Love and Obstacles

American Commando

When I was in grammar school, I most loved the weeks when I was the redar, the one in charge of cleaning the chalkboard. My job was to keep the sponge wet and to wipe the chalkboard when the teacher demanded it. I took pleasure in erasing everything, in the smell of moistened chalk and the dryness of my hands afterward, and I loved leaving the classroom to wash the sponge in the bathroom. The hallway would be silent and empty, redolent of clean children and floor wax. I relished the squeaking of my shoes, the echoes in the void; I walked to the bathroom slowly, adjusting my steps to produce a screechy rhythm. There was something exhilarating about being free and alone in that vacant space while the rest of the kids were interned in the classrooms, to be released only at the break. I would wash the sponge without urgency, then walk back extending every step to delay my return to class. Now and then, I would stop by the door of a classroom and eavesdrop on what was going on inside. I would hear the murmur of the compliant children and the steady, solemn voice of the teacher. What gladdened me was that nobody knew I was out there unbound, listening. They could not see me, but I could hear everything; they were inside, and I was outside.

“Why was that so exciting?” Alma asked, and looked at the little digital camera screen, as though to check whether I was still there.

“I don’t know. I felt free,” I said. “There, but not there.”

She’d said she was a great admirer of my work and, as a fellow Bosnian, she’d felt that in my books I was speaking directly to her. She’d spoken directly to me via my website and at first I ignored her message, but then she sent me another one threatening with her disappointment. Ever reluctant to disappoint people, I responded. Her name was Alma B.; she was a film student at NYU and a Bosnian, therefore interested in questions of “identity”; she wanted to make films about “the Bosnian experience.” Which brought her to the real reason for contacting me: for her final project, she wanted to make a film about me, to tell the story of my life and displacement, the loss and the transformation, my complicated identifications.

All of my identities are at your disposal, I cleverly wrote back.

We went on corresponding, and she asked me many thorny questions. It usually took me days to answer them, in long, repetitive e-mails, rambling about anything that came to my mind: my family history and the war crimes of the Bush regime; my thoughts on rock ’n’ roll and quantum physics; my theory of soccer and poetry; the epistemology of Conrad and Rimbaud and myself. I told her the stories of my life, embellishing here, flatly making things up there, for I frankly wanted to help her write a good script and get the funding for her project. I even meekly nudged her toward a short film in which I could play myself in various situations from my life — one of those brainy postmodern setups everybody likes so well because it has something to do with identity — but she gently rejected the idea. I flirted with her too, for, as everybody knows, the job of the writer is to seduce his readers. For some reason I kept all of our exchanges.

When her project proposal was finally approved, I suggested that she fly to Chicago to meet me, but she thought she ought to start from the beginning, find out more about me and talk to my parents first. So she drove up to Hamilton, Ontario, on a weekend. My parents took her to be a friend of mine and therefore another one of their children; on arrival she had to promise that she would stay overnight. Mother dug deep into her repertoire of cakes and pies, for she knew you could not fool a real Bosnian with bad Canadian food; Father summoned our kin, including a cousin with an accordion, to sing a selection of songs and drink to her health and the health of her family, then to her health again. And she videotaped the whole thing: their drunken singing, my father telling her about the film he had once directed, my mother telling her about my troubled adolescence — it must have been a catastrophe, I thought when I heard about it. It was not hard to imagine my intoxicated family seriously undermining the image of the noble, worldly misfit who found his salvation in writing, the image I had so carefully and publicly established. They told Alma everything, things I was amazed they could recall at all: they told her about the time I had been caught stealing hubcaps; about our young, pretty neighbor taking me by the ear to my parents so I could admit I had leapt at her from the darkness and grabbed one of her rather large breasts; about my suffering from a crew of bullies, whose meanness eventually compelled one of my classmates (Predrag was his name, I believe) to blow his brains out. And to me it wasn’t even about the damage to my image, it was that if those stories should have ever been told, I was the only one who was supposed to do that — I was the only professional storyteller in the family.

I tried to find out from my parents how Alma had reacted to their divulgations — for I did not want to disappoint her before I even met her — but they assured me there was nothing to worry about. Even when telling potentially compromising stories they rendered me lovingly and likably; my parents were (and still are) conventional and reasonable, always willing to dismiss any kind of alarmingly refractory behavior as “a phase.” And they did also convey their warm memories of our quaint summer vacations by the sea, and how they had let me swim in the deep waters, confident that I would come back to the shallows the moment I heard their whistle. (I remember the damn whistle: black, smelling of spit, with a baffling chickpea inside.) Alma later showed me the footage of them tearing up while recollecting our winter vacations, our mountain cabin, to which I went alone in the summer, they told her, to devour fat books and write stories and poems.

