Often I would sit in my room in the Sarajevo Holiday Inn, imagining the bombing of the Serbs. I imagined Serbs being burned. I imagined the men I had imagined as the men who raped Liljana burning, their faces shredded by American shrapnel.
I would imagine, also, Clinton sitting in the Oval Office, weighing the fate of a people, deciding whether or not to bomb the Serbs, deciding whether or not to lift the arms embargo that allowed the Serbs to keep all the weapons for themselves. He had the reports, thousands dead. All he would need would be one anecdote, one story that would make the war vivid for him, that would make it clear to him that he would have to act. What would it take? The story about Liljana? A story about a doughy, ambitious forty-six-year-old beaten almost to death in his own home? More photographs? There were plenty of photographs. Take more! Show as many emaciated bodies as you can find. Choose a prisoner at random from the Serb concentration camp at Trnopolje, put him in a cardboard box, and mail him to the White House, if that’s what it takes. Find a way to package the smell of dead bodies piled on top of each other, and make him smell it.
Instead Clinton read a fucking book, one that said that ethnic hatreds in the Balkans were eternal. As though anything is eternal.
Every day I was in Sarajevo, there was the constant thud of mortar fire, like a car alarm that won’t shut off. Every day I was outside of the city, there were new massacre sites to see. It got to the point where if I went a few days without seeing a dead body, I missed it. It was boring but I needed it. Once you’ve gotten used to a certain kind of smell from a certain kind of flesh, whether it’s a lover or a rotting corpse, you long for it when it’s not around. Or maybe it’s just me.
Milosevic’s parents both killed themselves after he was well into his adulthood, which, many of us liked to joke, was not nearly soon enough. Ana Mladiç, the daughter of Ratko Mladiç (the Bosnian Serb war criminal) killed herself in 1994, at the age of twenty-three, with her father’s favorite pistol. Of all the suicides I have ever encountered, this was my favorite.
The American bombs did not come until after eight thousand men and boys were murdered in Srebreniça. By then I did not feel a great deal of bloodlust. I felt sure that I would be killed by American bombs. I even drove down mountain paths that made this more likely. A fitting end to several years of what I had seen and smelled. At the very least I hoped some shrapnel would hit my eyes and nose. I would lose my senses of sight and smell. And yes, touch and taste and hearing as well. Take them all away. Stay in the sensual world, Rothstein had advised me, give up your abstractions. Well, give me back my abstractions.
But I continued my as-yet-unbroken streak of surviving every situation in which I find myself. All my senses were intact, and there were more bodies for them. After Dayton there were revenge attacks by Muslims against the Serbs. Old Serbian women were harassed and killed. The Chetniks got what was coming to them, I would say after some whiskey. It was racist and awful of me to say it, and the worst thing is that I didn’t even believe it at the time. I just wanted to believe that there was finally some sort of justice.
f
Some sort of justice: this was what I wanted to believe America could deliver. What I consoled myself with, after leaving Bosnia, was reading about the latest military advances. It had come too late in Bosnia, but it could come on time in the future. What had happened in Bosnia had happened because the Americans were too timid about using American power. American power was the only thing that could save the world. My mission now was to coax the United States into dropping bombs where dropping bombs would do some good. Everywhere there were artillery installations targeted at civilians, I wanted American planes to drop bombs on them. Everywhere a man with a machine gun on his lap was driving a truckload of his compatriots to a town where they would line up young children and old women and healthy young men and shoot them all, I wanted a precision bomb to shatter that man’s windshield and pierce his eyeball before blowing his friends to hell.
The American people no longer had any stomach for protracted ground wars, and there would no longer be any need for them. We had planes and bombs, bombs so exact as to more closely resemble scalpels than axes. No longer would there be any need to convince our soldiers that we thought they were heroes as we sent them to die, the way we might give a dog a pat on the head before putting it to sleep. No longer would we need to think of our soldiers as anything other than technicians, technicians who would do their job and then come home, and not expect stories to be told about them or expect politicians to pretend to mistake them for saints. No ideas of individual greatness or national glory would be necessary. Computers would do the work of defending the innocent, and computers don’t create myths about themselves, computers don’t find war erotic. The men in the planes would be more or less irrelevant, in uniforms that announced their humility, uniforms that hid their faces like burqas. (Now, of course, the men in the planes don’t exist, and the plane itself is like an empty burqa.)
And so it was in Kosovo. When Milosevic sent troops in, I was reluctant to cover it, because I thought it would all but certainly simply be a repeat of Bosnia, where we would do nothing until it was too late. And for the first several months it looked like this was exactly what it would be. But finally Clinton decided to launch an air war, and all of my dreams came true. Yes, there were mistakes—no dream is very far from a nightmare. There was the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy and a Serb passenger train, mistakes of intelligence. There was the excessive bombing of Belgrade, Milosevic’s home city and of course the home city of many, many civilians—a mistake of zeal, though if I was being honest with myself, I did not truly regard it as a mistake at all. Overall it was a wonderful war, as wars go. We won ugly, sure, but we won. And through most of it I felt that where I should have been, where the real action was, was not in freezing Kosovo, inspecting haystacks where Serb soldiers had tied old men and burned them. I should not have been in Kosovo, but above it.
