Saint Vitus Dances Eternity: A Sarajevo Ghost StorySaint Vitus Dances Eternity: 
A Sarajevo Ghost Story 
by Stuart von Allmen
_Unhappy the land that has need of heroes. 
-- Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo_ 
The clean-up progressed slowly. Vaso Miskin Street and the adjoining market area 
were pulped. Shellfire from the surrounding hills had pulverized the busy 
pedestrian area. The shadows were so thick here -- and the barrier that divided 
me from my previous world so thin -- that I mistook for rubble the arms and legs 
and heads I crawled over to stay clear of the frantic and confused Sarajevans. 
Centurion Gusticic, a stern but likable man, stood several feet away and watched 
carefully for interlopers, his eyes casually flicking over the scrambling 
people, while I and the five other Legionnaires who formed the patrol tried to 
extricate the dead, the newcomers to our world. 
I stood over one victim. A large boulder of concrete, probably a portion of the 
street disgorged in the vomit of fire induced by the mortar shell, lay across 
the legs of the woman I tended. 
Centurion Gusticic's command was terse: "Hurry, there are others." 
It was true. The blast had been terrible. The dead were everywhere. 
"She might live," I said, but squatting at her side I saw immediately that I was 
wrong -- her chest was turning dark, pigmenting her fair skin as her heart 
pumped blood not only out the shrapnel hole in her chest but into her torso as 
well, where it lubricated her lungs and liver and everything else. I yearned to 
staunch the blood, to cut her open and compress the artery leaking her life 
away; though in life I'd been a surgeon, I could do nothing. Now my work didn't 
begin until my patient was dead. 
I watched her closely, her life a violin string oscillating on key and off. Her 
eyes flickered open, and for a moment I think she must have seen me. But she 
didn't react differently than if she'd found a living man by her side. A woman 
in a city not torn apart by war might have questioned what she saw, but as I'd 
discovered little more than a month ago, the ghost-haunted terrain of Sarajevo 
visible to me now is no darker than the reality of the streets. 
I've always felt I existed between two worlds. Every facet of my life 
personified dichotomy. Certainly as an ethnic Serb I defied easy classification, 
caught as I was in a city in a nation that was itself once caught on the 
crossroads of great empires. The Hapsburgs and the Ottomans made sport of this 
land for centuries. I was drawn, ultimately drawn apart, by patriotism and 
nationalism, which is essentially the difference of pride in my country and 
making others proud of my country. Divided between a supposed ethnic ancestry 
and a lifelong devotion to my heartland home of Sarajevo. But there was more. I 
was a pacifist caught between generations of more serious-minded males: my 
father the Cetnik Serb and my anti-Serb son. I was an agnostic at the nexus of 
Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Islam and Judaism. Even in my job as a surgeon, I daily 
walked that dreadful, teetering axis that is life and death. And now, my prior 
life as a doctor offering but a crude glimpse of this damned world, I was 
suspended in this purgatory between life and non-existence. 
It's a purgatory where the dichotomy of existence is very different than the 
struggle between life and death waged by the living around me now -- a dizzying 
whirl of panic and flight that left me as lost in the crowd as I was in my 
thoughts. 
All the baggage from life that implores us to concern ourselves with body and 
spirit is reduced to simple concern for spirit here. Perhaps finally in death, 
humankind can escape the pummeling roll of the wheel of history, of fortune, for 
we become disengaged enough to actually concern ourselves with the state of the 
future, a development only allowed when apprehension for physical health is 
eliminated. 
My name is Dragos Miloslavic, and you already know more about me than I could 
recall for the first days that I wandered the haunted streets of Sarajevo. 
As soon as I recognized my ghostly state and tore down layers of denial to 
acknowledge my appalling situation (imagine a doctor surrounded not by the dying 
but by the already dead!), I immediately dropped the appellative "doctor." It 
made no sense here, and only subjected me to additional scrutiny by those who 
did not know I was firmly entrenched in the Hierarchy, the pointed and pointless 
way the dead name the main bloc here. 
For some reason everyone assumed I belonged to that despicable class of 
mercenary vultures called "reapers." The reputation of doctors apparently 
suffers unfairly even in the land of the dead, though it's true that many 
doctors become reapers, just as some doctorates still among the living have 
reaped life from my city. Reapers are the zealots of death that hover over the 
dying in anticipation of that last gasp with a hope that the newly dead, who we 
sometimes refer to as an Enfant, will arrive here as a ghost. Otherwise, they 
will transcend -- pass to whatever awaits us, be it heaven or, far more likely, 
just another miserable hell with new rules for damnation and frustration and 
isolation -- or fade completely into Oblivion, the dark void that in life is 
what I expected death to be, but which is the absence I now fear most and find 
incomprehensible. 
The Enfant, his or her vision and wits bound into confusion by a plasmic caul 
which all who arrive wear like a second embryonic sac, is easily tricked by 
these fiends whose only aim is to gather the new soul and profit by it. They're 
like afterlife bounty hunters, although for reapers "dead or alive" holds no 
meaning. 
The souls of the dead have value, for ironically they are all that breathe new 
life into these lands inhabited by beings -- people? -- so ancient they are said 
to be no longer recognizable as something once human. Perhaps they were never 
human. I know so little of this new world... but I do know that Enfants 
"rescued" by reapers inevitably end up in chains, while those liberated by 
Hierarchy patrols such as mine go to Stygia, the far-away home of those who 
govern the Hierarchy. In the city, there is a need, I suppose, to discover life 
again and savor its many delicate forms and fragile delights. The saved souls 
find solace in a city of death they make beautiful, and the Deathlords and the 
spirits of the long-dead already inhabiting the city are constantly renewed by 
those who, if not alive, are at least less dead than they. Admittedly, some 
reapers gather souls they will send to Stygia, but for a price, and to exploit 
in this way for personal gain is clearly a sin, if an agnostic can cast such 
stones. 
But that great wheel spins ever on -- human nature does exist beyond the grave, 
which is dire news for those who still live and may hope for respite from the 
petty masters who pain them and the idiots who lavish them with indignities. And 
this is certainly not welcome news for those who have already suffered through 
hell in life, such as those in my beleaguered and battered home of Sarajevo, 
Bosnia. 
And that's why my fellow Legionnaires and I are all dedicated to the 
multi-cultural, multi-religious -- the by-god-multi-human! -- existence that 
Sarajevo embodied! All of us are victims of this unprovoked nationalistic 
assault on Bosnia. We decided to remain instead of flee to reprieve in Stygia. 
And except for Mehmed, a Muslim who was killed by a terrorist-led Serbian strike 
force in the northeastern Bosnia town of Bijeljina where he was visiting 
relatives, we were all killed inside Sarajevo. 
While the world at large may see this war as evidence of the failure of what 
Bosnia sought to represent, it's really quite the opposite. Indeed, Sarajevo 
stands like a road sign on the roadway of human history even now. For even after 
almost two months of shelling and sniper attacks that have decimated the 
population by the death and the departures they have forced, Serbs and Croats 
and Muslims and Jews still work and survive side by side. And they all refuse to 
leave, as I refused while I still lived, because they believe in what this city 
represents. So no matter that the world outside the Balkans may turn a dry, 
blind eye to this "conflict," this war, as they deal with their own small 
problems, their terrorist threats or sagging economies. 
No matter that a sign marking a better future is now lost as the rest of the 
world detours us on their way to their own Oblivion. 
Even if the rest of the world will not move to protect the innocents who live in 
the city, at least in death Sarajevans can find succor. The Legionnaires of the 
Hierarchy are at hand to tend them! Unlike the ineffective Blue Helmets of the 
United Nations Protection Force, we actually intervene, we are actually moved by 
this tragedy and do not seek to profit by it. We are the Blue Helmets of the 
lands of the dead. 
But seeing death on this woman's face before her body realizes the end is near 
makes me wonder how we can save both the living and the dying. Can we replace 
the impotent United Nations Protection Force in the lands of the living too? I 
refuse to endure another Vukovar, which UNPROFOR allowed. That Croatian city 
fell to the Serbs after a three-month siege at the end of last year, and the 
people of Vukovar endured days of slaughter in the streets as the Serbs danced 
into the city and celebrated their victory. 
Perhaps because I'm dead already, I have a cruel foresight of death. Like 
glimpsing a dent in an automobile before an accident actually occurs, so too can 
I see death in the faces, on the bodies, of those approaching their time. Just 
as I see it in the face of this woman, I can inspect the crowd and I can plainly 
see that this horror will not soon end. 
A little girl crying at the feet of her dead mother seems to have skin pulled 
back to reveal a skull spider-webbed with fractures. 
An old man with an expressionless face and a small hole over his breast that 
weeps a slow red drip. 
