7.

IT WAS SEVERAL weeks before most of the rest of the city decided that the war had begun. It seemed safer to believe that some kind of madness was moving through, like a sudden, blinding snowstorm. No one could stop it; no one could be blamed for it. But at some point it would melt away. You could come up out of the cellar and find all the comforting artifacts of your life set up in your living room.

Yet within just a few days Irena and her family had made critical adjustments. Some of them were more or less instantaneous and, once done, more obvious than amazing. Irena was surprised to hear that Bruce Springsteen had left Julianne Phillips, or that Mick Jones had left the Clash to begin BAD II, or that Magic Johnson had gotten sick and could no longer play basketball. But sleeping through the pops of mortars and the rattle of machine guns; taking care not to sit above the line of the windowsill; opening old canned goods and dividing a few ounces of waxed beans into four cold meals; keeping all spigots open so that when the Serbs teasingly turned on the water for an hour they could spring up to capture it in tubs, cups, and bottles—all of that became their daily custom.

“Hell must also have its routines,” Aleksandra Julianovic said to Irena.

         

THE SERBS WOULD turn on the water only to keep Bosnians up all night, anxious and itchy, hoping to hear a splash. Turning on the water in a Sarajevo apartment building was like strewing bread crumbs around trees to attract famished pigeons. Serb snipers knew that if they turned on the water briefly, they could shoot into almost any bathroom window and hit or scare a Bosnian concentrating on an old milk jug under the bathtub spigot.

         

THE ZARICS HAD to decide what to do about the windows. The windows in each bedroom of Grandma’s apartment faced the mountains and the snipers. They could leave those windows alone, and go into the rooms only when they had to forage for possessions to sell or burn.

The window in the bathroom also faced the mountains. It was small, high, frosted, and risky. They could only hope that it would not be noticed across the way. To compress any profile he might offer a sniper through that window, Mr. Zaric decided always to sit on the toilet when relieving himself.

The center of their puzzle was the three large windows in the living room on a side of the building that faced away from the mountains at an angle. Mr. Zaric made a drawing on the inside flap of one of his mother’s old romance novels. He sketched out lines and arrows, and concluded that the plane was still broad enough to tempt a sniper. People in surrounding buildings, and in apartments on other floors, could be heard hammering doors, crates, and tabletops across their windows.

“Ah, but that must be so gloomy inside,” said Mrs. Zaric. “Like living in a cave.”

Mr. Zaric agreed. “So unlike our glamorous present surroundings.” This earned him the laugh he had sought from his wife.

“Snipers have a city full of targets to choose from,” said Irena. “Why would our windows be looked at in particular?”

“Because they’re there,” said Mr. Zaric. “Still there.”

“Pretty Bird would always be asleep,” said Irena. “I think darkness turns on some kind of sleep channel in his brain.”

“Well, if we don’t cover the windows,” said Mr. Zaric, “I don’t know how long I can scuttle over the floors like a crab.” He hunched up his shoulders and let his arms dangle to make his point.

“That’s a baboon,” said Irena. “They go from tree to tree.” Pretty Bird obliged with a trill.

“We can stand up in the hallways when we need to,” said Mrs. Zaric. “In shifts. You love schedules.” It was her turn to win a laugh. “Sing. Dance. There’s room enough for Toni Kukoc to stand up in our hallways.”

Mr. Zaric began to rock back on his heels in the hallway, as if he were about to deliver a judgment from on high. “You’ve convinced me,” he said finally. “In the end, it all pivots on advertising. Covering the windows with a door is like putting up a billboard for those bastards across the way. We might as well install a bloody blinking sign that says, ‘Hello, mate! Someone is living in here. Fire away!’ I think,” he went on, “that the windows ought to stay. At least for as long as they last.”

“I give you my word,” said Mrs. Zaric. “You will never catch me cleaning them.”

         

GRANDMA’S BUILDING WAS six stories tall, and each floor had six apartments—basic, boxy, late-Tito-era housing crates, with cold concrete floors and painted white cinder-block walls. The Zarics had been pleased when Grandma moved in. The building was well situated for an elderly person who was energetic and wanted to be independent. The apartments were just below Old Town’s picturesque twisting streets, coffee bars, and kebab stands, a block away from the central synagogue, which offered many cultural programs (Tuesday Night Rabbi Zemel will show full-color slides of his spring trip to historic Orlando USA) and served hot lunches at noon (although Mr. Zaric’s mother had preferred to have her lunch at a kebab stand, where she could have a beer).

