The New Year brought frigid cold and snow flurries, new court petitions from Mark, and US soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners of war. On my first day of the semester, while news of American soldiers beating wounded Iraqi prisoners filled the headlines, my department chair told me that my tenure file was still incomplete. Without the noisy colorful caravan that was my family, Natalia returned to her moodier self and our duplex felt icy and deserted.
I walked into my classroom for Politics 101 and explained the rule of law to my wide-eyed freshmen. In my Advanced Politics class on Eastern European post-Communist governments, the only advanced class that my chair still allowed me to teach, on account of my being Eastern European, I indulged in fleeting comparisons between the American invasion of Iraq and recent wars of aggression like the Bosnian war. There was no moral basis for the new model of American preemptive war; neither was there a moral basis for the Kosovo and Bosnian wars. Without the rule of law, almost anybody with a gun and a few soldiers under their command could become General Ratko Mladic, I told them. My voice carried through the amphitheater, even though my insides were twisting and thirst scorched my throat.
The trial was only a few weeks away, and I called Diana Coman as soon as my classes were over to strategize before leaving the office. She was hopeful that all was going to turn out all right and told me not to worry, to trust her and mostly, she said, to trust myself. As I shot out into the parking lot, I skidded on a patch of ice. I reminded myself to stay careful and strong. I got into my car with my ankle hurting from the fall and sat for a while looking out the window at the winter dusk and the whimsical snowflakes that were starting to fall. A childhood memory surfaced of the winter when my parents sent Biljana and me to our paternal grandparents, so we could experience country life for a few days, to make “real people of us” as my father said. Our grandparents lived in an old village near Dubrovnik. My father took us there by train during our winter vacation when Biljana and I were eight and ten years old, Natalia’s age now. The winter was bitter and thick icicles were hanging from all the village roofs. Biljana and I went sledding on a little hill at the other end of the village. She was crazy about sledding but this time it was special, she said, because this was an ice hill we were going to go sledding on. I didn’t want to go at first, but Biljana coerced me and told me it was like ice skating only downhill, plus you were sitting on the sled, so what was the worst that could happen? We soon found out exactly that, because on our first run she flew off the sled and a sharp piece of ice sticking out pierced her leg through her leggings. Blood gushed and I thought Biljana was going to die from all the blood coming out of her. The ice on the hill was becoming red and shiny in the cold sun. I remembered that hard trip down the icy hill. I must have let go of the sled and glided on my butt because the sled was not part of my memory when I saw myself sitting next to bleeding Biljana. I wanted to cry so badly that my throat hurt. But Biljana looked at me fiercely. “Don’t cry, do something!” she said. Even though Biljana produced a vigorous scream at her bleeding leg, nobody came out of their house to help us. I remembered thinking These are not good people who don’t come out to help a wounded child. I remembered the village looking beautiful and eerie under the heavy snow with no people anywhere in sight. Then Biljana yelled: “What if I can’t dance anymore? I’ll kill myself!” I took my scarf and wrapped it tight around Biljana’s calf in a tourniquet above the gash that squirted blood like a fountain, without saying a word. I tore my checkered shirt and wrapped it around her wound. “What if it gets gangrened and I die?” she screamed. I told her she deserved it because she had been the idiot who wanted to go sledding on ice. As I was wrapping my shirt around her leg trying to make the blood stop Biljana told me she loved me more than anything. I couldn’t say a word, I kept wrapping her leg, the blood kept soaking up the shirt, we had two kilometers to walk home and I would have given my life for my sister right there on the stupid ice hill. We walked the two kilometers back home with me holding Biljana like her crutch.
On the way back from the ice hill, I told Biljana stories of war I had heard from my father, how soldiers were coming home during World War II without a leg or an arm, or with wounds in their stomachs or in their heads, bleeding all over the place, and they made it home somehow: “What if we were at war, sister,” I said, “we would have to make it, think of that, what would we do if we were at war and you and I were wounded soldiers?” Despite all the pain she was going through, my sister still found the strength to say I was stupid because girls didn’t go to war. “Yes they do,” I said, “you and I would.”
