After a few days of war the Sarajevo streets were a catwalk for dogs: perfumed dogs, well-groomed dogs, dogs with cut-glass collars and not a flea between them. Their owners had left them as they left the burning city. The trash-heaps became a battlefield where the lapdogs lost to an army of strays, lean-limbed and mangy with hate. Cowering and cleansed, the back-alley refugees retreated to the doorways of locked apartments, barking in answer to each unearthly whistle as the morning shells came in. *** ...one of those locked apartments where we kicked down the door, searching for a bastard sniper and found the skeleton of an old woman fused to a kitchen chair, yes, merged with the wood. She had starved to death sitting next to a pantry crammed with cans of food. We spent a long time debating the crucial issue of her religion. Yackety-yack. We could get no clue from the photos that littered the place, or the needlepoint of a knight and castle, or the hundred bottles of perfume placed around her bed. Her piously folded hands remained a secret. It was dawn before the argument died out and we carred her into the street where dogs were fighting amid the garbage-- nothing they wouldn't risk, nothing they wouldn't eat. Who cares, anyway? Who knows whether she even believed in God? 'By God, God will find his hands full after this war," someone said, and we fell silent, pretending not to see her silly grin, and the sudden silver glint of the can-opener on its chain around her neck.
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