Bosnian Hotpot 

One should go somewhere like Africa where love happens and lasts as long as in fairytales. You know, when the two of them meet by chance, fall in love, have children and live happily ever after until death do them part. It is a pattern which, regardless of reality, we imagine even since puberty, about which little girls read in romantic novels and which parents with certainty instil into their children. However, everything usually turns out differently and finally, when it is all done and gone, it looks like a game of sadistically arranged circumstances. Elena was a young and ambitious girl from Zagreb when she came to Sarajevo, having chosen a major not similar to a dozen of the like in her city. At first she was annoyed by tram drivers who stop in between the stations at Baščaršija to buy burek, she was driven mad by people who talk loudly and cut cruel jokes, she was bothered by strong and unknown odours and by young men who tell you their entire life story on the first date, but the next time they see you, they send you to hell. As it was a city which didn't ask you to change and which could even put up with disdain, Elena could adjust to it. The fact that so many different people live in one place without being burdened by it, in time brought satisfaction and a pleasant feeling which with its superficiality and directness reminds on a train station waiting room from where the trains take you to hell and heaven.Zlaja was an elder undergraduate of journalism, a son of a wealthy and well-known Muslim family that had an air of meek Bosnian Islam and embalmed Viennese upper-class ways. The city teasers claimed that even a fly in their house was not an ordinary fly, but that it rather flew around wearing an evening dress. Since every decadence goes hand in hand with laziness, so did Zlaja become a man often seen in bars, a man of good manners, of a good swig and having a lot of plans about success in life, which of course never matched reality. The more he wasted away and the more the situation in his country worsened, the more Zlaja went on day-dreaming. Over every first drink he would start a story of a new brilliant business; around midnight he would be entering partnership and the following morning he would be founding a multinational company. The plans ranged from printing a paper which would be sold in thousands of copies, to the production of tea for pregnant women which would determine the sex of the child. One blend of tea for female child and the other blend for male child; and in the case the tea doesn't work and the parents get a child of undesired sex, the manufacturer returns the money. Since the probability theory says that the sex of the child is guessed in fifty percent of the cases, business could bring big bucks. Of course, this plan, as well as all the others failed as Zlaja came up with a new, even more brilliant idea. These endless bar stories could be tiresome to the ones not used to hearing them, however, most of those somewhat secretive daydreamers enjoyed spending nights in Zlaja's company mostly because he was educated and clever enough and didn't talk rubbish even when he was wasted. No one knows for sure how and when did Elena and Zlaja meet, but the likeliest version is the one which says that she happened to be a random guest in a bar where he held his speech. It was love at first and last sight. As they would walk through the town, she would melt in his arms, and with tenderness unsuitable for this world he would tell her stories which were as far from reality as were his plans, but which worked in love more then perfectly. In fact, Zlaja said all the things which we, boring and rational men, want to say but never know how.