But I was in Kosovo, adding to the list of the horrible things I have seen. There were infants dying in the mountains after their families were thrown out of their homes, and of course there were massacres upon massacres. But now the people were being rescued, the people felt pride in their cause and loved the Americans, and it was impossible not to feel differently. It was impossible not to think that what the Americans were doing was wonderful.
I returned home to New York after Milosevic surrendered. I remember thinking in the cab ride home how much uglier the skyline was now than it had been when I was a child, now that there were these two giant, faceless towers. Soon enough the towers were removed and New York looked as it did when I was young.
f
So there it is. Are you happy with what you have sown, Mr. Reaper? What was the point of making me write all that? Does the fact that I did something wrong and arguably evil mean that my thoughts on wars of liberation are somehow invalid? The best ideas often come from the worst people. Haven’t you ever heard of the tragic view of history? For that matter, hasn’t it ever occurred to you that history itself should be history? Who would have truly been harmed if everything that I have just written down had been forgotten forever? The Owl of Minerva flies at dusk: that’s why we should clip that motherfucker’s wings while there’s still enough light to see.
Now I have to go to Miranda’s funeral. Now that I am coming up for air I don’t know why I wrote down everything that I did. It doesn’t seem likely that Emily is alive; it should be easy enough for me to pretend that I am Peter Reaper, and that this was a hoax to expose my enemies as gossip-mongers. I will destroy all of my words as soon as I return.
AFTERWORD
By Sydney Rothstein
The Sunday of my mother’s funeral was, by mourner consensus, the finest Sunday of the year. “Miranda made this weather,” said someone standing around the gravesite. An idiotic thing to say, but in fairness, we were waiting for Daisy and my father and the funeral wa
s in an awkward cocktail party phase.
“So the blue sky is my sister,” I said. No one knew whether this was supposed to be a joke, and if it was, why it was supposed to be funny, so there were some non-committal half laughs, and then for some reason I was talking to two friends of my mother’s—one who had had too much plastic surgery and one who could have benefited from a little more. One said that she thought it would be inappropriate for Daisy to wear her “costume” today, and the other told me not to worry that my “little adventure” in REDACTED had hastened my mother’s death. Score one for the lady with the facelift. You need your wits about you whenever the dead are around, and I hadn’t packed mine, so I had no comeback.
Scattered disgusted gasps heralded the arrival of Arthur Hunt, groveling toward the grave. By groveling, I mean stumbling. The hill was steep and uneven and everybody stumbled and many relatively innocent older people lost their breath, but nobody’s here to stop me from reading repentance into his panting. He was wearing a crumpled light-gray suit and an untucked white shirt, and his tie was coming loose. A confused, terrified, bashful expression combined with messy gray hair made him resemble a heavily but poorly made-up sixth-grader starring in a school production of Death of a Salesman. Nothing like the solemn, even sexy figure he had cut at my brother’s funeral. When he saw me, he looked up and gave me a crooked little smile, as though that little boy playing Willy Loman looked out into the wings and saw his lost dog.
“Sydney,” he said. “I was so worried.”
His love for me was easy enough to see, and broke my heart in spite of everything.
“I got in last night.”
“Why didn’t you call?” he asked.
“Because you’re not my family.” This hurt him, as of course I intended it to.
“I guess you heard about…” he said.
“Yes. I heard about it.”
“I loved my sister. I did.”
“Neither wisely nor too well.”
The lack of total absolution didn’t sit well with him, and he screwed up his face into a nasty smile. “I guess I deserve that. So go ahead. Tell me about the mistakes I’ve made. Hit me with the wisdom of youth.”
I folded my arms over my chest. “I’m not that young. And I don’t have any wisdom.”
This was closer to what he was looking for, and he relaxed into his customary avuncular pose.
“The only thing that young people and old people have in common,” he said, quoting his epigram as he composed it, “is the same thing they have in common with the dead: none of them know anything.”
“Well,” I said. “Some of them know more than you do.”
Now he was angry. “All right, I’m an idiot. Yes, of course. I know that, at least. Honestly, Sydney, there’s nothing you can tell me that I don’t already know.”
“I’m Peter Reaper,” I said.
He took a step back, and he scrutinized my face for a sign that I was joking, but there was no such sign because I was not joking.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because you killed my brother. And your sister.”
“Sydney. What are you…”
“The woman you killed in the drone strike. The woman in the burqa. That was Emily.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Emily lived in REDACTED. Do you think you were the only one who stayed interested in the country? She moved there many years ago. She made a living selling DVDs outside of a hotel.”
“She was…she was the DVD Lady?”
It’s hard to describe what his face did as he absorbed this information. He took a few horrible breaths, and then he took a few more.
