Free The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon Page B

them says, decasyllabically. “Without suffering no saber is forged.” He receives a delegation of Muslims pleading for peace and coexistence and all that; they are offered a chance to keep their heads on their shoulders by converting back to “the faith of their forefathers.” He speaks of freedom and the difficult decisions required to protect it: “The wolf is entitled to a sheep / Much like a tyrant to a feeble man. / But to stomp the neck of tyranny / To lead it to the righteous knowledge / That is man’s most sacred duty.”
    In lines familiar to nearly every Serbian child and adult, Vladika Danilo eventually recognizes that the total, ruthless extermination of the Muslims is the only way: “Let there be endless struggle,” he says. “Let there be what cannot be.” He will lead his people through the hell of murder and onward to honor and salvation: “On the grave flowers will grow / For a distant future generation.”
    Karad ž i ć , who grew up in the part of Bosnia where mail is delivered by wolves (as we used to say in Sarajevo), was intimately familiar with Serbian epic poetry. A skillful player of the gusle, a single-string fiddle (for which no real skill is required) used to accompany the oral performance of epic poems, he understood his role in the blazing light cast by Vladika Danilo. He recognized himself in the martyrdom of leadership; he believed that he was the one to finish the job that Vladika Danilo started. He was to be the hero in an epic poem that would be sung by a distant future generation.
    Indeed, while hiding in plain sight in Belgrade, undercover as a New Age mountebank, Karad ž i ć frequented a bar called Mad House— Luda ku ć a . Mad House offered weekly gusle-accompanied performances of Serbian epic poetry; wartime pictures of him and General Ratko Mladi ć , the Bosnian Serbs’ military leader (now on trial in The Hague), proudly hung on the walls. A local newspaper claimed that, on at least one occasion, Karad ž i ć performed an epic poem in which he himself featured as the main hero, undertaking feats of extermination. Consider the horrible postmodernism of the situation: an undercover war criminal narrating his own crimes in decasyllabic verse, erasing his personality so that he could assert it more forcefully and heroically.
    The tragic, heartbreaking irony of it all is that Karad ž i ć played out his historical, pseudoheroic role in less than ten years. In the flash of his infernal pan hundreds of thousands died, millions (including my family) were displaced, untold numbers of people paid in pain for his induction into the pantheon of Serbian epic poetry. After his arrest in the grotesque guise of a spiritual quack, one can imagine him singing of himself as a wise sage for his prison mates in The Hague.
    If you’re a writer, it is hard not to see a kind of Shakespeare-for-Idiots lesson in the story of Radovan Karad ž i ć : his true and only home was the hell he created for others. Before he became the leader of the Bosnian Serbs and after he was forced out by the Serbian president Slobodan Milo š evi ć (who was Karad ž i ć ’s supporter until he exhausted his usefulness), Karad ž i ć was a prosaic nobody. A mediocre psychiatrist, a minor poet, and a petty embezzler before the war, at the time of his arrest he was a full-fledged charlatan with a clump of hair tied on his forehead to attract cosmic energy. It was only during the war, performing on a blood-soaked stage, that he could fully develop his inhuman potential. He was what he was because what could not happen did in the end happen.

 
    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