Nahid himself had only barely evaded capture and murder. He had been traveling to Srebrenica with his wife, and what was then their only child, because they, like the other Muslims, believed that the UN-protected town offered safe haven from the Serbs. But as they drew nearer, it became apparent that the Serbs had blockaded Srebrenica. Refugees were still getting through, but to Nahid it smacked of entering a mosque before the doors were locked and the whole edifice was set alight. So he had turned his wife and daughter away from the town, despite the risk of having their throats slit by the Serbs, and had found sanctuary in the basement of a farmhouse owned by one of the few Quakers in the country. His brother and his family, along with two male cousins and their families, had continued into Srebrenica.

The men, and their older sons, were never seen alive again. Only in the years after did Nahid discover documentary evidence of their fate. A piece of news footage showed a group of Muslim prisoners descending from a truck and being led to a grove of trees. There, Nahid subsequently learned, they were tortured by their captors, members of the Serb paramilitary unit known as the Scorpions. Finally, they were dragged to a hole that had been dug by an earthmover, and there they were shot. From the film, Nahid had identified his brother, his nephews, and one cousin among the prisoners in the truck. Later, he had helped war crimes investigators locate the scene of the massacre, and worked with them to exhume the bodies for identification and reburial, because it was important that they should all have a name and a formal resting place.

No, he did not hate all Serbs.

But some he really hated.

Nahid watched a mother walking her toddler on the grass of the Schönbrunn, the woman crouching to hold the child’s arms as his chubby legs carried him, half-stumbling, along. What people often forgot when it came to violent death were the connections, the links not only to those left behind but also to lives and worlds that might have been. Nahid found some consolation in the theory of multiple universes, and the idea that in a parallel existence those he had lost continued to live and breathe. Children were born, then grandchildren, on and on for generation after generation. These were potential states of being that did not conclude in sexual torment, in torture and murder.