My obsession with Bosnia never ended, like a bout of malaria that returns over and over, and long after the war, and long after I wrote two books about that forlorn, tragic country, I went back and found the man from the morgue. As we were drinking tea in his farmhouse in the hills above Sarajevo, a teenage boy wandered out. He looked strangely familiar. “My grandson,” the man said. His dead son’s widow had been pregnant when the son was killed on the front line. I wrote a story called “The Book of the Dead,” and sobbed as I wrote it — for all the dead, but also for my innocence and my youth which had equally died in that Balkan city. I did not come back from Sarajevo untouched; I came back with a mission. I did not want any of those 100,000 people whose souls no longer touch the earth to be forgotten, ever.