By the time I went back to bed, it was dawning already. In the trees outside, a nation of birds replaced the blood-sucking bats and was now atwitter in a paroxysm of meaningless life. Sleeping and dreaming were beyond me now, nor could I write. Smoking on the balcony, I waited for everything to make sense until it couldn’t. Down on the street a scarcely clad man squatted by a cardboard box with cigarettes lined up on it. There was nobody else on the street. It seemed that he was guarding the cigarettes from some invisible peril.

Determined to dispel the cloud of tedium hanging over us, Tata finally put a call in to the Yugoslav ambassador and invited ourselves to his residence in Gombe, where all the important diplomats lived. The mansions there were large, the lawns were wide, majestic flowers bloomed in impeccably groomed bushes, the venerable Congo flowed serenely. His Excellency and his excellent wife were polite and devoid of any human vigor or storytelling talent. We sat in their receiving room, the adults passing around statements (“Kinshasa is strange”; “Kinshasa is really small”) like a sugar bowl. Exotic trophies were carefully positioned around the room: a piece of Antwerp bobbin lace on the wall; an ancient Mesopotamian rock on the coffee table; on the bookshelf, a picture of Their Excellencies on a snow-capped mountain. A servant with an implausible red sash brought in the drinks—Sestra and I were each given a glass of lemonade with a long silver spoon. I dared not move, and when Sestra, abruptly and inexplicably, rolled like a happy dog on the ankle-deep Afghan carpet, I feared our parents would renounce us.

The streets of Goma were enveloped in roiling clouds of black dust. In an uncanny, disturbing moment, I recognized that everyone in sight was barefoot, and I could not remember what the purpose of shoes was. But then I saw booted policemen standing on the porches, leaning against the walls, like idle villains in westerns, and the world of straightforward facts was restored. When we stopped to let a skittish herd of goats pass, nobody approached the van to offer us carved human bones or knitting needles.

This happened in 1984, when I was long and skinny; my legs hurt, and I could not stretch them in the dinky bus. Pus accumulated in my budding pimples; there was an arbitrary erection in progress. This was youth: a perpetual sense of unease that made me imagine a place where my discomfort would be natural, where I could wallow in my wounds, in heavy air and sea. But my parents believed that it was their duty to guide me to a good, pleasant place where I could be normal. They arranged spontaneous conversations about my future, during which they insisted I declare what it was that I wanted, what my plans for life and college were. I responded with the derivations of Rimbaud’s rants about the unknown quantity awakening in our era’s universal soul, the soul encompassing everything: scents, sounds, colors, thought mounting thought, et cetera. Naturally, they were terrified with the fact that they had no idea what I was talking about. Parents know nothing about their children; some children lead their parents to believe that they can be understood, but it is a ruse—children are always one step ahead of their parents. My soul soliloquies often made Father regret that he hadn’t belted me more when I was little; Mother secretly read my poetry—I found traces of her worried tears staining the pages of my notebooks. I knew that the whole purpose of the freezer-chest project was to confront me with what Father called “the laundry of life” (although Mother always did his laundry), to have me go through the banal, quotidian operations that constituted my parents’ existence and learn that they were necessary. They wanted me to join the great community of people who made food collection and storage the central organizing principle of their life.

The food—bah! I forgot to touch the chicken-and-pepper sandwich my mother had made for me. In my notebook, I waxed poetic about the alluring possibility of simply going on, into the infinity of lifedom, never buying the freezer chest. I would go past Murska Sobota, to Austria, onward to Paris; I would abscond from the future of college and food storage; I would buy a one-way ticket to the utterly unforeseeable. Sorry, I would tell them, I had to do it, I had to prove that one could have a long, happy life without ever owning a freezer chest. In every trip, a frightening, exhilarating possibility of never returning is inscribed. This is why we say good-bye, I would write. You knew it could happen when you sent me to the monstrous city, the endless night, when you sent me to Murska Sobota.

It was in Murska Sobota that I truly confronted the ineluctable sadness of hotel rooms: a psyche with a notepad nobody had ever used to write; the bed cover with infernally purple flowers; a black-and-white picture of a soulless seaside resort; a garbage basket lined with crumpled paper tissues suggesting a messy quickie. The window looked over a concrete garage roof, in the middle of which was a vast puddle, shimmering like a desert-lake mirage. There was no way I was going to spend a night alone in this cave of sorrow. I needed to find places with a high density of youth, where comely Slovenian girls stood in clusters, steadily rejecting the clumsy advances of Slovenian boys, conserving their maidenhead for a pill-carrying Sarajevo boy, his body a treasure to squander.

She shut the door and locked it twice. Clearly, I had not said the right word; I was very drunk and had not considered this outcome. I thought that we had connected, that the electricity had started flowing between our trembling bodies. Swaying before the cruelly and unnecessarily closed door, I raised my hand to knock and clarify to Elizabeth that, yes, I was in love with her, and that, no, I didn’t mind that she was married. I didn’t do it; the door was closed as closed can be. I heard them murmuring conspiratorially, like a husband and wife, and I recognized that love was on the other side, and I had no access to it.

The same day, Mother washed the denim pants I had worn in Murska Sobota, with the pill in the change pocket disintegrating—nothing was left except a nugget of foil and plastic. The freezer chest arrived after seventeen days. We filled it to the brim: veal and pork, lamb and beef, chicken and peppers. When the war began in the spring of 1992, and electricity in the city of Sarajevo was cut, everything in the freezer chest thawed, rotted in less than a week, and then finally perished.

I met Muhamed D. for the first time in 1991, at a café called Dom pisaca, or Writers’ Club, adjacent to the offices of the Bosnian Writers’ Association. He was short and stocky, suddenly balding in his mid-forties, his expression frozen in an ugly permanent frown. I shook his hand limply, barely concealing my contempt. He spoke with the clear, provincial inflections of Travnik, his hometown, and was misclad in a dun shirt, brown pants, and an inflammable-green tie. I was a cool-dressed city boy, all denim and T-shirts, born and bred in the purest concrete, skipping vowels and slurring my consonants in a way that cannot even be imitated by anyone who did not grow up inhaling Sarajevo smog. He offered me a seat at his table, and I joined him, along with several of the other anthology veterans, who all wore the suffering faces of the sublime, as though they were forever imprisoned in the lofty dominion of poetry.

This took place just before the war, in the relatively rosy times when we were euphoric with the imminence of disaster—we drank and laughed and experimented with poetic forms into the late hours. We tried to keep the war away from the Table, but now and then a budding Serbian patriot would start ranting about the suppression of his people’s culture, whereupon Dedo, with his newly acquired elder status, would indeed suppress him with a sequence of carefully arranged insults and curses. Inevitably, the nationalist would declare Dedo an Islamofascist and storm off, never to return, while we, the fools, laughed uproariously. We knew—but we didn’t want to know—what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.