The Book of My Lives (10 page)

The one-bedroom in Novi Sad was often full of refugees from Bosnia—friends of friends or family of family—whom my parents put up until the unfortunate people could make it to Germany or France or some other place where they were not wanted and never would be. They slept scattered all over the floor, my mother stepping over the bodies on her way to the bathroom, Mek always at her heels. He never bothered the refugees, never barked at them. He let the children pet him.

Young male that he was, Mek would often brawl with other dogs. Once, when my mother took him out, he got into a confrontation with a mean Rottweiler. She tried to separate them, unwisely, as they were about to go at each other’s throats, and the Rottweiler tore my mother’s hand apart. Kristina was there at the time, and she took Mother to the emergency room, where they had absolutely nothing to treat the injury; they did give her the address of a doctor who could sell them bandages and a tetanus shot. They didn’t have enough to pay the fare back home, and the cabdriver said he’d come the next day to get the rest of the money. My sister bluntly told him that there was no reason for him to come back, for they’d have no money tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, or anytime soon. (The cabbie didn’t insist: the daily inflation in Serbia at that time was about 300 percent, and the money would have been worthless by the next day anyway.) For years afterward, Mother could not move her hand properly or grip anything with it. Mek would go crazy if he but sniffed a Rottweiler on the same block.

*   *   *

In the fall of 1993, my parents and sister finally got all the papers and the plane tickets for Canada. Family and friends came over to bid them farewell. Everyone was sure they’d never see them again. There were a lot of tears, as at a funeral. Mek figured out that something was up; he never let my mother or father out of his sight, as if worried they might leave him; he became especially cuddly, putting his head into their laps whenever he could, leaning against their shins when lying down. Touched though my father may have been with Mek’s love, he didn’t want to take him along to Canada—he couldn’t know what was waiting for them there; where they’d live, whether they’d be able to take care of themselves, let alone a dog. My mother could not bring herself to discuss the possibility of moving to Canada without Mek; she just wept at the very thought of leaving him with strangers.

*   *   *

Back in Sarajevo, Veba got married, and he and his wife moved out of the place across the street from us. Don stayed with Veba’s mother and brother because Veba’s duties kept him away from home for long stretches, while his wife, working for the Red Cross, was also often gone. Following a Red Cross official on an inspection of a Bosnian POW camp, Veba’s wife discovered that his father was alive. Ever since he’d failed to return home from work at the beginning of the war, Don—prompted by the question “Where is Vlado?”—would leap at the coatrack where Veba’s father used to hang up his uniform. Although
č
ika-Vlado would be released from the POW camp toward the end of the war, Don would never see him again.

I received only intermittent news from Veba’s family—Veba’s letters mailed by a foreign friend who could go in and out of the Bosnian war zone; a sudden, late-night call from a satellite phone, arranged by a friend who worked for a foreign-journalist pool. During the siege the regular phone lines were most often down, but every once in a while they would inexplicably work, so I’d randomly try to reach my best friend. One late night in 1994, I called Veba’s family from Chicago on a whim. It was very early morning in Sarajevo, but Veba’s mother picked up the phone after one ring. She was sobbing uncontrollably, so my first thought was that Veba had been killed. She composed herself enough to tell me that my friend was fine, but that someone had poisoned their dog. Don had been in horrible pain all night, retching and vomiting yellow slime, she said; he’d died just a short while before I called. Veba was there too; upon hearing the news, he’d biked from his new place in the middle of the night, the curfew still on, risking his life. He’d made it in time to hold Don as he expired, and was crying on the phone with me. I could find no words for him, as I could never provide any consolation for my friends under siege. Veba wrapped Don in a blanket, carried him down the fifteen flights of stairs, and buried him with his favorite tennis ball behind the high-rise.

*   *   *

My father recognized how inconsolable my mother would be without Mek and finally surrendered. In December 1993, my parents, my sister, and Mek arrived in Canada, and I rushed over from Chicago to see them. As soon as I walked in the door of their barely furnished fifteenth-floor apartment in Hamilton, Ontario, Mek ran toward me, wagging his tail, happy to see me. I was astonished he remembered me after nearly three years. I’d felt that large parts of my Sarajevo self had vanished, but when Mek put his head in my lap, some of me came back.

