Djuliana was nine years old and felt older, had spent more than half of her life suffering the effects of war between Serbs and Bosnians. He had become accustomed so much to the madness of his situation that his only real life lived in dreams. Far from lost men and women alone, far from the gray-negro of sadness and destruction.
He found me on the street, it was night and I walked back to my house. While walking, I felt someone threw from the bass of my pants. When I looked down I met his eyes and his sad rabbit look. With my hand open, I asked me for money.
This is how this beggar's girl, daughter and granddaughter of gypsies, entered my life, capable of being scared to the unspeakable with her self -confidence and her learned life lessons. He moved as a fish among the revolt waters of the city of Sarajevo that was able to swim in a jump from a center portal to a cafeteria on the other side of the city. And everywhere it landed as a passage that requested permission to replace fuel. He took a dirty hand from the interior of his body often and extended it to the nose of any greater.
But almost everywhere they threw it out, they were shouting that they left, they remembered, without subtlety, that in the cities that have suffered a war, children are not as children as in the other cities that keep their monuments and illusions intact . And although Djuliana insisted, there was almost always someone capable of scaring her with a very tall shout and an almost fierce look. My eyes witnessed that on more than one sad occasion.
Almost every time between the afternoon and the night you could find it in the most central street, rolling with its open wings between the feet of those who went from one place to another place. Sometimes her brother accompanied her, five years older and as gypsy as she. The two were there to request the little charity of those who had suffered the harassment of some crazy people and the oblivion of a world.
More than once I accompanied them back home, a brick nest and holes in which they slept and their grandmother cooked in an oil horn. The nest lacked windows, furniture, beds and even almost firm soil. He rose to him for some staircase and entered him through a door-water. Inside were extended blankets, some walker utensils and the smell of poverty. There, Djuliana and her brother dreamed impossible things while her grandmother gave me coffee and thanked my presence.
In one of the mornings I visited them, Djuliana confessed to me his secret desire to become a diaper seller for newborn babies and fresh fruits and vegetables for everyone. Whenever we talked about dreams, he told me about his mother, lost in the arms of a mysterious man who came like the wind, fell in love and took her in a hurry.
Djuliana hurt in his soul to be growing away from his mother's heat. I wanted a mother at all costs. I wanted to have it, even if I had to invent it. I was clear that children without mother are less children. I knew that this is such a great truth that there is nothing that can change it, nor the madness of men, nor their lack of consideration towards small angels. Neither their lack of tenderness, nor the war with which they communicate between them again and again. Nor the absence of rain or lack of snow. Nor all the magic of the world. Nothing was as valuable for Djuliana as the hug and the kiss of good night of a mother.
