During those six years of telephone calls, she consulted with the lawyers from The Hague about her files. We battled with our queens and knights and pawns and she told stories of her life, in fragments, each version never quite the same. We told each other the things we worried about and some of the things we loved. One late night she said, I am not afraid to die but I am afraid my life will disappear.

I thought, There is only the lifetime burning in every moment.

I said, Sometimes I think it is your own words that will immortalize you.

Who will hear them?

Someone, I said.

And then, because friendship is there for comfort too, I joked, Are you trying to make me too sleepy to beat you?

You have all eternity to sleep, she said. Let’s play.

—

When I met her in Vienna with her mother, Esma, and her daughter, Merima, we liked to walk in the Lainzer Tiergarten, and each time made our way to the observation tower. Edina said she enjoyed this country-in-the-city and she imagined that in Canada there were many parks like this. I told her that in some we saw wildlife, elk and moose and bears in more remote places, and that even in my large city I had seen mink on the waterfront and raccoons were everywhere. Edina laughed and told me to stop teasing her and telling her such outrageous stories. She was relaxed in Vienna. Then, as if reading my mind, she said, My nightmares do not care what country I am in. I have them here too. I never escape them.

—

In Sarajevo, I slept at Edina’s when I wasn’t with Kosmos. He didn’t have a home, only a room in someone’s house, so he had fixed up the projection room at his small theatre for us with a mattress on the floor and some posters. Edina told me his family’s apartment got taken over by others and he had nowhere to come back to. I liked making love with Kosmos under the flickering images of movies playing below.

I said to him, You have never told me about your family.

I had an older brother. I had my first cigarette with him. Let’s go for a drive.

He liked to go up the mountain and look over the city. He liked to walk along the old bobsled track and look into the woods and over the valley. We could not walk through the forest below because it had not yet been demined.

Kosmos said, My brother’s body is still missing. He was fighting to the west. My parents died before him.

After great sadness, silence is not enough. But I did not know what to say.

—

I sometimes travelled by bus with Edina to small towns outside Sarajevo for her fieldwork. She said she wanted dignity for women who had been pushed to the sides. At least, having told their stories to someone, to her, they would not die with a locked box inside them. She told me that before the war she used to watch the news coldly, and she thought little of it when she saw footage of refugees walking with nothing from one place to another. But now when she watched television images of war and migration she could feel their hunger and cold and fear.