By Tea Bajraktarevic

On the eve of civil war, a professor meets a mysterious stranger at a Balkan crossroads. First prize winner in the English Department's 2005 Edward W. Moses Creative Writing Competition.

Self rule is the greatest ambition of any occupied nation. With the fall of Turkish rule in Yugoslavia after two years of war, it finally looked like a possibility. But without a cohesive national identity, ethnicity becomes the thing that we hold close to ward off the night.

“How extremely odd,” the Serb said, and pulled his mustache twice to get the chill out.

Professor Ognen Vukovic stood at the crossroads of Brejevina and Stukica one evening in October, contemplating the shrine of the Virgin on the other side of the road, his mouth full of dried apricots. Someone, probably some passing gypsy, had draped a wolf-skin over the arms of the cross above the shrine. The teeth gnawed weightlessly at the damp wooden board, and one yellow glass eye had popped out and now dangled away from the socket.

The tradition was supposedly a commonplace one, but he had never seen it in practice. The gypsies were a most superstitious people, and, besides being eternally suspected of child theft and village hexes, they were renowned for littering the roads they traveled most often with wards to keep the devil at bay. A wolf-skin thus hung was intended to reinforce the protective powers of the Virgin. It fascinated him, this convergence of Christian and pagan ritual, though he shuddered at seeing it for the first time when he was so far from home.

The shrine stood draped in a canopy of wet foliage on the opposite side of the highway, or what the Slovenians called a highway because it was unpaved and wound like an enormous serpent across the slope before disappearing in the dark gullet of the forest. The sun had set some twenty minutes beforehand, and he felt crushed by the dusk, by the swiftness with which it had come upon him, alone in the middle of God-knew-where. Vukovic pulled his coat higher, and watched a vaporous fog crawl down the mountainside.

He did not know when the Brejevina coach would arrive to take him across the border, but he had come here early and he knew that the river, swollen with the winter rains, would delay the carriage. He had no money to take the train, and was twenty miles from the nearest station besides. So he stood in the hush of the satin forest and waited.

Rain had fallen all night, and the gravel path crackled wetly under his boots. He stood in a small alcove of trees where the two roads met, in full view of the shrine at all times, because even he, educated though he was, grew uncomfortable in the Slovenian deeps, where meeting a fox on the road was considered an ill omen one had to guard against by spitting on the ground and turning in place seven times to ward off the devil.

Mr. Vukovic longed for something familiar, and as he stood there he thought he could still smell the warm bread and cheese with which he had been hospitably stuffed at the miller’s house where he’d spent the night. The miller and his wife, a pair of marvelously plump Slovenians, had offered him lodging when he happened upon their hut some five miles up the road the previous evening. You could always count on such people to uphold the epitome of hosting — they did not have much, but what they had they shared with a proud fervor that would have shamed the wealthiest of men.

The miller had refrained from questions concerning his guest’s nationality — a rare thing these days, particularly in the more remote parts of the Balkans. Instead, he had sat across the flour-dusted wooden table, his round belly pressing up against the edge, and become more and more intoxicated as the night wore on. He had interesting ghost stories to tell about the nearby villages: most told of the moral punishments visited upon inconstant wives by their late husbands, who returned from the grave in horse-drawn carriages to exact their revenge. The miller’s wife scoffed at the tales as she served the bread and white cheese, brushing her husband’s large, greedy hands away with her apron. They had been welcome company on this last leg of his journey.

Vukovic wished now, as he looked at the shrine across the road, that he had not listened to so many of their tales, and cursed himself for sleeping so late as to miss all the coaches to Brejevina save this last one. He thought about going back up the road as the sun set, and spending another night in their home, but they had less than he did, and he did not wish to impose. Besides, he disliked the notion of being caught in the woods after nightfall.