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The
Massacre
Qamil
Shehu sat up in bed and listened. The knock on the door
was insistent. Pulling on his trousers and shirt, he groped
his way from the bedroom to the front of the house. As
he drew near the door, a man's voice called urgently.
"Qamil, hurry. We've got to leave."
Qamil opened the door, and a shaft of pale light passed
across his face. He looked first at his brother Haziz,
a lantern suspended from his right hand, and then at his
watch. It was just after midnight.
"It's NATO," Haziz said, "Four hours ago, they bombed
Pristina and Belgrade."
It took Qamil a moment to comprehend what was happening.
Then he nodded, and slipped back into the house to fetch
his wife.
Qamil was a sturdy man, strong-boned and compact, with
a lightness of bearing unusual for a person of seventy
years. He had lived all his life in Mala Krusha (Krusha
e Vogel in Albanian), a largely ethnic Albanian village
in the mountains of southwestern Kosovo. He had sought
and found a wife there, and had fully expected, when Allah
called, to die there. For most of his adult life, he had
worked for the Kosovena winery, located fifteen kilometers
to the south of the village.
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employed many of Qamil's neighbors, Albanian and Serb
alike. One of them, Dragan Gavric, a Serb, lived up the
street from Qamil in a large white stucco house. Dragan
was liked and respected by his Albanian neighbors. In
the late 1950s, the Krasniqi family gave Dragan the honor
of "kumar," the Albanian tradition specifying that he
who cuts the hair of the first-born son becomes godfather
of the family. Dragan and Qamil sat next to one another
on the company bus, shared lunches in the distillery's
cafeteria, and, on hot summer evenings, played with their
children under the cypress tree near Qamil's front gate.
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