No tears in hell.

A white U.N. armored vehicle is roaring through one of Sarajevo's streets. In front of the restaurant Makarska, which is now some kind of charity kitchen, women and children are standing in line. They are waiting for a free muffin (made only with flour and water)--"per children's capita"--and the temperature is below zero.

From the vehicle, which does not slow down, someone throws a cardboard box of oranges, and it falls on the frozen street. Oranges roll in all directions.

The line is immediately broken, mothers leave their children and fight like hungry wolves, slipping on the ice, falling down, struggling for precious fruits, heaping them to their bosoms.

One boy, no older than five, is trying to stop his mother; he is pulling her coat.

"Mama, please don't."

She desperately looks at the oranges lying in the street--fewer of them every second--and then she stares at the face of her five-year-old man, hugs him, and begins to cry.

His eyes are dry as he fondles her hand.

"Don't cry, ma. Everything is okay."

I know this may look like a cheap, pathetic scene from some pessimistic, futuristic movie or novel, but this is the truth I saw with my own eyes in A.D. 1993. It's about the children of Sarajevo, about those who are not children anymore, who don't cry anymore, who don't have tears anymore, because there are no tears in hell.

The older ones shed them for their fathers who, one dark night, pressed lips to their foreheads, scratched them with the bristles of beards, told them they would be back soon, but those fathers haven't appeared again. The older children have shed tears for their mothers, brothers, sisters who have lain in blood before their horrified and helpless eyes; for friends with whom they have shared, literally, their last crumbs of bread and whom they buried in the soccer field on which they dreamed about sport glory together.

The youngest, maybe, have never cried. They don't know what it means to pee in their diapers because they've never had a diaper. They are not complaining and crying when they are hungry because they don't know how it feels to be full. They are not afraid of darkness because they've spent days, weeks, and months in dark, cold basements--unsafe shelters from the shelling. Monsters, for them, are not beings from imagination but cruel reality which threatens them every day from the hills around Sarajevo. They don't have tears for their amputated legs because they lost them before they could walk.

The children of Sarajevo, with silent pain and dignity, have buried their childhood.

But it is important that they have survived; for tears and crying, they will have enough time. Their whole lives are before them. Will it be tears of sorrow or rage? I can't know, but I'm sure they will not need, and they will not want, anybody to dry their tears.

Dario Dzamonja is a Bosnian journalist and the author of six collections of short fiction. He was born in Sarajevo in 1955 and lived there until August 1993, when he was granted political asylum in the United States.

Ralph Steadman, an artist and author, lives in Kent, England. In 1990 he produced his first opera, "Librello: The Plague and the Moon-flower," an eco-opera for the '90s.