She kept watching the soldier, but his last breath had disappeared. He’d writhed in pain in the middle of the street when he was first shot, but he must have realized he was in even greater danger if he couldn’t get out of the intersection and crawl over to the buildings. He pulled himself across the pavement, dragging his wounded leg through the dirt, trying to stop the flow of blood with his free hand. The agony on his face was harrowing. She found herself quietly cheering him on, even though in another part of her brain she knew he was her enemy. He was part of the Militia—a brutal group of killers that showed no mercy. But that didn’t stop her from hoping that this soldier—the one outside her window—might survive.
She watched him from the window at the top of the cellar, because that one broken window was her only connection with the outside world. The cellar was the only place where she felt safe. The soldier’s last movements were slow and painful, as he kept trying to reach the comparative safety of the alley. He didn’t make it. After he’d crawled only a few meters, there was another crack of rifle fire. It came from the roof, where her brother and his friends had set themselves up as snipers. And with that burst of gunfire, there was an eruption of blood from the soldier’s chest. After that, he didn’t move at all.
When the shooting first started, she tried to sort out the individual sounds, wondering where the bullets were coming from. But as the gunfire became more incessant, she realized it could be coming from anywhere. The Militia troops were shouting in a dialect of Serbo-Croatian that she thought was spoken only in the villages across the canyon. She knew they were patrolling the streets, and she shuddered at the idea that they might be getting ready to burst into the house. The electricity and phone lines had been out for days, so she was by herself in the dark, hovered up against the wall, trying to stay safe and keep warm. She had her favorite books stacked nearby, but in the dark it was impossible to read. The only blankets she had belonged to their family dog, who had fled when the explosions began. She had no idea where he’d gone.
The day before, a shell had ripped through the nearby house where her friend lived, setting it afire. When she saw that, she ran screeching upstairs, trying to force her way through the door and out into the street. But her brother grabbed her. You can’t go out, he said. It’s too dangerous. She started screaming that she’d never see her friend again, but his grip got tighter. She tried arguing with him. You and your friends sneak out every night. Let me go! But he pushed her back. Listen to me, he said, we’re risking our lives to protect you from these animals. We know how to avoid getting killed. There’s no place for girls in this fight. She seethed at his words, but she couldn’t force her way past him. She headed back to the cellar, where she began burrowing into the dark.
From the cellar window, she could see the smoking hulk of their local store. By now, they were almost out of food in the house. When she first headed down to the cellar, her mother had grabbed some slices of bread and a hunk of cheese, leaving as much as she could for the others. Her mother’s words trailed her down the stairs, as she kept trying to reassure her that her sister would be coming back soon and bringing food with her. But her mother was talking more and more to herself. A day earlier she’d walked in front of the window by the sink and was met by a flurry of bullets that sent a shower of broken pottery down on top of her. But she refused to leave the kitchen. Even now she was upstairs, wandering around, sadly trying to prepare a meal with no food and for no one who would sit down to eat it. She was going mad like everyone else.
sss
He felt a shove in the small of his back that caused him to stumble into the debris from a collapsed wall. He managed only barely to step to the side of the alley, avoiding the sharpest nails.
“Keep moving, you little sissy.”
The rifle hit him again between his shoulders. “Are you going to act like a soldier, or are you going to keep being a coward?”
His tormentor let out a high-pitched noise that started deep in his throat and twisted its way into a screech. It was an obnoxious, grating sound, but he didn’t dare act like it was funny. No one ever did. The man doing the laughing was far too dangerous. He had a whole series of animal-like sounds that became even more chilling when he was enjoying some sadistic pleasure. Among the Militia troops, it had earned him the name Hijena—the Hyena.
The Hijena kept pushing him down the street toward their unit’s temporary headquarters, slowing down only as they passed the burnt-out remains of some local shops. The Hijena stopped, shoving aside the remains of a few books that had burst out of the window of a tiny corner store, and pushed his way toward a bottle of Slivovitz that was sticking out of the rubble. It was somehow still intact. He tore off the top and downed a couple of swallows.
