I Am Radar

1. VIŠEGRAD, BOSNIA

April 17, 1975

On the day they brought home his younger brother from the hospital, Miroslav Danilovic, barely three years old, swallowed the key to the cabinet that held the family’s rifle. The brass key, itself shaped like a small pistol, hung on a hook in the kitchen that was normally out of young Miroslav’s reach, but while they were busy fussing with the newborn, he slid over the chair, unleashed the key from its resting place, and promptly swallowed it whole.

“I ate it!” he announced, triumphant, as Stoja nursed baby Mihajlo at her breast.

“Ate what?” said Danilo.

Miroslav showed his father the chair and the empty hook.

The Ukrainian doctor in Višegrad urged patience and calm. The key would pass.

The doctor made a small circle with his thumb and finger. “If it’s smaller than this, fine. If it’s larger than this, then we’ll have problems,” he said, which did not really make sense to Stoja, given the irregular shape of the key. Depending on which way you looked at it, the key could be many different keys. There was no telling which one he had swallowed.

Thereafter, Miroslav was forced to squat and shit into a paper bag. Stoja would put Mihajlo down, don her gardening gloves, and search Miroslav’s excrement for the offending object.

“You’re a good mother,” Danilo said to her. “Your patience is a curse.”

“I’m a mother,” she said, hushing the baby to sleep. “My patience is all I have left.”

Weeks went by. The key made no appearance. Miroslav’s appetite had decreased since the incident, but he did not seem particularly ill. Nor did he suffer from the kinds of gastrointestinal pains that the doctor had warned them about. After several months, Stoja threw up her hands.

“The key has moved on,” she concluded. And so must she. Still, in spite of her reasonable, almost stoic nature, in spite of her declaration that the episode was now closed, Stoja could not shake the lingering threat of that gun-shaped key — for the rest of her life, she was awoken by the same nightmare, in which a metallic bug would crawl up her son’s throat, choking him while he slept.

Miroslav, a slender boy to begin with, never fully recovered his taste for food. Getting him to eat became a daily negotiation, involving bribery and complex feats of logical reasoning. A bowl of pasulj was traded for an extra half hour of drawing time before bed. In contrast to Miroslav, little Miša — who was not all that little — would eat anything that was put before him, like a goat. This indiscriminateness brought its own problems. Once, when he was four, he ate a whole roast chicken, bones and all. Yet no one was really worried for Miša, even as he cried out in pain on the toilet. Miša was going to survive whatever the world might throw at him. He was born to be a Danilovic, with the same protruding jaw, the same large eyes, the same tuberous forehead as his father. If there was a crowd of boys at school, Danilo could always point to broad-shouldered Miša and say, “There — there is my son.” And nobody in the village could disagree.

Things had always been different with his eldest. Miroslav did not have the Danilovic jaw. His cheeks disappeared into his neck without much enthusiasm. His forehead was long and narrow. While Mihajlo easily became “Miša” to everyone, only Stoja called Miroslav “Miro.” Perhaps the diminutive didn’t stick, due to his air of unsettling politeness — he would formally address the women of the village as “Gospoda,” bowing slightly in the old way, as if greeting them at a ball.

How strange, whispered the people of the village. Did you know that he’s a podmece?

This was the unfortunate term for the victim of a maternity ward swap, of which there had recently been several high-profile cases. There was no concrete evidence that Miroslav had shared their fate, but if such a thing was said often enough, it no longer mattered what was true and what was not.

Yes. I heard that. I heard his real mother was a Hungarian Jew.

Their scrutiny did not go unnoticed by Miroslav. Even before his younger brother came along, he had always sensed the narrow chasm of incongruity, the painful gap between himself and the idea of who he should be; yet, being so young, he lacked the language to articulate such existential displacement. To calm his unease, he had taken to playing with wires and string, sculpting tiny men of varying shapes and sizes and naming them all Miroslav. Danilo would help him suspend these figures from the ceiling of his bedroom, like a constellation of possible selves.

Though he was three years Miroslav’s junior, Mihajlo Danilo Danilovic — known to everyone simply as Miša or sometimes Miš Miš, or even beba džin, “the baby giant”—was already four centimeters taller than his older brother by the time he turned six. Whereas Miša spent all his time outdoors, shadowing their father in the fields, killing sparrows with his slingshot, playing football with boys twice his age, there were many days when Miroslav would not even leave his bedroom.

“Children are meant to move,” said Stoja, wise as always.

“His mind is moving,” Danilo replied, unconvincingly. Indeed, Miroslav was exceptionally bright — this much had been clear from the beginning, and more than one of his teachers had called him the most naturally gifted child they had ever seen — but he was also prone to bouts of melancholy, stubbornness, and obsessive behavior.

Instead of performing his farm chores, he would draw great maps of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) fighting off various invading hordes on the walls of his bedroom. At first, this practice was forbidden, but you could steer a horse away from water only so many times. Tired of rapping his knuckles, Danilo and Stoja eventually relented, and Miroslav began covering his bedroom with endless battlefield minutiae as he listened to old Partisan fight songs on his transistor. Every man, every gun, every trigger needed to be sketched, or else they wouldn’t exist and that side might lose the war because they were one soldier short. But just as soon as one soldier was added, the tides shifted, and another soldier had to be added to the other side. It was a never-ending task. A perpetual fractal of warfare. The hens would go hungry as Miroslav spent hours rendering the thousands of tiny soldiers, each with gun, trigger, backpack — stars on the hats of the JNA, squares on the hats of the invading foreigners.

No manner of beating could sway the child from his task, and there came a point at which Danilo found it was hopeless. He would be what he would be.

“Feed the chickens, would you, Miša?” Danilo sighed. “I don’t know what to do with your brother.” And Miša ran off without complaint, eager as ever to please the man he would one day become.

Soon the walls of Miroslav’s bedroom could no longer contain the war. He began to build armies of soldiers from screws and paper clips and bottle caps and bits of clay — thousands of them lining his desk and then his floor, arranged into elaborate formations, poised to attack and counterattack. Yet somehow, their static nature bothered him much more than the two-dimensional figures on the walls. Now that his men were rendered in three dimensions, he became all the more aware of their lifelessness. Simply moving them with his hands was both unsatisfying and inefficient: he was always conscious of his intervention, and he could move only a handful of men at a time. He stood at an impasse: how to control his men without implicating himself as the control?

His first tactic employed an old electric football game. When switched on, the vibrating metal pitch would cause his army of wary soldiers to tremble as if possessed by an evil spirit. They would chatter across the board, occasionally colliding with one another in a meager display of hand-to-hand combat. More often than not, however, the random shudderings from the electric game would result in the soldiers spinning in circles before collapsing and spasming in place, seemingly felled by their own volition. Miroslav could not stand such incoherence. He needed to be able to control his men, not watch them suffer the random consequences of electrical pulses. He shelved the game and searched for another way to gain complete command over his domain.

A solution came to him after watching a television program about a Volkswagen assembly plant in Sarajevo, in which cars were swung from station to station suspended on tracks. Inside his bedroom, Miroslav hung a series of coat hangers on four long rods that could slide back and forth using a system of pulleys. He then attached a tiny thread to each soldier and tied these threads to the rods above. In this way, he could manipulate the pulleys to draw the two armies into battle, and while he could move the soldiers only one company at a time, and while their battling was still limited to awkward, imprecise collisions, he could use his imagination to soften the clumsiness of his system and fill in the gaps of real warfare. When a tank blasted an artillery shell into the enemy ranks, he would release a string and a whole swath of soldiers would collapse to the ground, bloodied and wailing. Later, he would tug on the strings, and their souls, as one, would gently float to heaven. This was how he started to give life and death to the lifeless things around him. It was also where he came up against the essential dilemma of the puppeteer: that is, the governance of objects that have no minds to be governed.

From the moment Miša entered the world, he had idolized his brother, despite the vast chasm between their proclivities, outlooks, manners, bodies, and minds. In his eyes, his brother could do no wrong. “Miša would drink Miroslav’s bathwater,” as Danilo once put it. But such adoration was hardly mutual. Miroslav showed little patience for his brother’s clumsiness and lack of imagination. When Miša tried to join in one of his elaborate battlefield maneuvers, Miroslav would quickly become furious at how his brother was breaking the strict rules of engagement or letting the strings get tangled or moving too many men or too few. His hands were much too big for such delicate matters, and there was little room for error with a system as delicate as mass warfare.

“Get out of here, shithead!” Miroslav yelled after another entanglement had halted the battle. Miša, banished and inconsolable, would retreat to the safe space of the chicken coop.

A temporary truce was usually called between the brothers each Christmas. On Christmas Eve, it was custom for the eldest son to go with the father into the woods and cut down the badnjak, the oak tree branch that would serve as the Yule log. But Miroslav showed little interest in this tradition, and so it was Miša who eagerly climbed the tree, bow saw in hand, and felled the branch onto the snowy ground. He would wrap the branch in a blanket like a child and show it to his brother upon his return.

“It’s a good one, Miša,” Miroslav would say, knowing how much each and every word meant to his younger brother. “You can name him Otik.”

“Otik?” repeated Miša in wonder.

“If you wish hard enough, he’ll come alive,” said Miroslav.

“Okay,” said Miša, and off he would go to stare at the branch for hours.

Christmas Eve was also the time to bring out the vertep, the traditional puppet theater, which the boys of the town would use to tell the story of the nativity. Children would don paper crowns and fashion wooden swords for themselves, pretending they were the Persian kings on their way to see the Christ child. Predictably, most household vertep performances were rudimentary at best, with a few hand puppets utilized in haphazard fashion. Many kids simply used the occasion as an excuse to go around town and sword-fight with one another.

In contrast to those of his peers, Miroslav’s vertep was a fully automated electromechanical puppet theater with multiple hidden compartments, elaborate lighting and synthesized sound effects, and a loudspeaker from which he could perform the voice of God. His nativity productions soon became legendary in Višegrad, where he would perform several shows to a packed audience in the town square. Miša was his loyal if clumsy stagehand, though this relationship ended one Christmas Eve when Miša tripped and knocked over the entire stage during a matinee.

Afterwards, Danilo found his younger son on the kapija of the Turkish Bridge, tears streaming down his face, staring at those oxen hands.

Danilo sat down beside Miša. He was silent, listening to the quiet hush of the river, and then he said, “Your brother is a Danilovic, but he is not a Danilo Danilovic.”

This might have seemed like an odd thing to say had it not been for the convolutions of their family’s history: Danilo Danilovic’s father had also been named Danilo Danilovic, as had his father, as had his father, as had his father, Rabbi Danilo, who at one time had been one of only two rabbis living in all of Montenegro. This history was the source of much contention in the Danilovic family, particularly for Darinka, Danilo’s now deceased mother, who staunchly denied the presence of Jews anywhere in their lineage.

Rabbi Danilo’s ancestors were Sephardic Jews who had been living in Dubrovnik for more than three hundred years before Austrian annexation in 1814 withdrew the few rights granted by Napoleon to the territory’s Jewish citizenry. A subsequent confrontation with a Habsburg minister led to Rabbi Danilo’s public denouncement, forcing him to flee the city under a cloud of scrutiny. He moved his congregation east, to Perast, on the Bay of Kotor, a calm strip of sea flanked by mountains on all sides, leading some to label it (incorrectly) Europe’s southernmost fjord. In the middle of this bay, there was a small island shaped like a waxing moon. Legend has it that the island was completely man-made, created by superstitious fishermen over many hundreds of years, who had thrown a stone into the water every time they left and returned from their journeys. Those who did not add to the pile did so at their own peril and would die terrible deaths, devoured by sea monsters with poisonous horns, it was said. And so an island took shape, and it was on this island that Rabbi Danilo built a limestone synagogue among the linden trees.

Fig. 2.1. “Karta Oticic´a Abrahama” (1853)

From Mladinov, T. S. (1962), Židovstvo u južnoj Dalmaciji 3: 23

“Only God can reach us here,” Rabbi Danilo famously said after those gathered had consecrated the temple by circumnavigating it seven times and then throwing a stone into the waters just beyond. Thereafter, every Friday evening, they would hire a local fisherman to row the small congregation (only ten of them had followed the rabbi to Montenegro, the very minimum necessary for a minyan) out to the island, now named Oticica Abrahama, to hold Shabbat. Afterwards, they would throw a stone into the bay, and then the fisherman would row them back to town before sunset, two candled lanterns flickering at their helm.

When the Montenegrin state required all of its citizens to take a surname for the 1855 census — to essentially create a history out of nothing — Rabbi Danilo, after some deliberation, assumed the Russian-style patronymic of Danilo Danilovic.

“Because I am my own father now,” he liked to joke to those assembled on the dock of their little island as they sipped lozovaca on Sunday afternoons.

The rabbi, to no one’s surprise, named his own son Danilo Danilovic. And so a tradition was born: Danilo Danilovic (the second), a clockmaker, also named his son Danilo Danilovic. Danilo Danilovic (the third) was a stiff-headed bastard who fought for the First Serbian Army in the Toplica Uprising of 1917. Following the war, he discarded his grandfather’s Jewish faith as if it were an ill-fitting jacket, moved to Višegrad, and embraced Christian Orthodoxy. But he did fulfill his duty in one respect: he named his only son Danilo Danilovic. Danilo Danilovic (the fourth) had slimmer shoulders than his father and spoke in soft tones, like a man delivering bad news. He married a beauty named Darinka, a devoutly religious woman who would not let Danilo touch her during their long forest walks before they were properly wedded. When Germany invaded Yugoslavia and another war began, Danilo joined the nascent anti-fascist Partisan movement recently formed near Mount Ozren. Darinka became pregnant during one of his visits home, and he instructed her, by letter, on what she must name their child in the event that he did not return from the war.

“And what if it is a girl?” she wrote in reply, though her husband would never receive the letter, for he was killed by a sniper in Operation Rösselsprung, in May of 1944.

Danilo Danilovic (the fifth), born in September during the middle of an Allied air raid, would suffer from a fear of loud noises for the rest of his life but would also be blessed with the knowledge that all things must end. Darinka raised her son by herself; she taught him, above all else, to be thankful for God’s mercy. Her religion had been hardened by her husband’s death, and so in the years after the war, when the church was all but banned by the Communist Party, she nurtured her son’s faith behind closed doors.

“Tito is confused,” she would say to him. “He’ll come to find God soon enough. God is the one thing that cannot be forgotten.” As living proof of this, she proudly wore her husband’s red handkerchief every day. Others assumed that this was to signal her membership in the party, but Darinka knew better — through the presence of a small, nearly invisible cross that she had stitched into one of its corners, the handkerchief represented for her God’s almighty omnipotence, even in the depths of a misguided ideology.

Fig. 2.2. Miroslav of Hum’s Gospels (1168)

From Beardsman, T. (1956), A History of Illumination, p. 144

Once, on a trip to Belgrade, Darinka took Danilo to see an old illuminated manuscript inside a large museum. It was a book of the Gospels created for Miroslav of Hum, a twelfth-century prince from Herzegovina. At first reluctant and bored by the echoing halls of the museum, Danilo was startled by the book’s beauty beneath its glass case — he stared at the images of saints grouped in curious orbit around the thick Gothic strokes of the text. The museum guard, perhaps drawn in by Darinka’s beauty, offered to unlatch the case and turn the pages of the ancient book. So captured was he by the shimmering images that bent and swayed across the paper, Danilo did not notice the guard leering at his mother as he showed them each page, nor did he notice the man’s hand creeping up her thigh or how she let the hand linger for just a moment before discreetly brushing it away. Danilo was too transfixed by the miracle before him: Hum’s manuscript made him realize for the first time that if such beauty could exist in the world, then God must exist as well.

They moved to a two-story farmhouse in the hills above Višegrad. Even without a father to guide him, Danilo Danilovic sensed the way the earth breathed. He implicitly understood the angle of the sun, how a season always began during the season before, how water did not always run downhill. Holding his mother’s hand, he would kneel at the threshold of his bedroom and pray every morning and every night. Before the sun rose on Sundays, they would walk the four kilometers through the pines to attend the small, secret services at the village church, those assembled whispering their prayers to the dusty icons above, which were normally closed and shuttered to keep the party administrators at bay.

During the summer of 1972, Danilo attended an unsanctioned screening of Dušan Makavejev’s W.R. - Misterije organizma (W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism) at the Dom Kulture in Višegrad. He was not even supposed to be there, but someone had told him that they were showing a movie banned by Tito himself and that this movie would most likely change his life. Afterwards, he stood bewildered in a corner, trembling, awash in the utter innocence of his upbringing. He did not understand all of what he had just seen, but what he did understand made him fearful, and what he did not understand filled him with a great loneliness, as if the world had suddenly left him behind. It was then that a beautiful woman approached him. She was smoking a long, thin cigarette and wearing a JNA army cap. For a moment he was afraid that this was the woman from the movie who had been decapitated, that she had found some way to reattach her head and walk out of the screen and into the Dom Kulture.

“You look as if you’ve just seen a ghost,” she said to him.

Her name was Stojanka Stevovic. She was from Trebinje. Her mother was a Catholic Croat, her father was a Communist Serb, and she spoke like a Montenegrin, but she called herself a Yugoslav. Danilo was smitten by the strength of her eyes. Every time she opened her mouth, a little vacuum of space opened up inside his chest.

“Don’t go with her,” his mother warned when it was clear he was going with her.

“Why?”

“She’s not a believer.”

“That’s not a good reason.”

“That’s the only reason. If you go with her, I will never speak to you again.”

He called his mother’s bluff and went with her. He had no choice. She had seen him see the ghost. And she went with him, despite her ideological resistance to becoming a farmer’s wife. Stoja had always maintained a vague dream of moving to Belgrade and becoming a movie star, smoking her long, thin cigarettes in the Danube clubs as men hung on her every word. She would later say she never made it to the city because she was scared, because she did not trust herself enough to be on-screen, but this was not true, for she trusted herself completely.

Danilo asked for her hand in marriage on the banks of the Drina. It was early evening — the time of day when light moved slowly, laterally, striking the earth with such acuity of angle that everything was forced to step back and glow in wonder. They had just been for a swim, and they lay on the rocks soaking up the last of the day’s heat, watching the bugs spiral across the surface of the water, their paths now and again igniting into silver pinpricks of luminescence. Nervous at the absence of words in his head, Danilo wiped some moisture from his lip and tried to say what he meant to say in the right way, but in doing so said it all wrong, which turned out to be the right way after all. Technically, she did not give an answer, but it was clear from her smile and the heat of her silence that she would be bound to him until her last breath.

There was just one problem with their union: when the priest at the local Orthodox church heard of Stoja’s questionable lineage, he refused to marry them. Danilo suspected Darinka’s influence in the matter, so to spite her, he married Stoja in a civil service, where the Lord’s name was mentioned only once, and then only because there was a clerical error in the document read by the flighty municipal clerk.

After a period of time just long enough to make them both nervous that such a thing might never be possible, Stoja became pregnant. When a baby boy emerged into the world — small, thin-boned, but otherwise healthy — Danilo Danilovic made a decision that startled even himself: the child would not be named Danilo. They would call him Miroslav, though Danilo insisted that this was not after Miroslav of Hum, creator of the illuminated book that had so transfixed him as a child, nor even — as everyone would later assume — for Miroslav Stevovic, Stoja’s father. The child was simply named Miroslav, for himself.

“Are you sure?” offered Stoja. “We don’t have to. I don’t even mind the name Danilo. I married you, after all.”

“Every tradition is meant to be broken,” said Danilo, though he was not sure — nor would he ever be sure — if such a thing was true.

Darinka, on the other hand, was so upset that she refused to attend the baptism and did not lay eyes on her grandchild for the first six months of his life.

When their second child came along, she again intervened.

“There’s still a chance for you to honor your father,” she said.

Danilo thought about this long and hard. He came back to his mother with an offering.

“His name will be Mihajlo Danilo. Danilo will be his second name.”

“What is a second name?” Darinka asked, furious. “And who is Mihajlo?”

“Mihajlo is my son.” Mihajlo, the name of no one, and this was exactly the point.

“You’re a wicked man, Danilo Danilovic. I didn’t know this about you until now. You spit on your father’s memory. On your grandfather’s memory. On all of their memories.”

“I hope you’ll find room to love them, Mama.”

She would not find room to love them, at least not in this life, for she died a week later from a massive heart attack that killed her while she was sitting on the toilet, her skirt at her ankles, the red bandanna with its secret cross still hanging from her throat. The thread of time had been cut.

2

On Miroslav’s fourteenth birthday, Miša gave his older brother a pair of trainers. For weeks, Miša had been bubbling with the excitement of giving this most perfect of gifts.

“He can run everywhere in them,” he said.

Danilo remained skeptical. He thought such a gift would be wasted on his eldest, with his staid body and his wandering mind, but in the end, he gave Miša the money and sent him to procure the shoes from the sparsely stocked sporting goods store in town. Miša came back proudly toting his prize, elaborately hiding and re-hiding the box beneath his bed so that his brother would not discover it prematurely.

When Miroslav tore through Miša’s ungainly wrapping job that evening, his eyes lit up as he touched the new trainers, gingerly, carefully, as one would touch a newborn animal. The trainers were a pale shade of blue, the color of shallow water in the early morning. Miša’s pronouncement proved more true than he could have ever known, for Miroslav had been stuck on a project for several months now: how to perfectly replicate the movement of a man in motion. He had been studying Eadweard Muybridge’s famous sequences, frame by frame, trying to build a mechanical automaton that could jog a dozen paces without intervention from its creator.

The problem was proving terrifically difficult. Apparently a team had achieved the feat in Tokyo, but then, this team was Japanese, with all the resources afforded the Japanese, and Miroslav was convinced they had cheated anyhow. He was hung up on just three engineering challenges: the balance of the torso, the airborne transition from one foot to the other, and the limited flexibility of the knee joint. As it turned out, these three problematic areas were also the essential components of the humanoid stride. Without them, you merely had a body that tumbled earthward again and again and again.

Fig. 2.3. Eadweard Muybridge, “Animal Locomotion. Plate 63” (1887)

From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 960

Yet Miša’s gift awakened something within him. The trainers made him realize the solution had been right in front of him all this time: he would become the automaton. He did not need to build a running man when he himself could be that man. All he needed to do was separate the him part of himself from his body and he would essentially have the perfect robot, one that could mimic nearly all human movement. He would be his own puppet.

Except that excising the him from himself — leaving only a body in motion — proved more difficult than designing any automaton. His lanky frame and obsession for repetition made him perfectly suited for cross-country running, but as he covered ever longer distances, he could never quite outrun himself. He went wherever his body went.