*   *   *

Mek had a happy life in Hamilton. My mother always said that he was a “lucky boy.” He died in 2007, at the age of seventeen. My parents would never consider having a dog again. My mother confides in a parakeet these days, and cries whenever Mek is mentioned.

Veba moved to Canada in 1998. He lives in Montreal with his wife and children. After years of Veba’s refusing to consider having another dog, a lovely husky mix named Kahlua is now part of his family. My sister lives in London; she has not had a dog since Mek. I married a woman who has never lived without a dog, and we now have a Rhodesian ridgeback named Billie.

THE BOOK OF MY LIFE

Professor Nikola Koljevi
ć
had the long, slender fingers of a piano player. Although he was now a literature professor—he was my teacher at the University of Sarajevo in the late eighties—as a student he’d supported himself by playing the piano in the jazz bars of Belgrade. He’d even had gigs as a member of a circus orchestra—he’d sit at the fringe of the arena, I imagined, with a Shakespeare tragedy open above the piano keys, flexing his fingers, ignoring the lions, waiting for the clowns to enter.

Professor Koljevi
ć
taught a course in poetry and criticism, for which we read poetry with a critical slant—the New Critic Cleanth Brooks was his patron saint. In his class we learned how to analyze the inherent properties of a piece of literature, disregarding politics, biography, or anything external to the text. Most of the other teachers delivered their lectures passionlessly, even haughtily; possessed by the demons of scholastic boredom, they asked for nothing in particular from us. In Professor Koljevi
ć
’s class, on the other hand, we unpacked poems like Christmas presents and the solidarity of common discoveries filled the small, hot room on the top floor of the Faculty of Philosophy.

He was incredibly well read. He often quoted Shakespeare in English off the top of his head, which always impressed me; I, too, wanted to have read everything and to be able to quote with ease. He also taught an essay-writing course—the only writing course I’ve ever taken—where we read the classic essayists, beginning with Montaigne, and then tried to produce some lofty-seeming thoughts, coming up with hapless imitations instead. Still, it was flattering that he found it even remotely possible we could write something belonging to the same universe as Montaigne. It made us feel as if we had been personally invited to participate in the fine, gentle business of literature.

Once, Professor Koljevi
ć
told us about the book his daughter had begun writing at the age of five. She had titled it “The Book of My Life,” but had written only the first chapter. She planned to wait for more life to accumulate, he told us, before starting Chapter 2. We laughed, still in our early chapters, oblivious to the malignant plots accelerating all around us.

After I’d graduated, I phoned to thank Professor Koljevi
ć
for what he’d taught me, for introducing me to the world that could be conquered by reading. Back then, calling him was a brave act for a student ever in awe of his professors, but he was not put out. He invited me for an evening stroll by the Miljacka River, and we discussed literature and life as friends and equals. He put his hand on my shoulder as we walked, his fingers cramped like hooks as he held on, for I was considerably taller than he. It was uncomfortable, but I said nothing. He had, flatteringly, crossed a border, and I did not want to undo the closeness.

Not long after our stroll, I began working as an editor for
Na
š
i dani
. At around the same time, Professor Koljevi
ć
became one of the highest-positioned members of the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), a virulently nationalist organization, headed by Karad
ž
i
ć
, the talentless poet destined to become the world’s most-wanted war criminal. I attended SDS press conferences and listened to Karad
ž
i
ć
’s roaring paranoia and racism, his imposing head looming on our horizon: large, cuboid, topped with an unruly gray mane. And Professor Koljevi
ć
would be there too, sitting next to Karad
ž
i
ć
: small, solemn, and academic, with large jar-bottom glasses, wearing a tweed jacket with suede elbow patches, his long fingers crossed loosely in front of his face, as if suspended between a prayer and applause. Afterward, I’d come up to greet him, dutifully, assuming that we still shared a love of books. “Stay out of this,” he’d advise me. “Stick to literature.”

