There was nothing new in Fabo’s story about the car. He always launched into it by tightening and slackening his grip around the steering wheel with its treasured leather cover. Aaaay, those Bosnian floods used to be the harvest to beat. I’d put on boots up to my waist, my dear Gypsies would fetch the hooks, and we’d hit the banks of the Grlonica, up by Stojkovići—you wouldn’t believe. I mean, just feast your eyes on this cover. Those waters’d bring up plastic chairs, good-as-new buckets and canisters, sandals, all sorts of things. All from someone else’s misfortune, but what can you do, Fabo would shrug. You think anyone’s thinking about my misfortunes? And this here car of mine has outlived everything. Fifteen years I’ve been taxiing all over Bosnia, and there’s not a single person out there who could say it ever stalled or ran late… Fabo continued to fortify his defense while trying to start the Mercedes, calmly sucking his teeth until the fifth turn of the key, when the Merdžo obliged him.

Mercedes, model W123, engine 240 was the vehicle’s full name, and Fabo recited it with pride like the name of a squadron or of a noble family he belonged to, rather than the clunker he all but lived in. He uttered the numbers with a seriousness that suggested something horrible might befall the world had they been scrambled. Sure is, the 2–4–0, let that ring. With nothing to his name, his car would speak for him long after he was gone, Fabo thought. Everything I’m telling you about this here car is the honest truth, Fabo would say, every word an oath. Look here, he tapped on the round glass of the dash. See it says 832,587 kilometers—see it? So let ’em call Fabo a bragging liar, let them say I’m a drunk, another Gypsy inflating his own horse—the numbers’re all there. And it’ll keep going, Fabo crowed, as though sealing a deal, leaving no room for doubt in his silent interlocutor in the backseat, or in himself.

The car had to keep going. That metal contraption—which trailed three meters of smoke, and caused traffic to back up to Novi Travnik when Fabo struggled to start it at the foot of Čamića Brdo, and roused neighboring homes with its morning roar timed more precisely than a church bell—it had given Fabo everything he had in life and everything that had made him a man. Let me tell you, I drove whenever anyone flagged me down, charged only if and how much they had, and I pride myself on what I lack, Fabo beat his fist against the hanging epaulettes visible only to him. I can’t get on anyone’s bad side because I don’t want anything from anyone, and I don’t have anything anyone else would want. This was how Fabo defended himself against the hatred that had once driven him up Čamića Brdo to live among Roma, only he never mentioned it. Not one—and here Fabo would raise his finger and stare into the rearview mirror—not a single Gypsy soul paid for a ride in this here taxi! Let that be known! Brother, how’re you going to charge them when you’ve stayed at their houses, when their wives do your washing and cooking? I drive ’em over to their family in Doboj, and they bring back wood, and blankets, and baked goods right to my door. That’s how I earn my living, without a single dinar ever passing through my hands.

In the chipped rearview mirror whose corroded edges were covered with grease, the small unobstructed circle in the center framed the passenger’s face when Fabo looked from a certain angle. Now, there was only a dim voiceless shadow in view, but Fabo could easily imagine the passenger’s wide eyes and gaping mouth as he swallowed his every word. He searched frantically for a topic he hadn’t yet breached, because in those short intervals of silence, he became what he really was: a person without anyone, without a history, without roots, save the single-story house he’d cobbled together using fifty concrete blocks and sheet metal he may or may not find where he’d left it the day before, up on Čamića Brdo. I don’t need anything else in this life, few people have gone through half the misfortunates I’ve gone through, no, you know, one life isn’t enough for a man to set anything up right. These were the conclusions Fabo lassoed around his claim that he’d lived two or more lives.

We put ourselves out, by God, we did, my Gypsies and I, until we figured out how I could be of use. Fabo wanted to explain himself—from a self-chosen starting point. He would talk, but in a way that allowed him to skip over holes he himself had dug, his story ultimately sensical only to him. Now he’d suddenly come to the part about the pigs. No mention of drunkenness, or gambling, or warrants… Across Čamića Brdo, cluttered with wild bushes and trash, there roamed a herd of pigs, sick and mad, neglected to multiply in number and bloated from gorging on waste. So when one of those eighty-kilo behemoths keeled over from the undigested muck, it concerned nobody in Stari or Novi Travnik or in the surrounding villages. But Čamića Brdo didn’t have the luxury of being separated by distance and vegetation, so the pigs became the concern of the Roma. Know what it means to bury eighty kilos of meat? That’s no cat! Fabo complained in praise of himself.

