© Michelle Thompson
Aleksandar Hemon was born in Sarajevo and has lived in Chicago since 1992. He is the author of the novel The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the 2008 US National Book Award. His work appears regularly in the New Yorker and Granta.
Hemon’s latest, The Book of My Lives, is a memoir which travels from his childhood to his life during the Bosnian war to his arrival in America. “Hemon’s work crackles with so much humour and irony, so much compassion and humanity, that The Book of My Lives’ true calling almost goes by unnoticed,” says Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger’s Wife. “It is, without doubt, the most necessary, intimate and heartbreaking portrait of a world lost to one of history’s darkest conflicts.”
In “Dog lives” (below) Hemon remembers his family’s escape from Sarajevo and their life during wartime.
When I was a kid, I brought home many a mangy puppy I’d found on the streets. I’d arrange sofa cushions into a soft bed then go to school and leave my would-be pet to enjoy its new life, hoping that, when the puppy felt sufficiently at home, it’d be ready to commit to a lifelong friendship with me. But when my parents returned home from work, they’d find our house an unreal mess: the puppy had chewed up the cushions and peed on the floor. Quickly would my lifelong-friend candidate be evicted onto the brutal streets of Sarajevo.
Both of my parents were born into poor peasant households, dependent on the toil of farm animals, where the notion of having a pet could not exist. Hence I’d find myself passionately arguing with mother and father for my right to own a dog. My family was not a democratic institution and I was sternly made to understand that my obligations to the family exceeded all other duties and passions. As for rights, there was no family charter guaranteeing anything to me other than food, shelter, education, and love. The final, rusty nail in the coffin for my pet-owning hopes was my mother’s hard-to-counter argument that, since I never really cleaned up after myself, I most certainly would not clean up after a dog.
But my sister, Kristina, was (and still is) a strong-headed force of nature. While I often found myself fighting for my right to discuss my right to have rights, my determined sister had a different and a much more efficient approach. She wasted no time debating her rights with our parents; she simply acted as though she axiomatically possessed them and exercised them as she saw fit.
In the spring of 1991, she recruited her new boyfriend to drive with her to Novi Sad, a town in northern Serbia a coupled of hundred miles away from Sarajevo, where she’d somehow tracked down a breeder. With the money she’d saved from her modelling gigs, she bought a gorgeous, blazingly auburn Irish setter puppy and brought him home. Father was shocked—dogs in the city were self-evidently useless, a resplendent Irish setter even more so—and unconvincingly demanded that she return him to the breeder immediately; naturally, she ignored him. Mother offered some predictable rhetorical resistance to yet another creature she’d worry about excessively, but it was clear she had fallen in love with the dog on the spot. Within a day or two he chewed up someone’s shoe and was instantly forgiven. We named him Mek.
In a small city like Sarajevo no one can live in isolation, and all experiences end up shared. Around the time of Mek’s arrival, my best friend, Veba, who lived across the street from us, acquired a dog himself, a German shepherd named Don. ?ika-Vlado, Veba’s father, a low-ranking officer of the Yugoslav People’s Army, was working at a military warehouse near Sarajevo where a guard dog gave birth to a litter of puppies. Veba picked the slowest, clumsiest puppy, as he knew that, if they were to be destroyed, that one would be the first to go.
Veba had been Kristina’s first boyfriend and the only one I’d ever really liked. They started going out in high school and broke up a couple of years later; my sister was initially upset, but he and I stayed close. We were often inseparable, particularly after we’d started playing in a band together. After my sister got over their breakup, they renewed their friendship. Soon after the puppies arrived, they’d often take them out for a walk at the same time. No longer living with my parents, I often came home for food and family time, particularly after Mek had come—I loved to take him out, my childhood dream of owning a pet fulfilled by my indomitable sister. Veba and I would walk with Mek and Don by the river, or sit on a bench and watch them roll in the grass while we smoked and talked about music and books, girls and movies, our dogs gnawing playfully at each other’s throat. I don’t know how dogs really become friends, but Mek and Don were as close friends as Veba and I were.
My sister and Veba still remember their last time Mek and Don were together: it was April 1992; they took them for a walk in a nearby park; there was shooting up in the hills around Sarajevo; a Yugoslav People’s Army plane menacingly broke the sound barrier above the city; the dogs barked like crazy.