When she saw the two of us in the doorway, our baba yelled at us that we were idiot girls to go sledding on ice, only cretins did that, and it served us right. Dede gave us each a shot of slivovitz, the awful alcohol that Serbians drank and that burned your insides like hell’s fire. Then he called the village doctor. The doctor told me I had done a good job wrapping up my sister’s wound; otherwise she would have lost too much blood. Maybe even died, he said. After the doctor left and our baba put us to bed and made the cross sign over us for protection, Biljana and I cuddled and held each other under the thick down coverlet. Then we cried. We had survived. I glowed at the fullness of our childhood, which now seemed so close. I drove home slowly, somehow renewed with hope that the strength I had found that winter of Biljana’s bandaged leg would always sustain me. Maybe I could again rise unscathed above disaster and still keep some of my wholeness intact.
On Monday night of the week of the trial, I came home from work, and was surprised to find Mark at home with Natalia, since it was his day with her and he always took her out even if it was a school night. I came in quietly through the back door because I had groceries to deposit. I heard their overlapping voices in an excited, joyous conversation. I felt a jolt of jealousy for which I immediately reprimanded myself and tucked it right back under my new tight blue woolen suit. I walked in on tiptoes, respecting our understanding that on our nights with Natalia, we would each stay out of each other’s way. Mark and Natalia were reading together and talking about Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” “A man and a woman and a blackbird are one,” Natalia recited in laughter. The joyous relaxed scene between Mark and Natalia made me equally happy and jealous. Mark wasn’t just fighting for custody of Natalia to get back at me but because he genuinely wanted to spend more time with her. He really had learned to be a better parent because of our divorce. Maybe he was finally making the transition from teaching poetry to living it, even if it took a family cataclysm for that to happen. Even if it was too late for Mark and me, he could find that happiness with our daughter.
“You and Mommy and I are one and we are a blackbird,” said Natalia shaking with laughter at her own inventiveness. Mark was laughing, too, like I hadn’t seen him laugh in years. I was sad, too, for all we had missed in each other. I badly wanted to cry, like the time Biljana gashed her leg on the ice, but I pumped myself up, filled with all the sadness I felt, and didn’t let one tear fall. We were lonely blackbirds perched on snowy fences, we could have all been one blackbird at one time. “He rode over Connecticut / In a glass coach,” continued Natalia. Connecticut Avenue had once been my dream come true, my Cinderella palace. I had flown over it in a glass coach once, landed in it on the arm of my husband who rescued me from a genocidal and war-ridden country, I had made a colorful palace here until the glass shattered all around us. “The river is moving / The blackbird must be flying.” Now I was only a spectator, an outsider to the blackbird moment between Natalia and Mark. He looked particularly handsome that night with his delicate yet manly profile, his gray hair shining around the temples. There was a time I wanted him more than anything else in the world. Him and America. In two days we would face each other in court, fighting for the custody rights to the quivering daughter we had created. There was no poetry in that.
For the trial, I found my new survival mode. I disengaged from my own litigation and remembered that whatever battle Mark and I were playing out, there was a world outside filled with war and genocide. The lawyers wanted Natalia to come to the stand and I asked her if she would be willing to make a brief appearance at the trial, just to answer a few questions. She wanted to know only if they would ask her about the baseball cards and golf balls and feathers she had stolen from CVS and Walmart and then arrest her. I promised her that no, nobody was going to arrest her or even ask her about the stolen things, only about the relations she had with each of her parents. And maybe whether she had a preference about living more with one of us than the other. She might have a say in what was going to happen to her living arrangements. She became pensive for a moment and wanted to know if Aunt Biljana was going to be there in court. Once she knew this, she answered that yes, it would be cool to come to court, and was the judge going to wear a long black robe like she’d seen on TV?
The first day when I would take the stand, I left the house early to meet Diana Coman at her office. She told me she would accompany me to the imposing courthouse. Natalia would come later with Biljana and Rick. The die was cast, as Caesar had said when crossing the Rubicon, there was no turning back. When I reached the steps of the courthouse with Diana, I just about collapsed at the sight of the chair of the Politics Department, and beside him the journalism colleague who had been on my plane home from Paris in my truncated escapade with Karim a year ago. His wife, Sarah, was there, too. I had to remember my approach, to detach myself from what was happening. But were Sarah and Brian getting a divorce, too? I actually wondered for a moment in confusion. Everybody was getting a divorce, apparently it was the thing to do that frigid winter. Their presence in the courtroom made no sense. Then I saw Mark talking and laughing with them and his lawyers, glowing with confidence and good humor. I suddenly understood why Brian from journalism had recently stopped greeting me when we crossed each other on campus; why Sarah, his wife, had turned her head the other way when I ran into her at Natalia’s school before Christmas; why my department chair acted so strangely, even peevishly, when I ran into him with Natalia. They were all there to testify on Mark’s behalf.