War depreciated these assets. Mountain and river views now meant exposure to mortar and sniper shots. Early on, a mortar round had pierced one of the yellow panels, one of the building’s few gestures toward charm. The explosion gouged deep into a fourth-floor hallway, where people were snoozing in rows.

The Zarics heard crashing and screaming above them. They sprang out of their own sleep to rush upstairs. But, just as quickly, they heard snipers shooting through the hole. The Serbs had fired a mortar to shed blood that would draw more people to be killed.

“Wait,” said Mr. Zaric, holding up his arms. “Not just yet. Wait.”

“We have to do something,” said Irena.

“What?” snapped Mrs. Zaric. “Hurry just to fill their gun sights? Give them more targets?”

For a few long minutes, the Zarics faced one another across a dark room again, trading words heavily.

“Maybe it’s stopped.”

“Maybe. Wait.”

“For what?”

“For it to stop.”

“Stop? When?”

“Oh, fuck, it’s a war,” said Mrs. Zaric finally. “It never stops.”

They went upstairs and found that three people had died. A man flashed a beam of light from a torch over each set of eyes.

“Recognize them?” he asked Mr. Zaric.

“We’re new here ourselves,” Mr. Zaric answered, a touch defensively. “From Grbavica. We had to move into my mother’s apartment.”

“Yes, Gita,” said the man with the torch. “I heard. Aleksandra brings the word. She is our Columbus these days, sailing between worlds. Each floor is a continent.”

“Can we . . .” Mr. Zaric’s thought drifted off.

“Oh, hell,” said the man. “I don’t know these people. I know the Ciganovic family was living up here. But they may have gone across the other way. I don’t know if it’s forever or just for a while, though I can’t see that they have much reason to return. These folks might have come in from the country.” He flashed the light along their shoes, which were heavy-toed and mud-brown. “Bijeljina and Zvornik. Walked here with what they had on their backs and just kept turning doorknobs until they found a place left open. Made themselves at home. Even this place might seem like bloody Paris after Vukovar. And then, poor devils, they run into the same damn bastards here.”

The man scoured the cold faces with his torch: two men and a boy. Their blood had spilled out quickly, leaving their skin white and glistening under the light, almost like ice. God forgive me, Irena thought to herself, for seeing anything beautiful right now. She imagined the two men and the boy sleeping for centuries in some arctic gorge, safely awakened long after the men who killed them had gone.

         

SHE WALKED OVER to the hole in the wall and reached out to touch the rough bottom where concrete and plaster had been punched through. It was still a little warm, and gritty under her fingers. More of the wall gave way at her touch. It was the middle of the night, and the sides of the hole felt like stones and sand in a hot sun.

“That’s a stupid thing to do,” Mr. Zaric said from behind.

“It’s dark,” she said. “They can’t see me.”

“Infrared sights,” said Mr. Zaric. “Night goggles. Star Trek glasses. Even the old Yugoslav Army has them.”

“They’d have to be looking,” said Irena, as she drew back.

“You can see all these lights out there, you know,” she said. “The other side, I mean. Over here, it’s like someone just rolled a blanket over everything. Over there, in the hills, back home, close enough to touch. You can see porch lights, car lights, streetlights. You can see the little lights between floors in staircases, and fizzing little yellow display lights in windows for beer. I can see the light on the orange roof of the old Serb church, and the light over the loading dock at school. It’s amazing. It’s normal. I’m sure they even have ice cream.”

“Don’t they know that there’s a war going on?” Mr. Zaric took his daughter smoothly by the shoulders to steer her away from the hole.

“I could kill them,” said Irena softly.

“Don’t say that,” said her father.

“All right,” said Irena. “I won’t. All the same”—she turned toward the hole again, and saw another maddening sprinkle of pretty lights—“I could.”

