He spoke with the unusual archaisms of someone who has learned English from old books. He said that his grandparents had a farm near the Drina, the home of his deepest memories.

I knew nothing of the places and things and languages he spoke of, but I liked the timbre of his voice and the light in his eyes. I liked his smell.

He said, My play will begin with a famous story from Andrić about a bridge built by Rade the Mason. Every night someone was destroying the day’s work. To stop the destruction, Rade ordered his men to find Christian twins, a boy and girl named Stoja and Ostoja, and to wall them into the bridge’s middle pier. His men stole the babies from a distant place, and their wailing mother followed them all the way to the bridge. Rade felt pity so he entombed them alive but left an opening for their mother to nurse them. To this day people collect the thin white stream that mysteriously appears from the stone.

Kosmos paused to see if I was enjoying his story.

I said, This is pity?

—

That first night together sitting by the Seine, Kosmos told me he would take me to see the kapia on his favourite bridge, a stone sofa above rushing water where people came to trade and talk near the coffee-merchant with his charcoal brazier and copper pots and small cups. Kosmos said, Everyone meets on the bridge.

Then he counted on his fingers until he ran out and started again—Turks, Serbs, Roma, Bosnians, Moslems and Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians and Sephardic Jews, people who speak Ekavian and Turcizmi and Serbo-Croatian and German and Ladino and Arabic and Persian. He dropped his hands and touched my hand for the first time and my blood and breath quickened with this first touch of flesh. He smelled perfect, mountain-grass-sweet skin and salt-ocean sweat.

I asked, Is Kosmos your last name or first?

It is my only name, he said. In my left-nut-is-dancing-messed-up country, a person gets killed for a name. I do not tell any other name.

He put his arm around me, warmth against the quay’s cold stone.

I said, Soon the sun will rise just above Notre-Dame.

He asked, Do you think a bridge built by slaves can be the place for a love story?

Preserve me from the violent…continually are they gathered together for war.

I said, There must be atonement, apology, purification. Why was your bridge built by slaves?

Stories ran thick as spawning salmon in Kosmos’s head. Pulling me closer, he told me about the slave Radisav who destroyed the bridge-building work from a simple raft in the darkness every night. When he was caught, he was wrapped in hot, thick metal chains and his toenails were torn from his feet with pincers. The leader Abidaga asked him, What makes you destroy the bridge?

Radisav said, It is the devil.

Abidaga asked, What devil?

Radisav answered, The same devil who makes you enslave us to build it.