Mark’s two lawyers extolled his virtues as a father and downgraded me as a mother. He was careful, I was reckless, he was stable, I was unpredictable, he was caring, I was careless. He offered a good role model, I offered the model of a depraved woman, a bad role model for a girl. He had taken Natalia to the beach, I had taken a self-indulgent joyride on the Blue Ridge Parkway with my lover. There were pictures of Mark and Natalia at the beach, on a school bench, on a visit with his mother. And there were me and Karim always kissing. I exposed my child to danger in times of enhanced national security, the lawyers charged.
I nudged Diana Coman and she wrote to me on a piece of paper that the judge didn’t like for parents to denigrate each other that way. But the judge seemed to be listening carefully. How did Diana know? I wondered. I stared at the murals on the wall and was struck by the irony of a larger-than-life representation of Lady Justice draped in the folds of a tunic that left one of her breasts exposed as she held the scales of justice. I couldn’t help smiling to myself and wondering why even the incarnation of Justice had to be a sex object in a world of men. Images of Gregory Peck or Spencer Tracy, the passionate lawyer defending an unjustly accused woman, a poor man, or a person of color, passed through my mind. But Gregory Peck and Spencer Tracy were nowhere in sight to defend my virtue and my maternal rights under the glaring lights of that American courtroom.
Like a bad dream, Brian the journalism professor recounted how he saw me in Charles de Gaulle airport engaging in lewd acts with an Arab man. He stressed “Arab man” and then repeated that I was kissing an Arab man in public when he saw me. To that he added that after he and his wife had lent us their children’s old crib when Natalia was born, I returned it years later, damaged, with several of the crib’s nails missing. I had stolen nails from their crib, he said, and from this Mark’s lawyer concluded I was teaching Natalia to steal. Mark testified at length about our marriage, our arguments, our parenting disagreements, his shock and pain at discovering my love affair. He sounded convincing, and I even was able to believe his argument. His lawyer produced copies of emails between me and Karim, and more photos from Dulles airport, and I was mortified by the exposure, like a Hollywood star followed by paparazzi for the National Enquirer.
Of all the testimonies, I loved Rick’s the most. “Ms. Kulicz understands her daughter better than anyone else,” he said. “Better than even Natalia knows herself. It’s all smooth between them, no edges.” Rick looked stately and manly and his Mexican accent gave his speech a special weight of warmth and truthfulness. I understood why Biljana was so crazy about him. Between my sister and me at least one of us had been lucky that way, and had a happy marriage to a good man, without any necessary foreverafterness. It was all in the here and now. “A man and a woman and a blackbird are one.”
When Diana Coman started her line of questioning of the witnesses, she was my own Lady Justice holding the scales, my Gregory Peck. Mark, the witnesses, the judge, the lawyers, and everybody in the room opened their eyes wide and seemed to wake up from a long sleep. “Have you, Mr. Brian McAlister, observed Ms. Kulicz interact with her daughter for any length of time, yes or no?” She spoke without gibberish or extraneous talk. “No, I haven’t,” he said. “Have you, Mr. Lopez, watched Ms. Kulicz interact with her daughter for any length of time, yes or no?” “Yes, I have.” When my turn came to testify her confidence in me was unflappable, like she had waved her wand to make me a sparkling new person. I spoke clearly and coolheadedly about every aspect of Natalia’s upbringing, how I’d packed sandwiches with her favorite cheese, and how I’d read her Norwegian fairy tales before bedtime. I described our epic escapades to the zoo and to the sculpture garden, our visits to the doctor and the time we stayed up all night together when she had bronchitis, even before a long day of lectures. And there were the cello lessons and the practicing. Every time Mark’s lawyers asked about Karim, I took the Fifth and stared at them silently, just as Diana had instructed. “It is irrelevant for custody, Your Honor,” she would say to the judge. And then the judge asked me himself: “Did you have an extramarital affair? Answer the question, Ms. Kulicz, or I’ll hold you in contempt.” But before I could speak, Diana Coman stood up and approached the bench. Diana asked the judge to wait until Natalia was heard. The judge conceded.
