When Naira Kuzmich, my fiancée, died after a short battle with lung cancer on October 24th, 2017, I stayed in Los Angeles for the rest of that year, mourning with her parents. As she’d said herself, as she’d written, Naira returned home to die. After Los Angeles, I came to Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, not home but where I was born and my parents had returned to live, and to die, a year before Naira became sick. If L.A. was hell, it was still a more pleasant inferno than the simmering purgatory of Mostar and Bosnia, the limbo state in which I spent six months before coming back to the States. Not home either.

At first, I thought it was fate being there, tried to convince myself I was meant to mourn in Mostar; the pain I was spared from as child by surviving and having everyone I love survive the war, I felt it now, and I grieved now where so many had grieved, this waiting citadel of grief: Dolente . . . dolore. Where the gap between the self and one’s despair and hurt was nonexistent, constricted space, as claustrophobic as grief.

I persisted awhile in the destiny of return, in the belief I and my grief belonged there, that it was the right place, and maybe on a symbolic, literary level it was, but in every other way it was wrong. There was no quiet in the streets and it was too difficult to talk, to cry, to breathe, with too many faces from which to avert my face, and it seemed to me that each passerby knew, and judged, my grief. Stony contempt and the ghost of disgust in every gaze. A whole town full of pitiless looks. I longed for a bit of generosity, a simple greeting, some casual recognition, detached but still familiarly human, the relief of a smile, however artificial. How much I missed the easy, empty, drifting Midwestern smiles Americans flashed even on the coasts, though rarely, if ever, recent or older immigrants: Hispanics, Asians, Armenians in L.A., Bosnians in St. Louis. On Mostar’s insufferably busy streets, nobody said hello, nobody nodded; nobody there showed their teeth to a stranger. No tourists either, being the off-season, to relieve the hateful monotony of the hostile, local stares. This self-preserving, third-world stoicism was stupid and ugly, and it drained much of the kindness I’d been filled with after her death, the vast, but not unlimited, benefaction of Naira’s empathy.

This was no safe place; each day I felt more stuck, defenseless, and doomed in Mostar, within the shrinking walls of my devouring grief.

//

I tried to walk my way out of the connecting maze of my despair and the city’s misery; what other solution out was there but to walk, what other illusion to the problem of a labyrinth? There was no privacy and no peace on these walks, Mostar’s Old Town beautiful but packed, even in the off-season, the famous Old Bridge, over whose bony, silked arch we’d once walked, bright as enamel under a rare clear winter-blue sky and the floodlight of the midday sun and crowded to the point of asphyxiation (maybe there were tourists, but not the easily-smiling, Western ones, most of the women’s mouths obscured by crepe). There’re no forest trails there, there’re no forests, no parks but one, in the city center; there are only dry weeds and dead grass. Only deserts of grazed buildings and halted development due to a dearth of funds, an abundance of fraud. Only ruins standing since the war in whose hollowed-out structures trees flowered. Only nature in ruins. Only concrete, old stone and new asphalt, concrete and metal and glass. Only sparse green spaces. Only cars, cars, cars everywhere, clogging the tight streets, parked on sidewalks, idling in the heat of concrete and metal and glass. Only bad air, no air, choked breath.

Outside the Old Town there was little beauty, but on my walks I found the little beauty there was for me to find: the uncanny beauty of walking between ramparts of rubble, obscurely, fleetingly Greeklike, or the enduring mystery of Mostar’s narrow, loose, unlit alleys that snaked in such a way to give off the brief possibility of wandering. Or the eerie wonder of the slender, piercing minarets on the town’s Muslim side and white-washed cross gigantically hill-perched on the Catholic side by which I could orient himself—had no real choice but to orient myself by it. At dusk, the cross appeared momentarily human, a colossus in flames, pleading to the heavens.

