Gottfried appeared unexpectedly soon after I arrived. He produced a bottle of rakia, two thumbnail glasses, and insisted I drink. “Na Zdravje!” he says. To health. But Gottfried’s health is not good. He suffered a stroke ten years ago, leaving his left side paralysed. Now he carries himself around his home, a chubby bundle clambering in perpetual slow motion from the television to the computer to the balcony.
His wife met me at the bus station. She has twiggy black hair and a crumbling body. A retired economist of some sort, now she waits for tourists in need of a room. I discovered her guest-house on the internet, and had been impressed with how she responded to my emails with yekke-like efficiency, but now I discover that it was Gottfried who had been writing to me in his wife’s name.

We have three drinking sessions: two at night, one in the morning. Each time, I am the quicker to drink, and he promptly refills my glass. Each time, he insists on a clink and a toast, and by the end he is saying l’chaim like a yeshiva bocher. Each time, we talk intermittently but soon fall silent, his dead left arm lying down his side like a snake.

He tells me about Lake Ohrid and its endemic trout, about the legends of Saint Naum, about his time in the Yugoslav army (he insists that life was better under Tito), and his admiration for Hapoel Tel Aviv basketball team. I explain the difference between Hapoel and Maccabi while he bends back his dead left hand like silly putty.

Gottfried worked as an electrician and a mechanic for sewing-machines. Then came the stroke, retirement, an invalid’s pension, the balcony. “I like to sit out here in the summer,” he tells me, “until one, two in the morning. It is too hot to sleep before then.” When I return to the balcony after a day by the lake with Life and Fate, he tells me that he was watching a volleyball game on television, until a technical problem deaded the broadcast. I tell him that I was drunk after that morning’s rakia, but he does not believe me. I don’t tell him about my cry of “more toast maestro” at a local cafe, or that I almost fell over his wife at the bus station. I want to tell him that Jews are famous for many thinks but that drinking is not one of them, but I think better of it.

Enter Fernando, a middle-aged Spanish teetotaller who proudly tells us that he refuses to pay more than $5 for a fish, has caught Gottfried’s attention. I should get to be – tomorrow I have an epic four nation journey to Mostar. But, when I try to creep away, Gottfried tells me that it is still early, before asking in a lengthy, deep, pitiful voice for me to have one more rakia.

Social encounters are transactions. We enter into them in the hope of acquiring something, no matter how abstract. Gottfried, whose friendliness I had unfairly assumed to be an extension of his tourist business, is a lonely and crippled man sitting outside history in a flat without a view of one of the most magnificent tectonic lakes on the planet. Earlier, he had asked to see pictures from my visit to Saint Naum. Fuelled by nostalgia, I also showed him pictures from the last few months in Israel. Afterwards, I felt guilty.

Now Fernando tells us that he is fifty-seven, that he has never enjoyed any of the jobs he has done, that he has wasted his life, never got married, never had children, that he only has to survive another eight years before he is eligible for a pension. His words. Gottfried pours me another drink.

The great inequality in the world is inequality of experience. How should we respond? Guilt? Triumphalism? Condescension? I fear that there is no answer, that redressing material imbalances will not be enough. Inequalities of experience can only be extinguished through an unimaginable totalitarianism. We have to resort to cliches, count our blessings, remind ourselves of our shared fate, and drink, and drink, and drink: to our health, forever and ever, without irony.

*Name has been changed