—

The law creates a scaffold of order and civility. But every person who has been through a trial knows that under the surface lie cruelties. We accept law’s illusions because we have nothing better. We try to shape our complicated ideas into acts. It is all we can do. We are otherwise creatures driven by rage and revenge.

Judge Gladys Banda today would read the long judgment. She and Smith and Romano had had long discussions, reviewed thousands of pages of evidence and testimony in order to write the three-hundred-page judgment. The women witnesses had spoken. I feel dead but I am condemned to live. I feel destroyed. These words would have settled in Gladys Banda in a place she could not completely cordon off. All her life she had fought the idea of women as property and so, legitimate spoils of war. This judgment would find rape in war to be an assault on human dignity.

But today, when Judge Banda read the court’s carefully written decision aloud to the world, she would also read it to an individual man. She would say to him, You were a courageous soldier and your men indisputably held you in high esteem. By your natural authority you could easily have put an end to these women’s suffering. Your active participation in this nightmarish sexual exploitation is therefore even more repugnant. You thrived in the dark atmosphere of dehumanizing others.

How does a judge feel on the morning of a judgment? Today’s judgment would irrevocably change a single man’s life. He would go to a foreign prison far from home. He had behaved as thousands did during the war but this man, today, would be condemned to spend the next twenty-eight years of his life in prison.

Today Judge Gladys Banda would get out of bed, eat breakfast, put on her coat, wish her family a good day, close the door of her apartment and come to the court. Today the law would change. And a man’s life. And perhaps the women’s lives. Of this she could not be sure. In what way did she clear her mind? Did she take a coffee on the way? Did she pray?

—

I telephoned Kosmos and Edina and asked if they were going to watch the judgment. Kosmos said, Yes. The actors want their stage back, so it is our last day here. They want to even throw out our chairs. I told them to go away for a few more hours and the director complained and I said, Poserem ti se u ruku, pa nosi.

I was laughing but I did not know what it meant.

What did you say?

I can’t translate, said Kosmos. But he shouted to people behind him, Sisaj mi pitona, and to me, I told them to suck my you-know-what.

Python? I said. Always he made me laugh.

Then he said, I brought vodka for Edina to drink.

I said, I wish I was with you both.

Yes, he said. I am mixing it with tomato juice and Tabasco.