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Let’s start with a thought experiment.

Step One: Imagine two huge icebergs, one representing Ernest Hemingway’s writing and the other representing everything else in his life. Imagine that these two icebergs sometimes bump up against each other and sometimes drift apart. Imagine that these icebergs are like the one Hemingway uses to make an analogy with effective writing (especially his): its “dignity of movement . . . is due to only one-eighth of it being above the water” (Death in the Afternoon).

Step Two: Imagine that you decide to sculpt a new, smaller iceberg by synthesizing core elements of the two huge ones. Imagine that you challenge yourself to make seven-eighths of this sculpture visible above the water even as it has its own dignity of movement. Imagine that you develop what you regard as a viable vision of this iceberg.

Step Three: Imagine that you undertake the task of converting this vision into a 6-hour documentary about Hemingway’s life and work for PBS. Imagine how you will craft that conversion so that it both remains true to the sculpture in your mind’s eye and appeals to a contemporary PBS audience.

I’ll pause to give you some time to conduct all three steps of the experiment.

I start with this thought experiment for three reasons (1) It helps capture the ambitious and daunting task that Ken Burns and Lynn Novick took on in making Hemingway, their three-part documentary that recently aired on PBS (April 5, 6, and 7). (2) The experiment highlights the larger purpose of the documentary, its goal of replacing the myth of Hemingway with a far more accurate and layered view of the life and the writing. The myth constructs him as the epitome of machismo, a man with prodigious appetites and the will and means to satisfy them as well as a man with extraordinary talent who produced an enduring stream of what he liked to call true sentences. Burns and Novick retain the idea of the talent but complicate everything else in ways I’ll discuss below, and, in so doing, they reposition the writing within the life. (3) The experiment invites each of us to think about how we would have constructed the relations between the writing and the life in our own distinctive ways.

These three reasons, in turn, underlie my reflections here. On the one hand, I want to celebrate Burns and Novick’s execution of their challenging project: in breaking through the myth, they construct a much more complex and interesting Hemingway, a strange blend of strengths and weaknesses, virtues and vices, who has had more than the usual allotments of good fortune and bad.   On the other hand, when I took Steps One and Two of the thought experiment, I gave more attention to the writing than Burns and Novick do, and this attention led me to a different vision of the sculpted iceberg than the one that emerges in their documentary. I want to discuss my sense of the writing iceberg not to find fault with the documentary but use it as a spur to move some of what’s submerged there above the water line of the synthetic one.   First, though, a little more on Burns and Novick’s Hemingway.

In keeping with its myth-busting purposes, the documentary gives considerably more attention to the life than to the writing for two interrelated reasons. First, the myth about the life dominates Hemingway’s legacy in American culture. He is a figure that many people who have never read his writing know something about—and even have opinions about. Changing those views requires a new biography more than new analyses of the writing. Second, the genre of documentary lends itself to a greater focus on the life because it is a fundamentally narrative genre, and because Hemingway’s life is filled with tellable events. Giving pride of place to the writing—or even giving it equal prominence—would be extremely difficult because its narrative raw material would be the single event, repeated multiple times, of the writer sitting down to write. Hard to imagine that even the PBS audience would sit still for much of that.

In keeping with the goal of humanizing Hemingway, Burns and Novick give the greatest attention to his intense and fraught relationships with his four wives, Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn, and Mary Welsh. Using Geoffrey Ward’s script, voiced by Peter Coyote, to supply the baseline narrative, the filmmakers show the good, the bad, and the ugly in Hemingway’s behavior toward these women. Ward’s script includes testimony from the women themselves and Burns and Novick enlist accomplished actors to voice that testimony: Keri Russell (Hadley), Patricia Clarkson (Pauline); Meryl Streep (Martha); and Mary-Louise Parker (Mary). More generally, Burns and Novick’s skills as visual storytellers lead them to interweave these voices with Hemingway’s (ventriloquized through Jeff Daniels) and with a range of other materials—photographs, newspaper articles, and newsreel footage—that often bring in other events. Although Burns and Novick do not offer substantial new revelations about Hemingway’s life, they call attention to some things that have circulated more widely among scholars than among the general public. Especially noteworthy is their attention to his interest in bending and even blurring standard gender roles and the consequences of that blurring for sexual encounters. Above all Burns and Novick succeed in making visible what lies beneath Hemingway’s behavior throughout his adult life, identifying both distant and proximate causes of it. Among the distant causes are his mother’s increasing disapproval and his own disappointment in his father; his being jilted by his first love, Agnes von Kurowsky, the British nurse he met in Italy, while serving as an ambulance driver during World War I, and whom he thought he was going to marry; his witnessing of combat and his own wounding. The more proximate causes include his willingness to promote an image of himself that eventually he could not live up to; his multiple concussions; his alcoholism (called his “overdrinking” by Mary); and of course the complex personalities and histories of the women he loved. Burns and Novick also make judicious use of interviews with Hemingway’s son Patrick, with Hemingway scholars and biographers, and with the psychiatrist Andrew Farah as they round out their portrait of the artist as a fascinating and flawed, charming and repulsive, young, middle-aged, and aging man.

Even as they give greater prominence to the life, Burns and Novick make a valiant effort to highlight the writing and to explicate its power. The first image they show is the typescript for the opening of A Farewell to Arms, and they continue to sprinkle images of manuscript pages throughout the documentary, including ones for all the novels, for the nonfiction books, and for multiple short stories (“Up in Michigan, “Indian Camp,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and more). In addition, they employ the actor Jeff Daniels to read numerous excerpts from the writing, and Daniels does an exemplary job of bringing out the tones and rhythms of Hemingway’s remarkable prose. Furthermore, as Daniels reads, Burns and Novick guide their audiences to engage more deeply with the writing by putting evocative images on the screen, ones that capture moods while opening up rather than closing down interpretations.   To pick just a few telling examples: a dock in the gloaming to illustrate the setting of “Up in Michigan”; an oar pulling through the still water of a lake for the ending of “Indian Camp”; the exterior of stone building with a substantial set of stairs leading to an empty street for A Farewell to Arms and its final sentence (about which more below), “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.”