A family huddled together in a corner counts their numbers and their blessings. 
All have withered, crispy skin, except the oldest daughter will live because she 
won't be with her loved ones when they burn. 
Couldn't I follow these doomed souls and protect them from the reapers and 
salvage their essences for perpetual protection in Stygia? Alas, anywhere but in 
Sarajevo, where the soon-to-die outnumber not just the dead but seem more 
prominent too than the living. But at the current rate of death forecast over a 
period of a couple years -- though it's ridiculous to think that even this 
inattentive, irrational world will suffer the hateful, warmongering fools 
Milosevic and Karadzic to live even half that long, or even until the end of 
1992 -- the dead will outnumber the living. The ghosts of the afterlife will 
become the guardian angels of the damned. Where else but in Sarajevo would such 
divine sentinels be ghosts, not angels? 
Is this the sign of a city torn by ethnic strife? Where even after death we all 
fight for the other? 
"Dragos!" The Centurion's call brought me back. 
The woman was dead. 
"Yes, sir," I hastily acknowledged, amazing myself that conforming to a 
hierarchy of command was coming so easily for one always so independent in life. 
But order was naturally at the heart of the Hierarchy. It allowed all their 
efforts to run as smoothly as this one in Sarajevo, I suppose. 
As I watched, the woman seemed to swim across the barrier between our worlds. 
She wavered, drawn perhaps toward transcendence or possibly to Oblivion, but 
like so many in this city she was still tied to the life she so recently (and 
abruptly) departed; thus she became a ghost like myself. 
Like a diving mask to protect her during that swim through unfathomable depths 
and unknowable tests, the woman's caul protected her against the still visible 
horror of the Vaso Miskin Street massacre. What she saw now would seem only 
dreams to her later. For an instant I recollected the awful things I dreamt as I 
wandered in my caul before Legionnaire Gusticic found me. Worse was the 
disorientation and grief -- especially the grief -- when the caul was first 
lifted. But still I sighed in relief, knowing Gusticic's order to leave the 
Enfants cauled would spare this woman for now. 
She was gasping and thrashing, but I grabbed her and managed to haul her to 
Gusticic. There were already two others attached to him by the silken cord he 
used in such instances. All he'd had at first were rusted manacles, but as the 
organization of the Hierarchy in the city became better, more appropriate 
supplies became available. 
Though I'd delivered a dozen such Enfants this way, it was still unnerving to 
leave the woman's side. She was Caucasian, perhaps another ethnic Serb like me 
caught in the fire of the nationalists who made the claim in my name that I 
wanted to be free of Bosnia to join them in a greater Serbian state. But like 
Persephone who left flowers trailing in her footsteps after her return from 
Hades, so an ethnic Serb left Serbian soil. At least according to Milosevic, who 
claimed that where a Serb walked, there was Serbia. 
The woman was trembling, but there were others suffering more, so I turned to 
face the catastrophic scene again and to look for another ready to flee the hell 
of Sarajevo to what they expected to be the comforting arms of death. 
Looking at the ruptured earth and the mesmerized and stricken people, I tried to 
imagine the marketplace of Vaso Miskin Street with the eyes of a living 
Sarajevan. It was difficult though, because my new terrain mirrored Sarajevo, 
but it offered a skewed view. So I could imagine the smoke, along with tears, 
that burned their eyes; dust that billowed and sought hold in the folds and gaps 
in their clothing, as well as in their ears, noses and mouths. The heat of the 
scattered flames, here razing an overturned produce cart, there melting the skin 
of a middle-aged man whose soul transcended. But I was distanced from the 
immediacy of emotion. Oh, I knew the terror and outrage these mortal witnesses 
felt. But I could dissect it better. 
My view from beyond them also allotted sight from above them. The terrible, 
petty designs that ruled men became clearer from my vantage. My perspective was 
becoming more clinical as I sought to do the humane tasks of the Hierarchy and 
overlook the merely dead to struggle to claim the undying. But I could not 
forget that the humane task was for these humans, my comrades in life. 
It was a grotesque vantage, but one that was grotesquely beautiful. There was a 
stillness here. The kind of reverential silence that takes hold in a mosque. And 
if the world seemed more distant, less immediate, then it was because its color 
was greyer. Deader. As if a layer of chalk dust was spread to mute it. Or, as 
if, I realized suddenly, I saw the world through the purple lens of a kneeling 
man's robe, as I had briefly as a child. 
My mind wandered again, the urgency of the Centurion's commands fading as I 
became as incapable as the Sarajevans in the marketplace and allowed the strange 
beauty of the landscape to mesmerize me. I was a child surrounded by heavenly 
silence in an Orthodox church, and I gazed at the bustle of life through the 
large stained-glass window that dominated one of the walls. I remember craning 
my neck so I could look at the world through the different colored panes. Yellow 
that jaundiced the working faces. Red that ripened people's cheeks and lent an 
aura of invincibility to the buildings. Green that gave an unreal clarity to the 
leaves of the unending rows of trees that once lined the streets. And the purple 
of the kneeling man's robe. The man was bent in supplication to another. Perhaps 
presenting a gift. I don't remember. The picture in the window wasn't as 
important as how it changed my image of the real world outside. 
Such a beautiful color, purple. I'd drawn more than one demand from my father to 
sit still as I wriggled by his side to create a line of sight with the kneeling 
man and an object outside. What I eventually saw was a glimpse of Sarajevo as a 
ghost sees it now. The world looked wilted. Greens and reds became browns. As 
did every vibrant color I could spot. The complexion of the people outside, 
though, acquired a richness of hue that overcame the general greying and 
mottling of their skin. They seemed to achieve a depth that ordinary vision 
couldn't detect. That too was similar to how the living seemed to me now. 
Although they might be on the verge of death, they possessed a gripping and raw 
connection to the world, connections that ghosts such as I possess only 
tenuously. 
So, as through the lens of that kneeling man, I witnessed the carnage of the 
marketplace again. Around the perimeter of the damaged area stood countless 
Sarajevans hypnotized by the brutal reality of the destruction before them. In 
the unlikely event this war goes on for long, these same people, the ones not 
part of the pile of corpses themselves, will react more efficiently. Maybe save 
more lives. Now, only those with the proper training are able to react. The 
implausibility, the seeming impossibility, of bombs dropping on children in the 
midst of their city is beyond their comprehension. 
It's almost too much for me. But stained-glass and death: grotesque beauty. 
That's my world now. 
We worked for another five minutes before the first reaper showed himself. He 
was a tricky one, but his was a game the Centurion had warned us about. I would 
never have noticed otherwise. He was possessing a man... skinriding him to 
death. I noticed him only because I'd so carefully examined the crowd a few 
moments before. If Centurion Gusticic later disciplined me for slothfulness and 
risking the souls of the Sarajevans, I would have this as my defense. 
The reaper was rapidly growing insubstantial as he slipped his gossamer form 
into his prey, but I saw him well enough to note that he wore some sort of 
insignia. I couldn't make it out, but I was more concerned with the reaper 
himself. His features darkened as he completed the maneuver. He was a 
middle-aged man and had perhaps been fifty when he died. The skillful deftness 
he displayed in his maneuver made me assume he'd been dead longer than the few 
months of this war. 
The man the reaper was skinriding was one in whose face I'd read great horror. 
Moments before he had been frantically wiping his arm as if the sprayed drops 
were acid, not blood. Or if fearful like Lady Macbeth that the invisible spots 
were indelible and marked him forever as part of this madness. He certainly 
wasn't the kind that would ever harden to such tragedies. So when I saw him 
assisting the wounded, I paused again, just long enough to note that the person 
he was assisting was beyond help. He wasn't quite dead either, but almost. I 
could see through the mirror of the man's blank eyes that his brain had been 
severely bruised and death was imminent. 
If the reaper could move the dying man to a position away from the devastation, 
perhaps behind or in the midst of the crowd where I or other Legionnaires would 
not see him, then he could steal away with an Enfant's soul as his prize. I 
could see no sign yet that this dead man might walk again after death, but I 
acted on the assumption that the reaper knew better. 
The reaper started to move more quickly now. Vestigial spasms of life passed 
through the now dead man. I made certain that at least one of my comrades 
observed my pursuit before I attempted to negotiate a path on the reaper's 
heels. I avoided the crowd as best I could, but even so a few Sarajevans 
stumbled into me and caused some discomfort as I hurried to the corpse's side. 
But the reaper was also jarred by the crowd and he and his charge were knocked 
to the ground. Already, an Enfant was emerging from the corpse. 
Because the reaper had possessed a living man and effectively became part of the 
realm of the living himself, he was beyond my reach. I could have attempted to 
cause harm to the mortal he possessed, but since I strove to protect the 
Sarajevans, I refused that option. Even so, it was a stalemate. I was beyond his 
reach as well. Fortunately, the Enfant was arriving on my side of the Shroud. 
