‘A Yugoslav stone?’

‘I don’t know. He told me he’d acquired it in Trieste, during National Service after the war. The man who sold it to him, by circular logic a refugee from Tito’s new red Yugoslavia, told him it was Roman.’

Eva grew up with this story, as her sons had grown up with hers – the amulet stone lived on a shelf in her father’s study in Hampstead – but the modern-day Yugoslavs she met thought it might be older than that. An Illyrian guardian deity, perhaps. A Scordisci demon. Gimbutas, who was working at a dig in Serbia at the time, told her it was Neolithic. There were other such carvings along the Danube, on rocks, and in the structures she called temples. Later, in motherhood, Eva showed it to a friend from university who had gone to work for the British Museum: Probably Roman, the man told her, just a number stone, for counting. Five. A price-tag maybe.

Eva said, ‘It’s amazing, isn’t it, that ancient symbol, here, and in Pakistan, and in Yugoslavia.’

‘A women’s code,’ Lucija said.

Eva glanced at her. ‘Exactly. An international network of ideas. That’s what we need. A movement that crosses languages and cultures.’

LUCIJA: I tried to tell Omer how wonderful she was to Mariam and me. Wonderful. How she was always doing everything at once. She would pull down Bosnian things to show me; start a conversation about Pakistani music, to include Mariam. She tried to include us all in what she was saying or doing, to make connections and make everyone feel at home. I didn’t want to leave that morning and go back to the convent.

JUDGE: What about your religious beliefs?

LUCIJA: I always found her very open-minded. So, for example, she spoke to me about the female Pope, who she said was English. From the eighth century, I think. And even if this pope never existed, Eva said, it proved her point, that these islands of Britain have since ancient times been associated with sacred independent women. Why? I don’t know. Probably because, at one time, Britain really was at the edge of the known world, and that was the only place where such women could be thought of as existing. Eva and Alice were working on some kind of gynotopia anthology together.

Eva didn’t ask Lucija why she had become a nun. She didn’t say, was it because of the war? Obviously it was. The war had done strange things to all of their heads. Becoming a nun was the least extreme reaction to what had happened in certain parts of her country, with their now-tragic names.