Srđan never asked for directions, even wandering the halls of his own university. It was an open secret. Thus, Georgia slipped the 1900 Pilgrim’s Guide to Rome into his coat pocket with a wink and a congratulatory nod at his celebration dinner. He chuckled along—one jubilee year to another exactly a century later. He even feigned taking careful note of the price difference between a cab ride with one horse or two. He just as carefully avoided its foldout plans, which dizzied him already. For part of the joke lay in the fact that Georgia navigated the world by the cardinal directions indicated by sunrise and sunset, and she always got them where they needed to go, in contrast to his notorious disorientation. Still, Srđan made it through four airports and two layovers—only barely missing one flight when he could not locate his gate—across a continent and a half, and an ocean for good measure.
More even than that. For in his journey, he started as an exile from the stunned, shell-shocked walls of Dubrovnik, its hotel quarter in shambles, and from his martyred Vukovar home before that—its hospital massacre and the water tower bearing witness to the dead and, worse, the disappeared. All in a onetime country lately known as Yugoslavia.
