That year I was thirty-one and thought I had time for everything. I had been in Blagaj since June, because of an old mill on the Buna that a foundation from Mostar wanted to restore, and every day I measured stone, drew, and slept in a room above the bakery, with a window facing the cliff. I was born in Zagreb, and I had come to Mostar for work four years earlier and stayed. In the evenings I sat on the terrace of the restaurant by the spring, watched the water come out from under the cliff, green and cold, and listened to tourists speaking every language except mine.
One evening at the next table I heard Bosnian with a soft Swedish r. A brother and sister: Elmir, an engineer from Malmö, my age, and Merjem, who was twenty-one. Elmir asked me if I knew where he could buy good cheese, I told him, and until midnight we drank pomegranate juice and talked about Zagreb, about Malmö, and about how our people can be recognized anywhere in the world by the way they call a waiter. Merjem was silent the whole time and looked at me as if she were sizing me up for some role. When we got up, she said I had the hands of a mason, not an architect, and left before I could answer.
They had rented a house above the river, with a yard full of geraniums, and we saw each other every day. I could never catch hold of Merjem. One day she would sit on the terrace in a white dress and read, as upright as a schoolteacher, and answer me in complete sentences. The next day I would find her on the walls of Stjepan-grad, right on the edge, her legs dangling over the drop, eating cherries and spitting the pits toward the valley. On the third day, at the restaurant by the spring, in an apron she had borrowed from someone, she carried coffee to a group of Italians and pretended not to know a single word of any foreign language. Elmir would just shrug. "That's how she is," he would say. "She's trying out all the things she could be."
He told me the truth one night, when Merjem had gone to bed and the two of us had stayed on the terrace over coffee. Merjem was his sister only through their father. In ninety-nine his father had come from Sweden to Blagaj for a month and fallen in love with a woman who worked at the bakery below the tekke. Merjem grew up here, with her mother, in a house near the river. When she was thirteen, her mother fell ill and died, and their father took her to Malmö, to a house where Elmir's mother never accepted her. "She thinks she owes everyone proof that she's worth keeping," Elmir said. "That's why she either says nothing or says everything at once." They had come, he said, so she could visit her mother's grave and see the house, which belonged to strangers now.
After that I looked at her differently, and she felt it. She stopped playing roles. One afternoon she took me to the house where she was born, behind the tekke, with blue shutters that the new owners had painted brown. She stood in front of the gate and would not go in. She told me about her mother, about the smell of bread at five in the morning, about how her first winter in Malmö she cried every morning because there was no river under the window. Then she turned to me and asked, quite calmly, whether I could live somewhere without a river. I said I didn't know. She nodded, as if I had said something else.
That evening I left their house late, and when I stepped out into the street, something fell at my feet from an upstairs window. A sprig of red geranium. I looked up, but the window was already empty. I took the sprig to my room, put it in a glass of water, and for a long time I could not fall asleep. I thought: what am I doing? Twenty-one years old, Malmö, a girl who becomes three different people in three days. I thought I had time.
The next day Elmir came to the mill. He stood in the doorway, beside my drawings, and said without any preamble that Merjem had kept him awake all night. She loved me, he said. She had not told him so, she had shouted it, crying, at two in the morning, and made him promise they would leave at once, because she knew I could not want her. "I'm asking you as her brother," he said. "Not as someone who holds anything against you. Would you marry her?" I said what people say when they do not know: that I had known her for two weeks, that she was young, that it would take time. Elmir nodded. "Then we'll leave," he said. "But before that she wants to see you."
Around five a boy from the bakery brought me a scrap of paper. "Seven, at the mill. I have to." Only that. She came at seven exactly, in that white dress, and stopped on the threshold as if she did not know whether she was allowed in. She was pale and trembling, although it was warm, and she would not look at me. All I had to do was hold her. I know that now. Back then I stood between the millstone and the table with my drawings and talked. I said Elmir knew everything. I said she had made a mistake by telling him, that now nothing could go slowly, that everything was spoiled before it had begun. I talked like a man defending himself when nobody had attacked him.
"So it's my fault," she said quietly. I wanted to say it wasn't. I wanted to say something else entirely. But she was already at the door, then on the path along the river, white among the willows, and she was gone before I had moved from the spot. All I could hear was the water.
I looked for her until midnight. I went along the Buna to the spring, then back to the bridge, then up toward Stjepan-grad, with the flashlight on my phone, and I shouted her name at the cliff, which sent it back to me twice. Two older men were sitting by the tekke, and they told me they had seen a girl in white running toward the village. In the end I went to their house. Elmir opened the door in a T-shirt, tired. She was back, he said, wet to the knees, and she had locked herself in her room. He did not let me in, and I did not even ask. I said I would come in the morning. "Come," he said, and I did not know how to read the look he gave me.
I walked back through sleeping Blagaj and I was happy. That is what I am most ashamed of. I was happy because at last I knew what I wanted. In the morning I would come and tell her, in front of Elmir, in front of all of Blagaj if need be. In the morning. That night I did not want to wake the house, I did not want to knock on her window, I did not want her to think I had come only because I had been frightened. I wanted it to be done properly. I fell asleep just before dawn, with the geranium in a glass beside the bed.
At eight the house above the river was locked. The landlady, a woman watering the geraniums in the yard, told me they had left at four in the morning, by taxi to Sarajevo, to catch a plane. She gave me a note Merjem had left for me. "I stood on the threshold of the mill and waited for you to stop me. You talked about Elmir. Please don't look for us." Below it was her name, written in the large, careful letters children learn in first grade.
I looked for them, of course. I drove to the airport, where the morning plane had already taken off. I wrote to Elmir, and the messages stayed unread. Her profile disappeared within a day. In November I went to Malmö, found the street and the building, and there was some Swedish surname on the door. A neighbor said they had moved away, she did not know where.
Five years have passed. The mill was restored that autumn, and today they sell pomegranate juice in it to tourists who take pictures of themselves with the spring behind them. I have met other women, and some of them I have loved, the way you love when you know you have time. I keep the note and the geranium in an envelope, in the drawer of my desk. The geranium lost its color long ago and smells of nothing. The note is still folded in four, the way she folded it, and I do not open it, because I know by heart what it says.