         

JUST BEFORE DAWN, a dozen more families from Grandma’s building took their own ten minutes to fill gym bags and garbage sacks with as much of their lives as they could carry on their backs. A few had places in mind, and were welcomed into the apartments of relatives or friends. Others begged shelter from strangers, and a few, they heard, simply threw out other people at gunpoint.

The city was being reshuffled. The relocations began as a temporary inconvenience that each party vowed to bear cheerfully, as a human and a patriotic duty. As the weeks went by, though, cheerfulness and courtesy began to wear thin. Inside the apartments, people who had been relative strangers suddenly had to share the same small supply of food, water, and breathing space.

         

THE ZARICS FORCED open Mr. Kovac’s door to find anything he might have to help them get by. There was a little money and jewelry. They kept the money and hid a gray-stoned ring and a silver money clip in one of Grandma’s market bags.

“To save them from thieves,” said Mr. Zaric. He had ventured into Mr. Kovac’s closet and found that he could fit into the other man’s coats, shirts, and sweaters. The slacks pinched somewhat—he had to strain to button them. But the scarcity of food in the city was already working to tailor his waist to the garment. A green felt vest, a couple of pink oxford shirts, and four pairs of red Dutch socks were unexpectedly jaunty, and Mr. Zaric quickly got over his initial discomfort with wearing the undershorts of a dead man whom he had barely known.

“Plain white briefs,” he emphasized to Aleksandra Julianovic. “No pink silk panties, per your suspicions.”

Irena and her mother helped themselves to Grandma’s clothes. They hung loosely, but Irena found two pairs of blue jeans—one left by her, another apparently by her brother—that were a better fit.

         

THE INTERNATIONAL PLAYBOY clothing store (“No relation to Playboy International Inc. claimed or implied” had to run below the title ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall had given copyright lawyers more standing in local courts), which Mr. Zaric managed, was closed.

Mr. Zaric himself glumly brought back the news one morning after walking over to Vase Miskina Street in Old Town. He had promised to stay near people who looked as if they were streetwise and shrewd. He had been following a vigorous young man in a leather motorcycle jacket when a bullet snipped between them and slammed into the bricks of a water fountain.

The young man rolled into a drainage channel. Someone must have taught him that maneuver, thought Mr. Zaric admiringly. He could only scramble behind a green trash bin. There was a tinny sound as he thumped it gently, and he realized that the bin probably afforded him as much fortification as an olive oil can.

“I wouldn’t grip the thing with my fingers like that,” the young man called out.

“Oh, shit, you’re right,” said Mr. Zaric. “Fingers showing.” He drew in his hands and tucked his elbows into his sides. Knees, ankles, and now his elbows—every joint was straining to keep Mr. Zaric tucked behind his olive oil can. “A real Houdini pose I’m holding here,” he called back.

“Now would be the time to make yourself disappear!” said the man.

They heard their laughs falling on the empty streets.

“You seem to know how to handle yourself out here,” said Mr. Zaric. “Are you a soldier?”

“Oh, shit no!” the man called up from the drainage ditch. “A priest at St. Francis.”

“You seem streetwise,” said Mr. Zaric.

“I am Irish,” said the priest.

“Belfast?” asked Mr. Zaric.

“Sorry to disappoint. Donegal.”

“Where did you learn to duck like that?”

“Where does anybody learn anything? Television.”

“I wish we were having this conversation in a pub,” said Mr. Zaric. He could hold that posture comfortably for only about three minutes, and painfully for only another two. “I’ve got to turn round,” he shouted over to the priest. “Can’t do this anymore. I’ll just tumble over and look like a goose on a platter to him.”

“Turn carefully,” said the priest.

“My name’s Milan Zaric, and we used to live in Grbavica,” he said without moving. “My wife’s name is Dalila. I have a son, Tomaslav, who is in Vienna now, and a daughter, Irena.”

“She plays basketball,” said the priest.

“You know her?”

“She’s good. Number Three beat our girls’ asses at St. Francis in the Tito youth group games.”

“Well, if this turn isn’t so triumphant,” said Mr. Zaric, “we’re living on the third floor of a building right over on Volunteer Street. With an outdoor staircase.”

“The chalet, I’ll find them,” said the man. “I’m Father Chuck. I’ll pray for you to turn like Katarina Witt.”

