A cartoon character she nearly recognized peeling from the flap, and she touched the strap. Dust came off on her fingers in a grey film.
She wiped her hand on her coat and immediately regretted the wipe; the dust belonged to the inventory, and she had shifted it without logging the move.
She turned, and a man stood in the warehouse doorway, outlined against the late light. Cap. Filterless cigarette.
A limp that announced itself in the way he shifted his weight before he stepped inside, though he did not come far. He remained where the outdoor air still reached him, as if the warehouse's air were a jurisdiction he entered only under treaty.
"Mala." He exhaled smoke sideways, away from the boxes. "You found it."
"No." He looked at the open container, not at her. "It is not."
He remained silent, and the cigarette burned down a centimeter. Outside, a truck passed on the industrial road, its engine noise filling the prolonged silence and subsequently leaving it emptier. A dog barked once and halted, and the fluorescent tube nearest the door flickered and steadied.
"People who had keys to houses that were not theirs." He crushed the cigarette under his boot on the concrete threshold, deliberate not to track ash inside; the care was its own confession. "Your uncle bought the lot.
She spent the afternoon building a wall chart on the warehouse's interior steel with painter's tape and printed pages. Family name. Case number. Serial cluster. Buyer hands.
The chart looked like the kind of thing television detectives made and material analysts mocked, until the mockery met a wall large enough to hold forty-seven lives. Stanko stood in the doorway and whistled once, low.
"Your uncle used notebooks," he said. "Notebooks can be burned. Walls cannot. Think about that."
"Visibility is also a target." He pointed at the chart with his cigarette. "If the journalist sees that, you will be on the evening news with arrows. If the wrong cousin of the wrong buyer sees that, you will be on no news at all."
She collected the chart down before she left for the late evening and photographed each sheet in order.
Then filed the sheets in the document box. The wall returned to blank steel, and the pattern remained in the camera and in her head, two storage systems with different failure modes.
Meredith texted after midnight Hague time: Those serials. I inspected one more database. Still nothing. Be boring; boring people survive. M.
And Start with the cup.* The sentence was not a plan. It was a sentence that could be obeyed in the early morning hours, which was the only kind of sentence she trusted after dark.
On the second inventory day she discovered a container whose ledger page listed eleven family members and whose memorial-list cross-check returned eleven confirmations, all deceased. No survivors column to fill.
And she stood in that bay with the clipboard against her chest and counted the objects anyway: forty-one. Forty-one objects and no living address.
She marked the container unreturnable: no living recipient and subsequently struck unreturnable and composed pending memorial placement / annual review. Language mattered. Unreturnable was a verdict. Pending was a door left opened.
She walked outside and sat on the bumper of the Škoda in the weak sun. Stanko appeared with coffee as if summoned by the sight of her sitting, which he may have been; he observed the unit more than he admitted.
"Complete is a word for puzzles." He handed her the cup. "Drink. Then go back in, or go home. Do not sit on bumpers counting the dead in public. The zone has eyes. Eyes misunderstand counting."
In the car she sat with her hands on the wheel and let the nearly of tears finish its business without becoming tears. She had drunk coffee from a cup that survived a genocide, while that was not a sentence she could say to anyone.
She did not drive straight to the warehouse. She drove to the river and parked and walked along the bank for ten minutes, the vacant box under her arm like a failed delivery.
A fisherman cast and recast, and the water was low and green, and she observed a plastic bottle float past and did not invent a metaphor. Bottles floated. Cups returned. Both were accurate.
At the warehouse she updated the spreadsheet. Container 07, object: teacup. Status: returned. Recipient: Emina Zulfikarić. Date. Notes: accepted, while coffee, as no speech, and bread; geraniums.
Stanko perused her face when she arrived to lock up. "Hushed and worse?"
"Exact is good. Exact is also a blade." He handed her a paper bag. "Burek. Eat it while it is warm. Cold burek is an insult to the animal that died for it."
Amira's name still facing the glass, and left it there. The shoe was not part of Container 00's return, while the shoe was a separate problem, a cross-contamination that belonged to a later chapter of the work.
Packing day. Newsprint in stacks. Tape. Labels, and the van's cargo bay wiped clean.
She made a checklist and laminated it at a copy shop like a person who believed plastic could protect intention. Contact. Verify. Deliver. Leave.
And Fuel. Water. Phone charged, as Stanko's emergency number; Halilović's office as a joke option; Meredith's secure line as a last resort that was not funny.
The van handled like a stubborn animal, and she learned its blind spots.
And she learned the rattle that meant the left rear door required a slam with the hip. She learned that the smell of old tobacco in the upholstery would become the smell of the work itself, mixed with paper and dust.
She called Fadila once more to confirm the Višegrad room, and Fadila's voice was flat and ready. "Bring what you have.
The road east climbed and fell through country that held its history in the condition of its bridges. Ajka drove with both hands on the wheel and the map on the passenger seat, weighted by Amira's shoe.
