t the commander, when a man kisses a man, in war or peace, in an amorous encounter or a farewell to a warrior whose fate was long sealed, this is as unchanging as Greek myth. The commander would have been glad to imagine himself as Zeus, especially as the Zeus who’d turned into a swan, but then he hastily spun around, certain everyone must be eyeing his crotch. The commander was wrong, as was obvious to all of us but not to him because even if we’d wanted to stare at him there, and we didn’t, we wouldn’t have had much to see. The dark was as thick as dough, affecting every thought we entertained, every step, not to speak of our mood. But the commander had resolved that we’d play the game, he placed his people in positions, ordered us to set out the manikins that were designed, the next morning, to mislead, though the commander knew the deception wouldn’t last long, the motionlessness of the manikins would first stir suspicion, and then this would swell until the enemy commander finally chose three or, maybe, four, or even five soldiers—never underestimate the enemy—and in total silence, like true professionals, they’d traverse the distance between their positions and the checkpoint, but in such a way that not a single blade of grass would shiver, not a branch would sway and not a bird would flutter skyward, stirred from sleep or luring those strange creatures away from her nest and fledglings. Yes, thought the commander, as far as birds are concerned, people are indeed strange creatures, nothing more, and if things stood differently, if birds and people truly were buddies, they’d now be hidden away somewhere, carefree and certain that no one would ever find them. No, thought the commander, no one ever will find us, and then, by mysterious pathways, the thought popped into his head that he should whisper a warning to the soldier walking in front of him that if a flare were to be fired off they should freeze and stand that way until the light faded. He added: “Send it on,” and he saw the soldier lean toward the soldier in front of him, and just as the message reached the head of the column, they could all see the slender trail of a flare mounting in the sky and then blazing and spreading its phantasmal, wan light across the slope. The rigid, frozen soldiers looked like enchanted ballet dancers in a grotesque dance. Many of them found the muscles on their legs trembling and the light of the flare seemed like it would never dim. But no flare lasts forever, they are all transient, as are we all, thought the commander, as are we all. The soldiers barely had the time to stretch before a new flare had them freezing again, clinging to the nearest vegetation. “Down!” spat the commander to the shadows in front of him, and the soldiers, as if they could hardly wait, plunged to the ground. The flares lit the sky and the clearing several times and then stopped. The dark was still thin for a little longer, and then it thickened again around them like a curtain. The commander straightened slowly, rose to his feet, and drawing his head into his shoulders, strode to the head of the column. Just then they clearly heard the ringtone on somebody’s cell phone and the first notes of the popular song “Marina” jangled like a bomb blast. Where had this phone come from when they’d been without electric power for days? “Hello?” said a voice in the dark, and then they could hear the phone being flipped shut. “Wrong number,” said the same voice, defensively. “Turn off that piece of shit,” ordered the commander. He was doing his damnedest to sound fierce and stern, but it wasn’t working because he was also remembering how once long ago at the seashore he’d held a girl with ashen hair by the hand while that very song drifted their way from a hotel. He could even remember the words: “For days I’ve loved Marina, but her cold glances hurt me….” Then, for the first time, he wondered what point there was to a war in which you don’t even know who your enemy is, or why you’re fighting, or whether a peace treaty has already been signed, or who will end up envying whom: the dead—the living, or the living—the dead. Later on, in the woods, on the ridge, the commander chided himself for the defeatist thoughts, but they offered him some brief comfort. To be honest, war is a holy mess, we all agree, there’s no dispute. Every war is like that, the just and the unjust wars, the wars of conquest and defense, war on land and war on the sea, and war in the air and war underground, all of them are the same. War is shit, that’s that, period. Later, on the ridge, the commander would feel shame at these words, changing nothing. There is no particular use for words, read the commander a long time ago in a story by a local writer. The story had stayed with him for years, especially a scene in which the mother pricks her finger with a needle and then explains something to her daughter, and, in the end, the mother licks the welling blood from her fingertip. The commander winced: yes, he had been exposed to many deaths, both day and night, but the needle prick to the fingertip made all the deaths seem pointless. Meanwhile the soldiers had come up to a twisted old fence that once probably served as a border crossing. In a whisper the commander cautioned them not to approach the fence and even ordered them to stand back. He huddled with Mladen and a corporal and they concurred: the fence was the last barrier and the enemy would have focused on it. No matter how hard they tried, however, the