Always he had ideas. The waiters began to pile chairs on tables and people moved out through the front doors into the early morning. Still Edina sat. The waiters wiped the bar and mopped the floors around us and Edina drew her hands over her face, which seemed to soothe her. Then she turned to me.

I do not ask for their stories, she said. I beg for them. I document where a woman was taken and what happened to her and who in her family died and where survivors went after the war and how they live. They all need money. The women can’t support themselves.

I nodded.

She said, I want to prosecute.

Her body was intense and strangely vulnerable though she was a tall woman. There was a subtle fierceness in the way she held her back and her eyes were ball lightning.

She said, People have heard about my work. Some women from the international court are coming. But what can they really do? I want prosecution here.

She squashed her last cigarette and twisted the empty package and said, Shit. We are all betrayed. The world forgets us.

Turn aside this fate, you gods.

Kosmos offered her one of his cigarettes and she let him cup her hand while he lit it.

She reached into her bag of files and papers and she pulled out a photocopy of a newspaper photograph of women standing in a room together. She wrote something in the margin, crumpled the paper and handed it to me. She got up and Kosmos stood to follow her.

She said, They just wait for us to die.

—

I watched them leave and waited to pay the bill. They were out on the sidewalk and Kosmos hurried back, leaned in close and asked, Where are you staying?

I told him to come to my hotel in the old town. Everyone knew it. And then I walked through the narrow streets toward the old bazaar, blood-tainted since the Illyrian wars. The moon was very low and early dawn light was grey over the rough cobbles and there were many doorways and places to hide. Listening to Edina had shredded me like a grater. I looked at the wall of white names carved into red stone in the Markale fresh market. Vendors with dark smudges under their eyes were setting up tables of vegetables and fruit, figs and breads and honey under the names of the dead. Was a memorial a final deletion, so war could be put aside, so trade and life could proceed?

The bar downstairs at the Hotel Art was lit with Ottoman-style lanterns, and behind the mustard columns and stone tiles was enough cheap alcohol to poison an army. Three men were still drinking, heads and necks jutting forward like gargoyle downspouts. I asked for water. And the oldest man stood and handed me a blue bottle to take up three flights of stairs to my room. I opened the door to a pair of narrow twin beds with wrought-iron headboards and took a long drink of water. Outside, the river, and all across the valley, red rooftops and white buildings, minarets a breath taller than nearby church spires, then the forest on the ridge of the mountain. We are pack animals and live close to each other, even hunters and hunted nestle together in the bowl of the valley. Below my window were stone traces of the market where Venetian traders once bartered in twelve thousand stalls, five centuries old. They held their lovers at night. They prayed. They played with their children. They gossiped about politicians threatening war. They bought and sold the things people want—spices, a bit of cloth, a pot, a carpet. Nothing is more human than trade, worship and war.