No poet has tenderly described insult to the vagina and womb and bowels of a woman. No poet makes a word-monument to a woman fighting naked, biting and kicking, beaten to silence, and nine months later, naked again, legs open again, giving birth to a child whose life began in rape. A woman’s war is not redeemed for the ages by art.

Her suffering is meant to stir honour in the speeches of generals, Let no man hurry to sail for home until he has raped a faithful Trojan wife, payment for the shock of war. Her brave battle has no voice at all.

We embalm her in silent shame.

—

Kosmos was gone when I awoke in the late afternoon and I thought, This is complicated.

Our love was storm-tossed. Seeing him again was a sip of cool water.

I telephoned the number Edina had given me and she asked, Do you play chess?

Her office building was in a residential part of the city, apartments over barren main-floor rooms behind locked doors. Locks everywhere. I knocked and knocked and finally a young woman came out and let me in and we walked up some stairs and Edina was in an office with an elderly woman. I turned the pages of magazines in a language I could not read. After Edina walked with the old woman to the door, she came back to me and said, You came.

Yes. Will you show me your work?

Did you sleep with him?

Yes.

He sleeps with anyone.

She was pulling a file out of a drawer and she said, I knew him before the war.

I sat in the chair in front of her desk and said, When I met him in Paris, years ago, he told me about you on the first day. He only thinks of you.

She said, I will show you our work and what we are doing.

I opened the file she had given me but I could not read it and I asked, What is it about?

About what happened in the war.

She took me to a map on the wall with many coloured flags marking all the regions where she had interviewed women. I did not know what I was looking at, and she said, I am building cases to prosecute.

I asked, What happened to them?

She said, What happens to women in war.

Outside the office door, two volunteers were laughing.

I wondered, What did each flag mean? How many women?

Edina said, Let’s go for coffee.

I suggested the Zlatna Ribica. I liked the decorations, the manual typewriters with broken keys and hand-coloured orientalist Victorian prints in small frames. I told her that in Paris I had been employed in a shop where I water-coloured and framed black-and-white prints cut from books, repainting history to decorate sitting rooms. And I wanted to see the foreign money under glass on the tables and the crystal and silver and costume jewellery hanging from hooks and the mirrors in ornate frames.