As usual, there was quite a crowd at Marko’s this evening. Jozo Brandić was among them. At some point he told a story from the recent war in Bosnia. He hails from a village close to Šamac on the banks of the Sava. A number of Croat prisoners were held in a makeshift prison when a bunch of Serb soldiers came from Serbia itself. They were quite different than the local Serbs. One of them barged into the prison, which was formerly a garage, and started killing people held there. He would ask a few questions, and then he would shoot in the head with his pistol. He executed seventeen people in so many minutes. “Two buckets of brains were collected afterwards,” Jozo finished his story. I was fascinated with the quantification he used. Two buckets. I looked around the table at once. There was a bit less than a bucket of brains at the time.