Goat?

Kosmos.

He sat at a table with a woman. His hair fell over his left eye, and he moved with that familiar kinetic energy. He was pulling over a chair and saying, What are you doing here? In his eyes the ironic distance and intimate warmth I remembered, and I felt all over again blood pulsing beneath my skin. I loved all over again his lifted eyebrows.

He said, This is Edina, and she looked up, politely, was chain-smoking, did not speak. I wondered if she had no English. Her face was sallow, her bony fingers long, the skin around her lips a dry net of wrinkles. Some of her hair was tucked behind her right ear. She had once been pretty. Her shifting grey-blue eyes were more alive than her flesh, her energy an erect snake waiting to strike.

He was talking fast. He said that he had stayed away from Sarajevo for too long, could I not hear his British accent, was it not fucked up, and was not British English boring, their insults boring, nothing interesting like fuck my python.

He was a little uneasy.

Finally he asked, You?

I said, I have a daughter. I write. I came for the festival.

I thought, I came to see you.

He said, I was working at a small theatre in London, near a church, oranges and lemons, when the war started, and I did not come back. I thought I would go crazy watching the war on television, waiting, like waiting for fucking Godot.

His charming soup of language. But Edina leaned back, detached from his I-wasn’t-here-during-the-war stories.

He said, This festival is only for movie stars, in and out like a quickie. I am living here now. There was nothing for me over there.

I wanted to be alone with him. To ask him what really happened. Now I had seen him again, I wanted to touch him.

I asked Edina, Are you in theatre too?

I am a lawyer. But I do not practise.

Kosmos said, She works with women from the war.

What do you do?

Abruptly Edina rose, walked into the crowded room.

I looked at Kosmos. He said, Sometimes she has to get up and move away. When she feels trapped it is better to move. It is difficult for her to talk about what happened.

But I asked her about her work, I said.

It is the same, said Kosmos. She runs a documentation centre. She takes statements from women about what happened in the war.

I thought, Terrible things happened.

I asked, Does she have family?

Her daughter and mother live in Vienna.

Where is her husband? I asked.

Dead.

We watched Edina standing with a small group of people across the room near a chess game. She laughed with them over some absurd chess insult, came back to the table, reached for a cigarette, lit it, and called the waiter to order cakes for us. She flicked her cigarette ashes on the floor. I could see that she had once been a woman who was lively at parties, smoking and calling for food and moving easily through crowded rooms. She took everything in. I hesitated to say anything more, but Kosmos, who was never comfortable with silence, said to her, Maybe Goat could write about your work, help raise money.