They thought it would drive him away, that the stench of rotting flesh would suffocate the man’s caprice, which disturbed the semblance of peace they’d found on the hill, where the shined shoes of Gadže—those who weren’t Roma—never set foot. Instead, they stood dumbfounded at the sight of him as he tirelessly, with an almost saintly dedication, dragged the carcasses by the legs, floundering about in the mud while children laughed at him, rolling up his sleeves and doing it all over again, until he moved them to a cleaner and drier surface where the shovel wouldn’t stick. He wasn’t right for the job, Fabo would admit. He had to dig up the first five. He hadn’t paid attention to the wind direction or the proximity to the shacks. He had to go into the hole he’d dug, prop up the carcass with his hands and shove the maggot-riddled, half-decayed flesh back out, drag them to the other side of the dump, and rebury them. He encountered a problem with the other pigs as well, the ones he’d chosen a suitable location for: their burial was too shallow, and rabid, starving dogs had excavated them. He had to dig a deeper adjacent hole to transfer them. He would redo the task until he got it right. Until the Mercedes came into his life. Eh, well, from that moment on, Fabo said, Čamića Brdo and all the surrounding villages knew Fabo as a proper man.

The car’s engine eventually drowned out Fabo’s fading voice. Still, fear drove Fabo to keep his lips moving. He was consumed by his story, which had broken loose, and since he could no longer regain control, he deprived it of sound. His eyes were glazed like headlights in early frost softly warmed by light. He rebuked himself for that moment of weakness and took it out on the motor by shifting into a higher gear. The car had put up with all manner of things over the years. Eeeh, Fabo would nod, that car’ll never break down, it’ll just become one with the ground. He glanced over his shoulder at the backseat and the slumped body in it, the head bouncing against the left window, the eyes shut.

He’d be left with nothing, Fabo knew that, but he had to live as though he didn’t. Just as he had to feign being the only idiot who didn’t know weapons were being manufactured at the local Bratstvo factory. He pulled off his act very successfully, as he did few things in his life, given that he became the only taxi driver allowed to enter the plant with the charge of transporting secret military personnel. He made special effort to turn off all thought as soon as he passed under the large yellow “MMK Bratstvo” sign. He’d taken the same route for more than a decade now. The route lured him even when the need had vanished.

The road that led to the city cleverly bypassed the factory, maintaining its distance along the right side of the complex as though advising onlookers against peering through the gate or approaching, to look straight until the long row of buildings gave way to the scattered houses leading to Rostov. Fabo had memorized the entire three-kilometer span of the facility—all the way to the long one-story building at the edge of the woods holding the workers’ canteen, where Fabo traded his silence for a shallow bowl of watered-down stew. He occasionally peeked into the largest building and marvelled like a schoolboy. My god, they’re putting together another Orkan, he’d repeat under his breath. Nowhere—and I hear what they’re saying—nowhere are there that many weapons in one place. Sometimes he came to the plant because he was solicited, and sometimes, like now, because he was hypnotized by the yellow letters, as many as three or four times a day. It was early morning, maybe he’d spent the night in the car, parked or driving, he could no longer remember, the steering wheel had become an extension of his hand, and only instances when he’d slammed the car door shut were vivid in his memory, those moments when he stood in an almost shameful nakedness outside the vehicle. Dawn had just broken and the Bratstvo plant was cloaked in the rare silence punctuating a shift change­—graveyard into morning—when the machinery cooled, oil dripped down resting gears and belts, and the pipes breathed calmly, unencumbered by steam or the stench of welding. Although the porter in the booth at the gate was sleeping with his head on the desk, a hard-practiced hour’s long sleep, Fabo stopped some distance from the gate, to be safe.

It was where he usually waited for the officials, fretting about how the ride would go, depending on the Mercedes’ few minor flaws, which Fabo didn’t consider problems per se. I’m like a man who’s been married for too long and then suddenly told that my wife’d racked up so many flaws that it would do me good to replace her. Take those cursed suspension struts. Even if he managed to shift gears smoothly and his uniformed client barely jerked, he had to accelerate. But how, fuck me, when the Leerlaufregler valve is screwed up and perfectly timed so I have a client from Bratstvo in tow? It’s like the thing’s allergic to uniforms. So then the motor’s revving like crazy because it’s jumping from three to seven thousand revolutions in the blink of an eye and guzzling enough diesel for another circle round Bratstvo. And thanks be to God there aren’t any more open roads left in these Bosnian cliffs other than between Bila and Vitez, so I can just blame the road, but all that, when you stop and look, aren’t really problems now, are they? Fabo hoped his interlocutor would nod.

They idled in front of the gate, waiting. For what? It occurred to Fabo to explain and stop his senseless circling, admit everything—to the first officer he ran into, why not, let him take out his gun, let him do whatever he wants. Instead, he let out a long sigh, a relief, as though he’d ridden himself of a hard dilemma. He clenched his fists, turned the wheel, and glancing in the rearview mirror at the man bent out of shape against the door, said:

“Colonel Rastoković, let’s get on outta here.”