I am not the runner, he would repeat over and over again in his head. But he did not believe it. And so he ran farther and still farther, propelling himself forward with an existential urgency that defied both space and time.

At first, Miša tried to run with his brother, but after only a week he found that even he, athletic as he was, could not keep up. Miroslav could run forever. He would run for whole days through the countryside, over mountains, across the frontier and into Serbia, even, drifting through alpine meadows and interrupting the deer and the bears in their slumber. Strangely, his incredible journeys did not increase his appetite. He would run fifty, sixty, seventy kilometers and then eat like a bird. It was remarkable. Energy was not being conserved. Or at least he was drawing upon some unseen source for his perpetual momentum. And still he could not run from himself.

After a while, Danilo and Stoja began to worry. All he did was run. He had no interest in taking part in races for his school; he simply wanted to run alone. His teachers had begun to notice. He no longer turned in work. He slept through class. He talked back. When forced to sit still for any length of time, he constantly tapped his foot in a heel-toe stutter step, as if signaling some kind of code. It didn’t matter how bright he was — at this rate he would not make it through his studies.

“I have this feeling,” said Stoja, “that one day he might start running and never come back.”

What she was noticing without being able to say as much was that with each kilometer covered, Miroslav was running further and further away from the polite little child who had bowed to the women and greeted the postman’s arrival every afternoon. With the end of his youth also came an apparent end of his interest in the well-being of others. He was, for lack of a better term, becoming mean.

Secretly, Stoja blamed herself. She had given up everything for her children, given up a life that may or may not have come to pass, and she had grown into and accepted this choice until the choice had become no choice at all. But watching her son slip away like this shook her to her core. Stoja, who had never been a true believer, who had grown up a modern secular woman, began stealing out to pray at St. Stephen’s alone. She would light a candle at the manoualia and stare into the burning wick. By both being and not being there at the same time, the flame’s flicker consoled her.

“We must do something,” she said finally to her husband one day. “He’s my Miro.”

“All right,” said Danilo. “I’ll handle it.”

After one of Miroslav’s long runs, Danilo met his son at the top of their road.

“Come,” he said. “We’re going to a place.”

“To what place?” Miroslav asked, breathless. “I need to stretch.”

“Come,” said Danilo.

“Where’s Miša?”

“He’s working.”

“Can’t you take him to this place?”

“No.”

They took a local grunt bus that hugged the long curve of the river northward and then disembarked at the beginning of an old dirt road, which they started following up into the hills. A thick forest surrounded them. To their left, a small creek bubbled, its waters green with algae.

“Where are we going, Tata?” asked Miroslav. Walking was making him more tired than running.

“Your mother’s worried about you.”

“She’s always worried.”

“She doesn’t want you to run so much.”

“I like running.”

“She worries about you. She cannot help herself.”

“I know. But that isn’t my fault,” said Miroslav. “Where are we going, Tata?”

“To the source,” said Danilo.

Finally, after about half an hour, they came upon a small, ancient domed building. Moss and a wash of mineral deposits spilled down its weathered sides. Steam rose gently from a broken window.

Danilo gestured at the building. “This is a hammam. Built by the Turks who lived here five hundred years ago. They understood the heat of the waters. It will calm your muscles.”

“My muscles feel calm.”

“It will calm your soul.”

“And what if I am soulless?”

Danilo looked at his son. “We’re going inside.”

“What’s up there?” Miroslav pointed above them, where they could see a large, modern building peeping through the trees.

“Ah! Don’t look at that. That’s a resort. They built an ugly hotel so the tourists could soak in the hot springs and then eat some sirnica in the cafeteria. But this isn’t how it’s meant to be done. They’re stupid. They’re only interested in making money. We’re going to the real place.”

They pushed open the rotting door and shed their clothes and then slid into the ancient, recessed pool. A small stone chute poured water in from the underground hot springs. They soaked. The steam rose around them like silent music, swirling against the arched ceiling above their heads. They breathed, letting the wet silence shift and settle into the pores of their skin.

“Where did you run today?” Danilo finally asked.

“Down to Rudo.” Only Miroslav’s face floated above the surface, as if the rest of him no longer existed. His voice echoed off the ceiling.

“Rudo?” Danilo raised his eyebrows. “That’s a long way.”

“Not so long.”

“Why do you run so much?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It makes me feel good.”

They were quiet, and then Danilo said, “When the Turks still ruled this area, that place was called Sokol.”

Miroslav made a slight groan that curled and ended in a gurgle of water. His father liked telling stories about old things, things that happened so long ago they did not matter anymore. How often had he heard the story about the first Danilo Danilovic, who had defeated the Turks and built a church on an island? One hundred times? Two hundred times? It was enough to drive a man insane.

“Did you know that once upon a time there were two brothers who lived in Sokol?” said Danilo.

“Tata!” said Miroslav. “Please. I really don’t want to hear about them. Let’s just enjoy ourselves.”

“I am enjoying myself,” said Danilo. “The brothers’ names were Makarije and Bajo.”

“Please, Tata. No one cares about them. They’re dead. They died a long time ago. Let’s talk about something real.”

“What is real? Soon we’ll all be dead. Don’t you want to be remembered?”

“I’m sure they’ll say the same thing about us—‘Why are you telling me this stupid story about Miroslav Danilovic? What does this have to do with me?’”

“Just listen to the story. Don’t be so critical all the time. It isn’t good for you.”

Miroslav ducked his head into the water and spat a thin stream across the pool. “Okay, go ahead, Tata. I’m listening. Tell me about Makarije and Milo.”

“Bajo. Makarije and Bajo,” said Danilo. “They came from a poor family. A family with nothing. And so their father, who was a true believer in the mercy of God, sent them away to study at the Mileševa Monastery. This monastery was famous — it was a great honor for them to be admitted there, and the father was rightfully proud. Maybe one day his sons would become priests.”

“That is usually why you go to live in a monastery.”

“Usually. But these were not usual times. While they were there, the Turks came on one of their devsirmeler. You know what a devsirme is?”

“Yes, Tata, I know.”

“You and Miša are lucky they don’t have these anymore. Imagine — just when you were getting comfortable at school, in come the Turks on a devsirme and they snatch you boys up like a pack of animals. They do this to all the Christian boys they can find — they throw them into the back of a prison cart and drag them across the country. And behind the cart, a long line of weeping mothers begins to form. The women beg for the return of their sons. They offer anything — money, their homes, even their own bodies. And the Turkish guards keep them back with whips. Whips! Can you believe it? The women are bleeding from the whips, but still they follow. And when the cart is full, they return to Istanbul and they force the boys into Islam. They force them to become Islamic priests or warriors. Imagine this! How would you like to be kidnapped and forced to believe in something you don’t believe?”

“It doesn’t sound so bad. It’s a free ticket out of here. And I hear Istanbul was pretty nice back then.”

Danilo flicked some water at his son. “Ah! You have no idea. You’re too spoiled to even understand what it’d be like. A belief in God is the closest thing to your heart. No one can tell you what to believe. That is the one truth in life. But the devsirme was how the Turks kept these lands under their control. They were very smart. They kept us in fear by taking our boys, the same boys who might grow up to cause them trouble. Fear is the most powerful weapon, more powerful than any weapon you can hold in your hands.”

He paused. They listened to the water churtling down the chute into the pool.

“So here come the Turks, into the Mileševa Monastery, and they tell the two boys: ‘You must come with us.’ And you know what Bajo, the eldest, says? He says, ‘I’ll go. Take only me. Leave my brother.’”

“No way I’d do that. I’d be like, ‘Take him — look how big that guy is. Leave me; I’d be a shitty warrior.’”

“Watch your language.”

“That’s what I would say.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You’d do the same thing as Bajo.”

“How do you know?”

“Miroslav, just let me tell the story. This story has a certain rhythm to it and you’re ruining it.”

“I’m just saying that you don’t know what I’d do.”

“So the Turks, they actually listen to Bajo. They take him away to Istanbul and leave Makarije behind. And on their journey back, they of course must pass through Višegrad. But this was before the bridge was built. They have to ferry across the Drina. And the mothers who are following them, they cannot go any farther. They’re left weeping on the shore, watching their sons disappear across the river, disappear forever into Islam. And Bajo remembers this image of his mother weeping with the others.”

“The mothers could swim.”

“That isn’t the point. The Drina’s too dangerous to swim there. The current’s too strong.”

“Not so dangerous for a mother who’s crazy with grief.”

“The mothers don’t swim, okay? They’re stuck on the shore. Let me tell the story. You can tell the next story, but I’m telling this one now, and the teller gets to make the rules. That’s how it works.” Danilo paused, scratching at his shoulder as if trying to remember what happens next. “So Bajo arrives in Istanbul and begins to study the Ottoman system. At first he is confused, hopeless. He contemplates stealing a guard’s knife and plunging it into his own heart. But one night he’s visited by his mother in a dream, and she says that he must survive so that she can one day see him again. And when he wakes from this dream, he makes a decision: not only will he cooperate with his captors — he will defeat them at their own system. And this is what he does. Little by little, Bajo learns their ways. He discovers he has a natural gift for learning their Turkish methods of law. In fact, he’s so good that they quickly recognize his talents and they begin to promote him through the ranks. He gains influence with the inner court and develops a reputation for fairness in all matters. As the years go by, he continues to rise, leaving his rivals in the dust. Soon he becomes a governor and then eventually a third vizier and then a second vizier and then finally, after many years, he becomes the grand vizier. He’s now the chief adviser to the sultan himself, but everyone knows the grand vizier makes everything happen. And by this time he has a new name: Mehmed-paša Sokolovic. Once a poor boy from Sokol, an Orthodox Serb, and now responsible for the whole Ottoman Empire. Rich and powerful, able to affect the course of time itself!”

“So what?” said Miroslav.

“So what? Are you listening to anything I’ve just said? He decided to become someone who no one thought he could be. This, my son, is incredible.”

“Not so incredible for the other brother.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was left in the monastery. He didn’t become the grand vizier. His brother was trying to help him, but he ended up screwing him over.”

“Ah! Well, this is where the story gets interesting. Many considered Makarije to maybe not be so wise as his brother Bajo. He was even thought by some to be a little dim-witted. Maybe he was a bit overweight. But he did not do so bad for himself, either. He stayed in the monastery and studied very hard, and slowly he rose up through the levels of the church, one by one. Nothing was given to him by favor, nothing came easily. He earned everything through his patience, through his loyalty, through his utter devotion to God. And at the end of his life, he was ordained as the Serbian patriarch. Saint Makarije of Pec. This is the same Makarije, the same poor boy from Sokol, brother of Bajo. We celebrate his feast on the twelfth of September. Remember, when we roasted Dragan’s pig? And Miša caught the rabbits?”

“Miša crushed the rabbits. We couldn’t eat them.”

“Two brothers in the same family, and each grows up to be the head of a different religion. It just goes to show you that nothing is decided when you’re born. Everything is still possible. If you decide to change your life, you can.”

“Or maybe everything is decided already. How do you know that they weren’t always going to end up like that?”

Danilo thought about this. “That could be. Who’s to say how God works his plans?”

“Is that a true story?”

“Of course it’s true. Why would I make something like that up?”

“It sounds like bullshit.”

“I told you to watch your mouth.”

“Sorry, but it does.”

“You think I’m lying to you? Then what about the bridge? You think the bridge is a lie?”

“What bridge?”

“The Turkish Bridge! This is Mehmed-paša Sokolovic’s bridge! He never forgot the dream of his mother saying she must see him again, nor did he forget the image of the women wailing on the banks of the river as he was being taken away. This image haunted him for the rest of his days, and so when he became grand vizier, he ordered a bridge to connect the two sides of the Drina. The sad part of the story is that when he came back to see his bridge completed, his mother was already dead. It was too late. He, too, wept on the banks of the river, and dedicated the bridge to her memory. And it was the story of this bridge that won Ivo Andric his Nobel Prize. Stories are powerful things. But you knew this. You read his book in school.”

Miroslav shook his head. “I pretended to read it. It was too boring to read. All I remember is about that black Arab who lived inside the bridge.”

“What? You didn’t read it? But that book’s our history! Andric is our most famous writer! How could you not read it?”

“How do we know Andric wasn’t also full of bullshit?”

“Miroslav! I won’t say it again.”

“I’m just saying. That was a novel. Everyone acts like this was true, but no one knows what was really true.”

“How can you say this? You can see our history with your very own eyes. You can walk to the kapija of the bridge and read the inscription in Turkish from the sixteenth century. You can look out at the river and see. A river cannot forget. It remembers every person who has ever put their foot in it. It’s like a book of all time.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is true,” said Danilo. “And this hammam — the one we’re in right now — this was also built by Mehmed-paša. We’re sitting in history. We’re sitting in the middle of the story. You can feel the water on your skin. So don’t tell me this isn’t true when it clearly is.”

They sat. The waters steamed.

“It’s a good story, Tata,” said Miroslav finally.

“I’m not telling you any more stories,” said Danilo. “You can find your own stories.”

Miroslav closed his eyes and thought of the Turkish Bridge, where he had learned to fish with wire and string. He wondered if a river could actually have a memory, then he held his breath and submerged himself in the scalding waters. For the first time in his life, he felt mind and body separating. He had found the secret. He floated above himself, among the clouds of steam, watching his body sink down and down, further and further, three thousand meters into the center of the earth, into a small, hot place from which all things would eventually arise again.

• • •

AFTER THE VISIT to the hammam, Miroslav stopped running completely. He hung up his pale blue trainers and did not touch them again. He no longer needed them.

“What did you say to him?” asked Stoja.

“Nothing, nothing,” said Danilo. “Children just change, that’s all.”

“He needs to be with people his own age. He needs a girlfriend.”

“Give him time. Boys will be boys.”

But Miroslav did not find a girlfriend, nor anyone, for that matter. He became obsessed with building his robots. Soon the house was overrun with little four-wheeled electrical creations. The robots would wheel and bump into walls and fall down the stairs, and sometimes they would make strange noises in the night. He worked three jobs in town just so he would have enough money for his obscure electrical parts, which he ordered from Germany and sometimes Japan, because the Japanese loved robots more than anyone else in the world. He would collect these boxes, with their strange lettering, at the post office in Višegrad, and the postmaster would make the same joke every time about him being an undercover terrorist.

One day, after nearly breaking his neck tripping down the stairs, Danilo stormed into Miroslav’s room, the offending robot in hand. “Miroslav! What’s all of this nonsense?”

“They’re for my show,” said Miroslav.

“Things can’t go on like this!” said Danilo. Then: “What show?”

“You’ll see.”

His “show” turned out to be a dark, post-apocalyptic production of The Nutcracker in the Dom Kulture that utilized six ambimobile rat robots and twenty-four ballerina puppets manipulated by a modified Jacquard loom. He performed the entire show by himself, his legs pumping the clattering loom backstage as he manically worked a board of remote controls. It was a veritable feat of athletic engineering, and he broke a pinkie on opening night. In spite of the injury and in spite of the Rat King badly malfunctioning and falling off the proscenium into an old woman’s lap, the play awed the small audience, for it offered that rare glimpse into a world blessed with only the echoes of humans. After a glowing, if befuddled, write-up in the local newspaper, the story of Miroslav and his performing robots was picked up by the national news station RTV Sarajevo, which referred to him as “Robot Djecak” and “Genij Višegrada.”2

These nicknames would be lovingly recounted and modified at the Danilovic dinner table. Even if they did not entirely understand it, Stoja and Danilo could not help but have a certain pride in their son’s accomplishment. Maybe he had found his path, however unorthodox. Girls, friends, happiness would all soon follow.

Due to popular demand, Nutcracker Automata came back and ran for a week of sold-out shows. It was the kind of production that would still be recalled by audience members many years later. At the final curtain call, Miša was the one to hand his brother a bouquet of roses, and Miroslav responded by having one of the ballerina puppets walk up and stroke his leg.

It was a leg worth stroking. Miša had become a bruising center-back for the junior Drina HE football team. The beba džin was feared on football pitches throughout the land. Miša was almost twice as big as anyone on the field yet nimble enough to keep up with the skimpy strikers who tried to negotiate his turf, but more often than not would end up sniffling on the ground.

He was a great fan of Drina HE’s senior side, Višegrad’s decidedly mediocre semi-professional club. Most of his friends followed the more glamorous Red Star Belgrade, but he steadfastly supported the local team, even if they had finished middle of the table for the past four years. His favorite striker was Vladimir Stojanovic, an absurdly talented button of a man who would play well only if he was allowed three and a half cigarettes at halftime — no more, no less. During the war, he would go on to have a successful career for Cosenza, in Italy’s Serie B, but for the time being he was happy to wow the home crowd with his God-gifted skill and his occasional histrionics. Stojanovic always went to his left foot — all the defenders knew this, and still they could not defend him.

“Always to the left!” Miša would shout as he shot penalties at Danilo, standing in the cockeyed goal that Miša had sloppily painted across the barn. And this meant: I cannot be stopped no matter what you do. Miša was not naturally left-footed, but in honor of his hero he trained himself to use only his weaker foot. Eventually his weaker foot became his stronger foot.

For his brother’s thirteenth birthday, Miroslav made Miša a mechanical piggy bank in which a football striker shot coins past an inert keeper, the coins always landing in the left side of the goal as the keeper looked on helplessly. Miša shot every coin he could find into the goal, and when the bank was full, he emptied it and shot them all again.

• • •

DURING THE first warm day in April, Miša and Miroslav went swimming in the Drina. Miroslav did not want to go — he was in the middle of working on his next production, a bold, self-penned sequel to Swan Lake, but Miša persisted, flicking at the patch of skin above Miroslav’s knee until he finally relented. They would swim and then go eat burek at the bakery above the bridge. They jogged down their road into the valley, through the farmland, feeling the earth slowly breathing beneath them, now that winter had finally come and gone. It was the first time Miroslav had run in some time, and though he was desperately out of shape, the movement made him miss his long runs, and he vowed to pick up the habit once again. They ran through town and then took the path north, by the shoreline to a bend in the river where the water was deep and still as it eddied back into itself.

Miša quickly shed his clothes and dived into the water. When he came up again, he was almost halfway across the river. For not the first time, Miroslav stopped to admire the physical specimen that was his brother. A sense of pride tinged with jealousy that quickly parted into love.

He took off his clothes and dived in, and the water was so cold from the snowmelt that he felt his heart stop beating for a second. He hung there weightless, half dead. And then he pumped his arms and swam down and down until his cheek touched the river bottom. A thick clump of mud pushed between his lips and into his mouth. An ancient bit of earth, wet from the weight of the water above it. Miroslav held on to the mud, rolling his tongue through it, feeling the muck and the grit separate out against his teeth. Beneath the water, with a mouthful of earth, Miroslav felt strongly that he was of a place, of this place. This sense of belonging made him shiver.

He was in the middle of surfacing when suddenly he felt a hand grabbing on to his leg, dragging him back down. He panicked, kicking out wildly with his other leg at whatever had taken hold of him, but the hand would not let go. What was this? Was the earth reclaiming him for one of its own? Miroslav felt the last bit of air in his lungs draining away. He stopped fighting. He became certain he would die, that he would return to the bottom of the river and lie there forever.

The hand released him. Miroslav pushed upward, breaking the surface and gasping for air, the mud pouring down from his lips. Miša came up next to him, laughing.

“You’re such a fucker, Miša,” said Miroslav, panting, punching out at his brother.

“It wasn’t me — it was the river troll.”

“You could’ve killed me.”

“Lighten up, burazeru.”

Next to where they had dived into the water, a man appeared on the shore. They floated on their backs, and Miroslav felt the anger draining from him. It was difficult to be angry when floating on your back.

He looked back at the man on the shore.

“Miša,” he said to his brother. Miroslav started to swim over to where they had left their things, and suddenly he realized that the man was going through their clothes. Even from that distance he could see the man’s eyes: wild, like a horse’s eyes. The man had to be a gypsy. The gypsy had Miroslav’s wallet in his hands; he was opening the wallet and taking out his money.

“Hey!” yelled Miroslav. “Hey, stop!”

He was swimming back to shore when he felt a wave against his side and saw his brother shoot past him. Miša sprinted out of the water toward the gypsy, who looked up, startled at the sight of a giant running at him. And then Miroslav saw that the gypsy had a knife. He tried to warn his brother, but Miša didn’t hear him; he ran right at the gypsy and tackled him. They both fell, but Miroslav could see in the way his brother’s body recoiled in midair, like a snake’s, that he had been hit with the knife.

“Miša!” he screamed. He ran up the beach and saw the blood, saw his brother sitting on the ground in shock, one hand cupped to his chest. The gypsy turned to Miroslav. One of the gypsy’s eyes was no good — it was the color of milk and pointed off crookedly to the side.

“Jebi se!” yelled the gypsy and wildly whipped the blade at him. Miroslav jumped out of the way, his hands paddling the air to protect himself. His body was suddenly filled with a great electricity, the pads of his fingers throbbing with current. He saw something moving to his left, and then Miša was charging at the gypsy.

“Get away from him!” roared Miša, swinging at the man with one of his hands. The punch missed badly, and then the gypsy was hugging Miša, and Miroslav saw him stabbing his brother in the side of the rib cage, just under his left arm.

Miroslav was overcome by a wash of intense and very clear anger toward this man who was trying to do his brother harm. For the second time in his life, he felt mind and body part ways. He watched as his hands reached down and grabbed the dead limb of a willow tree, grasping the gnarled piece of wood as if he had always known it would be there. He watched himself as he swung the branch with all of his might. He watched as the gypsy, sensing movement out of the corner of his eye, turned back to Miroslav just as the limb came at his head. He watched the look of surprise on the man’s face, and then there was a grotesque sound of crunching bone, followed by a soft, inward squish, like a cantaloupe popping, and the man crumpled to the ground and did not move again. It felt as if he should react and writhe and scream from such a blow, but he did not. He was perfectly still. The right side of his face had folded into itself, the blood pouring out of a deep cut just beneath his eye.

Miroslav watched himself standing there, heaving, and then he was himself again. He went to his brother, who was lying naked on the beach. Blood was coming down from the wounds on his chest, across his belly and onto his thighs.

“Are you okay?” he asked, putting a hand on his brother’s shoulder.

Miša swore. “Do I fucking look okay to you?”

“Not really.”

Miša pulled himself into a sitting position, wincing heavily with the pain. He looked at the gypsy, lying still at their feet. “What about him?”

“Fuck him; we need to get you to a hospital.”

“But he’s. .?” Miša did not have a word.

Miroslav went over to the gypsy. He hovered a hand above his head, as if this would reveal some sign of life. He realized that such a gesture was silly. Before, there had been a living person. Now, it was obvious there was nothing.

