The din in his ears destroyed him. Every day there were orders to wipe out a whole people. One of those people was me. We had loved each other since we were children and he could do nothing to stop any of it, nothing.

Sarajevo, Foča, Toronto

Edina said to me over the telephone, You play white.

Where are you?

Vienna.

I said, e4.

Nf6, she said. They have indictments.

A different opening for her. I asked, Is this the Alekhine Defence?

Yes, she said.

I listened to her blowing out smoke. I asked, Indictments for your trial?

Yes, she said. My mother and daughter are going.

To watch?

To testify. Your move.

d3, I said. To testify?

I heard her light another cigarette and slide a chess piece across the board. She said, d6. I could picture her in her mother’s small, perfectly tidy apartment. She said, Yes. I too will testify. Your move.

Nf3, I said.

e5, she said.

I felt fresh defiance in her voice. I looked at the board and I was trying to grasp what she was saying. If she was going to be a witness, the indictments must be for men who’d held her captive. Her mother and daughter had also been held by him?

I said, I don’t understand.

It is not a difficult move, she said.

I mean about you and your mother and daughter testifying, I said.

We have decided to go on the record, she said. To speak.

I was staring at my pawn.

First they shot my father, she said. When they locked us in the Partizan Sports Hall, I told Merima to hide in the bathroom. Soldiers came in and one yelled, Where is your daughter? I tried not to answer and he was drunk and beating me. I could not raise my head. Then he lifted me by the hair and said, I will kill you. And we will find her anyway.

I must have looked toward the bathroom. I was half-dead. He dropped me and they took her and brought her back the next day.

I heard Edina stand, move away, come back.

She said, They locked me up in some filthy hotel and by the time I was taken back, Merima was gone. Fourteen years old. I did not see her again until after the war. They moved me to Karaman’s house and my mother was kept in town. Once a woman told her they had seen Merima in the Ribarski restaurant, but not that she was there being traded. My mother was evacuated to Tuzla and she did not know if we were alive. Ivo paid a soldier to buy me and get me out in the trunk of a car. I would have died. He could not find Merima. In Vienna I found a few rooms above a café run by a Bosnian couple. I had an operation, my insides were so destroyed, and I got work washing dishes. Then, one miraculous day, Merima appeared. We had not seen each other for almost two years. She was sixteen. She was so thin.