The sun shone across the lowlands of Travnik valley. The light pierced through the wooded hills and the grimy window of the Mercedes onto the colonel’s uniform. Fifteen hours on, Fabo had managed to quiet his fear, take advantage of the straight road, and get a closer look in the rearview mirror at Rastoković’s face. Only one side of his bowed head was exposed to the light, the other against the rumpled uniform at his shoulder—the standard Yugoslav People’s Army uniform composed of a coarse, thick olive-green fabric, properly maintained from collar to pant leg hem. He had a tidy military hairstyle, his face speckled with bristly white hairs, sideburns trimmed high, sitting above slightly redder skin streaked with fine veins. His mouth was cracked open, his lips hardened by a daily shaving routine. Spotless white teeth—alcohol yes, cigarettes no. The nose was comically small compared to the bloated neck that spilled a shade over the tight collar. His shut eyes disclosed nothing. Perhaps only his prominent eyebrows unveiled a man unused to being contradicted.

The Mercedes stuck to the asphalt, trundling ever slower. Fabo noticed the engine’s coughing and grew horrified at the sight of the indicator on the fuel gauge showing the pump had begun sucking up the corroded slush at the bottom of the tank, the very thing he’d been protecting his Merdžo from for all these years. He needed to find a gas station with enough traffic to obscure him. The first such was at the entrance to Stari Travnik, a stretch of road that never seemed longer. The car was a creature with the loyalty of a dog and the memory of a cat. He knew it would eventually get its revenge for this. He realized he’d also been sipping the sludge that had sedimented within him. He eked out the last remnants of his strength. It tasted bitter, viscous and dry from the soot of the last cigarette he’d smoked two days back while nibbling on the crust of an old piece of bread. He slammed his brakes at the pedestrian crossing, ran across the street, and rushed into Bajro’s for a medium portion of ćevapi to go, though he wasn’t overly hungry. He kept one eye on the idling Mercedes, and, catching sight of some children approaching it, he grabbed the ćevapi and ran back shouting “Shoo! Shoo!” throwing a couple of pebbles for good measure, whereupon the children skittered away, convinced they were dealing with a madman.

He breathed a little easier after that detour and returned to town, parking by the overgrown bushes alongside the road and tucking the rear end of the car into the greenery so the thick branch of a broad-leafed hazelnut tree draped across the glass against which Colonel Rastoković leaned his head. He took out two five-liter canisters and walked to the petrol station around the corner with a ready excuse that his car had died on the side of the road. Even that wouldn’t let him off unscathed, because they would wonder how ever could such a thing happen to Fabo the taxi driver, but he’d prepared: Better for you motherfuckers to pay attention to your diluted fuel—car fumes like a goddamn meat smoker. Fabo entered, hackles raised, an expression that staved off questions, and he came and went without issue, hauling his two canisters and pausing every few steps to rest his arms.

He poured the fuel into the tank nervously, dousing the entire side of the car. It smelled sweet to him, and refreshing compared to the stuffy air in the car. If he pumped the gas pedal gently and pulled off like this when he needed to pass time, the fuel could last him the week. Now he needed to drive, farther from town, but not too far, not onto roads whose patrol schedules he didn’t know.

Between him and Rastoković, silence continued its reign. He recalled days when he could keep a good conversation going with him. Despite the colonel’s rigidness, Fabo knew how to loosen his tongue. When he came to think of it, one topic in particular dominated their exchanges. Colonel Rastoković enjoyed travel, but even more than that he loved his notes, reports, figures, diagrams. The waxen hand slithering out of the olive-green brushed sleeve venomously oozed ink onto paper, leaving symbols, schematics, allocations and elevations, and it was clear to Fabo that this man could single-handedly tailor national and European politics, fuse lifelines and determine their allotment of time, but it wasn’t clear to Fabo why, if he could do all that, he devoted his time to analyzing old buildings, storerooms, and factories. Fortunately, in all his years traveling across Bosnia’s derelict places, Fabo had picked up the habit of memorizing locations in detail. Therefore Fabo could interrupt Rastoković’s mumbling as he checked over his notes aloud and correct him:

“—what do you mean, nine hundred people in the Vitkovići factory?! If it’s the one near Zavidovići, there’s no way nine hundred can fit in there unless a third are sitting on the others’ heads!”

“You shouldn’t be listeni—” Rastoković started to snap back, but a thought quickly struck him: “And how would you know this?”

“Well if I haven’t made five trips there with some jacka—clients of reputable character, I’ll cut off my hand—all in just the last three years.”

