a dog whimper, then another, then a third, and all three wailed together a little longer until an uncomfortable silence took over. Now he could move on, thought the commander, and, crouching close to the ground, he crawled toward an opening in the shrubs. In order to make himself even smaller and less visible, he imagined himself a worm or a slug and squirmed among the brambles and twigs. Reaching the end of the thicket, he saw a great meadow, a slope thick with grass and other greenery, which at first glance looked like a rug carpeting a room from wall to wall. However, soon it became clear that this was an illusion; his feet sank into the dense grass or slid over it, especially where the slope was steeper. Luckily, what was impeding his progress did the same for the men who were after him, except that in their efforts to be as speedy as possible they tripped with each step and tumbled down the hill. They were at the foot of the slope just as the commander had nearly scrambled to the top, or, actually, not far from a spot where the grassy slope became a rocky ridge; on its other side—the same place the path with the land mines had led to—would bring him to a border crossing and safe return home. Slipping, but this time on rocks skittering out from under his feet, the commander thought about how he’d set out with many, but now here he was returning alone. “I am Odysseus,” he sobbed bitterly, but he soon stopped mainly because he was no longer sure whether Odysseus came back alone or with a few surviving warriors, and besides, unlike Odysseus, he, the commander, had nobody waiting for him at home. Just then, the commander thought of the cook. Whatever happened to the cook? Only moments later the commander came across a gruesome sight: a dozen large birds crouching on a carcass, ripping off chunks of flesh with their hooked beaks. The commander thought, a mountain goat, but only when he came closer and shooed away the greedy raptors did he realize that before him lay the half-gnawed body of the company’s cook. He recognized the man by his large head and one pale blue eye—the other eye had been devoured along with the tongue and a part of the cheek. While he was inspecting the cook, the commander felt a wave of nausea, staggered over to the nearest rock and heaved, whimpering like the dogs who’d been poisoned a bit ago. Who knows, maybe he’d ingested a little poison while scattering the capsules around Mladen’s corpse. From childhood he’d had the habit of licking his fingers after everything he did, regardless of whether he was laying heads of cabbage in a sauerkraut barrel, or feeling through a fish fillet for the treacherous bones, or sprinkling salt on food, or adding the sugar to the cream filling when baking pastry. He’d always lick at least one finger, regardless of whether he’d actually touched something with it, so he’d probably done the same after scattering the capsules. What an idiot I am, muttered the commander, and went ahead lambasting himself with choice curses. Though he’d already retched, his belly was still distended and aching; he shoved two fingers down his throat to empty his stomach. The new wave left him gasping, and he thought his end had truly come. His gut tightened and stretched in attempts to separate the good from the bad, but he knew it was a lost cause that would only end when his stomach was completely empty. As he was gagging, the scavengers began to move freely around him. The commander felt a moist fog had settled over him; he kept having to squint and wipe away the sweat from his brow and cheeks. He could no longer stand, his legs were wobbling, so he dropped to his knees and found himself eye to eye with the cook’s remains. Maybe, he thought, he was destined to meet his end while guarding the hollowed remnants of the cook. He peered down the slope but didn’t see anyone. Again he was nudged by a presentiment that the enemy was at hand, watching him and sneering and waiting for his attention to flag, and when it flagged they’d rush in and snatch him along with the other prisoners, as if preparing for their triumphal return to Rome. The commander winced, crossed himself sneakily, and began collecting his belongings. He couldn’t find the key to his apartment but breathed a sigh of relief when he remembered he’d left it in the pocket of his other pants—stuffed into his pack, as were all his other clothes, his shorts, socks, underpants, handkerchiefs. He remembered how he’d packed while he was readying to leave with the company for the new combat situation, and it seemed that six months had passed since then, perhaps even eight, though everything had, in fact, happened over some fifteen days, three weeks, a month, maybe, no more, for sure, absolutely sure, which would mean that he must have at least twenty-one daily reports in his ledger, maybe twenty-five pages of notes, which would be easy to check by leafing through the ledger, but it was at the bottom of his pack under the dirty laundry, out of reach, especially now when at any moment the company would start to march. The commander knocked his head, yet again he’d forgotten there was no more company, he was alone. He