And, indeed, the mere intonation of the name seemed to inspire Mr. Zaric to spin his shoulders and knees around to bring his back against the trash bin. He settled in more easily.

“Bra-vo!” Father Chuck called over. “I heard that. Nine-point-eight, say the judges.”

Mr. Zaric could feel a crease from the bin pressing into his forehead, and kept his right elbow in at his waist as he raised his arm to touch it; he felt no blood. He had not been able to read well since his glasses were smashed in Grbavica. But he could make out a message that a hand had scored in large black letters on the side of the fountain: FUAD IS OK TELL HIS MOTHER. Mr. Zaric didn’t know the name.

“How long do we wait here, Padre?”

“Until dark wouldn’t be bad. But I have to go to the bathroom, and I’m sure we both wouldn’t be out here if we didn’t have things to do.”

“Maybe our friend in the hills figures he’s got us pinned down and has turned his attentions elsewhere,” suggested Mr. Zaric.

“Or he’s waiting.”

“Or bored. I am.”

Within ten minutes, they heard the sound of shots ringing elsewhere.

“Oh, that’s downtown,” said Mr. Zaric. “Blocks away.”

“They have more than one gun, I’m sure,” said Father Chuck. “Let’s get up at the same time,” he suggested. “Confuse the bastard.”

“Count to three. One.”

“Two.”

“Two and a half?”

“Yes, keep going.”

“Three!”

The two men scampered under the eaves of an old lunch shop that was known for its cevapcici, the small lamb-sausage sandwich of Sarajevo, and shook hands.

“You must come to our church for a meal sometime,” said Father Chuck. “During a lull or a cease-fire. Better yet, when this nonsense is over. We don’t want a family of three running through these streets for the canned soup we’re going through at the rectory.”

Later, Mr. Zaric didn’t tell his family about his ten minutes behind the trash can on General Stepa Stepanovic Quay. He simply said, “I met the most delightful young man in Old Town today.”

         

WHEN MR. ZARIC turned the corner onto Vase Miskina Street, there was a gaunt gray dog eating a carcass. Looters got greedy. They would run off with their arms overstuffed, and shed a trail of running shoes, cigarettes, soap bars, and cologne bottles. Mr. Zaric supposed that the looter of a cevapcici shop probably took more carcasses than he could carry. Then he saw that there were bits of blue cloth clinging to the underside of the lamb’s hulk. There was nothing to do except to keep walking, which is what Mr. Zaric did. “I have seen more sickening things,” he told himself. “I’m almost glad that the man and the dog could be useful to each other.”

         

THE INTERNATIONAL PLAYBOY store was now a shell. The windows had been smashed, and all the goods on the shelves had been stolen, down to the last pair of ankle socks. Someone had even ripped the toilet bowl away from the bathroom wall, leaving a bare pipe and angry black letters on the tile: MUSLIMS EAT SHIT.

“Like, ‘Katarina Witt Drinks Pepsi,’ ” Mr. Zaric told his family. But there was no concealing the depression behind his rueful jokes. “No work means no money,” he told his wife and daughter. “Our savings are locked up in Greater Serbia. I don’t know how we’re going to live. Did I just say that?” he asked them. “ ‘I don’t know how we’re going to live’?”

         

IRENA WAS BEWILDERED when her father told her that he didn’t want her going into the streets to pick up some of the aid supplies that U.N. troops had begun to hand out in the city. She had begun to feel cramped in the confinement. Spring was usually a pivotal time for her in basketball. She missed the challenge of being useful.

“I can carry more than anyone,” she argued. “And run faster besides.”

“That’s just the point,” said Mr. Zaric. “You can run faster than your mother or me. You might even run faster than a bloody gazelle. But not faster than a bullet.”

“You were fine,” she pointed out.

“I was fortunate,” he said. “That’s different. Michael Jordan couldn’t move fast enough to avoid a sniper if his aim is good. His or her, I suppose you have to say for everything nowadays.”

Mrs. Zaric, who thought that her husband had seemed blithe about his afternoon out, said, “I’ll go with her. We’ll be together.”

“So you both get in trouble?”

