We’re driving, and objects are closer than they once appeared. Braking hard for cattle and tractors, wagons stacked a story high with hay and always one man perched on the top, the lookout in the mast: land-ho. Always a car from Sweden or Norway is threatening, inches away from the rear bumper. Kosovo was different from the back of the bus, where the double-paned windows trapped the rainwater and made an Atlantis of the Balkans. Back then our companions were families from the village crowded into the aisles, students on their way to Pristina and elderly drunks. Back then we stopped in every village and the door opened to release the sharpening odor of men. For small change on the bus we saw the small difference between north and south, Kosovo and Serbia, Macedonia and Albania.

(Then we bought a car from a shatzi. He’ll fly back to Germany with our cash in his pocket this very afternoon if only we’ll agree to a reasonable price. It’s a family car, and we won’t take their advice, we’ll drive in Kosovo no matter what people say, we’re ready to drive with the best of them and the rest of them. The poorest European nation with cars puzzled neatly together on its sidewalks, cars towing cars, cars cramming the streets so tight and slow you can walk past them at twice the speed but not between them—I wouldn’t recommend that—and we’re ready now to swim in the mechanical river. Ready to bathe our car with the rest of them, frequently and with vigor, spraying rationed water and scrubbing and spraying again while Belgian soldiers take a coffee and observe the proceedings, their green and black machinery drying in the sun. More than a Euro a liter we’ll pay and pay, and wash and drive.)

We’re driving, gunning and thrusting ahead for every spare inch of the road we can grab, yelling at the young men careening around us into oncoming traffic and back. They’re skipping ahead one place and then skipping up again, or else stopping completely in order to shout greetings to friends driving in the other direction: they’re driving against everyone else and hardly ever dying. They’re heading to town while we’re heading north and west on the two-lane road to Mitrovica when we’re accidentally swept into a convoy. Gendarme and shiny black SUVs with blue and white KFOR plates, camouflaged personnel carriers and the white vans and block letters of the United Nations.

(We’ve joined their wagon train, our family car well protected to the front and back, but they’re traveling to Mitrovica for the protest while we only meant to drink a coffee with our friends. Together we exit into the center of town and wave to the KPS in his kiosk at the confidence zone. We bump onto the curb there and stop driving. We walk north past the increased security and leave the convoy behind. Everyone has left their cars by the side of the road and now they are walking north. The sounds of Orthodox chants and Slavic folksongs are playing in protest of the European mission, and half the population is walking past now, up the hill, to the rally.)

We’re driving, and tearing chunks of the brittle asphalt from the ground, releasing the black stone pebble infrastructure, defying some someone in the Ministry to try it again. Only the Belgians are left parked at the bridge. They lean there against the doors of their well-washed vehicles, and they lean against the post with its dead stoplights incapable of demanding that anyone go or stay in place.

 

"Blackbird" is an American artist living in Kosovo.