“He’s dead,” said Miroslav.

“Dead?” said Miša. He winced again. “Like dead dead?”

“What other kind of dead is there?”

“What do we do? Oh shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.”

“Miša! It’s not our fault. He came at us. You saw it. He had a knife. Look what he did to you!”

“I don’t want to go to jail,” Miša moaned.

“Miša, calm down. No one’s going to jail.”

Miroslav looked at the dead man lying on the riverbank. He reached down and searched the gypsy’s pockets. He found the money that the man had taken from them, and much more. He thought about it and then took it all. Then he grasped the gypsy’s dirty hands and dragged him into the river. The body was surprisingly heavy. When they were deep enough, the water eased the body away, and a slow current began to carry it downstream. The gypsy floated, the river turning him slowly in circles, just the tips of his shoulder blades poking out of the water. They watched until the body disappeared around the bend.

Miroslav came back to his brother. “We don’t say anything to anyone about this.”

“Ya,” said Miša. “Okay.”

“Never. I’m serious. It stays here. Nobody can know.”

“Ya. Okay. Nobody.”

“You swear?”

Miša reached down and wiped the blood off his chest. He offered his hand. “I swear.”

They shook.

“Can you stand?” asked Miroslav.

“I think so.” Miša got up, wobbling. His face was pale, his eyes loose in their sockets. They dressed carefully. Miroslav tied his shirt around his brother’s chest and helped maneuver him back to the road, where a truck from Žepa picked them up and drove them to the small medical clinic in Višegrad.

They told the doctors that Miša had been speared by a bull.

“A bull didn’t do this,” said the doctor. “Do you think I’m stupid? Are you trying to say I’m stupid?”

Lying on the examining table, Miša looked terrified.

“Do you want us to show you the bull? We can go show you the bull,” said Miroslav. “I’m telling you, he was a crazy bull. Someone should really watch out for that animal, because this will happen again.”

The doctor looked at him.

“Are you the one who did The Nutcracker? With the puppets?”

“Yes,” said Miroslav. “And robots. Puppets and robots.”

“Did you see it?” said Miša from the table. “It was—ah!” He tried to sit up but collapsed back down again.

“You must have a real imagination,” said the doctor.

“Not really. It’s mostly fixing things. Like you do.”

“Okay,” the doctor said and smiled. “Fixing things. Well. So do you remember if this bull’s horns were rusty by chance?”

Miroslav said he didn’t remember. Maybe. They could’ve been rusty. He couldn’t say one way or another. The doctor sighed and ordered that Miša get a tetanus shot anyway, just to be safe.

After stitching up Miša, he gave him a bottle of unmarked pills and told him to take three every four hours for the pain. As they were leaving, the doctor shook hands with Miroslav.

“I hope that bull got some attention, too.”

Miroslav realized his hand was still covered in blood.

“The bull’s fine. Don’t worry about the bull,” said Miroslav.

• • •

WHEN THEY GOT HOME that evening, Stoja, despite herself, began to weep at the sight of her youngest son wounded.

“A bull?” she said. “What foolishness! You could’ve been killed, Miša. And Miro, you let your brother get into this?”

“He saved me,” said Miša. “It was coming back to get me and he scared it away.”

“You’ve got to be more careful, Miša,” she said, slapping her thigh. “I swear to God, if something had happened. .”

“Yes, Mama,” he said, and kissed her cheek. “I’m sorry, Mama.”

Danilo pulled Miroslav aside. “Who was it?”

“What do you mean?”

“You and I both know there was no bull.”

“Tata—”

“I will say this only once, Miroslav. You have only one brother in this world. You have only one family. God gave you only one life. Take care of this. Take care. Someday it’ll all be gone, and if you wait until that day to know what you’ve lost. . by then it’ll already be too late.”

That night, Miroslav sat by his brother’s bedside. Miša had taken six of the doctor’s pills and a shot of šljivovica, and now his head was lolling against his pillow. He reached out and tried to hold his brother’s hand.

“Thank you, Miro,” he slurred. “You really saved me. I owe you so much.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” said Miroslav. “You’d do the same.”

“Will you make a show about this one day?”

“About what?”

Silence.

“Oh, okay. I get it. About nothing.”

Miroslav patted the soft maw of his brother’s palm. “Get some rest.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too, burazeru.”

Fig. 2.4. “Miroslav’s Robotic Swan v2.1”

From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 962

3

1. THE TOTAL AMOUNT OF ENERGY IN A CLOSED SYSTEM REMAINS CONSTANT OVER TIME.

Miroslav’s Swan Lake: Von Rothbart’s Revenge, while praised by the professional theater critic who had driven in from Sarajevo, was not well attended, and the preponderance of empty seats during the final performance of the three-night run sent Miroslav into a post — curtain-call rage. Before anyone could talk him out of it, he took a hammer to all of his actor-puppets, including the two giant black-and-white swan robots with their triple-reticulated, reverse-subluxated necks. This would not be the last time he destroyed his work after a show.

Two weeks later, Miroslav graduated top of his class at the secondary school in Višegrad, though this came as no great surprise to anyone. Nor was there much celebration among his peers for this achievement. Despite his relative fame, Miroslav was not admired by his schoolmates. There were more than a few rumors about his sexuality.

At graduation, there was an old tradition called krštenje svinje, in which students would papier-mâché a live pig with pages from their final exams and then heave the poor creature off the Turkish Bridge into the Drina. Though the origins of such a practice were unclear, it was beloved by local students, many of whom had stuck it out through school solely to take part in the ceremony. Miroslav called the whole endeavor “barbaric” and made a great show of boycotting the festivities, constructing a puppet pig in a field by the church that he slathered in writings by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and then set on fire. Despite the allure of fire and the melodramatic posters that he had pasted around town, no one attended this alternate krštenje svinje except Miša, Danilo, Uncle Dragan, and his bewildered twins. Miroslav, again humiliated, vowed never to perform again.

“This town’s the worst place in the history of the universe,” he said.

“That’s a bit extreme,” said Danilo. “I liked the pig.”

Miroslav’s indignation was tempered somewhat by his acceptance shortly thereafter into the University of Belgrade’s philosophy department. It was a great honor, for this was the first time in more than a decade that a boy from their village had been accepted into the university. Miša was so proud of his brother that he punched Ratko Obradovic in the face and knocked out three of his teeth. Miša claimed Ratko had called his brother a faggot; Ratko claimed the attack was unprovoked.

2. A SYSTEM WILL FOLLOW THE PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE.

It was the summer of the great drought. More would have been written about this in the history books had it not also been the last summer before the worst war in Europe since World War II. Soon there was barely any water in the mountain streams that fed the Drina; the once great river dropped to the lowest level anyone could remember. If a pig were thrown into the river again, it would likely be killed by the fall. Dead fish rotted on the muddy river shores, and a stench rose up into the narrow alleyways of the old town and hung there for weeks, until the people became accustomed to it. A man can grow accustomed to anything if he lives with it long enough.

Danilo worked long hours in the fields, trying to save the crops. He drilled several wells around the property, attempting to locate an underground spring that never materialized. While Miša recovered from his wounds, Miroslav surprised his father by offering his services, even going so far as to design a “root stimulation machine” that he had read about in an obscure nineteenth-century journal on electricity and mesmerism. He buried a long copper wire in the ground, encircling the rows of wheat with a low-grade current of 19.55 volts, which was supposed to trigger growth and replace the need for water. You could run your hand against the dying husks and feel a tingle migrating up your wrists.

“I’m thankful for your efforts,” Danilo said to his eldest son. “I really am. But I must ask you to remove those wires. You’re killing my crops.”

After this, Miroslav swore off farming for good. He retreated to the back of the barn, where he began building a life-size elephant puppet that could be operated by its rider. He planned to walk it across the Turkish Bridge and then push it into the river, in an homage to Tuffi the elephant’s famous fall from the Schwebebahn in Wuppertal. It would be his swan song to Višegrad.

“Why an elephant?” Stoja asked, surveying the huge metal skeleton taking shape in the barn.

“Elephants never forget,” said Miroslav. “They’ve witnessed all of history. Only they can read the river.”

Fig. 2.5. Tuffi plunging from the Schwebebahn into the River Wupper (1950)

From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 962

“I see,” said Stoja, though she did not. At St. Stephen’s, which had become her regular place of refuge, she began lighting a third candle alongside those for her two sons, though even she was not entirely sure if this was for the elephant, the river, or the country.

When Miša had finally recovered, he joined Danilo in the fields again, digging out the ditches, coaxing what was left of the water to run across their land. In the end, it was all for naught: one day the stream finally dried up for good. The grass shriveled and died. Three of their cattle collapsed from dehydration. They found one of them dead in the morning, its hindquarters devoured by a wolf.

3. FOR EVERY ACTION THERE IS AN EQUAL AND OPPOSITE REACTION.

FK Drina HE’s ultrafans were known as the Mosta, the “Guardians of the Bridge.” They had recently aligned themselves with Red Star’s Delije ultras, run by Arkan, the notorious criminal turned paramilitary leader. During the last game of the season, a crowd of Mosta beat a Muslim man unconscious during a match against Sloboda Tuzla. The man did not die, but he would suffer from chronic cluster migraines and never see out of his left eye again. There was no police investigation. Miša was present for the match, but he claimed he was too busy watching the game and did not even know about the beating until much later. He was much more concerned with rumors that Stojanovic had already signed a contract that would send him to Italy.

“He’s a traitor!” he wailed. “Doesn’t he know he’s one of us?”

4. A BODY’S MASS MULTIPLIED BY THE SQUARE OF THE SPEED OF LIGHT EQUALS THE POTENTIAL ENERGY OF THAT MASS.

In the back of the barn, the elephant continued to grow.

5. IF TWO SYSTEMS ARE IN THERMAL EQUILIBRIUM WITH A THIRD SYSTEM, THEY MUST BE IN THERMAL EQUILIBRIUM WITH EACH OTHER.

Most people heard the announcement that Slovenia and Croatia had declared independence from Yugoslavia on the radio. The newsman’s disembodied broadcast, quivering the little porous speaker on the mantel, informed them that Tito’s kingdom was finally unraveling. The radio gave the news a certain air of inevitability: it felt at once like a tale of fiction and an eternal truth. People could not believe what they were hearing, and yet they also could not remember a time when it had not been so.

In the days that followed, as Slovenia successfully defended itself against the JNA during the Ten-Day War, as tensions rose all across Croatia and tanks were moved into position throughout Dalmatia, people milled around nervously, lingering in bakeries, staring at the bends of the Drina, holding their lovers a second too long. Everyone wondered if Bosnia would get caught in the trouble brewing to the west.

Despite a three-month moratorium on independence, in August war broke out in Krajina between Croats and ethnic Serbs. Each claimed an ancient right to their homeland; each claimed the other had taken what did not belong to him. After the first weeks of fighting — in which almost the entire population of Višegrad did not move from in front of their radios, in which everyone was hungry for any new scrap of detail concerning the distant violence, in which the term “ethnic cleansing” was first used in all seriousness — people began to slowly accept that this would now be a part of their reality. Through the daily rhythm of their lives, they separated themselves from the fighting, hoping it would never come their way. Violence could happen only far away and over the mountains, in the valleys where evil like this had always lurked.

“It’s a Croatian problem,” one person would say, and wave his hand like a conductor. And his partner would clap, once, twice, as if to wake someone up from a light slumber, and respond: “Yes. Life never changes.” But even as they said this, they knew that life always changes, that life had already changed and would never be the same again.

It was also true that certain Muslim residents of Višegrad had already received veiled threats. A crude skull was spray-painted on the Selimovic house in Drinsko. And Alija Kujovic found a decapitated bat on his doorstep. Perhaps the bat had decapitated itself through a failure of echolocation. But it must also be said that these events were few and far between. The people of Višegrad had lived with their neighbors for a long time, and despite the vague rumblings of nationalism, there was still a pervasive belief — based on the slow thrum of proximity, based on the cushion of a handshake repeated ten thousand times — that everyone in their heart was decent and that a man could not turn on another man he had known his entire life.

6. THE FORCE OF FRICTION IS INDEPENDENT OF THE APPARENT AREA OF CONTACT.

That whole summer, the brothers did not speak of what had happened on the riverbank.

For Miša, such silence was an attempt to erase the event from his memory. If it remained unspoken, then maybe it had never happened at all. He played football and worked in the fields and fell in love with a girl from town who kissed him on a rock by the riverside and then broke his heart when a week later she was seen with an older boy on the same rock. But when the darkness came, he could not forget: he would dream of the gypsy’s body drifting in the current, the slight, tetrahedral mounds of the shoulder blades peeking above the water, the man’s long hair floating on the surface of the river like a black jellyfish. In the dream, he would run out into the river and lift the man’s head from the water and find that he was not a gypsy at all — he was Miroslav. He would cradle his brother’s head and then look back to the shore and the gypsy would be standing there naked, laughing at him.

For Miroslav, the memory of the killing was more complicated. He knew that he would never be able to forgive the world for directing such violence at his kin, that there was no way to return to the neutral ignorance that had enshrouded his life thus far. On the one hand, the echoes of the attack brought with them a great sense of shame and guilt; he could not rid himself of the feeling that his actions were somehow to blame for the natural and political disasters that were slowly enveloping their world. He was not superstitious like his poor baka back in Trebinje, who crossed and recrossed every threshold twice so as to confuse the trailing spirits — he did not actually believe in curses, and yet he was fairly certain that it was he who was directly responsible for the evil that everyone felt blowing in from across the river. He could not explain this knowledge in any rational terms, though he felt it in his heart, and this angered him. Why must he be the one who was held karmically accountable? Weren’t there much worse people in the world than him?

In his darker moments, as he lay awake on his back at night, the guilt was not what lingered. Tucked beneath the guilt was a longing — a longing to feel it all again, to be enfolded in that giddy sensation of mind and body bifurcating, of himself other than himself, of watching his person strike the gypsy down with such ease it made his bones ache. This division was what he had been searching for in each one of his plays — he relied on the services of puppets and robots to perform this cheap trick of displacement — but in that moment by the river, he had needed nothing but himself. He had been the other. Puppets — glorious and profane — were no substitute for the real thing.

7. THE FORCE WITH WHICH TWO OBJECTS ATTRACT EACH OTHER IS DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL TO THEIR MASS AND INVERSELY PROPORTIONAL TO THE SQUARE OF THE DISTANCE BY WHICH THEY ARE SEPARATED.

Work on the elephant stalled. Lacking one of its ears and a proper sheath of skin, it languished in the nave of the barn, silent and immovable. This picture of incompletion, of an animal half-realized, slipped Miroslav into despair. He feared he would never create anything again. The carcass presided over a tribunal of failure.

One day, when he felt himself on the edge of madness, he wrote a letter to Professor Darko Zunjic, in the philosophy department at the University of Belgrade, asking him if he wouldn’t mind providing a reading list of essential titles in hermeneutics and continental philosophy.

“It’s bleak out here,” wrote Miroslav. “I hope you understand. I’m primarily a puppeteer, but the puppets have stopped speaking to me. So now I’m at a loss. I’m interested in anything that deals with consciousness, reason, and/or death. Thank you very much in advance. Regards, Miroslav Danilovic.”

To his great surprise, Professor Zunjic sent him a battered box full of his personal books.

“May they change you as they have changed me,” read the note. “See you in the fall.” Professor Zunjic asked only that he return his books when he arrived in Belgrade.

Miroslav was so moved by this gesture, by the cracked binding of the books, by the wild, illegible notes in the margins, by the infectious evidence of a mind at work, that he spent his whole summer working his way through the box as his father and brother slaved away in the fields, trying to save what could not be saved. Aristotle, Kant, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Derrida, an American named Richard Rorty — he did not understand all of what was in the box, but what he did understand made him hungry, and what he did not understand made him hungrier still.

“What are those books about?” Miša once asked him after coming in from a day of digging ditches. There was a palm print of mud on the left side of his neck, as if the earth itself had tried to strangle him.

“Nothing much,” said Miroslav. “You could go through life and never read Heidegger and you would still be fine. You would probably even be better off. You could just go about the act of being without worrying what that meant.”

“So then why do you read them?” Miša asked.

Miroslav thought about this. “Well,” he said, “I guess I’m afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“What is anyone afraid of, Miša?”

“I’m not afraid of anything. Spiders, maybe.”

“I’m afraid of a world without meaning.”

“Okay.”

“I’m afraid of our capacity for self-deception. I’m afraid of being without being. I’m afraid of dying alone.”

“I would never let you die alone,” said Miša.

“I love you, Miša, but we all die alone. They never tell you this in school, but this is the only truth you can depend upon. Solitary demise.”

“But then you still go to heaven. And heaven is full of people.”

Miroslav smiled. “And then you go to heaven, Miša. Full of people. It’s true. There’s always that. Although you could go to hell.”

“Lots of people there, too,” said Miša. “You’ll never be alone.”

8. AN OBJECT IN MOTION WILL STAY IN MOTION UNLESS AN UNBALANCED FORCE ACTS UPON IT.

One evening in early August, Danilo knocked three times on Miroslav’s door.

The sequence was like this: — - such that the last knock seemed like it would never come, and then it came.

There was no answer. Danilo cautiously opened the door and found Miroslav reading on his bed.

“Why didn’t you answer?” he asked.

“Why did you come in?”

Danilo had noticed a shift in his eldest son. Long ago he had given up on his being a productive participant on the farm, and he had accepted this loss because Miroslav was destined for great things — opportunities were open to him that Danilo had never had for himself. And yet he sensed something impure in his son’s heart — he no longer looked at you when he spoke, and when he did, his eyes appeared heavy and resigned, the kind of look Danilo recognized in an ailing animal.

Danilo came over and sat on the bed. He put a hand on his son’s foot.

“Tata, what is it?” said Miroslav. “I’m busy.”

“Tell me what is on your mind.”

“What do you mean?”

Danilo remained quiet. He left his hand resting on his son’s foot.

Finally Miroslav closed his book. He sat like this for a while and then looked at his father.

“I think I’ll go to Belgrade next week,” he said.

“So soon?”

“I need to leave.”

“But it might be dangerous there. They’re saying it might be dangerous.”

“I can’t be here anymore.”

Danilo picked up the book.

“Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science,” he read out loud. “Immanuel Kant.” He opened to the first page and tried to read a few sentences. “So you like this?”

Miroslav shrugged. “Kant’s all right. He wrote his first book and no one understood it, so he tried again with this one. It’s better.”

“What was he saying?”

“He was trying to work out a theory that could apply to everything.”

“And did he?”

“Not really. He was wrong. I think he knew he was wrong even as he was writing it.”

“It’s easy to be wrong,” said Danilo.

“He didn’t know at the time how important he was going to be. When he was living, he wasn’t Kant. He was just another German philosopher trying to write down his ideas.”

Danilo closed the book.

“Maybe you should wait before you go. Maybe it’s better to stay until we know what will happen.”

“Well, we cannot know what will happen,” said Miroslav. “So does this mean we shouldn’t do anything?”

“I’m asking you not to go. I know I can’t tell you to stay, but I’m asking you, as your father, not to go. Just for now. Please. We need you here.”

“You don’t need me here. I don’t do anything.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. Your brother needs you.”

“Have you seen him? He doesn’t need anybody.”

“It’s just for the fall. Then we can talk about all of this again.”

“Tata. I can’t. You know I can’t.”

Danilo opened the book again. “Tell me, why do you hate it here so much?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Not if you don’t give me a chance.”

“Have you ever woken up and felt like you’re being suffocated by your own lungs?”

Danilo thought about this. “God’s with you. He’s always with you, wherever you go.”

“You can’t prove it.”

“I don’t need proof. I’ve always had proof. The world is my proof.”

“I’m suffocating, Tata. I’m suffocating with each breath. Every day I’m here, I’m reminded of me.”

“But you are you.”

“So you see my problem.”

“Wherever you go,” said Danilo, “you cannot leave those lungs behind. So you better get used to them.”

9. ALL CHEMICAL PROCESSES ARE REVERSIBLE, ALTHOUGH SOME PROCESSES HAVE SUCH AN ENERGY BIAS THEY ARE ESSENTIALLY IRREVERSIBLE.

On the seventeenth of August 1991, Miroslav loaded a single battered suitcase, the professor’s box of philosophy books, and a jar of his mother’s slatko juniper preserves into the luggage compartment of the express bus bound for Belgrade. The four of them stood together awkwardly, saying nothing until Miša went to his brother and hugged him.

“Burazeru,” he said. “Will you come back?”

“Of course I’ll come back,” said Miroslav. He pointed at their parents. “Take care of them.”

Miša nodded, tears in his eyes. “I’ll miss you.”

As the bus pulled away, he ran alongside it, banging on the luggage compartment before flashing his brother the peace sign, although he could not see through the glare whether Miroslav was looking back at him. The bus upshifted and moved out onto the road. Danilo hugged Stoja, who wept heavily in his arms. Then he walked back to their car before the bus had even passed the old pump station, leaving his wife and son standing alone to watch its final disappearance.

10. ANY EFFECTIVELY GENERATED THEORY CANNOT BE BOTH CONSISTENT AND COMPLETE.

After his brother left for the city, Miša shaved his head and began calling himself Danilo.

Like his father and his father before. And his father before and his father before that. He gave no reason for this change, but he no longer responded to Miša or Mihajlo. On several occasions, he expressed his desire to visit his older brother in Belgrade. Stoja forbade it.

“You must stay close,” she said. “I’m not going to lose you, too.”

When it was clear this was not negotiable, he took a mug and threw it at the wall with such force that it left a hole in the plaster in the shape of a sinking ship. Later he would apologize, crying like a baby, surprised by the permanent wake of such fleeting rage.

Stoja could now be found most days at the church. She went to confession every day at 11 A.M., though there was never anything to confess. Her husband was a religious man, but even he sensed something was amiss in the persistence of her visits.

“You know God is everywhere?” he said. “Not just at St. Stephen’s? We can pray here as well.”

Her collection of candles had grown. Now there were ten that she lit each day in the manoualia. In her mind, each candle no longer represented an individual prayer; rather, it was their collectivity that came to stand in for all things. Ten candles would be lit — no fewer, no more. She would stay until they had all burned right down to the wick, until she could hear the hiss and see the puff of smoke that signaled their extinction.

If you had asked her long ago, at that Makavejev screening in the Dom Kulture, whether she thought she would be one of those kerchiefed babas who whittled away their days praying in church, she would’ve laughed at you. And yet sometimes we become the person we most dread. Or maybe we dread most the person we know we are to become.

