Free The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon

in my pajamas, hopelessly summoning Mek to heel. He didn’t heed my calls and I caught up only when the unit stopped for a breather. They took off their gas masks and panted, sweat pouring down their faces, while I incoherently apologized for some perceived fault of mine. They said nothing, too exhausted and invested in their war rehearsal. As I stumbled downhill in my slippers, dragging Mek by the collar, they assumed new combat positions. For all I knew they might have pointed their guns at me.
    Another morning, in early December, I sat despondent and cold, drinking tepid tea, too tired to start a fire. Mek placed his head in my lap for petting. I gazed into the bleak fog outside and wondered what would happen to all of us. My mind was so defeated by the unstoppable advance of war that there was no longer a book to read or a story to write that could possibly help it ever recover. At the very moment I reached the deepest recess of despair, the phone rang—or at least that is how my memory has edited that particular scene—and a woman from the American Cultural Center told me that I had been invited to visit the United States for a month under the auspices of the United States Information Agency. I’d had an interview with the head of the Cultural Center earlier that summer, but had expected nothing from it and pretty much forgot all about it. Indeed, I thought for a long moment that it was a prank call of some sort, but when she told me I needed to stop by the center to work out the details of my visit, I promised her I would. I hung up the phone and started building the fire. The following day, I left the mountain.

 
    LET THERE BE WHAT CANNOT BE
    On October 14, 1991, Radovan Karad ž i ć spoke at a session of the Bosnian and Herzegovinian Parliament, which had been debating a referendum on independence from the Yugoslavia crippled by the secession of Slovenia and Croatia earlier that year. Karad ž i ć was there to warn the parliament against following the Slovenes and Croats down “the highway of hell and suffering.”
    I was in Jahorina at that time, placating myself with reading and writing. I turned on the nightly news to watch him thunder at the frazzled members of the parliament: “Do not think you will not lead Bosnia and Herzegovina into hell and the Muslim people into possible annihilation, as the Muslim people cannot defend themselves in case of war here.” Throughout his tirade, in a manner familiar to me from the press conferences I had attended, he clutched the lectern edges, as though about to hurl it at his feeble audience. But then he let go of it to stab the air with his forefinger at the word annihilation . The Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegovi ć , a Muslim, was visibly distressed.
    You can easily find a grainy YouTube clip of Karad ž i ć ’s ranting. The Internet and television can convert just about anything into benign banality, but his performance is still bloodcurdling. Karad ž i ć was then president of the hard-line nationalist Serbian Democratic Party, which had already acquired control of the parts of Bosnia with a Serbian majority, but he was not a member of the parliament, nor did he hold any elective office. He was there simply because he could. His very presence rendered the parliament weak and unimportant; backed by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav People’s Army, he spoke from the position of unimpeachable power over the life and death of the people the parliament represented. And he knew it and liked it.
    Tranquilized by the weeks of therapeutic reading (Kafka, Mann), I could not initially comprehend what Karad ž i ć meant by “annihilation.” I groped for a milder, less terrifying interpretation—perhaps he meant “historical irrelevance”? I could settle for historical irrelevance, whatever it meant. What he was saying was well outside the scope of my humanist imagination, prone to reveries and fears; his words extended far beyond the habits of normalcy I desperately