They sit in two places, a café and a bench across the street, and they stand in a third place of that intersection. There are more bridgewatchers than this, in apartments above our heads, but I have never actually seen them, only heard of them. On the bench outside of the corner store they sit, two or three of them, talking or reading newspapers. There are rarely less than two there and they have perhaps the least obstructed view of the bridge.

The view from Dolce Vita may allow a longer view, all the way down the road to the south, but the music, women, windows and beer: all these things provide distractions from a truly clear view. Unlike the men in the café, the men on the bench cannot be mistaken to be there for any of these other reasons. They are simply there to watch the bridge, casually and unashamedly. I have never felt threatened by them. Their watch is so steady and methodical that I feel myself accepted as a simple fact. We do not greet one another when I pass, but most of them probably recognize me from my regular walks. Those who do not at least my recognize my type; my clothes and hair, stature, backpack—these things signal a foreigner: an international or tourist. Only once, in the days after independence, was I challenged there. A young boy met me on the corner and asked if I was Albanian. No? English? Spanish? I felt my face turning red under the gaze of his father standing a few feet behind him, proudly observing his son’s first interrogation while I, miscast as Peter, was forced to denounce something I could not claim if I had wanted to. No, I said: Are you? And I walked away, immediately regretting it. But I never saw that boy or his father there again. They were not regulars. The men on the bench are uniformly middle-aged and tired. Their glances are guarded but not necessarily hostile, the look of cautious shift workers awaiting their replacements, reading the sports pages and handling their cell phones, ready to report if need be, should Armageddon arrive.

Dolce Vita is across the street, set back from the road behind the empty fountain. The contingency of bridgewatchers there are on average younger and tougher, but the café is full of others too. UN police officers and KFOR, and representatives of the entire international community. Fashion TV plays on the flat screens, near-naked models traveling the catwalk, back and forth. Girls sit in pairs and gossip, tossing their hair. You might mistake it for an ordinary Balkan café, Euro-trash and noise, rap blending with classic rock, disco, folk songs and Gypsy Kings, unaware of any incongruity, repetitive and boisterous, weak liquor and macchiato, and it is an ordinary Balkan café; it only happens to be the one favored by the younger set of local toughs for its location, and their conversation only sometimes veers towards the perceived threat from the south. If something did happen, if…to be sure, there would be at least a few there ready and eager to join in. But this is a less organized front, a reinforcement standing down over dirty ashtrays and bottles of Jelen.

A few feet up the road, before the fountain and the kiosks, are an occasional supplementary guard, and these are the ones who I have been most at pains to avoid, if only because of their irregularity. They might be there one day or not, for a few minutes or an hour, and they are undoubtedly talking only about the ordinary things of life. But they are also watching, they turn from their conversation and look over their shoulders, lean against the taxis and pretend not to watch the bridge. They might be entering or leaving the nearby teahouse, but they linger their by the kiosks for a little while. They are contemporaries of those on the bench, but somehow not on duty, only temporarily watching, or maybe carrying out an assignment to confirm that others are watching. They do not recognize me, and so turn to look after me longer, and I stay on the east side of the road when I see them there. Standing, they are less at ease; leaning against the taxis they are somehow more unbalanced, more nearly in motion.

Some of the high apartments are reported to be theirs as well, the real bases with the long view. Do they use binoculars? Walkie-talkies or only cell phones? Passwords and call signs? I do not know. I have not been there; have only heard about these from internationals who say they know. It is not clear to me, but I am ready to assume a lot of things to be true. The bridgewatchers themselves would have us believe that they are an organized force, ready to act at a moment’s notice and in fact I believe that they are less organized than they say but more organized than I can see, looking at this unemployed man on the bench, pulling a cigarette from his shirt pocket.

The bridgewatchers and other parallel structures are like this, known and also unknown. In a Houston bar I was asked a question I had not considered. A friend asked me, Are there tanks on the streets? Yes, I said, not immediately understanding how this could be in question. Perhaps not tanks every day, but caravans of jeeps and more foreboding military vehicles, soldiers behind mounted guns, Spanish flag or French. But then I realized that he considered this unusual, and also that I no longer did. I am accustomed to the military, and in fact they are ordinary, as ordinary as their parallels.

There are French bridgewatchers too. They stand on the south end, talking to Roma boys. The dogs love them. They lay in the middle of the bridge and around. There are dogs at every border crossing—they find the hands of soldiers more friendly to dogs—and our bridge, our border crossing, is no exception. They are all a part of Mitrovica as I know it. Maybe you don’t have these in your town. A year and a half has gone by. I don’t really think about any of them very often anymore.

 

Blackbird is an American blogger living in Mitrovica.