It was I who brought Karaman to Strahinja, as a puppy, from a village near Nevesinje, and that is why I think I have the right to tell this to the end. He was a Šarplaninac, gray and shaggy, and by his second year he had grown so big that the children in Gacko called him the calf. Strahinja Banović, my best man and my neighbor, drove a truck for a company from Bileća: three weeks on the road in Germany, one week at home. When he came back, Karaman would meet him at the gate and lie down across his feet, and Jagoda would call from the kitchen that at least someone in this house was happy.
Jagoda was from Bileća, the only sister of the five Jugović brothers and the daughter of old Bogdan, who owned a gas station there, two bars and an opinion about everything. She married Strahinja at twenty-two and for ten years she waited for the truck. They had no children. Winters on the Gacko plain are long, the fog can lie on the fields for weeks, and of all the voices in the house the one heard most often was Karaman's. I saw it, as everyone did. Nobody said anything, because you do not talk about another man's house until it burns down.
That autumn Mihajlo came to Bileća. People remembered him as a skinny boy who had left at eighteen without saying goodbye. He came back twenty years later, with shoulder-length hair, in a white shirt, with a restaurant in Istanbul and a story for every table. He came for his mother's seventieth birthday and stayed a month. He sat in Bogdan's bar and talked about the Bosphorus at dusk, about the ferries and the gulls, about fish you eat with your fingers. Jagoda started dropping in on her father every day. People said later that they had heard her laughing, loudly, for the first time in many years.
At the end of October, while Strahinja was somewhere near Cologne, Jagoda left. On the kitchen table she left a note and placed her wedding ring on top of it. She filled Karaman's bowl to the brim with kibble, enough for three days. When Strahinja arrived, I met him at the gate, because someone had to. He heard me out, sat down on the step and kept his hand on the dog's head for a long time. Then he got up, washed his face and drove to Bileća.
Bogdan received him in his bar, at the corner table, with his five sons around him. "I no longer have a daughter," the old man said. "If you find her, do not bring her to my door. We will find you a better one." Strahinja asked whether any of the brothers would go with him. The brothers looked at the table. The eldest, Damjan, said he had work to do. The others did not even say that.
He went alone, in his old car, with Karaman on the back seat, all of which the dog took up. He drove for two days, across Serbia and Bulgaria. He found the restaurant from the photographs Mihajlo kept posting: in Kumkapı, in a little street full of tables, musicians and cats. He parked the car across the street and for an hour he only watched through the glass. Jagoda was carrying plates between the tables, quickly, tiredly, with her hair tied back the way she had never tied it at home. In passing, Mihajlo patted her on the back, the way a boss pats a waitress who works hard. Then Strahinja left the window open a crack, for the dog, and sat down at a table outside. Jagoda came out with a tray and stopped. The glasses rattled. Mihajlo came after her with his arms spread wide. "My countryman! Sit down, everything is on me."
"I came to talk to Jagoda," said Strahinja. "She is a free woman," said Mihajlo. "Let her speak for herself." Jagoda put down the tray and said, loudly, so the other tables could hear: "What do you want? For ten years I talked to your dog more than to you. You sent me money and pictures of the highway. He showed me the sea." Strahinja listened to it calmly, the way you listen to a weather forecast for a road you have to take anyway. "I did not come to take you," he said. "I came to tell you that the car leaves tomorrow at six, from in front of the hotel by the station, and that the seat next to me is empty. If you do not come, I will go alone and I will not bother you again."
Mihajlo walked him out to the street, with his hand on his shoulder, laughing for the benefit of the guests. At the edge of the sidewalk he stopped and said, quietly but loud enough for Jagoda behind them to hear: "If you want her back, pay me for the ticket and the dresses. She did not come cheap." Strahinja looked at him for a long time and said nothing. In the car across the street Karaman threw himself at the glass and barked, with all his teeth, the way he barks at wolves near the sheepfold. Mihajlo took his hand off Strahinja's shoulder and stepped back two paces. They say the guests at the tables laughed. Jagoda did not laugh.
What happened in Kumkapı that night, I do not know. Strahinja never told me, and I never asked. I only know that at six in the morning she was standing by the car, with the same small bag she had left with, without makeup. Karaman whined and licked her hands. She did not sit in the front, next to Strahinja, but in the back, beside the dog. They drove for two days, and she spoke only once, at the Bulgarian border. "Why did you come?" Strahinja was looking at the line of trucks in front of him. "You left him a full bowl," he said. "Whoever leaves a full bowl means to come back." Somewhere in Serbia, at a gas station, Jagoda got out and brought him a coffee without asking, with two sugar cubes, the way he had taken it for ten years. Neither of them said a word then either.
By evening all of Bileća knew. In two days it would be Mitrovdan, Saint Demetrius Day, Bogdan's slava, when half the town gathers in his yard. On Saturday morning the five Jugović brothers came to Gacko, to Strahinja's yard, and I went outside, because I knew why they had come. Damjan spoke for all of them. Strahinja should bring Jagoda to the slava, in front of the whole family and the neighbors. He should stand her before her father, give her back the ring in front of everyone and say why. "So it is known," said Damjan, "that the Jugovićs do not defend women like that." Jagoda listened to all of it from the kitchen door, a dish towel in her hand, and did not look at her brothers once.
Strahinja took the ring out of his jacket pocket. "I have it," he said. "I carried it to Istanbul and back." Then he said, without raising his voice, that for ten years he had left his wife alone for three weeks at a time, on a plain where in winter the fog does not lift from the fields. That they were her brothers, and not one of them had got into the car with him. "So who left whom?" he asked. "We will come to the slava if her father invites us. Together. And whoever wants to say something to her can say it to me." Damjan opened his mouth, then closed it.
Strahinja went into the house. Through the kitchen window I saw him set the ring down on the table, in front of Jagoda, and not on her finger. She looked at it for a long time, like something she had forgotten she owned. Then she put it on herself. Karaman lay down on the threshold, across the whole doorway, and one by one the Jugović brothers went back to their cars.