Sometime that summer, Mek fell ill. He could not get to his feet; he refused food and water, there was blood in his urine. My parents laid him on the floor in the bathroom, which was the coolest space in the house. Mother stroked him and talked to him while he kept looking straight into her eyes — she always claimed he understood everything she told him. They called the vet, but the vet’s office had only one car at its disposal, which was continuously on the road, attending to all the sick animals in the area. It took the vet a couple of days to finally arrive. He instantly recognized that Mek was infested with deer ticks, all of them bloated with his blood, poisoning him. The prognosis was not good, he said, but at the office he could give him a shot that might help. My father borrowed my uncle’s tractor and cart in which pigs were normally transported to slaughter. He put the limp Mek in the cart and drove down the hill, all the way to Prnjavor, to get the shot that could save his life. On his way, the Serb Army trucks passed him, the soldiers looking down on the panting Mek.
The magic shot worked and Mek lived, recovering after a few days. But then it was my mother’s turn to get terribly sick. Her gall bladder was full of stones and infected — back in Sarajevo, she’d been recommended a surgery to remove them, which she’d feared and kept postponing, and then the war broke out. Her brother, my uncle Milisav, drove down from Subotica, a town at the Serbian-Hungarian border, and took her back with him for urgent surgery. Father had to wait for his friend Dragan to come and get Mek and him. While Father was preparing his beehives for his long absence, Mek would lie nearby, stretched in the grass, keeping him company.
Dragan arrived a couple of days later. On the way in, he was stopped at the checkpoint at the top of Vučijak. The men were hairy, drunk, and impatient. They asked Dragan where he was going, and when he explained that my father was waiting for him, they menacingly told him they’d been watching my father closely for a while, that they knew all about his family (which was ethnically Ukrainian — earlier that year the Ukrainian church in Prnjavor had been blown up by the Serbs), and they were well aware of his son (of me, that is), who had written against the Serbs and was now in America. They were just about ready to take care of my father once and for all, they told Dragan. The men belonged to a paramilitary unit that called itself Vukovi (the Wolves) and were led by one Veljko, whom a few years earlier my father had thrown out of a meeting he’d organized to discuss bringing in running water from a nearby mountain well. Veljko would later go to Austria to pursue a rewarding criminal career, only to return right before the war to put his paramilitary unit together. “You let Hemon know we’re coming,” the Wolves told Dragan as they let him through.
When Dragan reported the incident, which he took very seriously, my father thought it would be better to try to get out as soon as possible than wait for them to come at night and slit his throat. At the checkpoint, the guard shift had just changed and the new men were not drunk or churlish enough to care, so my father and Dragan were waved through. The checkpoint Wolves failed to sniff out or see Mek, because Father kept him down on the floor. Later on, in their mindless rage, or, possibly, trying to steal the honey, the Wolves destroyed my father’s hives. (In a letter he’d send to Chicago he’d tell me that of all the losses the war inflicted upon him, losing his bees was the most painful.)
On their way toward the Serbian border, Father and Dragan passed many checkpoints. Father was concerned that if those manning the checkpoints saw a beautiful Irish setter, they’d immediately understand that he was coming from a city, as there were few auburn Irish setters in the Bosnian countryside, largely populated by mangy mutts and wolves. Moreover, the armed men could easily get pissed at someone trying to save a fancy dog in the middle of a war, when people were being killed left and right. At each checkpoint, Mek would try to get up and my father would press him down with his hand, whispering calming words into his ear; Mek would lie back down. He never produced a sound, never insisted on standing up, and, miraculously, no one at the checkpoints noticed him. My father and Dragan made it out, across the border and on to Subotica.
* * *
Meanwhile, in Sarajevo under siege, Veba was conscripted into the Bosnian Army, defending the city from the former Yugoslav People’s Army, now transformed overnight into the genocidal Serb Army. Veba’s father, on the other hand, was on duty at his warehouse outside Sarajevo when the hostilities flared up and was arrested by the Bosnians soon after the fighting began. Veba and his family would have no news from him for a couple of years, not knowing whether he was alive or dead.
While my family was scattered all over elsewhere, Veba’s still lived across the street from our home. He was sharing a small apartment with his girlfriend, mother, brother, and Don. Very quickly, food became scarce — a good dinner under siege was a slice of bread sprinkled with oil; rice was all that was available for most of the people, meal after meal, day after day. Packs of abandoned dogs roamed the city, sometimes attacking humans or tearing up fresh corpses. To have and feed a dog was a suspicious luxury, yet Veba’s family shared with Don whatever they had — all of them were now skin and bones. Frequently, there was nothing to share and Don somehow understood the difficulty of the situation and never begged. During shelling, Don would pace around their apartment, sniffing and squealing. He’d calm down only when all of Veba’s family were in the same room; he’d lie down and watch them all closely. Every once in a while, they’d entertain him by asking: “Where is Mek? Where is Mek?” and Don would run to the front door and bark excitedly, remembering his friend.
When they took Don out to pee, Veba and his family had to stay within a narrow space protected by their high-rise from the Serb snipers. The children played with him and he let them pet him. Within weeks, Don developed an uncanny ability to sense an imminent mortar-shell attack: he’d bark and move anxiously in circles; bristling, he’d jump on Veba’s mother’s shoulders and push her until she and everyone else rushed back into the building. A moment later, shells would start exploding nearby.
* * *
My father and Mek eventually joined my mother in Subotica. When she had sufficiently recovered from her gall-bladder surgery, my parents moved to Novi Sad, not far away, where Mother’s other brother owned a little one-bedroom apartment in which they could stay. They spent a year or so there, trying all along to get the necessary papers to emigrate to Canada. During that time, Father was often gone for weeks, working in Hungary with Dragan’s construction company. Mek’s constant presence and my sister’s occasional visits provided Mother with her only comfort. She longed for Sarajevo, horrified by what was happening in Bosnia, insulted by the relentless Serbian propaganda pouring out of the TV and radio. She spent days crying, and Mek would put his head in her lap and look up at her with his moist setter eyes, and Mother confided in him as her only friend. Every day, she had a hard time confronting the fact that they’d lost everything they’d worked for their whole lives; the only remnant of their previous life was the gorgeous Irish setter.
The one-bedroom in Novi Sad was often full of refugees from Bosnia — friends of friends or family of family — whom my parents put up until the unfortunate people could make it to Germany or France or some other place where they were not wanted and never would be. They slept scattered all over the floor, my mother stepping over the bodies on her way to the bathroom, Mek always at her heels. He never bothered the refugees, never barked at them. He let the children pet him.