“You can’t expect us to stay cooped up in here forever.”

“No. Only as long as necessary,” he said.

“Like what?” asked Mrs. Zaric. “The Frank family?”

“I was hoping for a happier ending,” said Mr. Zaric.

“Look, we could use the food,” Mrs. Zaric said in the low tone of voice she had always used to keep Irena from hearing them (Irena heard them anyway). “If she doesn’t get out, Milan, she will be intolerable company in here. Besides, she’s right: she can be useful. And,” she added more urgently, “Milan, Irena has a right to see.”

         

THE RADIO SAID that a water tap had been opened on a small street off General Radomir Putnik Boulevard. They rinsed out a large plastic soft-drink bottle and an old roasting pan.

Irena sang, “Good, good, good, good vibrations!” as she drummed her fingers over the bottom of the pan she was carrying under her arm. Her mother carried the empty soft-drink bottle under one arm and a yellow pail in the other.

Mr. Zaric’s eyes softened as he saw them to the door. “Oh, my God,” he said. “You two look as if you were going to spend the day at the beach in Dubrovnik.”

         

MRS. ZARIC AND IRENA walked down Proletariat Brigade Boulevard without incident. But the silence of the main street was unnerving. Irena loved losing herself in the hum of the city—the clink of coffee cups and human commotion, the purposeful clatter of heels along the boulevard. She loved stepping in and out of knots of people and absorbing their conversations. Now she could hear only her voice against the stones. It sounded lonely when it came back to her.

“The temperature is better than I expected” was all she could think to say to her mother.

They joined a line of about twenty people, standing behind a bus that had been overturned in the street so that its undercarriage could block sniper fire. A Bosnian policeman in a blue shirt had opened a water spigot on the side of a red-brick building, and people took turns holding their soda bottles under the stream. The crowd was conspicuously quiet. People kept their eyes down. No one said, “How happy I am to run into you, hungry, unwashed, wearing borrowed clothes, and standing in line for water.”

Mrs. Zaric and Irena had been waiting for perhaps five minutes when a man came up behind them. He had three young children in tow, two boys and a girl, barely old enough to manage the jugs each carried.

A woman wrapped in a brown blanket turned around. “Those kids won’t get you any extra water,” she told him. “It’s two bottles for everyone, no more.”

“But I have three children,” he explained.

“It’s a rule. You shouldn’t drag those children out here anyway.”

“Their mother is dead,” said the man.

“So will they be if you don’t get them out of here.” Now she was upset, red-faced, and sputtering.

“I’m to leave them alone in our apartment, where they can crawl up to a window and be shot?” the father asked.

Mrs. Zaric moved closer to the woman in the blanket.

“I think everyone has made a good point,” she said.

When Mrs. Zaric and Irena got to the spigot, the policeman confirmed that they could fill only two containers—any two.

“So we can fill this old roasting pan?”

“Of course,” he said.

“And the pail?”

“Yes,” he said. “No matter.”

“But we could also fill just the bottle and the pail. Or two roasting pans? I’m not sure I understand the sense of this limit.”

People behind Irena and her mother were beginning to stir and snort as as if to say that they didn’t have all day. But although Irena wasn’t about to remind them, all of them probably did.

“Filling two containers—or ten—is not the problem,” said the policeman. He motioned them to place the first of their containers below the spigot.

Mrs. Zaric felt the pail get heavier as it filled with water, and enjoyed the cold splash over her knuckles. As she braced the full pail against her hip, Irena positioned the roasting pan below the spigot.

“That’s too much!” someone complained, but the policeman held up a hand. “We are fed by a spring here,” he told them. “Plenty for everyone.” The spigot made a rusty screech as he turned it open again to fill the pan.

Irena bent over to lift it and realized that it wouldn’t budge.

“Serves you right for being greedy,” someone called out.

With the pail in her left hand, Mrs. Zaric used her right hand to take hold of a handle on the roasting pan while Irena lifted it with both arms. Water splashed out of both the pail and the pan with their first steps. The more they walked, the more water splashed. Small waves rolled in the roasting pan and crested over the sides, spilling water over Irena’s chest. They had not taken ten steps before they had to stop and set down the pail and the pan heavily. They were losing the water, and losing strength from their laughter.