In 1992, when the Serbian attack on Bosnia and the siege of Sarajevo began, I found myself in the United States. Safe in Chicago, I watched Serbian snipers shoot at the knees and ankles of a man trying to escape from a truck that had been hit by a rocket. On the front pages of magazines and newspapers, I saw emaciated prisoners in Serbian camps, and the terrified faces of people running down Sniper Alley. I watched as the Sarajevo library perished in patient, deliberate flames.

The infernal irony of a poet (bad though he may have been) and a literature professor causing the destruction of hundreds of thousands of books did not escape me. On the news, I sometimes caught a glimpse of Professor Koljevi
ć
standing beside Karad
ž
i
ć
, who was always denying something—what was happening was for him either “self-defense” or it was not happening at all. Occasionally, Professor Koljevi
ć
talked to reporters himself, mocking the questions about rape camps, or deflecting all accusations of Serbian crimes by framing them as the unfortunate things that take place in every “civil war.” In Marcel Ophüls’s
The Troubles We’ve Seen
, a documentary about foreign reporters covering the war in Bosnia, Professor Koljevi
ć
—labeled as “Serbian Shakespearean”—speaks to a BBC reporter, dispensing spin phrases in impeccable English and explaining away the sounds of Serbian shells falling on Sarajevo in the background as a part of the ritual celebration of Orthodox Christmas. “Obviously,” he said, “from the old times, Serbs like to do this.” He smiled as he said that, apparently relishing his own cleverness. “But it is not even Christmas,” the BBC reporter observed.

I became obsessed with Professor Koljevi
ć
. I kept trying to identify the first moment when I could have noticed his genocidal proclivities. Racked with guilt, I recalled his lectures and the conversations we’d had, as if picking through ashes—the ashes of my library. I
unread
books and poems I used to like—from Emily Dickinson to Danilo Ki
š
, from Frost to Tolstoy—
unlearning
the way in which he had taught me to read them, because I should’ve known, I should’ve paid attention. I’d been mired in close reading, impressionable and unaware that my favorite teacher was involved in plotting a vast crime. But what’s done cannot be undone.

Now it seems clear to me that his evil had far more influence on me than his literary vision. I excised and exterminated that precious, youthful part of me that had believed you could retreat from history and hide from evil in the comforts of art. Because of Professor Koljevi
ć
, perhaps, my writing is infused with testy impatience for bourgeois babbling, regrettably tainted with helpless rage I cannot be rid of.

Toward the end of the war, Professor Koljevi
ć
fell out of favor with Karad
ž
i
ć
and was demoted from the realms of power. He spent his time drinking heavily, now and then giving an interview to a foreign journalist, ranting about various injustices committed against the Serbian people in general and himself in particular. In 1997, he blew his Shakespeare-laden brains out. He had to shoot twice, his long piano-player finger apparently having trembled on the unwieldy trigger.

THE LIVES OF A FLANEUR

In the spring of 1997, I flew from Chicago, where I was living, to Sarajevo, where I was born. This was my first return to Sarajevo since the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina had ended a year and a half before. I’d left a few months before the siege of the city started. I had no family there (my parents and my sister now lived in Canada), except for teta-Jozefina, whom I thought of as my grandmother. When my parents had moved to Sarajevo after graduating from college in 1963, they’d rented a room in the apartment of Jozefina and her husband, Martin, in the part of town called Marin dvor. In that rented room I was conceived, and it was where I lived for the first two years of my life. Teta-Jozefina and
č
ika-Martin, who had two teenage children at the time, treated me as their own grandchild—to this day, my mother believes that they spoiled me for life. For a couple of years after we’d moved out to a different part of Sarajevo, I had to be taken back to Marin dvor to visit them every single day. And until the war shattered our common life, we spent each Christmas at teta-Jozefina and
č
ika-Martin’s. Every year, we followed the same ritual: the same elaborately caloric dishes crowding the big table, the same tongue-burning Herzegovinian wine, the same people telling the same jokes and stories, including the one featuring the toddler version of me running up and down the hallway butt-naked before my nightly bath.