Already in the briefly undirected light before the sun, the candle trees over the garden wall were flushed and tiled villa roofs were orange down the hill towards central Kampala, gray blocks at this hour against a red boil of sky.
      Zala was at Peter’s veranda table, dressed for work: loose white blouse buttoned low, red scarf twisted through the belt-loops of wide-legged trousers with wet cuffs heavy from the grass. Peter was lifting Cheerios to his mouth, one by one, by hand. He was in the shorts and tee he’d slept in, unshaved, one leg crossed at table-level, the morning’s Daily Monitor in his lap. The car to take Zala downtown and him on to the American embassy would arrive in fifteen minutes. They began most weekdays like this, except that today the cook, whom the embassy had hired and who most likely didn’t know that Peter had a wife in the States, had asked what to make for their anniversary.
     “Who says six months is an anniversary? Right?” Zala flicked her hand back, her fork cigarette-like between two fingers.
     “Apparently, we do,” Peter said into his paper. He had a high voice for a man, and jumped octaves between words. “You are one cool cat.”
      “I am,” Zala said. “One cool cat.”
     She sluiced water through her teeth and bared their slight gaps. She no longer asked Peter to explain his expressions and distinguish Americanisms from Peterisms. She enjoyed repeating them, guessing what she was saying, feeling the shape of his syllables clipped into her accent.

     They had met at the American Embassy when Zala was giving her semi-annual report. She was thirty-five; Peter was the newly appointed USAID liaison for the clinics she oversaw in the southern highlands. He had thinning blond hair and behind thick glasses his eyes were splinters of Adriatic blue. Through feathery stubble his face was as soft as a woman’s, milky but with red permanently underlying his cheeks and creases. His talk was thick with jokes, but he took notes the entire time she spoke and he made no corrections to her English, her third language. She’d grown up in Sarajevo—her father had been Bosnian, a surgeon, her mother Belgian, born in the Congo before its independence.
     “Which makes home where?” Peter said.
     "That depends," Zala said. "Where am I this week?”
     Peter understood; he’d worked in six countries in twenty-five years.
     “Since I was ten.” She leaned into the conference table, biting her lower lip, grinning. She had a womanly face, she’d decided, too solidly framed to be pretty, even when ruffled by black, unruly curls. But she knew what made it dimple.
     He asked her to dinner the next Saturday. His house was a British-era villa on Kololo Hill, where clipped hedges made the news of fake checkpoints and rebel attacks into rumors of another country down the hill and into the bush. The house had butter-yellow walls and smelled of sandalwood, and stepping in from the loamy evening air, Zala pictured servants in old colonial uniforms, standing at attention for any need she might invent.
     After dinner, Peter offered to make up a bed for her on the couch. Kampala had few streetlights; night driving was dangerous. She put one hand on his shoulder, thanking him, and held it there for a moment, playing with the idea that it might be their most formal touch. She felt his stomach give against her side and he stood, unswaying, while she slid her hands down his arms.
     In the morning she awoke with her slacks still fastened, their legs pushed up around her knees. Peter was wrapped in the covers; he must have pulled them up once she was asleep. She stood slowly, buttoning her blouse. The cook was talking in the kitchen and water was running. Zala fluffed her hair, smoothed her blouse and wriggled into good posture. It was all she’d brought; all she had to worry about.

     They had their anniversary dinner—their “demi-anniversary,” Peter said—in the sunroom by candlelight, at Zala’s preferred corner of the long table they’d sat across their first night. Peter had chilled a bottle of Tselepos Mantinia. The cook brought in the grilled Nile perch and roasted peppers Zala had suggested, and tagliatelle with a basket of hot bread.
     “But not baked on a stone,” he said. Zala had mail-ordered him a baking stone like her mother’s that had yet to arrive.
     Outside was returning to gray, though Peter’s roses remained pink through the French doors, and over the garden wall the towers downtown were flecked with red where the sun clung to glass and metal.
     “It’s the light that gets me, not the heat,” Zala said. “It’s so embarrassing—for me, of all people, not to adjust.” She did like the rainy season—not the rain itself but the onrushing prows of cloud—but, really, she missed snug short winter days in Brussels, the fleeting overcast between the showers. “Ten, twelve, two o’clock—they were all the same. It was a very easy place to be.” She’d happened to be visiting her grandparents at the start of the Bosnian War and had stayed to study linguistics at the Université Libre.
     “Maybe that’s where you need to go.” Peter reached across her plate for bread.
     “No. It’s a—daydream, yes? To think of, but not to do now.”
     “There have to be lots of jobs.”
     “I have a job.” She speared a pepper with her fork.
