Mila and the Stranger

• Main Authors: Jovanka Kalaba, Ivo Andrić
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Zadar 2015-12-01
• Series: [sic]
• Online Access: http://www.sic-journal.org/ArticleView.aspx?aid=368

The boy was playing alone on a dusty road, not far from the big door of the courtyard of his house. On a day other than a market day or a holiday, the road would be peaceful, almost deserted, but the boy would always harbor a hidden hope that the road might produce something new, rare, and exciting. On that day the road brought nothing for quite a long time. At one moment the boy raised his eyes. High overhead he saw someone coming down the hill.The slopes of that unusually steep hill rose above the town almost perpendicularly, evoking in the boy’s mind the image of a school blackboard. The precipitous surface of the hill was streaked by a dusty white road that disappeared behind low, rocky and sparsely vegetated mounds with a well-trodden shortcut the color of clay stretching between them. High above on the hill the traveller emerged as a tiny figure whose clothes or age could not yet be discerned. The boy saw him disappear behind the rocky mounds and then appear again, coming out of every bend bigger and clearer than he had been the moment before. The boy kept a close watch on him until the man appeared on a small plateau, where the reddish shortcut merged with the dusty road, and the road descended almost straight as a waterfall in front of the first houses on the outskirts of the town. The boy’s house was one of them.