Having prompted this engagement with the writing, Burns and Novick then rely on the commentary of a wide range of thoughtful, well-informed experts to explain how and why it’s often so powerful (and sometimes not). These experts include Hemingway’s recent biographers, Mary Dearborn and Verna Kale; notable contemporary fiction writers, including Michael Katakis (executor of the Hemingway estate), Tobias Wolff, Edna O’Brien, Tim O’Brien, Mario Vargas Llosa, Paul Hendrickson, and Abraham Verghese; and first-rate literary critics, including Stephen Cushman, Miriam Mandel, Susan Beegel, Marc Dudley, and Amanda Vaill. They even bring in John McCain to discuss his life-long engagement with For Whom the Bell Tolls.

All these commentators are smart, engaging, and insightful. Wolff, for example, characterizes Hemingway’s effect on the writers who came after him by saying that “he changed all the furniture in the [writers]’ room.” Edna O’Brien frequently pushes back against the common view that Hemingway was a thorough misogynist and goes so far as to suggest that parts of A Farewell to Arms, her choice for his best novel, could have been written by a woman. Other arresting comments include on-target descriptions mingled with praise: Hemingway remade the language (Vaill); he goes beyond previously accepted boundaries (Katakis); he works against the modernist grain of difficulty that characterizes the fiction of James Joyce and William Faulkner (Cushman); he articulates a view of war that no one had ever articulated as clearly and powerfully before (Wolff); he creates a male character in “Hills Like White Elephants” whose subtle but incessant pushing to get his own way women will readily recognize (Mandel). Furthermore, in keeping with the myth-busting purpose of the film, these commentators also discuss what they regard as ethical failures in the man (his seemingly gratuitous meanness to other writers, even those who had advanced his career) and aesthetic ones in the writer such as Across the River and into the Trees.

Yes, yes, yes, I nod. And then I think back to my thought experiment and what I would want to do to make what lies beneath the writing more visible. If I were to convert my vision of the sculpted iceberg into a documentary film, I might well use the same commentators, especially Wolff, Edna O’Brien, Cushman, and Mandel, but I would ask them to comment more consistently on the interrelations of three aspects of the writing: (a) the material Hemingway works with, (b) his treatment of that material, and (c) how that treatment guides readers’ inferencing about the characters and events in ways that significantly influence readers affective, ethical, and aesthetic responses. I even think such commentary would appeal to the PBS audience. To illustrate what I have in mind, I’ll discuss two texts that figure prominently in the first episode of the documentary (entitled “The Writer”), “Indian Camp,” and A Farewell to Arms.

In “Indian Camp,” as Geoffrey Ward’s summary efficiently indicates, Nick accompanies his doctor father on an early morning trip to the eponymous camp, where he watches his father perform a successful but extremely painful Caesarean section with a jackknife on an Indian woman who undergoes the procedure without anesthesia. Once the operation is over, Nick and his father discover that the woman’s husband, who has been lying in the bunk above his wife, has slit his throat. That discovery changes the direction and emphasis of the story; rather than being one about birth and new life (and Nick’s father’s horribly insensitive treatment of the Indian woman—he tells Nick that “her screams are not important”), it becomes one about suicide and death. The ending, which Daniels reads with his typical skill, brings the story to an affecting conclusion, as Nick first asks his father questions about suicide and about dying and then retreats into his own thoughts. Here are the story’s last lines:

“Is dying hard, Daddy?”
“No, I think it’s pretty easy, Nick. It all depends.”

They were seated in the boat. Nick in the stern, his father rowing. The sun was coming up over the hills. A bass jumped, making a circle in the water. Nick trailed his hand in the water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning.

In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.

Burns and Novick bring in Wolff and Cushman for commentary. Wolff makes the astute observation that Hemingway is working with sensational material but handles it in an unsensational way. Cushman nicely underlines the paradox of the ending, the juxtaposition of Nick’s knowledge that he’s going to die with his denial of that knowledge. Good stuff, as far as it goes. But let’s go a little further beneath the surface.

Hemingway makes the sensational unsensational by restricting his audience to Nick’s perspective and, thus, having us take in the events as Nick does and then follow his struggle to process them. Furthermore, Hemingway’s treatment of that struggle demonstrates his impressive ability to deploy both dialogue and the representation of consciousness to guide his audience’s inferencing. Hemingway uses the dialogue to show that, although Nick’s father answers Nick’s questions with genuine care for Nick, the answers themselves are not particularly helpful because his father is not able to adopt Nick’s perspective. When Nick’s father says that the difficulty of dying “all depends,” the natural follow up would be “it depends on what, Daddy?” but Nick’s silence signals that he has now stopped trying to get insight from his father.

Cushman’s comment on the ending perceptively points to the way the details of the scene play into Nick’s denial or evasion. But digging deeper reveals how much Hemingway both trusts and subtly guides his audience. Hemingway reports Nick’s misguided conclusion without any narratorial comment because Hemingway knows that his audience knows that he knows that Nick is in denial here. (That’s a mouthful, I realize, but one I hope you’ll find worth chewing on.) What’s more, Hemingway affectively aligns his audience with Nick, despite his denial, in part by inviting us to see how nature seems to support Nick’s conclusion. The rising sun, the jumping bass, the warm lake water juxtaposed with the chilly air: as we follow Nick’s perception of these things, we also feel his connection with the ongoing stream of life. Feeling that connection leads us to empathize with Nick in denial, even as we find it poignant. More generally, Hemingway turns the genre of loss-of-innocence narratives on its head by making “Indian Camp” a story in which the protagonist denies that he has lost his innocence. Paradoxically, however, the inferencing that Hemingway guides us through makes us register Nick’s loss even more deeply. We come away empathizing with Nick and admiring the artistry of his creator.

The beginning and the ending of A Farewell to Arms provide even greater opportunities to reveal what lies beneath the writing iceberg. Here’s the famous opening paragraph, which Burns and Novick reproduce via a nice variation of their usual pattern with Hemingway’s writing. Daniels reads the first sentence and then forms a duet with Edna O’Brien, who reads the middle sentences with him; Daniels then yields the floor to O’Brien who reads the last one. This strategy highlights the rhythms of Hemingway’s prose.

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving, and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Cushman calls this passage a demonstration of “rhythmic mastery” that also “breaks all the rules” (no one before Hemingway would use “and” fifteen times in four sentences), and O’Brien suggests that Hemingway is applying what he learned about rhythm and repetition from Bach’s music to English prose. Again, good stuff, but let’s dig deeper by looking at material, treatment, and inferencing.

