I would like to have told the woodcutter that I was buying in Mitrovica out of a regional preference: that I preferred to patronize the people of our old town. But I did not have the Albanian words to express this sentiment, and the truth was that I simply hadn’t been able to manage buying wood in Pristina. I visited the markets but never saw a woodcutter, and I met no one in the city who could tell me where they gathered. From our landlady I knew the price, but she could not describe in English the location, so I wandered for a few mornings. Meanwhile winter was approaching, and the price of wood was rising, so finally I gave up on this city and drove instead to where I knew the woodcutters gathered in Mitrovica. The price was the same, and the conversation we could manage was the kind I was already comfortable with. We compared brands of cigarettes, we talked about our origins, and we badmouthed the capital city, where, I agreed, the girls were not as pretty.

All the men were sufficiently impressed by my drive—a short hour—for wood, although I am certain that they could not ascertain the reason for it, and they argued amongst themselves: competing theories about my motivations. The boss watched while one man chopped and another loaded the back of our station wagon full. I helped load as much whenever the boss looked away, but then he intervened when he caught me at it and insisted that such work was beneath me, so I spent the better part of the time leaning against the car, trying to look away from the woodcutter at his dangerous work. He raised the axe over his shoulder and brought it down, pulling his left hand away from the top of each slim and unsteady log at the last possible second, so that his left arm swung up like the suddenly freed half of a lever; the blade splitting its way through the log, or glancing of a knot and skittering further down through his legs.

It might be true that I only loved Mitrovica because I knew it; knew where to find the woodcutters, knew the best cafe for company and the best for being alone, knew the price of tea, coffee and beer. I allowed that I might feel this way, one day, about Pristina too, but: who would I hate then? What population would be left for me to scorn, to feel superior to? The woodcutters and I agreed: Pristina was a crowded place, soulless and indifferent to the particular concerns of much of the rest of Kosovo. It was easy to feel disdain for the political posturing and international misjudgments made there, but more than that: it was helpful to feel that way. Pristina made an easy enemy, and when I moved there I lost that, and it affected me deeply. I lost the enemy I had chosen, and there was no ready replacement. Honestly: I cannot now say who any of us are without our enemies. So who am I to blame now? Now that I no longer am “from Mitro.”

A foreigner from Mitrovica might have less ready disregard for Serbs, and less regard for the people in power, international and local alike. This left no one to blame, and without blame I ran out of things to say. This is what Kosovo did to me, and Pristina. First Kosovo, or rather my Kosovo: but only because Mitrovica charmed me, first with its novelty and strangeness that only an outsider could feel, and then with its separation from the rest of Kosovo, its easy and obvious place between opposing sides. I could take their sides, one or the other, or both, and risk nothing in doing so. I could play the part of knowing something that others might not, of observing and talking.

But Pristina took this away from me. The newspapers printed lies one day and completely other ones the next. Never once did I read a retraction. I stopped reading the newspapers, and when I did this I knew even less. I felt arrogant and stupid at the same time. [How else can you explain my desire to take a job that a local should have, while not even realizing that the position had been filled fays before?] I could no longer alight on a truth of any kind, no matter how subjective that truth may be: I could not understand the truth of Pristina.

It was easy to see how the last ten years had affected the people of Mitrovica. The physical signs are no less apparent than the cultural ones. These direct truths that lay on both sides of the river… I could not find anything like them in the capital. Everywhere people were rushing to do things I could not understand. Rushing to get business degrees in a non-economy. Rushing to leave the country for good. Rushing to judgment about those villagers, politicians, those people in the north and especially those Serbs they did not know, had not met, would not meet. Lauding the well-timed recognition of neighboring states and granting of European funds while showing few signs of having earned them. I could not understand their decisions, their taste or their intentions. I did not feel that I could understand Pristina.

A friend of mine showed me around Gjakova. It was a beautiful day, and I was impressed by beautiful things in the town. We discussed the non-economy and poverty in the Balkans, and he suggested that I write down some of my thoughts about it. I would like to do so, but I think that I need to wait, just a little while, until I feel a little less lost in the city that is defying an easy description for me. The charms of Gjakova and Mitrovica both are strange to me now. I do not want to present them how they once appeared to me, and sometimes still do: foreign and precious, unique and eternal. Pristina has tarnished this charm. It has told me that I only relied before on half the story, and even that I preferred the past I imagined to the present that confused me. It is easy to describe Mitrovica and Gjakova: their easiest stories are mapped in stones and winding roads, Turkish homes and Sufi tombs, shots of rakia and flags, flags, flags. Pristina is less loveable, but more: it is less anything at all.

A self-assessment at twenty months? I am less trustful than I once was. My local friends congratulate me on this, saying that it is a weakness to trust overmuch. But I do not wish to agree with them yet, for how else will we proceed? The newspapers, and the constant bargaining that declares, in a way, that we are not all in this together. I lost some small money to someone I trusted, there have been fights with crooked people, and other incidents too.

I left the woodcutter in a station wagon jammed with well-chopped wood. I left there and went to visit my bees, who seemed to be as intently preparing for winter as I: only a few were moving outside of the hive, and the box hummed strongly—a secret engine was at work in there. I drove into town and drank a couple of beers with a photographer friend and then drove home, immersed in a strong scent released by that axe blade some hours before. Condensation covered the windows. That night I had nightmares: that I didn’t know how to judge a cubic meter of wood; I didn’t know what kind of wood burned best, and so on. Even small successes here left me with equal sized doubts. I decided to take some time off from thinking about Kosovo.

"Blackbird" is an American artist living in Kosovo.