Free The Little Red Chairs by Edna O’Brien

and so resonating. They wrote billets-doux on your napkin and you pulled the plaits of your favourite one, Helga. Another incident that caught the attention of the world was a little girl of twelve on her bicycle, oblivious, when a shell hit her and soon the blood rippled out, a leitmotif of red rose petals on discoloured yellowish snow. Yes, that caught the attention of the outside world and some foreign intellectuals ganged together and put on a production of Waiting for Godot , to bolster the morale of the people. That annoyed you. It stole your thunder. After all, you were the Commander, the supreme leader, the mastermind whom diplomats and big shots came to appeal to, to implore you to call the siege off. How you bamboozled them with your charm and your procrastinations and sometimes your fierce temper. You insisted you were ready to negotiate, while also demanding human rights, placing yourself and your people in the role of victim – We are mice in the jaws of cats at play . At the outset, these dignitaries were always given a history lesson, our wronged race, starting with the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. When questioned about the atrocities you always had an answer. Either they never took place, or were fabricated by the enemy, and questioned about corpses down in the square, you insisted they were mannequins, which the enemy had planted there, to delude the world. You even said, “I have an abhorrence of war,” and maybe there was a grain of truth in it. You promised the earth, without meaning it. You promised the siege would be lifted, the shelling would stop and food and aid convoys would be allowed in, except none of that happened. It was all a lie, but lies can be just as persuasive and as palatable as truth in desperate times. So these diplomats and big shots went away moderately reassured and in any case,they were always in a hurry to get to the airport, lest you might already have ordered it to be shelled. Around that time you stopped writing. It stands to reason, with so much going on you had no time to reflect and maybe no wish to. As I say, I read more while the siege went on. I re-read Hamlet and thought for all his protestation of loving Ophelia more than forty thousand brothers, he too was a specialist in the macabre. Things began to get less robust down in the city, which is to say there were fewer corpses. You raved, you ranted, your Utopia, that diamond city enfolded in hills was beginning to slip from your grasp. Everyone was betraying you, the whole world was against you and you resolved on even greater conquest. There were more territories to be taken. Ethnic purification must happen, even if in the end you ruled over a land of ghosts. Shakespeare must have come to your mind – that tide in the affairs of man , yet you mastered any doubts you might have had. So came the next bonanza. Srebrenica. A killing spree. Eight thousand Bosniak men boarded onto buses, assured of their safety, driven off and herded into a concrete emporium, where, it is said, the shooting began after dark. We heard that the gunners were so tired from killing, they asked for chairs and chairs were provided. Then replacements took up the grisly task. Four days, four nights of it. Those cries, those screams, those expirations, the apotheosis of all bloodiness, with carrion men groaning for burial. As for the bodies, that was a matter for the engineers, hence the zillions of secret graves that litter our land. A hot night and the blood of so many in such a short space of time. I did not picture it and I did not want to. But as time went on it got to me, befouled by death, the stench of blood, in the mouth and especially on the palate. There was no escaping it. The spree seemed to have paid off, but as happensdown the ages, our fortunes began to wane. We lost whole swathes of land to the east and before long, our enemy got to be as bloodthirsty as us. They learnt, it was said, from our butchery. Soon the diplomats and the bigwigs