The Kinks couldn't have put it better: chilly chilly, its evening time...
Autumn's been making me nostalgic, for some reason. Not only does this song make me think with an eternally warm, fuzzy smile of my time in London - I really did walk over Waterloo Bridge at sunset once or twice, one of my fondest memories of that amazing city being the particularly radiant August evening I passed across that dirty old river (must you keep rolling?) with my three closest friends - but I've been thinking of the autumns past. Perhaps its because this is the first Autumn in many years that hasn't brought a change of scene or new beginnings. Last October I moved to Bosnia, the year before that I set out as a graduate and walked into the welcoming arms of Front Line. The year before that, in 2009, I could hardly contain my excitement about moving to London, and for the four years before that I had at least been facing into new years and new apartments and new stages of college in Limerick.
This year I'm simply settling into a place - this odd little country - that I already know, or if I'm more precise, continuing the process of slowly getting to know. Autumn doesn't seem to exist in the Balkans. Two weeks after I was sunbathing, swimming and coaxing out this year's very last little hint of a tan in Greece, we were cranking up the central heating, desperately searching for woolly scarves and shuddering against the cold when it came time to leave the office in the evening. It went from summer to winter almost overnight, and all of a sudden Kosovars were defrosting ice from their cars in the mornings and Pristina had become a city of woodsmoke and puffing chimneys. It's warmed up a little today, but it was jaw-achingly, toe-clenchingly cold earlier this week, dipping below zero at night and changing my wardrobe, appetite and weekend plans with alarming upheaval. All of a sudden the cafés and bars I've favoured all summer, lovingly chosen for their outdoor terraces and air-conditioning, are out of bounds and rather useless, and I'm reacquainting myself with this new Pristina emerging for winter.
But strangely, of all the places and feelings of newness I can associate with autumn, it's Sarajevo I felt homesick for this week. Six months on, I still find myself missing Bosnia and my life there. There was something indefinably cosy about it, some inherently familiar and comforting. Perhaps I didn't feel like that living there - maybe that's only a feeling that's possible in hindsight - but this week the familiar Sarajevo smell of woodsmoke, of indoor stoves, of the rich, fatty smell of qofta and the warm morning fug of bakeries which began to permeate the Pristina air (making me sadly aware that those weren't aromas unique to Sarajevo after all) brought on terrible pangs of nostalgia for my never-to-be-more-loved apartment, the pekara on the corner and the rattling, mouldy, woollen-layered tram ride to work.
More than anything I wanted to go for a pint at the Police Bar, a place I hadn't thought about for months and months but which was possibly my second home last winter. We called it the Police Bar because it was near the police station - I think its real name was The Hunting Lodge, but the Bosnian translation of that was somehow too complicated to remember. The Police Bar was just around the corner from the office and was more of a cupboard than a pub - it was the downstairs front room of an apartment, with a skateboard-sized bar in one corner and space for six or eight people to squeeze around a table in another. If you arrived only to find that three or four policemen had arrived before you, then you just had to reverse out and go elsewhere; you very literally could not fit inside. But best of all it had an open fire, and a window which fugged up with condensation behind a heavy net curtain. The middle-aged couple who ran the bar - if you can call the act of serving some drinks to people who essentially took over their sitting room the job of running a bar - were sweethearts, greeting us with one-armed hugs and enthusiastic and unintelligible (to me) Bosnian. If you ordered wine the husband would usually throw on his coat and go to the corner shop to buy it; if everyone stuck to beer he would often head down to the shop regardless to buy some pretzels or crisps, which he would pour onto an oval silver platter and set on the table with a smile of tired satisfaction as if serving a Sunday roast.
The couple would watch the evening news on the television and afterwards put on some Balkan power ballads which it seemed were appropriate listening for us "young people". They were sweet to us and sweet on each other; he would always stoop and kiss her goodbye if putting on his coat at eight o'clock to head downtown somewhere. She was strangely ageless but must have been in her late forties. She was a beautiful girl who was still living out past glories as she became increasingly middle-aged; she had immaculately highlighted bottle-blonde hair and wore an entirely mad pair of leopard-skin, spiky-heeled boots around the bar as if they were her bedroom slippers. But, you would get another squeeze and a hand on your shoulder as you and your friends struggled heroically to fit on your coats in the tiny space left for standing. We would stumble out onto a crystal night of ice and the shining darkness between the old, bullet-marked buildings, our breath proceeding out of the bar before us. The vents from the heating systems steaming majestically into the night, as a slippery trudge downtown to the next bar began.
The Police Bar was magic. And I really miss Sarajevo.