My parents liked Alma quite a bit. She was a true Bosnian girl, they thought: respectful of the elderly, kindhearted and polite, still unspoiled by America. “She can talk to anybody and everybody,” my mother said. “She doesn’t think she’s special.” They practically offered to adopt her; indeed, ever worried about my procreation, they suggested not so abashedly that we could be a good match. When I called them after Alma’s visit, they both got on the phone to laud her.

“She came to America alone. She had an aunt in New York,” my mother said. “She was only thirteen when she arrived. She is very smart.”

“Where you throw her, there she lands,” my father said. “But she didn’t have an aunt in New York, she had an older brother. And she was sixteen when she arrived.”

“No, no, she said her brother was killed by a sniper in Sarajevo. And her father had a heart attack in the war, and her mother died of cancer right after the war,” my mother said, and sighed. “Your father never pays any attention.”

“I pay attention,” my father said, irritated. “Her mother was killed by a sniper, and her father died after the war.”

“Listen to him. He never listens to me, or anybody else. That’s what I’ve had to deal with my whole life: I send him to buy detergent, he comes back with three cartons of milk, and we already have a fridge full of milk. What am I to do with all that milk?” my mother said. “I wish I had been shot by a sniper.”

Naturally, when Alma came to Chicago to interview me, I didn’t dare ask her to sort out who in her family died of cancer and who was shot by a sniper. But she evinced the kind of serenity earned through suffering, therefore unattainable by — perhaps even invisible to — those who had not experienced severe loss and pain; I understood why my parents liked her. I watched her as she was mounting her digital camera on a tripod in my office: the short, ascetic hair and the deft, determined hands; the large, heart-shaped head dominated by grand, dramatically dark eyes; the delicate frown of focus. Her body bespoke a hardened core, an irreversibly petrified toughness, the scar tissue of the soul, but I could still see the little Alma in her, the way she used to be as a grammar school girl: wearing a white shirt and a blue skirt, white stockings and red shoes, her long hair shimmering, meticulously combed by her mother. “Okay, let’s go,” she said when she was ready, and I had no choice but to begin.

I introduced myself to the camera, told it where I was born, described the part of Sarajevo by the old train station where I grew up. I am so old, I said by way of a joke, I can remember steam trains. We used to crawl under the trains resting in the station, then pull a plug and let the steam out; I burned my shins that way at least once. There was also a movie theater nearby, Kino Arena, and we would go to the movies all the time. My childhood was wonderfully socialist and there was no movie-rating shit, so we could watch whatever we wanted: spaghetti westerns, kung fu movies, German soft porn, communist war epics, all kinds of American trash — I grew up on a steady diet of sex and violence, I said, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with me, is there?

Abruptly and indelicately, she asked me about the phase when I had impersonated an American commando, pretending to be speaking English all the time. My parents told her that I had had a rifle I would not part with; they had described how I had imagined and executed combat operations in my room, sometimes in the middle of the night, waking my little sister, who would in turn wake them with her screams.

“Do you remember that?” she asked. “Can you tell me a little bit about you imagining yourself as an American?”

Amazed once again that my parents could remember that particular phase, I could not fathom the point of recollecting that story. One builds one’s life on consistency; one invests it with the belief, however unsupported by reality, that one has always been what one is now, that even in one’s distant past one could recognize the seed from which this doomed flower has bloomed. Now I could not understand the devout thoroughness of my childhood obsessions, the myriad origins of my overactive imagination — I could not quite summon who I used to be. The camera, I am sure, duly recorded my fidgeting, the shadow passing over my face, the titillating doubt and vulnerability. But once you get in front of the inquiring lens, it is hard to look away; once you start inventing and soliloquizing, it is terribly hard to quit.

Yes, when I was ten or so, I wanted to be an American commando, I admitted, but you have to understand the larger context.