I climbed the foothills of Velez Mountain, opposite the cross; there was solitude there, also strong winds; I screamed her name up there, and the wind screamed it back into my face. I uttered her name like I did over L.A., in yet another town, above yet another ambivalent home. Up there, the elevated view gave Mostar an elevated gravitas, the impressive gray compactness of a small metropolis, and threw into colorful relief the nature all around it and yet out of reach: mint-green and citric-yellow of grass, damp swampish greens and wet-bright browns of weeds, and polished white and various clean blues of boulders, ice. Wooded hills and snow mountains surround Mostar, confining it in its valley from all sides. The literal confinement comforted me, unlike the metaphorical one. The loose embrace of rock. I liked it up there, the solitude and quiet, but also the loud, invasive wind, and being eye level with the dwarfish, misshapen hills across the river that became over time aesthetically pleasing to me. It was in the late afternoon that I’d hike up there, when the shadows, violet and jade, began to wane, and I’d watch the hills on the opposite side slipping off their gowns. On my way down, I’d see the sun setting behind those hills in the west and illuminate the ones on the eastern side, where I’d stood.

Silhouette of the Neretva River—no, the Neretva River, coursing, cursive, italicized—a silk-black, flowing, rumbling swath, the lights from the bridges casting on it festive reflections at night. You could drink from the river, my mother, sitting on the balcony, overlooking the river, claim-complained. Not anymore. Here everything’s changed for the worse. My father bemoaned the dearth of greenery on our short rare walks together. Better on the other side, he said bitterly. Neither of my parents mentioned Naira too much, ostensibly out of consideration for my pain but also out of consideration for the pain my pain caused them (I tried to protect them, to shield them from the sight of my grief as best as I could, no matter the pain to myself, but sometimes I failed or I didn’t quite succeed enough; there’s just no satisfying the living). Silhouette of the Neretva, all of Old Town defined by shadow. Then the evening call to prayer, the one filled with the most longing, the most mourning. At night, the Old Bridge, floodlit, polished, is an arc of tusks. Then the river’s continued, never-ended, subsumed, garbled choral, unheard from where I’d stood. From where I’d stood: a near gray January sky, tense as a cat.

Back down in the busy streets, I was again Timon of Mostar, with my halo of motives, my desire to crawl into a cave, my growing resentment of those who, seemingly, resented me.

The ringing steeple, the wailing minarets, the emerald river winding between the ringing and the wailing. I was winding between them too. Little farmland around at a walkable distance, but there was a large square of land on the Catholic side, near the mansion of the former mayor, where once I saw men in a row planting seeds in the furrowed ground. Seeds from a slunk sack, waist-tied, and spread with a sweeping motion of the arm. In Old Town, on the Muslim side, firm-shouldered Romani women and their stained, luminous children begged in many languages, including English; they live out of their cars, next to which the husbands and fathers conversed and drank. First time they’d spoken to me was in German. Good Friday, half the town smelling like fish frying. The call to prayer over flooded soccer fields. On both sides I took shelter beneath broad trees that protected me from the rain, but when the rain ended everywhere else, under those late-dripping trees it started raining.

//

Before my return at the end of 2017, the last time I’d been to Mostar was summer 2011, with Naira. She enjoyed, found beautiful and significant, the mosques and minarets, the spectral, slow, numinous call to prayer, and was surprised by how most of the women were uncovered or wore only a light veil, just the Arab tourists tarped by their burqas. Being Armenian, it was a different piquancy of surprise at this, more alert, loaded, relieved, than at other surprises there, like at the death notices everywhere or how people still hitchhiked. I knew it made her nervous, or that it at least took her quite a stretch out of her comfort zone, to be among a Muslim majority, a small one in Mostar, but still sizable, especially on the eastern side of town where we stayed with friends of my family, a mixed couple like my parents. With an untaught, authentic faith in equality and her fastidious, fierce empathy, she’d defend and come to the aid, the instinctive aid, of any Muslim minority confronted with American Islamophobia, but here, surrounded by Islam, an embittered, defiant, postwar Islam, there was for her a natural, uneasy, militant sense of being in Turkey itself, where she refused to ever set foot.

