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.

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.

All the scant reading materials mention the fact that the cave was discovered in 1969 “by accident,” as if caves were commonly discovered on purpose. (No one expects a hole where there should be dirt and rock: the discovery of a cave must nearly always be an accident.) I feel foolishly proud to be one of the relatively few people I imagine has been admitted since it was opened to the public less than forty years ago. It’s not hard to go in; it’s easy. But, I suppose, relatively few people have, in the scheme of things.

Gadime Cave is named for the village of Gadime, and the walls are not the crumbling limestone I always expect. They are smooth rounded marble, sucked and lumped and emptied from an entire hill of marble. Striped and mottled red and pink and brown, with a ceiling like the bottoms of waves, the underskins of whirlpools and eddies. There are rare crystals, sexually suggestive stalactites and other unusual creations, but few things in the cave are much more wondrous than the tour guide.

“Professor” is a title granted virtually any teacher or holder of a diploma, earned or bought, so we are amused but not surprised to hear an elderly professor on a local television game show misidentify Mariah Carey as the scientist responsible for discovering radium. No, Professor—I’m sorry but the ‘T’ in ‘NATO’ does not stand for ‘Turkish.’ Let’s not be hasty to judge him. Trivia, like bread and liquor, is a cultural phenomenon. The boundaries of societal knowledge are drawn by need, and even intellectual nonessentials must be accompanied by the appropriate documents and a wad of Euros before being cleared through Customs. Like everything else, even trivia clears Customs twice: one upon entering, and once on leaving, on its way to the halls of other government buildings.