The Book of My Lives Read Online Free PDF

hungrier and more despondent.
    Apart from the continuous roughing-up that was to induce us into the deprivations of manhood, the army was supposed to be one big family, a manly community bound by loyalty and comradeship, sharing everything. As a matter of fact, at no time did we practice anything even close to sharing, unless you count the farts. You never, ever offered to anybody your goodie-laden package sent from home nor did you leave any food in your locker, which you were forbidden to lock—at the Yugoslav People’s Army’s barracks, pilfering was already being rehearsed for the future wars. If you had any food left after stuffing yourself, you bartered it for clean socks and shirts, for an extra shower or a daytime fire-watch shift. Food wasn’t meant to be shared, because it was a survival commodity. I had no trouble imagining heroically facing the foreign enemy only to get a bullet in my back and die for the tuna can in my pocket.
    The only one who willingly shared his food was the soldier in my unit who soon after his arrival went on hunger strike because he didn’t want to serve. Our superior officers ignored his self-famishment, certain he was bluffing. But he was quickly fading and soon it was clear to all of us he was dead serious, willing to go all the way. But the officers spent their days being idiotically certain they could see through his devious ploy, and the starving soldier, however weak, had to be present for the roll call and the subsequent meal. So a couple of fellow soldiers were always required to help him stay on his feet in the lineup and then totter to the cafeteria. Suddenly he acquired a lot of great comrades, all of whom were determined not to let his allotment of food go to waste. Eager to get his food, his escorts would fight over his boiled egg, piece of bread, or bowl of beans, while he smiled with his eyes closed, his emaciated cheek laid on the table. Perhaps he was delirious, but I thought he may well have been envisioning dinner at home with his family. A few days later, he was gone, and I never found out what happened to him. I hope he went back home, wherever it may have been.
    A few months after my conscription, my mother and sister undertook a two-day trip from Sarajevo to visit me for a weekend. At the time, I was deployed in Ki č evo, in western Macedonia, for truck-driver training. The weather lived up to a dismal forecast, so we spent the two days in a dismal hotel. Mother had dragged heavy bags of food on the many trains from Sarajevo and brought along a feast: veal schnitzels, fried chicken, spinach pie, even a custard cake. She spread a towel on the bed, as there was no table, and I ate from food containers, much of it with my fingers. The first bite into the spinach pie brought tears to my eyes and I silently swore that from thereon in I’d always respect the sanctity of our family meals. I wouldn’t entirely keep my promise, needless to say, but as the perfectly mixed spinach and eggs and cheese and filo dough melted in my mouth, I felt all the love that could be felt by a boy of nineteen.

    2
    An eventful century or so ago, my paternal ancestors left behind what was then Galicia, the easternmost province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now western Ukraine), and resettled in Bosnia, which had recently been annexed to the Habsburg domain. My peasant foreparents brought with them a few beehives, an iron plow, many songs about leaving home, and a recipe for perfect borscht, a dish previously unknown in that part of the world.
    There was no written document, of course; they carried the recipe within themselves, like a song you learn by singing it. In the summers of my childhood, which I spent at my grandparents’ house in the countryside of northwest Bosnia, a committee of aunts (sometimes actually singing a song) would start early in the morning, chopping various vegetables, beets included, then, under my grandmother’s supervision, boiling them mercilessly on a