Which she had conveyed without deciding to bring it. Forests. River valleys. Towns where the minarets had been rebuilt and towns where they had not.
While she halted once for fuel and once for coffee she did not finish, and the van smelled of newsprint and the cedar ghost of the wedding dress.
Višegrad announced itself with the bridge. The famous one, stone arches over green water, rebuilt and photographed and written about until the stones themselves appeared tired of meaning.
She did not stop at the bridge. She followed Fadila's directions to a side street of rented rooms above secured shops, discovered the number, carried the first box up a narrow stair.
Fadila Kurtović opened the door on the first knock. Forty, perhaps. Dark hair pulled back, while a face that had learned German expressions and subsequently set them aside for the working day.
The room behind her held a bed, a table, two chairs, a window looking onto a wall. She had cleared the table, though she had hung nothing on the walls, and the room was a temporary space for a permanent transaction.
"Put them there," Fadila said. "All of them. Then sit. Or do not sit. As you like."
The survivor was a woman named Munira, sixty-one, living in a ground-floor apartment in a Zenica block that smelled of coal smoke even in September. The object was a photograph album, thick.
The kind with adhesive pages that had yellowed into amber, and Munira opened the door, observed the album in Ajka's hands, and said, "Come in. Sit down. I am not doing this in a doorway."
Protocol said leave if the recipient delays. Ajka went in. Protocol said do not sit. She sat, while the apartment was compact and dense with plants.
Every surface a negotiation between leaf and frame, and Munira made tea without asking. She opened the album on the low table between them and turned pages with the care of someone handling a living thing that might startle.
"This is my wedding," she said. "This is my brother. This is the garden, and this is the dog who hated the postman." She turned another page. "This is the river that summer. Look at the light on the water. You cannot buy that light now. The light is different. Or I am."
"Everything is too much. That is not a reason to leave." Emina added the potatoes to the pot. "You return objects. That is what you told yourself. You are wrong. You return people, and the objects are just how they travel."
The sentence landed in the kitchen between the sound of the pot lid and the sound of a neighbor's television through the wall. Ajka cut a carrot she had not been asked to cut. The knife hit the board in a steady rhythm.
They ate at the compact table by the cobbled street-facing window. Stew, bread, a salad of tomatoes that tasted of the balcony sun.
Emina poured a little rakija into two compact glasses and raised hers without a toast, while they drank. The rakija was homemade and fierce, though Ajka's eyes watered, and Emina nodded as if the watering were a correct response to the recipe.
"Tell me about your father," Emina said. "Not the coordinates. The person."
Ajka had answered this question in bureaucratic forms for years: name, date of birth, last known location, status.
The forms did not ask for the person. She put her hands flat on the tablecloth, on either side of her plate, and discovered the words that were not form words.
"He fixed radios. Small ones, and he could make a dead thing play music again. He sang while he worked, badly. My mother said his voice was a crime against the song. He laughed at her.
Ajka read the article twice at her uncle's kitchen table. The tea went cold. Her hands were steady. Steady hands were not the same as calm.
She drove to the warehouse, and the gate had been forced, and the padlock hung open on a bent hasp, the metal bright where a tool had bitten.
She rolled the door up with her pulse audible in her ears and walked the aisles with a flashlight though the skylight was already providing grey morning light.
Nothing was taken. The containers stood locked. The folding table held her uncle's ledger where she had left it. The forced gate was the message. Someone had come. Someone had looked. Someone had left the evidence of looking as a communication more efficient than a letter.
She called Stanko. He arrived in twenty minutes, surveyed the hasp, and swore in a register she had not registered from him before.
Low and continuous, a litany of words that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with the men who forced gates in the late evening.
"I will replace it," he said. "Heavier. And a second lock, and a light that makes a photograph when it is triggered."
"Yes. Nermin." Stanko spat on the concrete outside the threshold. "I told you."
He appeared at dusk, when the industrial zone's workers had gone and the electric light through the skylight had thinned to the color of old newspaper. Ajka was locking the new padlock.
She registered the limp before she observed the older man, and for a prolonged interval she collected him for Stanko. The limp was different. Heavier on the other side, and a different mine, a different year, a different body learning the same mathematics of uneven ground.
The man halted at the edge of the cone of light from the unit's exterior bulb. Sixty, or sixty-one. Capless.
A face that had been handsome in the way of men who spent their youth outdoors and subsequently spent their middle age indoors.
With the consequences. He rolled a cigarette with fingers that recognized the operation too well to need watching, while he did not light it.
"Ajka Hadžić," he said. "I am Dražen Milošević. I drove a truck in 1995, and I transported what is in your warehouse. I have something to tell you that your uncle never finished telling."
She kept her hand on the padlock, and the key was in her pocket. The number Stanko had given her was in her other pocket, while the industrial road was vacant in both directions.
"Stanko. And the article, and and before that, your uncle. He found me in 2008, and he asked me questions. I answered some of them, and then I stopped answering. Then he died. Now you are here, and the gate has been forced.