Material: nature in the form of the river, the plain, the mountains, the blue water moving swiftly in the river channels, the leaves on the trees; humans whose presence disrupts that nature.

Treatment: the first-person perspective of a soldier in the village, who, we learn later, is a young American called Frederic Henry.

Inferencing: Hemingway guides his audience to see more about the scene than Frederic himself does. More specifically, Hemingway invites his readers to recognize that (a) the causal connections between the presence of the troops and the disruption of nature—”the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees . . . and the leaves fell early that year”—and thus the general destructiveness of the war; and that (b) Frederic does not register those connections, restricting himself to his faithful recording of one thing after another. All those “ands” are crucial to this inferencing.

Similarly, later in the chapter Frederic does not seem to register Hemingway’s implicit association between the effect of the rain and the effect of the troops: “. . . in the fall when the rains came the leaves all fell from the chestnut trees and the branches were bare and the trunks black with rain.”  By guiding his audience to see Frederic’s situation more clearly than Frederic does, Hemingway constructs Frederic as an unreliable interpreter of his own situation.

Hemingway then uses the last two sentences of the chapter to nail down this discrepancy between his audience’s inferencing and Frederic comprehension: “At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked, and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.” Who says, “only seven thousand died”? Who confines the casualties of the cholera to those in the Allied army? A committed ironist, a military official trying to minimize casualties, or a callow young American volunteer in the ambulance division who has not thought much about war. Frederic does not qualify as an ironist, given the earnestness of his recording, and he is no military official.

In sum, underneath that stylistically brilliant first chapter, Hemingway invites his readers to infer how much innocence and naivete Frederic has to lose and how much he needs to learn about the war and the world.

In contrast to the Nick Adams of “Indian Camp,” Frederic not only loses his innocence and naivete but recognizes the loss. Indeed, he learns a lot about the war and the world from Catherine Barkley, who once tells him that she’s afraid of the rain because she sees herself dead in in it. (The issue of how Hemingway’s ideas about gender influence his construction of Catherine’s character is a complex one that I won’t get into here, except for a few comments below.) After Frederic makes his farewell to military arms, he and Catherine establish their own happy but fragile existence in Switzerland. That happiness is permanently shattered when Catherine dies in childbirth, along with their baby. Burns and Novick use their commentators to emphasize how much Hemingway struggled with how to end the novel after Catherine’s death—the ms. shows forty-seven different attempts! The documentary, however, does not address why the ending Hemingway chose works so well, and, thus, misses an especially ripe occasion to make visible more of what lies beneath the surface of his deceptively simple prose.  

Material: what should the final part be? A philosophical reflection along the lines of the famous “If people bring so much courage to this world, the world has to kill them to break them” passage? Indeed, why not use that exact passage? Or should the narrative end with a line of dialogue? Or a report of Frederic’s actions in the immediate aftermath of Catherine’s death? Or something else?

Treatment: Once that choice is made, what’s the optimal way handle it? Should Frederic explicitly express his grief and sorrow about losing Catherine? Or should the emotion be suppressed? If suppressed, how to invite his readers to recognize it?

Hemingway opts for the report of a final action and treats it by returning to the style of the opening chapter: “Troops went by the house and down the road and . . .” becomes “I went out and left the hospital and walked. . . .”

Inferencing: The style is similar, but Frederic’s voices are radically different. The first chapter is in the voice of Frederic the naïve ambulance driver. The last sentence is in the voice of the enlightened man who feels Catherine’s absence and the destructiveness of the world in every fiber of his being but who is not himself destroyed by those feelings. This man now understands rain as a synecdoche for that destructiveness but who carries on despite its presence. As Hemingway matches voice to action, he invites his readers to recognize that, in taking these small steps back into the world, Frederic is not yet strong at the broken places but is deliberately (in both senses) advancing toward such a condition. The final sentence, then, though suffused with Frederic’s grief, also indicates the completion of his transformation from the unreliable character narrator of Chapter 1 to a character narrator wholly aligned with the perspective and values of his creator. From this perspective, Hemingway chose well among the forty-seven options he considered for the ending. We may cry, as Edna O’Brien did, in reading this novel, but we also come away moved by its aesthetic power.  

After such responses, we may also want to raise questions or objections. Here are just a few. Does Hemingway, despite initially giving her a perspective aligned with his—and showing that she is one who is strong at the broken places—treat her as a disposable woman, important primarily for her service to both Frederic and his own artistic ends? Even as he transforms his experience with Agnes in his construction of the Catherine-Frederic relationship, does Catherine’s fate include a tinge (or more) of vengeance against Agnes? Does Hemingway overdo it with the emphasis on the world’s destruction and on his use of the rain? (Riddle: What’s Hemingway’s answer to “why did the chicken cross the road?” Answer: “To die. In the rain.”) But I would suggest that these questions become more intriguing when put into dialogue with the answers that emerge from a focus on Hemingway’s handling of material, treatment, and inferencing.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

There’s a lot more to say about that handling in Hemingway’s other work, but I hope this much indicates how I’d go about saying it. I turn now to why I think the sculpted iceberg needs to include several holes.

The sculpture needs the holes to signal that the relations between the life and the writing can never be fully explained, and it needs more than one to signal that there are multiple gaps in those relations. The first, and perhaps largest gap, is between formative experiences and ultimate achievement. When Burns and Novick look to the life for experiences that help explain Hemingway’s famous style, they highlight such things as his extended childhood engagements with the music of Bach; his experience as a journalist for the Kansas City Star who insisted that their writers should: “Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English”; and his reading of Gertrude Stein with an eye toward her experiments with repetition and syntax. Influences, yes. Explanations, no. How many others played Bach, wrote short sentences and paragraphs, and read Stein, and how many of them became accomplished writers?