     “But not for good.”
     “I think it’s pretty good.” She sniffed her wine. Maybe it was an American reflex to look for happily ever after. She was content to be a visitor. Each night for the first few weeks she was with Peter, she had come over with a small suitcase and some clothes that needed washing, until half her wardrobe was in his closet. Not all: never all. Better to be safely scattered, and each night to have the luxury of the choice she was avoiding. “Six months is so long to be happy,” she said. “And not to think about it. So I start to think about it, and I think: I don’t want to think about anything.”
     The candles were burning unevenly, one brightly bobbing, the other tall and trailing smoke and drowning in melted wax. Zala pinched it out.
     “What if I didn’t go back?” Peter’s face fluttered in the sudden shadows.
     Zala knew—they’d talked about it—that the American government classified Uganda as a hardship post, and Peter’s next post, in three years, would be to Washington. To his wife.
     Double bags sagged below his eyes. He circled his mouth clean, two fingers hooded in his napkin. “They will let me choose another hardship post. If you want.”
     He laid his arm along his placemat, his palm open by her napkin. He and the room had bent to a great distance and his eyes shrunk behind his glasses to those of a smaller, younger face. She was glad she had no photos of him before his jowls and paunch. She hadn’t thought she was offering or accepting love. Comfort and company, yes, but for now, for this place. She could already see their goodbye, at a boarding gate at the Entebbe airport. She would pick seats by a window, in the lee of a check-in desk, three chairs so they could keep his bags—or hers—safe between them.
     “The thing is,” she said, “I don’t know where I’m going after this.”
     “That’s perfect.”
     She tried to grin his answer into banter, but dessert—chocolate cake and coffee—went down and clumped as if wet cardboard. Afterwards, in bed, she felt his tentative hand under her pajama bottoms and turned onto her back. He rolled her top up under her breasts. Every night was one day closer to when his wife would have him back, one day less that Zala had stolen. If she went with him to another post, her theft would continue until—when? The back of her throat scratched from the air conditioning, but she waited to feel his hand go slack and hear his breath asleep before she rolled up in the covers.

     At breakfast, Peter talked about tilapia farming. That was OK; anything was OK. It had rained a little in the night, but the clouds had blown off before the sun and the tile roofs and hedges were as scrubbed and freshly etched with shadows as Zala felt. She would tell him in the evening, when such things should be said.
     The morning’s car was a white Chevrolet SUV upholstered in black leather, scented with cigar smoke and sloughed-off aftershave. As usual, she and Peter rode in the back seat, separated from the driver by a sliding Plexiglas partition, Peter on the left, she on the right. He lowered the armrest between them and swung up its cover for the slot where he put his Blackberry, beside the cup holder, as if anyone would trust coffee with leather seats in Kampala traffic. He sighed. She knew: he hated being driven, and having the people that he was there to help see him through darkened windows.
     They turned onto Acacia Road, into a stream of boda bodas—Kampala’s ubiquitous mopeds—and white minivan taxis that might stop without signaling at any moment. Zala crossed her legs. Peter slid the partition shut and clicked off the intercom.
     “I told Carol.”
     His wife.
     “Told her what?”
     “Everything.”
     “Everything?”
     His hair stuck with sweat across the top of his forehead. “She wanted to know who made the first move.”
     “I did!” Zala said. “Did you tell her I did?”
     “I said that I’d never meant to do this, but I’d never met anyone like you…”
     “Don’t…” Zala held up her hands, palms out. “Don’t…”
     Their driver tapped on the Plexiglas and pointed for them to look behind. A white Land Rover was inches off their rear bumper, its headlights invisible below the rim of the window. A copy of the Daily Monitor was folded on its dashboard. Zala recognized the photo from breakfast, and the top of the headline, “Finance Minister Defends Land Deal.” A second Land Rover swerved into oncoming bodas. A man with a shaved head leaned out of the first Land Rover’s front passenger window. He was lighter skinned than most men Zala saw around Kampala and in the southern highlands, with a narrow face pointing to a clean-shaven chin. The rippled black plastic of an automatic rifle was locked in the crook of his arm.
     “Lord’s Army,” the driver said.
     “We don’t know.” Peter pressed his keypad. “Make a left on Yusuf Lule.”
     Zala recognized his suddenly precise pronunciation and level inflection from how her father had talked in the first days of Serb shelling, when booms on his end of the line had thumped her receiver into static. Danger ruled out feeling. Danger meant that all attention had to be on details: how closely their driver came up behind the bodas, and how the passengers jacked up on the back seats didn’t turn to look; how the drivers’ parkas puffed with slipstream.