The reaper, I believe, was prepared to fight for his charge, but a fellow 
Legionnaire, Pava Sacic, an ethnic Croat among the first killed by the snipers 
who fired into every imaginable part of the city from the nearby mountainsides 
or (as in Pava's case) from the remaining high-rise buildings within the city 
itself, reached my side to back me up. I didn't know if Pava saw the danger. 
"Reaper..." I said, indicating the ghostly man by the side of the corpse. 
Never had a living man stared at me so since I achieved my ghostly state. And 
even though I knew it was really a reaper I'd disenfranchised and not just a man 
at all, it was horrifying. The man's face was lit with fear and disgust. The 
former was probably a glimmer of the psyche of the old who had panicked at the 
touch of blood. On some level the mortal must know that death was touching him, 
using him. 
"This soul has been saved, reaper." I took the Enfant's hand and prepared to 
leave, but a haunting whisper rattled to my world from the throat of the 
reaper-possessed man. 
"This one was Prince Lazar's, fool!" 
I spun to face the reaper. His eyes were glowing a brilliant red. 
The reaper whispered again, "I know you now, Legionnaire. Your destiny is now 
Oblivion." 
But he made no move. Just the hot metal red from his narrow eyes that washed me 
with bloody light. I turned my back on the prone reaper and guided the Enfant 
carefully to Centurion Gusticic who immediately took charge of him. 
It was the end of our rescue. More than a dozen Enfants saved. I knew nothing 
other than these kinds of inflated numbers, but the Centurion had told me an 
inordinately high percentage of mortal deaths resulted in ghosts in Sarajevo 
now. So many lives tragically cut short. These people had too many passions for 
life left unexpressed to simply pass on. 
I surveyed the wreckage of Vaso Miskin Street a final time. At least the 
Sarajevans could tend their wounded. Their efforts were not thwarted by snipers 
firing at those who attempted rescues of the wounded or recovery of the dead. 
Such small respite is all that remains for them. 
Our clean-up was done, but the Sarajevans were only beginning to count the 
losses. 
* * * 
It was late, and the patrol had disbanded for the evening, so I wandered the 
empty streets of Sarajevo. Centurion Gusticic didn't sanction wandering alone, 
but the Lazarians were on my mind and I needed to determine whether that 
skinrider's threat should alarm me. So I deliberated in the way I'd done during 
my life: by walking the streets of the city, though then the roads had not been 
littered with fragments of glass, scraps of metal, and chunks of concrete. 
And I thought of Lazar. Lazar! 
I'd assumed "Lazarus" was the root of the so-called Lazarians, one of the larger 
groups of ghosts that refused to affiliate with the Hierarchy but remained 
active in Sarajevo nonetheless. Collectively called Renegades, such groups were 
actually more trouble than the reapers. Their time, I thought, was dominated by 
their conflict with one another, but perhaps their ridiculous battles involved 
the living too. 
But they said "Prince" Lazar. It made more sense as Lazarus -- a band of 
Renegades established on some premise surrounding the return of Lazarus by the 
hand of Jesus. It seemed natural for ghosts to honor such a story. 
But Lazar was someone else entirely. Serbian nationalism of a few years ago made 
it hard to forget that damnable self-proclaimed prince and the Battle of Kosovo 
where the Serbian noble, Prince Lazar, died fighting over five hundred years 
ago. 
Actually, it was just over six hundred years ago, and Lazar didn't really die 
fighting. Serbian poetry and legend has exaggerated the Battle of Kosovo into an 
epic of heroism and spiritual accomplishment that concluded with the flowers of 
Serbian nobility dying while defending their Balkan lands against a juggernaut 
onslaught of the nefarious Ottoman army. 
I knew this so well because June 28, 1989 was the six-hundredth anniversary of 
the Battle of Kosovo and it was celebrated with much fervor and Serbian fanfare 
near Pristina, Kosovo, at the battlefield of Gazimestan, where the ancient 
conflict was waged. This, of course, was a mere three months after the Serbian 
Assembly in March 1989 passed a resolution that abolished the independent status 
of Kosovo and made it, along with another province, Vojvodina, the first new 
components of Greater Serbia. Before he would personally set foot upon those 
sacred lands, Slobodan Milosevic, the Serb leader and the real architect of the 
bombardment of Sarajevo, apparently needed to possess the battlefield where his 
Serbian prince was captured and executed. 
In my mind's eye, though it seemed (and was literally) a lifetime away, I could 
see the television coverage of the event. Not the official Serbian media, which 
cast the event as the Second Coming that Milosevic suggested, but the Bosnian 
coverage that showed Milosevic urging the crowd with puerile rhetoric and 
threatening the rest of Yugoslavia with violence. I don't remember all the exact 
words, but he mentioned the struggles facing Serbs and noted the battles were 
not armed, but that, and this part I recall because of the chill that ran down 
my spine, "this cannot be excluded yet." 
Milosevic went on to forge the destiny of Yugoslavia. One that will likely claim 
hundreds of thousands of lives and also putrefy every moral and code of decency 
in order to wipe an entire race from the Balkans. 
The disgusting display at Kosovo was all heralded by Prince Lazar. He was dead, 
yes (though what did that count for any longer in my reckoning!), but the bones 
of the Prince toured Serbia before the event, and images of Lazar were hoisted 
and sold in Gazimestan. Posters of Lazar sold beside those depicting Christ and, 
sickeningly, Milosevic too. 
I was shocked, and still am, that such an ancient event could be used to rouse 
such passionate hatred. Why is it that humankind's memory, usually so short and 
usually so ignorant of the past, could dredge up this event and clasp to it so? 
Why is everything most foul about the past imprinted indelibly in our collective 
memory? These mistakes occur again and again like a rolling wagon wheel -- not 
only forever following itself but also forever mired in the same awful track. 
Meanwhile, all that is good becomes a mere blip, a single spoke on that wheel 
that rises only to fall away again, forgotten. 
If it's sins of the past he wishes to avenge, why doesn't Milosevic wish to 
carve his Greater Serbia from Italy? As if that were truly his goal. After all, 
it was Diocletian who persecuted the Christians long before the Muslims, and it 
was during that emperor's ten-year massacre that the Serbs' beloved St. Vitus 
fell. June 28th is also the feast day of St. Vitus. Where is that in the 
rhetoric of Milosevic? 
Or is it there still? Is it just another anniversary of slaughtered Christians 
to be set at the feet of the people with the most convenient territory? Perhaps 
the spirit of that slaughtered Sicilian youth will never fade. And not just from 
Bosnia, but from the world over. Wherever there is a lunatic who will 
sagaciously tap-dance through history -- here lingering on one event, there 
blithely skirting another -- there will be people to dance with him. 
But Lazar. Killed after his defeat at the hands of the Ottomans. I strained my 
memory to recall his executioner. Some of the pompous mythology of the event 
helped. It was the army of Murat I. At the Battle of Kosovo, Murat I captured 
Serbia for the Ottomans, though he wasn't present to enjoy his victory. He was 
assassinated before the final clashes by a Serbian posing as a deserter. The 
Ottoman died in his own tent, where he expected to gain information about the 
Serbian army from the "deserter." The lack of information, and the loss of the 
sultan, apparently did nothing to turn the tide of the war. 
But every person of Serb descent, for we are all probably familiar with these 
details of the story, knows that the Serbs actually lost the earthly battle 
because saintly Lazar loved his people so much. It's said that the angel Elijah 
appeared on the eve of the final battle and offered Lazar the choice between 
victory in the war on earth or else an eternity in the kingdom of heaven for all 
his people. 
I wonder now if it was Lazar who concocted this story for those near him at the 
moment of the Serbian defeat. Did he make a great tactical blunder and fear his 
people would kill him before the conquering Muslims were given the opportunity? 
It's much easier to explain loss if it's colored by the promise of an eternal 
victory. 
I had another wry thought about that date: June 28th. That was also the day in 
1914 when Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the 
Hapsburg throne, on Franz Josef Street in Sarajevo to spark the conflicts that 
eventually engulfed the world as World War I. 
All these thoughts stirred my imagination. My dismal surroundings did the same. 
I couldn't believe what a wasteland Sarajevo was becoming. I'd walked this 
street with the patrol no more than a few days ago, and already it was 
transformed. There was more debris. More buildings pounded flat. More holes in 
the taller, stronger buildings, like the nearby Oslobodjenje Building. And 
something else, I realized with a start: no lights. The electricity was out 
again. It was an ongoing battle of a different kind for the people of 
Elektroprivreda, the electrical utility company in the city. They were 
constantly repairing transformer stations the Serbs attacked, but once that was 
done a damaged transmission tower elsewhere would already have deprived another 
area of the city, if not the entire city, of electricity. The power would be 
back again. Sometime. 
