He said, Across the line, a lot of them were poor farmers. Part-time fighting. Sometimes we stopped to trade cigarettes and ammunition with them. Then we went back and shouted insults and fired.

Mak drove me first to the Širokača and Hambina Carina Cemetery in Bistrik to see his brother’s name in stone. I did not ask to go but he took me there. I traced my fingers over the carved names and Mak said, He died the third day of the war. I went crazy, I ran in front of bullets. Then I said to myself, If I die who will bring water to my two sons?

Mak’s war is the emptiness in his right ear and his brother’s tombstone. He drives foreign war crimes units who tell him about his own battles with their detailed maps and lists of names. He has memorized the foreigners’ war, burial grounds along the roads, in the mountains, outside every town, their body counts, their estimates made by comparing shifting earth and lists of missing. He has chiselled the history of their war inside his skull. His sorrow he keeps elsewhere. I asked him to take me to Foča, but after the cemetery he took me to the tunnel near the airport.

He said, It got gold medal for architecture. I would give it golden bullet.

Why?

Why not a few inches higher? They make it so low, like for dwarfs.

Mak liked to talk. He said, Better to have a good time together than sit like stones, why be quiet like boring? Men got a pack of cigarettes a day to dig the tunnel. The scaffolds were two metres high and when it rained the water was up to the waist. On the Butmir side we came out and this old farm woman gave us a cup of water. Angel with two teeth.

He laughed. He had told his stories so many times they were fables. He said, Someone falls in the tunnel or too tired to go on and no way to pass. Just wait. I was stuck in there many times.

He drove me to a bunker where he’d fought snipers on the hill above the city. It was a hot day and we hiked through the fragrant grasses where sheep grazed. We might have been going on a picnic. I did not even recognize this small grass-covered depression in the ground as a bunker. He asked why I wanted to go to Foča. He had never been.

I told him about Edina and about the trial and the rapes.

He looked away, down into the city. He said, People know about this but do not say. I drive everywhere and first time anyone wants to go there.

I thought, Everyone has secrets after war. Mak’s do not include rape. I do not think he could drive me if they did.

—

The way to Foča is a winding road through narrow mountain passes. Mak lit cigarettes, sipped water, worked the gearshift. He pointed out massacre sites that looked like pretty mountain meadows. He showed me barns and sports fields and ditches where people had been slaughtered. I admired a vista and Mak pointed, Thirty-three there.