The only time Pinto had seen a naked woman was when Binjoki had taken a herd of Bilave boys to Isabegov hamam, where Sefaradi women took their tevila; the boys climbed on the roof to find a crack through which they could only see a woman’s shoulder and the tip of her breast; Binjoki claimed it was Hanuča’s, but who could ever be able to say. None of the boys, other than Binjoki, had ever seen anything like that. Pinto was terrified that Padri Avram would find out and flay him alive. He never found out, but he did flay him anyway for some other transgression Pinto had committed.

  Hasan shook his hands to suggest the bosom’s ample weight. The hopelessly aroused Bosnians fidgeted in the prison’s murk, weighed down by a possibility that what might never have happened indeed might never happen again. Imagining the hanuma, a few of them would be stroking themselves tonight, or each other, if they were lucky.

  Osman would’ve relished telling the part about Alija’s sneaking glances, but he wouldn’t waste his words, let alone his hands, to describe the hanuma’s concealed body. Her face, maybe, its luminance when exposed to the daylight in the garden, or the hue of her blushing cheeks when she caught Alija looking at her. Osman used to glance at Pinto too, back in the barracks when they were fresh soldats, their faces still unvarnished by sun and dust and degradation. Pinto had always understood what the quickness of Osman’s gaze meant, and would blush, just like the hanuma had in Osman’s story; his cheeks and ears would flame up and he knew that the fire he was on could be seen, and he would burn even more, and kept away from Osman, the luminous hanino. Until Osman had lain down next to him that night in the barracks, and there was no longer a way to escape, and everything was as it was supposed to be. If a man is liked by his fellow man, he is liked by God.

  Well, Hasan went on, Alija trekked one morning all the way up to Vučja luka to forage for wood. He never cut trees or chopped young branches, because Allah had not made the world to be meddled with and everything in it to be spoiled. Every living thing wanted to keep on living so it could fulfill the purpose it was meant to have—everything in the world existed for a reason, even if we couldn’t always know what the reason might be. Thus was Alija collecting sticks when he heard a child cry. He followed the wail and discovered a tiny newborn baby, squirming in the hot sun. What could such a small creature be doing alone in the forest, exposed to the merciless sun? Alija felt so sorry for the child that he cut a leafy branch and placed it above the child’s head to give it shade. The child calmed down, turned quiet. He went back to collecting wood, but every once in a while he’d check on the child, now sleeping peacefully. Suddenly, a woman all in white appeared beside the child; her swarthy face couldn’t have been any more radiant, her long black hair flowed all the way down her back—Alija instantly realized she was a vila. She asked, Was it you who made the shade for my daughter? And Alija said, Yes, so that the sun will not burn her and she can sleep in peace. The vila said, Ask for whatever you wish, and I will grant it to you. Alija thought about it, and said, What I would like is to be strong and brave. Very well, the vila said, come and suck on my nipple. She unbuttoned her vest and lifted her shirt—Hasan lifted his filthy, tattered shirt to offer his flaccid tit—and showed him her full breasts and nipples. Alija did what he was told, drank her warm milk. Then the vila said, Do you see that big rock over there? This was a large rock, which twenty healthy young men could not have moved a hair’s breadth. She said, Now go and lift it. Alija lifted the rock just a little from the ground. The vila said, Come here and suck a little more, and he suckled at her other breast. Then he picked up the rock and threw it like a pebble.

  Hasan extended his arm, and pointed at the window, over the rows of supine soldats, as if to conjure up the rock’s trajectory. Osman used to make that very same motion whenever he had told the story of Alija and the vila. Yet Hasan’s move was not graceful at all; he was but a second-rate apprentice, still struggling to learn how to tell the story the way it was supposed to be told. All the same, the Bosnians followed the trajectory in unison; thus they bore witness yet again to the vila gifting Alija Đerzelez incredible strength, to his becoming the great hero they had always known. They could also see the other soldats, who didn’t speak Bosnian, or were too sick and dying to be interested in stories or memories. And they could also see the soiled, disintegrating boots of a Russian guard outside the window as he leaned against the porch pillar to doze standing up. They could see that there was no way out of this damned hole. They could see the nothing, the vastness of la gran eskuridad.

