Pinto nearly killed Hasan when he caught him stripping off the rags that served as Osman’s socks. He stuck a thumb into Hasan’s eye, even as Hasan was pounding him in the head, until others separated them. The rags had been made from Pinto’s shirt; he had torn it into strips to wrap Osman’s feet. Occasionally, Pinto would unwrap them: sores and pustules; nails fallen off, a few of the remaining ones nacreous, ready to come off as well. Pinto would rub and stroke Osman’s toes and soles, patches of his sickly skin peeling off, and he would be overwhelmed with love for that man, hardly present and so weak that he could not keep his eyes open. To the place my heart loves, there these feet lead me, to the place inside him, to his soul.

  By the spring, Pinto had become used to the wind, and would wake up whenever the windrush whistling stopped. Which was why he heard, turning his better ear to the source of the sound, the door slamming open, and a swarm of men bursting in, shouting in Russian, kicking the soldats with their boots and gun butts. Osman remained silent and motionless, as if they could pretend not to be there. They heard the cracking of the bones, the splitting of the flesh, the painful yelps. The raiders grabbed a few soldats, who grasped on to others, on to the door, on to the doorposts, wailing as they were yanked out. The door slammed shut and soon rifle salvos broke through the wind, followed by the pocks of pistol fire. And then the crunching of dirt as the corpses were hauled away, and the thuds of the bodies thrown onto a cart that would carry them to an afterlife in some Turkestan ditch. The Heavens are the heavens for the Lord and it is the earth that He hath given to the children of men to kill as they wish, whenever they wish, however much they wish. Nobody dared move or make any sound; they just listened to death and silence outside, to the somber hum of la gran eskuridad.

  The rumors of a revolution in Russia had reached them, of the Czar chased out of his palace, of cities burning. The soldats had expected that it would sooner or later come to Tashkent, for no misfortune had ever failed to find them before. Nobody quite figured what that revolution would actually look like, what it would turn out to be after it had rolled across the steppe, how it could make its cursed way to this jail. Osman comforted the soldats by telling them the story about Merima and Husref the Nobody. Thank good Allah we are nothings and nobodies, he would tell them, but they were not convinced their worthlessness could save them. And after the raid and the liquidation, they knew revolution would kill them. All the nothings and nobodies now watched the door night after night.

  Pinto positioned his better ear to listen for the sounds that made it through the wind, as if his sheer attention could stop the evil from breaking in. He would eventually hear the revolutionaries’ boots shuffling across the yard just before the door flew open again. They carried a couple of lanterns, and the darkness was suddenly a riot of fluttering, screaming shadows. This time a revolutionary rushed to Osman, ripped off his blanket, and was lifting him by the scruff of his neck like a puppy to be drowned. Pinto punched at the soldier, who kicked him in the stomach without any fury or anger, a matter of simple protocol. Pinto dropped to the ground to groan in pain; the soldier dragged Osman out; the door was locked. Pinto wanted to go after Osman, to whatever horrible thing they were going to subject him to, but he could catch no breath, and his body would not obey, and by the time he reached the door to bang feebly on it, there was no one on the other side, and Osman was gone. The shots never came, but the taken soldats never returned either. Osman was gone.

  For days afterward, few of the soldats could sleep, many praying again, some all the time. Pinto floated in a discombobulated state where everything was real and not, where he might have still been at home in Sarajevo but not, where there was war and death but not, where he was alive but not. Yet in no iteration of his nightmare did he forget that Osman was gone, that his space was empty. One night he looked out from his torment, and saw Kerim, thoroughly toothless from scurvy, trembling from the wind and trepidation, his gaze fixed to the door, reading like a Holy Book its shabby wood with its knot spots and cracks. Pinto got up to sit next to him, which Kerim didn’t even notice, continuing to shake, even if Pinto covered both of them insufficiently with his blanket. For the rest of the night, and for many nights after that, Kerim and Pinto would listen to the boots kicking up the dirt in the yard and then stomping down the stairs even when they were not. If the boots got close to the door, Kerim would wake everyone up as if they’d have time, or place, or desire, to escape, while Pinto squeezed his shoulders in a meaningless gesture of solidarity. He brings the living out of the dead and the dead out of the living, Kerim kept saying, slurring the words like a toddler. The living out of the dead and the dead out of the living. The soldats would at first wobble and rumble in somnolent panic, but when it turned out that the footsteps belonged to no one, they’d sit back down, disoriented and terrified. Kerim would look toward Pinto, as if to confirm that when death came it should take them both, then sobbed tearlessly. Pinto would squeeze his emaciated shoulder to confirm he too was ready to go.