     “Myself and one Bosnian national.” Peter said into the phone. “Acacia.”
     The golf course on Yusuf Lule Road snapped out of the windshield into the dark side window. The man with the rifle yelled towards the second Land Rover and swept his gun-free arm forward over his head. The folded Monitor slid towards the driver’s side of the dash.
     “Fifteen hundred,” Peter said.
     Zala braced her left hand against the front seat and her right hand on the door. She would be a dim silhouette to the man with the rifle, not even clearly a mzungu, as her mother had referred to Europeans when saying how les Africains respected them. So much for Zala’s penance for that—as if anyone wanted her apology.
     “How are you doing?” Peter said.
     “Fine.”
     “Good.” He raised his voice. “Go right on Jinja. The police will be at Coryndon.”
     Around the traffic circle, the driver’s horn split schools of boda bodas. Ten, twenty feet of dust and pavement opened between them and the first Land Rover and filled in with women balancing sacks and fabric on their heads, women on the backs of bodas in slacks and sleeveless tops with leather handbags and men, cuffs and shirttails flapping past a minivan skidding to a stop.
     At the end of a long shed, a truck was backing across three lanes. A box truck: single rear axle, scuffed white cargo container with “Kintale Market” in red script above a cartoon cornucopia, a thin red cab and a man in the passenger seat paddling his arm wildly out the window. Their driver braced his palms against the horn and flattened his head into his headrest. Zala felt their wheels lock. A minivan swerved past the truck, honked towards them and dopplered away. Red dust curtained the windows and the SUV spun tail first towards the truck’s undercarriage. She shut her eyes and covered her face.
     “Your ears.” Peter cupped his hands over hers and slid them under her hair.

     Kampala. The word stung into Zala’s sleep, nasal in an American woman’s voice, strained through a small speaker: the State Department is still holding victims’ identities while the investigation is ongoing.
     The words were dimmed by a low-pitched hum from somewhere deeper than Zala’s eardrums, as though her head were a fluorescent bulb that had finally been switched on. The hum paused when she held her breath and dropped a half step when she raised her head. She’d been sleeping sitting up, her arms goose-bumped under a thin brown cotton blanket. The bed she was in had metal side rails and slanted from her waist up to two doughy pillows with stiff cases. Her cheeks and nostrils had a bleached burning feeling. She missed Kampala’s warm, damp scent and Peter’s sandalwood. She was spinning in colorless noon light, a white blur of sky to her left, a blue glow head-on beaming the American woman over the hum: coming up next—summer means heading to the beach; we’ll look at what you need for the memories of a lifetime.
     Somewhere to the right, a doorknob clicked. The click was followed two pairs of feet—a man’s dull thuds and a pair of stacked heels that seemed to double off Zala’s skull.
     “Relax,” the man said.
     He had an American accent, a trim goatee and a nametag on a white coat: Doctor Rabineau. Zala remembered that. The woman beside him was short, slim, her dark hair pulled into a bun and her eyebrows plucked, the pale curve of her face unmarred by lines or visible bone structure. Her black jacket rode up over an untucked pink blouse.
     “How are you doing?” She leaned over Zala’s bed and held the back of her hand to the side of Zala’s head. Cold spiked in towards the roots of Zala’s eyes. Zala gasped, and the woman snapped her hand back.
     “Go slow,” Doctor Rabineau said. “She’ll flood easily.”
     If you’re like most of us, the blue glow beamed, you want the most for your dollar…
     “We just need you to look at a few photos,” the woman said. “Can you do that? Just tell me if anything looks familiar.”
     Zala drew in the air to say “yes” but her scalp was too clenched for her to release the sound. It was though she was coated in a new muscle and had no control of it. The woman smoothed the blanket and sat slowly on the bed, unzipping a slender black case of photos matted in clear plastic. She thumbed past a few sheets to a greenish, unsmiling close-up of a man with a wide, flat nose, deep smile lines and pockmarks under his cheekbones. Zala shook her head. “This?” A man in a white turban with a fine line of moustache down to his beard? No—Zala’s Land Rover man hadn’t thickened enough yet for his thirties.
     …Say farewell to allergies, and hello to summer…
     “Had you and Mr. Wilkinson been followed before?” The woman put the photos in her lap and laid her hand on Zala’s wrist. “My name is Megan. I’m sorry if this is difficult.”
     “It’s not.” Zala wiped her eyes. The entire left side of the room was white sky, plate glass, twelve or more stories up. Four and five story stone buildings pricked with thin windows punched into the haze. Deep green foliage rolled in from a rumpled distance pierced by a white obelisk and a round colonnade by a flash of water.