  Alija thanked the vila, who kissed him on the forehead, and then he headed home carrying on his shoulders a pile of sticks as tall as a minaret. The children watched him with new awe as he passed them on his way home, not one daring to assault him. He unloaded the sticks before the hanuma and said, As long as I live, you’ll never be cold again.

  Osman always looked toward Pinto when Alija made his promise, and Pinto would bite the inside of his lip until it bled so as not to grin at him. Back in Galicia, Osman had whispered those same words into Pinto’s ear, his arm across his chest, as they lay under a tattered, lousey blanket not long enough to cover their feet. The side Osman was not pressing himself against was cold, while the Osman side was warm and alive, Pinto’s every hair and patch of skin rising to meet him. He sang into Pinto’s ear, his voice breathy and moist: Bejturan se uz ružu savija, vilu ljubi Đerzelez Alija. Vilu ljubi svu noć na konaku, po mjesecu i mutnu oblaku. The way he pronounced the soft end of noć. You would never want the noć to end.

  People say that Alija kept the hanuma warm for a long time, Hasan said, and was done. He gave them nothing to take away, to ponder or remember—the story just made them despondent, so they sat there slouching, under the weight of their daily despair.

  Whereas Osman would’ve delivered that story as if he’d been the one who’d told it first, as if he had been Alija himself. Osman danced it: he swung to face the nonexistent nook whence the child’s cry came; he leaned forward coming upon the discovery; he reshuffled objects and events with his birdlike hands; he shaped the ravine and the child in it, his slender fingers straightening to mark the length of the baby; he chopped an invisible branch with the blade of his palm; he placed the branch above her head; he bent down as he sucked at the vila’s nipple; he dropped the bundle of sticks at the hanuma’s feet; he caressed her body and it exuded warmth, all of her silk unfolded, her legs intertwined with Alija’s under the rose-scented jorgan. And the bey, oblivious to it all, wasted his rich life on becoming more pious, fat, and important, and Osman outlined his belly, and his vain, empty heart, and the soldats would laugh, rejoicing that Alija enjoyed so well the world they could no longer live in, but still strived to imagine. Osman would sing the song about Alija and the vila to Pinto, breathing into his ear. Wormwood creeps along the rose, Đerzelez Alija makes love to a vila. To a vila, all night long in bed, in the moonlight and the murky cloud. Sarajevo was but a dream, the hanuma went on living her warm, eternal life, never running out of kindling, or Alija’s desire. But where is my Osman now? Where did he go?

  The body is strong, but the world always ends up crushing it. Being imprisoned did its damage, but Pinto’s body ached with missing Osman: his joints were inflamed, his feet swollen, his flanks felt scalded, and in his stomach pit a rock the size of the one Alija had flung kept grinding whatever was left of his vacant intestines. Glory be to Him who created all the pairs of things that the earth produces, as well as themselves and other things they do not know about. Where did he go without me? Am I still his vila?

  Once Osman had gone, the other Bosnians never mentioned him, never talked to Pinto about him, or about anything else for that matter. Osman’s space among them closed up after he was no longer there. It was Hasan who now told Osman’s stories; it was Zaim who took his wooden spoon. Pinto was Osman’s widow, someone who must suffer alone, someone destined to spend in sickness and isolation what little life he had left. Now he was a Ćifut again, the only one among them, and when it was his turn to be gone they would remember him for nothing else.

  Yet even without Osman no one challenged Pinto’s claim to a spot on the dirt floor whence, if he lay prone on his straw mat, he could see a patch of the sky. He would stare at the sky all day, and often at night. Los sjelos kero pur papel, la mar kero pur tinta. He’d occasionally catch a piece of the moon; one night he woke up to see a tip of the crescent slide across the corner of the window until it slipped out. There was sometimes a gaggle of stars, a fragment of a constellation. I want the sky as my paper, and the sea as my ink. Another time he saw a muster of storks flitting, like a sudden memory, across the framed sky patch. There were swallows too, and once there was a lightning bolt that was never followed by a boom of thunder. The vila cried from the cloud: No one will ever have as much pleasure, my Alija, as you and I. The sun never overtook the moon; the night never outran the day; the lice kept on burrowing deeper into him. To what there did he go?

