Free Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) by William T. Vollmann

screaming, and after it exploded, very near, the building shaking, they screamed and screamed, and Vesna’s young throat was taut and sweaty.
20
    In the middle of the following afternoon they were speeding back from the frontline (they had been running all morning, and, worse yet, through sunny places) when Enko said: Look. What are you going to give Bald Man?
    How much does he want?
    You don’t fucking get it. I told you: Bald Man doesn’t need shit from you. He has everything already.
    All right.
    Looking into the rearview mirror, he saw Amir’s sad eyes seeking him.
    The only thing you can do is show him you’ve got heart. Don’t you fucking get it?
    Sure.
    There came a sound as if some monster were wading through an ocean, loudly, yet not without a certain mincing daintiness; he had never heard that before. A window shattered. He was going to pay Enko in dollars again.
    Enko said: We caught us a sniper. A real bastard. A Serb. Now what I want you to do, and this’ll prove you to Bald Man, is go in there and do the job.
    You mean kill him?
    I’ll give you a gun. He’s in a room; he can’t hurt you. Go in there and take care of that Serb. You do that, you can ask Bald Man anything you want.
21
    After that, of course, he couldn’t exactly go to Vesna’s anymore.
22
    Many years later, when the journalist was fat and old, he returned to Sarajevo, in the company of his wife. Some of his younger colleagues had, as American businesspeople like to say, “adapted.” The grand old editors who had taught him were long since enjoying the sweetness of forced retirement. Most journalists of his own generation had simply been “terminated.” The war photographers kept lowering their prices in hopes of keeping “competitive” with the stock agencies whose images might be inferior but could be leased to production supervisors for sixty percent less. The rising cost of paper, and the increasing inclination of advertisers to buy wriggling, pulsing “windows” within digital publications, in order to better monitor the readers (I mean “content users”), left the quaint “hard copy” magazines feeble indeed. Perhaps our hero should haveexerted himself for his dog food, pulling harder on a shorter, ever more capricious leash—but he was more washed up than he admitted. His eyesight had worsened, and that new forgetfulness might be getting dangerous, for instead of straightforward admissions of confusion it confidently asserted the erroneous. Well, hadn’t he always been lost? After a week in the Stari Grad, he kept mistaking the way back to the hotel in those narrow streets between Ferhadija and Zelenih Beretki.— Last time, I couldn’t really go out much, he explained to his wife. They were shooting from those hills up there, so I mostly had to stay indoors, or else get into a car and be driven somewhere at high speed. Whenever we left the Holiday Inn we had to—
    No, we turn here, said his wife, holding his hand.
    But isn’t the river that way? No, you’re right as usual! You know, I never got down to the Stari Grad. Or maybe I did once—
    I know, his wife replied. Do you think a
cesma
is a fountain?
    I used to know. Didn’t we just look that up?
    You don’t remember either? I feel ashamed of myself; I just can’t make headway with this language.
    Never mind, sweetheart, and he took her little paperback dictionary, in order to look up
cesma
yet again.
    So that was our journalist, and why he had come his fellow Americans could scarcely imagine, for where lay the lucre for him? To be sure, he sometimes wondered what had become of the people he once met at Vesna’s; and perhaps he was interested in Vesna even now.
    For him it was nearly an adventure. He convinced himself that a new country remained to be explored: the past.
    In that season many of the young Muslim women wore matching lavender dresses and