commander and his advisers could not agree on the next step. Dawn would soon be breaking, thought the commander, and he was at a dead end. A little later, in front of everyone, he whacked himself on the head and said now he understood. He spoke softly into the dark and sounded as if he’d never stop. In short, he explained he’d suddenly seen through the enemy’s game. They’d figured the troops would assume the fence to be mined; he and his soldiers would be expected to detour around the fence and proceed, together, beyond it. Therefore, said the commander, we feel the fence itself won’t be mined, but there will be pressure action mines planted alongside it on both sides to catch us when we go around it; the closer we stick to the middle section the safer we’ll be. And as soon as he said this, the commander walked right up to it, threw his leg over the fence, and then, when nothing happened, called the others to follow. Alone or in pairs, the soldiers hopped over and soon it was behind them. The commander went back for a last look. He really wanted to toss a heavy rock sideways to set off one of the mines, but the blast would have given their location to the enemy. Better not, they thought, each of them, the commander and the soldiers. There are happy little moments like this of harmony, and everybody felt it. Far away before them the sky began to tear apart, and out of the crack gushed the bright, still sheepish, light of dawn. The commander summoned Mladen, told him to take another soldier and scout out what was going on around them. “You have ten minutes,” said the commander, “because they’ll see they’ve been hoodwinked, and they’ll do their level best to find us.” And so it was. First they heard shouts and random shots, then it was alternating bursts of gunfire and shell blasts. The checkpoint, thought the commander, has been obliterated. The shooting thumped a little longer, hand grenades blew and shells whistled, and then just as the shooting died down, everything reverberated with an explosion. “Yes,” whispered the commander, “oh, yes!” The magazine of weapons and munitions they’d left behind had just gone up, taking with it, hoped the commander, five or six enemy soldiers. Ah, the commander’s thoughts continued, if someone had told me I’d in any way, at any time, and in any place actually desire a person’s death, I’d never have believed them, but he was a soldier and he knew no one comes home unchanged from a war. It was good that he was surrounded by people in whom he had full confidence, at least he could trust them never to inform on him to the authorities or the police, though he always needed to be cautious, because if somebody reported him for having been earnestly sympathetic toward our alleged enemies, the commander would quickly find himself in a pickle. And even exile, whether forced or self-imposed, wouldn’t save him. Had the weather been just a little more agreeable, he’d have gone, long ago, to a village by a shore. Which shore? we asked, the shore of a lake or the sea? Whatever, said the commander, whatever. We chose a boat. The weather was sunny and mild, no one was in a hurry, it was warm, July or August, we could hardly wait to stretch out and bask. The commander did a double take and saw he’d been left completely alone. He’d been asleep behind a bush, probably why they’d abandoned him. They have no idea, in fact, where I am, thought the commander, though they were all sure he’d be back. He always came back, so why not now? Then a gust of wind blew by and brought with it fragments of a commotion. The commander licked his finger and raised it into the air. Their fate, he thought, depends on which way the wind is blowing, and he set out in the direction it came from. He pushed his way through the bushes and came upon his soldiers, gathered around a hole in the ground; at the bottom there were sharpened spikes and on them were impaled three—three!—soldiers. The legs of one were still jerking and the soldiers were barely able to convince the commander that these were nothing but belated reflexes of the muscles and tendons, like a headless chicken lurching madly about the yard. They’d been walking down the road, they explained, and nothing hinted at the likelihood of a trap or threat. The pit was dug smack-dab in the middle, so sooner or later somebody would have fallen in. But who dug it and when? asked the commander. He’d have given anything for a proper answer, but apparently this was not sufficient. Some things are worth their weight, some their length, and some the degree to which they’re absent. The more absent it is, the more costly a thing becomes—such a paradox. The commander finally realized that a buzzing sound he was hearing was coming from enemy soldiers who were streaming, in total disarray, down the slope and talking intensely, and the multitude sounded like the buzz of bees. The commander stepped back and cocked his head to the side, trying to stretch his field of vision to encompass all the participants. He tried to imagine his life elsewhere, but what reached him was the hum of the enemy’s discontent, and he sought out Mladen: “If this continues,” he said, “we’re plunging straight into chaos.” Their duty, the commander went on, was to settle on a secure route that would take him and the soldiers to safety. Mladen asked him, cautiously, how he knew which route was a good one. He didn’t, said the commander, but he was absolutely certain he knew which of the routes was no good, so