Speak, Silence

Also by Kim Echlin

Under the Visible Life

The Disappeared

Elizabeth Smart: A Fugue Essay on Women and Creativity

Inanna

Dagmar’s Daughter

Elephant Winter

Speak, Silence

KIM ECHLIN

Hamish Hamilton

an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

Canada • USA • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

First published 2021

Copyright © 2021 by Kim Echlin

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Excerpt from Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities. Published by Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, copyright © 1990 and used with permission cleared with Copyright Clearance Centre. Excerpt from Mehmedalija “Mak” Dizdar, “Calypso”, adapted from the English translation copyright © 2006 by Keith Doubt and Luisa Lang Owen, and used with permission from the Dizdar Estate. Excerpt from Calling the Ghosts: a Story About Rape, War and Women, quote by Jadranka Cigelj. Directed by Mandy Jacobson and Karmen Jelincic with executive producer Julia Ormond, distributed by Women Make Movies. www.wmm.com.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Speak, silence / Kim Echlin.

Names: Echlin, Kim, author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200233718 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200233793 | ISBN 9780735240612 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735240629 (EPUB)

Classification: LCC PS8559.C45 S64 2021 | DDC C813/.54—dc23

Book design by Kate Sinclair

Cover design by Kate Sinclair

Cover images: (leaves) Alpine Buckthorn from Traité des Arbres et Arbustes que l’on cultive en France en pleine terre (1801-1819) by Pierre-Joseph Redouté. Original from the New York Public Library. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel; (flowers) from Iconographie du genre camellia: No. 194 (1839-1843), published by Abbé Laurent Berlèse. Gift of The Print Club of Cleveland in honour of Mrs. William G. Mather / The Cleveland Museum of Art.

a_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

Contents

Cover

Also by Kim Echlin

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

A Note on the Novel

Toronto, Sarajevo

Paris

Toronto, Sarajevo

Sarajevo

Foča, Sarajevo

Sarajevo, Foča, Toronto

The Hague

Sarajevo, Toronto

Acknowledgements

for the women who testified

for Nicole Winstanley

…he sat down and lit a cigarette, and he said that he could perhaps do more, much more, but that I was about the same age as his daughter, and so he wouldn’t do anything more for the moment.