I did not tell her the only thing I knew about the Atacama Desert which was that below the great dry skies, the women of Calama walked day after day searching for the bones of the disappeared of Chile. After seventeen years of searching they had found the mass grave of their loved ones. I did not want to distract my daughter’s eyes from looking up.

I realized that I had been listening to Biddy in the mother-way of many streams at the same time. I had missed things. My second heart was outside me now. She had been waiting too long to meet Kosmos. My silence had made her another casualty of war.

—

Jacques Payac’s stump was getting itchier with age. He said the amputation had never taken root in his mind, that he often felt he could still get up and run for a plane, across a battlefield, through a hotel lobby. He put his cigarette butt in a tin can and asked, What’s happening with the trial?

I gave him a bottle of slivovitz and told him about the indictments, and that they only managed to bring in one man, Žarko Dragić. Jacques rubbed the part of his leg where the prosthesis joined.

No matter what I do, he said, there is inevitable withering of the limb. I add socks. The most dangerous part of writing is listening. Most people do not understand this. Hearing testimony means never ever being able to forget. Beatings. Breasts slammed by men in a drawer. Cigarette burns. You will hear detail after detail. Once you have heard you cannot unhear. The women will have to begin their forgetting all over again.

Maybe they don’t want to forget anymore.

Maybe. Or others don’t want them to.

I said, I need you to help me publish it.

Young man, I run a travel magazine.

I did not speak.

Finally he said, Don’t you have any other friends?

No, I said.

The Hague

I arrived in The Hague and took the tram from the train station to my new apartment on the fifth floor of a building overlooking the sea on Gevers Deynootweg. There were seven tram stops from there to the courts—Kurhaus, Scheveningseweg, Badhuiskade, Keizerstraat, Duinstraat, Frankenslag, and finally Congresgebouw—seven doors to the underworld. My balcony jutted into the sea winds. I unpacked two suitcases, one of books and another of clothes.

The tribunal’s grey administrative building at 1 Churchillplein, once home to Aegon Insurance, was reflected in a large, shallow pool in front of the building. In the pool were three stark, sky-bound sculptures. High fences and long, curving drives limited any uncontrolled movement around the outside of the building. Inside were heavy metal doors and locked basement storage rooms. Much wealth had once been created in this place from insurance promises to buffer us against the things we fear and cannot escape—accidents and sickness and death. The building was now renovated not for unwelcome events in the future but to serve justice for events in the past. There were courtrooms, witness rooms, cells, a large library, evidence vaults and offices, all tightly monitored behind ballistic glass and locked doors.