by the process of elimination it would be easy to ascertain which were viable, or at least had been viable at the outbreak of the conflict. What was expected of him? asked Mladen. The commander rubbed his chin and eyes, he was tired, terribly tired though he stood there and smiled, and it could be said that he wasn’t present, or, perhaps, he was more present than ever, and he told Mladen to take two soldiers and lie in wait for the enemy riffraff that was obliterating everything as it passed through. The idea was for Mladen to fake a battle and keep moving to entice the enemy to follow him, not along the route their men were taking, but along another that splits off and leads across a ridge at some distance. On that path there were several huts and an old mill. A stream used to run in a torrent through there, especially in spring, and spin the water wheel, but then the stream dried up, leaving behind it a narrow ravine. If Mladen could lure them into the ravine, they wouldn’t change direction until they’d realized their error, and by then it would already be night, or at least late evening, and this would allow the commander to cross the ridge at a much lower point, after which they’d have only a few miles left to the place where all units would assemble. Mladen nodded tersely and went off to find the soldiers. There weren’t many left, and nobody, but nobody, was eager to accompany him. Mladen coaxed, pleaded, begged, made promises, but the soldiers had had it. “Somebody else can play,” said one. The commander heard the words and was dismayed. Direct insubordination meant only one thing: a court martial and, probably, execution before a firing squad. The commander was overcome by an abrupt headache. He went over to the soldier who’d refused Mladen’s summons and asked him whether he had any ibuprofen or aspirin. The soldier dipped a hand into a pocket and brought out a small white pill. “I wasn’t asking for a sedative,” said the commander. “If there’s no proper medicine, any pill will do,” said the soldier with a sudden grin. The commander shrugged, swallowed the white pill, and later, truth be told, he felt much better. He’d never learn whether it was the sedative or his immune system rebounding, but so it was with many things: there could be no talk or whining here: you took things as they were or you didn’t take them at all. No negotiating or bargaining and wasting time on nonsense. This is life—thought the commander, wrapped in the white veil of the sedative—not literature. As if confirming his words, shots could be heard being fired somewhere behind his back, exactly where Mladen was supposed to be drawing the enemy away onto the wrong route. “Aha,” whispered the commander to himself. “If only we’d had the time to dig a pit trap for them, they’d all be in it now.” But if there was anything they’d been short of in this war, it was time, and when he gave it a little more thought, the commander had to recognize that the speed of events simply did not allow him to come to a timely, fitting assessment, to weigh them in their elemental and cosmic meaning, especially in the cosmic, because there everything was pure, untainted by malice and envy. The shots behind his back grew sparser and soon they stopped altogether. There were two or three spurts of gunfire, the sort usually used to finish off the wounded and superfluous soldiers. The commander trembled with a sudden bitter taste in his mouth and hurried the troops. Some ten minutes later, however, they had to stop and wait for him to vomit. He retched long and hard, his face drenched in an icy sweat. His belly swelled and clenched though it was already completely empty. He crouched by a beech tree and a soldier held his brow till the commander told him to stop. As soon as the soldier withdrew his hand, the commander sank to the ground next to the pool of vomit. As far as he was concerned, the war was over and he was prepared to lie there to the end of the world, but reality was something else and it compelled him to get up, so he summoned the strength and struggled to his feet as if he were rising, at the very least, from the dead. He stood there and stared at the soldiers standing before him: six soldiers, two corporals, and Mladen, who at that very moment stepped, blood-soaked, out of the brambles. “Where is my deputy?” asked the commander, but no one could say. He’d simply disappeared, period. No asking around would help and, besides, whom to ask? There is a misleading and heart-wrenching notion of war as the ideal time for forging friendships, rich with opportunities for self-sacrifice and dying for one’s ideals, when, instead, these notions are all part of the farce that is war. War is a business like any other and these stories are merely a manifestation of efforts to consign the truth to oblivion, whence it will only be allowed to emerge once it conforms to the government’s truth, but the honest truth would never accept that, and doesn’t even now. “My dear soldiers,” began the commander, but he stopped immediately because he felt tears welling. The commander, as is well known, had nothing against tears coursing down a man’s cheeks, but he believed there are moments when one may cry in public, while crying at any other time would not do for men, and this moment was one when he was supposed to be spurring them all to finish their combat mission, to inspire them not to give up on life before their time, and one cannot do this with tears in one’s eyes, right? The comma