A second gap is between specific experiences and the transformation of those experiences into powerful fiction. A Farewell to Arms is based on Hemingway’s experiences in World War I, including his relationship with Agnes. But A Farewell to Arms is far from a roman á clef, and the departures from Hemingway’s personal experience are crucial to the success of the narrative, especially the different trajectory of the relationship between himself and Agnes and the one between Frederic and Catherine.  Where do those departures come from? Not from other direct experiences, but rather Hemingway’s own imagination in combination with his sense of what the narrative needs. In other words, the transformation of experience into powerful fiction depends not just on the experiences themselves but also on the writer’s ability to see beyond the experiences to their significance. This transformation also depends on the writer’s sense, often intuitive but sometimes deliberately conscious, of how introducing something that departs from the experience can have ripple effects on the rest of the narrative. A third gap arises because writing is itself its own activity in which one learns by doing and in which what one learns has an existence apart from whatever else is happening in one’s life. How does one get to Stockholm for the Nobel Prize in Literature? Practice, practice, practice—and, to adapt what Michael Katakis says at the beginning of the documentary, be like “so many other people, except [have] enormous talent.”

In a sense, Burns and Novick devote six hours of filmmaking to unpacking Katakis’s description of Hemingway as such a man and to looking for connections between his fundamental similarities to so many others and that enormous talent. If I’m right about what stands apart between the life and the writing, it is inevitable that Hemingway succeeds more with the similarities than with their connections to that talent. Inevitable and perfectly fine because the life is captivating. Nevertheless, it’s the writing that fuels the interest in the life, and just how Hemingway was able to produce it will, I suspect, never be fully explained. What we can do, however, is continue to increase our understanding of what lies beneath its surfaces.

As soon as I read Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X, I knew there was a brilliant poetic voice illuminating the future. Acevedo is a performance poet whose beautiful free verse crosses over for both adult and teen readers. The Poet X is a verse novel with so much rhythm that it could be performed as musical theater. The story is both sensitive and energetic, emotionally complex and accessible. The Poet X asks quiet questions, but it asks them with a beat. The story explores immigration, relationships, and coming of age. Many of the poems are bilingual, written in confident Spanglish. The protagonist grows, loses some Dominican traditions, and learns to value others. Above all, she gains her individuality and freedom of expression, granting the reader a sense of hope. Elizabeth Acevedo offers a voice that young readers need.

—Margarita Engle, author of The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom and Poetry Foundation 2017–2019 Young People’s Poet Laureate

today, miles and years from Papi’s record player,
the night unrolls itself into blue linoleum,
the guitar strings my extended hand in his direction.

I killed him for almost half my childhood.
We are taught many things by counting time, even this.

If this was the only father I had to claim,
I preferred him buried in memory.

Now, his records drag like a long breath 
between the pause of songs.

He should have danced with me more often.

Where Harry and Helen Staley would sleep was obvious; Winnie would give up her full-sized bed and take the couch. She scrubbed the grimy black and white tile in the bathroom. She shopped for sophisticated snacks that would appeal to anyone: figs; a wedge of brie; a can of salted mixed nuts; two bottles of wine, one red, one white, each under six dollars, which would stretch her budget at that; and some sparkling water. New York had the best water, she heard people say, and had learned to repeat it. Harry wouldn’t mind drinking from the tap: he was originally from Brooklyn, and when he wanted to amuse the students in his James Joyce class in Albany, he spoke like he had marbles in his mouth, shaking his jowls, “Ahm from Brookluhn.” When he did that, Winnie, who sat on the left side of the first row, imagined him as a little boy in tweed knickers, knocking a ball out of a scrappy baseball field with a wad of age-inappropriate tobacco in his cheek. On the other hand, she wasn’t sure if Helen would drink tap water.

It was Harry who had been her professor. Semester after semester she took every class of his that was on offer: The History of the English Language, its centuries of root words tugging at her; James Joyce, if only for the dirty Molly Bloom bits; Romantic Poetry, and how romantic it was when he read to them, Keats, of course; Shelley, of course.

Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,

which makes thee terrible and dear–.

Their visits began in his office. Winnie would drop in, enraptured by a line from a book or poem, and flop down on the spare chair in his office hoping to get him talking. He would slip back and forth between his Brooklyn rogue and his Irish brogue. He smiled first and twinkled second and welcomed her back anytime third. One time she went to visit him, and another student sat in that same chair to talk about an actual paper. She listened outside the door, searching for the same fondness in his voice, and was comforted that it was nowhere to be found. He was wearing her favorite sweater of his, a sea green stitched wool with a moth hole in the elbow. If she could, she would have borrowed it to wear down the second elbow. On his desk were pads written on with a slanted Palmer-trained handwriting in stubby pencil, not pen.

Their visits continued at the Monday night open mic poetry readings at the QE2 bar on Central Avenue where he turned up to read poetry about his Irish heritage and Catholic upbringing.

I attended children’s mass,

lulled by Latin, carefully Young Father Smith revealed the host,

omnipotent and bright,

larger than a quarter.

 “But not a drop of the blood to pass my lips,” he said later, winking at her. She was sure he’d seen her outside earlier smoking, and she’d felt mortified, and stomped out the filter, aware of her stench. The feeling was a knotted mess: getting away with something, but craving approval. Maybe it was the poetry, maybe it was the moth hole, maybe it was the stubby pencils. Maybe she wanted to get too close.

And finally, they met across his own threshold in a historical building on State Street, in his formal parlor, a baby Steinway with no sign of play and lots of upholstery and creaky wooden floors and mouldings and furniture. During her first visit, Helen buzzed about the background of their pre-war galley kitchen, making tea. Until she didn’t hang back. She was small, but her presence formidable. She drove a long white Chevy Impala, and at 4’11” her hands reached up to the steering wheel like a young child’s. It was impossible to see her little head behind the wheel unless she was wearing her formidable black fur hat.

It didn’t take long for Winnie to understand herself to be witness to the strange dynamics of a marriage. Before her visits to State Street, marriage hovered in her mind like an abstract dollhouse that she’d never fit into, only with car payments and a shared bank account. Most often, marriage looked like divorce.

With a cup of tea balanced on a saucer that was balanced on her knee, Winnie noticed that for every word that Harry uttered, Helen uttered twelve. At first, she finished his sentences. Soon, she covered them over before they could get a running start. He sat like a scolded child with his hands folded in his lap, sulking in a deep chair. This gathering morphed into a strange triangulation, a daydream where Harry struggled to push open a heavy mahogany door, only to have it slammed shut by Helen. Winnie wanted to push it back open and leave it that way. She wanted a skeleton key, so she could push Helen into a dark hallway and lock the door and listen to him finish his own sentences for eternity.

