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the other stories of his life—of my grandfather’s days in the army; his great love for my grandmother; the years he spent as a surgeon and a tyrant of the University. One, which I learned after his death, is the story of how my grandfather became a man; the other, which he told to me, is of how he became a child again.
    The war started quietly, its beginning subdued by the decade we had spent on the precipice, waiting for it to come. Kids at school would say “any day now” without knowing what they were talking about, repeating what they had been hearing for years at home. First came the election and then the riots, the assassination of a minister, the massacre at the delta, and then came Sarobor—and after Sarobor, it was like something loosening, a release.
    Before the war, every week since I was four, my grandfather and I would take that walk to the citadel to see the tigers. It was always just the two of us. We would start at the bottom and come up the back of Strmina Hill, walking the old carriage trail through the shallow valley of the park on the west side of town, crossing the dozens of small clear streams that drizzled through the undergrowth where, as a little girl, I had spent countless hours, stick in hand, dragging the wet leaves of autumn off the mossy rocks in my useless pursuit of tadpoles. My grandfather, his shoulders bent, arms swinging— rowing , Grandma would call from the balcony as she watched us leave, you’re rowing again, Doctor —loped with long strides, the bag with our farm-stand offerings in his hand. He would wear his vest and slacks, his collared shirt with its long white sleeves, his polished hospital shoes, even for summertime uphill treks. Hurrying after him in worn-out sneakers, a foot and a half shorter than he was, my job was only to keep up. After we had crossed the railroad and passed the place where, at age seven, I had taken a dive off my bicycle and bawled through half an hour of treatment via rakija -soaked cloth to my ripped-up knees, the trail would begin to slope sharply upward.
    When he saw me fall behind, my grandfather would stop, wipe his brow, and say: “What’s this, what’s this? I’m just an old man—come on, is your heart a sponge or a fist?”
    And then I would speed up and pant all the way up the hill while he complained, with maddening relish, about how hoarse I sounded, about how he wouldn’t bring me with him anymore if I insisted on sounding like a weasel in a potato sack, if I was going to ruin his nice time outdoors. From the top of Strmina, the trail descended through a long, flower-speckled meadow across which you could see east over the ruptured Roman wall, stones spilled by long-silent cannon fire, and over the cobbled boulevard of Old Town with its dusty sun-smeared windows, its pale orange roofs, grill smoke drifting through the bright awnings of the coffeehouses and souvenir shops. Pigeons, clustered thick enough to be visible from the hill, shuffled like cowled women up and down the street that curved to the docks where the rivers were smashing into each other all day and all night at the head of the peninsula. And then the view would end as we reached the citadel courtyard and paid at the zoo entrance—always the only people in line on a weekday while the entire City indulged in its afternoon lunch break, always bypassing the green-mouthed camels and the hippo enclosure with its painted egrets, always heading straight for where the tigers were patrolling tirelessly up and down the old grate.
    By the time I was thirteen, the ritual of the tigers had become an annoyance. Our way home from the zoo was continually marked by encounters with people I knew: friends, kids my own age, who had long since stopped sharing the company of their elders. I would see them sitting in cafés, smoking on the curb at the Parliament threshold. And they would see me, and remember seeing me, remember enough to laugh mildly about it at school. Their mocking