The view from the window is breathtaking. From this vantage point high in a concrete tower block the old town unfolds beneath me, a jumble of buildings of different shapes and sizes, clad with red roof tiles and a clutter of television aerials and satellite dishes. The spires of the churches rise above the melee, golden crosses that glint in the sun. Somewhere within maze of medieval streets the river passes by sedately, controlled by concrete embankments and a series of weirs, framed on either side by the weeping willows that spill over and onto the surface of the water. Looking down on this scene is the castle on the hill, a tower of pure white that emerges from the dense greenery of the slopes, the flag of this new nation flying proudly in the breeze.

The uglier part of the town is hidden from my picture postcard view by the building in which I stand and the castle hill itself. The concrete boxes, Lego tower blocks and the other legacies of communism are the view for our neighbour across the hall. We live in one of these 1960s monsters, on the twentieth floor of cramped flats, leaky stairwells and broken lifts. The only positive aspect of living here is that when you are in it, you can't see it. And the view. The view that makes the cracked pipes, temperamental hot water and vaguely fascist graffiti all worth while.

It has begun to rain, huge heavy drops that explode into a thousand when they hit the saddle of the bikes on the balcony. It has come suddenly, this downpour, drenching the city. The kids playing in the courtyard below has been driven inside by the deluge from above, and a shout from a window in the building opposite. Passers-by huddle in doorways as they wait for it to pass, smoking cigarettes, as the red roofs of the old town turn a darker shade until they are angry like the sky.

 

Jelena is sleeping behind me, lying on her front, arms tucked under the pillow. Her brown hair falls over her face, moving slightly with her soft breath. I resist the urge to cross the floor and kiss her shoulder. Above the bed is a huge photograph printed on canvas, taken of herself by herself. She took it with her camera at arms length in the midst of the bustle of the market place. Her hair is being whipped by the wind as she looks beyond the lens, jostled on either side by elbows and shoulders of strangers She believes the picture makes her look vulnerable, weak, which is why she hides it away in our bedroom. By accident she has revealed too much of herself, it is not for public consumption. It is her favourite photograph.

 

These are the facts; she was born to a Serbian father and a Montenegrin mother in a small village near Knin, previously a Serb-dominated region of Croatia when it was all Yugoslavia. Her father was a policeman and her mother stayed at home, a comfortable loving childhood in an unforgiving landscape of dusty summers and bitter winters. Her youth was, she says, perfect, the memories she is willing to divulge are unconditionally happy. Then came war, taking her parents and her home, destroyed and changed beyond recognition to the point that it exists now only in memory and as a name on a map. Her war was spent in Belgrade with one set of relations, the Budapest with another, before arriving here in Ljubljana, the birth-place and residence of her maternal grandmother. A resident of Slovenia, born in Croatia and brought up in a Serbian household when all these places and cultures were theoretically one and the same.

This is the extent of my knowledge of her past, of the girl I have fallen in love with. No emotions. No feelings. Only facts.

We were stood in the kitchen, a Saturday night. She was cooking an omelette on the stove, eggs, ham, potatoes and cheese mashed together in a pan that hissed and spat aggressively.

"It's too hot," I said but she just looked at me, smiled, and flipped the thing over without taking her eyes from mine.

I leant on the counter, smoking, watching. She sipped wine as she cooked, a vision of domesticity, dressed in my dressing gown that scrapped the floor, fluffy slippers and her hair tied back in a loose, untidy ponytail.

The question came to me without a catalyst, a strange question maybe as I knew the story.

"Where are you from?"

She turned again, a confused frown on her face, lips pouted.

"You know where I am from," she replied and went back to her omelette.

"Yes," I nodded, "I know where you were born, where you grew up. But if someone asks you, say, maybe not `where are you from' but rather, `where is home for you', what would you answer?"

She took the omelette from the heat and placed it on the formica work-top.

"It needs to rest a while."

She stared at me, waiting, but I said nothing so she answered.

"I have no home, it was destroyed..."

She seemed upset, and I was surprised, but still I said nothing.

"My `home' as you call it is no longer there so I can't tell you where it is. It exists only in the past. It's history."

She began to slice the omelette in two, violently, and place it on the plates.

"Why will you never tell me about these things?" I said gently, my hands on her shoulders, "About how you feel?"

"Because it upsets me. Because there is no point. Because it is history," She took my hand and turned to face me, "How we feel about the past is what got us into this mess in the first place. It is crazy to discuss it because it happened and its over and we cannot change anything. All that matters to me now is the present and the future. It is all I consider."

She sat down to her meal and I joined her at the table. She took two mouthfuls, a sip of water, swallowed, and turned to me yet again, her brown eyes boring into mine.

"It is not worth talking about, how do you say...dwelling. I have no home because it is gone."

She turned away again and we ate the rest of our omelette in silence.

 

 I learned not to ask. And she never asked me, a very liberating way of going about a relationship. Both sides have no history, a clean slate. We make what we will. But despite this I want know, especially about the war and what she lost. Maybe it is because I want to understand so that I can sympathise. I hope so. But there is always the chance that I want to hear these terrible stories of war and tragedy for the same reason I slow down to look at a traffic accident or avidly consume footage of disaster and pain on the nightly news. This potential reality of the situation I do not like to consider.

