just above his beltline. As he smoked and the birds rattled around in their cages, he told me stories. About the great crossings of rivers, those beautiful tremulous mountains he and his family discovered even as they fled the invading armies, the cousin who was kidnapped in those mountains by bandits, only to be set free twenty years later and reunited with what was left of his family. He offered me this photo of the soldiers and the woman, and then he showed photos he had taken of every visitor to that garden he had had the privilege of meeting, volumes and volumes of them, compulsion made history. He took a fresh photo of the both of us, the camera stuttering out its timed click, and gave me a thumbs-up as goodbye. Such an incongruous gesture, but now it drives me to tears. All these and more crowd the office, and when I do fall asleep at my desk, the nightmares come. My heart heaves in my body, I believe this must be
 | | a coronary attack, and all the while it is a mere rattle of fear because events are taking place out of sequence, or reassembling into some opera, and it all becomes clear, even in the sunny light of day when I wake, face pressed to papers and decorated with ink: I should have lived then, I should have died then.
The word slave wasn't used. Women who wanted to stay alive accepted; those who refused were punished. Not killed, although that did happen, more out of sheer exhaustion than anything else, for the soldiers were still hungry, still wretched in their clothes and skin, rubbing dirty bare arms against dirty mouths, chewing on dust and gravel and sweat, maddened by the heat, and with all this, worrying about a woman was just too much to bear. Any movement, any glance that could be interpreted as reluctance or rebellion, was enough to drive them to action.
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