War Dogs

My family’s first and only dog arrived in the spring of 1991. That April, my sister drove with her new boyfriend to Novi Sad, a town in northern Serbia hundreds of miles from Sarajevo, where there was an Irish-setter breeder she’d somehow tracked down. In her early twenties, my sister was still living with our parents, but she’d long asserted her unimpeachable right to do whatever she felt like. Thus, without even consulting Mama and Tata, with the money she’d saved from her modelling gigs, she bought a gorgeous, blazingly auburn Irish-setter puppy. When she brought him home, Tata was shocked – city dogs were self-evidently useless, a resplendent Irish setter even more so – and unconvincingly demanded that she return him immediately. Mama offered some predictable rhetorical resistance to yet another creature (after a couple of cats she’d had to mourn) she would worry about excessively, but it was clear she fell in love with the dog on the spot. Within a day or two he chewed up someone’s shoe and was instantly forgiven. We named him Mek.

In a small city like Sarajevo, where people are tightly interconnected and no one can live in isolation, all experiences end up shared. Just as Mek joined our family, my best friend Veba, who lived across the street from us, acquired a dog himself, a German shepherd named Don. Čika-Vlado, Veba’s father, a low-ranking officer of the Yugoslav People’s Army, was working at a military warehouse near Sarajevo where a guard dog gave birth to a litter of puppies. Veba drove over to his father’s workplace and picked the slowest, clumsiest puppy, as he knew that, if they were to be destroyed, that one would be the first one to go.