Rosa Maric had many rituals. She woke at exactly the same time every day, washed her face and hands and her body, wiping each part with a warm flannel cloth, her armpits, under her breasts, between her legs, legs, feet and then she put cream on her skin and brushed her hair. She made coffee, prepared breakfast for everyone. She opened up the shop. And on Thursday mornings—she had chosen this day as it had been the first day she left the house after baby Yasen died—she went into the woods. No matter the weather. Yasen was born three years after Mona, a strong baby, eyes like blue marbles, a mouth as soft as the inside of a cloud. What happened? Rosa wondered. He looked perfectly healthy. But one day, he simply did not wake up. His life sucked out of him overnight. In his crib, unmoving. Rosa had seen death, all kinds of death, had caused death, was at the brink of death, but she had never experienced such short life, which just the day before had felt so forcefully evident in the tiny grip of its fist, the ferocity of its cry, she had never seen such life just disappear. There had always been a cause: war, hunger, savagery, disease, old age, accidents. But what was this? God’s will? The wheel of fortune? Bad luck?

After Yasen’s death, Rosa spent a month in bed. There was nowhere she could go, no one she could talk to, nothing she could do. It was Diogen, Ruben’s brother, who helped her. Ruben was devastated and could do no more than hug his wife and weep.

After the month in bed, Diogen went to her room and said, “Rosa, this cannot go on. You have to get up. You have another child. She needs you. You’ve been through the war, you know how to fight.” Diogenes said whatever he could think of, hoping it might stir the light in her soul. “I am taking you to the forest.”

He dragged her out of bed, took a warm flannel cloth and wiped her body. Face, breasts, between her legs, legs, feet. Every morning. It was as if she was being embalmed, or had returned to being an infant herself. Rosa surrendered to the process, felt herself removed from her body, like the flannel was wiping a wooden board that was somehow now meant to be her body. There was no sensitivity to her skin, no tickles, no pain, no sensuality. Then, Diogen would put her in the car and drive out of town, to the mountain where the forest changed from short, shrubby trees to tall birches and oaks and beeches, and the shade was comfortable and the light dappled and golden. The forest emerged onto a deep canyon with a sparkling river below, and at the top of the mountain was a bench and a shrine to a goddess who was said to bridge life and the afterlife and where people went and left mementos for their deceased loved ones. Diogen knew that Rosa would at least be stirred by the forest, and it was true that when she entered the woods, Rosa felt as if some of her had returned, that she had caught a glimpse of a way out from the deep grief that had entombed her soul. And every day, she and Diogen would go up to the top, and she would sit at the shrine, which was on a freshwater spring, and weep for her boy, thus suspended, Rosa, Comrade Rosa, the great huntress and warrior, between life and death, between the earth and the sky.

…

Ruben, Rosa and Mona sat at the dining table; there was lamb roast for dinner, Ruben’s favorite. The news was on; the search for the missing twins, 12-year-old girls, was continuing to no avail.

Rosa wasn’t thinking about Ruben leaving, or about Diogen. She was thinking of the missing sisters. Their family had lived in the house next to where Rosa grew up; Rosa played with Anka, the girls’ mother, when they were little. She had met the girls when they were little. Small, toddling twins with bows in their hair for Sunday church service. Rosa thought, Perhaps I could do something to help. Since hearing about the disappearance, it was all she could think about. Her own daughter seemed so distant these days, Ruben was going away, Diogen was in a world of his own. Rosa felt that she might be needed, felt this urge, a pull toward the twin sisters who were God knows where, and it was so cold out there. Snow calf-deep. She thought of the many ditches around their village, places where it was possible to fall in, the unreliable marshland, the rocks carved with crevasses. Animals sometimes fell in. Why couldn’t the girls?

The next morning, Rosa went into the garage and got into the shiny Lada, which was as cold as a grave. Rosa rubbed her hands together, started the engine. She drove out of town. The road was slippery, her pace slow. The town went past her, covered with snow. People’s faces crimson with the roughness of the wind.

“The Nation is freezing,” said Rosa.

The village of her birth was 15 kilometers out of town. The road was winding, and Rosa drove slowly. Trees were pointing at the gloomy sky like crooked fingers, interrupted by pine trees that stood in resolute triangles. The countryside was covered in snow that reached up to the knees; Rosa hoped with all her heart that the girls were alive. Magpies made the cricketing, rattling noise, that hacking cough cry of theirs; they sat on the frozen ground together with the crows, pecking with their strong beaks, trying to find dead things in the snow.

