Sometimes when I encounter a problem that has no solution, I write a letter.
Not because I expect anyone to read it. The act of writing simply gives me somewhere to place a thought that would otherwise continue circling my head. It is my preferred method of making peace with things that cannot be fixed.
Lately, I have found myself wanting to write a letter to the people who unlawfully occupied my father’s home during the war in Bosnia.
This is not because I expect a response.
In all likelihood, I will never know their names. I will never know where they came from or where they went after the war ended. All I know is that they are still alive somewhere, carrying their own version of this story through the world, and that our paths will likely never cross.
The truth is that I am writing this letter for myself.
Growing up, I watched members of my family wrestle with memories that offered no clear resolution. Yet every so often, something pulls those haunting memories back to the surface as though no time has passed at all.
I have often wondered what it feels like to carry something that cannot be solved.
Perhaps that is why I find myself thinking about the people who unlawfully occupied my father’s house.
Like the mother who may have stood in the kitchen making dinner.
And the father who may have spent weekends repairing things around the property.
And the children who may have run through the hallways and slammed doors despite being told not to.
I do not know their names, but I find myself wanting to know them.
And before asking them any questions, I think it is only fair that I introduce myself first.
Or at least introduce the house as I know it.
If this letter ever found its way to the people who occupied my father’s home, these are the stories I would include.
- A bicycle.
- And some floorboards.
The bicycle belonged to my father. Before that, it belonged to a German soldier who left it behind during the Second World War. Somehow it found its way to a village outside Travnik where he spent years of his childhood collecting missing parts and bringing it back to life.
The bicycle survived the collapse of countries more successfully than most people.
If bicycles carried passports, this one would have required additional pages.
- Germany.
- Yugoslavia.
- Bosnia.
And perhaps somewhere else after that.
My father spent his childhood years rebuilding it. During one of those repairs he fell directly through the floorboards of a barn. Whenever he tells the story, I picture him disappearing through the floor while stubbornly refusing to abandon the bicycle. It sounds less like family history and more like a village folktale.
Which brings me to the floorboards.
The floorboards deserve their own section of the letter.
Every summer when my family returned to Bosnia, somebody inevitably reached for a hammer. Music would be drifting through an open window, coffee cups would already be sitting on the table, and somewhere in the middle of it all a floorboard would decide it no longer wished to be part of the floor. Rather than complain, somebody would grab a hammer and start tapping it back into place. We would laugh, offer unhelpful advice, and joke that the house was testing whether we were truly committed to returning. A few minutes later the floor would be declared safe enough, the hammer would disappear, and the day would continue.
Coffee would be poured. Cards would appear. Children would play. Eventually somebody would start dancing.
And if another board popped loose later that afternoon, we would hammer it back into place and continue as though this was the most normal thing in the world.
These are the things I would tell them first.
Not because they are important.
But because they are ordinary.
And sometimes ordinary things tell us more about a home than history ever can.
…
After introducing the bicycle and the floorboards, I think I would finally begin talking about the things that have occupied my mind for years.
The older I get, the more interested I become in the ordinary parts of history. The things that never make it into documentaries or history books. The things people remember when the politics have faded and the headlines have disappeared.
I find myself wondering what your life looked like inside that house.
I wonder if your children ever rode my father’s bicycle. I imagine children racing down those roads without a second thought, chasing one another and returning home only when somebody called them in for dinner.
Perhaps your children rode that bicycle.
Perhaps they crashed it.
Perhaps they loved it.
Or perhaps it was simply an old bicycle and nothing more.
The funny thing about history is that objects often mean entirely different things to different people. To your children it may have been a bicycle. To my father it was a childhood accomplishment. He spent years tracking down missing parts and piecing it back together, only to discover that once the bicycle was finished, he still had to learn how to ride it. In a way, he was building and learning at the same time.
…
I think about the photo albums you burned too.
Not because I expect them to reappear, but because I cannot stop wondering whether you looked through them before throwing them into the fire.
The neighbors watched as the evidence of my father and grandparents having lived in the house rose into the sky in a plume of smoke.
For a brief period of time, you may have known details about my family’s life that no longer exist anywhere else.
That thought stays with me.
If I sat across from you today, would you be able to describe my parents on their wedding day? Would you remember what my father looked like when he graduated? Would you recognize their faces if I showed you a photograph today?
I sometimes imagine you sitting at the kitchen table, flipping through albums that belonged to strangers. Albums filled with weddings, graduations, birthdays, and ordinary afternoons. Did you pause on any of the pages? Did you wonder who those people were? Did you wonder where they had gone, or whether they would ever return?
…
I think about the hand painted walls too.
The delicate peaches painted directly onto the walls of the house. Not paintings that could be taken down and packed into a moving truck. They belonged to the house itself. At some point they were painted over.
For years, I viewed all of this as a tragedy.
Now I am less certain.
The older I get, the more I find myself imagining ordinary explanations. Maybe the peaches reminded you of another family. Maybe one of your children wanted a different coloured bedroom. Maybe they simply did not suit your taste.
I do not know.
But I find myself wondering all the same.
…
What I find myself wondering most, however, is what the village looked like through your eyes.
My family remembers the story from one side. I find myself curious about the other.
When you walked through the village, how did people look at you?
When neighbours passed by the house and knew my grandparents and parents had been displaced, did they avoid eye contact? Did they stop speaking when you approached? Did they stare? Did they pretend nothing had happened?
Most of all, I wonder what your children saw.
Children notice everything.
Did they ever ask why certain neighbours seemed cold?
Did they ask why some people crossed the street instead of saying hello?
Did they ask why a particular house carried so much tension around it?
And if they did, what answer could you possibly give?
I do not ask these questions because I am searching for someone to blame.
I ask because I have spent years watching people I love carry memories that offer no resolution. The house still exists. The village still exists. The people involved are still somewhere in the world. Yet there is no conversation waiting at the end of the story that suddenly makes everything make sense.
There is only the reality that two families became connected to the same house under impossible circumstances.
That is why I keep coming back to the floorboards.
Of all the things I wonder about, it is somehow the floorboards that make me feel closest to you.
I imagine your children running through the house on rainy afternoons just as we did. I imagine a loose board lifting from the floor and one of you reaching for a hammer while muttering the same complaints my family still makes today. I imagine music playing somewhere in the background while life carried on around you.
Maybe none of that happened.
But I hope it did.
Because there is something strangely comforting about imagining two families, separated by war, politics, grief, and decades of history, both being annoyed by exactly the same floorboard. And together we would probably discover that the floorboards were worse than either of us remembered.
And perhaps that is the closest I will ever come to understanding you.
Not through the war.
Not through the loss.
But through the ordinary moments that make people human.
…
If this letter somehow found its way to you, I do not think I would ask for an explanation or an apology. After all these years, I suspect I would be far more interested in hearing about the village. I would want to know where life took you after the war, what became of your children, and whether you ever think about that house.
I would rather imagine you as parents, neighbours, and children than as strangers.
And if there is one thing I hope for your family, it is the same thing I hope for my own. I hope your children grew up safely. I hope they found people they love and places where they belong. I hope the years were kind to them.
Most of all, I hope that wherever life eventually carried you, you found peace. Not just in the place you call home, but within yourself as well.
Because despite everything that happened, life continued for both of our families.
And if our stories are connected by anything now, I hope it is this:
That somehow, in one way or another, we both found our way home.