*

It had been a couple of years since Winnie packed up a U-Haul after graduation and moved to New York City. “Don’t put an ad in the Village Voice!” she’d said to a former classmate who was leaving her cheap apartment to move in with her boyfriend. It was now a couple of years since she’d sat in the Staley’s parlor, and they were coming to stay with her.

It was dark by the time her doorbell buzzed. Winnie pressed the intercom and tried to keep her voice steady. “I’m gonna buzz you! Come on in! I’m on the 3^rd floor.” Helen appeared first, emerging around the curve of the stairwell, the same black fur hat covering her fiery red hair that always covered her fiery red hair. Her black wool cape dragged on the floor as she climbed the stairs. Her winter boots were from another time altogether, also fur, with embroidery woven across the seams, not unlike the arts and crafts displayed at the annual Ukrainian street fair in Winnie’s neighborhood.

She hugged them both and showed them to her room, apologizing about everything in no specific order (the size of her apartment; the box of cat litter in the corner; the narrow spiral staircase with hard metal edges that lead up to the bedroom—oh, be careful!—; and the firmness of her mattress). For herself, she made a nest on the couch with her black cat, Charlie.

*

When Winnie came home from work the next evening, Harry and Helen were out visiting friends. Helen made their friends sound so glamorous. A homosexual, in the theater. An artist who we met in Japan. Her bathroom was now a skyline of personal toiletries, including a canister of orange-flavored Metamucil. There was no turning back, she understood. The cracks that surfaced with intimacy would only spread from there.

At 10:45, the buzzer buzzed, and they climbed the stairs, Helen chattering to Harry nonstop. “But they didn’t stay for long, did they? That was a bore. At least the borscht was homemade.”

*

The second time the Staleys came to visit, it was to attend an art opening on 25^th Street, not for their friend the Japanese artist, Helen was careful to clarify, but for another wonderful friend, from Amsterdam. Would Winnie be able to break free from work to meet them for lunch at the gallery? “Yes, of course,” she said, wishing she could see Harry alone.

On the appointed day, Winnie waited awkwardly for them to turn up. From a large picture window, she watched heavy, wet snow fall. A yellow taxi pulled up and she watched as Helen exited onto the slushy curb. Her black fur hat fell into the snow, and she bent like an accordion to pick it up. What was left of her hair was freshly dyed red, long and wild, and blew into her face. Harry emerged next, wearing sneakers with no socks. A thin, white anorak was the only thing protecting him from the sharp Hudson River wind. When they came inside, it seemed a wonderful shock at seeing her there, even though they’d made plans three days earlier. Winnie quickly surmised that they’d forgotten her. Lunch wasn’t going to happen. Oh dear, it’s snowing, and best if we don’t spend the night. Best if we turn around and catch an earlier train back upstate.

When she left to return to work, hot tears spilled.

On the floor of the small elevator in her office building, a brass stamp was engraved into the floor that read “Staley.” It might have been the elevator maker; it might have been an elevator distributor, if there was such a thing. Every time Winnie rode up or down, she meditated on the “S” which swooped with a lovely serif at each end. Sometimes it looked tarnished, barely noticeable under the scrum of shuffling feet. Other times, a fresh new shine drew her eyes towards it. Always, out of an odd respect for the randomness of its placement, she did her best to sidestep it altogether. If she were alone, she might articulate an S sound, connecting it to another word. Serendipity. Snake. Sunshine. Sadness.

*

The years ticked on and they fell out of touch. Occasionally, she spotted a book of poetry on her bookshelves by Harry called Lives of a Shell-shocked Chaplain. Winnie had perched it next to a book Helen had self-published, about a cat. She wondered if they were still alive, living in their grand, but down-at-the-heels apartment on State Street in Albany. The last time she’d been there, Helen was doing a furious “lightening up.” She came out of her kitchen holding a set of opaque, rose-colored aperetif glasses, and a sake set. “I carried these on my lap from Japan when we came home from our honeymoon. We would love for you to have them.” Harry sat upright in his faded green armchair, smiled, and nodded with approval. Winnie’s heart cracked open. They were like grandparents, but that wasn’t right. He was like an old love, but that wasn’t right, either.

The last time she’d sat in his office, he’d tucked his chin in his palm, looked at her wistfully, and said, “Oh Winnie, if only I were younger.” Until that afternoon, Winnie had never asked Professor Staley for an extension on a paper. She knocked on his door and he gently pulled it open, surprised to see her on the other side. “Sit, sit!” In the warm glow of amber lamp light, his grin was crooked, his eyebrows two white caterpillars. He had no problem with her turning in her paper a day late, but asking him made her cheeks burn. She accepted that afternoon’s visit as a complex but beautiful inevitability, and it stayed with her for many years, like an extra button in a teacup.

*

Of all the places they ended up, the Catholic nursing home on New Scotland Avenue was not what Winnie imagined. A nurse explained that he and Helen had separate rooms. She asked for directions to Harry’s room. At the end of a long corridor, she found his empty bed made up with a mustard-colored shaggy comforter. On the bedside table, a hospital-issue plastic water pitcher, and a framed picture of he and Helen as young war lovers, she in crimson lipstick with that same unmistakable intensity in her gaze, and he jovial and goofy in his uniform. Winnie followed the musty smell of overly cooked vegetables to the cafeteria and found them sitting at the end of a group table. Both were in wheelchairs. Winnie leaned down to their height. Harry smiled, his remaining teeth protruding. Helen scoured, sending her painted left eyebrow into a sharp 90-degree angle. “I didn’t think we’d see you again,” she said.

Harry offered her his tapioca cup and patted her shoulder. “I know you, I know you!” She could have been his student; she could have been his daughter. Had Helen not been there, she wasn’t sure which identity she would have claimed. Artist from Amsterdam. Borscht maker. Daughter.

When she went back to work, she entered the elevator and looked downward at the brass stamp below her feet. Staley, with its two serifs.

Belief:  A Primer

At her First 
Communion
she whirled 
her head
around 

and mouthed
the words
Does anyone 
believe this

as crumbs
of blood
tickled
the ends
of her lips

The Gallery: Disappearing Acts

I’m not sure how it began, but soon my tongue started falling out of my face.
At first it tingled, I pulled it lightly, then it kept unraveling until there it was, 
looped in a single pile on the ground, what looked like miles of tongue tape.
Red rope or fire hose or skin. A sculpture of tastebuds. And I wasn’t bleeding. 
Just stood there, mouth emptied, tongueless.

