Author Archives: E

Today in Budapest, a strong, cool wind from the northwest. I sit on the warm sandstone wall at the edge of the Danube, and I turn my face toward the wind, and I button my cardigan and close my eyes. The Danube gives way to the Sava. As I remember it, the Sava moves slowly [...]

In Budapest, in the kitchen overlooking the alley, Vesna boils coffee on the stove and pours it into glass mugs. I search my memory for the Serbian words for gratitude, and I think about drinking coffee this way in Chicago, in Sremcica, in Ivanjica. Three summers ago, we sat in his grandparents’ house outside Belgrade, [...]

An old Budapest flat filled with books, a high-ceilinged bathroom, a cast-iron tub. I plug the drain and turn the hot water faucet, and the gas heater hisses. I take off my dusty clothes and climb in. My legs are bruised from nights braced against adjacent seats in the bus or on the train. My [...]

There was a long night on a plane diverted through Dakar, then out from West Africa. A day in Paris, an hour watching the sun on the windows of Notre Dame. On the night bus to Munich, the man behind me shared the food his sister had given to him. Two days ago I was [...]

Deep in the unbuilt industrial district of this city, we sit at a terrace bar that shares a wall with an unfinished hotel. We listen to music at a dark table, my friend closing his eyes and shaking his head in his quiet way. I do not know how to describe the music here, the [...]

Last night, we dragged our foam mattresses up to the concrete roof of the house, tied a mosquito net to the underside of the satellite dish, and slept under the nearly full moon. This morning I woke up to see the egrets overhead, white and crooked-necked, flying west to the river. An hour later, we [...]

She was nineteen years old and already ten days blind. On Friday, I touched her shoulder, then lifted her eyelid with my thumb and leaned in with a borrowed ophthalmoscope. She fixed her eyes straight ahead, rested her hands in her lap, did not speak. The fundus of her eye was red and crossed with [...]

In the yard, I make airplanes out of torn notebook pages, the creases in the paper already red from the dust on my fingers. A young man roasts a rat over a small fire, then eviscerates it with a dull knife and hangs the charred body from a tree. The little boys fly the airplanes [...]

At sunset, I sit outside the walled compound, in a plastic chair, in the patch of dirt alongside the new ditch. The older children have been digging this ditch all afternoon, the younger dangling their legs over the edge and watching boys play soccer across the way. Dark comes fast; the soccer game and the [...]

We drove ten hours north and east from the capital, speeding over new roads. Camels kneel on the sidestreets here, and the wells at the edge of town are crowded with people lowering and lifting plastic containers for water. Late last night, I was woken by the sound of metal shutters clanging against the window-grates. [...]