She said to Mataruga, Do you know where you were eight years ago? Do you think they gave us calendars?

Judge Banda said, Counsel, the witness does not know. Recess.

—

After Edina’s testimony, I wanted to go to her, but I could not. Her witness assistant took her back to the hotel, protected her from any contact.

Was this really the best we had, this bludgeon of law, the severed reality of the court? To extinguish rage as if it has no place in truth? To demean a woman? Make her a victim trying to defend herself all over again?

I went to the café in the Novotel next door, transcribed my notes, reread a letter from Mam. I wanted to call her and Biddy to hear their voices, but I did not trust myself not to cry. I looked at Mam’s familiar handwriting. She had written that she had found a shoebox of old-fashioned christening announcements and antique funeral cards. She would keep for me the tattered notebook in which her grandmother had jotted entries about her eight children born one after another in a prairie farmhouse with a wood stove and no running water. She wrote, It is a good read. My grandfather wouldn’t let her have the horses to drive to town when women first got the vote so she walked, thirteen miles in and thirteen miles back. And there is an entry after the flu death of her eldest son, Baden: He’s gone—my first baby—Tonight the sky feels too big—I am a speck—The stars are more real to me than anything down here—poor Baden—he always wanted to ride in an airplane—and now he never will.

At the end of the letter Mam wrote that Biddy was doing well, becoming a young scientist. She wrote that the girl had taken to stargazing even in winter. She wrote, When the trial is over, I’m going on a holiday to Iceland to fly with some friends at their club. Work hard. Come home soon. XO, Mam.

—

Dragić struggled with the headphones and different languages. Did memories come back to him too, out of the fog of alcohol and the adrenalin of war? At Karaman’s he had ordered the women to cook and serve him meat and fresh bread. Edina’s was very good. He reported saying to her, I would come here only for your baking.

He made her serve it to him naked. He cracked her skull if he didn’t like how she looked at him. He had said that he wanted her pregnant. He kept track of her in Foča, even when he was out dismantling booby traps and land mines.

—

Merima spoke clearly and slowly. Many times she had rehearsed her story and she wanted to say it and go back to Vienna. She began, We girls were used as special rewards for soldiers. When Koza was finished with me, he let other men choose me. Sometimes they forced us to bathe them. They always kept their weapons with them. Sometimes they put guns under their pillows but I was too terrified to try to take one.