“But…but Reaper started posting before…”
“I met her at the hotel and she told me the story. That was enough to make me realize that you are a diseased liar. It made me realize that you are a diseased liar who murdered my brother, and it made me realize what an idiot I’ve been for trusting you. Then Emily had the bad luck to be out for a walk when you dropped your bomb on her.”
“It wasn’t my bomb. I didn’t drop it.”
“Of course it was, and of course you did.”
He looked up into the blue sky, as though looking up at the God who had plotted against him.
“So the head that I saw. That was…” This is when he raised his hands up to his gray hair and started screaming.
What I had said about Emily was not true—I had never met her and had no reason to believe she had ever set foot in REDACTED. The anguish that he was feeling would probably have been enough to make me admit that I was making this up had we not been interrupted by my own burqa-clad sister, who was emerging with our father from over the hill. My father tried to shake her off, but Daisy would not let him lose her. They resembled a father leading his daughter to the altar, except that they did not resemble this at all.
A bride who had been dipped in ashes: that was Daisy. By this time I had seen many women in burqas, but she still made me think of the Angel of Death. Given Arthur’s redoubled howl, he must have seen her the same way.
“Stay back, you black-sheeted slut!” my father said, and hooked his leg under hers so that he could trip her. He did, and though it looked like they would both fall down, he managed to stay upright as she collapsed into a pillowy black heap. With several halting steps, my father reached Arthur, and it surprised me when he grabbed Arthur into an embrace and joined him in hysterical sobbing.
“Oh, Arthur. I wish you had married her! Is it too late to ask you to take my wife, please?”
Arthur grabbed him tight. The crowd backed away, and, not wanting anything more to do with either man, I backed away, too.
“I miss my son!” My father said this with as much shame as if he were confessing to having had sex with his sister. “I miss my son!”
Daisy must have gotten to her feet and rushed toward them. Maybe she sensed what was about to happen and was trying to stop it, or maybe she wanted to die, too. In limited defense of my father, I don’t think he could have heard her approach.
Now that my whole family is dead, I have plenty of time to explain myself.
f
The night before he left for Basic Training, Jason came to my dorm room at Columbia with two 100 Grand bars that he had bought from the vending machine. I liked 100 Grand bars and he didn’t; the transparency of the gesture annoyed me and made me feel condescended to.
“You’re taking away my brother and giving me a candy bar?”
“I’m having doubts,” he said. “Maybe I won’t go tomorrow.”
This dangled hope annoyed me even more than the candy bar had, and I came close to throwing him out of my room.
“I’m not scared about my own life,” he said, making me believe it. “I’m scared about what will happen to Mom and Dad. They won’t be able to take it. They’re both such weak people.”
That Mom and Dad were weak—and therefore needed to be treated carefully, as the weak are treated—was an insight that I had thought was mine and mine alone, and the revelation that Jason knew it too made me feel proud of my little brother, if also a little resentful that my powers of perception were not as special as I sometimes wanted to believe. But mostly I felt much less lonely than I had thirty seconds earlier. My sister was so scared of the great power of our parents that she hid under sheets every moment of the day, and my brother’s desire to join the army had struck me as a similarly hysterical attempt to flee. Now it struck me as something else, and my brother struck me as my brother, someone who had seen the things I had seen. What I wanted more than anything else was to keep him right there. I wanted him to stay safe and to stay my companion.
“You have to go,” I said.
He unwrapped his candy bar and took a few bites. I never wound up eating mine. A few days later, I discovered it melted in my desk drawer.
“You think Mom and Dad will be okay?”
“I don’t know. But this is who you are. You’re someone who is going to go to war, not someone who is just going to talk about it.”
I intended this as a statement of fact, though as I’ve thought about it over the years, I’ve worried that it came across as a taunt.
He sat on the edge of my bed and he no longer looked like my baby brother. He looked like a mature man, a man who had made a decision and who would have the support of the universe in all his endeavors. He looked like he could walk through fire, or a firefight, and remain unscathed. He looked like a man to listen to.
Maybe the fact that such a man was my brother and was sitting on my bed led me to the next question.
“Are you doing this because of Arthur Hunt?”
“I’m doing it for a lot of reasons. Arthur Hunt just pointed them out to me.”
“So it doesn’t bother you that he had sex with his sister?”
Jason stood up from the long dorm-room bed. “That’s disgusting. And irrelevant. I don’t care about people’s personal lives. And maybe Mom is lying, anyway.”
“She’s not lying.”
“How do you know? You say all the time that you can never tell when people are lying.”
“Right. But you can. And you know she’s not lying.”
“I don’t know anything, except that Saddam Hussein is oppressing the people of Iraq and that destroying him will free them. It’s a pretty obvious principle that Hunt is pointing out. If it turned out that Newton fucked his sister, would apples stop falling to the ground?”
The last thing he said to me before he left was “I’m going to stay safe,” which he said in a way that made me realize, with one hundred percent certainty, that he was right. He was going to come home as surely as an apple shaken from a tree will fall to the ground. By the time this and everything else I believed turned out to be wrong, I had become a famous journalist.
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