DOG LIVES
When I was a kid, I brought home many a mangy puppy I’d found on the streets. I’d arrange sofa cushions into a soft bed, then go to school and leave my would-be pet to enjoy its new life, hoping that, when the puppy felt sufficiently at home, it’d be ready to commit to a lifelong friendship with me. But when my parents returned home from work, they’d find our house an unreal mess: the puppy had chewed up the cushions and peed on the floor. Quickly would my lifelong-friend candidate be evicted onto the brutal streets of Sarajevo.
Both of my parents were born into poor peasant households, dependent on the toil of farm animals, where the notion of having a pet could not exist. Hence I’d find myself passionately arguing with Mother and Father for my right to own a dog. My family was not a democratic institution and I was sternly made to understand that my obligations to the family exceeded all other duties and passions. As for rights, there was no family charter guaranteeing anything to me other than food, shelter, education, and love. The final, rusty nail in the coffin for my pet-owning hopes was my mother’s hard-to-counter argument that, since I never really cleaned up after myself, I most certainly would not clean up after a dog.
But my sister, Kristina, was (and still is) a strong-headed force of nature. While I often found myself fighting for my right to discuss my right to have rights, my determined sister had a different and a much more efficient approach. She wasted no time debating her rights with our parents; she simply acted as though she axiomatically possessed them and exercised them as she saw fit.
She first brought in a Siamese cat, which died from a form of peritonitis so rare that we donated his little corpse to a researcher at a vet school. The next cat was a piebald country girl, which we let out of the apartment onto the street, until she was run over by a car. Our heartbroken mother absolutely forbade any new pets entering our home; she could not, she said, handle the loss.
Kristina, having long asserted her unimpeachable right to do whatever she felt like, completely ignored the prohibition. In the spring of 1991, she recruited her new boyfriend to drive with her to Novi Sad, a town in northern Serbia a couple of hundred miles away from Sarajevo, where she’d somehow tracked down a breeder. With the money she’d saved from her modeling gigs, she bought a gorgeous, blazingly auburn Irish setter puppy and brought him home. Father was shocked — dogs in the city were self-evidently useless, a resplendent Irish setter even more so — and unconvincingly demanded that she return him to the breeder immediately; naturally, she ignored him. Mother offered some predictable rhetorical resistance to yet another creature she’d worry about excessively, but it was clear she had fallen in love with the dog on the spot. Within a day or two he chewed up someone’s shoe and was instantly forgiven. We named him Mek.
* * *
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.