I spent most of my childhood fighting various wars. An early one was inspired by the TV series Quentin Dedward: we divided ourselves in two groups and had sword fights with sticks. Since young Quentin was fighting his enemies over a fair damsel, and we had no interest in girls as such, let alone fair damsels, it was over in a week, as soon as our sticks started breaking. Then there was an ongoing war in which we were the partisans fighting the Germans. This one was, of course, inspired by the narrative and the films of the Yugoslav liberation as accomplished by Tito and our heroic people. For the Liberation War, we used the sticks as guns. We set up ambushes in the bushes; we threw rocks as hand grenades in suicidal charges at German bunkers; we attacked the innocently passing streetcars, which were in fact enemy convoys delivering the necessary fuel and supplies to the desperate Army Group D. The trouble with this war was that we didn’t have a real enemy: none of us wanted to be a German, because nobody ever wanted to be evil. We shot at nobody, we threw rocks into thin air, the streetcar attacks were too risky to do too often, particularly since a conductor caught my friend Vampir and slapped him bloody. War is an entirely different thing when you can’t enjoy your wicked enemy’s dying a horrible, prolonged, painful death.

Then there was a war over the control of the playground that was misfortunately situated between two architecturally identical buildings; our gang lived in one, the other gang in the other. The playground had swings and a slide, a merry-go-round and a sandbox, and was framed by bushes in which we liked to store stolen things and hide when hiding was required — the bushes were our loga, our base. The Playground War had a remarkable intensity, with many battles fought; there would be dozens of kids in each army, crowding the playground, using sticks as cudgels to their pain-inflicting maximum. I recalled for Alma raising high my grandfather’s walking stick to crash it through a cardboard shield that another kid put up as his pitifully feeble protection. We lost the final battle and the rights to the playground when the enemy army received reinforcements from two eighth-graders on their way to school: they swung their book-heavy bags with murderous delight and mowed us mightily as we retreated in disarray.

So we had to relocate our loga—our flags, our armory, our pride — to the garden behind our building. The garden was rather large and belonged to the old people who lived in the house at the far end of it. The house was decrepit; the walls had large water stains, resembling old maps of imagined oceans; the shingles would simply and suddenly slide off the roof. Before the Playground War, we seldom ventured there, for we were wary of the old people, who would come out of the house and bark crazily: the old woman flung her arms around like a demented windmill; the old man waved his stick at us as if conducting a hallucinatory orchestra. They were clearly sick: both of them wore heavy vests and sweaters in the summer; their legs were swollen like tree stumps; the smell of rot and death wafted out of their windows when they, seldom, opened them. But the garden was a vast territory of potato and cabbage patches and little forests of pole beans and corn, where we could hide and replenish our supply of war sticks. In the fall there were pumpkins; in the spring there were the green bunny ears of young onions. In the winter, it all turned into a mud field, which would slow down any enemy suddenly charging at us; and if there was snow, we could build an unconquerable ice bunker. There was even an apple tree that we could use as an observation tower, on which we could hang our flag. It was hard to believe that we had not thought of the garden as the loga before.

So we invaded it and conquered it, ignoring, indeed taunting, the old couple whenever they tottered after us in ridiculously hopeless pursuit. At last they accepted the defeat; we threw a rock through their window, and there was nothing they could do. Pretty soon we were ripping out their cabbage heads and beating them to shreds with our sticks; we were killing lizards in our rock-throwing practice; we were immolating snails by pouring lighter fluid into their shells and igniting them. The garden was our liberated, sovereign territory now, our home turf.

“And how is this related to your American-commando phase?” Alma asked, somewhat brusquely.

“I’m getting to that,” I said. “Be a patient young lady.”

A few weeks later, a crew of men in blue overalls drove up in a big truck and started putting up a board fence around the garden. It didn’t take them long to finish it, and we soon realized that we couldn’t just walk in to get our sticks or collect sacrificial snails. When we eventually sneaked inside, we found out that the old people’s house was roofless now; two sweaty men were tearing up the walls with sledgehammers; a bulldozer was lying in wait to turn it all into a nebulous pile. The following day, the workers completed the fencing off, and the garden was entirely out of bounds for us, the fence tall and surprisingly solid, devoid of cracks and holes. We could hear ditch-diggers and jackhammers and the din of demolition and construction, but we could not see what was happening inside. Suddenly we were banished from what had always been our rightful territory.

Finally, Vampir, being the youngest and the smallest of us, was hurled over the fence for a reconnaissance mission. We waited for his return at the steps of our building, passing around a cigarette, discussing, as we were wont to, masturbation and ways to die. He came back with a bleak report. The potato patch was gone, the apple tree was uprooted, the house was leveled, the bean poles and the corn were cut down; there was a huge hole in the ground, its edges marked by stakes connected with a rope on which yellow flags were hung. Djordje thought that was because they had mined it all. There was a brigade of heavy machinery scattered all around, Vampir went on. And near the gate, they were just about to complete a wooden barrack, with doors and windows, obviously their future headquarters. They had no intention of leaving, Vampir said. We were going to make them leave, Djordje insisted, and they were going to regret ever coming.

