Now, in 2023, the maps have changed. Not the geography—the mountains are still where they were—but the names. Villages that once held three hundred people now marked as "ruins." Roads that NATO satellites bombed in '99 now show as "unmaintained path." Dragan uses a red pen to update his old 1986 edition. He scratches out "Titovo Užice" and writes "Užice." He crosses out "Bratstvo" collective farms. He adds refugee settlements near Kuršumlija that look like scabs on the hillside.

And on the table, under the salt shaker, a single map remains open: , southern border. A place so jagged the cartographers gave up and wrote: "Terrain impossible to survey with precision."

He does not laugh back. He spreads across the table. Points to a ravine so narrow it has no name—only a elevation number: 1,017 m. "In 1942," he says, the first war he never mentions, "my father hid a Jewish family there for fourteen months. The Germans had planes. They had spies. But they didn't have this ." He taps the map. "They had road maps. Tourist maps. But not the topografske —the ones that show where a man can vanish."

"Why do you keep them?" she asks.

He locks the cabinet. Outside, the Kolubara keeps bending. Somewhere in the fog of his memory, his brother is still walking toward that sheepfold, map in hand, believing he will arrive.