On Fridays at half past two Miroslav was the first to leave his office in Marijin Dvor, before his boss and before anyone could catch him to ask about some statement. He worked as a tax adviser at a firm that taught people how to pay less, while he himself always paid everything, and on time. At the Markale market he bought a full bag of early cherries, at the toy shop by the Cathedral two wooden boats for Zoja and Ema, and on Baščaršija a box of rose rahatlokum, from the same shop where he used to buy it for Nevena when they were students. At four he was sitting on the train to Konjic with the bags on his knees, like a boy going home for the holidays.
They had bought the house above the Neretva three years ago, on credit, for the girls. An old stone house with a wooden porch, plum trees in the yard and a view of the river, which in summer was as green as bottle glass. Nevena spent the summers there with the children, and he came on weekends. In the first years she waited for him at the station in Konjic, in a summer dress, with Zoja and Ema running along the platform and shouting his name as if he were coming back from another continent. This year, since she had met the people from the art colony in June, something else was waiting for him at the station.
This time it was an old white van full of people. At the wheel sat Ševal, who was shooting a documentary about something he had never managed to explain in one sentence. Next to him was Sena, a poet with her hair cropped to the skin, who had published a collection of poems without a single capital letter. In the back seat was Kiki, a painter whose real name nobody knew, with his feet up on the window. Nevena got out last. She was tanned, barefoot and smiling, and she kissed him on the cheek quickly, the way you kiss a cousin at the airport. "Miro! What bags have you brought? Look, everyone, Miro has brought bags." Laughter came from the van, and Miroslav laughed with them, because he did not know what else to do.
The girls were not in the van. They were at the neighbor's, Aunt Šuhreta's, Nevena explained on the way, because grown-ups sometimes had to work in peace. In the yard Miroslav could not find the plastic pool he had spent an hour and a half blowing up by mouth last summer. He found it behind the woodshed, deflated and wrapped in a tarp. "It was ruining the composition," said Kiki, who had set up an easel on the terrace. "That blue. It was killing the whole valley." The guest room was now Kiki's studio, Sena slept in the room next to it, and Nevena made up the couch in the hallway for Miroslav, because, as she said, he was used to sleeping anywhere anyway.
The cherries disappeared before dinner, but nobody ate them. Kiki tipped them into a clay bowl, put Miroslav's tie from the bench next to them and began to paint. "Still life with a clerk's cherries," he said, and everyone laughed. Ševal filmed it. Sena opened the box of lokum, took one cube, sniffed it and put it back. "Who still eats rahatlokum?" she said. "It's like eating a postcard." Nevena laughed loudest. Miroslav waited for her to look at him, to tell him with her eyes that she knew where that box came from. She did not look at him.
On Saturday at noon they all set off for the river. Miroslav had already changed for swimming when Nevena, with a towel around her neck, stopped in the doorway. "Miro, you stay with the girls, okay? You're better with them than I am anyway. And the water is freezing, you wouldn't like it." They went down across the meadow, the four of them, Kiki with a bottle of wine, Sena with a book, Ševal with his camera, she in the middle. Miroslav sat on the steps with Zoja and Ema and floated the wooden boats in a bucket of water, because the girls were not allowed down to the river without an adult. Laughter came up from the river. Ema asked why Mom laughed differently now. Miroslav told her it was because of the water, because people laugh differently in cold water.
For dinner they grilled trout on the porch that Ševal had bought from some fisherman by the bridge. They talked about an exhibition in Belgrade, about a director who had betrayed art because he had made a commercial for a bank, about how marriage, as Sena put it, was only a contract for being bored together. Kiki asked Miroslav what exactly he did. When Miroslav began to explain, Ševal pointed the camera at him, and Kiki pretended to yawn, until Miroslav fell silent in the middle of a sentence. "Don't be angry, Miro," said Nevena, and put her hand on his shoulder, but she was looking at Sena. "They're like that with everyone." Miroslav knew that was not true. They were like that only with him.
On Sunday afternoon Ševal drove him to the station in the van. Nevena did not come. She stood on the terrace with Kiki's brush in her hand, because he had promised to teach her to paint water, and she waved the brush at him, the way you wave at someone leaving after a short, pleasant visit. The girls cried. Zoja pushed one of the wooden boats into his pocket, so that he would have it in Sarajevo.
On the train, past Bradina, where the track goes into the tunnels and the phone loses its signal, Miroslav took out the planner in which he usually wrote down deadlines for tax returns and began to write. He had not written a letter by hand since his student days. He wrote all the way to Sarajevo, tore out the pages, folded them, and in the morning, before work, handed the letter in at the Main Post Office, registered, as if he were sending a contract.
The letter said that he had seen how happy she was with those people and that he did not hold it against her. That maybe it was his fault, because he had become a man who wears a tie and buys cherries on Fridays, while she had always been someone who paints, and he had known it when he met her in the reading room at the Faculty of Philosophy, when she spilled coffee on his notes and instead of apologizing drew a fish on the stain. It said that he would not deny her freedom if she needed it. That the house was hers, that the girls could stay with her until September, and that he would not come next Friday unless she asked him to. "I love you the way I did that day with the coffee," it said at the end. "I don't know how to say it more beautifully. You always knew how to say things more beautifully."
The letter arrived on Wednesday, with the mailman who drove up to the house only twice a week. Nevena opened it on the terrace, at breakfast, and Sena snatched it out of her hand before she had read the first line. "A letter! A real letter, handwritten, registered! Everyone, this is a museum piece." She gave it back to Nevena. "Read it aloud. We all have to hear this." And Nevena read. She read in a funny, deep voice, as if she were reading a notice about a lost dog, and the three of them were rolling with laughter. At the sentence about the tie and the cherries Kiki slapped his knee. At the coffee and the fish Ševal ran off for his camera. "This should be framed," said Kiki. "This is better than anything Sena has written this year."
At the sentence about the girls and September Nevena's voice broke. She read "unless you ask me to," and then once more, quietly, in her own voice, and folded the letter. The others kept laughing, thinking that this too was part of the performance. Sena wanted her to read the ending. Nevena said the ending was boring, got up and went into the house.
Upstairs, in the bedroom, she sat on the bed and read the letter alone, from the beginning. This time it was not funny. She saw Miroslav on the train, with the planner on his knees, writing in the tunnel past Bradina about the fish she had drawn fifteen years ago and which he, obviously, remembered better than she did. She saw the bags, the cherries in the clay bowl, the tie beside them and her own face as she laughed. She was ashamed in a way she had not been ashamed since she was a child. I have to answer him right away, she thought. Today, before something else happens. She took a sheet from Zoja's sketchbook and wrote two words: "Dear Miro".
Under the window the van doors slammed. "Nevena!" Sena was shouting. "Ševal has found a spot by the bridge where the water is almost warm! Let's go now, while the sun is out!" Kiki honked the horn. Nevena looked at the sheet, then at the window, then at the sheet again. She would write to him tonight, calmly, when everyone was asleep and she could find the right words. "Wait for me!" she shouted, heard them laughing down below, and laughed herself, with that new laugh, before she had time to decide whether to. She grabbed her towel and ran down the stairs.
On the windowsill, held down by a pebble from the Neretva, lay the sheet from a child's sketchbook with two words on it and a cherry stain in the corner. Down below, across the meadow, four voices were moving away toward the water, and in the bucket by the steps the other wooden boat was floating.