     …Your morning commute just got a little bit easier…
     Peter was face down on the pavement after a blow to the back of the head with the butt of an AK-47. The man with the AK had slung it over his shoulder and was pulling Peter up by his necktie. Zala could recall their positions as precisely as if she was imagining them.
     …After the headlines, we’ll have a State Department briefing…
     “Whatever you can tell me,” Megan said.
     “Please.” Zala mimed turning a dial. Air or bone cracked, just in from her ears. They were light cracks without discomfort, sprinkling up towards the top of her head. It was the sound of crust expanding on loaves of pain de campagne that her mother had set on a rack to cool. “It was this that we did in Africa,” her mother used to say. “Il faut imaginer son pays. You must imagine home.” A splash of water tossed into a heated oven made steam and hardened the crust.
     “The TV.” Megan closed her case. “Turn it down.”
     “Where’s the remote?” Doctor Rabineau leaned over the bed, peered at the little bedside table and the chair in the far corner of the room. Megan sighed and stood up to the television set. The glow snapped off.
     “Did you ever hear fresh bread?” Zala said.
     “No,” Megan said.
     “That’s how it sounds.” She pointed to her head.
     Doctor Rabineau stood at the foot of the bed and folded his arms.
     “You’re going to be okay,” he said. “Whatever you may think is going on, the MRI showed no bleed after the initial injury. Trust us, and you’ll feel a lot better.”
     “You’re safe,” Megan said. “We want to hear everything you have to tell us.”

     “Now—no one’s going to make you say yes,” Doctor Rabineau said. “But his widow asked to see you.”
     “Carol.” Zala had tried not to say the name in Peter’s hearing. “Why?”
     “You’ll have to ask her.”
     Doctor Rabineau clicked his pen point in and out. Zala wondered if he had difficulty with any conversation that couldn’t be concluded by a diagnosis or prescription.
     Her thoughts were flowing better today. After breakfast, the booming in her head had settled into a throb like trucks idling, and now, as clearly as she’d seen goodbye to Peter at Entebbe, she saw Carol’s visit. Not Carol’s face—Peter hadn’t put out pictures, and for Zala a name been enough. It wasn’t as though they’d been going to meet. But meeting his widow was different. Zala nodded and let her head collapse her pillows.
     “Good girl.” Doctor Rabineau patted her leg.
     She pictured him making an observation—patient’s moral faculty intact—in a chart no one was keeping. She was only doing ce qu’il faut—what she had to; what remained possible.
     It was this that we did in Africa.

     “I’d started to think Peter and I were going to make it.” Carol panned across Zala and up and down the way women in supermarkets study ingredient lists on packages. Zala could either stare back or look away. Carol was as tall as Peter had been, maybe a hundred eighty centimeters, and square-jawed from below. A few unfastened strands of hair curled under her chin. The bow of her upper lip peaked in sharp points. Her eyebrows were dusted with gray, her pupils almost black behind small oblong glasses on the top ledge of her cheeks.
     “Well—Peter kept his taste,” she said.
     “I’m sorry?”
     “They left your face alone, too.”
     “My face?” Zala pushed herself up on her elbows for more air. The cracking trickled up the right side of her head. If she leaned into the sound and wiggled her ear, something snapped into place and the trucks returned to idling. “Mrs. Wilkinson.” It sounded wrong—too young, too abject. “I’m sorry.”
     “You’re sorry.”
     Carol lowered herself in sitting position over the end of the bed. Zala slid her legs aside. Pain seized the right side of her head. She gasped. Carol started to get up.
     “No,” Zala said.
     From eye level, Carol’s face seemed reapportioned, her pupils slowly roaming, her forehead furrowed askance, her mouth pulled up on one side, crinkling the skin below her eye in a way that could have gone into a smile or a cry.
     Peter had called her that last morning.
     “The first I knew of you,” she said. “You were the reason he was leaving.”
     “I didn’t know.” Zala’s throat refused to swallow. “I would have said no.”
     “But you didn’t.”
     “No,” Zala said.
     Carol had on no make-up except a light lip-gloss, and no jewelry except an almond-sized tiger’s eye on a thin gold chain.
     “He was a good man,” Zala said.
     “Oh, yes,” Carol said. “He loved Africa so much that he left two daughters who were still in high school.”  She pushed her loose hair back, splayed her fingers over her eyes, inhaled and pressed her hands to the sides of her head. Her fingers were long and her nails unpolished, cut square and even. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m saying.”