In a message posted all over our building, we indicated that the situation was very serious. We summoned all the veterans of previous wars, all the kids who had enjoyed the garden of freedom, for a war council where we were to decide what to do. The congregating place was a basement storage room belonging to the fifth-floor homosexual. We had broken the lock and established our temporary headquarters there, knowing that he would never come down. The storage room was full of suitcases, which were full of old magazines, which were full of pictures of sunny seaside resorts and people on the beaches. The suitcases were stacked haphazardly, so they formed a kind of shaky amphitheater that could host a lot of kids. But only seven showed up: Djordje, Vampir, Boris, Edo, Mahir, myself, and inexplicably, Marina.

“What happened to them?” Alma asked.

“When?”

“In the war.”

“Which war?”

“The real war.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I have to think about it.”

Djordje was presiding; he presented the situation in the starkest overtones. The garden had been overridden by strangers who seemed to be building something in its stead. We had been expelled so many times before that we no longer had anyplace to go. If we lost the garden, there would be nothing we could call ours. If we let them build whatever they were building, the loss would be irreparable and irreversible. We had to do something, now, we all agreed. War seemed inevitable, but there were only seven of us. I proposed that we issue a warning to the Workers — as our enemy was called from then on — to tell them they had encroached upon our lawful territory and so they must leave without delay. The proposal was submitted for a vote, and it passed; the only one against was Djordje. (I was particularly pleased that Marina raised her dainty hand: she had raven-black hair and even darker eyes.) I was given the task of composing the letter of warning. I put my advanced literacy to work and wrote a preternaturally verbose missive using phrases such as “righteous wrath,” “blood-soaked liberty,” and “the course of justice.” I signed it “The Insurgents,” the name inspired by the history of Yugoslavia, whose many nationalities traditionally died in various freedom-seeking insurgencies.

The Insurgents was a name I had thought up without discussion or approval. Djordje disliked it, as did Edo. But I had written it in blood-red ink, for dramatic effect, and it had taken a few ink-stained drafts to get it right, so rewriting would have taken a long time. Besides, the name Djordje proposed — The Motherfuckers — was too much, most of us thought, as was the way he formulated our anger in his draft: “If you don’t leave, we’ll fuck your mothers and sisters and children.” Thus it stayed as I wrote it, with the understanding that we could and should crank it up in the follow-up. We hurled Vampir over the fence again, and he spat on the back of the ultimatum and stuck it to the barrack door.

“Now, I have to ask,” Alma said. “What do you mean when you say you hurled him over the fence?”

I don’t like when people interrupt me; I like to tell stories as I see fit. But Alma asked firmly and, perhaps as an unconscious forewarning, looked into the camera’s viewfinder. It was important to me that she liked me, that she understood my experience.

“Well, two of us would make a square with our forearms, grabbing each other’s wrists”—I showed her, grasping her thin, fragile wrists lightly—“and then Vampir would step on it and we would throw him up on the fence. He was so light-footed, so limber and dexterous, that he could stand on the fence for a moment before jumping down on the other side.”

“Why did you call him Vampir?”

“He had no body. He was so weightless that he left no footprints in the snow.”

“What happened to him?”

I paused before I responded, and when I told her he had been shot by a sniper, in 1992, in front of our building, her face showed no emotion. I wondered if the word “sniper” necessarily brought up in her mind the killing of her mother, or her brother, whichever it was, so I hurried to continue the story.

In any case, the Workers did not leave. The next warning was written by Djordje, who threatened them with harsh motherfucking, overlooking the fact that fucking was not the strongest weapon of prepubescent boys. He gave them a week to leave, and to show them how serious we were, Vampir was to throw a rock through a barrack window after delivering the threat. But he stood too close to the window and merely cracked it; for all we knew, the Workers could have concluded that a sparrow crashed into it, breaking its neck.

It was a tactical error to issue all the threats, for instead of taking them seriously the Workers poured concrete into the hole in the ground and built a foundation for what looked like a huge building. Moreover, while we waited for their response, school was out, and we consequently lost Boris, Edo, and Marina, who were shipped off for the summer to their respective grandparents. Come to think of it, I can’t remember why I was not shipped off to my grandparents’ that summer.

“Because your mother was going through a treatment for ovarian cancer,” Alma said.

That was news to me. I shook my head in disbelief; she nodded, confirming.