The mountainsides now populated by the Serbs were more ominous too. With 
intervening trees and buildings removed by the shelling, their implacable 
strength stood revealed, though the details were obscured by darkness. 
I wondered if my son Kulin was poised somewhere out in that darkness to spring 
upon the encircling Serbs. It was with him that I last walked this street in 
life, and it was inevitably of him that I always thought when I walked its 
narrow way. Now I wondered if I would ever see him on the streets of Sarajevo. I 
doubted it. Certainly I would never again see him alive. If he was in Sarajevo, 
then it would be as a ghost like myself. But I doubted that too. If he existed 
in this afterlife, then his memories and passions would surely bind him to the 
battlefields of Herzegovina or whatever wasted place he made his last stand 
against the Serbians. 
Here our existence was indeed a sort of purgatory. I don't know if we could 
change our eventual fate or alter our inevitable destination, be it Heaven or 
Hell, by our actions here, but I know that many try. Centurion Gusticic, for 
one, must believe this. Something about him, something I can only subliminally 
detect, makes me think he was once less kind than he is now. I think he seeks to 
change his fate by altering the world into which he was originally born. In this 
way the belief that you can make such changes persists. For that I am thankful; 
without it this land would slowly grow as dark and evil as the world of my 
Sarajevo. Here it is spiritual wealth that determines the victor. 
My thought shifted back to my poor Kulin. Fatima and I named him with such 
optimism. We wanted his age to be one recalled centuries hence with the same joy 
as the time Bosnia was free for over twenty years at the close of the 12th 
Century under the Ban of the same name. It was time again to forget the racism 
of men like my father, the Cetnik Serb who had fought under General Draza 
Mihailovic, leader of the "other" rebel band during World War II. "Other" to 
Tito's Communists who came to dominate Yugoslavia's post-war years. 
My father, though, was in many ways unlike the general he so admired. Foremost, 
he was tempted where the general was not by the Serbian nationalist agenda of 
Vasic and Moljevic, whom I think must have felt that the confusion of the World 
War was the best time to seize lands for the Serbs, no matter the millions of 
Turks and Croats and Jews who lived here too. It could have been no worse had 
the devil Milosevic been my father. I spent part of my rebellious youth seduced 
by Communism simply because my father despised Tito. Then I discovered that Tito 
was a mass murderer himself, though strangely the world still granted him the 
1984 Winter Olympics before his death in 1980. But not so surprisingly really, 
as this is the same world that allows Sarajevo now. 
And for her part, Fatima wished to erase memories of her own father. Perhaps 
it's because I was not exposed to his hypocrisy day after day, but I cannot 
fault Ahmed Popovac as I can my father. My father was a close-minded fool who 
refused even to use hindsight to make his vision clearer. Ahmed was just a weak 
man. He accepted Tito's harsh laws against the Muslim faithful, like the 
forcible unveiling of Muslim women in 1950, the very year that my wife was born. 
It was only eight years later that Ahmed Popovac gave up his religious faith to 
integrate (or as Fatima would say, "ingratiate") himself with the Communist 
rulers of Yugoslavia. Two years after that, in 1960, a mere eleven years after 
many of his associates and friends in the "Young Muslims" were imprisoned for 
resisting the Communist annihilation of the Islamic faith, Ahmed Popovac was 
part of the Yugoslavian diplomatic corps in 
the Middle East. 
Ahmed upset Fatima with the degree of his delight in our marriage in 1969. She 
felt his instant approval of the arrangement was because I was not Muslim, and 
association with me, a Serb, would win her even more accord in modern 
Yugoslavia. And Fatima never forgave her father's scolding when she informed 
them that she had insisted on being listed differently than me in the 1971 
census. She classified herself as "Muslim, in the sense of a nation." I 
suggested that I be listed the same as a show of solidarity, but she rightly 
insisted that the strength of Bosnia was in its diversity and variety of ethnic 
personalities, so I noted myself as Serbian. 
Kulin was born in that same year. We listed him as Serbian, because there was no 
option for "Bosnian," and because that was the choice that would cause the least 
dispute with our fathers. Both, of course, were delighted. 
But Kulin's life would not go as pleasantly as either of us hoped, or, I'm 
certain, we so fervently believed it would. He grew up the product of a 
multi-ethnic society. It was one, of course, that didn't encourage diversity, 
but options were still there. Something in him, though, sensed the injustice 
done to Alija Izetbegovic, a former "Young Muslim" and future President of 
Bosnia, when in 1983 Izetbegovic was prosecuted for pro-Muslim activity. 
After that, Kulin was wary for signs of political turmoil. He didn't begin to 
associate with the Muslims even now so much as he disassociated with the Serbs. 
And this was especially true with the rise of Slobodan Milosevic and his speech 
in 1989. Not long after that, Kulin flew the nest. Fatima's death by cancer 
later in 1989 -- thank God she missed this hell! -- certainly precipitated his 
departure, but his own motives and passions were fully formed as a young man of 
nineteen, and he joined the Party for Democratic Action, Izetbegovic's SDA, in 
1990. 
I celebrated beside him on the streets of Sarajevo just a few months ago in 
March. We walked this route the next day. We stopped here, I realized as I 
stopped my walk again, at this now burnt out hull of a caf for cevapi, Turkish 
coffee served in beautiful fildjans, and just a sip of that wonderful brandy, 
lozovaca. I was hopeful, but he was fearful, and eventually his worries broke me 
down too. I spoke with Kulin as parents should speak with their children 
sometimes. We spoke of many things, and I hold those moments in my heart as my 
last words with my son. I do not have regrets that anything in my life with him, 
my life for him, was left unexpressed. 
Before the end of the month he was gone to defend any number of villages against 
the assault of Milosevic and Karadzic's Serbs. I only knew he was gone by a 
brief message on my phone machine. It was all he needed to say. 
I wonder if he knew I was dead. That I was killed less than a month later? Or 
that one week earlier I had buried my father? I'd smiled ironically on Kulin's 
behalf when his grandfather was killed by a Serbian shell. More Serbs die every 
day at the hands of those who claim to wish to liberate them. I wonder if they 
cared that they had put down a WWII Cetnik. 
And so it was that I wandered the dying streets of the city until dawn. A life 
does not flash before one only at death, but countless times after death as 
well. Yet with the rising sunlight there was also a flash in my mind as the 
silent ruminations of the night bore fruit. Perhaps it was just my imagination, 
but the leader of the other major faction of Renegades was a Turk, maybe an 
Ottoman. Did the dead bear such hatred, such animal animosity, as the living? 
Did the ominous wheel of history endlessly roll even among the dead? 
Was this harrowing landscape the result of a promised land not to Lazar's 
liking? Was he here leading the Lazarians and trying to reclaim the physical 
landscape he'd ignorantly forsaken in exchange for this purgatory of grey? 
* * * 
A month passed before I learned more. The shelling of my once beautiful city was 
unending. Not a single day passed without more shelling, which made it over two 
months of constant terror and death for the residents of the Sarajevo. 
Unbelievably, the Hierarchy was still the only force that seemed to give a damn. 
Our counterparts in the living realm, the Blue Helmets of UNPROFOR, once cheered 
and cherished by the inmates of Sarajevo, were now the object of contempt. Just 
now I've watched a young man -- despite the continuing fire of the Serb assassin 
-- hurry to the side of another man sniped from the top floors of an abandoned 
apartment building. The young man, a civilian, perhaps a baker or chimney sweep, 
risked his life, while twenty paces away a Blue Helmet stood and watched. When 
the shooting became heavier the young hero was forced to retreat. 
Only after much cajoling and much time did the young man convince the Blue 
Helmet to roll his armored car ten paces backward to provide cover for his 
rescue efforts. Thirty minutes later the wounded man was dead, and I, left 
behind at Centurion Gusticic's order, waited to see the fate of the man's soul. 
He transcended. 
He might have made it to a hospital and survived if the Blue Helmet had 
possessed just a sliver of humanity -- just enough to a bit more quickly bend 
the non-intervention rules they all break. 
It was the first time I was able to pause long enough to actually witness 
transcendence. Others I administered had transcended before, but always when I 
was on patrol. In such instances there was not enough time to appreciate this 
miraculous event. I was too busy racing into the next fire-gutted building or to 
the side of the next tattered corpse. 
