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The Other Side of The Mirror As I was leaving Sarajevo this morning, my cousin told me: “You are returning to the other side of the mirror.” And indeed, looking west from his 13th floor apartment, you can see the mountains in the distance where people walk freely, where they have enough to eat, where they were not freezing to death last Winter. Those not-so-far-away mountains might as well have been a part of a mirror, a magic mirror from where some people suddenly appear, bring the news, some goodies and hope from the free lands and then return the same way—through the mirror. Ordinary mortals don’t have a chance. When I first came to my cousin’s doorstep three days ago he cried: “It’s Christmas, it’s Christmas—I see St. Nicklaus.” It must have been difficult for a 55 year old family man, an electrical engineer who still goes to work every day and brings home an equivalent of a half-a-pack of cigarettes a month, to cry and shiver like a baby on my shoulder. “You came all the way from America to see me?! It’s a miracle,” he whispered into my ear as his unshaven chin rubbed against mine. It was hard for me too to hold back and we both just stood there crying and hugging desperately. I held his worn out body in my arms and felt just his bones and his heart beating profusely. I felt two years of siege, hunger, digging trenches, missing death by an inch. “Every time they took me away to dig trenches I left my wedding ring and all my documents with my wife and kissed her good-bye. I never knew if I’d see her again,” he said, his eyes red full of tears and emotion, his feeble voice hardly leaving his throat. As I held him so, I felt this precious thread of humanity connecting us at that moment. I knew then that my visit meant much more than a few goodies I brought him; it gave him a chance to regain some of the lost hope, it gave me a chance to share myself with him. As the time for my departure came, he simply said: “Please, tell those on the other side of the mirror not to forget us. Tell them that we are a proud people, that we are an able people, that we are a loving people. Tell them that we forgive them.” So I boarded the gray-colored UN military plane and stepped to the other side of the mirror. Dubravko Kakarigi
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