The witnesses worried about live transmissions. Many did not want their families at home, in whatever countries they were living, to know. I begged the soldiers to kill me but they laughed. They said, We don’t need you dead. You will have our babies. Memories of lost husbands stirred the women’s anguish as much as living ones. Some men supported their wives and some refused to live with them after the war. Some women did not want their children to know. No one’s peace was ever to be restored.

The voices of the witnesses would be altered on the transmission and their faces blocked with a pixelated mosaic. Only people inside the courtroom would see them.

Karla listened and absorbed the women’s suffering and rage. But never could she fully know what their torment was. No one could. And she could not predict what might happen when a woman sat under the gaze of three black-robed judges, rows of lawyers and assistants for the prosecution on her right and, unseen but felt, the public gallery behind her. How would a woman tolerate the eyes of the accused on her, with his lawyer and security officers on her left?

Women were reluctant to leave the difficult new lives they had painted over their old lives. At the last moment would they even show up? Who could say what would happen in this new court?

Karla told them, I refuse to allow your testimony to fall into silence, shame.

The women did not know how to believe her.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me?

Lawyers talk about the rich narrative of a story in court, but anyone who has participated in a trial knows there is no rich narrative in the way that storytellers think of one. There are really only fragments of a mirror selected for legal battle. Its reflections may once have been the life, but no matter how carefully the fragments are put back together there are cracks. We labour to understand what has been lost between the silvery shards.

—

One Sunday morning in The Hague I visited the Celestial Vault, an outdoor art installation, a peaceful, grassy crater that people enter through a curving underground tunnel. At the centre of the crater is a sloped stone bed with two rounded stone pillows on the bottom edge. I was lying head down and looking up to see the crater’s rim, to see the illusion of the sky as a vast sheltering dome. I wanted to bring Biddy here one day.

I was looking at the clouds when a woman approached quietly and said, Hello. Please, I do not want to startle you.

I sat up and recognized Karla.

I slid off the stone couch so she could try it. She lay down and said, Ah yes, I see. It feels like the sky is an umbrella.

We walked a little and chatted. She was curious about what I was doing and I told her I was writing about the trials and my friendship with Edina.