  Osman had knelt under the muzzle of a Russian rifle. Pinto could see, even now, the tightening of the Russian’s finger on the trigger, his unshaven face and his eyes dark as coal. It was clear that he was about to kill Osman, who was, incredibly, smiling, as if the whole thing was ending exactly as he had known it would. The other Russians stood around, some drinking from their canteens, some wiping their bloody bayonets. Pinto hurled himself at Osman to grab him from under the Russian’s rifle and cover him with his body; the Russians laughed at Pinto’s cries and tears. It could be that they had simply become tired of killing, or that they had found Pinto’s despair amusing, or, who knows, they may have even been touched by his willingness to die for his friend—whatever it was, they had shot neither him nor Osman. They laughed instead at their pathetic embrace in the blood and mud of the massacre. The Russian who had pressed the rifle against Osman’s pate gun-butted Pinto in the neck, and when Osman put his left hand on it to protect him, broke Osman’s wrist. But they survived, the wormwood and the rose.

  Once upon a time, Pinto had believed, like all the soldats on their way to war, that they would be either dead or returning home once the war was over. It was going to turn out one way or the other for them, life or death, home or not. But no soldat, least of all Pinto, could ever have imagined they would be rotting in a frigid Russian jail in Turkestan. None of them had even heard of Tashkent before reaching the collection camp in Kiev where the Russians processed prisoners of war, stripped them of all possessions, and kept them alive half-heartedly. It was going to be Siberia, they were told as a detachment of vicious, drunken Cossacks whipped them into what the history would remember as teplushki—train cars with coffin-like bunks and a stove that was supposed to keep them from freezing to death. They spent the long weeks crossing the steppe and dreading the endless Siberian winter, its icy tentacles already crawling up their scabrous limbs. For days and days, they could see nothing other than the patches of ashen sky passing over their heads. The train stopped every now and then so that the dead could be dumped out and buckets of fetid water be provided to those unlucky enough to be still alive. Once or twice, there was bread and rotting cabbage to buy, but nobody had any money, so the closer to Tashkent they got—still believing they were on their way to their freezing death in Siberia—the weaker and more apathetic they were.

  Osman spent the entire journey by Pinto’s side, killing the misshapen time with weak-voiced stories for the weary soldats. Somewhere in the endless steppe, days after a morsel of food passed anyone’s lips, he told them about Nasrudin Hodža teaching his ass to live without food, cutting its meals in half each day—and just as the ass finally learned how to live on no food at all, it died. The Bosnians chuckled, in spite of their infirmity, against their despair. The other soldats wanted to know what the funny story was about, but neither Osman nor any other Bosnian had any language or strength to translate it properly, so Pinto retold it in German and it was not funny at all.

  After a while, Osman’s stories dried out; all he would do was sleep, and Pinto knew that he was ill. Soon Osman had red spots all over his face and body and was fading and feverish, losing his mind in no time. How many towns have we destroyed! he would suddenly scream. How many countries! Our punishment came to them by night or while they napped in the afternoon! He would howl and rock like a Hasid while draining himself over a feculent bucket in the teplushka corner: This is not good! Not good! How wrong we were! Don’t let me die wrong! He would sob over someone he called his bride—she was his only joy, he suckled on her tits, she was faithfully waiting for him in Sarajevo, she had an embroidered handkerchief he had gifted her. He would sing raspingly a song wherein he begged the bride to visit his mezar after he was killed, while she asked how she would recognize his grave. Who can ever know what their grave will look like? He would grab Pinto’s face with his unhurt right hand, a delirious sheen in his eyes, and tell the bride how the Russians had put a bullet in the back of his head, how Pinto had defeated the Russians, charged and scattered them like sticks, and then raised Osman from the dead, healed his wounds. Because he was a melek—and he would press Pinto’s hand to where the bullet hole would’ve been, and Pinto would stroke the back of his head until he calmed down. But the calm would be brief; he would soon rave again about the handkerchief, about the hollow in his bride’s neck, about the pearl button protecting her bosom. Holding up a pinch of nothing between his fingers, he demanded that Pinto take a good look at that button, to look at it, to look at how beautiful that pearl button was. Yes, it was beautiful, Pinto would say, he had never seen anything as beautiful as that pearl button. Finally, exhausted by delirium, Osman would lean uneasily on Pinto’s shoulder to burn it with his febrile cheek, and mumble, He created man from a clot of blood. He created man from a clot of blood. When the train stopped again, Pinto would have only a sip of water before pouring the rest down Osman’s throat, as if it could scorch the disease out of him, aware that the Russian might have been giving them infected water all along. Osman’s curls stuck flat to his temples, his mustache like a wet brush. Fear is strong but typhoid fever makes it stronger: The soldats thought Osman would die, and soon after him Pinto too, so they maintained a distance from the bunk where the two slept together, not talking to them at all, willing to forget they had been alive until they thought their end was near and started edging toward their scant possessions: their boots, their buttons, Osman’s single fingerless mitten, covering his injured hand. Pinto kept himself awake and had to kick away a Pole who was interested in Osman’s mitten. How wrong we were! Osman abruptly screamed into the typhoid air, sitting up to smash his forehead against the bunk, while Pinto held him down, and all the other prisoners now wriggled a finger breadth farther away from them.