But now I watched. The man seemed not to sink into himself as one does before 
the journey across the barrier between life and this ghostly plane. Instead, he 
appeared to expand. It was the metaphysical parallel to a blind person seeing 
for the first time -- that first instant of shock when he thought it was too 
much and that it would be better to be blind again. But then came a bliss, like 
the unburdening union of inspirational love, when he was able to ken the scope 
of everything, but was not nearly capable of deciphering this infinity. Then, 
slowly, came the heady amazement of realizing how to express the universe's 
gestalt. Or perhaps a satisfaction at no longer needing to know. 
I could only observe the man himself, of course, not whatever he was 
encountering or contemplating. As I watched, he shuddered through a sudden 
twisting that sent shivers of vertigo through me. The sunlight refracted in 
circuitous patterns and swallowed him. 
I moved on, envious of the omnipresence the man seemed to gain. I didn't have 
that much time to spare. I was to meet the patrol along so-called Sniper Alley, 
formerly Vojvode Putnika, which was the main cross-town boulevard in Sarajevo. 
It was here that the Serb snipers had a relatively clear view of Sarajevans on 
the streets. It was here that people were specifically targeted, instead of 
caught in the random destruction of a mortar shell. How a monster could 
purposely shoot civilian men and women and, yes, children too, and call himself 
a warrior, or even a soldier, was beyond my understanding. 
The Hierarchy made constant patrols of the area because deaths were inevitable. 
The area was also thick with mindless ghosts haunting the site of their deaths. 
I hurried down the northern bank of the Miljacka River. It was not long before I 
saw that the Oslobodjenje Building was in flames. The bastards had finally 
gotten it. The flames were burning hard in each of the twin ten-story towers, 
but the landmark that was hailed upon its completion as the most modern building 
in Sarajevo looked like it would yet survive -- if only as a skeleton of steel 
and concrete. 
I wondered if Kemal Kurspahic was inside. I hoped the editor-in-chief and the 
crew that responded to his call to continue the paper were unharmed. The 
newspaper "Liberation", for which the building was named because of the paper's 
origins in 1943 when Tito's militiamen printed it from mobile presses, was still 
printed every day, and the 10,000 available copies always sold out instantly. 
The voice of the paper is one not purely of alarm, but of outrage, which I think 
was the predominant emotion at least at the time of my death. Of course, that 
was more than a month ago. Almost too long for me to still imagine the travails 
of trying to live. To simply survive! Now I only had to exist. So much easier! 
So far fewer questions to answer. 
I tried to concentrate on my immediate surroundings, but the burning building 
dominated my attention. Then I heard sniper fire rattling into the upper reaches 
of the building -- at the floors in flame, I thought. Probably to discourage 
rescue or firefighting efforts. Surely a patrol was already in the building! I 
knew the Hierarchy would respond. That calmed me, and I watched the street 
again. 
I passed a number of cars abandoned in the streets. The hoods were mostly 
propped open. The old reaction of attributing this to vandals jumped to mind 
before I realized that only a few items were being stripped, and one in 
particular: the car batteries. The power outages were frequent and often long, 
so people were searching for any means of powering their lights, stoves, and 
other appliances. 
On the other side of the street I soon noted an oddity: a hardware store still 
open. What manner of customers, I wondered, would possibly be in search of 
material to rebuild their devastated homes? The roof of the store itself was 
torn by a meter-long gash. But as I passed I saw that there were indeed 
customers within. People desperately trying to maintain a sense of normality. 
As I came within about a quarter-mile of the UNPROFOR headquarters, just a scoot 
beyond which was the still burning Oslobodjenje Building, I witnessed a very 
discouraging transaction. It was the black market in operation. Two men stood 
ahead of me in an alley recessed from the street. One was nonchalant and seemed 
oblivious to the war-torn surroundings, while the other flinched with every 
rattle of gunfire in the distance and almost threw himself to the ground when he 
heard a shell detonate in the distance. The first didn't seem perturbed at all. 
The patient man was clearly in control and enjoying it. His stubble of a beard, 
wild tattoos, and especially his gleaming and malicious little eyes marked him 
in my mind as a likely miscreant. The kind of young man who lived on the fringes 
of society before the war. The kind just waiting for the veneer of civilization 
that's taken thousands of years to build up to be stripped away so everyone 
could exist in his realm -- a world in which he could be the master. 
The nervous, older man was purchasing cigarettes from the "merchant," though he 
was clearly not enjoying it. He looked the sort of intent, intellectual man who 
had once occupied a position in society won with time and effort. Now his 
position was reversed. I imagined the two as former student and professor. Where 
once the professor flunked the unruly youth, now he was dependent on him for a 
quick stroke of nicotine. 
I had an ironic vision of these men as the two faces of Radovan Karadzic, the 
political leader of the Bosnian Serb nationalists. He came to Sarajevo from the 
mountains as a young boy, rough and looking for chances of promotion into a 
society to which he did not belong. To enter it he became a professor -- I could 
hardly believe my memories of him as a tenured professor of Psychiatry at the 
University of Sarajevo or as the team doctor for the Sarajevo Football Club. But 
then he put the old face back on. That of a man driven to be a king, even if it 
meant that civilization had to be torn down to make it so. 
I tried to imagine he was a smart man who used devious psychiatric tricks to 
twist the thoughts and beliefs of the men who followed him. But it was in vain. 
The only tricks I could imagine him capable of were the most ordinary ones, like 
his claim that he was once imprisoned as a political prisoner when his sentence 
was truly for a scandal involving home loans. 
But there was more about this exchange on the streets that staggered me: the 
price. I could clearly see the bills being exchanged as I drew nearer the two. 
The professor paid more than a thousand dinars for a pack of cigarettes! That 
was fully one-tenth of the average pension of 10,000 dinars a month! 
I shook my head in dismay. Perhaps the price would have been less had the man 
been able to pay in dollars. Our inflation had never really been under control, 
but this was ridiculous. Each dinar the black marketeer accepted probably lost 
value every moment. 
I could recall a time just a few years ago when that same amount of dinars would 
have bought well over fifty U.S. dollars of cigarettes. That, I suppose, was a 
war-time economy. The man didn't look the sort to have a family, so at least 
that tenth of his possible monthly earnings wasn't necessarily better spent on 
rations or bread. Still, it struck me as ridiculous. 
I resumed my walk, making a large loop around a capsized and shell-shocked 
streetcar. 
Finally, I passed by the Oslobodjenje Building. I saw no evidence of a Hierarchy 
patrol, but I knew one must be inside. I remained very aware of it burning 
behind me even as I passed out of its shadow. 
Just a short time later I crossed the Miljacka and entered a major intersection 
along Snipers' Alley. Everywhere around me I saw people huddled against walls. 
Mostly they were pressed against the buildings on the south side of the street, 
for most of the heavy guns were in the hills south of the city, so this was one 
means people had of seeking a little extra protection. Of course, safety bade 
them to remain in their homes, but hungry children and a knowledge that their 
homes were also potential targets of random Serb violence compelled them to the 
streets. And they needed to cross these intersections. 
A business man clutched his briefcase to his back and sprinted across the 
street. 
An adolescent boy on some unknown mission backed up to get a running start and 
darted diagonally across the intersection. It was a greater distance, but it 
saved two crossings. 
From near me a woman toting two loaves of bread said a short and almost 
silent prayer before hustling across. 
And on the south side, a young man in jeans and T-shirt shuffled his feet in a 
repeating pattern for good luck before dashing into the street. More and more I 
observed a dependence on such superstitions and hopes as a defense against 
insanity. 
Watching these people was like viewing an early black and white movie. They 
moved in hurried blurs like Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton when pursued by 
incompetent policemen. The setting in Sarajevo was a little bit different, 
though. It was Chaplin mixed with a 1940s war newsreel. Keaton prancing madly 
about the ruins of gutted and torn buildings. Grotesquely beautiful. 
Amid all of this scurrying I was slow to detect the cauled ghost that walked 
slowly to the center of the intersection. For one still cauled, this new denizen 
of the land of the dead was acting with rare dedication to her task. The ghost 
was indeed a woman, and from the deathmarks still plain upon her, and a mouth 
that was yet wide open and gasping for breath in this airless land, I guessed 
she'd died by asphyxiation. Perhaps she'd been trapped under a pile of rubble of 
the kind that results when a shell strikes nearby. 
I watched in confusion. What was she doing? 
The woman's eyes were wide open and intent, and just visible through the fog of 
her caul. There seemed to be purpose behind them, and when she stopped in the 
middle of the intersection and raised her hands high overhead, I suddenly 
realized she at least knew where she was. Physically, anyway, if not 
metaphysically. The psychotic and polychromatic images surely assaulting her 
since she rose after death were overpowering her clouded faculties. 
If death wasn't enough, then afterlife would drive you mad. As was nearly the 
case with me, until Centurion Gusticic had found me. 
