The third summer after the separation was drawing to a close. I had spent this one walking as well. Walking kept the hard-won peace intact. We reached Rijeka in the late afternoon; the heat was still unbearable.

I stepped into the VBZ bookshop on the pedestrian street without much enthusiasm. More for the air-conditioning and the smell of books than out of interest, I stayed longer than I’d intended. The shop was huge; two floors with shelves up to the ceiling. The day before, Hemon had launched his latest book there; copies were still scattered everywhere. I picked one up, leafed through it, and set it back on the pile. In the early years of exile, I read Hemon a great deal. That day, I was after something else. On one of the shelves, almost side by side, I spotted Meša Begić’s Pauk u meskalinu and Bekim Sejranović’s Ljepši kraj. I took Begić’s book down; its hard, glossy binding looked mainstream—at odds with the poems inside.

I’d discovered Begić’s poetry a few years earlier and since then picked up every new book I came across. I found them everywhere—from legitimate online bookstores to flea markets and obscure secondhand shops. For Opasni čovjek, long out of print, I even posted an ad offering to trade it for a gold ring. I was prepared to offer more. In the end, through a chain of Auster-esque circumstances, I got it for free, from the very online shop where it was listed as sold out.

Between Čekajući mesara (Waiting for the Butcher), Begić’s first solo collection, and the most recent, Predaje (Surrenders), stretches twenty years of perfectly honed, melancholic lines. How and why certain writers become “ours” depends on both them and us—probably on timing too; perhaps most of all. Begić’s poetry is terrifying in its nakedness and beautiful in the clarity of its line. It’s the existential bareness that makes the poems almost unbearable. In me they settle somewhere between the ribs, the heart, and the solar plexus. The all-pervading melancholy makes them heavier still. Every poem is a hymn to the trouble called being human. In truth, every line. And the lines shine like razor blades.

I pushed the door and stepped outside. The air was unbearably sticky. Right by the entrance a street musician was just starting:

Tad još nisam ništa znao
i još nisam verovao
da na svetu tuge ima

Anyone who grew up in the former Yugoslavia knew these lines by heart. I crossed the street, sat down in the café opposite, ordered an Ožujsko, and opened the first page of Pauk:

Death in the Palm

Once you master yourself, all becomes clear
and it is easy to walk among the lonely.
You nurture the scar that others reawaken,
and in the end it all comes down
to gestures that undress
and the right to pain.
Visions repeat:
rustling treetops surrender
an unbridled stream hums in the hills
the fox and the birds forsake their home.
Drunken leaves fall into the mud,
and you tuck two questions
into the smile of leaving.
It takes no great wisdom to live among the lonely.
What you need is
your own death in the palm of your hand,
and a body through which one forgets.

There are moments in life so crystal that they could be called truth. Perhaps even pure happiness. At least that’s how I choose to see them. Moments when the gut and the universe resonate. This was, unmistakably, one of them. I set the book down and took a few sips of ice-cold beer. From the other side of the street came:

još sam sretan što postojim
pišem pesme, zvezde brojim
još sam onaj isti vetropir.

I took a few euros from my pocket, walked over to the street musician, and dropped them into the guitar case.

The sun was sinking below the horizon. I set off to meet it.