Or maybe she felt like she had when she’d visited Germany over the holidays in 2008, while studying abroad in Ireland, a feeling she explained to me before later putting it in writing:

…some people may never understand what it means to have history simmering always in the blood. But perhaps they can understand this: Germany is home to the larges population of Turks outside, approximately three million. Understand that Germany, with its notorious history of genocide, is home to a people whose ancestors tried to wipe min off this earth. Understand also that when I walked in Germany, I may have been confused for a Turk, but I confused no Turk, no German, no hybrid, for an Armenian.

She knew I understood the feeling well, my history still recent, the blood bright and reflective as fresh paint. And she understood well who the main victims, the victims of genocide, had been of the war in Bosnia—she disbelieved in moral relativism, that it exists on the ground, at least among civilians or prisoners, the most powerless, and the ethical math of my conflict, uncomplicated as power and its victims, was ease to figure—and despite the far ancestral trauma caused by Turks and the near familial resentment shown toward all Turks, meaning all Muslims, none of it dampened her empathy toward those deserving of it, her soul branded with kindness like it was hide. Her discomfort was small, subtle, elusive, and she wanted to be there, in Mostar, the birthplace of the man she loved beyond all division, including life and death, in the capital city of the stories she’d fallen in love with before she even loved him.

Her discomfort was also felt in the shadow of my own, less complex, much less subtle, more glaring, garish. Mostar and Bosnia was the middle leg of a month-long, three-country, European journey that took us from Prague to Dalmatia, our first international trip together, while we were in graduate school at Arizona State University, where we met. After the beauty and easy joy of Prague especially, Mostar repelled me. There was the animal discomfort and human despair of the heat, the oppressive sun bloating the city and hasting its decomposition. I noticed little, observed nothing, the ruins, trash, and trash piling up in the ruins because of the garbage strike but also due to a general lack of proper sensitization across the Balkans, making it hard to focus. The stench in the city defiled the rest of the senses. This was most true on the Muslim side. I found it difficult, and one night impossible to find restaurants passably clean where I’d feel comfortable enough to eat, going to bed hungry.

I was clearly overreacting, but overreacting to something I felt spontaneously within, something chemical, atomic, my physical revulsion an external metaphor for an inner contempt, exaggerated yet sincere as any reaction from the gut. I couldn’t romanticize this place, edify it, its liabilities, knew no pride and felt little pity at the landscape and its people, the way Naira did, the way she was starting to do, with Armenia, which she hadn’t revisited since high school. Immigrant L.A. remained a poignant reality but Armenia became for Naira a borderline myth, with its stone churches and lost mountains and stern dances, its many superstitions and one faith. But even in the immigrant stories it’s these home myths, imperfectly preserved in the new world, she was describing and mourning and, growing more vociferous, I felt, celebrating. I wondered how two people so alike, linked by their foreignness to their adopted and birth countries, to the whole rented world, could have such differing relationships with the respective places of origin?

In Mostar there wasn’t such sweetly bitter mysticism, no wise ghosts or visions, river and mountain spirits, or else the air and water pollution concealed them, hid them from casual view. There was only modern poverty, shoddy democracy and capitalism, Catholicism and Islam, the nagging, unclosed pain and regret of the past, and blooming, relentless uncertainty of the present and future. Maybe it’s a matter of perception, how she saw in Armenia what I couldn’t in Bosnia, when from certain angles they appeared so similar.