11. THE PATH TAKEN BY A RAY OF LIGHT BETWEEN TWO POINTS IS THE PATH THAT CAN BE TRAVERSED IN THE LEAST TIME.

On the first of October, the JNA began its seven-month siege of Dubrovnik, Croatia’s Adriatic jewel. It was a symbolic attack, for the town was without strategic importance; the siege was intended solely to damage Dalmatia’s biggest tourist attraction. Of the 824 buildings in the old town, 563 were hit by shells, and 114 people lost their lives during the bombardment, including the poet Milan Milišic, translator of The Hobbit and close friend of the writer Danilo Kiš. Milišic died in his wife’s arms after a 120-millimeter shell landed on the threshold of their kitchen at No. 7 Župska Street.

His second-to-last poem was titled “And Outside”:

In the room it is night

And it is day outside

The three tumble outside

And the table sniffles inside

Something new is going on outside

In the room, only partially

There is no window in the room

That can be seen from the street.

12. EVERY INDIVIDUAL POSSESSES A PAIR OF ALLELES FOR ANY PARTICULAR TRAIT. EACH PARENT PASSES A RANDOMLY SELECTED COPY OF ONLY ONE OF THESE TO ITS OFFSPRING.

(Mihajlo) Danilo Danilovic began spending all his time with his friends from Cˇuvari Mosta, who had become increasingly radicalized since the outbreak of war.

With the beginning of the new season, football matches were now highly choreographed scenes of nationalism and elaborate xenophobia. Arkan guided the discourse from his refuge at the Cetinje monastery. New banners were unfurled, listing the populations of Croats in various towns in Krajina; these numbers shrank with each passing game. Chants were repeated and repeated again until they became something close to true. At halftime, as Stojanovic — who still remained despite the rumors of his imminent departure — puffed his three and a half cigarettes in the locker room, the crowd, hands held high, thumb and two fingers extended in the Chetnik salute, gloried in the singing of “Vostani Serbije” (“Arise Serbia”) and “Marš na Drinu” (“March on the River Drina”):

Poj, poj Drino, pricaj rodu mi

Kako smo se hrabro borili

Pevao je stroj, vojev’o se boj

Kraj hladne vode

Krv je tekla

Krv je lila

Drinom zbog slobode.

Sing, sing, Drina, tell the generations

How we bravely fought

The front sang, the battle was fought

Near cold water

Blood was flowing,

Blood was streaming

By the Drina for freedom!

It was an old song written by Stanislav Binicki to honor the Serbians who had fought the Austro-Hungarians in the Battle of Cer in 1914. But this old song had been given new life and new meaning by a group of frantic young men inside a half-empty stadium.

Blood was flowing, they chanted. Blood was streaming by the Drina for freedom!

Danilo the elder did not approve of such appropriation.

“Those idiots,” he said to his son. “They have crazy ideas in their heads. They’re talking about medieval battles and old wars that have nothing to do with us.”

“You’re the one who’s always saying history is so important.”

“Not when you make it up! Those people have no idea about history.”

“Tata, we’ve got to protect ourselves. You saw what happened in Krajina. The same thing’ll happen here if we’re not careful.”

“I didn’t see anything in Krajina. I’ve never been to Krajina.”

“The Muslims have an army. They’re organizing a jihad.”

Danilo stared at his son. “You’re not allowed to go to any more games.”

“What? You can’t do that!”

“I can do whatever I want. I’m your father, Mihajlo. You are fifteen years old. You know nothing.”

“My name’s Danilo.”

“Your name’s Mihajlo.”

“My name’s also Danilo. You gave me this name. You can’t deny that.”

“Why do you want to be Danilo all of a sudden?”

“Why did you name me Danilo?”

“It was for your grandmother.”

“You see. Everything has a reason.”

Danilo pressed his hands together. “Be careful, my son. Be very careful with this.”

“We’re making a stand, Tata. Someone has to. At least my boys believe in something.”

“Please. It’s not about believing,” said Danilo. “Belief on its own is a house with no foundation.”

13. ALL PARTICLES EXHIBIT BOTH WAVE AND PARTICLE PROPERTIES.

On October 16, somewhere between twenty and one hundred fifty people (depending upon whom you talked to), most of them Serb, were systematically massacred in Gospic by an elite Croatian military unit nicknamed Autumn Rain. The massacre was in apparent retaliation for the murder of Croatian civilians by Serbian rebel forces several days before in Široka Kula. The Gospic victims were doused in petrol and burned, then buried and hastily concealed under an uneven layer of concrete, although this would become known only much later, in evidence given at the 2004 trial of General Mirko Norac at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.

14. THE ANGLE OF REPOSE IS EQUAL TO THE MAXIMUM ANGLE AT WHICH AN OBJECT CAN REST ON AN INCLINED PLANE WITHOUT SLIDING DOWN.

Danilo Danilovic never attended another Drina HE match. He never saw Stojanovic go to his left again. He did not need to. Mosta had joined with the newly formed Serbian Radical Party (SRS). Meetings were now held in the basement of the municipal hall. Old flags were hung on the walls, ceremonial rifles placed on the table. “Marš na Drinu” was sung to the accompaniment of a wheezing accordion. There was talk of forming a local militia, of strategies for self-defense when the war came to the valley.

Not long after, Danilo and two other boys from Mosta took a bus to Užice and tried to enlist in the JNA. The recruitment officer, who was from Višegrad, recognized Danilo from primary school, and would not take him.

“I admire your initiative, Mihajlo. The army needs people like you. But you’re still a child. Come back when you’re of age and then we can talk again,” said the officer.

“My name is Danilo, sir,” said Danilo.

When Stoja came back from the church and heard what had happened, she flew into a rage.

“What were you thinking?” she screamed at her son. “You cannot fight!”

“I’m trying to help the country!” he yelled from the doorway. “I’m trying to actually do something! You’d let us just die here.”

“If you go,” she said, “I will never forgive you.” She came over and embraced him like a tree, and he stood there and let her hold him and cry two long wet spots into his chest.

“Oh, my baby boy,” she whispered.

“Mama, I don’t want to die alone,” he whispered to her.

15. AT ANY JUNCTION IN AN ELECTRICAL CIRCUIT, THE SUM OF CURRENTS FLOWING INTO THE JUNCTION EQUALS THE SUM OF CURRENTS FLOWING OUT OF THE JUNCTION.

The next day, a day of chilly, unending rain, he was gone. He left without saying goodbye.

16. THE POSITION AND MOMENTUM OF A PARTICLE CANNOT BE SIMULTANEOUSLY MEASURED.

Later, after Vukovar fell and was cleared of its Croats, after the massacre at Ovcara, there were reports of Danilo Danilovic doing strange and terrible things for Šešelj’s White Eagles in Vocin and then Bokane. Legends began to circulate about his strength, his courage, his ruthless innocence in battle. It was said that he could not grow a beard but that he was the size of two men. It was said they called him the beba džin. It was said that he locked an entire village of Muslims outside of Brcko in their six-hundred-year-old mosque and then burned the building down, shooting those who tried to escape, calmly and without malice, like a child reciting a poem.

But these stories would all develop and emerge slowly, over time, and the sources of such reports were unreliable at best, as the ICTY would later discover when it attempted, unsuccessfully, to assemble evidence for an indictment of Mihajlo Danilo Danilovic for crimes against humanity. The facts, if there were any facts, were difficult to establish beyond a reasonable doubt. Who had actually lit the match, and who had ordered the match to be lit? Perhaps many people had lit the match at once, or perhaps the match had simply lit itself.

17. THE RATE OF CHANGE OF ANGULAR MOMENTUM ABOUT A POINT IS EQUAL TO THE SUM OF THE EXTERNAL MOMENTA ABOUT THAT POINT.

After her son left Višegrad, Stoja went to St. Stephen’s and would not leave. In the evening, her husband found her crouching next to the manoualia, surrounded by hundreds of candles. He tried to bring her home, but she insisted on staying through the night.

“He’ll die without me,” she said. “Both of them will die without me.”

“You can’t stay here,” he said. “There’s no place to sleep.”

“I won’t sleep.”

“Come home.”

“Home?” she said. “Where is home?”

He left her kneeling on the floor of the church. That night, he finally managed to reach Miroslav on the phone in Belgrade. This in and of itself was quite a feat, for ever since Miroslav had left for the city, phone calls had come few and far between. University life was busy, he said. He didn’t have time for country chitchat anymore.

Danilo told him of Miša’s enlistment with the Chetniks.

“I know. He wrote me a letter.”

“When?”

“A while ago. He told me it was his calling.”

“His calling?”

“That’s what he said.”

“He wrote you a letter and you didn’t tell us?”

“Why should I? The letter was to me.”

“He’s your brother, Miroslav.”

“I know who my brother is.”

“He’ll get himself killed. . he has no idea what he’s doing. And fighting with a bunch of savages? Have you heard the stories of what they’ve done?”

“Miša has more courage in one pinkie than the rest of us will ever have.”

“He’s not Miša anymore. He calls himself Danilo.”

“You named him Danilo.”

“I named him Mihajlo. Danilo was only for my mother.”

“He’s going to be fine. Stop worrying. Worry about the poor Croatian idiot who meets Danilo Danilovic in the middle of a field, man against man. Worry about him.”

“Your mother’s upset. She’s at the church. She won’t come home now that you’re both gone.”

“Tell her to stop worrying so much.”

“Will you come back home? Just for a weekend? It would mean so much to her.”

“I’m busy,” said Miroslav. Then: “I’ll see what I can do.”

18. AT THE LEVEL OF THE SUBATOMIC, THE LAWS OF CLASSICAL MECHANICS BEGIN TO BREAK DOWN.

It was late October by the time Miroslav came back to Višegrad. The air had already turned cold; the birds had stopped singing. People tightened their scarves against the early chill of winter. Though Stoja had agreed to sleep in her own house, she spent nearly all her waking hours at St. Stephen’s. News of her son’s visit briefly lured her back. She busied herself preparing the house, baking fresh bread, turning and re-turning the sheets. They waited at the kitchen table, listening to the tick of the clock. When he finally arrived, late in the evening, they couldn’t believe their eyes. He wore tight-fitting, peculiar clothing and what looked to be eye makeup. Stoja would later say that he resembled an exotic bird caught in an oil spill.

“Miro,” she said. “How are you?” Her voice quavered.

“Fine. I’m fine, Mama.”

Danilo brought out the šljivovica, which Miroslav took down in one go. Danilo refilled his glass and gave his shoulder a squeeze.

“Welcome home, son.”

Miroslav again dropped back the šljivovica without pause.

“Easy,” said Danilo. “There’s time.”

“So you’re happy?” said Stoja. “What’ve you been doing with yourself?”

He brought out a black box about the size of a milk crate, which he placed carefully onto the dinner table. A black velvet curtain flowed down from one side. He ducked his head underneath the curtain for a moment, fiddling with various unseen things before reemerging and motioning for his father to put his head beneath it.

Once inside, Danilo found himself in complete darkness. It was like diving into a deep well. He fought the urge to whip the curtain off his head. He waited. Nothing happened. He breathed. He could smell the stuffiness of his exhalations.

“What am I looking at?” he asked from beneath the curtain.

“Patience,” he heard from somewhere in the world beyond.

And then, from out of the gloom, he saw tiny figures appearing. A bird. Shivering. It was a crow, pecking nervously at the ground. Looking up at him, pecking again. The movements were so natural — the bird was alive, but it was impossible for this bird to be alive, because it must’ve been less than a centimeter tall. Pecking. Ruffling its feathers. The beat of a heart.

The whole scene gradually became illuminated. A wooden farmhouse. The walls streaked with age. A woman emerging, kerchiefed. Danilo marveled at the detail. He could see her breathing. She swept the threshold with her little broom, rested a moment on its handle, looking up at the sky. Danilo tried to look up with her, but he realized he was not part of the scene. He felt altogether massive, a clumsy, towering presence in this minuscule world. The woman shook her head, gave the threshold one last sweep, and then disappeared back into the house. From somewhere off to the side he heard the rustle of wind in the trees, though he could not decide if this was from her world or his own.

Footsteps. A man came from around the corner of the house. Bearded. Wearing a peasant’s cap, with a rifle draped over his shoulder. When he saw the crow, the man stopped. Silence. Then the man’s arms, tiny, moving, lifting the gun, aiming. The crow looked up and saw the gun. The bird lifted its wings, but it did not fly.

Then: everything went black. The kind of black that happens just after a dream. Danilo heard the sound of two gunshots. He jumped, peering into the dark, trying to see the body of the bird. He couldn’t see anything. He breathed. He could feel his pulse thumping. He waited.

The curtain was lifted off his head. A rush of light.

“So?” said Miroslav.

“How did you make it so small?”

Fig. 2.6. “M. Danilovic´’s Black Box Theater”

From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 974

“It’s not that small. We’re big, is all.”

“Where are the strings?”

“There are no strings. But what did you think?”

“I’ve never seen anything like it. That bird? What happened?”

“It’s a secret, Tata.”

Stoja donned the curtain and viewed the scene. She came out, blinking, tears in her eyes.

“We’ve missed you so much, Miro,” she said.

“Don’t call me Miro,” he said.

• • •

THE WEEKEND WAS UNPLEASANT for all. After the brief magic gifted by the black box, Miroslav seemed to slide backwards into the safety of unpleasantries. He drank often and in great amounts. He swore. He did not help to clear the table. He had begun smoking, which he did indoors, without asking for permission, leaving his cigarette butts strewn about the house. It was as if their son had been replaced by another, a copy that was not quite right.

“Does he have an accent?” Stoja whispered to her husband as they lay in bed.

“It’s not an accent.”

“He smells different.”

“It’s the city.”

“Do you think he’s taking drugs?”

“It’s the city.”

“He might have an accent.”

“He doesn’t have an accent.”

During dinner on the second night, Danilo looked over and noticed his son’s hands were shaking.

“Your hands,” said Danilo.

“My hands?” said Miroslav, and for the first time he looked like their child again.

Danilo went to pour his son more šljivovica, but Stoja grabbed his arm and shook her head.

“Your elephant’s still in the barn,” said Danilo. “What shall we do with it?”

“My elephant,” said Miroslav, shaking his head. “My elephant. You can burn it.”

“You don’t want it?” said Stoja.

“No.”

“I thought you were going to walk it over the bridge,” said Danilo.

“I can’t stand that fucking bridge,” said Miroslav.

“Watch your language,” said Danilo.

They ate the burek in silence.

“Has Miša written to you again?” asked Danilo after a while.

“Has he written to you?”

“No.”

“He must be busy, then.”

“Too busy for his own mother?” said Stoja.

“You know there’s a vast fucking world outside of this little shit town of yours.”

“Miroslav!” Danilo yelled. “Don’t speak to your mother like this.”

Miroslav offered a smile. “Sorry, Mama. I haven’t heard from him, either.”

“I light a candle every day,” said Stoja. “He doesn’t know what he’s gotten into.”

“He’s okay, Mama. He’s okay. You can stop lighting your candles.”

She nodded. She wiped at her eyes and split open a piece of bread. “And you’ve met girls in Belgrade?”

“I’m not looking for girls, Mama. I have an audience. This is much better than girls,” he said. “They’re hungry for something new. And I give them something new.”

“Is that right?” she said. “So you’re learning new things?”

Miroslav leaned back in his chair. “Yes, many things. I’m learning that nearly everyone is an asshole. And I’m learning this country enjoys fucking itself in its own ass.”

Danilo put down his fork. “I won’t say it again. Watch your mouth,” he said. “This is still a house of God. We’ll not tolerate such language. If I hear it one more time, you can find your own roof to sleep under.”

“A house of God?” said Miroslav.

“When you’re under my roof, you follow my rules. You can go back to the city and live however you like, but here you show respect.”

“Tata, wake up! This town is full of whores. The city is filled with hypocrites. The priests are war criminals, and the war criminals are priests. So good luck with your whole house of God there. This house will be the last one standing when everything around it fucking crumbles into shit.”

Danilo stood up, furious. “Get out.”

Miroslav picked up a piece of bread.

“This is where you came from, Miroslav Danilovic. This is the house you came from. Don’t ever desecrate your own home. Now get out.”

Miroslav rose from the table.

“Danilo, we can’t—” Stoja began.

“You are a Danilovic,” he said to his son. “You will always be a Danilovic.”

“Believe me, I know. Why do you think I left?” He kicked his chair and stalked out of the house.

Miroslav spent an hour shivering in the barn with the ghost of the elephant. Once he had calmed down, he came back and knocked contritely on the door of the house. Stoja answered.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” he said. “I didn’t know what I was saying.”

“Miro,” she said. She reached across the threshold and took him in her arms. “My baby.”

Danilo came down and saw them like this. He put his hands on his kin and whispered his love. The three of them stood together in the doorway until the cold wind blowing into the house forced them to swing the door shut.

• • •

THE NIGHT BEFORE MIROSLAV was to return to the city, Stoja wept in bed.

Danilo tried to reassure her. “It’s natural. He’s making his own way. He needs to separate himself from us,” he said.

“But he’s my son! He’s Miro! How can he be like this?”

“Give him some time. You’ll see.”

“Miša is God knows where,” she said. “And Miroslav’s here, in this house, but he feels even further away. What have we done to deserve this?”

Danilo put a hand on her stomach. “No matter what he says, he will always be. .” And he had meant to say, “your son,” but he did not say it.

19. THE ANGLE OF INCIDENCE EQUALS THE ANGLE OF REFLECTION.

That January, a cease-fire was finally declared in Croatia. Televisions were filled with images of UNPROFOR’s bobbing Blue Helmets moving in to manage the peace. Despite the bleakness of winter, everyone’s mood began to lift. Maybe this would be the end.

Life had grown more and more difficult on the farm. There was an increasing shortage of goods, and prices had risen. Without enough hay for the winter, they had been forced to sell all except two of their remaining cows. Then Danilo fell one morning on the ice and injured his leg. He limped around, trying to keep up with the work. Stoja was forced to abandon her daily vigils at the church and run the farm herself. She built her own manoualia and iconostasis in the barn next to the elephant.

Miroslav called to say he would be coming home for Orthodox Christmas, surprising them both. After his last visit, Stoja had been afraid that he would not come back.

On Christmas Eve, the three of them sat in the kitchen as a light snow fell outside. Stoja served tea and then sat down next to her son.

“Let’s talk like adults,” she said.

“Fine,” said Miroslav.

“Your father won’t say this, but he needs your help. It’s been very hard with his fall, and without Miša here to work—”

“Danilo,” said Miroslav.

She took in a little breath and then began again. “I know the university’s important for you. I can see you’ve learned things. But we need you here. You can go back to Belgrade when everything’s normal again. We all must do our duty in difficult times. God bless us, we’ll get through it.”

“I never would’ve guessed,” said Miroslav.

“What?”

“That you would be the one to go so God crazy,” he said. “Him maybe, but not you.”

“I was always a believer. I just didn’t realize when I was younger, that’s all. We’re foolish when we’re young. We’re blind to the truth.”

“Miša’s gone,” said Danilo from the other end of the table. “We could use a hand here.”

“That’s not my fault. Don’t put that on me. Miša left because he wanted to leave.”

“It’s not for forever,” said Stoja. “Just for now.”

Miroslav formed a beak with his fingertips and pinched his tea bag.

“Asking me to come back here’s like asking me to take a poison that’ll slowly kill me. Is that what you want?”

“We’re all taking the poison,” said Danilo.

“What’s all this about poison?” cried Stoja. “What about us? This is your home. It’s your duty to come home.”

“Come help me chop the badnjak,” said Danilo. “Just like you and Miša used to do. We can do it together.”

Miroslav smiled a long, sad smile. “You’re still looking for your badnjak, aren’t you, Tata?”

“What happened to you, Miro?” said Stoja.

“You and me, together,” said Danilo. “We’ll find a nice badnjak. I know the perfect tree where we can find one. Then you can do a vertep performance, just like the old days.”

Miroslav shook his head. “It’s too late, Tata,” he said. “It’s too late for all of this.”

• • •

THE NEXT DAY, Stoja rose early and collected the water from the well. She made krompiruša pie and sarma and roasted the pastrmka. She rolled the dough for the cesnica bread and placed the traditional coin inside. Danilo hummed to himself and went around sprinkling the hay on the windowsills. Then he went out and chopped down the badnjak himself.

Miroslav came down late in the morning, a bag slung over his shoulder.

“I have to go back,” he said.

His parents stood in the kitchen, dumbfounded.

“But the meal. .” his mother began.

“It’s Christmas!” said Danilo. “You can’t leave now.”

“What about the cesnica? We must see who gets the coin!” said Stoja.

Miroslav shook his head. His eyes were heavy. “I have to get back,” he said.

“Miroslav,” said Danilo, raising his voice. “You must stay! You cannot go!”

“Sorry,” said Miroslav. “Now one of you can get the coin.”

He hugged them both once and then turned and left his home for the last time.

20. WHEN TWO PARTICLES BECOME ENTANGLED, THEIR SHARED STATE IS INDEFINITE UNTIL MEASURED.

Two months later, Bosnia declared independence from Yugoslavia, and the war came to Višegrad. The town was overrun by the JNA; huge tanks squeezed down the narrow streets, flattening signposts, crushing flowerpots. Danilo tried to call Miroslav in Belgrade, but he could not get through. The lines had been cut. He wrote to him on several occasions. He was not a writer, but he tried to write nonetheless.

From a letter dated April 19, 1992:

There is no telling what might happen in the future. Normal people have become sick in the head. They are pushing the Muslims out of town. The army is here now but they will leave soon. After that, no one knows what will happen. .

Why don’t you ever write to us? Your mother is worried. She prays for you every day in the barn. It’s too dangerous to go to St. Stephen’s anymore. We miss you. We miss both you and your brother. I pray we will all be together again.

Love, your father,

Danilo

From a letter dated May 21 (?), 1992:

The JNA have left. . We heard their tanks going by at night. When I went down the next morning, I found they had knocked over our fence. There was garbage everywhere. It is a mess. They say bad things will happen. . Maybe you should come back home. It is best for us to be together. We can celebrate your birthday together. I hope you are safe in the city. I have not heard of how things are there. Your mother sends her love. Write if you can. We miss you.

Love, your father,

Danilo

From a letter dated June 25, 1992:

We tried to call you yesterday for your birthday but the lines are still cut. We lit a candle and said some prayers. We are always praying. We think of you every day. Things are very difficult here. You can’t imagine. The White Eagles have moved in. They are in charge now and they are very terrible. The worst kind of evil. I can’t believe Miša would know them. . They told the Muslims to move back into town and then they began to kill them. Every night, they say. They line them up on the Turkish Bridge and then shoot them or cut their throats and then they throw them down into the Drina. Sometimes they push them over the bridge while they are still alive, and they let them swim and then they shoot them. I saw blood on the bridge last week. Lots of it. I could not look. It is madness, Miroslav. The river does not forget. . I think it is best if we move to Belgrade with you. The Serbs in the town are safe for now, but what if the Bosnian Army hears of what is happening and does the same to us? Do you want your parents thrown off of a bridge into the river? Do you want our throats cut like animals?. . Your mother is not the same as she was. I worry for her. I worry for us all. Please, write to us.

