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.

I stared at him with watery eyes, pleading for compassion, while he berated my sloppy prosody

Still, living displaces false sentiments. I had to go on with my American life, keeping Dedo out of it, busying myself with local survival, getting jobs, getting into graduate school, getting laid. Every once in a while I unleashed the power of his words upon a sensitive American woman. The first one was Cheryl, the idle wife of a Barrington lawyer, whom I met at a Bosnian benefit dinner that she was kind enough to organize. At least one Bosnian was required to benefit from her benefit dinner, so she tracked me down through a friend, an expert in disability studies with whom I had read a paper at a regional MLA conference. Cheryl was generous beyond the dinner; before she went back to Barrington, I took her to my tiny studio—a monument to the struggles of immigration, with its sagging mattress, rotting shower curtain, and insomniac drummer next door. I recited Dedo’s poems to her, pretending they were my own. She particularly liked the one about the man walking, during a lull in shelling, with his rooster on a leash, a soul fastened to a dying animal. Then I removed the permed tresses from her forehead so that I could kiss it and slowly undressed her. Cheryl writhed in my embrace, kissed me with clammy passion, hoisted her hips, and moaned with pleasure, as though the intensity of her orgasm would directly succor the Bosnian resistance. I could not help thinking, in the end, that she was fucking Dedo, for it was his words that had seduced her. But I took what was given and then rolled off into the darkness of my actual life.

The crushing sadness of hotel rooms; the gelid lights and clean notepads; the blank walls and particles of someone else’s erased life: I rolled him into this as if into hell.