I distinguished it least of all in the people, who were at the heart of Naira’s sympathy for Armenia, were its very soul. I saw in Bosnians no heroic forbearance beyond the individual endurance of suffering, certainly no poetic resignation of an entire peoples. No national character or spirit, at least none worth praising or glorifying. Naira claimed her people as an artist does, not as a politician claims them, and I know her art truly spoke to a universal humanity and not a subconscious tribalism, but I also know, as she also knew, that there’s often little distinction between a national leader and a national poet. (For us both, any sniff of nationalism was rotten, be it its purely tyrannical variety or its more romantic form of resistance to tyranny, as in the American exceptionalist style.) A general glorification hoisted upon a specific group of people is to me nonsensical, cynical, false, dangerous. It was to her, too, but not as strongly, less strongly the older she got. Her love for the people and for the myth of the people increased with age, becoming a behemoth, a gentle one, as she aged, inordinately, in her dying, an accelerated devotion. But it wasn’t that what we saw was so dissimilar, but that we saw it with a divergent level of empathy, the difference not in the sight of our intelligence, but vision of our forgiveness. She criticized with love; I, hate (self-hate?). She gave motherly instruction, from a daughter. Wasn’t it the love Naira had for her mother that grew into the love she developed for her motherland? And didn’t I often hate my country and its people like I sometimes hate my mother and father, hating that I was born to care about them, no choice, hating how much I love them, no matter what they do, that there was no freedom from loving them?

She wanted me to have a better, healthier, closer connection with Bosnia, with Mostar, on that trip and in my life. Writing about it was enough of a connection for me, enough thought and passion and, yes, love conferred. (I always chose, and always will, language over faith, or, rather, faith in language over faith in religion, but Naira made English a liturgical tongue. Religion and language matured together and in Armenia never separated. Neither did it in her writing, its ecclesiastical inflections, its moral, stylish, priestly pronouncements.) So it was that many Bosnian traditions—public feasts and personal appetites, wedding and funeral rituals, customary expressions of merriment and mourning—I knew only in their Armenian versions; she brought me back home consciously and by accident, the way she always steered me back to her. She directed me toward finding, not meaning, but acceptance in my heritage, and pleasure from that acceptance; I wouldn’t, she believed, receive it from any other place. It did improve my writing. My compassion, too: in both of our countries, one curses God and asks forgiveness from God in the same breath, from the same heart. But isn’t that true in all countries, in all hearts?

//

The slow plumes and ruptured wisps of June, my last month in Mostar. In the summer Mostar felt more forgiving, despite the heat, the people on the street seeming more sympathetic to my pain. Maybe I felt this only because I’d soon be leaving. The longer the days, the longer my walks; I wandered the days away: Old Town, new town, eastside, westside, Muslim, Catholic, I kept exploring within the town’s confinement.

It was easier to speak her name in higher solitudes—there aren’t any hikers in Bosnia, only hitchhikers—though the gusts up there took my breath away before my mouth could form and air more orisons. I liked the sky bearing down on me, especially during stormy weather, which was less frequent in gauze-blue June but ferocious and spectacular whenever it did come; I’d be up there then, under clouds low, dark, and shimmering, to listen to the muffled loudness of still distant thunder, hear lightning crack like a pomegranate, see it behind the Catholic hills, seeds bursting in the lightless glimmer.

Up there it did make me wonder how I’d hold up this grief for the rest of this life.

Still, always, I looked for beauty. I found that up there too. Found it below as well, glancing upward. A casual look melting into a gaze. Gazing at the melting blues of mountains. At the layered evanescence of mountains, like of memory. A peaked cap of snow, a hood of fog. The fiery ridge of dusk. The cool glaze of dawn over those mountains had a distinct alpine tint. After all, they’re called the Dinaric Alps. These, my home mountains, stretching past Sarajevo, all the way to the border, and beyond, with their near-perianal snowcaps and the apple, pear, cantaloupe-green spring fog around their hypothetical peaks, and the luminous margins of dawn and dusk picking away at and restoring them. Having been witness to suffering here, as if fated, from birth it seems, I’d make myself now a willful witness to the beauty of my birthplace.