And this woman, thinking herself still alive and walking Snipers' Alley in 
Sarajevo, was committing suicide -- suicide Sarajevo-style. She was offering 
herself to the snipers in the mountains beyond the city. No one fired, of 
course, because people she could see and imagine could not see, let alone 
imagine, her. She was overcome with images of the past, present and future which 
assaulted her at once, and because she accepted them all as reality, she was 
deranged. All because a patrol had not found her. Until now. 
I didn't know where my patrol was now. Perhaps they were diverted into the 
Oslobodjenje Building. If so, I'm thankful I did not join them, or else I'd 
never have saved this woman. 
As I watched, though, my chance to save her was slipping away. While I stood in 
amazement watching her futilely offer herself to gunmen who could not kill her, 
a reaper launched himself toward the woman. Before I could shout a warning to 
him or cry in alarm to the woman, she was shackled and soon at his feet in 
manacles. 
I stared, stupefied, then I finally challenged my enemy. "Reaper! Unhand her! 
She is under the protection of the Hierarchy." 
The reaper looked up quickly, warily. He was surprised, but did not appear 
alarmed. He was a stout man, and his drawn, Slavic face with its sunken eyes and 
taut cheeks was mostly covered by a shaggy beard like the kind worn by the 
Cetniks. I immediately bristled. 
"Now!" I shouted as I strode from the corner. My attention was diverted for a 
moment by three rapid plinks of sniper fire as a man ran across the street. The 
sniper was, thankfully, not very good. 
The reaper leaned over and tightened the manacles around the woman before 
straightening again to face me. He stood ready, but didn't appear tense or 
especially prepared for action. 
He smiled, his beard wrinkling like the rest of his face. "You'll save me a long 
trip, Legionnaire, if you will take charge of this one." 
I hesitated at this peculiar reply but did not relinquish my momentum and strode 
firmly toward the reaper. As I neared, he finally realized that I was ready for 
action and he tensed himself. 
"Just what do you intend, Legionnaire?" 
I said firmly, "To rescue this poor Enfant from you. Release her now or I will 
use force. My patrol is waiting just down Vojvode Putnika." 
The reaper shuffled one foot backward and tightened his grip on the chains. "Is 
this a trick?" 
His tone was one of incredulity, confusion. I wondered if there was any way I 
could take advantage of that, but I was just as confused as he was. 
I simply said, "It's no trick, reaper. She is simply not yours to profit from. 
Her soul is to be safe within the Hierarchy." 
It was now amusement that wrinkled his face. With a slight shake of his head, 
the reaper said, "What in the hell are you talking about? Safe? With the 
Hierarchy? Are you mad?" 
"Mad? Crazy, no. Angry? Yes." 
"You must be part of some other Hierarchy, then," he said flatly with a 
bewildered shake of his head. 
I was so confused by how this Serb was reacting to my demands that I nearly 
forgot the manacled Enfant at his feet. I considered the possibility that this 
reaper was in life one of the Serb propagandists responsible for the outrageous 
lies and deceits of the nationalists. 
I said firmly, finally, "Release her now!" 
"You are either stupid or deluded," he spat. 
"Damned reaper!" I lunged forward to rip his hands from the chains that bound 
the woman. Just as my hands swiped cleanly through the air where the Cetnik had 
once been, a sudden feeling like a hot flash washed over me. I ducked without 
quite knowing why. Glancing back, I saw the Cetnik, who was suddenly somehow 
behind me, extended in a kick at where my head had been. I reacted swiftly 
enough to kick one of my own legs backward and sweep the reaper's other foot 
from beneath him. He went sprawling to the ground. 
I completed a forward somersault to put a couple paces of distance between us. 
The bound Enfant was now between us and I tugged at the chains momentarily. They 
were already locked. 
"She is my prisoner, Legionnaire! Either pay what the Hierarchy will give me at 
Lukavica now, or simply wait. Your damned Hierarchy will have its soul soon 
enough!" 
Heedless of the reaper's threat, I grabbed the chains around the cauled woman 
and repositioned her behind me. 
The reaper's face shot crimson, "Very well." He reached into the dark folds of 
his clothing and withdrew a long, curved sword. He brandished it at me. "Perhaps 
now you'll reconsider." 
My only weapon was a small relic knife that Centurion Gusticic said I was 
entitled to after I rescued my first ten Enfants. Though it seemed petite and 
ineffective, I drew the dagger. 
"Hold your ground," I warned, "unless you wish to die. It's enough that you take 
this Enfant, but wait until the remainder of my patrol hears how you slander the 
work of the Hierarchy!" 
He laughed, "You are mad! Are you but an Enfant too to be beguiled by such 
shameful lies? If only Sarajevans in life had been so easy to fool! As easy as 
the ignorant leaders of the western nations!" 
How I hated him! For being a Cetnik Serb. For being a reaper. He was all I'd 
opposed in two lifetimes. I wanted to sunder his plasmic frame, but something of 
what he said didn't sound false. I had a sudden sense that this dead man was 
somehow important to me. Could one see that in others? How convenient -- how 
wonderful -- if those who might shape my destiny always shone with such 
unmistakable light! 
I said, "I won't yield, but I will listen to your lies for a moment more before 
calling my patrol. So tell me why I'm mad!" 
The reaper stepped back a pace as he languidly dipped and glided his sword. He 
looked at me closely and said conspiratorially, "I suspect you are alone, 
Legionnaire. First, if you were part of a nearby patrol, then more of them would 
have arrived by now, or you would have called for them immediately. Secondly, I 
cannot believe that you are even a member of the Hierarchy if you believe the 
kinds of lies you've told me. Therefore, it is I... who control this situation." 
The last he said with a final flourish of this edged arm. 
He continued when I only glared at him, "Tell me this, Legionnaire: What is it 
that would happen to this woman if I did release her to your custody?" 
"She would be delivered to my Centurion, who would deliver her with any others 
we've saved this day from the likes of you and the Renegades or an aimless, 
confused existence like this one's." I pointed to the woman. She trembled within 
the links of steel. 
"Yes. And what of her fate after that?" 
"She would be transferred from this hell-torn city and sent to Stygia to become 
a citizen of the city of the dead." 
The reaper shook his head and said, "Wrong." 
"Then tell me, reaper. What is her fate when in the hands of the Hierarchy? You 
mention selling her to the Hierarchy. If so, then perhaps you are less 
reprehensible than the reapers who will sell her into slavery; but surely 
whatever fate holds for her with the Hierarchy is no worse than the consignment 
you would make." 
"It's the same, fool!" The reaper's sword slashed the air in frustration. 
"You've never been to Stygia, have you?" 
I shook my head. 
"Then perhaps you truly don't understand that you are collecting the souls that 
become the playthings of the Stygian lords and their favored minions. Don't you 
realize that this woman will be put in the hands of an artificer who will mold 
her entirely into a relic of some sort, perhaps like that dagger you clench so 
furiously? Or, if she is weak and worthless, her soul may become a single coin, 
a single obulus which can be used to purchase other items and services among the 
dead?" 
"You're lying." 
"No, and that's why I reap, Legionnaire. The Stygian lords of my life, Milosevic 
and Karadzic, sent me to my grave. Why, once here, would I fight for their likes 
again? Or why join another crazy group like the Lazarians -- who are the true 
cause of the slaughter here, even if it is the Hierarchy that feeds off the 
carnage." 
I couldn't, wouldn't, accept it. "Prove it." 
The reaper laughed. "I don't think you have the stomach for the truth." 
"I had the strength to face the lies your kind told me in life, Cetnik. I can 
face the lies you tell now." 
He laughed again, not angered at all by the political barbs. "Very well." 
He thought for a moment, then relaxed and said, "Take this woman to your 
Centurion. Tonight, after she is turned over, as you say, to the protective 
custody of the Hierarchy, we will visit her at Lukavica. We will meet again here 
at midnight. She will not be transported out of the city until later tonight." 
"What's the price? Why release her to me?" 
"Simple. When you see that I am right, you will owe an obulus." 
I said, "And when it is I am who am correct?" 
"You will already have your prize," he said, motioning to the woman who was now 
entirely on the ground under the weight of the chains. 
"True," I admitted. "Very well, I accept. Now release her." 
As his right arm melted back into its rightful shape, he presented a pair of 
keys with his left and calmly unfastened the locks. 
I knelt by the woman, trying to assure her that everything was okay. When I 
stood, I helped her rise beside me. I was relieved with my victory, but the 
reaper had planted a seed of doubt. 
I said, "Here, at midnight." 
"Yes." 
With that I wandered away and maneuvered the woman out of the paths of the 
people still racing to avoid sniper fire. 
The reaper shouted one last command to me as I steadied the staggering Enfant. 
"Remember, Legionnaire, to wear no emblems of your office." 