Love, your father,

Danilo

21. THE ENTROPY OF ANY ISOLATED SYSTEM NOT IN THERMAL EQUILIBRIUM ALMOST ALWAYS INCREASES.

These letters no longer exist.

4

Stoja,” said Danilo.

“Stoja,” he said again.

Above them, the great elephant loomed against the flicker of the candles. A line of saints stared at his wife, who was kneeling, hands clutched in prayer.

“You have to move to live,” he said.

He put a hand on her shoulder. A dankness in the air.

“Please,” he said.

“Where can I go?” she said, staring at the saints. “It’s too dangerous to go anywhere.”

“Just don’t go into town. Take a bicycle. You can ride to the river. The weather’s nice today.”

“I don’t have a bicycle.”

“Take Miša’s. Ride to the river and then come right back. It isn’t far. It’ll be good for you. You’ve got to move around or else you’ll shrivel up into a nothing.”

“I like being here.”

“If you don’t want to do it for yourself, then do it for me.”

• • •

SHE CHANGED into a summer dress. She put on earrings. Danilo found the red bicycle in the shed. He inflated the tires. He lowered the seat with a wrench and squeezed a drop of oil into the gears.

“You see?” he said, spinning the pedals. “Like new.”

“I haven’t ridden in years,” she said. “Since I was a girl.”

“You don’t forget,” he said, kissing her forehead. “Go. I love you. Take care. And bring your ID card. They’re checking everyone these days.”

She followed the road down into the valley. The air felt cool and light on her face. Danilo had been right: she had lost herself somewhere along the way. The barn, the candles, the elephant — it was a trap, she could see that now. She smiled, feeling the ground slip beneath her. She felt as though she could ride clear across the world like this. If she could just keep riding, everything would be normal again. And when she went back home, she would find that both of her sons had returned, and they would run out of the house to greet her.

As she got down to the main road, she saw a car stopped in front of four men armed with machine guns. She caught her breath. The men had strung barbed wire across the road. They were talking to someone in the car, which she could see was stuffed to the brim with suitcases. Through the back window she could see a small white dog. It seemed to be barking, but she couldn’t hear any sound. One of the men saw her coming down the road on her bicycle, and he waved with his gun for her to dismount.

“Oy,” said the man, approaching her. He was wearing camouflage and a traditional Šajkaca army hat, like the ones she remembered seeing in history books. This had to be one of those White Eagles that everyone was talking about. She had never seen one of them up close before.

“What’s your name?” he said. He had a splotchy mark on his temple, the color and shape of an overripe raspberry. She could see how young he was. Young and foolish, just like Miša.

“Stojanka Danilovic. I live there,” she said and pointed back to where she had come from. She wanted to tsk this boy for dressing up in such a stupid costume. For playing games. Why had his mother let him do such a foolish thing?

He asked to see her ID card. Stoja reached into her pocket, but even as she did this, she realized she had left the card on her bureau. She had picked up the card and then set it down when she put on her earrings. She could see the card lying on the wooden bureau. She could see the grainy photograph staring back at her, her smile that was not quite a smile. She hated that picture, though Danilo had said it was not far from the truth.

“I don’t have it,” she said, her heart dropping. “I left it on the bureau.”

“What?” he said, moving closer.

As calmly as she could, she explained to the young man that she was the wife of Danilo Danilovic, that she lived just over the hill, that she had not planned on seeing anyone, she was merely trying to ride to the river, “to get the air back into my lungs.” This was how she said it. She was a Serb in good standing, she said. She was an Orthodox Christian. A believer. Had he not seen her holding vigil at her manoualia in St. Stephen’s? She pulled out the little silver cross around her neck to show him. A gift from Danilo. She had never been more grateful for it than now.

She thought that everything would be right then. This stupid boy would understand and let her go and she would turn her bike around and tell Danilo all about this. The White Eagles are everywhere! she would say. And they are using children to fight for them!

But the young man did not wave her through. He looked concerned. He took a step forward and grasped the cross in one of his hands. He was close to her now. She could smell the rancid stink of alcohol and dried meat on his breath. God bless, how could they let such a boy drink? The boy’s fingers, covered in a deep layer of grime, fumbled with the small silver object. He turned the cross over, as if to find proof of its authenticity on the reverse side. When she looked up at him, he was not looking at the cross but at her.

“Please,” she said quietly. “God bless.”

“You’re a liar. I can hear your accent,” he said and ripped the chain from around her neck. Her head snapped forward. She could feel the burn on the back of her neck where the chain had split.

“Please. Listen. I’m a Serb. I promise,” she said, and tried not to let the fear split open the seams of her words. What he heard was true: she had been born in Trebinje, near the Montenegro border, and so her accent was foreign. Not quite foreign, but peculiar.

Oh Danilo, Danilo, what shall I do? This boy has no idea!

“You’re lying. You carry this cross to hide yourself.” He held up the necklace. “You should be ashamed.”

“I’m a Serb, I swear to you. I’m a devout Christian. I hadn’t been until recently, but now it’s all I have. My sons left me. My youngest is your age. He’s fighting like you.”

“You’re an old, filthy, lying whore is what you are,” the boy said. He stepped forward and grabbed the space between her legs. The force with which his hand moved emptied the air from her lungs. His lust, fetid, like a whiff of curdled milk. The blindness of his fingers, kneading at her. He brought his mouth very close to her ear, breathing raggedly, the raspberry splotch on his temple trembling with each pulse. She was gathering her strength to scream when he pushed her to the ground.

“Here’s another Turkish whore for Lukic,” he said to the others.

“Fine, fine,” said one of the soldiers. “Let’s go back. It’s enough for now.”

They loaded her into the back of the truck with a mother and a daughter whom they had taken from the car. Stoja recognized them from the market. They were Muslim, she knew. The mother’s name was Remiza. Remiza was holding on to her daughter’s hand so hard that her knuckles were turning white. Remiza’s husband stood by the car and watched them go, his hands on his hips, his face registering nothing at all.

The truck drove through the valley and then turned up a steep road. A stream flowed nearby, the water thick with bright green algae. There was no wind in the trees, and she could smell the thickness of the minerals in the water. Stoja tried to smile at Remiza, to let her know that she was with them, but the woman held on to her daughter and looked right through her.

They came to a hotel, looming in a clearing of the forest like the hull of a great beached ship. The facade of the hotel was bright white, the top floors lined with concrete balconies, their railings painted red. All of the curtains behind the balconies were drawn closed. From somewhere there came a cry, and then silence. Around the hotel, men lay sleeping, sunning themselves. Some wore ski masks pulled up above their faces. Stoja had heard of this place. Before the war, people had come to heal themselves in the thermal pools. They had come from all over, as far as Austria and Hungary and Romania. Somewhere nearby, the Turks had built a hammam hundreds of years ago. The waters from inside these mountains could supposedly cure all ills.

As they pulled into the parking lot, Stoja saw a girl come out onto one of the balconies. She had short brown hair, cut close to her head. The girl watched them come to a stop in front of the hotel and then disappeared back into the room.

As soon as they were stopped, a man with black paint on his face came at them with a machine gun and ordered them off the truck. Remiza began to weep. She begged the man to take her but leave her daughter. The man leaped up onto the back of the truck and rammed the butt of his gun into her head. He did this easily, without effort. Remiza fell down onto her side. She lay there, unconscious. Her daughter collapsed onto her, weeping.

“Shut up,” the man said to them. “When we want you to talk, we’ll ask you to talk. But we’ll never ask you to talk, so you will never talk.”

He grabbed the girl by the back of her neck and pulled her off the truck. Then he turned to Stoja.

“Please,” she said. “There has been some mistake. I’m a Serb. I’m like you.”

“You’re nothing like me,” said the man.

The last thing she saw before the darkness came was a red car driving up the hill, and in that split second she could not help but hope that whoever it was had come to rescue her.

• • •

IN THE AFTERNOON, when Stoja had still not returned, Danilo grew nervous. Maybe she had gone back to the church? He should have figured as much. Then he found her ID card on the bureau. He stared at her picture.

“Stoja,” he said.

Their truck was not working, so he ran over to his cousin Dragan’s house and asked him for his car. Dragan insisted on coming along. They first drove to the church but found it locked. They tracked down the caretaker, who opened it up for them, but the church was empty, the candles unlit. Danilo’s mouth went dry.

They slowly drove down the road that led to the river.

“There,” said Danilo, pointing. “Stop.”

It was Stoja’s red bicycle. Leaning against a tree, as if waiting for its rider to return. An open suitcase lay by the side of the road, its contents strewn into the ditch. Children’s clothes. A little doll made of sticks and strings sat by one wheel of the bicycle.

They searched up and down the road. All the way to the river and back, until it grew too dark to see. Their headlights began to make every mound, every irregularity, look like a possible body.

“She’s not here,” said Dragan. “Maybe she went into town.”

“Why would she go there?” said Danilo. “I told her not to go there.”

“Maybe she had dinner with a friend?”

“I told her not to go there. I told her just to the river and back.” Danilo brought his hands to his face. “Oh, this is my fault. It told her to go.”

“It’s not your fault, cousin,” said Dragan. “We’ll find her.”

They drove into town. Past burnt and gutted houses. A couch sitting upright against a doorway. The streets were deserted. Dogs running around, searching for scraps.

A soldier came up and waved for them to stop.

“There’s a curfew,” the soldier said. “Go home.”

“I’m looking for my wife.” Danilo leaned over to the window. “She was bicycling today. She hasn’t come back. Her name’s Stojanka Danilovic. Have you seen her?”

The soldier stared at him. He looked shocked. Then he raised his gun and pointed it at them. “You can’t be out now. Go home.”

“But she’s my wife! She left her ID card. I’m very worried she—”

“We’ve got to go back,” said Dragan.

“But I’m just worried something’s happened to her. Have you heard anything?”

“No one is allowed to be out.” The soldier’s eyes flicked back and forth between them. He was young, with a birthmark on his temple. They heard him click off the safety of the rifle.

“Danilo!” said Dragan. “We can come back in the morning.”

They left the car at Danilo’s house. Dragan tapped his cousin on the shoulder.

“Everything will be all right,” he said. “What did your mother say? ‘The Danilovics are survivors.’”

“My mother was a liar.”

Danilo fell asleep sitting up, in a chair facing their bed. Before the sun had fully risen, he awoke, made himself some coffee, and washed his hands. Then he took down an alabaster jar that they kept hidden inside the ceiling. Inside the jar was a roll of deutsche marks. He took all the money and his wife’s ID card and drove Dragan’s car down to the police station in town, where he waited all morning for them to open.

At eleven o’clock, a large man pulled up in front of the station in a small blue VW Golf. The man looked tired. He spent some time in the car before he struggled to pry himself from the front seat. He headed to the locked door of the police station. Danilo got out. He tried not to run.

“Please,” he said, approaching the man. “My wife has gone missing.”

The man showed no interest in this news. He busied himself with unlocking the door.

“Please,” Danilo tried again. “There’s been a mistake. We’re Serbian. Here’s her card.”

“I don’t know anything about this,” the policeman said. “Why are you telling me this?”

Danilo took out half of the money in his pocket and showed it to the man. “Please,” he said. “There’s been a mistake. Can you help me?”

The policeman, who walked stiffly, as if one of his legs could no longer bend, took Danilo down the block to an old hotel that smelled of dried sweat and blood sausage. A small radio was playing Herzegovinian folk music in one corner. The policeman left Danilo sitting in the lobby and headed upstairs. When he came back down, he said, “Lukic will see you.” He stood, waiting. Danilo reached into his pocket and gave him several more bills. The policeman left without giving any further instructions.

Danilo waited in the lobby. Men came and went, many of them bearded. They wore all sorts of military uniforms. Sometimes their tops did not match their bottoms, as if their clothes had become mixed up in the wash. Many of them wore the patch of the White Eagles, and almost everyone carried a gun. He did not see the young man who had stopped them the night before.

Finally, one of the men came into the lobby and motioned for Danilo to stand and follow him up the stairs. The man, smoking a cigarette, roughly patted Danilo down for weapons, then he pushed him into one of the hotel rooms.

Lukic was a large, clean-shaven man, with a broad, flat nose and surprisingly soft eyes. He looked like a father who had not yet become a father. He smiled slightly when Danilo entered the room, and Danilo saw the flash of a rotten tooth that had turned blue. Lukic sat in an armchair. He wore camouflage pants and a grey sweatshirt that was marked by several indecipherable stains. The bed next to him was covered with ammunition and handguns of varying sizes. Danilo briefly wondered if this was how he slept, in a sea of bullets. On the table next to the bed, a lone plastic flower stood at attention inside its vase.

In a voice that he tried to keep strong, Danilo said that he had known Lukic’s uncle in grade school.

Lukic smiled. “Pluto.”

“Yes, Pluto,” said Danilo. “He’s a nice man.”

“He was a terrible man. A sadist. But he’s dead now,” Lukic said with a smile.

“Oh. Well. I’m sorry to hear this,” said Danilo.

“What can I do for you?”

He told Lukic that he was looking for his wife, Stojanka, who had disappeared the previous day. He explained that her two sons had moved away; one had joined the Chetniks up in Croatia — he lingered on this word, Chetniks—and the other had moved to Belgrade to study at the university. His wife had been distraught for several months. It was unlike her to be so on edge. She was just going out for a little bicycle ride to clear her head and she forgot her ID card. Simple as that. He didn’t care what had happened. Or who had done what. He just wanted to bring her home.

Lukic listened politely and took Stoja’s ID card when Danilo showed it to him. He studied it closely, holding it up to the light.

When Danilo was finished speaking, he reached into his pocket and took out the money, which had somehow gotten wet. Lukic took the damp deutsche marks from him and dropped them on the bed without looking at them.

“Go on,” said Lukic.

Danilo shrugged. “There is nothing more to say.”

Lukic picked at something beneath his fingernail and suddenly made a little chuckle, as if he had just remembered a joke. Then he looked Danilo in the eye.

“Okay, so first you must know this: I like you,” said Lukic. “I like that you came here and had the courage to talk. So this is why I’ll tell you what I will tell you now. Otherwise, you have to know, you’d already be dead. So today is your lucky day. This is the first thing you must know.”

Then he went on to talk about the war for a while, about the justness of their cause but also the difficulties of conflict, about how sometimes things happened that were regrettable, and that no one could be said to be responsible for these things when they happened in the heat of battle. It was difficult enough to maintain order in a town when no one knew whom to trust. Mistakes would inevitably be made. It was the way of things. But they were doing their best. Višegrad was in very good hands, this much he could say.

Danilo grew impatient. “So then you know what happened to her?” he said.

“I’m not saying that; I’m just saying you must understand the circumstances. We’re looking after many people right now. We’re making sure this country’s safe to live in. It’s not an easy job. The Turks let this place go to shit. So you must understand our situation.”

“But she’s done nothing!” said Danilo, exasperated. “Stoja’s innocent!”

“I understand your opinion. But I must disagree. She was without ID, as you say.”

“I told you. She forgot it. She was just—”

“And, as you say, she looks like a Turk.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“She even talks like a Turk. And this is not my fault. This, of course, is asking for trouble. You can imagine how difficult it would be if all the Turks had no identification and they claimed they were not Turks and we had to check each one. It would be madness. It would not be good,” Lukic said, but very kindly, as if he were doing Danilo a favor. “You have to understand the Turkish mind. I understand this mind. It’s my business to understand the Turkish mind.”

“What have you done with her? Please? Just give her back. I just want her back in the house. She’s a good woman. Her sons went away and—”

“Why would you let a woman out like that without an ID? Don’t you love your wife at all?”

Danilo fell to the floor. He clasped his hands together. “Please. I just wanted her to get some air. She was not herself. . she was praying all the time. .”

“Look, look. I’ll see what I can do,” said Lukic sympathetically. He placed a hand on Danilo’s shoulder. “But if you want my opinion, it was her own fault for coming from a mixed family. This was a disaster waiting to happen.”

Danilo stared up at him. He was filled with a sudden, unbearable hatred. He had never before felt such venom in his blood. If he had had a knife, he would’ve plunged it into this man’s heart.

“Not all of it is your fault,” Lukic was saying, “but you must think about these kinds of things before you marry a woman like that.”

“Like what?” Danilo could feel his body shaking. He was worried what he might do next.

Lukic studied him calmly. “A man can never change who he really is.”

“People change all the time,” said Danilo. “I’ve seen good people become very bad.”

“Maybe they were bad to begin with,” said Lukic. He picked up one of the guns from the bed and began to play with it. “We’re making right what was wrong. That’s all. Nothing more. Now get out before you disappear. I’m being so nice right now my balls are beginning to hurt.” A man came back into the room. He grabbed one of Danilo’s arms and hinged it up into his back, painfully.

They pushed him out into the street. He stumbled, righted himself, and then let himself fall. He felt as if he could destroy a thousand men if only he had the strength. But he did not have the strength, and so he sat on the sidewalk next to a bright red Passat and wept. He wept for his wife, and he wept for the town that was once his home, the town that now watched him silently.

Danilo got up and began to walk through the streets of Višegrad. Only a few souls had ventured outside. He passed the Dom Kulture and the restaurant where Darinka had taken him on his sixteenth birthday. He passed the town square where his boys had put on the Christmas vertep performances. He passed the sporting goods store where Miša had bought his brother those blue trainers. It was now closed for good, its shelves overturned, its windows broken.

He came upon a woman selling ragged beets from a basket. Danilo handed her a coin and smiled through his tears.

“Be well, Danilo Danilovic,” she mumbled.

With the beet in his hand, he came around the corner, and there was the bridge. Mehmed-paša’s bridge. Empty. As always, the Drina flowed silently beneath. Not for the first time, Danilo was struck by the feat of building such a massive stone construction all those years ago. He thought of all the lives sacrificed in order to erect a road from this side to the other. Danilo made his way out to the kapija, halfway between the two banks. He did not care if they shot him. To die crossing the bridge — this could be the most noble of all deaths.

They did not shoot him. He stood with his beet and placed his hand on the cold stone of the bridge, scrubbed clean of its blood. He watched the river. A few pages from a forgotten book were floating on its surface.

“Stoja,” he said. And he knew then that she was still alive.

• • •

THAT NIGHT, HE AGAIN tried to call his son. The phone line clicked and popped, but finally, through some miracle of the wires, his call connected. Miroslav’s roommate picked up. He said Miroslav had moved out of the flat two weeks earlier. He didn’t know to where. He didn’t have a new number.

“This is an emergency,” said Danilo hopelessly. “I need to know where he lives. Who knows where he lives now?”

“No offense to you, but your son’s a bit of an asshole,” said the roommate. “He didn’t pay rent for six months, so we kicked him out.”

“He’s a good boy,” said Danilo. “It’s not easy.”

“He’s a dick. I’m not saying it’s your fault. Some people are just dicks,” the roommate said and hung up.

• • •

TWO DAYS LATER, Danilo awoke to Dragan knocking on his door.

“They found her,” he said.

“Where?”

“In the river.”

“In the river?” said Danilo. “Are you sure it’s her?”

“They say it’s her.”

“Did she suffer?”

“She’s not suffering now.”

“Oh, Stoja!” He leaned against the threshold. “Stoja, my Stoja.”

His cousin kissed his cheek, and the two men stood like this for some time.

• • •

THE POLICE, WHO SUPPOSEDLY had found the body in the river and deemed the death an accidental drowning, had sealed the body in a coffin and then delivered the coffin to the town morgue, with strict instructions to keep the coffin shut.

“I’d like to see her,” Danilo said to the mortician when he went to identify the body and sign the paperwork.

“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” said the mortician.

“But how do I know it’s her?” said Danilo.

“She’s already been identified.”

“But what if she’s not dead?”

“She’s dead. It’s my job,” said the man. His voice turned soft and instructive as he handed Danilo the papers. “I know this can be difficult, but you must sign here, please. The signature is the first step in the process.”

• • •

AT THE FUNERAL, Danilo wore his only suit. Stoja had helped him choose it for their wedding. Only Dragan, his parents, and a handful of friends attended. Stoja’s two boys were not present to see their mother being put to rest. Their closest neighbors were also conspicuously absent, perhaps fearful of how their presence might be interpreted by Lukic and his men.

• • •

SOMEONE HAD NESTLED A vase of wild lilacs into the dirt of the freshly dug grave. The doll made of wood and string that they had seen next to the red bicycle was sitting against the vase. There was no note.

Halfway through the service, it began to rain. The priest paused in his sermon to look up at the sky. His tongue slipped out between his lips and caught a drop of water, and then he bowed his head and began again.

5

Less than a month later, as an unusually cold, early fall descended upon them, Danilo sold his last cow to Slavko Novakovic.

“Where are you headed?” Slavko asked, rubbing the side of the animal.

“To find my son,” said Danilo.

He found locks for the farmhouse and the barn. He had never locked these buildings before, and the click of the mechanism made his blood run cold. Before he closed up the barn, he stood before Stoja’s altar. The wax frozen into white rivers. He looked up and saw the elephant watching him through the dust-filled darkness. He touched its lone ear. A certain kind of warmth.

“Someday, you will walk the bridge,” he said. “I promise.”

He took down one of her icons and slipped it into his bag.

At the bus stop, two idle young men in White Eagle uniforms sat on the hood of a car, picking at the remains of what looked like a chocolate cake. They watched the line of people shuffling onto the bus. As he boarded, Danilo glanced back. One of the men blew him a kiss.

• • •

MANY HOURS LATER, after passing through what seemed like dozens of army checkpoints, in which IDs were shown and reshown and a man he did not recognize was dragged screaming from the bus by his legs, they finally arrived in the city. Rolling past row after row of tall buildings, Danilo realized he hadn’t been to Belgrade since that trip with his mother to see the illuminated manuscript forty years ago. Had it really been that long? He tried to decide what was worse: having never left Višegrad or not realizing he had never left Višegrad.

He was gathering up his two small bags from beneath the bus when he heard someone yell his name.

“Danilo! Danilo Danilovic!”

He turned and saw Ilija Dragonovic trundling toward him in a suit that could barely contain his great body. Ilija was a distant relative who had left for the city twenty years ago. Danilo had written to him about his arrival but had never received a reply.

