I have come to rely on my extremities: my feet for walking, my ears for listening, my hands for breaking bread, and, most recently, it is my thumbs that have been put to good use for I have come to realize that there is no better way to get from one place to another, one country to another in the Balkan mountains without a car than hitchhiking.
And so it is in the middle of July, in the middle of these mountains I departed Bosnia in the same way as I arrived: as a unexpected passenger in the cars of two women who separately, but somehow together, refused to leave another woman stranded on the road.
They were so very similar except for one stark contrast: Lubicje is a Serbian Orthodox and Adina is a Bosnian Muslim. Other than that their differences were few. They were about the same age; one had only just entered her sixth decade and the other was soon to leave it. Like me, life had rendered them single and they both traveled alone to the mountains of Montenegro and the coast of Croatia and I had the sense that when the years continue to pass as they have in my life I could be either one of these women.
In their English, which they spoke with the quiet confidence of those that learned this language not first, but second, they asked me if I was scared to be traveling alone to which I always answer no. How else am I to have these experiences and these conversations?
And so our conversations came with ease, escaping from and returning to the past as the miles and the mountains unfolded before us.
Neither woman spoke of those three years and eight months of war between their countries; only the years before and the years after.
With reverence they spoke of Tito and how their experiences with communism were better than their experiences without. So much so that I began to believe that, given the opportunity, they would go back to the way things were before the death of Tito, before the wall fell, before the wars began. I sensed their longing for one country under one leader rather than what they have become: a once great nation now divided; former Yugoslavians against former Yugoslavians.
With the kilometers came comfort and Lubicye began to recall eighty-seven days in 1999 and Adina told how she fled Bosnia in 1992 and sought refuge in Germany. She has been there for twenty-five years. She has been there ever since.
These are the days, these are the years that are not only remembered, they are counted. Perhaps it is only the ticking of time that keeps people sane during the madness.
They both shared the belief that it is politics and not people that wreck havoc on this world. They both understood that war was not the answer and that perhaps there were no answers, just as there is no truth. There is only life; complicated cruel beautiful life.
And as we drew closer to our destination I began to count all of my blessings on all of my extremities for being able to share this journey with these women, to be able to share in their histories, and their presence.
And I thought that maybe this lonely lonely world would not seem so lonely if only we stopped and picked each other up every once in a while for it is only by having these conversations that we learn to understand one another; it is how we get from one place to another.