When
war broke out, many animal owners were unable to care for their pets and
they ended up in the street. Other owners were killed or had fled the
country and their dogs, cats and other pets were abandoned. Those
that survived best were the mongrels. In the aftermath of war, you
never saw pedigree dogs: the French poodles, Chihuahuas and Lhasa
Apsos. They were war’s early victims, too far away from their
ancestral stock to live alone for very long, too slow and small to
gain advantage in the race for scraps of food. During and after the
war, the police organized hunts to cull the survivors, but, many
years later, the crafty and the hardy still roamed the streets of the
towns and cities. Some of them were heroes. One of these in Mostar,
Heki, was a footsore mongrel who hung about in the old town begging
food from cafés and passers-by. He had four separate pieces of
shrapnel in his body, one of them lodged in his brain. He limped
around and somehow survived. His home was the Ruza; the shelled ruins
of a tourist hotel constructed in the 1970’s, across a tributary
that falls into the Neretva River close to the Old Bridge. It was
completely destroyed, but you could still read the fading signs to
the “terrace bar”, the “sauna” and “hairdresser.” Heki
was its longest-standing guest and when you didn't see him there, you
could hear him padding around in the rubble. Whether from
brain-damage, resignation or because he'd had his fill of war, Heki
was a passive dog with neither bark nor bite. Buildings don’t need
their ghosts. They are ghosts. I often peered inside this hotel and
the many other shelled homes, offices and shops and felt a tangible
memory, a feeling that if you touched the bullet holes and
plaster-shattered walls, you would discover the truth of the
building, its happiness and sadness. The Second World War spy
warning - “walls have ears” could have had added to it that
“walls have memories.” If that is true of buildings, how much
more is it true of dogs. Read more about the 'Dogs of War' in 'Left Field'.