“Danilo Danilovic!” Ilija hugged Danilo as if they were brothers. “Welcome to Belgrade. Everything is such shit, but welcome.”

Ilija was over two meters tall. He was a former basketball player who had flirted with playing on the national team before a blown-out knee destroyed his jump shot. Now he made a living selling washing machines.

“Business is no good,” he said, weaving his car through the crowded streets. “No one wants to buy a new unit. Do you want to buy a new unit? No, because maybe a bomb will fall on your house tomorrow and then your new unit is totally fucked. I understand. But I’m still pissed off — WATCH OUT, LADY!” He swerved, then smiled at a terrified Danilo. “It’s important to remind people of life, yes?”

They arrived at Ilija’s warehouse in Vracar, where Danilo would stay until he got his feet on the ground. When Ilija rolled up the graffitied garage door to the storage room, Danilo saw a small army cot among the stacks of plastic-wrapped washing machines. He could see his breath.

“There’s a shower and toilet in the back,” said Ilija. “Hold down the handle for at least three seconds; otherwise it all comes up again. It’s not the good kind of déjà vu.”

“Okay,” said Danilo.

“I used to come here to think,” said Ilija, lighting a cigarette. “But I don’t think anymore, so there you are.”

“Thank you,” said Danilo. “It’s only for the time being. Until I find Miroslav.”

“You know, I was so sorry to hear about Stojanka,” said Ilija. “I always liked her. She was a beautiful woman.”

“Thank you, Ilija.”

“Shit, man,” said Ilija, shaking his head. “I just can’t believe it. One day she is here, and then she’s gone.”

The warehouse was sandwiched between a tennis club and a train yard filled with rusting boxcars. The nets at the club had all been taken down for the season, but despite the frigid temperatures, a single old man still showed up each day in tennis whites to serve a bucket of balls across the court. Danilo would watch him rumble through his routine, tightening and snapping his body like whip. The balls made a light and easy sound coming off the man’s racket. Every serve looked good, but then, there was no net to halt the ball’s progress.

It was freezing in the storage room. There was a single radiator that sputtered and spat but only grew tepid to the touch. Danilo shivered through the nights, and, in an act of midnight desperation, he ripped open a carton of hand towels and carefully spread them over his blanket in rows, like uncooked bacon. He lay on his cot in the darkness, mummified and alone.

Soon after his arrival, he took a bus over to the university at Studentski Trg. The bus was shockingly crowded. Danilo found himself standing with his face inside another man’s armpit, barely able to breathe. After two minutes he knew he would die inside this bus along with everyone else. He looked down and saw a small child crammed among a sea of legs, twirling a leaf between his fingers.

When the doors finally opened, he tumbled out into the air of the world, gasping. He vowed never to take another bus again. He would walk one hundred kilometers if he had to. Grateful to be alive, he circled the Brutalist buildings of the university square, trying to find the philosophy department and a clue to his son’s whereabouts. Next to a bookstore, there was a two-story mural of a man entering a doorway at the end of a long path. The man appeared decapitated, for his head had already disappeared into the darkness of the doorway.

Danilo asked a student lounging beneath the mural whether he knew Miroslav. Who? Miroslav Danilovic. He did not. Danilo asked another, with similar results. Maybe Miroslav had never even come to the university. Maybe he was no longer in Belgrade.

He was just about to give up when he saw a man wearing eyeliner and army fatigues, smoking a cigarette and rolling a ball across his hands, theatrically, as if he was doing it for money, though there was no place to leave money. If anyone knew where Miroslav was, it would be this man. As Danilo approached, he saw that the man was really no more than a kid.

“He’s the puppeteer, right? Who never says anything?” the kid said after Danilo asked him about his son. He did not look up from his ball play.

“That’s right,” said Danilo, wondering if this was true. “Where does he live?”

“He was in the papers for something or other,” the kid said, still rolling his ball. “He became kind of famous.”

“What do you mean, kind of famous?” asked Danilo.

But the kid didn’t know anything else. He hadn’t seem him around in months.

“When you’re in the paper, I guess you don’t have to go to school anymore.”

“But where does he live?”

The student shrugged. He stopped moving the ball across his hands. From out of his bag he produced a lackluster ferret, which he held up to Danilo, as if offering it to him for a good price.

• • •

AROUND HIM, the city practiced a restrained form of agitation. International sanctions and the toll of an uncertain war had led to a volatile hyperinflation of the dinar. Money that was worth something this morning might be worth nothing this afternoon. It seemed like every couple of months the government would revaluate the currency at a rate of 1 million to 1, so that everyone would instantly become a million times poorer than they had been the day before. The government was thus forced to issue larger and larger denominations; this culminated in “the poet of sympathy,” Jovan Jovanovic Zmaj, having the unfortunate distinction of appearing on the five-hundred-billion-dinar note. The constant uncertainty brought about by these daily fluctuations and the imminent threat of another devaluation left people in a perpetual state of apprehension, as if they were awaiting a terrible diagnosis from their doctor. They tried to go about their daily business, sipping coffee in cafés, window-shopping the wide promenade of Knez Mihailova, but no one bought anything. They were playing the role of citizens in a city that no longer belonged to them.

The little money Danilo had brought quickly evaporated, even when he was not using it. He would often see little torn-up bits of the old currency blowing through the streets like pollen; it was as if an entire civilization had once lived here but now was gone forever. One department store, in a gesture of black humor, wallpapered its window displays with the worthless dinars, a pink-and-violet iconostasis of fallen Yugoslav heroes: Zmaj, Tesla, Andric, a mournful Communist child staring into the future.

Grocery stores, more often than not, had no food on their shelves, and the little food they did have cost almost a month’s wages. Danilo stopped eating at night. He would lie on his cot wearing all of his clothes, shivering, reading from his Bible and praying as his stomach growled in protest. To think: a farmer who could not even feed himself. It was the worst humiliation imaginable.

He began to smoke. He, who had never smoked a cigarette in his life, even as every man in Yugoslavia had merrily puffed away. And now, when there were practically no cigarettes to be had, he had begun to smoke.

“It’s a beautiful habit,” said Ilija as he lit Danilo’s Marlboro. “Forget what the doctors say. They are just jealous. Smoking keeps you healthy as a bull.”

After observing others sifting through trash — respectable people, men in suits, women in hats — Danilo began to follow suit, searching for items that might be bartered for food and cigarettes. Old kerosene lamps. Broken radios. Tailors’ dummies. Cracked spyglasses. Only Gazur, the kind, paunch-laden owner of the Rijeka Café, on the River Sava, would accept his hodgepodge of defective items in exchange for a glass of black currant juice and a bowl of fish stew. It was clear that Gazur had no use for such things, but without fail, whenever Danilo showed up on the terrace, he glowed and began humming old folk songs.

“Would you like a table with a view?” Gazur would ask, relieving him of his latest tawdry procurement. All of the tables had a view of the river, the same view, but nonetheless the question gestured at a rare kind of decadence.

“Please,” said Danilo. “And a glass of black currant juice.”

“Of course! The usual!” And Gazur would go to the kitchen and order the busboy to come out with his accordion and play a song, and Danilo would sit there drinking his juice and then quickly suck on his cigarette so that the smoke entangled with the dying sour notes on the back of his tongue. Danilo could not even say he liked the flavor of smoke and currant together, but he found himself compelled to create this pairing every time, as if pressing at an old wound.

“The river’s beautiful, yes?” Gazur would say.

“Yes.”

“And the music?” The busboy was earnestly banging out the Macedonian song “Zajdi, zajdi, jasno sonce.” Darinka had sung this song to him at night when he could not sleep.

“The music is nice, thank you.”

“Eder likes the turbo-folk, but I tell him, ‘No, you must play the old ones. Play the old ones so we don’t forget.’”

Danilo often wondered, as he watched the river and thought of all that had gone on in the past year, what the source of Gazur’s kindness was. It would have been much easier to let him starve with the rest.

• • •

HE SPENT HIS DAYS wandering the city, searching the unhappy faces for a version of his son. Once, an old woman carrying a basket of stuffed rabbits came up to Danilo on the street. She touched his hand, startling him with the sudden intimacy of this contact.

“My son,” she said, peering into his face.

For a moment he wondered if this woman could be Darinka, whether there had been some colossal mistake and she had never in fact died — she could not die, because she wore the red handkerchief with the little cross. Yet this woman was not wearing a red handkerchief. And then he saw in her eyes that even as she was staring at him, she did not see him. She had the eyes of a child. She was a vagabond. A miscreant. Did others now see him this way, too? When they passed him in the street, did mothers pull their children closer and avert their eyes?

After another moment, the woman let him go. He watched her shuffle away, orbiting a telephone pole before dissolving back into the weary stream of men.

• • •

SLOBODAN FACE was everywhere. Those imploring eyes, the certainty of his uncertain gaze. You could find him splashed across billboards, newspapers, and television screens as he declared one victory after another for Mother Serbia. Yet Danilo also heard a surprising amount of dissent with ’s version of events on his little radio in the warehouse. He listened as academics and activists argued passionately about the injustice of such a war.

“We are witnessing a state suicide. The snake has bitten off its own head. These are the spasms of an animal that is already dead,” a poet said during a talk show.

One night, in a vision probably informed by his flat’s frigid temperatures, Danilo dreamed he was hiking through snowcapped mountains with . They were trying to find his wife’s body. Only knew where the body was hidden. They kept walking and walking, and —sipping from a bottomless thermos of tea — kept promising that the body was just over the next rise, but that summit would only reveal more mountains that closely resembled those from which they had just come. Eder, the busboy from the Rijeka, was also there with his accordion, trying to keep up with them. Eventually he fell in the snow, his accordion making a last gasp as he collapsed, and they left him where he was.

Finally, Danilo turned on his guide, ready to kill him with a knife that had appeared in his hand, only to realize at the last moment that it had not been this whole time, but Miša. The last image before he woke up was his son’s terrified expression as the blade came down upon him.

6

The next morning, a scissor-sharp October morning, Danilo drifted through the city toward Nikola Pašic Square and the Parliament building, as if to confront the real about Stoja’s whereabouts. With the last of his money he bought some warm nuts from a one-eyed vendor of uncertain descent, possibly a Gypsy, possibly a Turk.

“Please enjoy,” the vendor said with great kindness.

Danilo was studying the majesty of the olive-colored Parliament dome when he noticed a small group of onlookers clustered just off the square, next to a children’s playground. The crowd was focused intently on something in their midst. Danilo walked over, casually munching on his bag of nuts, letting their oily warmth settle into the foundation of his teeth.

When he got closer, he caught his breath.

The crowd was assembled around a black box. A man was hunched next to the box, his head covered by a velvet curtain.

Danilo ran up to them.

“Miroslav!” he yelled. Those assembled stared at him warily.

“Miroslav!” he called again. He grabbed the man beneath the curtain and pulled him up. It was an old man with a gold tooth.

“Did I do it wrong?” said the man.

“Where’s the puppeteer?” asked Danilo.

The man looked confused. “I’m sorry. I did not have enough,” he said.

“What?”

The man pointed to a handwritten sign propped up on the ground:

I WILL BE RIGHT BACK.

FEEL FREE TO WATCH THE SHOW.

PLEASE, BE GENTLE WITH THE BOX

AND ONLY 1 AT A TIME.

SUGGESTED DONATION:

Next to the sign was a little wooden cashbox with a slit on top.

“Is that Tesla?” said Danilo.

“It means ten billion dinars. That’s the note Tesla’s on,” someone said behind him.

“That was the old bill. Tesla’s on the five-thousand-dinar now,” said a woman.

“No, it’s the thousand-dinar bill,” said another. “But it’s worth more than before.”

“No. That was the old currency.”

“Well, it’s too much, whatever it is. Who would pay that?”

“It doesn’t mean that,” said a man with a mustache. “It’s not referring to money. It’s a metaphor. It means you must bring your imagination to the box. That’s what my friend said.”

“Can I see?” said Danilo to the old man whom he had interrupted.

“There’s a line,” said the woman.

“But my son made this.”

Their collective groan made it clear that the people did not believe him. Embarrassed, he slipped behind them, awaiting his turn, glancing around nervously, half expecting his son to materialize out of the city at any moment.

Nearly everyone put something into the cashbox, though it was clear that most were just getting rid of old worthless bank notes, whether they featured Tesla or not. They would then hunch over, duck their heads beneath the black curtain, and emerge five minutes later wearing a dazed look. One woman waited for her friend to watch, then they embraced and moved to the nearby playground, where they spoke excitedly, occasionally gesturing at the box. After watching the show, the man with the mustache circled the box six or seven times, inspecting it from all angles before finally shaking his head and walking away.

When it was finally his turn, Danilo bypassed the cashbox altogether, not caring what the others might think, and hastily threw the curtain over his head.

He was met with darkness and silence, tempered only by the faintest of rumbles from the city beyond. Danilo was suddenly struck by how vulnerable he was, crouched like this in the middle of the street. Anyone could come up behind him and punch him, rob him, kill him. There were others to protect him, to shelter him, but maybe they were pointing at him as he stood beneath the curtain: That one. He’s the crazy one. He’s the one who didn’t pay. Him. Take him.

He waited patiently, but the darkness remained. Perhaps the box was broken. Perhaps the whole point was to get strangers to crouch down in this ridiculous posture, to pay money, thinking some little entertainment was coming simply because others had done it before them, but in the end there was no entertainment, and this expectation of entertainment was what had so upset people.

And then: soft music, coming from just in front of his ear. The sound of a few violins joined by a pair of cellos and then an accordion. The music felt very close but very far away at the same time. The song being played was familiar, though Danilo could not name the tune. Maybe it did not have a name.

The darkness was softening. But this was not quite right: the darkness was no longer darkness. There was a feeling of rising from the depths. A sense of shape. An awakening into form.

A scene appeared before him. Danilo could see a river. Not an image of a river, but an actual river. He could see the water moving, turning back into itself as water does. There was a river somewhere inside that box. But how could it be? From where, and to where, did it flow? And now he could see there was a bridge over this river. Not just any bridge: the bridge. The Turkish Bridge. Tiny, resplendent, complete with its kapija, and the central pillar beneath with its grated opening, inside which a black Arab was supposedly imprisoned. It was the one detail Miroslav had remembered from the book. Had he also included a miniature Arab inside that pillar? An Arab who stared longingly at the river that flowed into the distant sea?

Danilo began to cry. How he missed his home! How he missed her! How he missed the life they had once lived!

He was again taken by the scene. How on earth had Miroslav made a river inside a box?

Something was moving slowly into the frame. At first Danilo could not tell what it was, but then he saw it, unmistakable and true: an elephant. Yes — there was the trunk, the flapping of the ears. A tiny elephant, no more than five centimeters tall, walking along the road. It was all so real, so perfect — the way the elephant leaned heavily into each step, the left front leg slightly lame, the little tail now and then fluttering away at the invisible flies. Its walk was a kind of dance, in time to the lilt of the music. And as with the box he had seen back home, there weren’t any strings. No wires or tracks or anything to betray the presence of a controller. The elephant moved on its own. Although this was not quite true: the elephant had a rider on its back. A minuscule man with a whip. The rider was directing the elephant to walk across the bridge. Danilo sensed some hesitancy in the animal, as if it knew what would happen next. Would the bridge hold? It must. It had been used for so many years. Hundreds and hundreds of years. But then Danilo remembered that this bridge was not the bridge back home, that this bridge had not been built by the hands of slaves and artisans and soldiers and thieves. This bridge could fit in his lap, and so: could this bridge, this whisper of a bridge, hold an elephant ridden by a man?

Danilo noticed then that the elephant was not right. Half of its body looked as if it had been eaten away by wolves. There was a great hole in its stomach, and you could see inside it, even as it was walking past the last building and onto the first stretch of the bridge. There were no guts or blood inside the animal, only metal, mechanics, pulleys. He noticed then that the elephant had only one ear.

Yes. He understood now. This elephant was the elephant in the barn. Incomplete, but complete. Moving. Walking.

He leaned in, staring at the rider on top, who was no taller than a thimble. He could almost see it. He cursed the age of his eyes. He squinted. Yes. It was. It had to be. It was his son. Beneath the black curtain, Danilo crossed himself twice.

The elephant had arrived at the center of the bridge, next to the kapija. It stopped, flapping its ears. The music, too, hung still, waiting. The tiny Miroslav seemed to gesture with his whip, and then the elephant shook its head and Miroslav gestured again and whipped the elephant’s back, and slowly the animal turned, shuffling to its left, placing one, then two of its feet onto the bridge’s parapet. The violins rising, urged on by the hook-slant caress of the accordion.

“No,” he whispered.

The elephant seemed to hear him, for it paused, its body open to the world, straining. He could see the whirring gears inside its rib cage. The music gathering force, the cello working itself into a frenzy, the violins everywhere at once, and then the creature was lifting itself, up and over the parapet, and Miroslav was urging it onward, whipping the creature with a whip the size of a thread. The music crescendoed as gravity caught the elephant and it started to fall toward the surface of the water and then—

Black. The violins sounded once more and everything went quiet.

Danilo waited for the light to return, but there was no more. A click from somewhere in the darkness, a flipping of a switch. He could hear the muffled traffic again. The show was over.

He lifted his head from beneath the curtain, blinking at the dingy city that greeted him. A woman with several shopping bags full of bottled water looked at him impatiently. He stepped aside so that she could have her turn.

• • •

DANILO WAITED by the black box all day. There was always a small line of people, and passersby would see the line and stop and talk and then begin to wait themselves. Occasionally children would swing on the swings in the little playground and then come over, curious, and they too would put the curtain over their heads and watch the show, and some would come out crying, running back to their parents.

At one point, a photographer came up and snapped photos of the box and of those waiting to see it. Shortly after, a group of soldiers, on their way to guard the Parliament building, stopped and examined the box, poking at the curtain with the muzzles of their guns, though none of them stayed to watch the show.

Some patrons put money into the little wooden box. Some did not. One man slipped in a letter. Danilo began to predict who would give money and who would not. There was a recurring conversation about what was meant by the picture of Tesla and, by extension, how much the show was worth.

“Nothing is worth anything,” a woman in dark glasses declared, and she looked as if she meant it, though she stayed to watch the show three times.

Danilo himself rewatched the elephant perhaps a dozen times. Each time, it was the same: the creature reached the point of falling and then the scene went dark, never allowing the animal to complete its fall. And there was never any evidence of previous falls. He began to look for clues, to watch the rider’s movements, to stare at the meticulously rendered houses in the background. He noticed more things: laundry drying on balconies, a crow watching from a nearby tree. After witnessing the interrupted fall for the fifth time, he knew the movements and the timing so well, it was like watching a recurring dream. After a certain point, he could not be sure it was not a recurring dream.

Miroslav never showed. Danilo marveled at how he could leave something so remarkable and precious out on the street like this, where anyone could steal it, where anyone could take the money in the wooden case, even if this money did not amount to much. And yet the box remained. Where was the creator of all this? No one could say. The sign, it turned out, was a lie: he would not be right back.

Night fell. Danilo was hungry. The vendor selling nuts had already packed up his cart, but Danilo did not dare search for food, fearing that as soon as he left, his son would come back and fetch his box.

The streetlights sputtered, popped on, one by one. Danilo sat on the sidewalk, watching the box. The number of people on the street had thinned. A policeman came up to him and nudged him with his baton, telling him to move on.

“I’m waiting for my son,” he said.

“Where is he?”

“He told me to watch his puppet box while he was gone.” He pointed across the street, though the black box had been swallowed by shadows. The policeman looked confused.

“Have you seen it?” said Danilo. “It’s really something. My son is a great artist.”

“Get out of here, old man,” said the policeman.

Danilo drifted to a park across the street. From such a distance, he could just barely make out the silhouette of the box. He was hungry and cold. He sat on a bench and felt sleep coming, though he was afraid to close his eyes. Finally, reluctantly, he walked back through the city to his storage room, which felt comparatively balmy. The little sleep he got was interrupted by an insistent vision of his son coming to take the box away in the middle of the night, leaving nothing behind but an empty sidewalk.

At first light, he jumped up and ran back to Nikola Pašic Square. To his relief, the box was still there. The same sign, the same wooden cashbox, although when he shook it, he found the cashbox was empty. Someone had taken the money! Or maybe Miroslav had visited while he was gone. The thought gave him hope. There was no line to view the box, so Danilo dipped his head under the curtain and waited for the elephant to appear.

As soon as he entered the curtain, he noticed that the smell had changed. Or maybe it was the darkness itself. He waited. This time, when the music came, there was only a lone cello, surfacing from the deep as the light gradually rose. It was the same Turkish Bridge, the same small Drina, though the water was darker, reddish this time, filled with the mud from a heavy rain.

There were people on the bridge. The sky had changed. By the pinkness of the stone, Danilo guessed it to be early evening. He had been to the bridge many times at this hour; it was one of his favorite times to visit, to feel the valley slinking toward nightfall.

Fighting the soft blur in his eyes, Danilo squinted and saw that the people on the bridge were soldiers. He recoiled. They were White Eagles. The soldiers were standing and talking, their guns slung casually across their backs. But surely they could not see him. They were inside, and he was outside. He leaned in again, marveling at their littleness, the independence of their movement. Who controlled these men? If he reached out and smashed them with his hand, would they fight back? Would they shoot him with their tiny guns?

And then he saw the blood. The bridge was stained dark crimson with blood. They were standing in the blood, talking casually, smoking.

The cello dipped and swirled with the muddy current of the river.

A woman appeared. From the near bank, where the elephant had walked the day before. She was running, looking back in the direction from which she had come. Her clothes were torn, and she was wearing no shoes. She moved quickly, up and onto the bridge, in the direction of the soilders. Danilo wanted to warn her not to run toward them.

Turn back! Don’t run over there!

She saw the soldiers standing amid the blood and stopped. She was already a quarter of the way across the bridge. She looked back in the direction of Danilo.

He saw then that the woman was his wife.

Stoja.

Good God, Stoja! Turn back! Run! Get out of there!

The men approached her.

“Turn around! Run!” he yelled, his voice damp and close beneath the cloth.

Stoja froze. The cello, waiting, held its note. She looked up at the sky.

“I’m here,” he said. “I can see you, Stoja. I’m here with you.”

She did not hear him. The cello sounded a ferocious chord, and Stoja bowed her head and ran toward the bridge’s parapet, one foot on its top, and then she leaped. Her body making an arc in the air, gravity’s rainbow catching her in slow motion — yes, Danilo was sure that she was falling more slowly than normal. She splashed into the water. The White Eagles were running to the parapet, guns drawn.

“Stoja!” he yelled.