“How the hell do you know that? I’ve never heard of my mother having ovarian cancer.”

“She told me.”

“She told you? My mother? She told you about her cancer? Why didn’t she tell me?”

“She didn’t want you to worry.”

Honestly, I don’t know whether I would have worried, being busy with the Garden War and all. But my mother’s cancer explained a lot. For example, it explained why I had been enrolled in a summer course of English, despite my strenuous objections — they had wanted me out of the house, yet close to them; they did not want me to know but could not let me go too far, to my grandparents’. And now I knew why I could stay out and dedicate the late summer nights to our war efforts, and why they had bought me a lot of unsolicited toys, including the rifle I loved so much, an AK-47 replica I mistook for an American weapon. They wanted me distracted, and distracted I was. It was because of my mother’s cancer that I became the American commando. Imagine that.

Anyway, I hated the English classes. We had to sit in a small, hot room, the sun beating into the green shades, whole inhalable galaxies of dust particles levitating around us. I preferred observing their rotation and random movement to listening to a visibly bored teacher, who perked up only when we sang songs in English. We idiotically repeated the words she fed us, following her lead as she belted them out; it appeared her secret passion was to be a famous singer. We sang “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” “Amazing Grace,” songs I could not even hum now without retching. Her favorite, however, was “Catch a Falling Star.” She translated the lyrics for us, and whenever she sang it she would reach out to catch the imaginary falling star and put it in her pocket. It was pathetic; we elbowed one another and giggled.

You see, I had acquired a rifle I loved, I was learning a language only I could speak, I had parents who left me alone — for whatever reason — and what I needed was the right identity that would absorb it all. I discovered it in the movie in which a small unit of American commandos destroyed a mountain serving as a secret weapons factory for the evil Germans. The slow-motion images of the apocalyptic blast greatly impressed me: the mountain belching before its top vanished in a cataclysm, the curlicues of fire emerging from the black-cotton-candy smoke, and then the peace of absolute destruction afterward, the ashes of oblivion floating down, the silence. And there was a beautiful scene in which an American commando was tortured by the Germans, and instead of breaking down under the duress, instead of selling out his buddies, he sang “Clementine.” The movie was called The Mountain of Doom, and having seen it twice in two days, I began crawling on the carpeted floor of my room imagining it as a mossy mountain slope; I hid under the bed as if under a truck; I assumed shooting positions behind the furniture in wait for a German who did not know that his death was around the corner. Hence it was an obvious and natural step to become a sniper watching from my window a Worker pushing a wheelbarrow. I imagined a bullet entering and exiting his head, followed by a spurt of brain offal. At some point, I spoke to myself in what I thought was the American language, a distorted combination of the sounds I had picked up watching movies and singing in class, pronounced according to the rule that my father had once established: Unlike British English, which you pronounce as though your mouth were scalded with hot tea, American English requires chewing imaginary gum. Fow dou sotion gemble, I would say under my breath, my gun pointed at a Worker hosing down his rubber boots. Fecking plotion, camman. Yeah, sure.

My conversion into an American commando coincided nicely with the escalation of the armed struggle against the Workers. They had not left, of course, for they were well into raising the building, what with the steel rods sprouting out of the concrete and the first-floor walls being put up. When Djordje said that now was the time to fuck some mothers, nobody objected, and therefore the war was commenced.

Djordje became the commander in chief, the leader, focused and ruthless. Vampir was the Special Force, a spook who performed clandestine operations: he talked little, wore darker clothes than the rest of us, and acquired a penchant for sneaking up from behind. Mahir was the infantry, bravely obeying orders, ever reliable in combat. And I was the American commando, on a special mission to help the cause of freedom in the Garden War, well equipped with a real rifle, speaking fluently the chewing-gum American, even if I had to translate it constantly for my comrades.

The first engagement of the Garden War took place on a June evening. While most of the Workers had gone home, a few stayed behind to drink beer on the steps of the barrack with the Security Guard. They did not know that war was descending upon them; they were innocent of the enemy rattling their weapons within a stone’s throw. In preparation for our first assault, we had dug a tunnel under the fence, then covered the exit hole with a plank and debris. The objective was to burn down one of the wooden sheds where the Workers kept their tools and rubber boots and overalls. That evening, we crawled inside through the tunnel, our pockets full of little lighter fluid containers, our bookless school bags full of old newspapers and rags. I had my rifle strapped to my back, so I got stuck under the fence, but the others managed to pull me out. While the Security Guard was getting wasted with his comrades, we ripped the tips of the plastic lighter-fluid containers with our teeth, then soaked the bunched-up newspapers and rags piled against the back of the shed farthest from the barrack. As we lit the pile, the Workers laughed in dear oblivion. Then we raced toward the tunnel and crawled out. Even if my heart was performing a drum solo, I had the presence of mind to have my gun in my hand. According to the plan, we scattered and went to our respective homes. By the time I was up at my window, one corner of the shed was wildly aflame and the Security Guard and his buddies were stupidly sprinkling the fire with their beer, until the least drunk one among them stretched a hose from the spigot and put the flames out.

