Vesna had been drinking, as had he, so he said: Sweetheart, will you be my human shield?
If you don’t cut my throat afterward, darling! Oh, Enko, there you are—
The American turned. The poor poet was glaring at him, and he thought: Who am I, who have not suffered as he has, to threaten his one one-sided love? — And then he further thought, as if for the first time: I could be killed tomorrow as easily as he. More easily, in fact, since I’m at the frontline—
Accordingly, he wished to flirt with Vesna some more. Instead, he flirted with Dragica, who had no use for him (the night sky flushing with bursts of fire), after which he questioned the poet about Olga Ilic until the poet was mollified. A smiling fighter carefully wrote in the American’s notebook: MPs in BiH is the only MPs fronting the frontlines at all fronts. — Thank you, he said. Then Dragica and a girl named Aida were trying to educate him about the sounds of bullets, and Aida said, opening her pinkish-silver-painted fingernails (they still had cosmetics that autumn): Of course it’s different when a sniper shoots and when a pistol shoots, because when a sniper shoots it’s a longer hissing. — By then he had built up a certain opinion of himself, and had he stayed in Sarajevo for another two weeks, which his budget of course did not permit, it is possible that such aphorisms might have ceased to impress him, and he might even have thought: Woman, I wonder if you’ve ever been to the frontline, whereas I go almost every day and have learned how to watch Chetniks in an angled mirror so that both parties can see but the Chetniks cannot shoot. — I for my part hope that he never would have thought that way. — Through the taped window, following a shell-hiss, he saw the birth of a glow which nearly seemed comforting; it could have been the lamp of some student, perhaps Thea or Jasmina, who was preparing for her examinations before getting married; and the glow brightened; he could neither hear screams nor smell any smoke. Vesna’s guests fell silent, watching that fire, and then their talk sprang brightly up again. Dragica carried around the plate of emerald-fresh halvah. The American recorded the words of the haunted man who whispered what he had seen at night in Kovaci Graveyard; then Jasmina was confiding: I was afraid when a 120-millimeter grenade fell into my flat, but, thanks be to God, it went to the other side of the room; they fired it from the direction of the Studentski Dom… — And then Enko was informing the poet, practically shaking him: To hear them tell it, everything always went well for the Serbs, even in World War II. You know why? Because shame was never put into their fucking minds! God told their Prince Lazar: You have two options, either you will win today and be prosperous, or else you will die and go to heaven for a thousand years. Fuck their stinking Chetnik mothers! They never lose! Well, guess what? — The poet cringed away; then Vesna came, laid down her long fingers so gently on Enko’s hand, and said something which hushed him, and she turned him around and sat him down on the sofa between Aida and Jasmina, and the hatred had bled from his face, but his shoulders would not unlock. Then a Serbian girl named Branka was telling the American in a low and rapid voice: I think Slovenians were the big problem, at which her Croatian friend Olga said: I think we can blame the Croatians the most, because the Serbs did most of what they did out of fear of Croatians. — Vesna, sweating in her white top (with her pink mouth and short blonde hair, her narrow V-shaped dark eyebrows and blue-green eyes, she looked nothing like Olga Ilic), now said: The ones who decided to do this, it’s so sick, like pedophilism; someone was sitting in an office thinking about all the nasty things he could do to the people! The joke is that the Chetniks are copying old Yugoslav war movies. But these people who are shooting… well, as I’m growing older, I understand that religion is only manipulation and nothing else. — He thought he had never heard her so bitter. Meanwhile the poet stared down at her breasts. And then more people were telling the American their stories, each of which could have occupied his life in proper retelling. Perhaps in retrospect these nights at Vesna’s appeared more bright or even brilliant than they were; or it might have been that they were what they were by virtue of simple contrast (the darkness, the hissing of the shells). But he knew, he knew, that these people’s agony was not meaningless. And then came a shell, the women straining their faces at the window, then suddenly screaming, and after it exploded, very near, the building shaking, they screamed and screamed, and Vesna’s young throat was taut and sweaty.
In the middle of the following afternoon they were speeding back from the frontline (they had been running all morning, and, worse yet, through sunny places) when Enko said: Look. What are you going to give Bald Man?
How much does he want?
You don’t fucking get it. I told you: Bald Man doesn’t need shit from you. He has everything already.
All right.
Looking into the rearview mirror, he saw Amir’s sad eyes seeking him.
The only thing you can do is show him you’ve got heart. Don’t you fucking get it?
Sure.
There came a sound as if some monster were wading through an ocean, loudly, yet not without a certain mincing daintiness; he had never heard that before. A window shattered. He was going to pay Enko in dollars again.
Enko said: We caught us a sniper. A real bastard. A Serb. Now what I want you to do, and this’ll prove you to Bald Man, is go in there and do the job.
You mean kill him?
I’ll give you a gun. He’s in a room; he can’t hurt you. Go in there and take care of that Serb. You do that, you can ask Bald Man anything you want.
After that, of course, he couldn’t exactly go to Vesna’s anymore.
Many years later, when the journalist was fat and old, he returned to Sarajevo, in the company of his wife. Some of his younger colleagues had, as American businesspeople like to say, “adapted.” The grand old editors who had taught him were long since enjoying the sweetness of forced retirement. Most journalists of his own generation had simply been “terminated.” The war photographers kept lowering their prices in hopes of keeping “competitive” with the stock agencies whose images might be inferior but could be leased to production supervisors for sixty percent less. The rising cost of paper, and the increasing inclination of advertisers to buy wriggling, pulsing “windows” within digital publications, in order to better monitor the readers (I mean “content users”), left the quaint “hard copy” magazines feeble indeed. Perhaps our hero should have exerted himself for his dog food, pulling harder on a shorter, ever more capricious leash — but he was more washed up than he admitted. His eyesight had worsened, and that new forgetfulness might be getting dangerous, for instead of straightforward admissions of confusion it confidently asserted the erroneous. Well, hadn’t he always been lost? After a week in the Stari Grad, he kept mistaking the way back to the hotel in those narrow streets between Ferhadija and Zelenih Beretki. — Last time, I couldn’t really go out much, he explained to his wife. They were shooting from those hills up there, so I mostly had to stay indoors, or else get into a car and be driven somewhere at high speed. Whenever we left the Holiday Inn we had to—
No, we turn here, said his wife, holding his hand.
But isn’t the river that way? No, you’re right as usual! You know, I never got down to the Stari Grad. Or maybe I did once—
I know, his wife replied. Do you think a cesma is a fountain?
I used to know. Didn’t we just look that up?
You don’t remember either? I feel ashamed of myself; I just can’t make headway with this language.