This is my first posting to the group.

I wrote a version of this recently that was too dry and analytical. This is a more lyrical and stylized version of the same true story. I feel like it is close, but a little bit... umm... disjointed? I think I might be too close to it, so I am putting it out there for comment and criticism.

Thank you in advance!
- CJ
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Eastern Wind
by Christian "CJ" Jacobsen


Night time drops fast and hard in the Balkan winter. The dull light of the day gives up by early afternoon, and night comes down like a concrete block.

During the day, the wind is formed in the soft and sophisticated winter of European skiers. Layers keep you warm and deflect this western winter coming down from the forests and mountains of northern Italy and Austria.

Then you shiver. Look up from what you are doing. Check behind you. Something is different. Something has changed.

The wind. It comes from due east now… from the steppes it blows across the Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria. Unhindered, the wind gathers the cold as it sweeps across the fallow plains and frozen waterways of eastern Hungary and Serbia. You feel the change instantly. Through your layers the cold needles from the east freeze your skin and chill your bones.

It is dark. The eastern cold is here. This is a night when families gather round a fire that never seems to be quite big enough, quite bright enough, or quite warm enough.

I am somewhere in Bosnia i Herzegovina, also known as BiH, or just Bosnia. I am driving a large delivery truck down a small two-lane road. At irregular intervals my headlights illuminate uninhabited villages that still show prominent evidence of the battles fought here recently. More often than not, the village or town is mostly inhabited, with only the most badly damaged homes and businesses still abandoned.
The heater in the truck is trying valiantly but I still have on my layers, my jacket, my gloves.

This is a deeply creepy part of the world. In daylight, the path the Yugoslav army took through these idyllic villages is obvious. Huge gaping holes in the walls of homes indicate the tanks came from the east. Deep scars from machine guns ring bedroom windows, the only testament to some local villager who stood their ground for a few minutes before being crushed under the onslaught of the Yugoslav army. The light of the day illuminates the depressions in the ground where the tanks rolled and a path of young trees among old growth forest indicates where the army came through the woods.

At night, the scene changes. I catch brief glimpses as the headlights illuminate details of the roadside destruction. A peek into an abandoned living room through a hole left by a tank round. Splintered door frames sticking up out of the rubble of a demolished home. Bullet holes tracing an upward arc along a wall.

The single most disturbing thing to see is just as night falls. The countryside is littered with cemeteries, some official, next to a church, and others stand alone in fields or at the edges of villages, cemeteries built according to need. Some with graves in neat rows, others more hastily built.

In every one of these cemeteries, families and friends of the deceased come out every night and light a candle in front of the grave markers. One a simple stone marker capped with the crescent moon and star of Islam. Another with the Star of David. Another with a cross. And another with the double-bar cross of the Serbian Orthodox church. All these graves, side by side, most with a single candle inside of a red glass candleholder like you would expect to find on the table at some kitsch Italian restaurant.

Each glass globe shields the flame from the wind and casts an eerie red glow onto the grave marker.

Coming around a bend in the utter darkness of a Balkan winter, and seeing a clearing in the trees with hundreds of these red flickering tombstones is a sight that will forever cause a tightening of stomach and shoulders. As I write this, more than five years after the experience, goose-bumps rise on my arms.

The sight itself is enough to leave an indelible impression. But as they say: it’s the thought that counts.

Consider this: Every day, someone goes out there and lights a candle at one or more of these graves. Every day, that person plans their trip to the cemetery. Every day, that person checks if they have a candle for tonight, or if they need to go by the shop on the way home from work. Every day, that person kneels in front of the grave of a friend, family member, loved one, and remembers them. Their life. Their vibrancy. Their times together that impels this person to make their daily pilgrimage to this grave.

During that Balkan winter the chill needles of the eastern wind, the wind from the steppes, the wind like icy concrete, cold and gritty on your cheek, the wind from the Ukraine that has been gathering the cold like a mother gathers a frightened child to her breast, the wind blows across the remains of the Balkans. The cold stones scream of the life they represent. Scream to the deaf wind.

And another person kneels down, lights a candle for the dead.
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