I always enjoyed destruction; there was always something breathtaking in effecting obliteration. I had been prone to laying waste: I had liked to take a hammer to a toy car or to drop marbles from my balcony and see them explode on the pavement. I had torn pages, one by one, out of a book I disliked, until there was nothing but the meaningless cover. After all, I had even enjoyed wiping the chalkboard clean. But I had never been remotely as elated as when I watched that shed burning, when I witnessed the idiotic helplessness of the Security Guard spraying the inferno with his beer. And we knew that it was but a rehearsal for taking down the skyscraper, once they completed it — in the blaze of the shed fire I could see the Building of Doom collapsing unto itself.

It didn’t matter that the shed was an actual outhouse. We watched the Workers retching and pinching their noses as they kicked the torched walls in, exposing an impressive mountain of shit. For a while afterward, the Workers, their bowels irritated with whatever bile they were served out of a large vat at lunchtime, scurried over to squat behind a stack of steel beams, clutching their communal roll of toilet paper. We had plenty to feel victorious about: A shithouse was a legitimate target, impeding the logistics of the building construction, not to mention that we had gotten behind the line of an enemy who didn’t even know what had hit them. When we reconvened a couple of days later, I said: Fatch ah salling frow, sure yeah, fut ow gnore tocket, which I helpfully translated as: “The next thing, my friends, is the barrack.”

We needed a lot of lighter fluid for the barrack. Collecting the little containers — the torpedo-shaped, finger-sized things — would have taken forever and would have cost too much. We had been stealing a lot of money from our parents’ wallets to finance the Garden War, and the guy at the newspaper stand had already asked Mahir whether his dad was running his car on lighter fluid. Djordje assessed that a few cans of gasoline or some other flammable liquid would suffice. We broke into more storage rooms looking for something combustible that someone may have unwisely put away with some old pillows and rugs. We found no fuel, but there were a lot of coats, picture frames, defunct vacuum cleaners, old records and books, disintegrating furniture — the detritus of paltry existence. I could not imagine that anyone would have ever noticed or cared if it were to burn down.

And as I was saying that, I noticed Alma scanning my office: the plastic cups blooming with blunt pencils; a malachite ashtray; a cameraless lens; a bowl full of international change, collected on my writerly peregrinations; unframed pictures pinned to the corkboard above my desk, fading and curling upon themselves.

“You know, when I went back to Sarajevo for the first time after the war,” she said, “I had to clean out my parents’ apartment so I could sell it. So I made three piles of stuff: one to throw away, one to give away, and one to take with me to New York. The New York one fit into a suitcase. When I got back home, I put the suitcase in a storage room and haven’t opened it since.”

But see, for us, the war was elating, the freedom inherent in erasure, the absolute righteousness of our cause — we loved it all. Everything looked more beautiful from the top of the Mountain of Doom. And the life of stealth and deception, the feeling that we always knew far more than the people around us. Now we were courteous to our neighbors, deferential to the elderly; I did my English homework regularly, volunteered to sing in class. I knew that the pretending, the sacrifice, would help me perform my duty; the lies were an essential part of our mission. I found pride and beauty in self-denial, and finally understood what my parents meant when they said, “Sometimes you have to do things you hate doing.” Even if they meant it in relation to being forced to have haircuts or to wash the car with my dad.

And after our good-boy performances we would get together in the basement and plot the Great Attack. Djordje thought that we ought to keep pressure on the Workers, never let them rest, while we were preparing for Doomsday. So as our parents imagined that we were playing marbles or watching a Disney movie at Kino Arena, we were wrapping sand and crushed glass into newspaper sheets that we would wet before the action. We called that weapon the Grenade; it was my invention, the idea being that the wet paper would break upon impact, and the sand mixed with glass would stick to the skin, and when the Worker tried to wipe it he would cut himself or scrape his skin off. And if we got him in the eyes, he could lose his eyes.

