You stepped away from me and said, Edina, I cannot go on, and you put your hand in your pocket and pulled out a grenade and you said, Come with me.

I could not look away from your finger on the ring. All I could think about was our daughter and I was watching you hook your index finger around the ring, and you said, I’ll count to ten.

I knew grenades, ten was not enough, and I ran, I had to make thirty feet and in a moment I do not understand, counting as far as six, I jumped over the bobsled track and fell, in slow motion. Please, please, no land mine on the ground where I fall. These thoughts passed clearly through my head in those six seconds and I remember only silence in the falling, then the click, then darkness. I do not remember the landing or the explosion but I remember the falling and I smelled forest and I saw a bit of sunlight on a pine needle.

She put the photograph back in the drawer.

—

Edina said, When I woke up, I heard hospital sounds, nurses laughing in a hallway. Kosmos was sitting beside my bed and my first thought was, I am alive.

Anything else was remnant.

She said, Kosmos cried and he said, That crazy bastard. How could he do that? Why the hell do we blow ourselves up?

Edina said, I told him to stop talking and to go write something only in swearing.

He said, I will call it I Hope Your Cow Dies.

I was alive in the thin world of the living.

I told Kosmos to leave me alone but he said, One who loves once, loves always. He said, When you are better we will bury Ivan together.

I said, How will I tell Merima? There is nothing to bury.

But there was. We buried Ivan, limbs, his head, in the Širokača and Hambina Carina graveyard in Bistrik so he could be in a high place looking down over the valley.

Now he is another fleck of soldier-dust.

I miss Ivo, she said. Even his enemies will weep when they know what happened to him. I still hear his voice, Oh god, put me gently to rest without struggle. Let me perish, tell my old father, tell my mother who raised me, tell my beloved. Anything left untold, I myself will tell to the dead in the underworld.

At least I think this is what Edina said. Her words were indistinct. I had a sensation that the dead were speaking through her, but of this I could not be sure.

—

I get up to write in the cinnabar chill before dawn. But first I will walk through Sibelius Park to the twenty-four-hour grocery store. A long time ago, a small girl disappeared here and was found a few weeks later, her limbs wrapped and bent and hidden in a freezer. In the empty store I choose an apple from the bins, Red Delicious, which Mam calls Hawkeyes, Golden Delicious, McIntosh, and newer kinds, Fuji and Pink Lady and the Honeycrisp to which I am partial. The sleepy clerk has been awake all night.