looked at the sky and saw the sun had begun to set, it was squeezing the tube from which night would squirt, and under the cover of dark the commander would trek across the last miles separating him from home. At first this seemed the most challenging stretch of the whole journey, especially because the passage would transport him through the border of another country, across terrain that yawned open wide, which the soldiers had to traverse as speedily as possible, hoping to dodge enemy bullets. But now the commander was alone and he couldn’t decide whether this heightened his chances, or, possibly, diminished them. Diminished probably: when fewer were crossing, the gunfire would be focused on each soldier. So if the commander dared to dash across the unsheltered ground on his own, he could count on all the officials at the border post training their weapons on him. He wasn’t overly concerned, he was still confident that his lucky star shielded him as it had so far. He tossed his pack onto his back, darted a glance at the slope and again thought back to their arrival. He saw himself at the head of the company, talking cheerfully as they approached the spot where they’d been assigned to operate the checkpoint that had been held by their allies. Everything else, admitted the commander, was an improvised and endless frustration. Who needed the checkpoint, and what was it checking? When he’d asked that question of the colonel who delivered the order that had come from the Supreme Staff, the colonel replied that such things would be dealt with in stride. Ultimately, said the colonel, the checkpoint is a two-way street, somebody is always crossing from one side to the other, meaning, added the colonel, that there would always be work for those charged with its maintenance. But, the commander dared interject, does that mean our position in the conflict will change, or that we’ll turn our backs on old alliances and form new ones? The colonel’s face fell, and he said the commander couldn’t have heard any such thing from him. He, meaning the colonel, had merely served as a bearer of tidings, a courier, a screw in an intricate mechanism, no more. If the colonel was nothing but a screw, thought the commander, then what could he—meaning the commander—say for himself? He wasn’t a screw or even a tack, smaller yet, or as thin as a straight pin, coming back—as he was—alone, without a single soldier, without even a cook. He did quickly make a point of saying that the story of the cook was a mesmerizing one, so he’d leave it for better times, because the cook’s heroism, he said, definitely deserved that. But first of all the commander thought he’d go to the military archive and investigate what had transpired with the various alliance treaties and protocols for collaboration; this might be the only way to explain the fact that his unit, obliged to hold the only checkpoint in the vicinity and beyond, had always been in the crosshairs of the opposing forces, even when the current opponents had until very recently been allies. And while he mused over the last few weeks, the thought kept bothering him that, without his knowledge, of course, the whole company had been a part of a cruel experiment, and they were sacrificed so insights on the structure of warfare could be gathered, which, in other words, meant that no one was to blame for what happened to the soldiers and commander. A cruel thought, thought the commander, but not implausible. Cruelty is, alas, sometimes necessary for the pursuit of the proper path toward tenderness, but in his unit’s case no one had given two cents for tenderness, instead an army bureaucrat had had the bright idea that the time was ripe for a study of the impact on soldiers of a sudden shift in the enemy’s standing (in other words when friend becomes foe, or vice versa). What happened presumed not a reality-based result—the outcome of earlier events in this same reality—but instead a faux reality, a strategy game like Battleship, always in barter mode, always opening with “What if…”, which would not, in and of itself, have attracted such attention, especially in comparison to the media frenzy when pop and rock stars breeze through an army center or R & R site. But to experiment with real people, to measure and chalk up points for the corpses of the ones who had had a shortage of luck, or maybe, instead, had a surplus, was something else again, though it essentially came down to the same thing. “Had” and “had not” were, at least in this situation, largely interchangeable and the only thing to keep an eye out for, in the spirit of stylistic purity, was to avoid using them three or four times per sentence. And it mattered less whether the sentence pertained to customs inspection, or to searches for new books and narrative voices. Of course, there were sentences for which there was nothing to be done so they stayed as they were, such as: “We had to add two more soldiers, but this changed nothing. They only succeeded in postponing the inevitable. Of course, we hadn’t considered the dogs, because we still hadn’t succeeded in laying the appropriate path, and at first, when we heard the dogs, we