The Book of My Lives

by Aleksandar Hemon

  * * *

  In a small city like Sarajevo no one can live in isolation, and all experiences end up shared. Around the time of Mek’s arrival, my best friend, Veba, who lived across the street from us, acquired a dog himself, a German shepherd named Don. Čika-Vlado, Veba’s father, a low-ranking officer of the Yugoslav People’s Army, was working at a military warehouse near Sarajevo where a guard dog gave birth to a litter of puppies. Veba picked the slowest, clumsiest puppy, as he knew that, if they were to be destroyed, that one would be the first to go.

  Veba had been Kristina’s first boyfriend and the only one I’d ever really liked. They started going out in high school and broke up a couple of years later; my sister was initially upset, but he and I stayed close. We were often inseparable, particularly after we’d started playing in a band together. Once my sister got over their breakup, they renewed their friendship. Soon after the puppies arrived, they’d often take them out for a walk at the same time. No longer living with my parents, I often came home for food and family time, particularly after Mek had come—I loved to take him out, my childhood dream of owning a pet fulfilled by my indomitable sister. Veba and I would walk with Mek and Don by the river, or sit on a bench and watch them roll in the grass while we smoked and talked about music and books, girls and movies, our dogs gnawing playfully at each other’s throats. I don’t know how dogs really become friends, but Mek and Don were as close friends as Veba and I were.

  * * *

  The last time I remember the dogs being together was when we went up to Jahorina to mark the arrival of 1992. Apart from my sister and me and our friends—ten humans in total—there were also three dogs: in addition to Mek and Don, our friend Guša brought along Laki, an energetic dog of indeterminate breed (Guša called him a cocktail spaniel). In the restricted space of the smallish mountain cabin, the humans would trip over the dogs, while they’d often get into their canine arguments and would have to be pulled apart. One night, playing a card game called Preference into the wee hours, Guša and I got into a screaming argument, which made the dogs crazy—there was enough barking and screaming to blow the roof off. I recall that moment with warmth, for all the intense intimacy of our shared previous life was in it. I didn’t know then that the week we spent together would amount to a farewell party to our common Sarajevo life. A couple of weeks later, I departed for the United States, never to return to our mountain cabin.

  * * *

  My sister and Veba still remember the last time Mek and Don were together: it was April 1992; they took them for a walk in a nearby park; there was shooting up in the hills around Sarajevo; a Yugoslav People’s Army plane menacingly broke the sound barrier above the city; the dogs barked like crazy. They said: “See you later!” to each other as they parted, but would not see each other for five years.

  Soon thereafter, my sister followed her latest boyfriend to Belgrade. My parents stayed behind for a couple of weeks, during which sporadic gunfire and shelling increased daily. More and more often, they spent time with their neighbors in the improvised basement shelter, trying to calm Mek down. On May 2, 1992, with Mek in tow, they took a train out of Sarajevo before all the exits were closed and the relentless siege commenced. Soon the station was subjected to a rocket attack; no train would leave the city for ten years or so.

  My parents were heading to the village in northwestern Bosnia where my father was born, a few miles from the town of Prnjavor, which came under Serb control. My dead grandparents’ house still stood on a hill called Vučijak (translatable as Wolfhill). Father had been keeping beehives on the family homestead and insisted on leaving Sarajevo largely because it was time to prepare the bees for the summer. In willful denial of a distinct possibility that they might not return for a long time, they brought no warm clothes or passports, just a small bag of summer clothes.

  They spent the first few months of the war on Vučijak, their chief means of sustenance my father’s beekeeping and my mother’s vegetable garden. Convoys of drunken Serbian soldiers passed by on their way to an ethnic-cleansing operation or from the front line, singing songs of slaughter and angrily shooting in the air. My parents, cowering in the house, secretly listened to news from the besieged Sarajevo. Mek sometimes happily chased after the military trucks and my parents desperately ran after him, calling him, terrified that the drunken soldiers might shoot him for malicious fun. When there were no trucks and soldiers around, Mek would run up and down the slopes, remembering, perhaps—or so I’d like to imagine—our days in Jahorina.

  Sometime that summer, Mek fell ill. He could not get to his feet; he refused food and water, there was blood in his urine. My parents laid him on the floor in the bathroom, which was the coolest space in the house. Mother stroked him and talked to him while he kept looking straight into her eyes—she always claimed he understood everything she told him. They called the vet, but the vet’s office had only one car at its disposal, which was continuously on the road, attending to all the sick animals in the area. It took the vet a couple of days to finally arrive. He instantly recognized that Mek was infested with deer ticks, all of them bloated with his blood, poisoning him. The prognosis was not good, he said, but at the office he could give him a shot that might help. My father borrowed my uncle’s tractor and cart in which pigs were normally transported to slaughter. He put the limp Mek in the cart and drove down the hill, all the way to Prnjavor, to get the shot that could save his life. On his way, the Serb Army trucks passed him, the soldiers looking down on the panting Mek.