  And here was Pinto now, still alive, and alone. Kerim was gone. Osman was gone. To what there did they go? All the blue was absent too, the sky vacant, the wind even colder. He thought he saw a snowflake, but it could have been ash, or a fleeing soul, or nothing. When the wind goes forth from the Holy One, it endeavors to destroy the world. He scratched his hair and beard, absentmindedly crushing a few lice. But the Holy One slows the wind down with mountains and breaks it up with hills. He commands it, Take care not to harm My creatures, and the wind obeys. Often doesn’t.

  There had been a time when Pinto envisioned returning with Osman to Sarajevo—what their way home from Tashkent could be, he couldn’t begin to know. He had imagined Manuči meeting Osman for the first time. He had seen Osman and himself walking up the streets of Bilave, and how he would impress him with the stories of il hanizitju and its old Jews, with knowing the names of all those feral children, of the exact same kind that threw rocks at Alija Đerzelez, and sending them home to tell all their parents that Rafo Pinto had come back home after the war. That one there with a smeared face is Alfi who never forgets anything, Pinto would tell Osman. The little fool knows the names and birthdays of all the people in the neighborhood, knows the Atora by heart. And here’s the old Papučo whose daughter ran off with an Austrian and ended up in a brothel in Graz after he’d left her, as everyone always knew he would. Do you know about the time Sinjor Papo went to Stolac to place a stone on Rabin Danon’s grave, but never made it there because he got stuck in a kahvana in Mostar, where he spent all his money to have some beautiful Emina sing all night at his ear? And he would explain to Osman who Rabin Danon had been; how he’d known it was his time to die so he’d set out to walk to Palestine and die there, but had never made it past Stolac; and how the Sarajevo Sefaradim liked to say that a Jew is always on his way home, but never makes it there.

  Manuči would like Osman, she would relish his smile, his stories. Kel hanizu! she would say. What a handsome man! She would serve him coffee with rose rahat lokum, and listen to his stories, happy that Rafo had found himself such a good friend, even if he was a Muslim. Manuči would press her hands against her chest as Osman told her how the two of them had lived through the slaughter in Galicia, and then survived the jail in Tashkent, and how it had taken them years to find their way back to Sarajevo. She would cry as he described how the muddy jail floor would frost up when the nights got frigid, and how they had kept each other warm and alive. She would see how much they loved each other, Rafo and Osman, but she would never recognize the presence of toeva, could never imagine the miškav zahar, never believe they were lovers. I want to reveal my secrets, the secrets of my soul. Sekretos kero deskuvrir, sekretos de mi alma. This man is my kismet, Manuči, I love him more than I love myself. And now he’s gone. Where did he go without me?

  He should write to Manuči. He will write to her, as soon as it gets a little warmer and he finds some paper and a pencil. As soon as he is strong enough to sit up. Dear Manuči, I am as well as I hope you to be. My man is gone, before you got to meet him. There is nothing left here, the endless wind and a patch of the sky, piles of corpses swelling like cotton puffs. Meine Mutter hat viele gülden Gewänder.

  In Vienna, before the war, a century ago, Pinto had gone to poetry readings in peripheral cafés and gasthauses, where fetching but unkempt students vociferated against obscure elder poets and the unconscionable damage those charlatans inflicted upon the spirit of the German language. Maybe that Vienna, like Sodom, like his soul, was now obliterated, along with all those ruddy-cheeked poets and their curls and eyelashes, and their desire-laden bodies. Most of them, except maybe the tubercular ones, ended up in the trenches, where all poetry inevitably ended. Where are they now?

  My mother has many golden robes, they are made of God’s garment. She would be spending her lonely days as if her Rafo was still alive somewhere, praying and imagining the unimaginable places in which the Lord might be good and kind to him. All of the world is, or soon it will become, la gran eskuridad. She had no idea how much her son longed to die right now, how ready he was to go to the next place, to finally reach the nowhere. Among the dead I am free. Madre mija, si mi muero, hazanim no kero jo, so non doze mansevikos. It must be that there were no men left in Bilave, except the oldest of the Jews, Sinjor Papučo or Sinjor Samuel, both further bent from keeping their noses stuck inside the Atora, no longer able to walk before anyone’s coffin, eager to face the Lord they had loved so well, to pray for those left festering in their earthly lives. El ki seja dovadži. And what if Manuči was already dead, if she was praying for him at His feet, if she was the one keeping him alive despite his wishes? He had no news about her, or about anyone in Sarajevo. It was too late to write to her even if he could. He was already dead, just waiting for the door to open so he could step straight into the heart of la gran eskuridad. Osman was already there, because he was not here. Weep for the mourners, not for the soul that has already gone home.

