Yet to testify, she had to remember. She had to speak.

Merima told her counsellor who was old with stern wrinkles between gentle eyes that she did not know if she had the strength for a trial. But she wanted to please her mother.

The counsellor said, You do not have to go.

Merima said, I do not want to be a victim.

The counsellor said, The shame is his, not yours.

Merima wondered what people wear to court, how long she would be away from university.

The counsellor said, A person must be loyal to who they are, no matter what happens.

Merima chose her best jeans and a white T-shirt and jacket in the style of Austrian students. Her grandmother could not travel alone and so she would take her. She told her professors she had appointments. She was twenty-two years old, and she had to dig up the fourteen-year-old she had locked down in silence. A young Austrian man was interested in her and she had told him nothing about her past or about the trials. She wondered if she might ever feel anything for a man.

She had decided to go to please her mother. She had decided to go because to remain silent would be her own soul’s suicide. How much more did she have to suffer?

—

East, light of the world. Death, in a world turned over.

On my last trip with Mak we travelled east. He said, I want you to see Srebrenica.

Through the mountains again, past simple farms and barns, then the large battery factory warehouse made into a barracks. Mak led me through empty rooms at the back, past pornographic graffiti in Dutch and English, to barns, to massacre sites. The memorial at Potočari was a wide white-capped sea of grave markers, rows of green-covered coffins awaiting burial and marble walls of carved names.

People squatted, some with hands covering eyes, others with hands palms up to the sky, in ancient postures of grief. Craftsmen were still engraving name after name. People were still collecting and identifying, bone by bone, arranging memory.

Even Mak was quiet on the drive home. I dozed and awakened as the wild mountain road disappeared into the tunnel on the east side of Sarajevo. I opened my eyes in darkness and abruptly we emerged from the tunnel into the city, as if we had passed through a curtain into a fairy-tale kingdom. Out of a nightmare and into a dream.

—

I was walking with Edina through the narrow streets of the old market when a crowd of drunken young men approached us from behind. Before I knew where she went, Edina disappeared into a shadowed corner like a scrap of paper. The men passed and she stepped out and we said nothing. It was a sultry evening and many people were out. We strolled and turned into the courtyard of the Baščaršija mosque. We sipped cold water from the stone fountain and Edina reached into her purse and showed me a black-and-white photograph.