Which meant I must leave my dagger. That's when I knew for certain he was lying, 
but I would go along with his game. 
I returned at midnight after placing the woman in the charge of Centurion 
Gusticic and learning that the patrol had indeed been reassigned to watch for 
casualties near the Oslobodjenje Building. 
I saw the reaper was waiting for me. "How do you propose we get to Lukavica? 
It's miles from here." 
"Easy, Legionnaire. We hitch a ride. Let's go to the Holiday Inn." 
He started to move, then stopped and turned. "By the way," he asked, "what's 
your name?" 
"Dragos." I made no reciprocal inquiry. 
"Serb too, eh?" 
"No, Bosnian." 
The reaper smiled. "Right." 
It didn't take long to walk to the Holiday Inn. The hotel was the last one 
operating in Sarajevo. It now served as the home to dozens of foreign 
journalists, among them perhaps the only Westerners to understand the scope of 
the tragedy here. 
It was nerve-wracking to cross the hotel plaza to reach the building. Though it 
was the early hours of the morning, I knew that snipers were still watching. 
Waiting for a person lulled to sleep by the hour of night. 
I recalled a conversation I'd had in life with another surgeon about the snipers 
here. The surgeon claimed he recognized the work of certain snipers. When he 
learned what area of the city a victim was from, he could guess the wound before 
even confronted with the victim. A factory worker from the Bistrik District as 
shifts changed? Then get two extra pints of blood because it's a gut shot. Shot 
in the hotel plaza at the Holiday Inn in the middle of the night? Then prepare 
to amputate because the bones of the right leg have been shattered by three 
shots. 
From Bascarsija in Old Town? Then pack up. She's already dead from a 
shot clean through the head just above the left ear. 
How did he know? And how could he know that last one was definitely a woman? I 
listened incredulously as he told me that some of these snipers apparently 
fancied themselves artists. They signed their work with signature wound, like 
surgeons who make characteristic incisions to mark their work. Not only do they 
shoot only certain locations, but sometimes only specific targets as well. Not 
just "only women," but sometimes "only children" too. 
But we were invisible to the sniper who aimed for legs, and reached the front 
doors of the hotel at a leisurely pace that no one living could afford. 
The reaper said, "Let's wait to see if someone will open the door. The UNPROFOR 
vehicles aren't scheduled to pull out for another half hour." 
We could step through the doors, but that would hurt. After several moments of 
silent waiting, and without anyone even lingering near the doors or threatening 
their use, we had to endure the brief stab of pain that came with breaking the 
physical laws of the living world. 
As we entered the lobby I noted a number of signs that indicated changes to the 
operation of the hotel because of the siege. The only one I took the time to 
read notified diners that meals were served in the old conference room because 
the dining room had a wall of windows facing the hills to the south of the city, 
and people in the room were therefore at risk. It didn't specifically spell out 
the danger, which was snipers with telescopic sights who could shoot a tine off 
a fork in a diner's hand if they wished. 
Of course, that entire side of the Holiday Inn was nearly obliterated now. 
I followed the reaper past the check-in and reservations desks. This area of the 
hotel seemed just like any I'd ever seen. The clerk on duty seemed perfectly 
alert, unafraid, and absolutely unaware that she was inside a crumbling building 
within a dying city under siege. 
I tried to ignore this and followed the reaper to an elevator that led to the 
underground garage. The reaper tried to exchange words with me twice while we 
waited, but the clerk was still on my mind. 
She surely had wonderful opportunities to remind Foreign Ministers and diplomats 
and UNPROFOR representatives that they visited a slowly dying city as she 
checked them in and out. Did she at least mutter a word in favor of succor for 
the 400,000 civilians within the city? Or would that be unprofessional and 
disrupt the officials' pleasant visit with a jolt of reality? 
"You are a thoughtful one," the reaper said, finally piercing my haze of 
concentration. 
"I suppose." 
"Wondering if I am, after all, correct?" 
I said, "That doesn't worry me. You're wrong." 
"Then why are you coming?" 
"Because it was the price of your releasing the woman to my care." 
The reaper shook his head and, for the first time, stroked his beard. "If that's 
the only reason you're coming, then forget it." He waved his hand. "And you 
claim the West is close-minded!" 
He continued somberly, "I waive the price. Have the woman with my prayers for 
you both." He looked at me earnestly and almost repeated, "For both your souls." 
Then he began to walk away. 
At first I was startled, then relieved, then I wanted to call after him, to tell 
him that there was another reason -- I needed to know without doubt that I was 
right. I could no longer simply accept old beliefs as fact. Not in light of the 
truths that surrounded me every moment: ethnic cleansing, genocide, and 
wholesale destruction. And certainly not in light of what might be truth: a five 
hundred year battle between the ghosts of a Serbian and an Ottoman warrior and a 
Hierarchy that was perhaps everything I despised. 
Nothing would surprise me now. 
I still didn't call to the reaper. 
Nor did I leave after him. 
I waited patiently by the elevator. Perhaps there were stairs somewhere. Then I 
realized that elevators wouldn't be the same as passing through a glass door. 
While they would seem more complicated for a ghost, they were actually far 
simpler. All I needed was to embody myself just enough to exert a little 
pressure on the buttons. 
I concentrated and then pushed the down button. Within moments the elevator 
dinged, and one of the doors opened. I noted with some satisfaction that the 
clerk at least noticed this unexplained arrival and departure of a elevator car. 
Perhaps she was aware of her surroundings after all. 
Soon the doors closed and the elevator hesitated. I embodied myself briefly 
again and pushed the button marked "Parking." The elevator shuddered and then 
rumbled down. It opened to reveal a garage full of the largest collection of 
battered and beaten cars I have ever seen. Many of them were lettered with 
graffiti, but all of them sported the wounds of shells and snipers. In a glance 
I took in a wobbly-tired Russian jeep, some sort of Renault with doors that 
looked glued on and a battered car of unrecognizable make that had a message 
written on both the hood and trunk that read in English complete with the 
misspelling, "Don't shoot, don't waste your bullet. I am immortel". 
I didn't spot an intact front windshield anywhere in the garage. 
Until I noted the short line of three UNPROFOR armored cars. They were all 
Panhard scouts. They were all white with darkened air vents lining the sides. 
Only two-seaters, but I saw just five people lingering near them. Perhaps I'd 
have a seat to myself instead of hiding among the equipment they carried. 
All five of the men were dressed in fatigues and berets. They looked Western 
European. When one spoke, saying something about the time that I couldn't fully 
understand, I realized they were French. The French were among the Europeans 
more dedicated to the Bosnian war, though only if you judged by numbers of 
"peacekeepers." 
It took a moment for me to realize that the passenger side of each car would 
probably be locked, so I decided to slip in through the driver's door instead. 
The middle Panhard seemed to carry the fewest goods, so I climbed in and pressed 
myself toward the rear. 
The five Frenchmen were soon joined by an officer, and they all immediately 
dispersed to their vehicles and clambered in. The drive to Lukavica began. 
I watched through the slitted windshield as we raced up the ramp of the parking 
garage, following the Panhard in front, and pursued a course down Snipers' Alley 
and eventually toward Lukavica. The darkness and my cramped conditions made it 
almost impossible to see anything during the trip. Fortunately. 
I took this moment of relative safety to refresh myself as I prepared to face 
Lukavica. I'd heard from another Legionnaire who still checked on his Sarajevan 
family that, only three or four days ago, about 2000 people were deported to the 
barracks at Lukavica. These were civilian prisoners of war taken directly from 
their apartments straight to a hell closer to the devil Karadzic. 
After the Panhard rolled to a stop within the brightly lit grounds around the 
former barracks, now a concentration camp, I wrestled out of the passenger door. 
I didn't know where exactly to go. But, after looking around for a moment, I saw 
what the reaper probably intended to show me. At the far end of the building was 
a section so dilapidated and rotten that even I felt a chilly emanation. It was 
definitely haunted. Certainly an area that no mortal would stray near. Clearly, 
it was the home of ghosts. 
As I neared it, I noted there were two Legionnaires on guard. I wondered what 
ploy the reaper planned to get past them. Was this even the right place? 
I knew it had to be. But could I get in without lying to the guards? I could 
think of nothing. Nor could I think of a suitable lie since I didn't know what 
was inside. Was I ready to risk my position in the patrol over a foolish, 
niggling question? I knew at once I was. If my new suspicions were incorrect, 
then the Hierarchy would prove to be the kind of organization that would forgive 
me for such a transgression. If, on the other hand, the reaper was right, then 
my status be damned. 
I backed up so I could approach the guards within full sight for a good 
distance. I immediately drew their attention. 
"Good evening," I said as I drew near them. 