Rosa arrived at her old house, a place where now no one lived. She looked up at the three pines that were planted when some of her brothers and sisters were born. One had grown to the sky, the other two had remained dwarfish. The tall one had been planted when her sister, Nada, was born. Nada suffered from ill health all her life and died early. Rosa always thought that perhaps it was the tree sucking up her life energy, but of course, this was irrational. She walked around the house. The walls had fallen in. The house of the family of the missing twins was at the back. Rosa walked through the snow, called out Heeya! as was customary. No one responded. She knocked on the door, and soon enough, Anka answered.

“Praise be to Jesus.”

“And to Mary,” answered Rosa.

Anka looked like hell.

“I’ve come to try and help search for the girls,” said Rosa.

Anka motioned her to come in. She was home alone. Her husband was in the fields, searching, Anka said.

“Sit down.”

Rosa sat. Anka brought out coffee and grape brandy. The women drank the brandy first, straight down.

“When my mother died,” said Anka, “she cursed me. I had left my first husband. He was beating me. I had bruises the size of summer plums on my face. He’d come home and drink and go straight for me. The twins had to watch it all. So I left him, I left the village. I was married off in the neighboring village.”

“I remember,” said Rosa.

“I came home with the girls, but she wouldn’t look at me. Father let me stay, said my husband was a beast. It was a disgrace, my mother said. To be a wife who was discharged, that’s what she said. Now, no one will ever have you. That bastard never gave me a divorce. But then he died. There is a God in Heaven, I tell you, and I met Ante.” She paused, scratched the fabric of the tablecloth a little with her fingernail. “But my mother cursed me. She said happiness will never be yours. Those were her parting words from this world, aimed at me. I’d only just remarried. Father had died the year before.”

Rosa saw the black-and-white picture of the old pair. The mother had a slight moustache, the father a large one. They were both serious. Their cheeks warmed by a salmon blush.

“For years, everything was okay. Ante is a good man. We work the land, live off what we make. The twins grew up in a peaceful home. And now this. It’s my mother, from somewhere, working that curse.”

Rosa said, “Come on Anka, you know that sort of stuff doesn’t exist. We’ll find them. All sorts of dark thoughts come to one in a time of crisis. We’ll find them. Tell me what happened the day they went missing.”

Anka said that the girls had gone out, probably to go into the next town, which they sometimes did on foot. It wasn’t so cold that day. She thought they were with Ante, pulling up cabbages. And when Ante came home and found they were not there, he asked where they were and that’s when they realized that they had not returned. They waited and waited, but the girls did not come, not in the morning, not the next evening. Then they called the police.

“But the truth is, the police are doing little. It’s the hunters and people from the village who are out searching. I am sure it’s your own grief that makes you understand mine.”

Rosa had to swallow hard.

“I am grateful for anyone willing to look.”

Anka didn’t cry, as such. Her eyes were two permanent pools of grief, her head in a scarf. She too was like Mary, watching her crucified son.

Rosa walked across the flat, snowy plains that stretched behind the village. There was a distant barking of dogs. The wind was cutting. The snow fell into her eyes and chilled them. Rosa had been deemed “exceptional” as a partisan. She was known for her incredible dexterity, logical thinking and endurance. Also her memory. And here she was, in the middle of the field, binoculars on, her back straight. She was a huntress, a Diana. She felt like she understood it all. The deer tracks, they led into the woods; the hooves of a singular boar, covered by snow. She remembered everything from when she was a child; the way they used to go tracking, understood where each animal lived and how it behaved and when it came out in search of food. She remembered everything from the war. There were wolves when she was small; there were wolves in the war. There were wolves now; they came down to get the sheep and the chickens in the night. Jackals, too.

She tried to spot the others, saw several black figures in the distance and walked toward them. The land was flat, and in the summer, the fields were busy with mosquitoes, dragonflies, crickets, grasshoppers, frogs. The reeds were tall, swaying this way and that. Now, everything was white, like the surface of the moon, and Rosa was a lonely explorer, an olive dot on the horizon, moving forth. She put on her fluorescent armband, to be visible from a distance.

When she reached the search party, she saw that they were volunteers from the village and a couple of policemen who were mostly ill equipped. The villagers, all men, were the hunters. They had rifles, tall boots and squinting eyes; theirs were the rough faces of men who bore the elements. Several dogs ran around. And Ante, of course. Looking lost, repeating, “Oh dear, they must be so cold, wherever they are,” his breath a storm of vapor. They had been looking for three days. Nothing. Rosa found out what areas they’d covered.

