Young male that he was, Mek would often brawl with other dogs. Once, when my mother took him out, he got into a confrontation with a mean Rottweiler. She tried to separate them, unwisely, as they were about to go at each other’s throats, and the Rottweiler tore my mother’s hand apart. Kristina was there at the time, and she took Mother to the emergency room, where they had absolutely nothing to treat the injury; they did give her the address of a doctor who could sell them bandages and a tetanus shot. They didn’t have enough to pay the fare back home, and the cabdriver said he’d come the next day to get the rest of the money. My sister bluntly told him that there was no reason for him to come back, for they’d have no money tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, or anytime soon. (The cabbie didn’t insist: the daily inflation in Serbia at that time was about 300 percent, and the money would have been worthless by the next day anyway.) For years afterward, Mother could not move her hand properly or grip anything with it. Mek would go crazy if he but sniffed a Rottweiler on the same block.
* * *
In the fall of 1993, my parents and sister finally got all the papers and the plane tickets for Canada. Family and friends came over to bid them farewell. Everyone was sure they’d never see them again. There were a lot of tears, as at a funeral. Mek figured out that something was up; he never let my mother or father out of his sight, as if worried they might leave him; he became especially cuddly, putting his head into their laps whenever he could, leaning against their shins when lying down. Touched though my father may have been with Mek’s love, he didn’t want to take him along to Canada — he couldn’t know what was waiting for them there; where they’d live, whether they’d be able to take care of themselves, let alone a dog. My mother could not bring herself to discuss the possibility of moving to Canada without Mek; she just wept at the very thought of leaving him with strangers.
* * *
Back in Sarajevo, Veba got married, and he and his wife moved out of the place across the street from us. Don stayed with Veba’s mother and brother because Veba’s duties kept him away from home for long stretches, while his wife, working for the Red Cross, was also often gone. Following a Red Cross official on an inspection of a Bosnian POW camp, Veba’s wife discovered that his father was alive. Ever since he’d failed to return home from work at the beginning of the war, Don — prompted by the question “Where is Vlado?”—would leap at the coatrack where Veba’s father used to hang up his uniform. Although čika-Vlado would be released from the POW camp toward the end of the war, Don would never see him again.
I received only intermittent news from Veba’s family — Veba’s letters mailed by a foreign friend who could go in and out of the Bosnian war zone; a sudden, late-night call from a satellite phone, arranged by a friend who worked for a foreign-journalist pool. During the siege the regular phone lines were most often down, but every once in a while they would inexplicably work, so I’d randomly try to reach my best friend. One late night in 1994, I called Veba’s family from Chicago on a whim. It was very early morning in Sarajevo, but Veba’s mother picked up the phone after one ring. She was sobbing uncontrollably, so my first thought was that Veba had been killed. She composed herself enough to tell me that my friend was fine, but that someone had poisoned their dog. Don had been in horrible pain all night, retching and vomiting yellow slime, she said; he’d died just a short while before I called. Veba was there too; upon hearing the news, he’d biked from his new place in the middle of the night, the curfew still on, risking his life. He’d made it in time to hold Don as he expired, and was crying on the phone with me. I could find no words for him, as I could never provide any consolation for my friends under siege. Veba wrapped Don in a blanket, carried him down the fifteen flights of stairs, and buried him with his favorite tennis ball behind the high-rise.
* * *
My father recognized how inconsolable my mother would be without Mek and finally surrendered. In December 1993, my parents, my sister, and Mek arrived in Canada, and I rushed over from Chicago to see them. As soon as I walked in the door of their barely furnished fifteenth-floor apartment in Hamilton, Ontario, Mek ran toward me, wagging his tail, happy to see me. I was astonished he remembered me after nearly three years. I’d felt that large parts of my Sarajevo self had vanished, but when Mek put his head in my lap, some of me came back.
* * *
Mek had a happy life in Hamilton. My mother always said that he was a “lucky boy.” He died in 2007, at the age of seventeen. My parents would never consider having a dog again. My mother confides in a parakeet these days, and cries whenever Mek is mentioned.
Veba moved to Canada in 1998. He lives in Montreal with his wife and children. After years of Veba’s refusing to consider having another dog, a lovely husky mix named Kahlua is now part of his family. My sister lives in London; she has not had a dog since Mek. I married a woman who has never lived without a dog, and we now have a Rhodesian ridgeback named Billie.
THE BOOK OF MY LIFE
Professor Nikola Koljević had the long, slender fingers of a piano player. Although he was now a literature professor — he was my teacher at the University of Sarajevo in the late eighties — as a student he’d supported himself by playing the piano in the jazz bars of Belgrade. He’d even had gigs as a member of a circus orchestra — he’d sit at the fringe of the arena, I imagined, with a Shakespeare tragedy open above the piano keys, flexing his fingers, ignoring the lions, waiting for the clowns to enter.
Professor Koljević taught a course in poetry and criticism, for which we read poetry with a critical slant — the New Critic Cleanth Brooks was his patron saint. In his class we learned how to analyze the inherent properties of a piece of literature, disregarding politics, biography, or anything external to the text. Most of the other teachers delivered their lectures passionlessly, even haughtily; possessed by the demons of scholastic boredom, they asked for nothing in particular from us. In Professor Koljević’s class, on the other hand, we unpacked poems like Christmas presents and the solidarity of common discoveries filled the small, hot room on the top floor of the Faculty of Philosophy.
He was incredibly well read. He often quoted Shakespeare in English off the top of his head, which always impressed me; I, too, wanted to have read everything and to be able to quote with ease. He also taught an essay-writing course — the only writing course I’ve ever taken — where we read the classic essayists, beginning with Montaigne, and then tried to produce some lofty-seeming thoughts, coming up with hapless imitations instead. Still, it was flattering that he found it even remotely possible we could write something belonging to the same universe as Montaigne. It made us feel as if we had been personally invited to participate in the fine, gentle business of literature.
Once, Professor Koljević told us about the book his daughter had begun writing at the age of five. She had titled it “The Book of My Life,” but had written only the first chapter. She planned to wait for more life to accumulate, he told us, before starting Chapter 2. We laughed, still in our early chapters, oblivious to the malignant plots accelerating all around us.
After I’d graduated, I phoned to thank Professor Koljević for what he’d taught me, for introducing me to the world that could be conquered by reading. Back then, calling him was a brave act for a student ever in awe of his professors, but he was not put out. He invited me for an evening stroll by the Miljacka River, and we discussed literature and life as friends and equals. He put his hand on my shoulder as we walked, his fingers cramped like hooks as he held on, for I was considerably taller than he. It was uncomfortable, but I said nothing. He had, flatteringly, crossed a border, and I did not want to undo the closeness.