  The magic shot worked and Mek lived, recovering after a few days. But then it was my mother’s turn to get terribly sick. Her gall bladder was full of stones and infected—back in Sarajevo, she’d been recommended a surgery to remove them, which she’d feared and kept postponing, and then the war broke out. Her brother, my uncle Milisav, drove down from Subotica, a town at the Serbian-Hungarian border, and took her back with him for urgent surgery. Father had to wait for his friend Dragan to come and get Mek and him. While Father was preparing his beehives for his long absence, Mek would lie nearby, stretched in the grass, keeping him company.

  Dragan arrived a couple of days later. On the way in, he was stopped at the checkpoint at the top of Vučijak. The men were hairy, drunk, and impatient. They asked Dragan where he was going, and when he explained that my father was waiting for him, they menacingly told him they’d been watching my father closely for a while, that they knew all about his family (which was ethnically Ukrainian—earlier that year the Ukrainian church in Prnjavor had been blown up by the Serbs), and they were well aware of his son (of me, that is), who had written against the Serbs and was now in America. They were just about ready to take care of my father once and for all, they told Dragan. The men belonged to a paramilitary unit that called itself Vukovi (the Wolves) and were led by one Veljko, whom a few years earlier my father had thrown out of a meeting he’d organized to discuss bringing in running water from a nearby mountain well. Veljko would later go to Austria to pursue a rewarding criminal career, only to return right before the war to put his paramilitary unit together. “You let Hemon know we’re coming,” the Wolves told Dragan as they let him through.

  When Dragan reported the incident, which he took very seriously, my father thought it would be better to try to get out as soon as possible than wait for them to come at night and slit his throat. At the checkpoint, the guard shift had just changed and the new men were not drunk or churlish enough to care, so my father and Dragan were waved through. The checkpoint Wolves failed to sniff out or see Mek, because Father kept him down on the floor. Later on, in their mindless rage, or, possibly, trying to steal the honey, the Wolves destroyed my father’s hives. (In a letter he’d send to Chicago he’d tell me that of all the losses the war inflicted upon him, losing his bees was the most painful.)

  On their way toward the Serbian border, Father and Dragan passed many checkpoints. Father was concerned that if those manning the checkpoints saw a beautiful Irish setter, they’
d immediately understand that he was coming from a city, as there were few auburn Irish setters in the Bosnian countryside, largely populated by mangy mutts and wolves. Moreover, the armed men could easily get pissed at someone trying to save a fancy dog in the middle of a war, when people were being killed left and right. At each checkpoint, Mek would try to get up and my father would press him down with his hand, whispering calming words into his ear; Mek would lie back down. He never produced a sound, never insisted on standing up, and, miraculously, no one at the checkpoints noticed him. My father and Dragan made it out, across the border and on to Subotica.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, in Sarajevo under siege, Veba was conscripted into the Bosnian Army, defending the city from the former Yugoslav People’s Army, now transformed overnight into the genocidal Serb Army. Veba’s father, on the other hand, was on duty at his warehouse outside Sarajevo when the hostilities flared up and was arrested by the Bosnians soon after the fighting began. Veba and his family would have no news from him for a couple of years, not knowing whether he was alive or dead.

  While my family was scattered all over elsewhere, Veba’s still lived across the street from our home. He was sharing a small apartment with his girlfriend, mother, brother, and Don. Very quickly, food became scarce—a good dinner under siege was a slice of bread sprinkled with oil; rice was all that was available for most of the people, meal after meal, day after day. Packs of abandoned dogs roamed the city, sometimes attacking humans or tearing up fresh corpses. To have and feed a dog was a suspicious luxury, yet Veba’s family shared with Don whatever they had—all of them were now skin and bones. Frequently, there was nothing to share and Don somehow understood the difficulty of the situation and never begged. During shelling, Don would pace around their apartment, sniffing and squealing. He’d calm down only when all of Veba’s family were in the same room; he’d lie down and watch them all closely. Every once in a while, they’d entertain him by asking: “Where is Mek? Where is Mek?” and Don would run to the front door and bark excitedly, remembering his friend.

  When they took Don out to pee, Veba and his family had to stay within a narrow space protected by their high-rise from the Serb snipers. The children played with him and he let them pet him. Within weeks, Don developed an uncanny ability to sense an imminent mortar-shell attack: he’d bark and move anxiously in circles; bristling, he’d jump on Veba’s mother’s shoulders and push her until she and everyone else rushed back into the building. A moment later, shells would start exploding nearby.

  * * *

  My father and Mek eventually joined my mother in Subotica. When she had sufficiently recovered from her gall-bladder surgery, my parents moved to Novi Sad, not far away, where Mother’s other brother owned a little one-bedroom apartment in which they could stay. They spent a year or so there, trying all along to get the necessary papers to emigrate to Canada. During that time, Father was often gone for weeks, working in Hungary with Dragan’s construction company. Mek’s constant presence and my sister’s occasional visits provided Mother with her only comfort. She longed for Sarajevo, horrified by what was happening in Bosnia, insulted by the relentless Serbian propaganda pouring out of the TV and radio. She spent days crying, and Mek would put his head in her lap and look up at her with his moist setter eyes, and Mother confided in him as her only friend. Every day, she had a hard time confronting the fact that they’d lost everything they’d worked for their whole lives; the only remnant of their previous life was the gorgeous Irish setter.

  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 čika-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 Koljević 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 Koljević 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 Koljević’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.