One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [94]
No one was allowed to wander off into the woods. Ten years after the war in Bosnia ended, land mines still hid in the forests, regularly exploding unsuspecting deer. The dog at my feet looked up at Christof with a panting smile. It was hot as hell on that mountain and the dog, a stray who had wandered around the mountain and had become a somewhat unwelcome fixture around the guest house, rested happily in the shade of the pavilion. Despite his size and rather tough look—he was a Rottweiler-German shepherd mix—he had a deep love of people and warmed up to the children immediately, following us around from activity to activity. I marveled at his survival, wandering as a stray through these deadly woods on this deadly mountain. That he had not set off a land mine was a miracle. He had a wound on his mouth that made him look ferocious—he was at least fifty pounds—but he clearly loved people and loved getting scratched behind the ears and on his amazingly soft belly, which I gladly invested a good deal of time doing. Christof did not join me in petting the dog, but he looked at me puzzled as I did. He watched me looking at the shell casing he had given me, scratching the mutt, and generally pondering the sordid history of this mountain.
“Ugly dog,” he shouted suddenly and mimed kicking the mutt in the stomach.
It was my turn to look puzzled now. Christof bolted off again to play soccer without giving any explanation for his outburst. I would join him soon, but I needed another moment alone with the dog that we had named Prijatelj, which means “friend” in Bosnian. He was a mixed breed dog, which made him unpopular in a country where the term “ethnic cleansing” had been coined less than a decade earlier.
I watched Christof hit his stride—he was a graceful thirteen-year-old who took great pleasure in a well-placed slide-tackle or an elegant header. It was hard to believe, watching him leap off another boy’s shoulders to head the ball toward the goal (he missed and laughed about it to convulsions) that he could be filled with so much hate toward this beat-up dog. I had come from Kosovo a few days earlier and had grown used to bigotry among people, expected it even. But hatred toward this one dog? I couldn’t understand it.
I had stopped him and his brother more than once from throwing rocks at Prijatelj. Christof was blond with piercing blue eyes, just becoming aware that girls liked how he looked though he was still uncomfortable with himself. He picked on other kids, the smaller ones, the weaker ones, or the ugly ones. But when the adults around scolded him, he was not only quick to apologize to the other kids, he showed them real kindness. He included them in his games or even, in the case of a tiny Jewish girl named Sofya whom he had been mercilessly picking on for days, carried her on his back during a hike when she grew tired. He struggled to figure out his place, the kind of young man he wanted to be. In that struggle, though, he had decided where this mutt stood. He hated the dog with unapologetic venom. Even in the presence of the adults (there were three Americans, including myself, and two older women from Sarajevo who worked with the youth group year round), Christof’s hostility toward the dog did not abate.
Christof, I learned, was a mixed breed too—half Serb and half Croat—and during the siege of Sarajevo, no one trusted his family, though they suffered the deprivations and shelling like everyone else. They lived in Grbavica, the one neighborhood in the city controlled by the Serbs. The neighborhood was on the front lines and was as dangerous a place as any. Bosnian and Serb snipers faced off and fired mortars at each other, killing anyone unfortunate enough to be inside the targets or in the range of the shrapnel. A fragment the size of a roll of lifesavers could take off your head. Death came easily in Grbavica, just as it did in the rest of the city. When the siege ended, however, and the Serb lines moved back and the city became one again, Christof’s family ran into other problems.
Neighbors