The chess board was a blur.

She said, Your move.

I said, Edina, I did not know.

How could you know.

I am so sorry.

She said, Your move.

I said, g3.

Bg4.

Impossible to play. She had often startled me in the past when she got her bishop out like that. Bg2. Do not turn away.

Nc6. Then she said, Merima picked up German quickly. She accepted counselling. The settlement workers said that she has adapted well. One said to me, Women refugees make a home wherever they are. Your move.

Castle, I said.

Good, she said. Be7.

h3, I said.

She took my knight, Bxf3.

And I took her bishop, Bxf3.

Now her attack. She said, Qd7.

I said, Bg4.

She took my bishop with her knight, Nxg4. She repeated her old joke, I take your wooden sliver.

It was obvious to take her knight. hxg4.

I asked, Does Merima want to go?

No, she said. h5.

I moved, gxh5.

She slid her queen out to Qh3.

I did not see what was coming and continued on the wrong part of the board, played Nc3.

Edina said, My mother also does not want to leave Vienna.

She took the pawn that was blocking the rook, Rxh5.

She said, We will only be two days in The Hague. My mother starts reliving it all. She cries. Talks about my father, how they destroyed our family’s farm of seven generations. And I tell her the soldiers who tortured us still walk the streets freely. Your turn.

Nd5.

She said, Not good. Qh1. Checkmate. My mother says, Merciful god, I want death. She says that she is alone and she can’t learn German and she wants to go home. But she can never go back. There is no place to go back to. Who thinks of old people after a war? Their time is finished.

I listened to her sweep her pieces into a little cloth bag.

This is what I think, said Edina. She is alive in death. She dies every day the moment she awakes. Yesterday she said to me, I saw some pigeons outside my window and I thought, even birds have more hope than I do. You made a couple of mistakes in that game.

Then she hung up.

—

The next evening, I phoned Edina and told her I was going to Foča.

Why?

To prepare to write about the trial.

Never will I go to Foča, she said. You write. The world forgets us.

Light crushed by darkness. Torment to remember. Torment to forget.

—

I was afraid to go to Foča alone. Kosmos said, I will introduce you to Mak. He drives tourists everywhere. He drives for the UN. He drives politicians. He drives everyone.

You come, I said.

I am writing my play, Kosmos said. I like Sarajevo. Go see Mak.

—

Mak was rangy with powerful forearms. He had lost most of the hearing in his right ear during the war. He was sixty-three but moved like a man twenty years younger. During the war he was on the front line around the city. When he could get gas, he left the fighting and drove his beat-up beige Zastava through the darkness to fill water containers at a hidden artesian well. The water ran in a trickle and he waited and dozed like a young wolf alert even in sleep.