“I’m glad we didn’t bring a bathtub,” said Mrs. Zaric. “We’ll have empty pans and wet shoes.”

They waddled past the overturned bus and back down Proletariat Brigade, looking a little like tottering ducks to anyone who might have been watching.

         

MR. ZARIC HAD found a sheaf of postcards in his store that he used to send out to customers; he put them in his jacket pocket. He was a methodical man who believed in orderliness. He could see using the cards to prepare lists of things the family should bear in mind: the bottles they had available to bring to public taps, the number of cans of beans and meatballs that were still in the kitchen, the number of bandages they had left. He put the cards aside when his wife reached across the kitchen table for one and wrote “Tuesday: Stay Alive” in the center.

         

MR. ZARIC HAD worked every day of his life since the age of eighteen, including most Saturday afternoons. This had occasionally conflicted with Irena’s basketball games, and he had asked for his daughter’s understanding: they both served the public. She couldn’t play a league game on, say, Wednesday at ten in the morning, when it would not conflict with social plans for her and her teammates. Games were scheduled for fans. Games had to be played when their work was done, dinner was done, and the dishes had been put away. So it was in selling, he said. What they did served others; that made it worth doing.

Mr. Zaric had no job to go to now. Mrs. Zaric asked Irena to understand that this was another loss for her father, like the sudden disappearance of a longtime friend. Mr. Zaric missed the companionship and sense of purpose that his work had afforded him.

They were running short on candles. The electricity had flickered and then died when Serb paramilitaries severed the power lines. Stores selling candles had stocked only enough for birthdays and romantic dinners, and had already been looted, in any case. So Mr. Zaric went to work. He took the residue of wax left by each candle that burned down and put it into an empty bean can. While his wife was heating water for tea over a fire in the kitchen one morning, Mr. Zaric lowered the bottom of the can into the water. In time, the water began to sputter. So did Mr. Zaric.

“It—it—look! I’m on to something!”

Irena and her mother sat bleary-eyed, wanting only their tea.

“Look!” he cried, brandishing the bean can in an oven mitt like one of Irena’s basketball trophies. “Do you see? Do you see?” They didn’t, quite.

“Look here,” he said, presenting the can for consideration as if it were a prop in a magic act. “Observe that the wax has begun to melt. Had we heated a little more water,” he went on with obvious excitement, “more of the wax would have melted.”

Irena and her mother smiled—amenable, if still uncomprehending.

“So. A candle burns out. But, as philosopher John Lennon once observed, we all shine on. The candle merely waits—and under the circumstances I don’t avoid the spiritual connotation—for resurrection. Voilà!” he said, irresistibly. “When we heat water for tea or coffee, for washing, we remember to add the previous day’s candle droppings into the bean can. I’ll make out a schedule. No, I’ll take charge of it myself. I have laid a length of string vertically inside the can. We suspend the bean can in the simmering liquid. The old wax melts into the bottom. Each day, another inch or so accumulates. Until—” He motioned for Irena to give him a match, and she slipped one into his hand.

“Until,” he intoned while striking a match and lighting the string, “a new candle is born. This spent bean canister becomes a cauldron for new light.” A small flame burned over the lip of the can.

“We won’t be able to see the flame in a few minutes,” Mrs. Zaric pointed out. “It will dip below the side of the can as your precious candle burns down.”

“I thought of that,” her husband said, pinching out the flame with his fingers. “We cut away the can and let the candle stand free.”

“Cut with what?” she asked. “I didn’t see a steel cutter among Grandma’s kitchen things. She didn’t build cars in here.”

“With my teeth, if need be,” said her husband, undaunted and somewhat touchy.

“Let me point out,” he went on, “how this system renews resources. I truly think—I am being serious here—we should tell the United Nations Earth Summit. Sarajevo shows the world! We do not build an extra fire to melt the wax. No extra precious kindling. We use heat from water that is already boiling. All candles burn. Ours will burn over and over. We have invented the self-perpetuating taper!” he said.

Irena had never seen her father in such a state, and thought he had gone mad. Mrs. Zaric, standing with her hands on her hips, said, “Sometimes catastrophes unveil the true geniuses among us.”