They remained expressionless, so I pressed, "I need to check inside for a relic 
of Centurion Gusticic. He lost it here earlier and claims he looked everywhere 
else. So, he sent me." 
They didn't budge, so I rattled on, running my lie into the ground. I wished I 
had my dagger so I had some proof of my station. 
"I'm just a grunt, so I was chosen to come all the way back out here. Just let 
me have a look, will you, please?" 
"Sure," one of them said finally. 
"Great," I said before I could think of how foolish it sounded. 
Each of the guards drew a key from within their drab grey fatigues and 
simultaneously unlocked nearly identical padlocks on the bars blocking the 
doors. 
The other said, "Just hurry, or we'll lock you in with them. They might take you 
by accident too." 
A chill rang my spine dry. Suddenly I didn't want to enter. 
"Hurry," the second guard repeated more urgently. 
I stumbled forward into the darkness. All I saw at first was that a light 
source, a fire, burned in the rear of the room. It grew larger and brighter when 
the doors swung nearly shut behind me. 
Then the moans reached my ears. It was the murmur of damned, not rescued, souls. 
The flame of the relic torch at the back of the room slowly illuminated the 
faces of dozens of Enfants crowded into the room. The light caught and slowly 
revealed their pale faces. The contorted faces emerged from the darkness like 
bloated and pasty corpses bobbing to the surface of an inky sea. As the heads 
were unveiled, I could see that most of the ghosts still wore their cauls. 
My mind leaped in confusion. My plasmic heart beat with alarm. I wondered -- no, 
I hoped -- that there was an explanation for it all as I ran the aisles 
frantically looking for something to prove that this was not what it seemed. 
I found the proof. But it was damning, unforgiving. The woman from Snipers' 
Alley lay crushed between two other women, one an elderly lady killed by a 
sniper, and the other an adolescent still bearing the marks of the shrapnel 
fragments that tore her to pieces. 
The woman I'd unchained and delivered to Centurion Gusticic as a soul about to 
be freed was here instead! Chained again. Crowded like a thing, a possession, 
into this small chamber. Like a veal calf in a dark barn. She still wore her 
caul, and her eyes were large with a fear that sang to me. 
I'd spent months fighting not for the ghostly counterpart of the Blue Helmets, 
but for those like the Cetniks? Abominable. As I thought about it, though, my 
old Blue Helmet-Hierarchy comparison became even more apt. 
I trembled. 
A door creaked open. "Hurry." 
I almost cried out when that slight opening spilled enough additional light into 
the room for me to see the babies. They too were chained. One was missing both 
legs, which means he was probably killed while lying in the hospital after 
already barely surviving a first shelling. All were treated with equal degrees 
of disgrace and irreverence -- innocent souls bound for every kind of hell I 
could imagine. 
I tried to think what I might do. The padlocks on these chains were far smaller 
than the large ones on the door. There was absolutely no chance that the keys 
the guards possessed would open any of these locks. 
I swept a last look at the damned souls. But for my foolish gullibility, here 
too would go I. 
I stumbled out, still trembling. This time I walked the miles back to the heart 
of Sarajevo. 
* * * 
I just wanted to let the dead fight their own battles. After all, their 
conflicts were grounded in centuries-old disputes I could not fathom anyway. Or 
perhaps a single 600-year-old dispute. Were the wars through the ages in the 
Balkans just a continuation of the feud between Murat I and Lazar? If their 
hatred was spilling over into the world of the living, as I suspected it was, 
then resistance was impossible because success was implausible. 
If the essence of what a ghost becomes is the puissance of its emotions as it 
dies, then the ghosts of Sarajevo had a sort of metaphysical predisposition to 
fight an unending battle -- a battle that goes beyond death for the parents and 
continues in life for the children. 
Such were my ruminations two days later. I'd not reported to my patrol 
assignment and had learned that Centurion Gusticic, who was tracking me, 
considered me AWOL. 
I sat pressed against a crumbling home listening as shells continued to fall 
upon the city. It was only so much background noise now. Children I saw playing 
on this street sprinkled in a snow of powdered glass did not even flinch at the 
reverberations of the blasts. This was a part of their world now, and they'd 
adapted. They kept on playing. The soccer ball bouncing among them like a hot 
potato, or a live bomb. 
Though I too could acknowledge my world, I still hadn't adapted. 
But I did finally realize that I was wrong. 
During my flight of the last two days, I once watched as a Blue Helmet accepted 
a hundred Deutsch Marks from a Sarajevan in return for transport out of the 
city. It was another Sarajevan who would live. And one of the few who could 
perhaps believe that the Blue Helmets were heroes. One who could believe that 
the world outside this hellish playground could even produce heroes. But heroes 
aren't enough for the world anymore. The simple will to resist betraying your 
conscience makes you a hero. 
Where did that leave me? 
If merely comprehending that I was making the same mistakes as the rest of 
humanity and resisting perpetuating the mistakes makes me a hero, then heroes be 
damned. All that says about me is that I have at least passed a basic test of 
humanity. 
For the world thought wrongly of Bosnia -- that the war was unfathomable because 
it was supposedly rooted in centuries of ethnic hatred. It wasn't. This war was 
the powerplay of a handful of traitorous madmen who created accomplices in the 
Serbian people and now guilted them all into completing what had been started. 
In this time of flight I decided I would forge a group of true saviors for the 
dead of Sarajevo. A new patrol to do the job I thought I'd done with the 
Hierarchy. Eventually I might halt the transport of Sarajevans souls to Stygia 
completely. But was that as small-minded as what the Blue Helmets represented? A 
token response to greater ills? A hero's task? 
Yes, but it would be only a beginning. To be true I would have to fight the 
Hierarchy even beyond the time when their traffic in Sarajevo had ended. It 
would mean becoming the standard-bearer for all subjected people -- a saint of 
sorts. 
To be a saint meant to embody the virtues of the hero but to act with greater 
vision. It meant knowing a sense of injustice too large to be sated by momentary 
heroic action. It meant being a hero even when heroes weren't in demand. It also 
meant knowing that you might be too small to make a difference against something 
so large. Like I undoubtedly was in the face of the Hierarchy. 
But first it meant to care at all. 
Then I realized why others before me found it easier to be a hero than a saint. 
Because the world only responded to heroes, the quick fix. When ennui everywhere 
is too great for saints, what more could one person do? What less? 
I walked toward the children, hoping that in their diversion I too would find an 
answer. The secret that allowed them to ignore the destruction around them and 
still at least pretend to be children. 
Among them, I suddenly felt as invisible as I truly was. Even if I were not 
separated from them by death, they would not have seen me with their eyes glazed 
and transfixed by the spinning white ball. Their bodies coiled and sprang, and 
their limbs fluttered madly as they danced wildly in pursuit and expectation of 
the ball. For them, and for the moment, there was no other world. 
But as it has now for months, the world invaded their fantasy. As the ball 
bounced up and away from the head of a small, energetic girl, a shadow passed 
like a lightning flash behind it. 
No storm of nature could unleash a force like the bomb that drove into the earth 
under my feet. The pavement rippled like an ocean, lifting the children into a 
gout of flame and concussion that blew them like weightless angels, tattered 
T-shirts whipping behind them like the stumps of wings. 
Six tiny bodies fanned out at the periphery of the blast radius. Where there had 
been so much motion and energy there was now only death. I waited anxiously, 
dreadfully. I grimaced as I realized how ordinary this tragedy seemed to me. 
Perhaps I had adapted to my world after all. 
I waited to see the fate of the children. If they did possess secret, then 
perhaps one of them would bring it to my world. But none of them moved. Then 
suddenly, four transcended. 
A fifth began the grotesque journey to my land of shadows. I gazed at the torn 
body and stared into eyes as cold and dark as the morning ashes of a midnight 
bonfire. He couldn't see me, blinded as he was, but he sensed my presence. He 
grasped willfully with a thrashing hand as a newborn baby gasps that first 
breath of air. 
I took it. His hand was tiny and still warm with the remnants of life. Or the 
heat of the bomb blast. As I pulled him free of his entangling remains and 
across the gulf between the worlds, I looked up to see the sixth, the young girl 
whose header had been so clean, watching me. 
I continued reflexively to pull my first charge, the boy, but I was confused -- 
the girl who stared at me wore no caul. Blood streaked her face, and her large 
eyes blinked. She subconsciously wiped tears and grit out of her eyes as she 
stared at me with a profundity equal to my own. 
I realized that she was alive. I smiled at her as I lifted the boy to my chest 
where I closely hugged his shivering body. She managed to smile back. And she 
nodded slightly. Knowingly. She was in shock, and her world had been turned 
inside out, but she was relieved. 
Now she truly possessed a secret to shield her from nightmares. 
I hugged my own shield closer. 
----- 
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