Last night she told me she loved me. We had spent the evening in a collection of bars and cafes in the old town where the small community of small town filmmakers, artists and writers hang out and talk about how they are changing the world. A night of beer and brandy and earnest conversations in a language I was for once glad I didn't understand. A couple of my students shyly bought me a drink, a drunken Austrian fell off his stool, and all the while Jelena was laughing and joking, taking photographs with fun camera, fulfilling her self-appointed role.

We walked back to the flat, the building rising out of the gloom as we approached it along the river, arm in arm, immune from the cold. She pulled me to one side and into the doorway of a record store and kissed me hard on the lips.

"I love you," she said, the first time. Then she was gone, skipping down the street from one pool of light to the next as I followed behind, hands in pockets smiling. We arrived home and drank some more brandy, smoked some more cigarettes and collapsed into bed. It had been a good night I had thought before drifting from consciousness.

She told me she loves me but I know she will leave me. I have known and accepted this for some time, maybe since the beginning. She told me she loves me because she will leave me. To soften the blow.

She will leave because she feels she needs to. She feels foreign in Slovenia, and as she cannot return to Croatia she will probably go to Serbia. Her cultural home. A place where she has spent no more that three months in total in her entire life. She will go back to make a new home, to save her country, pull it back from the abyss, be one of the new generation of Serbs that looks away from the past towards a new future. Dramatic eh? She will never tell me this because she believes that I couldn't possibly understand, being as I am a middle-class Westerner who has never had to fight for anything.

But what I do understand is that even she doesn't follow her guiding principle of "living for the present and for the future". She is going to Serbia because of her past. Her past is shaping that present and future however much she tries to pretend that it doesn't, that it has no baring on anything, that she is living from a blank slate...if she really had no feelings about the past, about her history, she would have no desire to move to Serbia, she would have no attachment. She has to leave me so that she can go home, to find home, in order that any exile in the future is no longer imposed, as it is now, but through choice, as it is for me. This is why I want to hear about her past, why I always wanted to know even when I didn't ask. It wasn't through sympathy for the horrors she had seen, or voyeurism over the tragedy of her adolescence, but to understand why I will lose her.

 

She is still sleeping. I move softly across the bedroom and into the living room. It is a typical mess, a city-skyline of empty bottles on the coffee table, overflowing ashtrays and piles of identical framed photographs of the castle and the dragon bridge that she sells to tourists. She packs them five at a time into brown paper before taking them to the postcard shop by the Philamonic, wrapped like pornography. The name on the back is not hers.

There are at least four packets of cigarettes in the lounge, a product of her inability to leave the house without forgetting. All the magazines and most of the books are hers, the furniture, the lamps...I have lived her for four months and I realise that I have yet to make a mark. She still dominates the space and I still feel like a guest.

I make coffee in the kitchen and hear movement from the bedroom. In an moment she appears at the living room door, dressed in a T-shirt of mine and rubbing her eyes.

"Morning," I say, smiling, and she grins back.

"Hallo."

She picks some magazines up from the couch and drops herself down onto it. I come to her from the back of the sofa and kiss the top of her head.

"I love you," I say and she laughs.

"I love you too, but because we said it the first time do we have to now say it all of the time?"

I shake my head and grin.

"Nope. Just making sure you weren't drunk last night."

She throws a cushion at me. I go back to the coffee and she turns the television on, half-watching a movie with the sound down whilst softly singing to herself in Serbian and flicking through a three day old newspaper. Just woken up and monumentally restless.

"Do you have a cigarette?" she asks and I laugh. "What is funny?" she grimaces but I just shake my head and throw her the closest of the four or five packets to hand.

 

She tells me two weeks later at the Cafe Nostalgija, our favourite place along the narrow cobbled street of cafes in the old town where the tables blend into one long line, differentiated only by the menus on the wipeclean surfaces. The sun is shining and the air is full of coffee, fresh bread and the smoke of harsh Balkan cigarettes. It is the same cafe in which we met, six months ago.

"I'm going to Belgrade," she says and I nod, surprised by my own surprise.

We sit in silence for a moment. I know she is looking at me, waiting for a reaction, but I am lighting a cigarette and thinking how nice the extra j's are in Slovenian; Nostalgija, Slovenija...part of my habit of thinking of totally unrelated things at the most serious and important moments.

"What do you think?" she continues, breaking my train of thought.

"Whatever's best..." I mumble, looking for something to look at, anything except those brown eyes. She sighs and lights her own cigarette, her smoke meeting and mingling with mine under the sun umbrella before being disposed by a guest of wind. I try to work out how long it will take to pack up my things from the flat. Not long. Then I think about where I will go next, before being distracted by a young boy on a tricycle who is repeatedly ramming the back of his fathers legs.

"I love you," she says at one point but it doesn't matter. It carries no weight, however true, because there is no consequence. It will not shape her actions, make her stay. It means nothing.

"I love you too," I reply and order another beer.

"Can we stay in contact?"

"I dunno...can we?" I wonder about the man at the next table who is reading an English language newspaper. You don't see many English people in Ljubljana I think, but then I consider; What the fuck do you know?

Eventually she gathers her things and leaves the table. I think she is crying but I have no energy any more. The man reading the paper turns out to be Italian. I sit for a while longer, watching the people stroll up and down the street, couples, groups of lads with slick hair and sunglasses, kids struggling with skateboards on the cobbles...some come by three or four times, just enjoying the pedestrianised street in the sunshine. "Live for the present and for the future," I think to myself as I pay the waiter. Now she is the past. I wander, whistling, along the river, under the weeping willows, back to the flat.