Soon thereafter, my sister followed her latest boyfriend to Belgrade. My parents stayed behind for a couple of weeks, during which sporadic gunfire and shelling increased daily. More and more often, they spent time with their neighbours in the improvised basement shelter, trying to calm Mek down. On May 2, 1992, with Mek in tow, they took a train out of Sarajevo before all the exits were closed and the relentless siege commenced. Soon the station was subjected to a rocket attack; no train would leave the city for ten years or so.
My parents were heading to the village in northwestern Bosnia where my father was born, a few miles from the town of Prnjavor, which came under Serb control. My dead grandparents’ house still stood on a hill called Vu?ijak (translatable as Wolfhill). Father had been keeping beehives on the family homestead and insisted on leaving Sarajevo largely because it was time to prepare the bees for the summer. In willful denial of a distinct possibility that they might not return for a long time, they brought no warm clothes or passports, just a small bag of summer clothes.
They spent the first few months of the war on Vu?ijak, their chief means of sustenance my father’s beekeeping and my mother’s vegetable garden. Convoys of drunken Serbian soldiers passed by on their way to an ethnic cleansing operation or from the front line, singing songs of slaughter and angrily shooting in the air. My parents, cowering in the house, secretly listened to news from the besieged Sarajevo. Mek sometimes happily chased after the military trucks and my parents desperately ran after him, calling him, terrified that the drunken soldiers might shoot him for malicious fun. When there were no trucks and soldiers around, Mek would run up and down the slopes, remembering, perhaps—or so I’d like to imagine—happier days.
Sometime that summer, Mek fell ill. He could not get to his feet; he refused food and water, there was blood in his urine. My parents laid him on floor in the bathroom, which was the coolest space in the house. Mother would stroke him and talk to him while he kept looking straight into her eyes—she always claimed he understood everything she told him. They called the vet, but the vet’s office had only one car at its disposal, which was continuously on the road, attending to all the sick animals in the area. It took the vet a couple of days to finally arrive. He instantly recognised that Mek was infested with deer ticks, all of them bloated with his blood, poisoning him. The prognosis was not good, he said, but at the office he could give him a shot that might help. My father borrowed my uncle’s tractor and cart in which pigs were normally transported to slaughter. He put the limp Mek in the cart and drove down the hill, all the way to Prnjavor, to get the shot that could save his life. On his way, the Serb Army trucks passed him, the soldiers looking down on the panting Mek.
The magic shot worked and Mek lived, recovering after a few days. But then it was my mother’s turn to get terribly sick. Her gall bladder was full of stones and infected—back in Sarajevo, she’d been suggested a surgery to remove them, which she’d feared and kept postponing, and then the war broke out. Her brother, my uncle Milisav, drove down from Subotica, a town at the Serbian-Hungarian border, and took her back with him for urgent surgery. Father had to wait for his friend Dragan to come and get Mek and him. While Father was preparing his beehives for his long absence, Mek would lie nearby, stretched in the grass, keeping him company.
Dragan arrived a couple of days later. On the way in, he was stopped at the checkpoint at the top of Vu?ijak. The men were hairy, drunk, and impatient. They asked Dragan where he was going, and when he explained that my father was waiting for him, they menacingly told him they’d been watching my father closely for a while, that they knew all about his family (which was ethnically Ukrainian—earlier that year the Ukrainian church in Prnjavor had been blown up by the Serbs), and they were well aware of his son (of me, that is), who had written against the Serbs and was now in America. They were just about ready to take care of my father once and for all, they told Dragan. The men belonged to a paramilitary unit that called itself Vukovi (the Wolves) and were led by one Veljko, whom a few years earlier my father had thrown out of a meeting he’d organised to discuss bringing in running water from a nearby mountain well. Veljko would later go to Austria to pursue a rewarding criminal career, only to return right before the war to put his paramilitary unit together. “You let Hemon know we’re coming,” the Wolves told Dragan as they let him through.
When Dragan reported the incident, which he took very seriously, my father thought it would be better to try to get out as soon as possible than wait for them to come at night and slit his throat. At the checkpoint, the guard shift had just changed and the new men were not drunk or churlish enough to care, so my father and Dragan were waved through. The checkpoint Wolves failed to sniff out or see Mek, because Father kept him down on the floor. Later on, in their mindless rage, or possibly, trying to steal the honey, the Wolves destroyed my father’s hives. (In a letter he’d send to Chicago he’d tell me that of all the losses the war inflicted upon him, losing his bees was the most painful.)