He saw her surface and begin to swim. The sound of tiny gunshots. He winced, transfixed, but she continued to swim until she reached the central pillar of the bridge, with the small grated opening above. This was the buttress that held the Arab. She grasped the stone, pulling herself from the water. The men were looking down at her, aiming, ready to kill her. And then, at the last moment, she slipped through a narrow opening and disappeared into the bridge.

“Stoja!”

His hand thwacked against a thin pane of glass. He swore he could see the figures jostle, as if an earthquake had hit — the bridge trembling, the White Eagles confused — but then the lights and the music abruptly cut out and everything was black again.

Something had gone wrong. It was not meant to end like this.

He took off the curtain, touched the box, looking for her, for a sign, then got back inside the curtain. He waited for ten minutes, but the show would not go on. After hesitating, he shook the box with both hands. A faint rattle. He had broken it. And now Stoja was trapped. She was trapped inside the bridge with the Arab. What would he do to her? Was she safer in there than outside, with the soldiers? He contemplated ripping the whole thing open to rescue her, but instead he fell to his knees and prayed.

Eventually others arrived to see the box. Some he recognized from the day before. Some had been told about the elephant and were eager to see it for themselves. But everyone who put their head under the curtain waited and waited, and nothing happened. And even then, more people came, having heard rumors of the wonders inside the box. They too waited in vain.

“It must be broken,” one said to his companion.

“You were telling me a lie, weren’t you? You were teasing me,” said the companion.

“I was not. I swear. Yesterday there was an elephant. You wouldn’t believe. It was alive. I swear to you.”

“Maybe no one paid enough money,” someone said. “Typical. People are selfish.”

“I paid!”

“I paid twice!” said another.

The crowd grew restless, and Danilo, feeling infinitely guilty for having caused all of this, found himself trying to calm a woman down.

“The show will be on tomorrow,” he said.

“How do you know?” she asked.

“It’s my son’s show.”

“Who’s your son?”

“Miro.” He wasn’t sure why he gave only his son’s nickname, but there it was.

Others came up to him with questions. How did he do it? What was the secret?

He tried to answer as best he could, until he saw an angry man in a beard go up to the box and shake it violently.

“All right!” he yelled to everyone. “The show’s been canceled for today. I’m sorry. We’ve had technical difficulties. Please come back tomorrow. I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”

“Who are you?”

“I work for the artist.”

“Who’s the artist?”

“His name is Miro.”

“Where is he now?”

“He’s gone to get new parts. Please. Come back tomorrow. Everything will be fine tomorrow.”

They left, eventually, grumbling. Danilo found an old newspaper and a pen and wrote out CANCELED TODAY and posted it on top of the sign. Then he went across the street and waited.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder.

“I’m going, I’m going,” said Danilo.

It was a reporter. The man wanted to know whether it was true that Danilo worked for Miro, the artist who had made this cabinet of wonders.

“Cabinet of wonders?” said Danilo.

“That’s what they’re calling it. What would you call it?”

“That sounds good to me.”

“Can you tell us more about Miro?”

“He was born in Višegrad.”

“But how does he do it?”

“Do what?”

“Make them move like that? There are no strings.”

“You can’t see the strings.”

“So there are strings?”

“You’ll have to talk to him about that.”

There were more questions, but, realizing he might have already said too much, Danilo declined to answer them. He told the man to come back the next day. “The artist will be here tomorrow and will be happy to answer any questions.”

“I think your Miro will be a famous man someday,” said the reporter as he left.

Night fell again. The streetlights came on. Danilo had brought warmer clothes this time, and he settled down in the park, a good ways from the box and the playground, but not so far that he couldn’t see it. He waited, watching the changing of the guards in front of Parliament. An ambulance went by. More policemen. At some point, without meaning to, he drifted off to sleep.

When he awoke again, it was still dark. His body was freezing. He opened and closed his fingers and slapped at his legs, trying to conjure some kind of circulation. The soft halo of a streetlight caught the outline of a feral dog slipping into the park. The dog threw him a glance before trotting off. The streets were empty save for the guardsmen in front of Parliament and a lone taxi driver asleep in his cab.

Danilo walked over to the box. He noticed immediately that his announcement about the cancellation had been removed. There was only the original sign. He looked around but saw no one. Then he ducked beneath the curtain.

The darkness had shifted again. He heard gypsy music. Two horns. The quiver of a drum. An accordion.

The lights rose. Again, the bridge.

There were two figures on the bridge. Not soldiers this time. The blood had been scrubbed away. Only a faint stain remained. Danilo rubbed his eyes, shivered. Trying to blink away the blur. The men, familiar but too small to recognize. He thumbed out the sleep and looked again.

Yes.

It was Miroslav. An older version of Miroslav, to be sure, but there was no doubt it was him. The angle of the jawline. It did not change, even at such a size.

Next to him, a big mass of a man, rendered in miniature. Those shoulders. Such shoulders. Danilovic shoulders.

Seeing the two of his boys together, moving together, made him wish they all could be together again. If they were together, then they would all get through this, he knew.

He wanted to tell them that their mother was trapped in the bridge beneath them, but Miša and Miroslav were bending over, lifting something up. It looked to be a body. A body of a man! Who was he? But it was all too quick. They were heaving, rolling the body up and over the wall of the bridge. The body fell. Danilo half expected the scene to cut off then, but the man continued to fall, and there was the sound of a splash and then the body was floating in the river. Danilo again wondered how he had created such a river. A river with no beginning or end?

His sons stood on the bridge, watching the body float out of the frame. A flock of birds moved past overhead. Miroslav turned away, but Miša remained, staring at the river. Then black.

In the darkness, Danilo suddenly felt very cold. He remained crouched as he was, wrapping the curtain around himself, shivering. The show did not start again.

He didn’t know how long he had been like this, his forehead resting against the glass of the box, when he felt a hand on his back, lifting the curtain up and over him. Maybe the police would take him to prison, where he could get warm again. He felt as if he would never get warm again.

Outside, the first rays of sun were already reaching across the sky.

“Tata?”

He looked up, confused, and through the dim light of dawn he stared into the face of a man who vaguely resembled his son. The man had a beard and long, greasy hair beneath a white fedora, but the eyes had not changed.

“Miro,” he whispered.

“Tata.”

“I found you.”

“What’re you doing here?”

“I’m sorry. I was the one who broke the box. I was trying to catch her.” His voice cracked. He swayed on his numb feet, nearly tumbling backwards into the street.

“It’s okay, Tata.” Miroslav grabbed him, hugging him. “It’s okay.”

“I saw her in your box,” Danilo whispered. “I was trying to catch her.”

“It’s okay.”

“She’s inside the bridge.”

“Who?”

“Stoja.”

“What’re you talking about, Tata?”

“She’s dead. Your mother’s dead.”

Miroslav released him. “What?”

“But I saw it in your box. The Chetniks. . She was running, and she jumped. . and now. .” A sob, long buried.

Miroslav was staring at his father.

“But you must’ve known!” said Danilo. “Tell me you know. Your mother was in the box. She jumped off the bridge. I saw it. .”

“That wasn’t her. It was just a woman.”

“But it was her! I saw her go into the bridge.”

“They aren’t people, Tata. They’re just puppets.”

7

They went down the street to a restaurant called the Double. They were the first customers of the day; the waitress, still sleepy-eyed, nodded and made a gesture with her hand that meant they could sit anywhere. Miroslav took off his wool coat and placed his fedora on the seat next to him, as if saving it for another. The waitress came over and they ordered two bowls of hot pasulj. After a moment’s hesitation, Miroslav called her back and added a shot of šljivovica.

Danilo considered his son. The long, greasy hair had grown prematurely thin at the top, and the skin around his eyes was ashen. He looked as if he had not slept in weeks. Danilo spotted a single white hair in the middle of his beard. He resisted the urge to reach across the table and pluck it out.

“Miroslav,” he said, and he was not speaking to his son but to time itself.

Miroslav smiled weakly.

“I’ll also have a šljivovica, please,” Danilo said to the waitress. He realized he had no money.

“I can’t afford this,” he said shamefully.

“It’s okay, Tata. They know me here.”

The šljivovica came and they clicked glasses. Miroslav downed his in one go; Danilo sipped the liquor slowly.

“So,” said Miroslav. “Tell me everything.”

And so Danilo began to speak. About the resort hotel where the White Eagles took the women. About Lukic. About the funeral to which no one came. The anonymous delivery of flowers. He did not mention the sealed casket, that he had never seen the body with his own eyes.

The soups arrived, but neither man touched his bowl.

“This hotel’s the same one we saw that day, above the hammam?”

Danilo nodded.

“I can’t believe it,” said Miroslav. “I can’t believe she’s gone.”

“I should never have told her to take that bicycle,” he said. And then it hit him again, as it had hit him, as it would hit him. He rubbed his eyes.

“It’s not your fault, Tata.” Miroslav reached across the table but did not touch his father.

“I told her to get outside. She was so sad to see you boys go. . you can’t imagine,” he said. “She was in the barn, praying every day. She never went out anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” said Miroslav.

“Oh, what did she do to deserve this? She was so kind.”

“I know.”

“You don’t know. You’ve no idea,” said Danilo. “You weren’t there! Where were you?”

Miroslav was silent.

“I’m sorry.” Danilo exhaled. “I miss her. I want to see her smile again. That’s all I want. I would like to see her smile once more.”

He covered his face again, but the tears came down through the little spaces between his fingers. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes, then he lit a cigarette.

“You smoke now?” said Miroslav, incredulous.

“It’s a strange city.”

“Danilo Danilovic is a smoker. I never thought I would see this day. Can I have one?”

“It’s good to see you,” said Danilo, lighting his son’s cigarette. “I’ve been trying to find you. You’re all I have left.”

“There’s Danilo.”

“Who?”

“Miša.”

“Yes, Miša,” Danilo sighed. “But where is Miša?”

“You haven’t heard from him?”

“I haven’t heard from anyone.”

“He wrote to me a while ago. But nothing since then.”

“Sometimes I worry he’s gone too.”

“If something happened, I would know,” said Miroslav. “He’s just busy, that’s all. He’s fighting a war. Someone needs to fight the war, otherwise there’d be no war.” A little laugh.

“Someone should tell him about his mother. How do we get word to him?”

“I don’t know,” said Miroslav. “I make a point of not talking to those people.”

Danilo looked down at his soup and suddenly felt a sharp pang of hunger. He realized he had not eaten in almost a day. He picked up his spoon and began scooping the soup into his mouth with short, quick strokes.

Miroslav watched him. “You’re hungry.”

“It’s a strange city,” Danilo said through a mouthful of soup.

They slurped at their pasulj in silence.

“I feel like I’ve never eaten before,” said Danilo.

“I know what you mean.”

“A reporter asked me yesterday how you did it.”

“Did what?”

“Those boxes. How you made them.”

“Oh, yes. They always want to know. What did you tell him?”

“I said they should ask you.”

“I was already on the cover of the paper.”

“I heard about that. Was it for the boxes?”

“No. For a piece of graffiti.”

“Graffiti?” said Danilo. “You got into trouble?”

“Not really. A little. But people viewed it like a kind of art.”

“What was the graffiti?”

“It’s not important. People were just looking for a phrase. And I gave it to them. I gave them an anthem.”

Danilo considered this. “You should see the people when they come and look at your boxes. It’s like they’ve seen a ghost. They don’t know what to think. I watched them for a whole day.”

“I know. I’m watching too.”

“You are?”

“Of course. You think I would miss it?”

“You were watching the last few days? From where?”

“I have a place.”

“Then you saw me?”

“Yes.”

“So why didn’t you come and say something?”

“I don’t know.” Miroslav shook his head.

Danilo stared at a little globule of spilled soup seeping into the white tablecloth. “You said they weren’t real people.”

“They aren’t.”

“But I saw you. I saw you and Miša throw that man into the river.”

Miroslav’s eyes went wide.

“I saw you in the box,” said Danilo. “You threw him off the bridge. You turned and Miša stayed. I saw it.”

Miroslav stared at his father. The corner of his mouth was quivering. He suddenly looked angry, as if he might strike his father, and then he said, very quietly: “I killed him, Tata.”

Danilo nodded. “Only God can save us now,” he said and crossed himself.

“No. You don’t understand. It was true. I made this all happen.”

“Made what happen?”

“I killed a gypsy. I killed him and then I pushed him into the Drina.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“You’re the only one who knows. Besides Miša. I killed him. And then the war came.”

“Miro, what are you talking about?”

“That day Miša was stabbed. It wasn’t a bull. It was the gypsy.”

Danilo’s face fell into comprehension. He folded his arms. “I knew it wasn’t a bull,” he said.

“He had a knife and he was robbing us. And then he attacked Miša, and I killed him. I took a tree branch and I crushed his head. And then I pushed him into the river.”

“Who was he?”

“I don’t know. A gypsy. But I killed him. I made all of this happen. I’m the one to blame. . for Mama. . for everything.”

“Stop it,” said Danilo. “You can’t think like this. It’s not how it works. Do you know how much evil there’s been in this country? It’s not any one man’s doing. It’s the work of many. None of us can say we’re innocent anymore.”

“But it’s because of me! I started it. I know this. It’s why she died. Something needed to happen. Something needed to be taken away again. That’s how it works.” His voice was rising. The waitress was staring at them.

“Miroslav,” said Danilo. “Only God knows how it works.”

“There is no God,” said Miroslav.

“Miro—”

“I don’t believe what you believe.”

Danilo was too tired to argue. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’ve missed you, my son. How are you feeling? You look tired.”

“The boxes tear me apart. They’re very difficult to make. I leave a part of myself in them.”

“I can imagine,” said Danilo. He thumbed at the droplet of pasulj sitting on the tablecloth. “Wait — when did this happen?”

“When did what happen?”

“You and Miša. With the man by the river.”

“I told you. It was last April. Before the drought.”

Danilo thought about this. “That must’ve been the Selimovics’ son. That was Mahir. He was found downstream, near Žepa. Everyone thought he was the first.”

“Mahir?”

“Didn’t you hear about that?”

“No.”

“You remember Mahir, though.”

“Mahir?”

“You went to primary school with him. Everyone thought the Serbs had killed him. He was the first Muslim to die in the Drina. After him, there were hundreds. There was a man in Žepa who would fish them out of the river every day and then bury them. That’s all he did. He would give them a Muslim burial. Mahir was the first person he buried.”

Miroslav blinked at his father. “Yes, but the man I killed was a gypsy. I know who Mahir is, and this wasn’t Mahir.”

“He was found in the river, downstream. His head was knocked in. You don’t remember this? They said he was the first.”

“It wasn’t Mahir.”

“Okay,” said Danilo.

“It wasn’t Mahir.”

“Okay,” Danilo said again. “It wasn’t Mahir.”

Miroslav stared at his soup.

“Your brother has done far worse things than you,” Danilo said quietly.

“You don’t know that.”

Danilo reached across the table and touched his son’s hand. The nails were bitten to the quick, the palm soft and damp. Such a foreign hand.

“Miroslav,” he said. His son was crying.

“Miroslav!”

His son looked up at him.

“Your mother loved you. To the very end. I know this. There’s evil in this world, and we cannot solve this evil, but don’t forget your mother. Don’t forget her. Speak her name to everyone you meet. We must not forget her, even if this is all that we can do. She’s the reason I live now. She’s with me when I wake up, when I take a step, when I take breath into my lungs. You may not believe in a God, but I do. I do, and He tells me that she’s here. She’s with us. I saw her in your box. I see her everywhere.”

Miroslav held his father’s hand. “Will you tell me a story, Tata?”

Danilo shook his head. “I’ve no more stories to tell.”

• • •

AFTER THAT, THEY MET every week. When the weather became warmer, they would walk along the Danube, past the shuttered houseboats, pausing to watch the children do their exercises in the fields. Danilo would occasionally ask what his son was doing, but Miroslav would say little, only that he was working on “a show that was going to change everything.”

When Danilo was not with his son, he spent much of his time alone in the storage room, reading his Bible and smoking. In one corner he had set up a little altar to Stoja, with a photograph of her taken one Christmas, smiling next to her two boys. To one side was the icon he had taken from the barn and a couple of candles that he had swiped from a local church.

The weeks and months passed. Without running water or a proper razor, he grew a beard, just like his son. Ilija began to call him Moses.

“Hey Moses, we need to get some culture!” Ilija declared one morning after rolling open the garage door to the warehouse. “No more praying.”

Danilo blinked at the rush of light. “What culture?”

“Museum culture,” said Ilija. “Otherwise we’ll forget we’re a civilized people.”

“I don’t forget.”

“Well, I forget,” said Ilija. “And if you spend enough time with me, you’ll forget too.”

But the source of their culture, the National Museum, was closed.

The sign on the door read:

WE’RE SORRY, BUT DUE TO BUDGETARY CUTS THE MUSEUM IS OPEN ONLY ONE DAY A WEEK, OR BY APPOINTMENT.

It did not list which day of the week the museum would be open.

“Complete and utter bullshit,” said Ilija to the guard out front.

“I just do what they tell me,” said the guard.

“Can we make an appointment?”

“You have to do that before you come.”

“I want to make an appointment with you.”

“It’s impossible.”

“Listen to me: nothing is impossible. If I’ve learned anything from the washing machine, it’s this. Together, you and I can make a deal.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” said the guard.

“Do you know about this?” Ilija said. He handed the guard a wad of bills. The man looked around, pocketed the money, and then opened the door.

“We can be open for a little bit,” he said.

They walked up the grand staircase, past a series of towering marble sculptures, past a shuttered ticket booth, into a room with a vaulted glass ceiling. They were completely alone.

“Imagine. This is my palace, and I’m the king,” said Ilija.

“Why are you the king?”

“You can be a prince,” said Ilija. “Believe me, it’s a much better job. You have no responsibility. All you have to do is make love to beautiful women and ride your horse in the parade.”

They wandered through the halls. Their solitude made the great works of art at once personal and impossibly distant, as if they had broken into another man’s house and were perusing his private collection.

They stopped in front of Composition II, by Mondrian.

Great blocks of color. A perfect field of red.

“I’ve wasted my life,” said Ilija.

It was the sound of their feet on the polished floor that made Danilo remember Miroslav of Hum’s illuminated manuscript. This was the same museum he had visited as a child.

He found the book inside a glass case in the same room on the second floor where he had seen it forty years ago. Open to the same page, even. The saints, lugubrious, resplendent as ever. Aware of all that had gone on, but unchanged in posture and expression.

His mother had stood right there.

“Do you see, Ilija?” whispered Danilo. “It’s from 1186.”

“I keep telling you: we come from great people. Look at this book we made,” Ilija said, his face glowing from the light coming off the page. “We’ve just lost our way. That’s all.”

He put his hand on his heart and began to sing “Uz Maršala Tita.”

“What’re you doing?” said Danilo. “This is a museum. You can’t sing in here.”

“This is our palace. As king, I can do whatever I want.”

He began to sing again, louder this time, and after a moment of staring at his friend, Danilo joined him. Together they belted out Tito’s anthem, serenading Miroslav’s saints, who looked bemused and even a touch flattered:

Rod prastari svi smo, a Goti mi nismo.

Slavenstva smo drevnoga cest.

Ko drukcije kaže, klevece i laže,

Našu ce osjetit’ pest.

Of an ancient kindred we are, but Goths we are not.

Part of ancient Slavdom are we.

Whoever says otherwise slanders and lies,

and will feel our fist.

Danilo made an appointment to return. And return again. Just so he could stand near the book. He even took Miroslav to see his namesake’s manuscript. His son was underwhelmed.

“You named me after a tyrant.”

“I didn’t name you for him.”

“It doesn’t matter who you named me for. I’m still named after him.”

“Forget him and just look at the book.”

“That’s not how it works. The book is nothing without its maker.”

• • •

DANILO RETURNED so many times to see Miroslav’s Gospels that the museum staff got to know him well. The guard who had first let them in was named Boris.

“Hey, Dino,” said Boris. This was what he called him. “Dino, you should work here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you should work here. They got someone else, but he’s a drunk. He can’t hardly stand up. You can stand up, right?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a lock. The job’s yours, I’m telling you.”

So Danilo became a guard at the museum. They gave him a uniform with a tie clip. It was two sizes too large, but it was still a uniform with a tie clip. On the day the museum was open to the public (this changed regularly, but usually it was a Tuesday or a Wednesday), he had to work all three floors, though he would always try to maneuver himself to the station on the second floor when a patron came through. He liked to be there when they walked into the room containing Miroslav’s Gospels. He would quietly stand at the doorway, watching them watch the book. If visitors looked particularly transfixed, he would go over and offer to show it to them.

“I don’t normally do this,” he would say.

Then he would carefully lift off the glass case, put on a pair of white gloves, and turn the pages of the great book for them. He was fairly sure that if his boss caught him doing this, he would be fired instantly. But it was worth it.

“It’s from 1186,” he said to a young woman and her son.

“It’s beautiful,” said the woman. “Isn’t it beautiful, Danilo?”

“Yes,” said the boy.

“His name is Danilo?”

“It’s a family name,” the woman said.

The three of them stood and stared at the book in silence.

• • •

A YEAR WENT BY. The dinar — now the novi dinar — had stabilized, officially pegged 1:1 to the deutsche mark. After bouncing around on several astronomical banknotes, Nikola Tesla now presided calmly on the five-novi-dinar bill. Though there was still a shortage of food, and though public buses were still stuffed dangerously full of people, and though there were still only a few cars on the streets because of the oil embargo, people had grown used to the struggle of wartime life. There was even a kind of humorous nostalgia for it, although the war was not over. Turbo-folk singers lamented the end of difficult times that still remained.

On four separate occasions, Danilo had written Miša a letter to explain all that had happened. He had sent these to a variety of Srpska army bases in eastern Bosnia, but none of the letters had gotten through. This became evident when Miša again wrote to Miroslav in the late spring, saying he had been stationed above Sarajevo next to the 1984 Winter Olympics bobsled track, where he would loft mortars down into Stari Grad. He said he was now being moved to Srebrenica, where there were “still some problems to be solved.” The joyous news of his son’s still being alive was tempered by these details of his involvement in the horrors of war.

I might be able to get some time off and come see you in Belgrade soon if things don’t get busy again here. There’s never time to leave because the fight is too important right now. . Commander Vukov says we are close to winning.

If you speak with Mama or Tata, tell them I say hello and I love them. I wrote to them but wasn’t sure if they received my letter. I hope they are fine.

Your brother,

Danilo

“He still doesn’t know,” said Danilo when Miroslav showed him the letter. “In his world, she is still alive.”

He thought of his letters lying in bags in the back rooms of Srpska army bases as mortars rattled the ceilings. He thought of those bags, filled with undelivered letters, filled with impossible truths.