It confused Fabo how someone could ever think the tarp at the military warehouse in Rabići near Derventa could hold fifteen truckloads of people. That’s almost five hundred people. Nope, can’t wrap my head around that one at all. But Fabo satisfied himself with supplying information the colonel found of such interest as the ceramic fountain pen bobbed in his hand.

“…and that Rostov ski center above Bugojno, maybe you…”

“Is it possible, sir, that you’re posing the wrong question?” Fabo grew arrogant in his knowledge. “You don’t even have to get into skis to know that up there in winter’s where you can get your hands on the best mulled wine in the whole municipality. You can squeeze in two hundred people if they’re seated, five hundred if they take their drink standing.”

“So, five hundred people could fit in there?”

“Eh, my dear colonel, I have no idea what five hundred people would be caught doing in Rostov when there’s no snow, or who’d want to be among those five hundred crammed together like that. Me, hell, I definitely wouldn’t—to be honest, they’d be less like people and more like livestock!”

“I just need a rough estimate, no reason to get all worked up,” Rastoković responded absently. “Is there anything comparable in the Goražde area?”

“Pfft, in Goražde? All sorts, my dear colonel! There’s a cement factory, what was it called—Vitković, I think. A huge space, but it’s all pretty rough, bare concrete, dust everywhere, I wouldn’t even keep chickens there, honestly. No, there’s a better place, where I dropped off a foreigner once who happened to get lost, right there in Goražde, the old Hotel Balkan.”

“Get a look inside by any chance?”

“Ah well, it’d be stupid to go all the way to Goražde and not get a look inside. I saw the boiler room and five or six pretty big storage rooms next to the bathroom in the basement, and on the ground floor there was a sliding door to a terrace…”

“Never mind that, tell me more about inside.”

“Well, I was getting there before you interrupted. The basement led to a large space for three hundred people, with nice flooring and insulation, I have to say. Perfect for a party.”

“If only there was something like that around Brčko…”

“Colonel, you sure like jumping around—I haven’t even gotten through Goražde yet.”

“That’s fine. I wonder about Brčko…”

“Wonder no more. Old and young alike went on tournaments there—I’m surprised you didn’t know. Indoor football, I remember it as a kid, the Partisan sports pavilion. Boiling over with people. There’d even be people hanging onto the fence… three hundred hollering as one…”

The colonel added his scribbles and tiny numerals and symbols under columns understandable only to him. He put crosses in boxes and wrote notes outside them, made markings then looked at the small map adhered to one of the pages. Meanwhile, Fabo bloomed: he could be an equal participant in the conversation, instead of the loudmouth and pain-in-the-ass others usually styled him. A pity there was no one to witness how Fabo could be useful even to a colonel.

“Bosnian Šamac, the SUP building?”

“Seven hundred!”

“The large warehouse, at the Kozarac station, along the Prijedor – Bijeljina railway line?”

“Thirteen hundred!”

Fabo chuckled, the colonel thought he could trip him up, but for nothing: Fabo had passed through central and western Bosnia and turned over every stone. There wasn’t a building he didn’t know.

“The retirement home in Travnik?”

“Eight hundred! No easier doing.”

Now, Rastoković’s hand was still. As blood rushed to Fabo’s face remembering those exchanges, the colonel’s blood slowly congealed in the car’s quiet.

---

Cloud the Color of Skin is available from Fraktura. You can order a copy here.

Nebojša Lujanović was born in 1981 in Novi Travnik (Bosnia and Herzegovina). His novels include Stakleno oko (Glass Eye, 2007), Godina svinje (Year of the Pig, 2010), Orgulje iz Waldsassena (The Organ of Waldsassen, 2011), Oblak boje kože (Cloud the Color of Skin, 2015), Južina (Sirocco, 2019), Maratonac (The Marathoner, 2020) and Tvornica Hrvata (The Croatian Factory, 2023). He is the author of the short story collection S pogrebnom povorkom nizbrdo (With the Funeral Procession Down the Hill, 2008), a creative writing manual called Autopsija teksta (Autopsy of the Text, 2016), and a scholarly book on Croatian literature called A Space of Dissent: From Ideology and Identity, to the Literary Field (2018). Instagram: @nebojsa_lujanovic

Ena Selimović is a Yugoslav-born writer and translator. Her work has appeared in Words Without Borders, ANMLY, The Paris Review, Asymptote, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships from the American Literary Translators Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her latest full-length translation—Maša Kolanović’s Underground Barbie—is out with Sandorf Passage. Her translation of Tatjana Gromača’s novella Crnac (Black) recently won Trafika Europe’s Prize for Prose in 2025. Instagram: @yugaduga ; Twitter/BlueSky: @enaselimo