Free Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergovic

was nothing he could see (or hear) from his gloomy vantage point to confirm (or deny) the existence of the ugly voice that had been audible for only a second or two. He had been standing there since the lights went out across the city and now he couldn’t think what to do next. One false move, like going back to bed or playing thecool guy, would only upset him even more. Shaking in the night wind, he gave in to his fear of the coming madness, hating nostalgia and the crystal lake.
    He was seven years old when he first held a live trout in his hands. He couldn’t help thinking that the fish, cruelly separated from the water and thrashing its tail angrily, wriggling helplessly, was almost as big as he was. He felt there had to be something else, a reason to throw the fish back into the lake, and as far away from him as possible, before the creature had no option but to use a secret weapon – its spikes perhaps, the ones his father said it didn’t have – and to fill him with a dreadful pain in order to get away. Growing up, the boy sometimes watched films in which these aquatic beings managed to escape from the grasp not only of children but also of experienced anglers, just at the point when the fishermen were beginning to congratulate themselves on vanquishing the trout. He had come across the widespread belief that fish were slippery for a reason – and that reason was the constant need for a last-minute escape – but he no longer believed this old-wives’ tale. It was more likely, he reckoned, that the unfortunate fishermen who let the trout slip through their hands were frightened of its dark and watery strength, knowing it could trick and destroy ordinary mortals right now or in a hundred years.
    The father used to go fishing at the weekend. The rest of the time he was a miner who worked at the colliery next to the lake. The pit was as muddy and dirty as every other mine in the world, but hisfather was proud of his job. Being tall, handsome and blond, he spoke up at parents’ meetings on behalf of all the other fathers, and whenever they travelled anywhere by train he would tell his fellow passengers in the carriage that he was a miner. On such occasions the boy would often feel embarrassed and prod his father with his foot, but his father just laughed as if the boy had cracked a good joke. Many years later in some Balkan hotel, the young man tricked a naïve and vulnerable girl, by means of a series of flirtatious glances, into believing that he too was a miner. The girl looked at him and observed cautiously that only uneducated people go to work under ground. The young man smiled with a kind of insouciance, but she just responded with a stupid grin. At that moment he envied his father, who had always been able to choose the right place and the right way to fascinate people with his stories about the life of a miner.
    As the old saying goes, you can see the whole world from the roof, or at least you can see the parts you’re really interested in. The young man strained his eyes until they began to hurt, and yet he still couldn’t see anything. At that moment the only thing he wanted was to forget the bad news, and to pretend that nothing had happened – except he had already told his girlfriend and most of his friends what he had heard. In the end it was their sympathy and kindness, and acts of spurious compassion, that made it impossible to forget his bad news. His friends suggested that maybe his father wasn’t dead after all – perhaps it was just a terrible mistake – but none of them really believed he wasstill alive. He was the only one. He continued to believe – or to disbelieve, as the case may be. He didn’t expect very much in return. He would have settled for the average presentiment, however low-key, or indeed anything else that was likely to persuade him to come down off the roof and go back to bed.
    Just then it looked as if it might