• • •

IN LATE JULY, Danilo and Miroslav met at the Rijeka. Miroslav ordered a cappuccino and Danilo ordered a black currant juice. As soon as they were sitting, Gazur sent Eder out to play his reluctant accordion, a rendition of “Stani, stani Ibar vodo.” Danilo, thinking Miroslav would not approve, was about to wave Eder away, but his son’s expression seemed content with the music.

It was early evening. They smoked and watched the light come in off the Sava. A lone canoeist was working his way northward to the point where the two rivers met. It occurred to Danilo then that all rivers were the same river.

“I heard from Miša again,” said Miroslav.

“Why doesn’t he ever write to me?”

“He did write to you. He doesn’t know you’re in Belgrade.”

“He didn’t mention Stoja?”

“No.”

“What about that mess in Srebrenica?”

“He didn’t say anything about that. He said he had been blessed by a priest and that because of this, a Muslim soldier had fired at him from close range and missed. He said he was down in Žepa and even got to swim in the Drina, but he didn’t make it to Višegrad to see you.”

“I’m not in Višegrad.”

“He doesn’t know that.”

“Višegrad,” said Danilo. “I wonder what’s become of it.”

“But he sounded fine, considering.”

“Mihajlo. Danilo.” Turning over the name. “What could I have done?”

“Don’t worry, Tata. He’ll be all right.”

Danilo shook his head. “You can tell they aren’t saying what happened in Srebrenica.”

“An American said ten thousand Muslims were killed in six days. They were hunting them in the forest. Children too.”

“Good God.” Danilo closed his eyes then shook out another cigarette. “Miša didn’t say anything about that?”

“It’ll all be finished soon. Before the year’s out,” said Miroslav.

“You think so?”

“’s pushing his luck. Even Clinton—dickless, prickless Clinton—won’t be able to put up with him much longer.”

“I never knew you were such an optimist, Miro.” Twining the smoke with a sip of juice and wincing at the terrible beauty of it all.

Eder started in on “Ajde Slušaj, Slušaj Kaleš Bre And¯o,” and Gazur came over with two slices of cherry štrudla.

“A gift,” he said. “Compliments of the house.”

“I might be dead without that man,” Danilo said as he watched Gazur waddle away. “Everything has been compliments of the house.”

“Well, it’s a big house. You know he runs one of the biggest black market rings in the city.”

“No!”

“I thought you knew. It’s how he and Ilija know each other. Why do you think he has so many compliments to give?”

“Gazur? But he’s such a good man.”

“To you, maybe.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“They say he was born a Jew but renounced his faith.”

“Now you’re lying.”

“This is only what they say.”

Miroslav seemed to grow serious. He took down the last of his cappuccino and then looked at his father. “Look, Tata. I have to go away for a while.”

“What do you mean?”

Miroslav looked over at Eder on the accordion. “You can’t tell anyone,” he said. “No reporters. Not Ilija. Not anyone.”

“Where are you going?”

“Sarajevo.”

Danilo blinked. “Sarajevo? But it’s under siege.”

“Oh, is it? I hadn’t heard.”

“It’s not safe, Miroslav. You’ve seen the pictures. They’re shelling it from—”

“Tata, it’s not safe anywhere. The Americans could drop a bomb on us right now. So should we not sit here? Should we not sit here and take our drinks because of a bomb that may never come?”

“But you can’t even get near there. How will you get inside the city?”

“You can always get inside. Getting inside isn’t the problem.”

“And then? And then what’re you going to do?”

“Tata, I need you to promise you won’t say anything. I mean, it would be very bad if they found out I told you.”

“If who found out? What are you talking about, Miroslav?”

“I need you to promise.”

“Okay,” he said. “I promise. I won’t say anything.”

Miroslav shifted in his chair. “Last year I was contacted by some men who are living in the United States. They’re a very important group — they’ve done incredible work all over the world. I saw a video once of this miniatures installation they did in northern Russia in the 1960s. It was in the middle of a nuclear test explosion. The installation was destroyed by the blast. You can see the bomb and then the blast coming. . Well, it changed everything for me. I mean, you see something like that and it’s as if there’s your life before and then your life after. Things could never be the same again. And I knew what I was supposed to do.”

“You mean make those boxes.”

“Yes, but it’s more than that. . It was like I saw the world in a different light, a different set of possibilities. Suddenly there was a way for me to be me.”

“And so these people. . they contacted you?”

“They had heard about my work through a professor in the philosophy department here. He knows these guys, he’s a great admirer of theirs, and now they asked me for help putting on their show in Sarajevo. I mean, it’s a huge honor. These are my heroes.”

“But of all the places in the world, why would you want to put on a show in Sarajevo? You could be killed!”

Miroslav shook his head. “Oh, never mind, Tata. Forget I even told you.”

“I’m sorry,” said Danilo. “Where are you going to do it? On the street? Are there snipers?”

“We’re performing in the National Library. It’s burned down, but the shell of the building’s still there. It’s a magnificent space. Here, look.” He slid a photograph across the table. “Can you imagine?”

Danilo examined the photo. “You’ll put a black box in there?”

“No, no. They have a whole show. They’ll use some of my technology, but they have an agenda. They have a whole plan.”

“What’s the show about?”

“Many things. It’s about many things.”

“Like what?”

“Like many things. String theory. Neutrinos.”

“Neutrinos?”

“Invisible particles that pass through everything.”

Fig. 2.7. National Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Winter 1993

Photo by R. Richards, from Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 988

Danilo returned the photograph. “Can’t you wait until the war is finished to do this?”

“No. It has to be now. That’s the whole point.”

“But do people really want to watch something like that during a war? If I’m trying to survive, maybe I just want food and water instead of a show about neutrons.”

“Neutrinos,” said Miroslav. “But this is what this group does. The whole performance is what it is because of where it’s taking place.”

“Well, it doesn’t sound right to me.”

“Fine,” said Miroslav. “It doesn’t sound right to you. Let’s just forget it, okay?”

“Okay.”

They ate the pie and smoked and listened to Eder working the accordion.

Gazur came over. “How is the štrudla?”

“Delicious,” said Danilo.

“The river’s beautiful today, isn’t it?”

“It’s always beautiful.”

“Your father’s a real man,” Gazur said to Miroslav. “I meet a lot of men, but none like your father. The world needs more men like him, wouldn’t you agree?”

“He’s a real man,” Miroslav agreed.

“Father and son.” Gazur smiled. “It’s good to see.”

When he had gone again, Danilo turned to Miroslav. “He’s really into the black market?”

“He’s the biggest there is. He has a whole warehouse of guns. Drugs. Prostitutes. Everything.”

“Gazur,” said Danilo, shaking his head. “What next?”

After a while, he said, “You know, back home, your elephant’s still in the barn.”

Miroslav laughed. “That old thing. I told you to burn it!”

“I’ll never burn it. So long as I live. Stoja’s altar is there.”

Miroslav nodded. His face grew somber.

“I miss her,” he said.

“Yes,” said Danilo. Then: “This group from the U.S., they like you?”

“They said I was the best they’ve ever seen.”

“They did?”

“It’s a chance of a lifetime, Tata. It will be my greatest achievement.”

“I’m proud.”

“Thank you.”

“You’ve become a man now.”

“Why does everyone keep saying that?”

“You’ll be careful?”

“Of course, Tata,” he said. “I’m always careful.”

“I can’t lose everything again.”

8

The next week, Danilo found a homemade postcard slipped beneath the door to the storage house.

Fig. 2.8. Postcard of Neutrino Collision, Hydrogen Bubble Chamber (1970)

From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 991

At first he thought it might be from Miša, and his heart began to race, but when he flipped it over there was no stamp or address, only the minuscule handwriting of his eldest:

Vraticu se uskoro.

— M.

“I’m sorry,” said Ilija later that day at the Rijeka. “Where did he go?”

“I’m not supposed to say.”

Ilija looked down at his hands, then reached into his bag.

“I wasn’t going to show you this. A friend found it. From last year. You said Miroslav had been in the papers.”

“That’s right.”

Ilija handed him a rumpled copy of Naša Borba, a leftist monthly.

On the cover was a picture of Miroslav and an older man, each holding a pipe; Miroslav’s was grotesquely larger than the other man’s. The older man was wearing some kind of peasant’s costume. He looked strangely familiar. The two men stood next to a wall, which was covered in a black-and-red graffito.

“Ja nisam takav sin oca,” it read—“I am not my father’s son.” This was also the title of the article.

“Who’s that other man?” said Danilo.

“He looks like you, doesn’t he? That’s what I thought.”

“But what does it mean?”

“Everyone said this was a big antiwar statement. I thought it was stupid. I didn’t realize it was him.”

Danilo read the article. In the accompanying interview, Miroslav claimed his graffito was not a play on the common phrase “Kakav otac takav sin” (“Like father, like son”), but rather that he was paraphrasing another famous graffito, seen on the crumbled wall of the Berlin Zoo in the aftermath of World War II: “Sind wir mehr als dieses Erbe. .” (“We are more than this gift. .”).

N.B.: But this doesn’t seem like a paraphrase.

M.D.: Well, exactly, exactly. We can no longer paraphrase our parents’ generation. And the generation before. We see what happens. We repeat their mistakes. Carnage.

N.B.: Would you say you have a political agenda?

M.D.: I have no agenda. I’m an artist.

N.B.: Surely everyone has an agenda, whether they’re willing to state it publicly or not.

M.D.: My job is to make my work. The audience can decide what it means. I can’t control their reaction.

N.B.: Do you think the artist becomes more critical to society in wartime?

M.D.: The artist is always critical to society, even though the artist must end up hating society. War happens when society forgets its artists.

N.B.: War happens for many reasons.

M.D.: War happens for only one reason: we cannot see past our own death.3

“No offense, but your son has always rubbed me the wrong way,” said Ilija when Danilo looked up from the paper. “I never knew where he stood. I never saw him with any girls.”

“He’s a good boy.”

“Yes, yes, of course. I meant no offense,” said Ilija. He grunted, clapping his hands. “Aye. I’m so constipated I could punch a horse. Gazur! Gazur. . come here. Do you have something to get this train started again?”

• • •

DANILO BEGAN to collect newspapers. He started listening to the radio again. There were more reports of mass graves being found in Srebrenica. Even some of the Serbian press began to call it an atrocity, though others claimed it was revenge for a previous massacre performed by the Muslims. Perhaps sensing an endgame, had begun to slowly distance himself in his speeches from Radovan Karadžic and the Bosnian Serbs.

But no news came from Sarajevo. No news of a show in the library that was no longer a library. Danilo lay on his back and listened to the radio, but there was nothing. No mention of either of his sons. He lay among the washing machines and smoked and listened and waited.

Then, on August 28, a 120-millimeter mortar fell onto Mula Mustafe Bašeskije Street, just outside the busy Markale Market, in the heart of Sarajevo. Thirty-seven people were killed, and nearly one hundred wounded. The news over the radio was sketchy at first; the newsman initially claimed the attack had been perpetrated by Bosnian authorities on their own people, to garner sympathy from the international community. This would later be meticulously refuted during the 2006 ICTY appeal case of Stanislav Galic via a thorough analysis of the depth of the impact crater (22cm ±2cm), the angle of descent (60º ±5º), the bearing of the shell (20º ±3º), and the charge of the mortar (0 ±3), narrowing the Markale projectile’s origins to two possible positions above the city, both of which were held by Srpska troops in August 1995.4

Prompted by the Markale massacre, on August 30, after years of waiting on the sidelines, NATO began Operation Deliberate Force, a comprehensive air offensive against Bosnian Serb positions. Belgrade ground to a halt, wondering if the bombs would soon drop on them.

• • •

DANILO SAT in the Rijeka, listening to the peculiar silence of the city. Even Gazur’s customary cheer came off as oddly hollow.

“The river’s still beautiful,” he said. “No matter what happens.”

“Where’s Eder?”

“He left. He didn’t want to play the old songs anymore. So he quit and went to war.” Gazur waved his hand dismissively. “Bah! Now he can play all the turbo-folk he wants. This war kills me.”

“But a war can also be profitable, yes?” said Danilo.

“Nothing is worth the price of life, my friend. I would trade everything I have for peace tomorrow.”

Danilo drank his black currant juice and smoked. He put his hand on the morning’s newspaper but did not open it. The night before he had dreamed he was floating down a river. Not the Sava or the Drina, but a mighty river in a jungle. At some point he looked up and saw that the river abruptly vanished into thin air. In the dream, he wondered if he was actually inside one of Miroslav’s black boxes. Whether he was tiny now. He had awoken just before he got to the point where the water ended. He did not get to see what was beyond the box.

Ilija came out onto the terrace.

“Ilija,” said Danilo, surprised. “Come, join me. Let me tell you about my dream. You can tell me what it means.”

“Hello, friend,” said Ilija.

“There’s no music. Eder has gone to war. .” He saw the expression on Ilija’s face. “What is it?”

“Your son,” said Ilija.

“My son?” Visions of Miša, shot in a field. “Which son?”

“Miroslav.”

“Miroslav?”

At this precise moment, Gazur came up to the two men, but, seeing their expressions, he froze, understanding everything, and withdrew.

Ilija wiped some sweat from his brow and grimaced. “I’m so sorry, my friend,” he said. “They found him in his flat. They said he had suffocated.”

“Suffocated?” Danilo’s body froze. “How?”

“That’s all they said. My friend’s a policeman. He called me just now. I went to the warehouse to find you.” Ilija shook his head. “This world is such shit.”

“But he was supposed to be in Sarajevo! Are you sure it was him?”

“A neighbor found him in his flat. The door was open.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. My friend didn’t know anything more. He’s expecting you to call.” He handed Danilo a slip of paper.

Danilo looked at the number. “He didn’t even tell me he was back!”

“I’m very sorry, my friend,” said Ilija. “I wish I could do something more. His body is at the morgue in St. Sava’s hospital. I can drive you there if you’d like.”

Danilo sat. The breath was gone from his lungs.

“Danilo,” said Ilija. “I can drive you.”

“No,” said Danilo. “I’ll go myself.”

“This is no time to be alone, my friend. Life’s too short for this. We must be together.”

“Please,” said Danilo.

Ilija stood and then bowed in the old way. “Well, you know where to find me. Anything you need. I am here for you. No joke. Anything I can do.” He walked over to Gazur, and the two men talked and shook hands.

Danilo left money on the table, even though he knew that the juice, as always, was on the house. As he was leaving, Gazur approached, but Danilo ignored him. He kept walking across the road to the railing overlooking the Sava. A tugboat was crawling upstream, tugging nothing but itself.

Danilo imagined the river inside a great box. Imagined himself in the box. Imagined men beneath a black curtain looking in at him as they stood on a street corner.

He began to take off his clothes. Piece by piece, until he was in only his underwear. Then he climbed over the railing, struggling with his stiff leg. He jumped. The water was cold, not entirely clean, syrupy against his skin. He pushed himself out to where the current was and then floated on his back and thought about letting himself sink.

When he looked back at the bank, he could see Gazur, waving his hands, the white city rising up behind him.

• • •

SOMEWHERE ALONG THE WAY, Danilo had lost the policeman’s number. He did not go to the morgue as he knew he should. Instead he went to Miroslav’s flat in Voždovac. A small part of him hoped that Ilija had been mistaken, that the police had been mistaken, that someone had to be mistaken and that he would knock on the door and Miroslav would be sleeping and he would take a while before he opened the door, blurry-eyed, angry at the awakening, and Danilo would gaze upon him and the two would embrace and everything would be as it once was.

The door to the flat was just a door. Nothing to indicate that anything unusual had occurred on the other side. Danilo realized he had never actually been inside the flat. On several occasions he had met Miroslav here and they had gone out together on a walk, but Miroslav had never invited him to come in, a fact that now seemed odd.

Danilo knocked. There was no answer. He tried the doorknob and, to his surprise, found it to be open.

The flat was nearly spotless. As if someone had come in and swept the place clean. Surely this could not have been how Miroslav lived? If anything, his son thrived in a space bordering on the edge of chaos. Getting him to clean his room as a child had always been an affront to his sensibilities.

Danilo walked through the flat, laying his hands on the surfaces. There was a table with an empty bowl on it. A bottle of old milk in the fridge. The bookshelves were empty, save a single xeroxed article. Danilo picked it up. Something by Werner Heisenberg.

Where were all of his son’s books? He must’ve had books. He remembered seeing many books through the door the last time he was here.

A typewriter sat on a desk, a blank sheet of paper tucked in its roll. Danilo pulled out the sheet and found on its reverse side a small eye printed on the top of the page:

In the bedroom, a cheap bureau reinforced with tape. Also empty. The bed had been stripped. Danilo got down on all fours and looked beneath it. Nothing, except a landscape of lint and a stray yellow tube sock. He reached out and took hold of the sock. Squeezed it.

Danilo stood up. He sighed. He tried to imagine his son sleeping on this bed, opening the refrigerator, spending many late nights working on his black boxes. Had he made them here? Had he assembled all of the little pieces on this carpet? Had he breathed in his magic, closed the lid of the box, watched the elephant leap from the bridge for the first time?

Such miracles in such an ordinary place. He suddenly felt very close to Miroslav, closer than he had ever felt before. He rubbed his beard and inhaled.

On his way out, he opened the closet. Like everything else in the flat, it was empty. There was only the top of a yellow tracksuit hanging from a plastic hanger. Danilo was just about to close the door when something caught his eye.

On the shelf behind, in the shadows. He leaned in closer, blinked.

It was him. It was Miroslav. Tiny and true, no more than two centimeters tall, as if he had escaped from one of his boxes.

“Miroslav!” he said.

Miroslav did not move. He was lying on his side, his expression frozen in amused wonderment. Danilo saw then that a little white string was attached to his belly button. He followed the string. It ran down to the floor of the closet. Danilo got down on his knees. The string ended at the belly of another tiny man, also lying on his side.

“Miša!” he whispered.

Miša was in his uniform. His eyes were open but contained no life.

Fig. 2.9. “Danilovic´’s Umbilical Mirror”

From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 973

For the second time in his life, death would not reveal itself to Danilo Danilovic. The pretty young mortician at the morgue in St. Sava’s smiled sympathetically and said that his son’s case was still under review, and the body was not able to be viewed. This was how she put it: “not able to be viewed.”

“But he’s my son,” said Danilo, a level of desperation in his voice. “He’s my son. Do you understand? Please. If I cannot see him, how do I know he’s dead? You must understand.” He looked around at the rows of metal drawers. “Which one is he in?”

“He’s not here,” the mortician said kindly.

“Then where is he?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “He’s with some specialists.”

“Are you not a specialist?”

The mortician gave him a strained smile. “You will see him soon,” she said reassuringly.

This turned out not to be true. According to the records, an error in the paperwork had caused the corpse to be transferred to Višegrad, and it was subsequently lost in transit. But in that moment, against all his instincts, which wailed for some kind of proof, Danilo brought his hands together and tried to believe what she told him.

The mortician showed him to the exit. They paused in the hospital lobby.

“Do you know how he died?” asked Danilo. “He was younger than he looked. He was still very young. Maybe he wasn’t eating well. His mother was always worrying about this.”

“We don’t know yet,” said the mortician. Her mascara was smudged beneath her left eye. “It looks like he just stopped breathing.” She touched his arm in the same way Stoja once had. “I will try and find you some answers, Mr. Danilovic. I know how hard it can be.”

Danilo nodded. He wondered what life would’ve been like if he had had a daughter instead of a son. If this woman with her smudged mascara were his daughter; if they could have dinner together later at the restaurant around the corner as they always did; if she would bring her boyfriend for him to meet for the first time; if this boyfriend were charming but reserved, nervous that he would offend her father, of whom he had heard so much; if, only months after this first dinner, she would announce to him that she would marry this man and he would approve, first in words and later in spirit, ushering her down an aisle before men and God himself; if, barely a year later, there would be a baby cradled in her arms, the husband standing at a safe distance as the grandfather leaned in close, knowing that life spills across generations in the simplest of ways, and as Danilo touched his grandson’s tiny sea-creature fingers, his daughter would look up at him and say, “His name is Danilo.”

“Oh, I almost forgot,” said the mortician. She reached into the pocket of her lab coat and handed him a small ziplock bag. “I was asked to give this to you.”

Inside the bag there was a small metal key.

• • •

AS PER RØED-LARSEN POINTS out at length in Spesielle Partikler (pp. 693–705), the official police report on Miroslav Danilovic’s death is a curious document. While it offers seemingly superfluous details about the “deceased wearing [the] lower half of [a] yellow tracksuit, seated in front of a bowl of milk,” it remains vague about the actual cause or essential circumstances of the death itself. One of the officers who signed the document, Officer Stanislav Radic, was later dismissed from the police force under suspicion of extortion and bribery. Miroslav’s obituary in Naša Borba, the only Serbian paper to carry an announcement of his death, was brief, if complimentary, mentioning the graffito and the cult of the black theater boxes. It did not reference a theater project in Sarajevo.

Røed-Larsen elaborates on Miroslav’s role in Kirkenesferda Fire, that group’s famous Sarajevo performance, which ran for only four nights in the eviscerated shell of the National Library of Bosnia, from August 24 to 27, before it was cut short by the Markale marketplace massacre. He writes:

[Miroslav] was perhaps the most talented of all the puppet-makers. . more so, it could be argued, than Ragnvald Brynildsen, the original, or even Tor Bjerknes, who so beautifully oversaw the design of Kirk Tre in Cambodia with Kermin Radmanovic. What separated Miroslav [from the others] was his erasure of the connective tissue between puppet and puppeteer. His objects moved without intervention; they literally took on a life of their own, in which the puppeteer became just another spectator to the miracle at hand. (999)

Per Røed-Larsen, for all his thoroughness, fails to mention what happened to the rest of the family. After the war, Danilo Danilovic moved back to Višegrad. The farm had been untouched in his absence — all was accounted for except one thing: the elephant had vanished. He would eventually sell the farm and move to a house not far from the bowed shadows of the Turkish Bridge, which he would visit each evening until the day he died.

Mihajlo Danilo, his only remaining son, lived in semi-hiding as a bricklayer in a hamlet outside Belgrade, occasionally writing to his father. He returned once to Višegrad for a reunion of sorts, but neither father nor son could say he recognized the other. Eventually his underground network of supporters began to unravel and he was forced to flee to Argentina, where he worked reshelving books at a municipal library, even though he could not read a word of Spanish. Over the years, many of his friends and colleagues, former paramilitaries and Srpska army officials, were arrested and brought to trial by the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. Mihajlo Danilo was never captured. He remained at large, existing only in the memory of those who had once known him.