What did it feel like?

I don’t remember any feeling, stood numb dumb mute, mouth open and empty. 
Watching. And then the other bodies faces gathered to watch. It was a real show. 
The Tongue Gallery. That’s what they called it.

What happened then?

After the show, after the clinking of glasses and the murmur of watching, a man 
stepped forward. He stood next to me, before the pile, and pulled a Swiss Army 
knife from his front pocket with the flourish of a magician beginning his act. All 
became quiet.

Everything blacked out, everything but the man, the pile, the knife – visibly dull 
from too much whittling of wood or gutting of trout or carving off skins. Slowly 
he circled and began to unravel the pile until it lay flat across the room, one 
continuous track of tongue.

He sliced cross-sections, slicing quickly down the line.

A woman in a white suit assisted the man with the knife, delicately holding a tray, expertly collecting each slice. Slices lay atop the tray, layered in pinwheels the deep pink of medium rare, not bloody but far from the taste of live tongues flapping; pink slices fanned across the tray with catered delight. She offered them up as a delicacy and a souvenir, a reminder of the show that had been so sweet.

And then?

Each guest took a cocktail napkin and a slice, sniffing their morsel, then risking a small bite. Chewier than I expected, but such flavor shared a woman in ruffles and gold hoops. Best to take the whole slice in your mouth at once advised another woman in silver taffeta and knee-high boots. When the tray arrived before my eyes, I paused. Not wanting to be rude, but knowing I must refuse my slice, I held right hand over stomach and shook my head side to side. Must’ve eaten something strange for lunch whispered taffeta into white suit’s ear. And the tray moved on through the crowd, offering up its pinwheels of tongue, fanned delicately into infinity.

And then?

Grasp onto limbs
hold onto the present-tense of bodies 
slough off past and future pains 
breathe in this room of shared skins

tonight we fall asleep in calm tides of this lullaby.
But sooner rather than later, we will awaken to a loud 
cloud of smoke and tears, a towering pile
of the nothing left behind.

Seeing Them for the First Time 
(For Cherie)

i. 1989

I took the day off
from earth science
and algebra and clay
to drive over the
George Washington Bridge
and cry with people I didn’t know and some I did.
We looked inside the casket thick red carpets muting
a roomful of swallows and gulps the corners alive with whispers.

Cousins twenty years older 
are myths, a stolen whiff of 
what you might someday be. 
They kiss and drive
and die before you, usually.

He was young: electric eyes
long lashes, a smile.
My brother and I held
each other saying nothing
and later drove home across the river 
in a quiet I can still hear 
remembering Eddie.

ii. 1963

You know the sound 
someone makes
when they feel pain? 
That’s what it sounded like 
at my Cousin Joanne’s 
open casket funeral
as they lowered her into 
wet Wisconsin ground.

Everyone said we could be twins. 
That afternoon I climbed 
upstairs to her room
and while I was running my
hand over her hairbrush
her sister walked past
and screamed But you’re dead! 
That day I was her ghost.

Their house was on a farm
at the top of a valley, their well 
downhill from the pigpen.
To make a long story short:
as it flowed down, they drank
the shit and she got cancer from it. 
Dirty water gets you every time.

iii. Outside Time: A Dream

There were toilets on every floor. 
Each overflowing, though not 
how you’d expect.

Each overflowing with 
hard-boiled eggs.

We worried but how to make it 
stop? and when the worrying 
became exhausting we stopped 
and ate and dreamt and ate. 

The Swallower’s Art

The Sword Swallowers Association International – codename SSAI –
is a non-profit organization home to a hundred or more amateur and pro 
swallowers world round.

Swallowers must learn the art of taming their gag reflex, a spasm of muscles 
where throat meets esophagus: the esophageal sphincter, if you must know. 
When you think about all the pills and spills we’re expected to swallow,
our gag reflex is a throwback to another time and place and Life on Earth. 
What began thousands of years ago as an act of divinity morphed into a bawdy 
entertainment, then condemned as dark art in dark times of Inquisiting minds, 
resurrected with circus sideshows carnival tents World’s Fair Coney Island 
spectaculars by the shore.

Swallowers train for years: the triumph of body over nature, will over reflex. 
They begin with small household objects, spoons and knitting needles, before 
moving onto wire hangers and knives. Then the solid steel swords begin,
at least half-an-inch wide, fifteen inches long to pass snuff with the SSAI. 
An oft-cited affliction of even the most skilled swallowers – other than death by 
impaled aorta or burst stomach – is affectionately called “sword throat.”

All fun and games until your left lung explodes from a 16-inch steel rod.

Most celebrated swallowers are middle-aged men once-upon-a-time boys 
catapulted into lifetimes on a late-night dare. Never as simple as: one day
I stuck the blade in. For the burgeoning performer, there’s a first audience, 
the clinch moment – to walk or stay, intoxicated by this little death so near.

It all begins with that first swallow, the plunge.

Faruk Šehić was born in Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 1970, just in time to experience the war (1992-95) as an officer in the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, leading a frontline combat unit. A poet forced to be a warrior, he strives in his work to recover the value of life and literature destroyed by violence. His sentences are sharp because he wants to stab us with them so we too can feel the pain. They are relentlessly beautiful because the world does not need us to exist. His first novel, Quiet Flows the Una, won the Meša Selimović prize for the best novel published in the former Yugoslavia in 2011, and the EU Prize for Literature in 2013. His novels, stories, and poetry have been translated in many languages, published in dozens of countries. He is a devout fisherman.
 

—Aleksander Hemon, author of My Parents: An Introduction/This Does Not Belong to You (FSG) and professor of creative writing at Princeton University 

Nađa is a kid. Greta is an elderly woman. Nađa goes to secondary school, she’s not quite a kid but that’s how I refer to her. From time to time, her friends visit our refugee home. One of them has a fair complexion, blue eyes. I sometimes think she eyes me furtively, but I pretend not to notice because I am a soldier, a grown man, although I am only about twenty. Then again, it’s not proper for kids to fall in love with young adults. I’ve no time for love; I’ve devoted myself to other things. Amongst them war, but I’ve mentioned that more times than one. Comradeship with other soldiers, friends, acquaintances, rakia and weed, but I’ve mentioned that, too. One might say it’s a case of fraternal love between young men, but that’s quite beside the point now.