         

ONE MORNING, POLICEMEN from the new Bosnian government came to the apartment building on Volunteer Street and announced that all men over the age of eighteen had to report for army duty. Irena’s father received them grandly.

“I have been expecting you,” he said. “I would have enlisted myself, except that I hadn’t heard where to go. I have Serb heritage, you know, and I am proud to defend Bosnia. I am ready now.”

The police were a bit taken aback by his ardor, but they didn’t want to dampen it. “Noncombat duties are important, too,” they said in Mrs. Zaric’s direction.

“Who among us in Sarajevo has a noncombat life right now?” he replied. The officers chuckled into their buttons and said that if Mr. Zaric came with them they would find something for him to do; he could return for home leave in a few days.

At an officer’s suggestion, Mrs. Zaric packed a change of Mr. Kovac’s clothes for her husband, wrapping them inside a pair of slacks that he could carry under his arm.

“It’s a new army,” a policeman had explained with some embarrassment. “We have no uniforms per se. Everyone kind of wears what he can find.”

Mr. Zaric kissed his wife and daughter goodbye. They held themselves back a bit, so as not to spoil Mr. Zaric’s delight in his new sense of purpose. He pressed his face against Pretty Bird’s cage to blow a kiss. “Keep our family laughing, Pretty Bird,” he said. “I will keep the nation safe and be back before you know!”

Mr. Zaric was back in the apartment that night.

         

“THEY DIDN’T QUITE know what to do with a forty-four-year-old nearsighted clothes salesman,” he said. “I volunteered to be a general. They said they didn’t need to dip that far down into the barrel yet.

“They asked me if I had ever done anything besides sell shirts. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I wrote poems in school. I know about a hundred words of Chinese. I know every lyric ever written by the Beatles and Leonard Cohen.’ The captain in charge—a capable young man from the country, I think—just rolled his eyes and said, ‘Fucking Sarajevo.’ I told him that I’ve been digging graves recently. He said, ‘Well, maybe you’re not totally useless.’ ”

         

THE ARMY WANTED to dig up some graves along the front lines on Kosevo Hill. The captain said that some Serbs in the Yugoslav National Army had stolen weapons from their arsenals and buried them in coffins in the Bare Cemetery. They were heard to declare, as they turned the earth, “Serb history is no longer in the grave. These coffins hold the Serbs’ future!”

The captain said that a strike team from the Bosnian Army (a phrase that still rang so strangely—so foreign—as to sound hilarious to Mr. Zaric) was going to make a sudden thrust into no-man’s-land that would draw fire. Mr. Zaric and three other men would run in with shovels to dig up the freshest grave there, and bring out weapons for Bosnia’s new army.

“The Blue Helmets are here to enforce an arms embargo,” said the young captain. “Which means that Serbs keep the weapons they have from the old national army. We have to have old men dig our guns out of graves.”

“I’m not offended,” said Mr. Zaric, who was, a bit.

“And I’m not incorrect,” said the captain. “I hope you understand: I am not going to risk soldiers to do a grave digger’s job.”

         

SO THREE HOURS after his morning coffee Mr. Zaric met three other men of his approximate vintage: a schoolteacher, a dishwasher, and a prisoner who had just been released to lend a hand to Bosnia’s war effort.

The prisoner said he had been arrested with hashish in his pocket, and avowed that he had no violent traits. The schoolteacher told Mr. Zaric that he had heard of Irena. The dishwasher said that he used to work at Fontana restaurant, and would sometimes see Mr. Zaric behind the counter of his store.

“Don’t get to be best pals,” the captain barked. “You may have to see one another die today!”

The captain had parked his four grave digger-uppers in a blue van partway up the hill along Jukic Street. They heard someone shout; rifle shots crackling from somewhere not far ahead of them; and then the slap of feet in front of them, to the side of the van, and finally, behind them. The captain leaped into the driver’s seat.

“We opened up with guns,” he gasped, “and they’ve just rolled out a tank.”

“Maybe we should leave the van and just run down the hill,” said Mr. Zaric.

