The park bench, half submerged in the Ibar, turned out to be part of a larger construction project: a jetty jutting out into the water; a tiny man-made peninsula of shattered chunks of concrete, broken tiles and stones retrieved from some rotting part of the city, grafted onto this tiny harbor in the south and pointing towards the opposite bank. It was being built by a mentally disabled man that I recognized.
In a town the size of Mitrovica all of the mentally disabled citizens would be recognized, whether you think of them as “those poor souls,” or the most aggressive panhandlers, or as the village idiots, and they really are all of those things; beloved nuisances and mascots by birth or trauma, and landmarks in their own way. In Mitrovica there are four (or five, depending on who you count.) There is the woman they call a junkie and whore who hangs out on the bridge. There is the somewhat older woman with thick masculine hands, long curling hairs on her chin, and peroxide white wig on her head. There is the short woman who was clearly born retarded, and who spends her day demanding money and being taunted by the school children. And there is the big guy, who is always pushing a wheelbarrow, his pants halfway down his naked ass. I think of the big guy as “my” mentally disabled guy, since he lives a couple blocks away from me. So I felt a touch of provincial pride to see that the jetty was his project.
There is something profoundly poetic about a mentally disabled man building a jetty out of stone across the river of a divided town. So poetic, in fact, that I decided that it was best not to say anything about it.
I walked home through Roma Mahalla. It was Friday, and it was the Feast of Saint George, a big holiday for the local Roma: Đurđevdan. I leaned up against the wall around the clinic and watched the dancers: old men clapping their hands and pouring beers from plastic liter bottles into plastic cups, husbands with their arms around their barrel-hipped wives, and kids climbing naked and wet from the tin wash basins in their front yards. Newborn puppies seemed to be clambering through every hole in every fence. Young girls fled the festivities with their booty—enormous sandwiches bigger than their heads—past equally young boys in impeccable suits a size too big for them, proud and confident, looking for all the world like a miniature mafia. The power in my camera ran down just as the kid on the bicycle asked me a question I couldn't understand. It was probably for the best.
