between premises, he dreamed of one night being swallowed whole by the waterlogged ground. Such a dream usually ended in one of two ways. Either he would be buried alive in all that mud, his every jerk pulling him deeper into the vacuum of insatiable earth enraged by the misery oozing over its surface. Or he would somehow pull himself out of the mud and stumble among people who, with disgust on their faces, moved out of his way. Then he would start scraping the mud off of himself, scratching away at it with his nails until, horrified, he realized that he hadn’t removed a single layer, that the mud wasn’t a hardened matter on his skin, his morchi: it was his morchi. And while he was tormented with insomnia by night and headaches by day, the others wheeled their carts, clattered pots from one end of the settlement to the other, rattled spoons from door to door, dragged enormous nylon bags brimming with containers, biked back from a night shift in the pristine city whistling ornate melodies, tugged at the sleeves of brats who wouldn’t cry when spanked, quarreled with a God they knew not how to address because they’d forced their own del to mate with Allah, Yahweh, and whatever else… Everything proceeded from the satisfaction, incomprehensible to him, of reconciling oneself to life. A reconciliation without ceremony or haste, strong feeling or grand gesture. A person simply woke up to discover it in tow and continued living, unaware of the new antibody, inoculated against the need for change, for something different and better. It never happened to him. And in the end, he turned out to be the only failure who hadn’t experienced a single moment of peace or pleasure. Not even on that bit of sodden earth they’d so generously reserved for him. “…nis.” For years he’d practiced, when reconciliation had become an impossible feat. With a sigh, without, swallowing, stuttering, deliberately opening his mouth insufficiently, muffled.

The book Cloud the Color of Skin was published as part of the Growing Together project, co-financed by the European Union.

The book was translated from Croatian by Ena Selimović.

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