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up.
    I’ll give it to Amir.
    I said shut up.
    The party fell nearly silent, so that the American could hear a fighter say: Fifty men armed with rifle grenades—
    Turning away from his good friend, the American clasped Amir’s hand, transferring the money that way. Then he went to seek out the poet.
10
    Every day they worked for him, Enko and Amir earned their money. He interviewed fighters in a concrete building with wadded-up shutters in the smashed black-stained windows, met the mothers of murdered children and imagined that he would “make a difference.” All the while they were running Enko’s errands, the most common of which was to carry ammunition to comrades at the frontline. Once they took a bag of onions and potatoes to Jasmina’s mother. What Amir could have used and even where he lived the American never knew. In the shade, a longhaired boy was hosing down his sidewalk, walking on broken glass. Sometimes Enko said: Tomorrow I’m with the squad, and then the American went out with Amir alone, who of course could interpret perfectly well. Often no interpreter was needed, as when he and Amir sat on a terrace near the head of some steep high street, drinking slivovitz with a blonde named Sandi (twenty-two years old, he wrote in his notebook); for them she had arranged fresh flowers in a big jar on the table. Her boyfriend lived down in Centar; she could not reach him even by letter. Beyond the fence began a view of other red-tiled roofs, then trees, then more red roofs, then the zigzag mined path. Sandi said: The fear is the most difficult, don’t you think? It’s so awful. My sister is in Germany and I don’t know what I canexplain to her. She just doesn’t understand that every minute you’re in the street you feel it, and then when you go inside . . .— He wrote this down, thinking that he must make others comprehend what the sister could not, while Amir gazed into his eyes.
    Enko demanded an advance on three days’ salary. Smiling, the American paid. Every night that he could get a ride, he went to Vesna’s. On other nights he sat in the lounge of the Holiday Inn, where there were occasionally off-duty soldiers and always both kinds of journalists, the suit-and-tie species with the press card on the lapel, and the devil-may-care ones in the photo vests, making extravagant plans or exchanging boasts. It was scarcely comme il faut to sit alone, as the callow American did. This branded him as the impoverished freelancer that he was—a parasite, in fact. When he first arrived, some television journalists had taken pity on him and given him a ride from the airport to the Holiday Inn (the speeding auto receiving a token bullet from the heights of Gavrica). That day there had been no means of getting into the city but with that group. He was grateful, and hoped not to require any other favors. He had not yet learned that one can always pay one’s own way, whether or not the currency is acceptable to others. Indeed, there was an exchange of sorts: To the extent that they noticed him at all, they dismissed him as a denizen of that backwater called “features,” while he for his part pitied them for being the merest producers of spectacle.
He
was going to get to the
why.
— Mostly, of course, all parties ignored each other. They schemed out their stories and listened for the shells.
    How old were your sons? he asked Mirjana.
    Five and three.
    What were their names?
    I don’t want to talk about it.
    But in time (by which I mean half a week, for where there is much death, friendships mature quickly) Mirjana and the others came to know (or at least such was his impression) that he cherished them for their suffering, which he hoped to preserve for others because it tormented him. (He could not decide whether to admire Enko, not for his bravery and his knowledge but for his pain, which armored him like a bulletproof vest.) The poet of