The rest of the men in the unit were sitting on broken boxes or lying against abandoned automobiles, smoking and talking, watching the two-man parade that the Hijena was leading in front of them. There was some laughter—but it was uneasy. They all knew the Hijena was sending a message that their turn could be next. The Hijena and his older brother, the Komandant, didn’t hesitate to take even the harshest measures whenever they felt the need. Two days earlier, they’d tied a soldier—whom they claimed was a deserter—to a pole in the street and ordered the others to shoot him. When none of the soldiers in the line made any move to open fire, the Komandant walked up to the prisoner, put a pistol against the man’s temple, and fired. With the gun still in hand, he then walked slowly down the line in front of the reluctant firing squad, staring at each one of them.
sss
The brutality of it sickened her. It seemed like the Militia would just keep shooting until there was no one left. Her brother and the others had been warning her for weeks that this would happen. These militiamen were dogs, they said—filthy animals that were capable of anything. Rumors had swept through town about terrible things going on in other parts of the country. There were stories of mass killings—murders in places like Srebrenica and other towns to the north.
And there was more, they warned. There was rape. That thought made her sick to her stomach. She couldn’t even grasp the idea that a soldier could stop long enough to assault a woman in the midst of all the killing going on around him. The madness of it was unbearable. Was being raped worse than being killed? That made no sense to her. But the idea that someone attacking her might think that it was worse left her gripped in fear. And it was more than just the Militia she was worried about. She was fearful about what was going on in the heads of her brother and his friends. These young, would-be soldiers had decided that the rape of a woman was an attack against them. This was an intolerable offense, they kept saying—an intrusion into their territory. An attack on their women was an attack on their sense of pride. It demanded retaliation.
The things that had held her together were falling apart—her family, her school, and her friends all seemed to be spinning away. This was the time of day when she might be reading a book or be on the phone with her girlfriends, talking about things that had happened in school. They might be planning their next shopping trip or chatting about their upcoming vacation. But it was becoming harder and harder to hold on to any of that. Her clothes, her books, and her other things were upstairs in her room, but when she’d gone up to get them she’d been totally exposed. There was gunfire just outside her window, and bullets had ricocheted off the outside walls. She’d grabbed some underwear and a couple of books, scooping some clothing off of her chair as she raced for the stairs. By the time she got down to the cellar and looked at what she had grabbed, she realized she had only one item of real clothing in her hands. It was her favorite party dress.
Her piano was upstairs, but it was as good as gone. It was buried under rubble from a shell that had struck the other side of the compound, causing a living room wall to collapse. That piano had been in their family for eighty years, and her grandmother had left it to her in her will. She’d thought about her grandmother as she played it every afternoon, trying to learn the Bach Fugue in G minor. Her music teacher had said it might be too difficult for her to master, but she kept working at it. The sheet music was still open to that piece when the artillery shell hit the building. Now the main theme of the Fugue was running through her head as she sat there in the cellar, moving her fingers, trying to remember the sequence of notes.
She picked up the dress and stared at it in the dark, trying to get a sense of its color and design, resisting the temptation to burst into tears. The memories hiding in that soft material seemed to be mocking her, reminding her of times spent celebrating with her friends, flirting with the local boys, dancing at parties—things that she had now lost. But as she ran her fingers around the bows and straps of the dress, it started to come alive to her touch. She allowed herself to be lost in its textures and sensations. Without really thinking about it, she’d slipped out of her other clothes. Now that dress was hovering above her head as she let it slide slowly over her body. The noise of artillery shells was getting louder, but she tuned that out of her mind for the moment. The dress now covered her completely. She felt herself swaying slightly. Was she going mad? she wondered. Was she really dancing in the cellar to the silent music of the Fugue? She caught herself for a second but then gave way to the feeling, letting loose the emotions she had almost lost.
sss
The Hijena kept prodding and shoving him until they got to a small open space at the back of the alley. They were in the middle of a makeshift office, where the Komandant was hunched over a temporary desk pieced together from packing crates. He was reading a map and checking it against some other papers. A cigarette dangled from his mouth, holding an ash that looked ready to break loose. He took one ferocious drag and then tossed it away. He reached for the pack on his desk and, finding it empty, squashed it and threw it in the direction of the cigarette.
One hard push by the Hijena sent him sprawling against the desk, coming face to face with the Komandant. The other man looked down at him with an icy stare. His eyes were uneven, with the right one opened wide and arched while the left one drooped slightly. But the two eyes had one thing in common—they both seemed bottomless.
“What’s going on?” Even as the Komandant stared in his direction, he kept directing his voice at his brother.
“It’s this little coward.” The Hijena shoved him again. “He’s a slacker, and he’ll desert us at the first opportunity.”
“What do you want me to do about it?”
