Each of us loved the wrong person.

—

War creeps up. Loudspeakers. Broadcasts. Hate your neighbour. On the radio, hate mixed in with local reports. Weather. Hate. Community news. Hate. Music. Hate. Some lives are worth less than others. People shrugged. Propaganda, they said. As if words no longer mattered, said Edina. At first no one believed what was happening.

She said that Ivan’s friend Danilo went home to visit, got conscripted and could not come back. Young men began to hide in apartments. She said that rumours were moving through the city like grass snakes. The taste of gunpowder. Beatings. On the radio, exhortations of malice. These things can happen anywhere. Hate-voices were mixing into the air like the cries of birds and church bells and calls to prayer. Militia set up barricades around the parliament buildings and sniper positions were organized and thousands of city people went into the streets to face down the occupiers.

She said, Ivan asked me to stay home with Merima, but I said, No, I am coming. Our daughter was fourteen and we had always raised her together. On a cool early-spring evening when we should have been going for a stroll up the mountain, our little family joined a large crowd to push back the soldiers. There was sniping from unseen places. We heard that trainloads of people with the possessions they could carry were leaving the city. Ivan wanted me to leave too. I was annoyed with him. I had a job too, a life there too. But Ivan said he had already bought bus tickets for us to go back to Foča in the morning, just for a few days, until we saw what would happen, please, keep our daughter safe. Go, find our parents, he said, and he would come as soon as he got our money from the bank. I remember the warmth of his hands. I could never resist him. And so, the next morning, I took a bus out of the city.

It was the last bus.

In hours, the roads were blockaded and we were trapped. Soon they were burning Trošanj and Mješaja.

Ivo telephoned and said to me, I am joining as a radio operator so I can find you. I will come to you. I am coming to you, Edina.

Then the lines to Foča were cut.

Our homes were gone. We had been tossed into the air like ashes. Men go to war for honour and come home to forget. But when homes disappear, where do soldiers go? Ivan’s parents were killed by accident the day the soldiers blew up the Aladza mosque. Ivan heard about it during military surveillance. He had to record his radio transmissions in children’s notebooks with colourful covers because there was no paper. On the front of Ivan’s was a smiling elephant with three balloons. His commanders took his information and gave it to the generals to plan how to kill. They ordered soldiers to bomb people to the edge of madness, to report how many packages done away with.