When Natalia spoke, her voice was crystalline, and the room was silent. You had to listen to her, and listen carefully. The judge asked all the questions himself, not the lawyers. His voice became almost tender. He was a tough guy with a kind heart, I thought. He asked Natalia if she had any preference about who she wanted to spend more time with. She said no, she loved us both the same. He asked her about her cello lessons. She told him about her classes and the pieces she was working on. What would her ideal living arrangement be given that her parents were going to live separately now, the judge asked her. “You mean like my dream living situation?” I watched her face unblinkingly and noticed a quick expression of pain spread over her. She looked so delicate, I thought she might break into a thousand small pieces. At that moment, I was cracking, too. If she broke I would turn to dust. The judge smiled and said that yes, that was what he meant. “It would be fun to live with Aunt Biljana and my cousins Amanda and Melissa and Uncle Rick and see my parents on weekends for now. For a while, until they both calm down, that would be my dream living situation, Your Honor. I still love both my parents but right now things are sort of crazy in the house with the divorce and all.” The judge released Natalia from the stand and wished her good luck with her cello playing. He thanked her for her help. “It wasn’t to help, it was to tell the truth or something.” She smiled and stepped out of the room in her pretty sunflower-yellow dress.
“You should try to settle, Lara,” said Diana in low whispers after the judge ordered a recess. “I think neither of you is going to get full custody so it’s better at least to attempt to come to an agreement, this way for whatever is left unresolved at least the judge has seen you are both reasonable people and are thinking of what’s best for Natalia. Then he will most likely rule in favor of who is showing most reason.” “But she said she wants to live with Biljana,” I said naively. “This is not a wish-granting institution, Lara, and you know it. It’s a court of law, the judge has to rule according to the way he thinks will best serve the child.” Diana told me I should settle for split physical and legal custody. “Lots of parents settle with these kinds of arrangements these days, you could go for one week each, split vacation time and alternate holidays. She’s tough, your Natalia, she might take this better than being yanked unevenly in one direction, and the novelty of the living situation might offer her some excitement, too.” I told Diana that was fine, I’d go with that, if Mark accepted. But what if he didn’t? “Let’s see what happens, and we’ll deal then,” said Diana and hurried to the other end of the room where Mark and his lawyers were deliberating.
Mark did not accept my proposal. He stuck to his initial claim. The judge looked disappointed, and even angry. Then he ordered equally split legal and physical custody between the parents with reasonable visitation rights for both my sister and mother. I had underestimated that owl-faced judge who stared at all the witnesses with a mad fixity. America was not like Serbia after all, Justice was sometimes possible, and as in the painting, Justice meant keeping things in balance, bare-breasted or not. Then the judge spoke to each of us, addressing Mark first. He told Mark he needed to cool off from his anger and hurt, it was human to feel that way, but it was hurting Natalia, too. He couldn’t be the best parent he could be if he did not deal with his anger and stop tearing the child in two in order to punish the mother. What had happened between us was solely between the two of us and should not affect the child. He waited to hear Mark say that he understood and he would act accordingly. Mark was shocked, and began to speak in a whisper. But then the judge raised his voice and asked Mark to speak up. That was when I experienced a sharp sense of satisfaction. Mark said meekly: “Yes, Your Honor, I get it, I understand.”
But then when the judge turned to me he changed his tone and spoke to me harshly and disdainfully. He told me I should be ashamed for having caused such havoc in my family. Didn’t I know that marriage was forever? I had taken vows and I had caused great pain to many people with my reckless behavior. He had scolded Mark but it was a man-to-man scolding, like two guys wrestling and then shaking hands after the match. But he talked to me like I was the fallen woman that all the lawyers had tried to portray in their statements and questioning. I now could understand that “liberty and justice for all” meant that if you were a man, and the judge was a man, you most likely got the thicker slice of that frosted cake called Justice. What irked me most in his statement was the marriage foreverness bit. It sounded like next he would order me to believe in the afterlife or in God. When he asked me if I understood, I said loudly: “Yes, sir, Your Honor, I understand.” I wanted to sound militaristic, not to give him the satisfaction to think he had crushed me under his heavy and Just step. I cast one last look at the space in which I had spent the most excruciating eight hours of my life. Lady Justice seemed to wink at me as I left the courtroom. Her exposed boob even seemed to be shining, and I finally allowed myself to laugh.
