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Lying beneath the bleeding corpses of his friends, Shala didn't understand why he was still alive. "I felt born for the second time," he says. He waited 20 minutes beneath the weight, pulled himself out, then, bleeding heavily, slipped into a neighboring building. Serbian snipers had taken positions on the roof of a school across the street. Shala waited three hours until the snipers withdrew. Someone he knew -- someone he would not name -- walked by. Shala signaled to him, begging for help, but the neighbor walked quickly on, afraid for his own life.

At 11 a.m., in agony, Shala spotted a girl of 7 or 8 in the street. He signaled to her and asked her to bring him water. When she returned with the water, he asked for bread and cheese, and she -- still unknown to him -- brought him those things. The girl returned a fourth time with her mother, who told Shala's wife where he was. At first Shala sent his wife away, fearing for her life. But they spent that night together in the house, lying on the floor, talking quietly of their escape.

By the next morning, Shala's bleeding had subsided, and with his wife's help he made his way back to his house. The Serbian police came looking for him, but his wife and children hid him beneath a couch, draping his 7-year-old daughter atop him.

The bodies, 90 in all, lay untouched in the street and carpentry shop for three days, when the Serbs returned to bury them in hastily dug graves in a cemetery across the street. Most were refugees unknown to Shala or anyone else, and those who do know them will most likely never know where they died.

Shala and his family then began a dismal journey identical to that of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians, taking refuge in one village, then the next. They were on the run for seven weeks. They returned to Suhareka only recently.

Shala holds out two plastic vials. One contains three bullets removed from his shoulder. The other holds the cigarette he dropped in his breast pocket moments before he was shot. "They are my memories," he says.

He leads his visitors to the cemetery and stands among the unmarked graves. A hardened man, he begins to weep. He wonders which of the mounds contain his friends. "The ones who fell on top of me saved my life," he says. "They paid."
salon.com | July 9, 1999

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