  What if Sarajevo perished too, and no one and nothing was left? What if the city had been burnt to the ground by some rabid army or another, not a stone left upon a stone? There is no reason to believe that the world, let alone a city, is a lasting endeavor. Worlds perish, why shouldn’t cities perish too? It could well be that there is nothing outside of what I can see in the present moment, what is now framed within my window; it could be that the Holy One relentlessly erases all that is outside of what I can see, wipes out the traces of my past being, imprisoning me in this endless present. If He keeps creating worlds and destroying them, creating worlds and destroying them, then this one too might be at any moment flattened like a rotten egg. The worlds that preceded this one and were destroyed were like the sparks that scatter and die away when the blacksmith strikes the iron. It could be that this herd of defeated half-dead soldats is all that is left of humanity—no more Jews, no more Austrians, just a few Russian guards, and Dumitru and Milan, and the ghost of the insane Kerim, and me, and no Osman, all of us perishing but still not quite perished. God has no beginning and no end, but to create He has to open up space that is not Himself so He enters deeper into Himself and opens up a void, la gran eskuridad, into which we were spilled, alive, to die.

  And look at us now. He has abandoned us here to feed lice, to be thrashed and killed by the Russians, to be eaten by fever, to long for death that would unite me with the man I love. Manuči would’ve adored Osman. All a world needed to justify its existence is the presence of Osman, his body, smile, and stories. He spread his light among us like a candle. I have seen people’s heads explode like a pomegranate; I have seen soldats draining themselves to death into shit buckets, giggling all along as if being in on the joke; I have seen people pulled by their feet into la gran eskuridad. I have no explanation nor reason for being alive, other than Osman, my kulu alegri. Eternal life means living in an endless present. But Osman is gone.

  The bald Bosnian Alija who doesn’t like to cut trees except to make shade for children. Who was he, really? How did he die? Did he mourn the hanuma to his own death after she had perished? Or did he charge at an army in order to get himself killed and thus end his long suffering, only for his cursed power to stop him from dying? Did he ascend into the moonlight and the murky cloud to be with the vila? If you can imagine death, you should be able to die. If you can imagine a life, that life could be lived, and if it could be lived, it could be unlived too, it could be lost. Why would the Holy One go out of His way to create unless He was intent on destroying what He had created, sooner or later? Why can’t He let me go? The Lord sent me Osman only to take him away. I should go too. Let me go. As the gardener so the garden.

  Pinto was startled when the door flew open. All the soldats cried at once, and pressed themselves against the far wall to shiver like chickens before slaughter, eyes locked on the daylit doorframe. The wind rushed in, and they would’ve been cold had they not already been so terrified. They hid behind one another, pushing the weak ones toward the front of the throng to be taken if someone needed to be taken. They cried, and cursed, called for their mothers, trying to find a position as far away as possible from the opening into which they’d be sucked to die. Pinto did nothing. This was it then, the time had come: when the Russians came in he would submit himself, to being tortured and shot. He sat up to welcome the blessed guard who would hurl his corpse into la gran eskuridad.

  But nobody came in, nothing happened. It took a while for the soldats to dare to sit down, still staying away from the door because they believed that beyond the door was their end. No boots came down the stairs; no guard came in to take anyone away; nor did they deliver the vomit soup, nor the wooden bread. The soldats were restless and scared, turned toward the door like sunflowers. Pinto watched their hesitation, and their fear and their pathetic desire to be free, and alive, and he pitied them. The sky looked different now: there was more of it, but it was also farther, and more indifferent. Los sjelos ker pur murir.