The captain grunted. “No time. I’m trying to save this fucking van.” He drove it down into a small dip in the road, below the tank’s line of fire—or so they all fervently hoped. He ordered the others out of the van and into a sprint while shots from the Serb lines snapped in the air over their heads. Mr. Zaric felt a hot orange ball growing in his lungs as he ran. Four sets of running shoes made desperate little rubber yelps until they reached an embankment at one end of the cemetery. They rolled to a stop against one another, panting like tired dogs behind a chiseled stone wall.

“I think,” said the schoolteacher, panting. “Our little raid. A mistake.”

“Yes,” said the dishwasher. “Intelligence. They should have. Intelligence. That tank.”

“Intelligence?” the old prisoner said. Their breathing was beginning to return. “The tank is across the street. You don’t need James Bond to tell you there’s a tank across the street.”

“That young captain is no Rommel,” said the schoolteacher.

“Yes,” said Mr. Zaric. “He lacks our experience.”

         

THE MEN’S LAUGHTER was cut short by their breathlessness. The prisoner—who, Mr. Zaric thought, ought to be the most at ease behind a gray stone wall—began to squirm. “Oh, shit,” he said. “We left our shovels. Back in that damn van.”

“They’re gone now,” said Mr. Zaric. “From the sound of it, I think the Serbs have taken back a few feet of ground.”

“Not that they need another van and a bunch of shovels,” said the schoolteacher. “What with guns and tanks.”

“Tomorrow young Napoleon will order us to break into a gun warehouse,” said the schoolteacher. “To get back some shovels.”

The men hunched behind the wall for more than an hour, even as the battle sounds subsided. They didn’t know where else to go. In time their young captain pulled up in an old red matchbox Lada and they all squeezed in. Mr. Zaric thought of high-school science films showing packs of zebras standing head to rump, head to rump.

“I was wondering, Captain,” said Mr. Zaric, “as we were all thrown into this rather suddenly. Where would you like us to stay tonight? Are we assigned to specific units? I was also wondering if, at some point, we might qualify for a small amount of food.”

Captain Kesic—his name was visible for the first time on a creased plastic identity card snapped to his shirt—turned to fix Mr. Zaric with a look that could have shot down a bird.

“Do you think this is the American army? Air-conditioned barracks, beefsteak on the table, and cold beer in the dining hall? Do you want red tunics and bearskin hats like the Buckingham Palace guards? You will stay at home. You will feed your own faces at home. The Bosnian Army will not spend one worthless red Russian ruble on you. Until, God forbid, we have to call on you again. Maybe to dig a shit hole.”

His sense of accomplishment restored, the captain had the men back to their families within the hour.

         

WHAT HAD BEEN Grandmother Zaric’s telephone would twitch and twitter with a shrill, unbroken ring every few nights when Serb militia, tapping into some of the lines they had cut, wanted to chat. The calls commonly came in the middle of the night. Daylight would have dispelled much of the intended effect. Mrs. Zaric would leap for the phone, hoping it was Tomaslav, who might think to call his grandmother when their old number did not ring.

“Yes, please, who is this?”

“Who is this?” a male voice echoed back. “Lady, we are your worst nightmare.”

“Oh, please,” said Mrs. Zaric. Or sometimes, “Oh, fuck off. Call someone who cares. Just let us get some sleep.”

“Sleep? We’re coming over to kill you.”

“Then let us sleep until you do,” she said.

“What’s your name? You sound cute.”

“I am. What’s your name? You sound pretty pathetic if you have to call women you don’t know in the middle of the night.”

Then the line went dead.

“I think the boys are passing out our number over there,” Mr. Zaric whispered heavily.

“They call to scare us, and I scold them,” said Mrs. Zaric. “We’re even.”

“Not so,” said her husband. “Not close.”

         

MRS. ZARIC LOOKED over in the dark to see if Irena, who had stirred at the sound of the phone, had fallen back to sleep. She was breathing deeply. But the curve of her backside was tense.

“Pimply, horny boys, that’s all,” he continued hoarsely. “Calling to hear a cute girl say dirty words.”

“One of those boys . . .” Mrs. Zaric’s voice trailed off. She and her husband looked over at their daughter and saw that her toes were clenched, almost like Pretty Bird’s. It was as if Irena, too, were asleep on a slender perch.