“There are some pits over to the north. Let’s try there,” she said.

“The abandoned mines?”

“Yes.”

So they went north, and they searched. The day was short, and they searched until nightfall. The snow fell and fell. Their boots creaked. No one talked. Every so often, they yelled “Marina! Ana!” to one side, “Marina! Ana!” to another side, “Marina! Ana!” to the ground, “Marina! Ana!” to the sky. No one answered, save the echo of their voices.

After two days of searching to no avail, the situation seemed hopeless. The girls had been missing a week already; no one could survive such conditions. The search group had been reduced to the old hunter Josip, and his two nephews, Oto and Efi, who were eighteen, over six feet tall, and rather gregarious. The rest had lost hope, had homes to return to, their own worries to tend to. Oto and Efi had been sent by their father to help the search, as an aid to Josip, and “to learn something,” their father had said. They found the idea of Rosa, or rather, a woman, searching, a woman being able to withstand the physical strain of the cold and walking, they found that very funny and surreal, and mocked Rosa when they thought that she wasn’t looking. What they did not realize was that Rosa, set in search mode, her senses completely attuned to the world around her, heard all and saw all. It was as if an inner compass was guiding her, as if she were a wild animal, sniffing the ground, noticing every movement in the forest, a rushing of leaves, a movement of a bush.

She watched for birds, for a murder of crows moving across the sky; if the girls were dead, the scavengers would go for them. She smelled the air for wild animals. She noticed how it moved behind trees like a whisper. Oto and Efi made faces impersonating Rosa, silly noises that were meant to sound like her.

Tired of these two enormous idiots, Rosa said, “I’m going to head east toward the mines one more time, there is one that we didn’t get to the other day. I’ll check there. If either of us finds something, fire the light bullets, okay?”

Rosa headed toward the old mine, along the straight path that they had been down a few days before, and walked past the first coal pits. Started and abandoned several years ago; not enough coal. She walked on, to the one that sat four kilometers further from the rest. It was a dead part of the landscape. No one came here. The woods were where life went on, where mushrooms popped up, where berry bushes prickled, trees blossomed and pines threw their cones to the ground. Where, if one was as quiet as a shadow, one could watch a doe lick its baby with divine tenderness. But here, there was nothing. Flat lands. Miners were brought in with their families, housed in the small town nearby. They were transported at the earliest sign of dawn to work, but hardly anything came out of those pits. So they moved the miners on to better underground areas. The ground was porous, and over the years, some of the mines had collapsed in places and were now open pits. And then, it happened. Rosa heard them. Help, shouted the little voices. Help! For a moment, Rosa thought she was hallucinating. But then she knew what she was hearing. She ran toward the voices.

For years to come, Rosa dreamed of the moment she saw the girls. They lay curled on the ground, skeletal. Their eyes were open and their mouths were open, shouting for help, teeth chattering, going in and out of consciousness.

“Oh my god,” Rosa said, her breath nearly giving in on her, but she collected herself. “Don’t worry; help is here! We’ll get you out.”

She fired three bullets into the sky. She then tied a rope to a boulder and descended into the pit. Her backpack contained everything she needed to administer first aid. Rosa wrapped up each girl in special Civil Protection blankets, with careful and decisive movements. Her adrenaline was pumping, making her feel like a young partisan again working a dangerous secret mission. She lifted the first girl over her shoulder and told her to hold on while she climbed up the rope. At the top she laid her on the ground and wrapped her in another blanket. She limbed down again, put the second girl over her shoulder and climbed up the rope. She saw Josip approach. He had some type of radio, which he used to call for help.

The girls looked at Rosa with wonder in their eyes and said, “Thank you, thank you.”

Rosa gave them warm tea from a flask and kept them wrapped up in many blankets until the ambulance came.

Everyone thought that the survival of the sisters was a miracle. The Nation followed the story, and many donated money to the family. The girls were transferred to the capital on a helicopter sent over by the president himself.

Rosa was awarded a medal for exceptional courage, which she accepted. The girls lost their legs to gangrene. There were newspaper pictures of them in wheelchairs, knitting, looking casual. When interviewed, one of the girls said, speaking for both of them, “We believe in fortune, and sometimes fortune does not favor you. Sometimes you’re luckier than anyone on Earth. The wheel of fortune turns and turns. One never knows where it will stop.”