life was split into pre-bees and post-bees. A brief spell of warmth and something indefinably sweet, and then his first clear memory—when they visited Belgrade, not long after his father’s death. His anxious mother took him to the Military Medical Academy for an ultrasound of his heart; the place was all vast and cold, and the doctor’s diagnosis confirmed the local doctor’s suspicions. The big tin soldier, who looked nothing like a doctor to Marko, pinched him on the chin with ice-cold fingers while announcing that there was good news after all: the boy would live. His little organism pulled itself oddly together in a cardiac counteroffensive which he’d rely on in the years to come as a kind of life principle, but the soldier-doctor must have cast a curse on him, just like in a fairy tale, when, wagging the boy’s jaw between thumb and forefinger, he declared: “You’ll be back when the time comes for you to serve as a soldier. We’ll meet again! Take care, my boy!” When the time did come, in 1990, for his military service, coinciding as it did with the start of the war, Marko did his damnedest to evade the army, using his heart defect as his excuse, but nothing worked that year: not the certificate issued by the university showing he was enrolled in the study of Slavic languages and literatures, nor his mother’s terrified pleas to chop off just one finger, which he couldn’t agree to because he loved playing the guitar. At the time he’d have rather died than agree to a life without music. He came home only twice from his year in the navy in the Montenegrin coastal town of Tivat, and his mother visited him there once. Over four months, the longest he’d ever gone without seeing her, she seemed to have aged at least fifteen years; in one of the rare photographs there was a brisk wind blowing at her back while she stood on a dock and, weighing scarcely over a hundred pounds, looked as if she were about to be whisked away by the wind. Marko had his arm around her and looked as if he were holding her down; he was young, with too serious a gaze, full of a prescient sense of dread at something coming, something imminent and horrible. He returned from the navy in the summer of 1991 and tried, again, to enroll at the university. His efforts resulted in little more than a trip to the chaos-ridden city of Belgrade for the entrance exam. Posters featuring Slobodan Milošević were already plastered everywhere. Marko had sold off his comic book collection so he could at least attend a music festival while he was there. When he came home he discovered his mother’s sudden aging was because she had bone cancer. She could no longer stand at her station at the factory. She went on sick leave and never returned to work. For the next months, Marko stayed with her and never got around to enrolling. Meanwhile he was recruited for a unit that was a hybrid, a cross between the regular army and territorial defense, something that never officially existed, nor were there documents or a commander to prove it had; it functioned, indeed, as a link between the Yugoslav People’s Army and the unruly Serb territorials. The unit was made up of mercenaries and young reservists who hadn’t seen what was coming quickly enough, mustered by appeals that played on their sense of patriotism, the duty they’d sworn to uphold, and fueled by youth, inexperience, and a crushing sense of having no way forward. They were all promised financial reward at a time when nobody had a job, and as soon as this is over, once we’ve eviscerated the Ustashas—in a week or two, max, the finest medical care possible would be available to Marko’s mother at the Belgrade Military Medical Academy.
The halfhearted gestures toward a truce and the negotiations which Marko attended as Velimirović’s bodyguard, the musty cellar where he was forced to listen to the lewd jokes of the officers, generals, and politicians, and their perverse laughter, while he and Schweppes—a kid, just his age, who worked on the Croatian side for Ilinčić—patrolled, fully armed, by a door that was slightly ajar. They exchanged glances over their gun sights, wincing at some of what they heard. For the first time, here, through the smoke and wan light, the name Kirin came up. Only years later did he realize what they were talking about then, and what Velimirović was congratulating Ilinčić for. Then, without hardly anyone ever knowing, he saved Schweppes’s life and the lives of several others: he overheard plans being hatched among the Serbs to ambush the delegation of Croatian negotiators and, with news of the putsch drumming in his ears, he persuaded the Croatian team to travel by a different route. Years later he received a message of thanks over the Spanish mobile-phone network, to which he never replied, and then found a package by the door to his apartment and in it, a bottle of Glenlivet. Months of hell followed; Marko began distancing himself from his fellow fighters in the unit and kept as low a profile as he could manage. His mother was finding it a struggle to get out of bed; without his help she couldn’t even reach the improvised chamber-pot toilet in the corner of the cellar where they were sheltering from the constant shelling. For days and nights she lay on a narrow folding cot, waiting for Marko to come home and lift her. The most cherished item, the best thing, he ever received in return for his service in the paramilitary unit was a package of diapers from Belgrade, through someone he knew; all the local suppliers had run out. Whenever he had to leave on an assignment that would be taking him away for a whole day or night, he’d rinse his mother with water from a
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