  By the time they realized they were not heading to Siberia, there was much more space in the teplushka, as many emaciated corpses had been discarded in deep anonymous ditches along the way. Osman’s head was now covered in scratches, bruises, and scars, a detailed map of his febrile nightmares; but his wrist somehow was healing. Pinto kept his hand on Osman’s forehead in a vain hope his touch might cool it, singing what Manuči used to sing to the sick little Rafo: Anderleto, mi Anderleto, mi kerido i namorado. As the train pulled into what would be Tashkent, Osman opened his eyes to look up at his man and attempt a frail smile. Aj, mi kerido i namorado. That which my lips know they shall speak in purity. Ever a beautiful man, a hinozu, Osman was; that smile could break many a heart, take down empires, sink a thousand ships. That lovely face, like a moon, where did he go? The vila cried from Heaven: No one will have as much pleasure, my Osman, as you and I have had.

  Manuči used to drown mice, and the little Rafo would stand over the pail weeping at the sight of a mouse clawing the walls. He’d beg her to let it go; he’d offer to carry the pail out of Bilave and all the way down to Mejtaš and release the mouse there, far away from their house. But she would never let him do it, and the mouse would hopelessly and incessantly struggle to climb the pail walls until it drowned. Long after its corpse turned mealy on the garbage heap, Pinto would still hear the scraping, even while playing klis out on the street, even in the middle of the night, even in the temple on Šabat. He knew it was possible that the mouse would never die, or that it would never escape the bucket, scratching and scraping, just as it was possible that the Lord could undo the world in which such a thing could take place to create a better one, with at least one mouse that could break out of Manuči’s pail and live. Everything that lives wants to keep on living, but all that really means is that everything is always deferring death until the moment of death. A wise man spent his life searching for a way to live without perishing, and just as he found it, he perished.

  Osman and Pinto survived the teplushka only to find themselves dying in Tashkent, a place that had not fully existed in the world until they disembarked the train and saw the ochre mud-wall prison building, and the minarets beyond, and the sky above it all, just before they were shoved into the murk of the jail, where the freezing wind searched for every crack in the wall, where the rats and lice sought shelter from the cold under their straw mats.

  Osman had barely, and miraculously, survived; reduced to a slender bag of bones and organs, he slept for days, waking up only when Pinto made him eat and drink water; his wrist healed, but it was curled inward, like a hook. Pinto would keep him warm through the winter by snuggling against him, alert to his grunts and gasps, to his remaining alive. At night, the wind failed to muffle the sound of the soldats tossing and turning as if on a grill, hacking and moaning, but all Pinto would hear was the steadiness of Osman’s breath, the swelling and deflating of his chest. Sometimes Osman would suddenly shake and shiver and Pinto would embrace him and squeeze him tightly as if wrangling a šejtan, and then would wait, tight as a spring, for whatever form of death was passing through Osman, for Pinto would never let it stay with them. When our love is strong, we can lie on the edge of a sword, or we can lie on a vermin-infested straw mat and avoid dying until the war is over and something else, something better, replaces it.