When a fire at Zagreb’s Three Palms café tragically takes the life of the owner’s son, everyone joins the search for a culprit. And there can only be one: the young Roma man—Enis—employed as a waiter at the café.
With all eyes on him, Enis is forced to flee, his face looming large on the front page of every newspaper and channel. The only place where he can think to take refuge is in Bosnia, in the settlement where his estranged father lives. Meanwhile, the event, which coincides with the outbreak of the wars of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, draws a crowd to surround the Roma settlement in Zagreb, turning it into a ghetto. The protesters blame the Roma collectively, seeing danger in their differences.
Weaving between Zagreb and Bosnia, between past and present, between a Roma ghetto in the heart of Zagreb and the lesser-known ghettos of the Roma Holocaust (or Porajmos), and between an imagined better life and the blaring trumpets of war in reality, Nebojša Lujanović’s Cloud the Color of Skin tells a story of guilt and justice, victimhood and violence, peacetime and war—and the Roma in the midst of it all.
The book Cloud the Color of Skin was published as part of the Growing Together project, co-financed by the European Union.