When I arrived home that evening, depleted of all energy and willpower, a large envelope from Hassan was waiting in the mail. At first I thought it was for Mark, but it was my name that was clearly spelled out in capital letters on the envelope. I breathed deeply as I opened the package, which contained another envelope on which my name was written in Marija’s handwriting. Inside the second envelope was a new wad of letters addressed to me and more notes from her diary. Almost forgetting about the day in court, I sat down in my study and began to devour the pages from Marija until Natalia walked in, and I closed them. She of course knew exactly what they were and climbed into bed next to me. I would continue after she fell asleep.
With another spring gliding in after a winter that looked just like the spring, I had to leave the oppressive blues of Santa Barbara and move to Los Angeles. I had to find a place to live and contact Sally’s connections, in case I wanted to work. Los Angeles’s maze of highways was almost uplifting. I found an apartment near the university with no view of the sea, just trees. I had a craving for trees and dirt as if they lacked from my diet. I craved for copper and snow. I was yearning for tree roots and sidewalks. The Los Angeles residential street provided some of those. Sally’s connections found me work on one of the Hollywood sets. I did freelance writing and reporting for one of the local newspapers. A few times I even reported on a local TV station. I was supposed to bring in my Eastern European perspective to the happenings on the Hollywood set. They loved my accent and my demeanor, they said, I should just be myself. That made me laugh since there was no longer such a being as “myself,” but only a palimpsest of bits of myself carefully arranged in a colorful simulacrum. I was light and fake like everybody else in Hollywood and it felt good for a little while. Nobody would have really wanted me to be myself, the hard-core unadorned me, if they had any idea who I really was.
Then the woman from Sarajevo called and asked if I was thinking of going back anytime soon. She was getting tired of doing the work in my place. I told her we had an understanding and it wasn’t time yet. Just a little bit longer and I would call her back. She said she needed more money, she had to move to a new place and had no money and it wasn’t safe anymore. I told her I would send her more money, if only she could be patient for a little while longer. It wouldn’t be long before I would go back to Sarajevo and take care of everything. She agreed and said she would wait for me but might still move. As I was talking to her on the phone in the living room of my new LA duplex apartment I saw that there was a tree with azaleas right in front of my window. They weren’t red but white, what a relief. For once, the azaleas that followed me everywhere had lost their color. A group of children were playing outside my window, a rare occurrence on LA streets. They spoke Spanish and sounded joyous.
Suddenly the huge hole in my womb felt full and the Spanish of the children playing in front of my window sounded Bosnian, which really was Serbo-Croatian. Languages morphed into one another and so did the azaleas and the snow and the children and Los Angeles and Sarajevo. Lara and Marija and Biljana were all playing amid scaffolding and chasing each other to see who got first to the highest point on the scaffolding of the National Library reconstruction. Everybody was building something in the world and the crew on the Hollywood set that I was working on three days a week was building a version of Sarajevo during the siege for a movie with Angelina Jolie. They were building shelled, mortar-hit, and blown-up Sarajevo out of Hollywood materials. The woman from Sarajevo kept talking on the phone in a language I could no longer understand, maybe it was Albanian or Turkish. It could have been anything. As I was looking outside my window and watching Lara jump hula hoops on Angelina Jolie’s set imitating wartime Sarajevo and as the red in the azaleas was quickly withdrawing leaving snowy-white fleshy petals behind, the hole in my womb grew to the size of a basketball, to the size of a grown baby. I knew the time had come to get in touch with Lara and go back and finish what I had started as the woman had said. It was time to take possession of my child. The one I had given birth to in a state of semi-coma somewhere in one of the houses where the woman kept hiding me that year. It was time for me to come to terms with that reality and embrace it. It was time to keep my promise to the woman. Remember everything and own it like it was actually happening in my own life. Enough of the emotional blunting and all the psychoanalytic crap. I called Lara. A man who was probably Mark and had a stern voice answered and said, “Hello, hello, who is it?” I hung up and I called Biljana in Chicago. “Hello, Biljana, this is Marija. Remember me? I’m back from the dead and I’d like to speak to Lara. I wonder if you could give me Lara’s cell phone number.” Just like that. It wasn’t hard at all.