“It was your idea to put him in our unit in the first place!” the Hijena shouted. “He never should have been here.”
“Shut up for a minute. You may be my brother, but I’m in charge here.”
The Hijena didn’t back off. “You should take him out and shoot him as an example to the others.”
As the back-and-forth continued between the two brothers, spasms of weakness rushed through his knees. He was afraid to move. He tried to think of a way out of that nightmare, but there was nowhere to go. As they debated what to do with him, his life was swinging in the balance.
“You’re the one who picked him out of all the other garbage at the orphanage. You should have sold him like the others and made some money for yourself instead of sticking him with me.”
He had been dragged out of the orphanage a year earlier. At the time, the man standing in front of him wasn’t known as the Komandant, and he wasn’t wearing any kind of uniform. Whether he had any kind of military authority, no one said. He just appeared one day at the orphanage in Sarajevo, walking slowly behind the director, peering at the children lined up in front of him. He said nothing, but he didn’t have to. He had the air of someone you needed to listen to—someone you needed to fear. As he walked down the line, he stared at each of the orphans and strays who were unlucky enough to be there, sometimes grabbing one of the children for a better look, often turning the youngster’s head from side to side, as if to assess how much it was worth. The rumor around the orphanage was that he was a child broker. With one flick of the finger he could pack you up and send you off to God-only-knows where.
“What’s so important that you had to come bursting in here?”
“Here—look at the books I found in his pack.” The Hijena grabbed the backpack and dumped the contents on the desk. “Take a look at these.”
“Oh, sit down.” The Komandant flicked his hand at his brother. “You look like you’re drunk. What are these books?” The Komandant picked one up and turned it over. “You just carry these books around with you? This writing here in the margin—is that poetry? Did you write that?”
“Yes.” He could feel his voice breaking.
“When do you find time to write poetry?”
“He doesn’t even find time to fire his rifle straight,” the Hijena broke in. “I’ve watched him. He always fires into the air.”
The Komandant gave his brother a gesture to be quiet. He grabbed another cigarette from a pack that he kept in a drawer, holding it between his yellow fingertips as he lit it. His teeth were gritted together as the smoke escaped from the sides of his mouth. He stared straight ahead without blinking.
“What is this, more poetry? It looks like these books are in English.”
“They’re American… They’re American poets.”
The Komandant poked the pages. “What are these, women poets?”
“Yes, sir, they’re…they’re mostly women.”
“And what’s this?” He picked a couple of petals out from the pages and rubbed them between his fingers. “You put flowers between the pages?”
“They’re just local… I mean, they’re not really flowers. They’re wild plants that I found at one of our camps and used as bookmarks.”
The Hijena leapt out of his chair and poked at him. “What are you doing with all these books? Are you sitting there and reading them and playing with yourself?”
The Komandant kept staring at him, ignoring his brother’s outburst. “Where did you get these books?”
“At a bookshop. I took them… I mean, I bought them. It was a little shop that was nearby in Sarajevo.”
The Komandant gave a small laugh that turned into a grunt. “I know that bookshop of yours—or what remains of it. Did you love it so much? The last time I looked, some riflemen had blown all the walls out.”
He kept laughing to himself as he thumbed through the other books. But then one of them caught his attention. As he picked it up, his gaze grew more menacing. “What does this mean, The Laws of War?”
He flipped it over and looked at the back, and then he opened it and scanned a few more pages. “It says this is the text of the Geneva Conventions.”
He looked up sharply, his eyes reaching out like a pair of tentacles. “Did you get this at your bookstore?”
He stammered out a “yes.”
“So do you think you are in Geneva?”
It was phrased as a question, but he knew not to answer it.
“Do you look around every day and think, ‘I am in Switzerland’? Do you see some laws hanging out there on the trees, saying ‘you can do this, but you can’t do that’? Do you think there is a set of rules out there that everyone plays by?”
He gave a faint “no.” The Komandant kept going as if he hadn’t heard him.
“Do you think there’s some little rule book we look at to see what we can do?” He picked up the book and spat on it. “That’s what I think of your book.
“We have one of our soldiers lying out there dead. He’s there right now—lying in the middle of the town square with the dogs sniffing at him. There’ll be maggots there before long. Do you think that we can send these people a nice little letter and quote them some section of your law book? Do you think we can say, ‘May we please go out there to recover the body’? Do you?”
He tried to shake his head, but he was afraid to move.