We threw Grenades and rocks at the Workers; we scattered nails at the truck entrance; we stuck matches into the barrack locks; we lit up lighter-fluid containers and cast them randomly across the fence. And as the building progressed, we refined our tactics. We learned that to attack the Workers was not prudent: there were too many of them, their movement was unpredictable, they far outnumbered us, and by now they worked high up inside the building. Therefore, the Security Guard became our main target. When others worked, he lingered around the barrack, opening and closing the gate for the trucks — he was often within a Grenade throw. He had a globular wart on his left cheek, which stuck out even if he was unshaven; there were dandruff droppings on his sloped shoulders. He wore a dun uniform, and a cap with a required red star that would have given him soldierly authority if it hadn’t been so filthy — we had seen him wiping the sweat on his neck with it. In the evenings, he was alone, unless he had talked some Workers into staying and drinking with him, but even then, they would go home sooner or later. He didn’t seem to have a home; we watched him wandering around the construction site languidly; I would have him pinpointed with my rifle as he sat at the barrack steps staring into some invisible distance — with a real weapon, one easy shot would have sufficed. Sometimes he would pull out a kitchen rag and unwrap it and take a piece of bread and some meat out of it; he munched detachedly, without appetite, as though the purpose of chewing was to make his jaw less lonely. God knows what he was thinking about; most likely it was nothing. We often caught him unawares and pelted him with rocks and Grenades, but had few direct hits.

For the longest time, he could not figure out who or what was after him; people like that take their own suffering to be a condition of their existence. Once he innocently bought a naked-lady magazine from Djordje, who went to the gate and called him over; we were supposed to attack him at that moment, but decided instead that his money would be more useful to us. He did not recognize that he was at war: we enjoyed watching his confusion, his vague, passive awareness that he was surrounded by the usual malice; we reveled in the fact that he didn’t know who we were, what we were.

But as stupid as he was, the Guard eventually caught on. In fact, he nearly captured Vampir, who was writing messages featuring fucking, mothers, sisters, and children on the barrack. He sneaked up on him from behind, and started punching him, but Vampir managed to wriggle out of his hands and take off over the fence in a blink. We orchestrated a revenge attack immediately thereafter. We pelted the Guard with paper bags full of pebbles — Cluster Bombs— and had a few handsome direct hits. He cursed at us with venom and hatred, and after that, it was clear the war was to be fought until one side suffered a consummate defeat.

And around that time we suddenly recognized we had long abandoned the hope of regaining the garden. We would not have been more satisfied if somehow, miraculously, the sovereignty of the garden was restored. Indeed, we would have lost our purpose. All we ever thought or talked about was how we could hurt the Workers as personified by the Security Guard; that was what the goal of the war had become, and we could imagine nothing before, after, or beyond it. It was like being in love, except we wanted to kill him. Beside the obliteration of the skyscraper, our dominant fantasy became torching the barrack while the Security Guard was in it.

For that, we needed fuel. One day, we lucked out: a picture frame shop by the train station burned down. We saw the smoke rising, we heard the howling of the sirens. Ever interested in ruination, we rushed over and watched the firemen douse the shop through the shattered front windows, while the owners, a husband and wife, wept and embraced, trying not to look at it. We went back to the smoldering shop the following day, walked over the warm ashes, here and there mushed up into cinereous mud, and inhaled the smell of charred wood and scorched mortar. We sifted through the rubble of the owners’ lives: a woman’s shoe with its heel completely melted; half a chair, leaning on the absent leg; frame corners still on the wall, still symmetrical. In the back of the shop was an unburnt corner: a stained blue overcoat still hanging; a framed picture of a wedded couple, facing the ceiling; and right by the back door, three beautiful cans of paint thinner. Sengson clotion wicklup, I said. We got what we needed.

Let me confess: I was perfectly aware that there was something inappropriate in my telling this story to Alma with so much pleasure. She must have found the boys entirely and typically aggressive, violent, and silly; she could have been hurt by the ease of their blood thirst. She was certainly not someone who could see the beauty in war, but she expressed no dismay — in fact, she showed no emotion at all. Occasionally, she looked into the little screen and adjusted the camera because I had wriggled over to the edge of the frame. And I am submitting that I was — how shall I put it — perversely amplifying certain details so as to elicit some reaction from her, to see her feel. But she was as stoic as her digital video camera.

“Do you want to take a break?” she said. “You’ve been talking for an hour.”