On their way toward the Serbian border, Father and Dragan passed many checkpoints. Father was concerned that if those manning the checkpoints saw a beautiful Irish setter, they’d immediately understand that he was coming from a city, as there were few auburn Irish setters in the Bosnian countryside, largely populated by mangy mutts and wolves. Moreover, the armed men could easily get pissed at someone trying to save a fancy dog in the middle of a war, when people were being killed left and right. At each checkpoint, Mek would try to get up and my father would press him down with his hand, whispering calming words into his ear; Mek would lie back down. He never produced a sound, never insisted on standing up, and, miraculously, no one at the checkpoints noticed him. My father and Dragan made it out across the border and on to Subotica.
My father and Mek eventually joined my mother in Subotica. When she had sufficiently recovered from her gall-bladder surgery, my parents moved to Novi Sad, not far away, where Mother’s other brother owned a little one-bedroom apartment in which they could stay. They spent a year or so there, trying all along to get the necessary papers to emigrate to Canada. During that time, Father was often gone for weeks, working in Hungary with Dragan’s construction company. Mek’s constant presence and my sister’s occasional visits provided Mother with her only comfort. She longed for Sarajevo, horrified by what was happening in Bosnia, insulted by the relentless Serbian propaganda pouring out of the TV and radio. She spent days crying, and Mek would put his head in her lap and look up at her with his moist setter eyes, and Mother confided in him as her only friend. Every day, she had a hard time confronting the fact that they’d lost everything they’d worked for their whole lives; the only remnant of their previous life was the gorgeous Irish setter.
The one-bedroom in Novi Sad was often full of refugees from Bosnia—friends of friends or family of family—whom my parents put up until the unfortunate people could make it to Germany or France or some other place where they were not wanted and never would be. They slept scattered all over the floor, my mother stepping over the bodies on her way to the bathroom, Mek always at her heels. He never bothered the refugees, never barked at them. He let the children pet him.
Young male that he was, Mek would often brawl with other dogs. Once, when my mother took him out, he got into a confrontation with a mean rottweiler. She tried to separate them, unwisely, as they were about to go at each other’s throat, and the rottweiler tore my mother’s hand apart. Kristina was there at the time, and she took Mother to the emergency room, where they had absolutely nothing to treat the injury; they did give her the address of a doctor who could sell them bandages and a tetanus shot. They didn’t have enough to pay the fare back home, and the cabdriver said he’d come the next day to get the rest of the money. My sister bluntly told him that there was no reason for him to come back, for they’d have no money tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, or anytime soon. (The cabbie didn’t insist: the daily inflation in Serbia at that time was about 300 percent, and the money would have been worthless by the next day anyway.) For years afterward, Mother could not move her hand properly or grip anything with it. Mek would go crazy if he but sniffed a rottweiler on the same block.
In the fall of 1993, my parents and sister finally got all the papers and the plane tickets for Canada. Family and friends came over to bid farewell. Everyone was sure they’d never see them again. There were a lot of tears, as at a funeral. Mek figured out that something was up; he never left my mother or father out of his sight, as if worried they might leave him; he became especially cuddly, putting his head into their laps whenever he could, leaning against their shins when lying down. Touched though my father may have been with Mek’s love, he didn’t want to take him along to Canada—he couldn’t know what was waiting for them there; where they’d live, whether they’d be able to take care of themselves, let alone a dog. My mother could not bring herself to discuss the possibility of moving to Canada without Mek; she just wept at the very thought of leaving him with strangers.
My father recognised how inconsolable my mother would be without Mek and finally surrendered. In December 1993, my parents, my sister, and Mek arrived in Canada, and I rushed over from Chicago to see them. As soon as I walked in the door of their barely furnished fifteenth-floor apartment in Hamilton, Ontario, Mek ran toward me, wagging his tail, happy to see me. I was astonished he remembered me after nearly three years. I’d felt that large parts of my Sarajevo self had vanished, but when Mek put his head in my lap, some of me came back.
Mek had a happy life in Hamilton. My mother always said that he was a “lucky boy.” He died in 2007, at the age of seventeen. My parents would never consider having a dog again. My mother confides in a parakeet these days, and cries whenever Mek is mentioned.