thought of sheep that bleat and move with their flock, but later, when we saw the effect the dogs had and learned that the percentage of waste had been minimal (as long as the time for understanding the stories was prolonged), we felt we were able to and dared to continue.” The commander clutched his head, hoping the pain would wake him, but he felt no pain, everything was dull and shimmering like light shining through mist. Then the cook, again, popped into his mind. How had the cook made it this far before all the rest of them, how had he clambered up the hillside, and how had he even known that this was the place to cross over, and, by that same token, that there was, probably, a tunnel under the river, and that there was lateral drainage, all of this being information that he, the commander, had been given in a file marked in red with the English words TOP SECRET written across it, which, by the way, always irritated him, because he could not understand why these words were used and not others such as SECRET OF SECRETS, well maybe not, or, simply NAJVIŠA TAJNA in Serbian. Whatever the case, he had decided to accept the offer and lead the handpicked company at the checkpoint. As we’ve said, the checkpoint was hardly a new building, it had been in use for many years with sleeping quarters, lecture hall, mess hall, the pantry and the commander’s small room. The small room was small indeed, but suited him fine. The only thing that bothered him was the lack of an en suite bath and toilet, but the soldiers kept the shared latrine tidy, and the commander often went there to enjoy the fresh fragrance of the air freshener. The commander might have seemed to be overdoing things just a wee bit with his upbeat description, sounding more like an ad for the sale of vacation cottages, but we knew this was not the case. The commander really did like the checkpoint, and he felt it was a place he could live, of course not during war, but during peace. Here he could breathe deeply, surrounded by forests full of conifers, and everything would be calm, slow, as if its weight had been jettisoned and it was prepared at any moment for takeoff. To see all of this from above, thought the commander, what a thrill that would be! He imagined a scene in which geometry played the lead, turning the forest into an elongated rectangle, the meadows into a multicolored chessboard, the hills into cones, and the river into a curving line that yearned to be straight. Yes, thought the commander, some wishes are never fulfilled. He’d said the same the first or second evening after arriving at the checkpoint. The evening was divine, the sky full of stars, the soldiers tired from travel and quartered in the building, and in front of it crackled a fire, a little fire of dry grass, twigs, and an assortment of leaves. A step or two from the fire began the dark, and the commander at one moment said he had always dreamed of leaving the world of light for the world of the dark, but never had had the courage to try. A soldier lazily lifted his head and asked him why he didn’t do it then; all it would take were a few steps. And to have the resolve, of course, someone added, to never come back. The commander tried to defend himself, but the soldiers were unforgiving, they chanted, helped him stand and pointed him toward the fire. They left him when they felt too much heat. The commander, alone, took two more small steps, then one longer one, stepping over the flames, and then on he walked until he was certain he had completely sunk into the darkness. He turned and, clearly, as if under a magnifying glass, saw the soldiers staring tensely into the dark, and then he realized he could easily decide to never go back. True, none of us had ever been sure what such a decision would mean and whether pursuing that route was even possible. By no means did we want anybody to think we’d imposed a different choice on him. He himself chose it, so he did, and he was, himself, responsible in full for everything that would happen with it and to him. From the dark it was he, after all, who stepped into the light and then it became clear that he’d been fighting sincerely against the darkness that had been hampering and refusing to release him. And who knows what would have happened here if one of the soldiers hadn’t charged with his bayonet and hacked through all the finer and coarser filaments of darkness, which had latched like leeches to the commander’s back, arms, and legs. And when the bayonet slashed through them, we could all hear the darkness bleat in pain, but that, we cried, is something like the song of the sirens with which they hoped to lure Odysseus, and if someone responds to the song, that person will never again see the light of day. This is why we all spun around as fast as greased lightning, and plugged the commander’s ears. The words “We won’t relinquish our Odysseus” buzzed among the soldiers, and this surge of a feeling of unity brought tears to many eyes. The commander had to admit he hadn’t in years met such a feeling of camaraderie and understanding and this made all the more painful what happened on that miserable hillside path that led