I soon forget about Nađa’s friend, for one must press on, one must be mature as long as there’s a war on; I’ve no time for by-the-ways like love. Love, at the moment, is a bit stand-offish towards abstractions such as homeland or nation. There is, however, such thing as true love for things quite concrete and tangible, like home, street or town. Here I mean the lost home, the lost street, the lost town. The town has lost us and we are alone in the universe. It’s not the town’s fault, and it isn’t ours, either.

I don’t know what Nađa is thinking about and I don’t take her seriously. Nađa spends time with Greta. The two of them live in a world of their own. Greta raised Nađa, she is like a second mother to her. Greta is an elderly woman, very wise and knowledgeable. Nađa and Greta play patience and listen to Radio Rijeka on a set connected to a car battery. Greta is a passionate smoker, she loves crosswords but there aren’t any in wartime. Inside the radiobox Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman sing “Time to Say Goodbye.”

It’s as though Greta and Nađa were two dispossessed noblewomen. Greta, of course, is a countess, Nađa her right hand. They have now been expelled from their county. Nobody knows them; the faces in the street are strange. None treat them with due respect. In turn, the two of them don’t much care what people in their new town think about them. Greta and Nađa listen to the news, remembering the number of shells that have fallen on such and such town on a given day. They remember the number of dead and wounded, because we all do. It’s an informal sport of sorts, it may become an Olympic discipline someday, and it consists of a radio speaker informing us in a distraught voice that such and such number of howitzer, mortar and cannon shells were fired on town XY during an enemy attack on the very heart of the town. Greta and Nađa are able to tell howitzer and cannon shells from one another, because the former fly a lot longer than the latter and you have time to find cover. They learnt this from our father. At times, radio reports made mention of surface-to-air missiles, which are used – ironically enough – not to shoot down aeroplanes but to destroy our cities and towns. For nothing is the way it may at first seem in war.  The missiles have poetic names: Dvina, Neva, Volna. The surface-to-surface missile Luna has the prettiest name. One missile landed near our house, the blast lifted a few tiles off the roof. Dry snow seeped through the hole in the roof onto the concrete steps carpeted with varicoloured rag-rug. The cold falls into our home vertically.

Greta & Nađa remember all that. Nađa goes to school. Greta stays at home with our mother. Father and I are on the frontline all the time. The radio-sport of remembering the body count and the destruction of towns and cities spreads to every house without exception, be it inhabited by locals, or by refugees. It goes without saying that we, being refugees, couldn’t have possibly brought our own houses along on our backs like snails can and do, so the houses we’ve moved into have become the way we are – homeless, with few possessions and many human desires.

Suada, our mother, is the barycentre around which all things and living beings in our home orbit. Apart from Greta & Nađa, there is also a little tomcat, as well as a dog that has survived distemper and twitches a bit as he walks. His name is Humpy Horsey, after a character from a Russian fairy tale. Father and I are optional subjects in our refugee family portraits, as we are seldom home.

Suada looks after our civilian lives. Every year she takes a horse cart to a remote village where she plants spuds. The yields range from 500 kg to 700 kg. This guarantees that we won’t starve, in case we also don’t die in some other way, and the ways to die are many, and they form part of life. 

Once I was detailed to spade up a patch of the green behind our house. I was at it until Mother saw me toiling and moiling, my face flushed, pushing the blade into the hard soil with the sole of my boot. She snatched the spade from my hands and did the job herself. I was dismissed, and I could go out, where my mates were, were the alcohol was.

Suada procured not only victuals but also articles of clothing to meet our modest needs. Thus I was issued a terry robe with an aitch emblazoned on the chest, and I called it Helmut. A kind-hearted Helmut donated his robe and helped me feel a bit like a human being. It’s not advisable to feel like too much of a human being though, lest your being assume an air of haughtiness, and you become toffee-nosed, as they say in the vernacular. A being could get all kinds of ideas into its head. It might lust after this or that, and there is neither this nor that to be got in the new town. Unless you have a lot of money. Still, even with money, many pleasures remain out of reach, and all they do is feed our fancy and lend us faith in a future better than counting shells and remembering body counts.

That is the main sport in our County. It’s just about to go Olympic.

Nađa grows and goes to school. Greta is always the same. Patience, news and Radio Rijeka playlists shape their time. They have a room of their own – they may have been expelled from their lands, but they’ve retained some trappings of nobility. Greta sends Nađa out to survey the prices of foodstuffs on the black market, things such as oranges, juice, chocolate. Nađa returns and briefs Greta, who decides what will be purchased. Sometimes Nađa fetches ingredients and Greta bakes a cake. This happens when Greta receives money from her relatives in Slovenia. The two of them have a special nook in the wardrobe where they stash their goodies. Inside the radio, the blind Andrea Bocelli and  Sarah Brightman sing “Time to Say Goodbye.”

Suada looks after the house and all the living beings in and around it. The little tom is becoming less and less little. At some point I can no longer remember what happens to him, he vanishes into a mysterious feline land, far from the radio reports, far from the laundry soap with which we wash our hair, far from the bath tub mounted on four bricks, far from the cold tiles of the toilet in which I often see my face, distorted with weed and alcohol because it cannot be otherwise. It is the same bathtub in which Mum washed the shot-through blood-encrusted camo vest I strutted about in during nocturnal piss-ups, flaunting my spoils. I’d stripped a dead Autonomist, as if I was about to wash him and wrap him in a white shroud for funeral. But he remained lying on the melting crust of snow on a slope overgrown with stunted conifer. Almost naked, in his pants and boots with socks showing. He lay there for a few days before somebody thought we should bury him, then dig him up again to swap him for victuals.  For we were made by nature, and to nature we shall return, naked like the day we were born.

Nađa goes to school, and school, like war, drags on forever. Greta plays patience, feeds Humpy Horsie, feeds the tom who pops down from the mysterious feline land every now and then because he misses us (at least I like to think so), and the birds, for Greta loves all living beings.

