What I don’t know I make up, I fill in gaps with whatever I have handy and in this way I can piece together something more or less continuous. You should see what I’m working with, though — the archive is very thin in places and always, always raises more questions than it answers. I also never know what records will be available to me on the day; sometimes I will have been with something very interesting which helps to provide context and then even later that same visit, sorry, the room is locked, the records inaccessible, call back tomorrow. Or never, it’s all the same. The trick is not expecting anything at all, but I have discovered that playing sevdah helps access some of the more fragile fragments. Today’s visit yielded this one:

Bojana was married to some man in Bihać and didn’t take to it, returning heavily pregnant some time later and refusing to speak of the matter. At some point she took to living outdoors (why? unclear) but would sometimes deign to sleep in a hayloft, on top of one blanket, with another over her, and then hay was piled on top of her until she said, enough (how much was enough? it depended. Ideally until all that could be seen was the little pipe she kept clenched between her teeth, the red ember in the bowl winking in the darkness as she inhaled). When grown her son entered the army because all men had to do military service (where had he been in the meanwhile? Did he also sleep in haylofts? The hayloft came after, and there is no record of the intervening years, but Christ himself had a similar lacuna, don’t get picky) and came back to visit once and only once. She was terrifying, a kind of village Baba Yaga and people would threaten their children with her but she was also kind. She drank, a lot, and sometimes could be found in front of the village party HQ bellowing that she was milking the government! Ten entire dinars a month! (this was peanuts, it’s why she relied on charity, she went to people’s houses and they fed her). Everyone loved her and then one day she disappeared and when the ice on the river Una melted, there she was, she who would never so much as cross the what’s it called, oh god, I hate this, the most (bridge? yes bridge). She hated moving water (how old was she? ageless. did she have family? possibly, I don’t know).

At this point the archive sighs, exhausted, and asks for the second time today how old it is. You’re seventy nine now, I say, with the same cadence I used the first time.

Seventy nine. I’m really getting up there.