Your sweet voice no longer rolls down across the water, across the rivers of Anaguri, across the sea, across the ocean to our valley. We no more can hear you calling us to your good country to join the seven native sons beneath the seven stars, at arms or at table. When you stumbled, we must have felt our mother the earth tremble. Your brother wails now from the mountains, where the bells demand: Why, why?

How can I write on the death of a friend I never really knew? We shared food, drink, and song on both sides of the world, but we spoke only briefly, only through second languages and interpreters. Bondo never came to my home or met my cats or even my fiancee. I never saw his home or his brother or knew if he loved someone. Now my fiancee is my wife, my cats have died, my home has new tenants for the third time, and Bondo's brother is home in the mountains with his mother, where I'll never meet them.

What the hell can I write? I don't know how he received guests, I don't know if he loved children or sent them running, I don't know whether he trusted in Christ, pagan gods, neither, or both. I don't even know what Bondo felt about his music. Did he celebrate and embrace folk tradition, or was folk music something to be rescued from the folk--or was it just a way to make a living? Would he even remember me or care that I was writing this? I know my name was too foreign for him to remember, but that's just a name--I have trouble with Ramin's name too, and I don't think he would doubt that I remembered him.

I hate the cruel thing that has happened. I hate the distance that makes the hatred linger without relief. I harbor no conceit that I have written any of this well, but I must write it to expunge that hatred. What was it Rustaveli wrote? What tears down enmity, builds up love.