in Kosovo, a man and his ants (a short story — written July 12, 2022)
what was going on here?
Above: near my guest house in Pristine, Kosovo
My journey to Serbia, Kosovo, and Macedonia began in Romania, where I boarded a train around six in the morning in the city of Timisoara. I had been in Romania for a week, and before that I had passed through Prague and Budapest.
As soon as I had set my things on my bed in my Belgrade hostel, a group of Australians approached me to see if I was interested in joining them to find an Irish pub. By now I was familiar with the customs of the Australian people, who seem to arrive in countries hardly aware of the capital’s name or relative location. They are eager to judge those they encounter for thinking their capital is Sydney, but simultaneously they demonstrate only the most minimal concern for learning anything about the culture, history, or politics of their destinations. Uninterested in joining these Australian gap-year kids on their endless excursions to Irish pubs and brothels, I politely declined, setting off instead for the heart of downtown Belgrade.
My hostel was directly across the street from the old home of the Serbian Ministry of Defense. The Serbs had left it in ruins since my country bombed it several years ago. It made me remember being in fourth grade, watching a story about Slobadon Milosevic on the news and imagining that perhaps I could be the one to go super saiyan and kill that man someday. But on this sunny afternoon as a 21-year-old, having long ago abandoned my dreams of training with Krillin and Piccolo, I took a few photos of the former ministry’s twisted steel and crumbled concrete on my Canon digital camera.
I took a day trip to a nearby town, where hundreds of para-militaristic police had deployed in full riot gear. They stood austerely in long lines along the road, carefully anticipating any misbehaved soccer fan who might require a good beating.
I arrived at Pristine after dark had settled. Looking around from the window of the taxi I took to a bed and breakfast, the city seemed like one vast construction site. Those buildings without any surrounding equipment appeared as though their construction had at some point been declared “good enough,” rendering finishing touches unnecessary. The streets, too, seemed simultaneously unfinished and deteriorated, and this scenery of widespread underdevelopment contrasted sharply with the glimmering glass towers populating downtown Belgrade.
Arriving at my bed and breakfast, a small concrete structure off a paved but dusty road, I was immediately praised for my American passport. The large man at the desk told me how much he loved America for everything we had done for his people in Kosovo. He showed me pictures of soldiers from the armies which had fought against Serbia, and he embraced me in gratitude for my government’s helpful bombing campaigns. “You are a great friend of Kosovo,” he told me, and then he ushered me upstairs to my room.
He gave me an introductory course on how to operate my satellite TV, which he left turned on to BBC World News. I soon found myself alone in the room watching clips from the ruthless war being waged upon the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. There, I was able to indulge briefly in the glamorous appreciation of the distance I had crossed in coming here to Kosovo from Germany, having passed through Prague, Budapest, much of Romania, and Serbia on the way. Although I enjoyed exaggerating the scope of my knowledge about the world’s newest country, my fledgling academic background was not the impetus for my trip. I had come to Kosovo not because I felt a passion for Albanian liberation, but because I wanted to visit those corners of Europe which are less commonly trodden. Craving an international identity, I wanted to be a traveler who went places others would not even consider. And what could be more enticing to the mythologizing mind of the adolescent explorer than a chance to cross a UN patrolled border?
Now that I had ticked this item off my bucket list, I proceeded across the street to take advantage of the free dinner on offer in the hostel’s breakfast room. To get there, I walked through a doorway which opened out onto the street. Seeing that the staircase led down into a dark basement, I flicked on the light. I tried to close the door to the street behind me, but it was locked open. I proceeded down a flight of about ten steps down into a basement. With the sounds of vehicles and bicycles trickling down the stairs from the open air outside, I made myself some cereal at the kitchen counter, helping myself to the communal milk and Special K. Then I sat down at the table, facing the staircase as I uneasily consumed my meal.
A few bites in, my apprehensions were confirmed by reality. I was not to be alone. First shoes, then pants, then a whole man appeared on the stairs across the room from me. The man paused at the bottom of the stairs, staring at me with a grin. I continued to eat my cereal in silence, though his gaze did not leave my face. Try as I might to maintain my focus on the matter of tomorrow’s itinerary, I was unable to open my Lonely Planet Eastern Europe book to the Kosovo section without feeling the man’s eyes continuing to stare at me. Then, just as I was taking another bite and beginning to scan a page in my guidebook, the man started moving toward me, circling me until he was standing right behind me. I could feel him looking over my shoulder at the pages of my book. Wondering what my dad would say if I got murdered eating cereal in a basement in Kosovo, I wanted to move away immediately. But I was painfully paralyzed at the uncomfortable realization that the man, who was now almost leaning over me while he stared over my shoulder, was standing directly between me and the sink where I would need to take my bowl. And as I happened to be midbite the moment he made his move around me, I hardly resisted the fearful inertia which compelled me to finish one final spoonful of Special K. I chewed on it even as he lurked creepily above me, and I swallowed it frightfully as I stood up and turned around.
He was still standing right there, holding his gaze directly on my face. Although he refused to look away from me, I found it too difficult to maintain our brief eye contact. To merely glance at his body was like being asked to stare directly into the midafternoon sun. And so it was with my vision cast firmly downward that I made my way around him to the sink, hopelessly spooked by the certainty of his continuing glare. It was like he was a demon who existed exclusively to look at me. In the few moments when I dared directly contemplate his appearance, I saw a sinister and playful adversary who knew I was afraid and enjoyed that fear for its own sake.
I knew I was supposed to wash my own dishes. But panic overtook me when a brief glance over my shoulder confirmed he was still staring at me. He had turned his whole body completely around, in fact, to continue looking at me with ease. At this startlingly freakish confirmation of his unwelcome intentions, I grabbed my Eastern Europe guidebook off the table and rushed away up the stairs. Crossing the street back to the hotel, I vowed never to set foot in that strange basement again. I reminded myself that I had a big loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter in my backpack to sustain me tonight.
In the hallway on my way back to my room, where I planned on eating a few pieces of bread and then falling asleep to the BBC World News, I encountered another American who was also traveling solo. We greeted one another and, after exchanging some smalltalk about our origins and itineraries, we agreed to meet the next morning to go on a day trip outside the city.
After day trip:
I woke up the next morning to hundreds of ants swarming the ground beneath my bed. They looped up around the leg of the table. Leaning against it, my backpack was the midpoint of the ants’ journey between the floorboards and the strawberries. Several of the insects were making their way not up to the exposed fruit, but down into the innards of my bag.
Rushing out of bed, I hastily pulled my backpack away from the ant-infested area. I smacked as many ants out from the edges and insides of the opening as I could, knowing my efforts could not capture them all. There were far more of them on the table than I could have realized from the bed. Clusters of them stampeded around its surface, feeding not only on the strawberries but also on the candy I’d left out. I gathered all of their food sources together and threw these all into the garbage. But that hardly left me any more excited about going back to sleep in a room still teeming with the voracious creatures who had already claimed my own luggage as a new home. With my friendly companion having already departed, and with the memory of the man from the basement still fresh in my mind, I decided it was time to end my brief stay in Kosovo.
I gathered the few items I had unpacked and flung my backpack around my shoulder. I walked downstairs to the desk and turned in my key at six in the morning. I settled my bill, reporting to the disappointed manager that I would not be extending my stay after all. Then I took a taxi to the bus station. I boarded the first bus heading for Skopje, the capital of Macedonia. And the swiftness of it all fit into the other crucial component of my identity as a traveler: spontaneity.