She said, I would like to sit on a stone couch. And then she asked, Why don’t we know where he is?

I don’t know.

She had no father and no image of a father. She liked to look for faces in the bark of the tree where her swing hung. Mam showed her an abandoned nest hidden high in the leaves. When Biddy got older she liked to sit alone on the front porch and look at the stars. My curiosity about Biddy is fathomless. I felt sorry that she had no father like mine who loved me. She only had Mam and me. There is no perfect in a family.

A child is loaned to us and when the time is right the child is reclaimed by the world. And yet, mother and child are inside each other forever. A mother receives wisdom if she is willing to submit, if she is willing to love ferociously and then shake her child free.

I learned one kind of love from Mam and another from Biddy. I learned that I only felt right when my daughter and my mother felt right. We were wrapped around and through each other like the roots and branches of a wild banyan tree holding together an abandoned home for the compassionate god.

—

The war went on and on. The world slowly roused itself like an old and weary dog. It stretched stiffly from its front legs up to the back, and then it shook, tried to take a step, to do something, to resist the thick urge for vengeance. Silence breaks people. There would be a negotiated end. They were writing indictments in The Hague and bringing in criminals and witnesses. My brother, with his retentive memory and a keen allegiance to fairness, had left practice to become a judge, and we often talked about the new court. He liked to visit on Sunday evenings to see Biddy. After she was in bed we watched the news and he asked, I wonder if your guy went back there.

I do too, I said. If they sentence people in The Hague, where will they incarcerate them?

My brother had visited prisons. When he started out as a judge he said he needed to feel what he would be condemning others to.

He answered, I suppose each country agrees to let them use their prisons.

Do you think they can really make an international understanding?

If everyone agrees. It’s logical.

Law changes. Which means it is sometimes wrong.

You always say that, he said. It’s imperfect. It’s what we have.

We must not make a scarecrow of the law, I said.

What are you talking about?

It should change. When it stays the same, the birds use it as a perch.

Nice image, he said.

Not mine, I said. And spoken from a position of power.

I like quotes to start my judgments, he said. I might use that.

Je t’en prie, I said.

My brother’s mind did not linger on a single strand. He liked to work on lots of threads at the same time. He was taking everything in. He watched baseball and read newspapers and looked through law books at the same time. He nodded toward the television and said, Those war criminals will not only be in prison but in exile.