Suada picks pigweed in the dales and meadows. She is a pigweed gatherer, in pigweed dwelleth iron, and iron we need to keep the blood red. Greta and Nađa may well be blue-blooded, what with that room of their own, whilst Mum, Dad and I sleep in the sitting room. The tom slept there, too, before he broke away to live a life of roaming and roving. When he was little he would stalk me, and when I blinked in my sleep he’d give me a brush with his paw. Humpy Horsie is growing up and twitches less and less. Prognoses are good for Humpy, even the end of war may be in sight, but we cannot afford to have such high hopes, we are not accustomed to such luxury. Therefore we cannot allow ourselves to entertain fancies and reveries about a better world that is to come. We are wholly accustomed to this one, like a lunatic is used to his straitjacket. Although all fighters are wont to declare that they would get killed on the frontline eventually, deep inside I believe I will survive, but I don’t say it because I don’t want to jinx myself.

Smirna is a pal of mine. She works as a waitress, rumour has it she moonlights as prostitute, which is of no consequence to me as I’m not interested in rumours, even if they’re true. I’m interested in human beings as such, and Smirna is one, and so am I. Majority opinions don’t interest me, I don’t cave under peer pressure, I rely on what my heart tells me. The only difference between the two of us is that she isn’t a refugee. Smirna likes to read, I’ve lent her a copy of Mishima’s novel The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. She’ll likely never return it, there’s a war on, who would remember to return a borrowed book in times like these? I remember the closing sentence: Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.

Zuhra, known as Zu, is a friend of mine. We’ve known each other since before the war. When you say since before the war, it’s as though you remembered that you once used to live in a lost kingdom, the same one in which Greta & Nađa had been noblewomen. In the days of the Kingdom of Before-the-War, Zuhra worked at a video rental, I rented tapes at her shop. We listened to the same music, we patronised the same regal café. She once sent me a beer with a dedication note to the frontline. Zuhra is young and combative, she doesn’t lack optimism. We listen to grunge music, we drink beer and rakia. It makes us happy. Although we are young, we know full well that there’s something missing. Someone has taken something from us and refuses to give it back. We don’t know what that something is called, or what it looks like, but we do know it’s something very important for our young lives. Older adults feel the same way, they, too, have had something taken away from them, they, too, don’t know what it’s called or what it looks like. When someone takes something like that away from you, it’s too late for common sense. The only thing you know is that there’s a hole that’s getting larger and larger and there’s nothing you can fill it with.

Zuhra is strong enough not to think about these things. That’s what we’re both like, that’s why we’re friends. We’ve known each other since the days of the Kingdom of Before-the-War. We like to spend time together because it makes us feel that the hole in and around us is shrinking, if only by a smidgen.

Azra, too, is strong and upright. She is tall and beautiful in a special way. I was on a perilous line once, beech and hornbeam trees outside were crackling with cold, Azra phoned me via the brigade phone exchange. One flick of the switch on the switchboard, and we were transported to a realm of magic where nothing was impossible. She was at home, her civilian receiver in hand. I was in a dugout, holding the olive-green receiver of a military field phone. I keep it away from my ear; the phone is prone to tiny electrical surges that zap the ear-lobe. During my stint at that line on Padež Hill I wore Azra’s turquoise scarf. It held the smell of her skin and the swoosh of unknown seas, a memory of all the kingdoms we lost, and all the ones we might someday regain.

I envy her for the fact that her family home is intact. All things inside are in the same place all the time: the photographs on the wall, the telly, the sofa, the armchairs, the tables, the doors, the shelves above the basin in the bathroom. Immobility is a virtue. When you get uprooted from your pot and forcefully transplanted into another one, all you want to do is strike root and stay put. Books gather dust as if the war never happened. Azra’s house keeps the memory of a bygone peace. It is peace.  When I come over and talk to her parents I feel like a phantom. As if I’m making things up when I say that we, too, had a house and a flat before the war, a family history of our own, that is now undocumented, since we no longer have any photos.

Azra works at a café, I’m constantly on the frontline. Sometimes, on leave, I drink at her work and I don’t pay. With her wages she’s bought a pair of Adibax trainers, and we admire them, although the brand name betrays a counterfeit.  Matters not, the trainers are new, fashionably designed, worthy of admiration. Sometimes she buys a Milka chocolate and a can of proper coke for each of us, and we give our mates a slip. We hide behind the wooden huts where smuggled consumer goods are sold, and we greedily eat the chocolate and drink the coke. That is also how we make love, furtively, in places secret and dark. Azra keeps me alive by loving me. I have a higher purpose now, something loftier than bare life and the struggle for survival.

Dina is a strong, brave young woman. She has a child with the same name as me. I used to see her around in the Kindom of Before-the-War. I was younger than her and we were never formally introduced, the great generational gaps that existed in that realm were difficult to close. Black-and-white was the kingdom, it was the eighties, films with happy endings, New Wave.

Dina works in catering, like Azra and Smirna, due to the circumstances. We’re sitting in the garden of her refugee house. We’re drinking instant powder juice from jars: glasses are superfluous in war. All glasses are broken, all hands bloody. As Azra and I kiss feverishly, our bodies intertwined like in the sculpture Laocoön and His Sons, Dina’s son darts towards the road wanting to hug a car, but Dina catches him in the nick of time and my little namesake is safe. Azra and I were charged with keeping an eye on him, but our kisses took us far from reality. We drink Step Light instant juice from pickles jars, because we’ve been expelled from our empires, and now we can be barbarians if we jolly well please. We’re entitled to all kinds of behaviour, and getting a-rude and a-reckless is just our style. We all fight in our own way. Women’s war is invisible and silent, but it is of vast importance, though we men on the frontline selfishly think we matter the most. There are women medics and women fighters on the frontlines. I can never forget a young female fighter I once saw, and her firm, confident gait. From one of her shins, through a tear in her uniform trousers, jutted out the nickel-plated bars of a fixation device.

Greta & Nađa play patience. Suada manages the planets of our household solar system. Azra, Dina and Smirna work at their cafés. Zuhra waits for her brother to return from the front. She also waits for us, her friends, to return so we can hang about. Somehow, all things grow and eventually collapse, like a great big wave when it finally reaches the shore. Someone in us plays patience, goes to school, does chores, washes up in a smoky boozer, goes to the front, digs spuds, someone in us laughs at us and our lives. We have an ancient life force inside, and it refuses to leave us. The blind Andrea Bocelli and Sara Brightman sing “Time to Say Goodybe.”

Translated from the Bosnian by Mirza Purić.
This story originally appeared in Under Pressure (Istros Books). Reprinted with permission from the publisher.