“No, not at all,” I said. “I like talking. I can talk forever. ”

One evening, we sneaked the cans through the tunnel, the mud from the day’s rain soiling, possibly clogging up, my rifle. We scurried over to the hidden space between the barrack and the fence. We planned to soak with paint thinner the walls of the barrack in which the Guard was sleeping, make an inflammable puddle before the front door, so as to cut off his escape route, and then set it all ablaze. It should have been an easy mission; it should have lasted only a couple of minutes, but numbed by adrenaline, dazed by the danger, we did not think clearly — nobody had matches. Mahir was sent to fetch some while we waited in our hiding space, our courage draining by the moment.

Within a few minutes, Djordje became antsy and decided to go look for Mahir. I knew then that he would not come back, but I said nothing. Vampir and I slouched in silence, waiting for the time to pass so we could propose retreat. But then we heard the barrack floor creaking; the Guard stepped out, and stretched his arms toward the setting sun, roaring with a yawn. In an instant, he was going to turn around and see us and the cans. Before I could even think of making a move, Vampir darted past him toward the tunnel, and the Guard turned around to face me, as I stood paralyzed with the muddy rifle in my hands. What are you doing here? he asked me. Geffle creel debbing, I said. Vau shetter bei doff. Camman.

It is hard to explain why I was speaking the chewing-gum American to him. Perhaps because I thought, in panic, that if I still pretended to be an American I might convince him that I was a foreigner, that I was there by mistake and therefore innocent, and he would let me go. Or because I was, in fact, an American commando at that moment, thinking — if that is the word — that if I stayed inside my identity he would not be able to reach across the reality gap and punch me in the face, as he did, several times in a row. I put up my rifle against his fist, but he went around it, as I yelped: Fetch a kalling star and pet it de packet, maike it for it meny dey. And I kept repeating it, until it turned back into a song, as the Guard was raining blows on my head.

But the singing-under-torture did not help me at all in that moment. I fell to the ground and the Guard now tried to kick me in the head, while I tried to protect it with my arms. I have no doubt he would have killed me if he hadn’t been distracted by a beer bottle flying at him. As he looked up, another one smashed into his forehead and exploded, and a shower of blood poured over me and the Guard fell down on his knees. I thought we had finally killed him. I was overcome with the joy of salvation and survival.

“Your parents did not tell me any of this,” Alma said. I wished she had stopped looking at the little screen.

“They did not know,” I said. “Nobody knew. We were a cabal, as they say, loyal only to each other. I’ve never told this to anybody.”

“I see,” she said. She didn’t seem to have entirely suspended her disbelief.

So I escaped; Vampir saved me. The Guard was not, in fact, killed. While we ran home, he went inside the barrack and found a rag to press against the wound. Some minutes later, from my window, I watched him stagger through the gate, stand in front of it, look up (I ducked), and then heard him howl with pain and fury such as I had never heard before and never would hear again. He was not producing any words; he was inarticulate with rage and helplessness, bellowing like a wounded beast. I was thoroughly terrified, for I knew he would have without any doubt killed me if he could have laid his hands on me at that moment.

It was then, Alma, that the world became a dangerous place for me. Perhaps that is why my parents remember that period fondly — I spent a lot of time with them, seeking, unbeknownst to them, their protection. At the end of that summer, we went to the seaside for vacation and I obeyed the infamous whistle. When school started, for months I was afraid to leave our home alone, and they had to walk me to school and back. I returned to their fold; I returned home after the war.

And while Alma was glancing at the camera, I realized that pretty soon, my mother and my father would die and that, even though it had been long since they had protected me from anything, I would be left alone and exposed to the world, devoid of home and love, left alone to confront all the people full of pain and anger. I thought of the day way back in grammar school when I had gone to wet the chalkboard sponge, and in the empty hallway there stood my parents, looking for a teacher’s room. Usually, only one of them would come for a conference with a teacher, but this time, they were together; I seem to remember them holding hands. They looked big in comparison with all the little lockers, the children’s shoes lined up; they grinned when they saw me, proud of me clutching a sponge, performing duties. I felt that the three of us were together; we were inside, and everyone else — the kids in the classrooms, the teachers — was outside. They kissed me; I went back to my classroom; they went to wait for the teacher.

“And that’s it,” I told Alma. “That’s the end of the story. Now we can take a break.”

“That’s great. I could probably use that,” she said, not sounding convinced. “But could you speak a little more in your chewing-gum American? Can you still do it? I’d like to have you speak American and Bosnian in the film. Could you do that for me?”

“Sure,” I said. “Floxon thay formtion. Camman, dey flai prectacion. Gnow aut sol, lone. Yeah, sure.”