Stops along the route
Places
19 places where this novel is set. The streets, the buildings and the addresses are real and stand where the book says they stand. The company names are not. A lamela is one wing of a single building, with its own entrance and its own stairwell.
Alipašino Polje, phase B
The neighbouring phase, six hundred metres west. The buildings are the same, only the square has a different name and the lift works. In the flat on the second floor everything has been in its place since ninety-nine, and nine framed photographs are lined up by height.
43.84169, 18.34480Alipašino Polje, phase C
A lamela a hundred and twenty metres long, with two rows of balconies glazed in eight different ways, because it was done over thirty years and everybody glazed their own as best they could. Four entrances, set along its length, every thirty metres or so. Not one of them has a letter on it.
43.84613, 18.35238Bare city graveyard
It is bigger than some neighbourhoods in this city. It has its own streets, they have signs on them, and the people who work here speak of them as streets. Plot nineteen is on the northern side, behind the waterworks, where the ground falls away and where the snow lies two weeks longer than in the valley.
43.87639, 18.39744Čengić Vila
One room, a kitchen area along the wall and a bathroom you go into sideways. The furniture is the landlady’s, including a framed photograph of Mostar that the tenant did not put up and has not taken down. Over the window there is a blanket, because after a night shift you sleep in the daytime.
43.84771, 18.37079Dobrinja III
The western end of the city, where the valley stops being a valley. The lift in the building works, but it stops between the third and the fourth floor and then goes on, and because of that older people do not use it but climb on foot.
43.83032, 18.35101Ključ nekretnine, Dalmatinska 2
A ground floor in a narrow street the sun does not get into in winter. Two desks, a shelf of box files, last year’s calendar that nobody has taken down, and a coffee machine that works. The logo is stuck to the glass from the inside, so from the street you see only its shadow.
43.85904, 18.42045Kod Zaima
A small bar on Trg solidarnosti, with that smell that rooms have where people smoked for twenty years and then stopped. The television is on with no sound. At the counter sit two men who do not know each other and who keep quiet together.
43.84531, 18.35175Koševo, A and E
A and E. A corridor and two rows of chairs, and paper, because at night everything is written down on paper, since paper is faster than anything they have been given.
43.86972, 18.41490Malta, by the warehouse
A passage between two buildings, the one people go through to make the walk to the stop shorter. Across the way is a warehouse where people worked shifts for thirty years. Half the neighbourhood goes through here and nobody raises their head, because after a night shift you go the shortest way.
43.85565, 18.38190Market, Alipašino Polje phase A
Twenty or so stalls under a canopy, and another ten that spread out onto the tarmac in summer. People do not come here once a week but every day, because they buy little. Nobody pushes, everybody knows the queue and everybody knows the stallholder.
43.84614, 18.35026Maršala Tita, from thirteen to twenty-seven
A row of buildings along the main street. The ground floors are shops, and above them are offices: a language school, a physiotherapist, agencies, notaries, and one brass plate on every second floor. Here you wait, and that is the only thing that is done here until your turn comes. Not one of the people waiting looks like somebody something terrible is happening to.
43.85893, 18.42066Mojmilo
The same buildings, the same lamelas and the same numbers that skip, only under a different hill. On one side the numbering runs backwards. Nobody has reported it, because that is not a thing that gets reported.
43.83817, 18.34616Novi Grad police station
Prvomajska twenty-two. A building that looks like every other building of its kind: an entrance at the side, a porter behind glass, and on the noticeboard in the corridor three notices of which the most recent is from last year.
43.84410, 18.35479Općina Novi Grad, the counter hall
A long room with seven counters, four of which are working, and a display that skips numbers. People come there before it opens. They stand against the wall, they do not talk, and every one of them knows exactly where they are in the queue although nobody has signed in.
43.84672, 18.35456Otoka
A neighbourhood along the Miljacka, between Alipašino and Čengić Vila. A market hall under a canopy, a passage where keys are cut and watch batteries changed, and residential estates from the seventies, all of them to the same plan.
43.84741, 18.36557The ambulance service
A room with no windows, six desks and one screen on each. The ventilation runs at two speeds, quiet and quieter, and it never goes off completely. On the wall there are two maps of Sarajevo, one old and one new, and on both of them people have for years written with a marker things that mattered only to them.
43.85429, 18.38550The ramparts above Vratnik
Four fortresses stand above the old part of the city: Bijela, Žuta, Crvena and Zmajevac. You go up Vratnik on foot or you do not go, because the taxi stops where the street narrows, and it narrows early. From up there the whole valley can be seen, and in the morning the city comes on from the bottom upwards, estate by estate, as if somebody were going along the streets and lighting it by hand.
43.86146, 18.43773Vogošća
The northern end of the valley, twenty minutes from the city. The houses have climbed up the sides, and between them are gardens with folded polytunnels. In winter it is two degrees colder here than in the city and it is felt at once.
43.90183, 18.34329Vrelo Bosne
A park at the western end of the valley. An avenue of plane trees three kilometres long leads to it, straight, without a single bend. In winter there is nobody on it but a man with a dog, and it is the only road in this city on which you can see who is walking behind you.
43.82197, 18.27219