     Zala’s head hurt too much for her to reply, and she didn’t have the English to say what she wanted to, that recompense could only be made too late. By the time she’d been able to return to Sarajevo, safety had once again been regulated and her parents’ apartment building condemned, its front door bolted. Through a cracked, half-boarded window, the lobby’s black and white diagonal tiles looked dusty but intact. But then, the shell hits had been on the roof and five floors up, in Zala’s mother’s kitchen.

     The afternoon Zala was released, Carol returned unannounced. She was wearing nylon pants that swished when she moved and a dark blue sweatshirt with “NAVY” in white letters. Her hair was in a ponytail. Outside the window, the day was done thundering. Doctor Rabineau had said that Zala’s head might register shifts in barometric pressure for some time. If she’d ever driven up or down a mountain, she would know the feeling. The rain had deepened the leaves and darkened cement and stone, and under the rags of low cloud the city resembled Brussels at the end of spring term. It was the right time to leave.
     “Where are they putting you?” Carol sat in the chair in the far corner.
     “Arlington.” Zala leaned over the night table for her hairbrush, bracing her hand on the bed. They’d gotten her a suite in a Marriott. The State Department would only extend her a ten-day visa, and Doctor Rabineau wanted to see her in two weeks.
     “If they thought you knew something, you wouldn’t have to worry about a visa,” Carol said. “And they wouldn’t be putting you in a Marriott.”
     Zala didn’t have much to pack: the hairbrush, and strawberry-scented lip balm that one of the nurses had brought her, a replacement passport, a clear plastic drawstring bag to hold them, sunglasses. The slacks and blouse she’d worn that last morning with Peter been washed and left folded on her bed but someone must have kept her scarf.
     “I wanted to ask.” Carol’s voice was quiet. Zala pulled the drawstring tight and set the bag on the floor beside the bed. “Did you hear his last words?”
     Zala dropped onto the bed. Men had been shouting, in Luganda, English, Swahili and a language Zala didn’t recognize. The man in the box truck had left its engine grumbling. Zala was kneeling, macadam into pressed her kneecaps, her back to a gun barrel and someone’s hand so tight around her neck that she had to lift her chin.
     Physically, it would be simple. Bullets would perforate her chest wall regardless of how it was pressing against her esophagus. A meter and a half, and her head would be on the pavement, as she’d been told her father had lain for three days, until it had been thought safe to retrieve his body.
     Peter was close enough that he bumped her right elbow. His hand was limp and wet. The man with the AK was suspending him by his necktie into a wavering kneel. Peter’s throat heaved, frog-like. His glasses were off. He wouldn’t stop blinking. Then Zala’s jaw was jerked back and something cracked in her neck. Warmth washed up from the back of her head, around her ears and down her forehead.
     “And after that,” Carol said. “You didn’t see him?”
     The narrow-faced man stalked into Zala’s view, placing each step before giving it his weight, moving swiftly nonetheless. Zala straightened her back and raised her chin. The narrow-faced man grabbed Peter’s tie, held it taut and pulled a serrated thick-handled knife from a leg sheath and across Peter’s throat. Blood stuttered from the tear and from Peter’s mouth, and down his shirt into the dust.
     “No,” Zala said. “The next I knew, I was here.”
     “Of course.” Carol shook her head, eyes shut. She faced Zala fully before opening them. “I don’t know what I was hoping for.”
     “Seeing it wouldn’t help.” Zala said.
     “Nothing helps.” Carol’s fingers felt past her ears and tightened her ponytail. The sky had whitened almost to the color of the obelisk. Carol stood, straightened her sweatshirt over the top of her pants and settled her purse strap on her shoulder. “I’ll walk you downstairs.”
     At the nurses’ station, Zala signed two forms without reading them. The duty nurse explained: one form certified that Zala was fully aware of her condition. The other released her physician from responsibility.
     “And that’s it,” the nurse said. “You’re free.”
     Carol was standing by the elevator bank, dangling a key ring from her index finger. The length of the hall was muffled with strangers’ distant mutter. In the elevator, a polite silence between six nurses shut Zala in her head with her hum. Today it was coming in booms, long and steady, like breathing. Carol’s chest was tan and nubbly where her sweatshirt was unzipped.
     “It’s hot,” Zala said.
     “It is,” Carol said.
     In the lobby, chairs were silting up with patients. Later, their faces, cleared of any expression, would join Bosnians and Ugandans on the inside of Zala’s eyelids.
     The rubber foot of the revolving door thumped behind her. Outside, the air clung with smoke from a cart selling roasted peanuts at the curb. Passing window glass flashed. But Zala’s stomach felt taut and flat, and she was almost on her way. Until she arrived, where she was going could be anywhere.