What of this is real

The city is real.

The streets, the neighbourhoods, the bridges, the market, the counter hall, the hospital, the graveyard and the fortresses above Vratnik exist and stand where the map says they stand. Not one coordinate in this book was estimated from memory. Every one of them is tied to a point in OpenStreetMap and compared against it, because the first version had estimated coordinates and Alipašino ended up on Otoka.

That is not a small thing. The whole weight of this novel comes down on exactly which entrance is in which building. If the map lies, not one sentence above it is worth anything.

The companies are not real.

The estate agency, the notary’s office, the care service and the bar carry invented names. The pin sometimes stands on real premises, and that is deliberate, because it gives the correct geography, but the name and everything done under that name are invented. Before any name was adopted, it was checked that it did not land on any business that exists in the city.

This is not a legal disclaimer but decency. The book needed somebody to be taking flats, and no office that exists in Sarajevo deserved to have that put on it because I needed one.

The people are not real. Not one character is written after anybody, including the ones it would be easy to recognise by the job they do.

What is real is everything else.

The lifetime maintenance contract exists, it is regulated by law, it is made in front of a notary, and there is nothing unlawful in it. People sign it for the reasons given in the book and for a dozen others. A notary is not obliged by law to separate the parties and ask an older person in private whether she understands what she is signing. Some of them do it. They are not obliged to.

Addresses in the Sarajevo estates are a real problem. Buildings have lamelas and entrances, in many places the letters have fallen off or been painted over, in places the numbering runs the opposite way round from the way the street reads, and a man who did not grow up in that estate can stand in front of the right building and be completely lost. The ambulance service knows it. The delivery firms know it. Everybody knows it and nobody writes it down anywhere.

And this is real: in the systems this book has been through, from the record of calls to the land register, there is no field in which it is written that a man is on his own. There is none, there is no code for it, and not one of those institutions has any duty to record it.

That is nobody’s fault. That is a description of the job.

The rest is invented, and for the rest I answer.

A note on the translation

Some things in this book are left as they stand in Bosnia. They are explained here, and each of them once.

An address in the Sarajevo estates runs number, then lamela, then entrance. A lamela is one wing of a single building, with its own entrance and its own stairwell, and a building of several lamelas can hold six hundred people. A number on its own therefore reaches a building and not a door. English has no word for this and the book does not invent one, so lamela stays, with an English plural.

The ambulance is reached on 124, which is what 999 is here.

Money is in marks. The currency is the convertible mark and everybody there says marks, which is what the book says. Nothing is converted anywhere in this edition, because a sum given in another currency is a sum from another place.

Exitus is the word a doctor writes instead of died. It is Latin in Bosnian too, and it stays Latin here for the reason it is used there, which is that it costs the person writing it nothing.

1/1 is how the land register records sole ownership of the whole of a property. It is the ordinary notation and it is what an advertisement puts in when it wants a buyer to know there is nobody else to ask.

The cannon fires from the fortress above the old town at sunset through Ramadan, the month of the fast, to say that the day is done. Half the city sets its evening by it, and a man who goes up to hear it is going up for the sound.

Kod svojih is the name of a care service and keeps its Bosnian form, as company names do. It means something close to among your own people.

Bosnian has two words where English has one. A dženaza is the Islamic funeral rite, and this edition keeps the Bosnian word for it. The other word is the burial counted as a cost, the thing that has to be paid for, and that is what this edition calls a funeral. The book holds the two apart and so does the English.