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for coffins was long gone. Daily I heard the dynamite crack, loosening the terrible frozen earth to sneak in the sheet-wrapped corpses, tall and short but almost all bone thin, pulled in on sleds, abandoned at the cemeteries for group burial. Too many to name or count or care about. But I would not come to such an anonymous end, I told myself, even then as though looking back from a great distance of years.
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    In a small town near the Pacific Coast, Alena and I had walked the square, taken in a colonial church with an unusually fine and simple wooden altar, and purchased a fabulous melon from a stall on the street.
    The melon was unlike any I had previously encountered, and I have seen only one since, on another trip to Central America. It was large and oblong like a watermelon but with a pale, ridged, almost-white rind that made it look more like a winter squash than a summer fruit.
    It grew heavy in my arms as we waited for the boat that would ferry us across half of Lake Nicaragua, to the island of Ometepe. There, a small band of us planned to collect what we could of the coffee, sesame, and strange fruits that grew in its fertile volcanic soil. We would also take notes on an unusual breed of cattle for colleagues in Tbilisi and photograph some pre-Columbian petroglyphs by request of the culture ministry. Alena and I hoped to photograph some howler monkeys.
    Heat was coming in with the day, and a pack of dirty boys pestered us for coins. The great director stood at the launch, looking out toward the two volcanoes that rose from the lake to form the largest freshwater island in the world. It struck me that he was seeking to putmaximum physical distance — indeed all forms of distance — between himself and the little beggars.
    I watched a woman just down the shore, washing clothes on the rock. Unlike cheap travel paintings of boisterous women working and gossiping and splashing together, she was straight-faced and alone. She washed her family’s clothes not as a social event but because they needed to be cleaned.
    Sergei, loaded with bananas, distributed them to the beggars, and with the eating they again became boys, joking and playing hopping games with Sergei until the boat pulled close.
    On the boat’s deck, moving slowly toward the clouds and volcanoes of Ometepe, we cut into the melon.
    I was surprised at Alena’s appetite, which, four months into her first pregnancy, had been weak for some time. And the large lake’s water was chopped by the strong, warm wind, makingthe boat jerk up and down. Yet Alena devoured slice after slice of the melon’s rich orange flesh. Over and over, she said, “I’ve never eaten anything so good” and “Absolute ambrosia.” And I thought: I do not know this woman at all.
    I had such high hopes for us at that moment. I had already lied to her, of course, but I thought that along with the baby we would be delivered a new beginning.
    Alena spit a melon seed into the sublime lake, warmth bathed us, and we were deeply happy for the last time.
    What I realized only later, after seeing it again more than once, was that the return of Alena’s appetite was caused by the plummeting of her hormones. She was no longer sick from pregnancy.
    Alena miscarried the baby in a not entirely uncomfortable inn, in the middle of medical nowhere. She rested on the clean sheets that the innkeeper had insisted we accept while wewaited for a boat to return us to real land. I sat at a table outside and watched our friends swim foolishly among the small but still dangerous freshwater sharks. I drank a sweet, purple drink made from pitaya fruit, and then beer after beer, and ate, grilled, three of the small fish that live nowhere in the world but Lake Nicaragua.
    A local man used only a small stick to move a herd of a dozen or so cattle down the beach. I imagined him returning to a simple meal, a thick-waisted wife, and a