My hangover had subsided by the time the bus trundled into Banja Luka. After the drama of getting to Jajce, I was thrilled to enjoy a wholly uneventful journey, the only interesting aspect being a young group of dudes who seemed to be rapping at each other. Two of them seemed to be far more vocal than the rest, and I deduced that they must have been the leaders of this rap troupe. That was as exciting as it got.
The bus station in Banja Luka was located within spitting distance of the train station (depending on the power of your lungs), but neither was particularly close to the city centre. The increasing heat and my general reticence to walk in a vague direction made a taxi inevitable, so I steeled myself for a bungled conversation in a language I didn’t really understand before being told that I spoke it very well, a lie that neither of us really believed. And that is exactly how it transpired, as I told the taxi driver the vague details of my journey from Pale to Banja Luka via Višegrad, Mostar, Sarajevo and the rest in a mangled form of Bosnian (or Serbian, if you asked the driver) before he responded with a surprised “oh” and a seemingly genuine “ti pričaš dobro!”. I knew in my heart of hearts that I didn’t speak dobro, but I was happy for the kind words.
The major problem with this recurring situation is that the driver then takes it on himself to assume that I understand everything (mixing ‘everything’ with ‘enough’, in fairness) before launching into his life story. I worked out from his rapid-fire comments that he spent some time in Algeria, but I wasn’t quick enough to ask why, how or when. Did it matter? Obviously not, as we were both doing little more than playing our roles. Him the friendly taxi driver, me the vaguely educated tourist. All that mattered was that we passed the time before we arrived at my destination, a splendid little apartment complex on the banks of the Vrbas river.
My accommodation for the next few nights was an apartment owned by a mother-daughter duo, although the age of the latter and the English skills of the former made me assume that most of the owning was done by the mother and most of the explaining was done the daughter. They made a fun little team, but it didn’t make me long to work out that the daughter was somewhat autistic. It isn’t always obvious when someone is autistic and neither should it be, but growing up with Bethan and spending plenty of time in the schools she attended (not to mention that whole university degree thing) led me to believe I had a good eye for the condition. This girl was autistic.
I’m not entirely sure why, and I’m not in a position to make a judgment call about it all, but every now and then a conversation with an autistic person will leave me in a bit of a funk. It reminds me of Bethan and the life that she wasn’t able to experience, a life that was always going to somewhat tempered at best. This girl in Banja Luka was explaining to me the intricacies of the city and its history in note-perfect English, finding out information about bus times for me and generally acting the perfect host, but my thoughts could only revert to a nine-year-old girl whose speech only really progressed in her last six months, and even then it was a few choice phrases uttered in response or at random. If Bethan hadn’t died in her sleep, would that development have continued? I don’t think she would have found herself explaining Welshpool to guests in perfect English, but who knows what she could have been capable of? It is all hypothetical and it is rather silly to get upset about the hypothetical, but thoughts of what might have been cause greater despair in me than concrete memories of what I lost.
How are you supposed to deal with grief? By immersing yourself in memory? Hitting the bottle? Or by packing your bags and heading out to Bosnia & Herzegovina, travelling the length and breadth of the state in the hope of coming to terms with the tragic death of a loved one? John Bills chose the latter, and ‘A Currency for the Cat’ is the story of that trip. From Mostar to Jajce via Sarajevo, Trebinje and more, Bills dives deep into the history of this famous country on a most personal level, facing his biggest fear in the face all the while. It is available in digital form from www.poshlostbooks.com.
Poshlost Books 