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hospital soon.”
    We talked like this for two long minutes. I held on to the branch with one hand, and gripped my bag full of apples with the other. I was overwhelmed by a sudden feeling of nausea that was infinitely worse than anything caused by exploding shells and by guns that have or have not been found in people’s houses. It was as though, hanging from the top of the apple tree in front of Rade’s window, everything I knew about myself and other people had become meaningless.
    Rade continued, “You know, son, when you lose an arm you continue to feel it for a long time. It’s something psychological, as though you deceive yourself into thinking you still possess the missing limb. Every day I cook a little something to take to my wife, but there is no life in it. I look at the beans or the thin soup, and then I look at her and I say, ‘Jela!,’ but she doesn’t respond. Then she says, ‘Rade!,’ and I don’t respond. D’you understand, son? We’re alive just enough to see each other and to conclude that we’re not alive any more. That’s all. SometimesI look at these apples and marvel at the life in them. They don’t care about all this. They don’t know. I daren’t even mention them . . .”
    I stretched over to the window and passed him the bag. He looked at me, rather surprised, and then began to shake his head. Suddenly my throat became tight and it was as much as I could do to move my lips. I was paralyzed for half a minute; if the Chetniks had been looking at me they would have been very confused. Rade was trembling like a man who had nothing left. He was reduced to shivering like an unhappy, frightened animal. At last he raised his arm but he still couldn’t say anything.
    The following day Rade knocked on our door with a hundred apologies for disturbing us. He gave us something wrapped in newspaper and then left in a hurry, so I didn’t get a chance to speak to him. The parcel contained a small jar of apple jam.
    Soon afterwards Jela came out of hospital. The husband and wife continued to live behind their closed window, and Rade only ventured out to collect the humanitarian aid. One day, standing next to my mother in line, he whispered “Thank you” to her. She turned around just in time to hear him say, once again, that the apples were full of life.
    In the next few months a handful of men in uniform came for Rade twice, took him away somewhere and later brought him back again. The neighbors watched these mysterious comings and goings, twitching at lace curtains, sometimes peeking through their keyholes.Feeling guilty perhaps, they couldn’t help reminding one another of the hidden guns. Half a dozen gossips went back to the idea that Rade must have wanted to kill somebody. Others remained silent, as if the mere act of talking about their neighbor was enough to cause pain. The obvious solution would have been to hate Rade, but somehow it wasn’t possible.
    Nobody knows who killed Rade and Jela. They just disappeared one day without fuss or explanation. Perhaps it’s wrong to say what I am going to say, but I only remember two things about poor Rade – his apple jam and the remarkable fact that he never once, not even in the dead of night, reached out of his window to steal an apple.

Beetle
    The War broke out in the year she came of age. She was only just getting used to the slick city streets and to the smell of gasoline and oil and lead. By then she had more or less got the hang of swerving sharply to the right, or sharply to the left, straight on, over the bridge, before the traffic lights turned red. But her early life was spent on the Ravna Romanija mountain with a chap called MiloÅ¡, who put her to work on the hardest, dirtiest jobs. When I first saw her she stank of cement and manure and liquor. It was not long after she’d come back from the building site on the premises of a glamorous