But I felt none of the pangs of bitter romance Naira felt when she thought and wrote—even just the name—about Ararat, Armenia’s national mountain, but within the wrongful border of Turkey, disputed land, stolen, cleansed. Not even the massive cross roused the dark fascination that arose in her soul at the meaning of Ararat. Neither had war, the rumor of artillery on the hill where the cross is erected, under which I’d grown up and then fled like those from under Ararat had fled when the rumor was confirmed (by a stammered declaration of mortars). The landscape of Bosnia never became symbolic for me, and I didn’t connect it on any deep, passionate, destined level with the people “chosen” to live on it, never able to metamorphize it in my mind into a fated embalm of and for its inhabitants. Or in my heart. Nobody belonged to this land and this land belonged to nobody. Like the world.

Or in my soul. Naira claimed a simple, pure Armenian soul; did I possess a simple and pure Bosnian soul beneath all these layers of American metafiction, the second skin of parody with which I protected myself from the hurt of the past? I doubt it; I have never written about Bosnia in my fiction the way Naira wrote, in her nonfiction, about Armenia. My characters maybe did, but not me. No numinous stone churches built from the mountain and built into it, no spiritual root to the land, no sacred manifest virtue in the place or its people.

On Sundays, I’d pass the church-going crowd filling the street as service let out, coming from my personal early mass. A faint, ritual serenity on clinical faces, no one too enraptured. I kept a safe distance, but was close enough to glimpse the back pews, their veneered glow, through the entrance, curtained velvet. One day, walking by one of the churches on the westside, a light rain was falling, darkening the blue-streaming, amber-blotched windows, the bells robust, striding, fluid, motioning through air like oars through water. Nothing’s lonelier than a Sunday, I thought, struck by the beauty of it all: stained windows, church bells, the gray-green, soft rain, the Sunday quiet—the relative pedestrian paradise of a Sunday. Nothing made me lonelier or more connected to the world than beauty. I wondered then if beauty, my connection to the world, is also what connects me to Mostar, and if there’s a special beauty to this place only people born in this place, people from this place, people like me, could appreciate, or if there’s, and I possess, a specifically Bosnian appreciation of beauty wherever encountered. Or both, that all my sense and appreciation of beauty, here or anywhere, is informed, is inspired, by my simple, pure Bosnian soul, born out of its desire for return.

I thought then of the Cavafy poem we both loved, how there was no new country, no other shore, that Mostar would always pursue me, that I would always end up in this city, and that if I wasted my life here, I’d destroy it everywhere in the world. Then I thought that Naira already understood this. But then the cathedral bells started to toll, heavily, territorially, with an auctioneer’s resonance, muffling the distant minarets but also the gentler bells nearby, rising above human speech and birdsong, smothering everything, drowning out even the rain.

That lonely, individualizing beauty that made me lonely because it made me recognize, so clearly, so fiercely, my individuality, that simultaneously isolated me from and united me to this living world, a beauty that felt like homecoming, that was all I understood, all I understand, and I did know it in Mostar, and I knew it, too, this beauty, in Germany, my place of refuge after the war, and all over immigrant America, and in our travels—but I knew this beauty most of all in Naira and in our borderless love. There, with her, I became accustomed to quieter, more benevolent, and evanescent sounds, a softer, yet more powerful, oar-like celerity, a continental spaciousness with the depth of all the oceans.

So I walked around Mostar mourning the home I found in Naira’s love, not the home I lost there. Not, despite their beauty, the many churches or mosques, not a toddler’s stilted run up to a ball, the small spastic movements of their stiff, trembling limbs, or the hurrying old man with a chessboard under his arms, not, despite their beauty, the mountains or the blackbirds, or the college boys bowing in prayer, neither the black liquorice slickness of a newly paved road nor the browned, fresh, crisped heel of my mother’s homemade bread, not napping on a narrow lean bench seat in the saunish warmth of my aunt’s summer kitchen or ferrying off to sleep on the balcony of my parents’ apartment, watching the river, the green swagger of its lithe current. Mourning none of it, but attentive to it all, at home in my noticing, I felt I was a small part of everything around me and that a small part of everything around me was within me, even the silver-black echoing roar of a motorcycle fleetingly caught in the mesh of my consciousness.