I sat on the bed and stared at the wall in a state of stupor. Marija had a child. The news seemed unreal. Bizarre questions were swarming in my head with a deafening clamor: Whose child was it? Why in the world did she have a child? Were her notes really meant for me? Was this her way of letting me know this formidable news? Natalia had woken up and was looking at me. “Mama, what’s wrong?” But I couldn’t answer, my mouth stayed clenched. Natalia took the letter from my hand and began to read. What difference would another bit of traumatic news make now to my daughter who had already glimpsed a world that most American children her age had no idea existed? I remembered Marija’s collected stories of all of the women when Natalia and I sat in the Sarajevo hotel room. The women who became pregnant in the camps, or were made to become pregnant, some miscarried, others aborted gruesomely, many dying in the process. Others gave birth to dead babies that they threw in the trash, others gave birth to live babies and gave them away. There were other women still who carried their babies to term, gave birth to live babies, and then wanted to keep them. Apparently Marija was part of this last group, even though it seemed she had at first given her baby away. Marija was her own group. “A child is a child, Mama,” Natalia said quietly. But I possessed neither Natalia’s innocence nor her luminous wisdom. For me a child was not always just a child, particularly in Marija’s case. I was terrified.
We had to divide everything in half, not just Natalia’s custody. We were to sell the duplex and split the profits, savings, and assets, and divide the furniture. We each kept our own cars, me my blue Chevy (I had always dreamed of owning an American car while in Serbia) and Mark his black Honda (he boycotted American cars). The scales of justice were balanced to a T, even if I wasn’t. I had thought I would calm down and settle into my new divorced life, with everything in it split in half. But it turned out that until we found a buyer for the house the three of us still had to live under the same roof. With everything now final, and without even a tiny crumb of hope that everything would be the same as before, life was still hard under our roof. This is how it was when wars were started, I thought to myself.
When the phone would sometimes ring, I’d startle thinking maybe it was Marija. But it was never her. Once there had been a call and a cavernous silence at the other end. I now blamed myself for not having felt it, known it, and just said: I know it’s you, Marija, where are you? Let’s meet! Something direct and simple like that. I must have been gathering papers for my divorce trial or correcting Politics 101 exams or doing homework with Natalia. There had been other unanswered calls, too, wrong numbers, weird soliciting. I’d never paid attention to them, I just hung up. Once in the evening when the phone rang, Mark and I both ran to the living room to pick it up. I got there first and said a loud “hello.” But there was no answer, just a long silence, the sound of breathing and maybe the sound of soft cries. Or maybe I imagined that. “Hello, hello, is anybody there?” I kept saying, just like in the dreams and visions I had. I was certain that it was only a matter of weeks before Marija and I would see each other. Her notes seemed pretty clear on that. I called Hassan and asked him when he got the package of Marija’s notes, in what form had they arrived, were there any other letters with it, and why him? “We’ve been in communication for quite some time,” he said. His voice was warm, just like it had been in his office in northern Virginia. “I sent you the notes because they came to me sealed, inside a larger envelope, with a note from Marija saying they were for you. All the other papers she sends are postwar materials and human rights stuff. If you want to come by the office and talk, you know you’re always welcome.” I thanked Hassan but I knew I wouldn’t go. Any attempts to find her in any phone book in Santa Barbara or Los Angeles were fruitless. And though I knew I could find Sally Bryant, I didn’t want to get to Marija in that way. I wanted to leave it to Marija’s own orchestrations. Some more time had to pass for me to be ready, and Marija, too. Our trajectories had to match, to come into perfect accord across the American skies.
I started calling Karim again, to fill the void of postdivorce. His voice still sounded melodic and sexy, streaming into my ear in raspy rivulets of French vowels. He asked me to come to Paris for the same conference we had been at a year before, just when the war was starting. The divorce had been finalized and I would think about coming, I told him, although I was nervous about my tenure. He said he really missed me, to please come, that he was scheduled to speak at the conference anyway. It would be mad on our part to miss the occasion to see each other, he said, “une vraie folie,” true madness. One April morning as I watched the delicate petals of the dogwoods in front of our house, I decided I would go to the conference. I didn’t need to have a paper to present, I was free. I booked my ticket to Paris. I needed to close accounts in all the areas of my life, tidy up all the compartments that composed it like a wobbly house of cards.