To know is not enough.

—

So I went to Sarajevo to write about the film festival when they were still fighting outside the city. They ran the projectors off car batteries. Someone asked, Why are you holding a film festival in the middle of a war? The director answered, Why are they holding a war in the middle of a film festival?

I saw the Sarajevo roses in the sidewalks, the pockmarks on the walls. The city was alive with the temporary glamour of international film stars gathering in war ruins. Where was the rage? On the streets I heard wry humour and relief. I felt mourning. Exhaustion.

I asked at the Sartr Theatre box office, Do you know a man called Kosmos?

Yes, said the young woman.

Does he have another name?

She thought for a moment and said, Everyone calls him Kosmos.

I left an envelope for him. Inside was a note in which I told him I would meet him that night at the Kino Bosna. I had not seen him for eleven years.

—

The announcement of a new court in The Hague had spread quickly around the globe. They would need judges, litigators, researchers, interpreters. They would write a new set of rules and procedures. They wanted to bring order into that lawless place, the border.

In Hamburg, Karla Vogel-Babić applied to be a prosecutor. She was married to a man from the region. Her specialty was international white-collar crime but she was tired of the greed. When she was a child she had lost her home in the rubble of her war-flattened city. She knew the smell of decomposing corpses. She wanted to be part of this new thing, a world court. A woman has no country and wants no country. Borders shift and crack into something different.

Other women in other places were also deciding to leave their homes to go to The Hague. They too wanted to act. They too felt their home to be the world.

In Lusaka, the deputy chief justice told Judge Gladys Banda that the United Nations was looking for African judges. At first Gladys thought she could not fit in with international lawyers. She had five children but this had never stopped her from doing new work. Her husband encouraged her and she thought, All the new judges will have to learn the new law too. She had learned how to navigate Zambian tradition and British common law. Perhaps there were things she could do.

All over the world, people were weighing the idea of joining the new court. History is now. In the moment of consciousness. New law on the border.

—

The Kino Bosna café was converted from a cinema, seats replaced with tables and red-checked cloths, and on the walls classic black-and-white photos of old Hollywood stars, Bogart and Hepburn and Monroe. The smoke-filled room was full of young students whose educations had been interrupted, laughing through their war trauma, trying to invent a retro-present in a city besieged for three years, ten months, three weeks and three days. They crowded round a game of chess and mocked missteps, called out things like The chicken has laid a potato. For the young, hope is as natural as violence. They played U2 and Sikter and Protest. They joked, You think one president is difficult? Try three, a Bosniak, a Croat and a Serb. But it was not a joke.