A Key That Opens Nothing

People in Sarajevo have been waiting by the Eternal Flame for as long as anyone can remember, and everyone who waits there pretends not to be waiting, but to be reading the plaque or looking at the shop windows on Ferhadija. Amela arrived half an hour early and did the same. A fine April rain was falling, the kind you do not see but only feel on your face. She had an umbrella, but she did not open it. She recognized him by his walk before she recognized his face: he was coming from the Cathedral, leaning slightly forward, hands in his pockets, as if pushing against something. He was fifty-one, with a gray beard and the same leather jacket, or one very much like it.

The last time they had seen each other was at the bus station, one April morning in 1992. Her mother had somehow gotten two seats on a bus to Split for her and her younger brother, and she kept telling everyone it was for two weeks, until things calmed down. Igor ran alongside the bus as it pulled out of the station and through the open window tossed into her lap the key to his parents' flat on Koševsko Brdo. "So you'll have somewhere to come when you get back," he shouted. That was the last thing she heard from him with her own ears.

Getting from Split to Melbourne took her two years, a refugee camp in Germany, and a twelve-page form. In Melbourne she worked the night shift at a biscuit factory in Dandenong and studied English in the evenings, and then she became a lab technician at a hospital. She married Kemal from Prijedor, a good man who cooks beans on Sundays, and had two sons who understand Bosnian but speak it as if they were reading it off a sheet of paper. Her mother had died the year before. She had come to sell the flat in Alipašino Polje where she grew up. She had written to Igor three weeks earlier, a single sentence: would he have a coffee.

Igor had stayed. He carried water in canisters from the brewery up to the fifth floor, studied for exams by candlelight, and in 1993 received one letter from her through the Red Cross, with a photograph of her in front of some house, a photograph in which everything was strange except her smile. He wrote back four pages. He never found out whether his letter arrived. He heard about her marriage in 1997, from her cousin, at the market. He married two years later, Danijela, who works at a bank and knows everything about Amela, because she does not like secrets. They have a daughter, Lea, who studies architecture and helped him come up with a reply to the message.

When he stopped in front of her, neither of them knew how to say hello. He held out his hand, she tried to hug him, and they bumped shoulders and laughed, and that helped. They did not want to sit in a café. Amela said she had never ridden the new cable car, and before she could add anything, he remembered her nineteenth birthday and the old cabin in which they had ridden up Trebević in July 1991 with a bag of cherries, tossing the pits out the window. They walked to Bistrik and bought two tickets.

The cabin rose slowly above the rooftops. Below them was the city where she had grown up and which she did not know: new towers, glass, minarets, and on the hills white Muslim gravestones and crosses that had not been there in 1991. Igor did not point them out. They talked about their children, about apartment prices, about how in Melbourne nobody is surprised by her name. He asked her whether she still took her coffee without sugar, and when she said she did, they were both surprised at how glad it made them. They sat facing each other and took care that their knees did not touch. The whole time she kept her left hand in her coat pocket. Halfway up the cabin swayed in the wind, and Amela grabbed his hand with her right, then let go, as if she had touched something hot.

At the top it was colder and smelled of wet pines. They walked to the old bobsled track, which ran down through the forest like a gray concrete snake covered in graffiti, and sat down on its edge. Then she asked him what she had really come to ask. "Did you wait for me?" Igor looked at the concrete for a long time. He said that whenever it was possible, on the first Sunday of every month at five o'clock, he had gone to the Eternal Flame, until the fall of 1996. He did not know himself why at five. Probably because that was how they used to arrange to meet.

Then she told him what she had told no one, not Kemal, not her mother. In March 1996 she had bought a ticket to Sarajevo, by way of Vienna. A week before the flight, in a pizzeria in Footscray, Kemal asked her whether she would marry him. She said yes, because he was good and because he was there. The ticket stayed in a drawer, and it is still there today. "If you had come," Igor began, and she put her fingers to his lips, the way she used to when he started singing at the tram stop. "Don't," she said. "I know everything that would have happened. I have been thinking about it for thirty years."

They sat like that for a while, shoulder to shoulder, on the cold concrete. Igor took her right hand, and she did not pull it away. Neither of them said anything that would have to stay up here, among the pines. And then the phone in his pocket rang. It was Lea. She asked where he was, because Mom said he should buy bread and milk on his way back and not forget that Grandma was coming to dinner tonight. Igor said he would, that he would not forget, and that he loved her. He said it in an ordinary way, as he did every day.

When he put the phone away, Amela was already on her feet. She took her left hand out of her pocket and opened her fist. On her palm lay a yellow key with three teeth, warm, because she had been squeezing it all the way up. She placed it on his palm. "I had nowhere to come," she said. "So I kept it." Igor looked at the key for a long time. He said they had changed the lock back in 1997, when they sold his parents' flat, and that this key no longer opened anything. Then he put it in his jacket pocket anyway, next to his own keys, and zipped the pocket shut.

At the upper station he said he would walk down, through the forest, because that was how he always went. They both knew that was not how he always went. They did not hug. She touched his sleeve, briefly, as if brushing a hair off his jacket, and got into the cabin. The doors closed by themselves. The cabin set off, swayed, and descended down the mountainside, and she watched him standing at the edge of the platform among the pines, growing smaller. He did not wave. Then, when she could barely see him anymore, he raised his hand after all.

Only above the rooftops of Bistrik did she look at her left hand again. On her palm the imprint of the key remained, red and clear, with three teeth. She looked at it the whole way down. By the time the cabin reached the lower station, the imprint had faded.