I wanted him but I was also angry. I wanted this moment but I did not trust it.

I asked, Have you had many lovers?

He looked into my eyes with a little humour and with great gentleness and he said, It has been eleven years. Not many. Have you?

Yes, I said. But I wanted to say, I had a child. Ours.

He wanted to coax us back toward warmth, and he touched my leg and asked, Is this okay?

I said, I don’t know if we should make love.

We have a daughter together, he said.

Always the way he spoke made me laugh. Time out of mind, a lover’s brain.

I stood, pulled the curtain across the window, and now we were unhurried because something had been decided and he looked on the bed at the crumpled paper she had given me and he said, She wrote her number for you?

I came back and stood behind him and put my arms around him and said, Yes she did. I will lock the door.

And after I hung up the sign outside, Ne ometaj, I asked, Shall I call her?

He did not answer but took off my clothes, and I took off his, and we made love and I remembered the hungry joy of our months in Paris. But he had betrayed me and there had not yet been time for understanding or forgiveness though my body had already forgiven him because a body knows only what it feels in every moment. We were not in a yellow-lit city of love where neither of us belonged but in his war-forlorn country. We made love haunted by our past and by Edina, and by her dead beloved husband too, each of us loving the wrong one. We were tattered things, and foolish and lost. And there was also a child. A mother must reckon with the life she creates. And so, with the measure we used, our story would be measured to us.

After, we talked about London, about Toronto, about Biddy. Then we made love again, and this time it was deep and slow, and with our bodies we told each other the truth.

—

People knew what was happening to the women in that war. But there was never a magazine cover of a woman looking into a camera with clothes ripped, breasts cut, blood running down the insides of her thighs. There was no cover for this kind of victim of war. The places where women were locked up were called not prison camps but motels and schools and recreation centres. Women who survived that war were not called heroes. They were hidden.

Rise, unhappy woman, cries Hecuba, all gone. No longer queen but coin. Spoils of war.

Epics sing battle in words so lovely they shimmer over stench and pain. I think of the poor boy Harpalion, the spear’s hideous wound between his genitals and navel, at the right buttock, under the bone, into the bladder, the boy gasping out his life, lying like a worm extended along the ground, dark blood drenching the earth, the boy-corpse lifted into a chariot and brought in sorrow to his father.