Ilija (Boban) Jelicic and Aleksandar (Sasha) Popovic were soldiers. Both were Serbs in their 20s, and both died in the last days of the war. Although they grew up just a few miles from one another in this northern Yugoslav city, they never met.
Boban Jelicic was an army driver who would have completed his one-year military service this week. He liked techno-music, parties, girls and weight-lifting. He was shot dead by the Kosovo Liberation Army in Vranjevac, the Albanian quarter of Pristina, on June 13th - four days after the war ended and one day after NATO troops entered the city. He was 21 years old, and his family buried him on Saturday. His brother Zoran (27) spoke to me after Boban's funeral at the family home in the Novi Sad suburb of Futok.
The only son of two medical doctors, Aleksandar Popovic was a brilliant, 26-year-old computer scientist who last year declined a scholarship from the University of Illinois. He loved Greek classics, the books of Tolkien, Monty Python and astronomy. Sasha Popovic was called up in April and operated a SAM-6 surface-to-air missile launcher only 30 km from the home of his widowed mother, a 57-year-old ophthalmologist named Ljiljana. Just after midnight on June 1st, a US aircraft fired a missile at Sasha Popovic's battery - he had not shut down the radar quickly enough - killing him and another soldier.
During the NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia, it was impossible to obtain information about military casualties or meet the families of dead soldiers. Zoran Jelicic and Ljiljana Popovic agreed to speak to me because they want some trace of their brother and son to remain, because they cannot bear the idea of their loved ones becoming statistics. It is not easy to square their grief with the atrocities committed by Serb forces in Kosovo. Others might dismiss the tragedy of Serb families on the grounds that Albanians suffered more. But their story also deserves to be told.
In a local newspaper in Novi Sad, I found a funeral announcement with a photograph of a dark-haired, heavy-set young man. "In grief," it said. "Our beloved son and brother the soldier Ilija Jelicic (Boban), born 1978, tragically lost his life defending his homeland. Funeral at 13:00, Futok cemetery. House of mourning: Nikola Tesla, Street number 17."
When I arrived at the Jelicic home, dozens of relatives and family friends - including Yugoslav soldiers - were drinking a toast "to free Boban's soul". Local beggars were also invited to the funeral meal of chicken soup and roast meat, set on picnic tables in the driveway of the simple, two-storey bungalow.
It was only after I had heard Boban's life story that I realised what an extraordinary coincidence had occurred. On June 13th, I had to turn back on the road through Vranjevac when shooting broke out. Three Yugoslav soldiers were shot dead by the KLA, I learned later the same day. On the 14th, I interviewed the Pristina KLA commander, who claimed that the Serbs had been looting. As I left Vranjevac, I ran - by chance - into two British Kfor officers who had retrieved the Serb soldiers' bodies. They did not believe the KLA's explanation. The bodies and household goods had been placed to give the appearance of looting, they told me; they believed the killings were revenge murders.
Boban Jelicic was one of those three soldiers. I heard the shots that killed him, interviewed the man who ordered his murder, and spoke to the British soldiers who collected his blood-soaked body. A week later and more than 300 km to the north in Novi Sad, I met his grieving family.
The Jelicic family had emigrated from Bosnia after the second World War. When Boban was a baby they had a chance to emigrate to Australia, but changed their minds at the last minute. Their mother Boja worked in a local shoe factory until it went bankrupt. Their father Nikola is a plumber. Zoran, the serious elder brother, is a manager at Novi Sad's open air market.
The Jelicic parents have worked for 20 years to build their little bungalow, which is still not completed. The second storey was for their sons and wives when they married. "The last thing he said to me on the telephone was, `Brother, are you going to get married?"' Zoran recalls. "That was in mid-April. The week before he died, he phoned all his friends from Kosovo. They told him, `just take care of yourself and when you come back, everything is going to be easy'."
Boban was always sociable. "Sometimes I'd wake up in the morning to go to work and he would just be coming home from a party," Zoran recalls. Speaking of the brother he has just buried in the present tense, he continues. "He likes girls very much, and girls like him very much. He used to cut his hair very short and dye it blond. When he was small, we joked that when he saw anything made of wires he would open it and take it apart to see how it worked. I used to complain about his techno music. `Boban you are going to break my head,' I would tell him." Nikola Jelicic, Boban's father, walks through the room where we talk, his face unshaven and his eyes bleary. He seems to listen for a few moments, then sinks back into his grief.
Had the war not ended when it did, Boban Jelicic was scheduled to leave Kosovo on June 8th, but as an army driver he was needed for the Serb withdrawal. Contrary to western prejudices about the Serb working class, the Jelicic family is neither hawkish nor nationalistic. "Does any good ever come of war?" Zoran asks. "I think it was possible to solve everything without a war. The most tragic thing for us is that he was killed after the peace agreement."
The desire for revenge is a powerful force in the Balkans, but Zoran Jelicic feels only sorrow. "Even if they brought the Albanians who killed my brother and executed them in front of me, it would mean nothing to me, because nothing can bring him back now. I was never interested in politics; my brother wasn't either."
She sits in her apartment near the Danube, an oil lamp burning above her dead son's photograph and an icon of St Michael.
Ljiljana Popovic's home is unassuming; she preferred to spend her money on books, a computer and a telescope for Sasha, travel to Greece and the monasteries of Kosovo - with Sasha.
Mrs Popovic wears a pleated black skirt and a black cardigan, and small pearl earrings. She is a dignified, frail woman, and for an hour she struggles to keep her tears back. "I am very proud of my son and I will try to keep his memory because he deserves it," she says. "It is very hard for me, but I have to collect my strength to do it."
Perhaps because she has been longer in mourning, perhaps because her son was her whole life, Mrs Popovic is more bitter than Zoran Jelicic. It was the US that provoked Albanians to hate Serbs, she insists. The US attacked Yugoslavia to destroy Serbian Orthodoxy, she says. "I don't want to discuss our politics, because our politics are not responsible for the death of my child. The only guilty people are the NATO pact headed by the US."
Mrs Popovic's husband Borivoje, an anaesthetist, died 11 years ago. "Sasha was 14 then. I tried to play the role of mother and father. I wanted to raise an honest child, and I believe I succeeded."
Sasha Popovic graduated first in his class at secondary school and at university. By the time he was called up in April he was an assistant professor writing his second book - in English - on computer programming. If the war had not started, he would have received his Master's degree this month. Last year, Sasha studied briefly at the University of Illinois in Chicago. "He could have stayed and built a new future," his mother says. "But he wanted to use his knowledge in his own country, and he realised that the Serbian soul cannot live in America. He said the Americans had no soul but lots of money, and he came home."
Nine hours before Sasha Popovic was killed, he said goodbye to his mother for the last time. "He came home for 20 hours, to have a bath and rest a little. He told me, `Mother, don't call anyone. I just want to be alone with you, to talk.' "He wanted everything to end quickly so he could return to his books, which he missed so badly these two months. We parted cheerfully; I never thought for a moment that it might be for the last time . . . Sasha wanted to get married and have at least four or five children. Now I shall never be a grandmother."
The last photograph of Sasha, taken just before the war started in March, hangs on his bedroom wall. The young man with a gentle, intelligent face wears a blue pullover and a plaid shirt. He does not smile, and like Mrs Popovic, I see sadness and worry in his eyes.