“Because if you do, let me tell you that it was those same people who shot him from the roof of the house. And then they shot him again as he was trying to get to safety. And it’s those same people who will shoot us if we try to get his body back.”
He walked around the desk and grabbed him by his shirt. “There’s only one law out there. Shoot them before they shoot you. Attack their women before they attack yours. Do you understand that?”
The Komandant gave him a shove against the wall. Then he picked up the books one by one, ripping them down the spine and throwing them into the corner.
“What do you want me to do with him?” the Hijena asked.
“Get him out of my sight.”
The Hijena prodded him back toward the alley.
“Just take him somewhere and make a man out of him.”
He exhaled a long line of smoke.
“And when you’re through with that, get rid of him.”
sss
An artillery shell hit somewhere close to her house, sending a shock though the cellar. She squeezed against the wall, but it was shaking. There was more rifle fire, louder than before, coming in short, staccato bursts from somewhere nearby. She heard unfamiliar voices, men screaming commands, as they ran from room to room above her. Suddenly, the door to the cellar smashed open, and a group of armed men poured down the stairs.
sss
He’d been running up the street with the others, trying to stay invisible in the pack of sweating, panting soldiers. They reached one of the houses, and the lead man shot at the door until it gave way. The Hijena screamed orders as they scrambled through the hallway. Two of the men raced over to the cellar stairs and kicked at the door. The first jolt knocked it off its hinges, and the second one sent it clattering down the stairs. As the two men jumped over the debris, he felt a rifle butt in his back, shoving him down the stairs behind the others. The Hijena shouted commands and warned them that it might be an ambush.
Could it be a trap? He looked around quickly, trying to see if there was anyone lying in wait. From the dark corner, he suddenly saw a pair of eyes staring at him. It was a girl—maybe a little younger than him—and she was trying to make herself invisible behind a pile of blankets. He saw fear in her eyes.
He’d been the first one to see her.
The Hijena saw her next.
sss
She could see him shaking. She could almost feel his fear, as he seemed to be quietly pleading with her to hide, to dig a little deeper into the corner. He was a soldier of some sort, but she knew he didn’t belong there. He was carrying a rifle, but he was pointing it into the air like he didn’t know what to do with it.
But there was another man—a very different kind of man. And he had just seen her.
The second man had a high, screeching voice that sent a chill through her. He pushed at the young soldier, forcing him to get closer and closer to her. Then he held up for a second, but only long enough to yell at the other two men to go back upstairs and check the other rooms. She suddenly realized she didn’t want the other two soldiers to leave. Every instinct told her she would be in more danger if they left than if they stayed.
Now there were only the three of them. The man with the screeching voice shoved the terrified soldier on top of her. He pushed down hard on him, yelling at him to get even closer.
sss
“This is how we teach these animals a lesson.”
He felt the pressure from above pushing down hard on him, but his body kept refusing to move. The pair of eyes under him were terrified, and he thought he couldn’t bring any more pain to those eyes without bringing incalculable pain to himself.
“Rip the dress off of her!” The Hijena’s hot breath enveloped him. “Do I have to kill you in order to teach you anything?”
He was caught up in the pile of rags with the girl pinned underneath him. His tormentor was on top of both of them, shouting in his ear.
sss
He’s going to get himself killed. That thought spun through her head until it became a certainty: he was about to be shot. The things she had been taught as a child raced through her mind, but none of them had anything to do with what was happening at that moment. There was nothing she knew that made any sense.
The young soldier was pushing down on her, while at the same time he himself was being pushed. The madman hovering over both of them was going to shoot him, and then he would shoot her. They would both be left to die like a pair of pathetic lovers with their bodies entwined in a pool of blood.
sss
He tried to get free, but the Hijena was on him, yelling in his ear, and reaching under him to tear at the girl’s dress. As her clothes came off in shreds, she seemed to be letting up. Was she giving up, or was she trying to protect him?
sss
His eyes had a tearful message: I’m so sorry.
sss
The eyes below him seemed to answer: I know.
sss
The Hijena finally grabbed him by the shirt collar and pulled him back up.
“You’re through with that. Now, we have to get out of here.”
He looked down at the girl and then back at the soldier.
“Now, shoot her.”
The Hijena waited a second and then yelled at him again.
“Did you hear what I said? I told you to shoot her. You can’t leave witnesses around for this kind of thing. Do you want me to shoot her for you?”
He stared at him.
“You have a gun, use it.”