  “Come out,” Osman said, “I want to see you. I want to kiss you.” The voice was mirthful, as if kidding, just as it was that first night in the barracks. “As long as I live,” Osman said, “you will never be cold again.” Pinto looked around to see if Osman was somehow back in the jail—it was his body that turned, in fact, for he knew Osman would not be there, just as he knew that Osman’s talking to him meant that he was alive, elsewhere, outside. He was not distraught by the presence of Osman’s voice and the absence of Osman; all he felt was a rush of weakness as though his body was being emptied of blood, and of death; his knees buckled, his neck thinned so that keeping his head up was suddenly hard. The door gaped at him, the sunlit darkness beyond it throbbing with possibilities. “Come out. There is only one guard here, and he’s packing to leave,” Osman said. He hadn’t heard Osman’s voice inside his head since Galicia, because they had not been apart. And now there it was again, that warm, plush timbre, that breath that tickled his ear and so easily turned into a kiss. The soldats fidgeted, stomped their feet, waiting for something to reveal itself. “It’s very nice outside,” Osman said. “There is food. There are good people. You will never be cold again.”

  Nobody moved, because no one else could hear him and Pinto now saw what Osman must have been seeing and hearing at the same time: minarets and muezzin calls; houses of clay and straw, dust devils spinning in narrow streets; wild poppies covering the flat roofs like a purple carpet, and there were poplars too, and blooming locust and almond trees, and swallows and turtledoves, and barking, skinny dogs, and beyond it all the tall mountains stood against the sky, their peaks snow-covered and sharp, illuminated by the setting sun. “Here I am, Rafo,” Osman said. “Come out. It is a beautiful day outside. I’m waiting for you. I can’t wait to hold you in my arms.”

  Pinto stepped out into the blinding day and kept tottering forth, until he fell on his knees to blink at the ubiquitous light. When you enter a town, follow its customs. Someone helped him stand up, but it wasn’t Osman because this man smelled different—sweat and vinegar and saffron—and they walked together through curtains of heat and coruscation. Troubles dim your eyes, but liberty blinds you. The stranger who was helping him along kept talking cheerfully in some obscure language, as if he were making it up on the spot. Pinto could see nothing but the light, and it had different hues and shades. The evil in this world is the leftover from the worlds destroyed. He had thrown himself at Osman to snatch him away from under the Russian muzzle. He saw luminescent motion in the corner of his blitzed eye and it seemed to him that it was made by some whirling dervishes who also sang and chanted, but when he got closer he could only recognize the familiar outline of hungry soldats huddling. He had lain on top of Osman as the Russian dropped the butt of his gun on his hand. Then the light changed, turned narrower, and Pinto was on a street, crowded with bodies flowing past him, as around a rock in a creek. In the jail they had all been pickled in spacelessness, not moving because there was nowhere to go, and now warm and whirling bodies rubbed against his, bumped into it. The stranger talking to him was laughing at something, with someone, and they talked past Pinto. There were men in splendorous dresses and turbans, like sultans in a fairy tale. There was a row of heads stuck on poles, but they turned out to be astrakhan hats. He ran into an enormous snorting beast that stank like a dead horse and was angry. The stranger led him around the camel by his hand, like a child. A man offered him a gourd and Pinto took it but didn’t know what to do with it until the man showed him how to suck smoke out of it, so Pinto did and it was not tobacco but something else, something that rushed blood into his head. Because you hear so many voices do not imagine that there are many gods in Heaven. Where was Osman’s voice, it was drowned out by this terrible noise of the unfettered world. Who is this that has revealed my secrets to mankind? In the jail, death sat in the corner, humming and moaning and festering, and you always knew where it was. Everyone positioned themselves at an angle in relation to it, not turned away and not staring at it. Here on the street, life rushed through and caused pain and noise, and it was hard to tell where it was coming from or where it was going. There were veiled women and there were barefoot children prancing like squirrels. Recite and thy Lord is the most bountiful. He created Man from a clot of blood. They turned into a narrow street, and then into a passage so tight that they had to squeeze through it sideways, so Pinto could see the stranger’s profile and his nose and lips against the light and he was willing to kiss those lips even if they didn’t belong to Osman. Where was Osman? To what there did he go? The stranger was still talking, untroubled by Pinto’s incomprehension. Is there a language no one in the world can understand? A language spoken by one man alone, or maybe even none? All the gurgling and growling and chuckling and grunting and lip smacking the edepsiz stranger was producing. Why couldn’t he understand it? Where did my beloved go? The stranger stood at a door, not knocking, and the door opened. Jo paso por la tu guerta, tu estavas en la puerta. And then Pinto was in bed, unable to lift his head, and Osman was by his side with his crooked hand on Pinto’s forehead, speaking to a man in a Viennese suit in a language Pinto understood but could not name. Osman said: Here is my Rafo. And the other man said, My name is Isak Abramovich. Welcome back to the world, Rafo, such as it is.