I was at home, too, in my grief; the same home, after all, as love. All the world’s beauty corresponds to Naira, but pity, too, to her and me. In Mostar it was reflected everywhere I went, lost, shipless, without a road, walking past dilapidated buildings, their flaking existence like my own, all the color peeling off. Past a former shopping mall made gaunt and enigmatic by war, and beautiful too, the grotesque, surprising, capacious beauty of all of those bombed-out buildings. Past so many wartime ruins, of which I was one, every window blown out, their shadowy emptiness a ghostly howl now, though I could well imagine the torrents of all that shrieking glass, because I’d heard it myself, almost daily, that almost musical shattering. The fullest part of my life was now hollowed out too, but lit from inside, shadow-haunted, by her. I was the ash and dust of her destruction. But there were plenty of human remains in Mostar too, the widowed and the orphaned, and those like her parents.

I was broken down so completely, fine as powder. Stray dogs scurried at my approach, and I wondered how badly they’ve been broken, beaten into submission, and by what means. Then I remembered how I’d thought of myself as a whimpering dog too, no more, and no less, than a cowering animal. What pity I had for all of them, the stray dogs and the mangy feral cats that eyed me with enough suspicion to last me several lifetimes. For all strays, orphans, ghosts, for the thin, hunched, pensive, old-looking middle-aged men with their amnesiac, drifter’s gaits, my future selves, also my present selves. (When my mother, to win an argument I no longer want to fight or win—how she has more wisdom about suffering, how she’s suffered more wisdom—says she has lived longer than me, I think: nobody has lived longer than me. I’m already so old, older than my father, older than my mother, older than their griefs.) There they go, those men, and they seem mostly men, with that pronounced uncertainty in their step, an oblique emptiness in their gaze, mouthing words with sub-aquatic opaqueness, hands making floating, tentative, stalled gestures of conversation, not the tense, baton-like, Slavic gesticulations of the living—there they are in the supermarket, ambivalent and submerged, browsing each aisle, but not there to buy anything, just to pass the time, to waste it, to spend it, among the living.

But I was never fated to Mostar, though I’d always end up in this city and my new life had to start here. On the very last day in Mostar the sight of a dead kitten on the side of the road would’ve scared me if there was anything left to be afraid about. There was no omen in its fate, only pity in its circumstance. I’d known that after L.A., that after Naira, wherever I went, I’d feel out of place, so I went where I was born, where feeling out of place felt most natural. Where the end of exile is home is the start of exile. Not the natural circularity of destiny, just the vertigo of taking random, hurried, desperate shelter from misfortune. She was my home. Naira alone. Naira. Her name now a rumor on those mountains.

//

Los Angeles was Naira’s place of protection, the place of her final protection the way Armenia was of the first. I felt no such protection in Mostar, or anywhere in America, the protection of home. Or the illusion of protection and of home. But illusion is also a sanctuary. What remains of her, though it too may only be an illusion, still protects me. But there’s for me no home in this world, and I won’t look for one here. Instead, I want the freedom, or the burden, of the ferryman, compelled to motion and constrained in movement by the lack of an origin and the absence of a homecoming, noncommittal, ambivalent about arrival—or of the bridge-keepers that gave Mostar its name, bridges places of constant transition, for the immigrants of the world, for all of life’s refugees, its pilgrims of grief. Below, the river, long cleansed of its water spirits, somewhat polluted, still beams with a mineral sheen accessible to enchantment: the heavenly, earthbound glow of oxidized copper in its limestone.

A hard, emerald, light-filled, enduring, definite magic.

But in the next life I want off the bridge. Not into water, nearly mute and almost fluent, among yet more stone, not into the decorated earth or incredible, common fire, but skyward—into higher air. Outside Naira’s house there are oaks, their seeds littering the sidewalk. The light is everywhere. In the next life I don’t want my presence on earth to be that of ghost or demon, neither dog nor wolf, but like a sparrow taking flight, a colored shiver of holy, organic matter.