In Graz, in November, it gets dark before five. That is when Arnes shuts down the computer at the office by the Mur, where for eleven years he has been calculating the water levels of other people's rivers. At home he does not turn on the light. He sits by the window and watches the light from the tram stop slide along the wall to a small framed photograph. In it there is a girl in a yellow jacket, on a rock above green water, laughing at someone who cannot be seen in the picture. Arnes knows it by heart. It is enough for the light to reach it, and he goes back to the Una.
She was six and he was eight when, on the bank below the houses in Golubić, they built a hut out of willow branches and old plastic sheeting. Selvedina secretly brought plates from her mother's kitchen, and Arnes brought stories: about the countries he would go to one day, about rivers that flow underground and come out at the other end of the world. "Will you take me too?" she asked. "I will take you," he said, "if you don't cry on the way." She promised she wouldn't, and that summer she did not cry once, not even when she fell out of the willow.
When she started third grade and he started fifth, the school took the children on an outing to the meadows above the village, and the teacher promised a chocolate bar to whoever picked the most strawberries. Arnes claimed he knew a place where there were as many as you could want. They wandered for two hours through beech trees and ferns and found one single strawberry. When they came back, Selvedina said in front of everyone that at their spot the strawberries had been sweeter than anywhere and that they had eaten them along the way. Arnes never forgot that she had lied for him, and without a trace of shame.
After finishing high school he went to Graz to study. His uncle found him an attic room. That first winter, at night, Arnes copied into a thick notebook the songs his grandmother used to sing to him: old songs from the Krajina about girls by the water and mothers who know everything. Before New Year's a parcel came for him, and inside it were an apple pie from his mother and wool socks Selvedina had knitted. One was noticeably longer than the other. In her letter she wrote that this was because he was always one step ahead of her.
He did not come home until the spring break of his third year. Selvedina was twenty by then and worked at a pharmacy in Bihać. On the kitchen windowsill stood a cage with a yellow canary. The first one, which Arnes had bought her at the market before he left, had died that winter, so Senahid had brought her a new one. Senahid was Arnes's classmate, the son of a man who kept trout ponds on the Una near Kostela. "Senahid knows what a woman needs," said her mother Ifeta, pouring Arnes a coffee. "Songs don't heat a house." "Neither do canaries," said Arnes.
On the last evening he gave her the notebook with his grandmother's songs. Selvedina leafed through it on the steps in front of the house, and the songs she knew she read aloud, and the rest with her lips alone. In the morning she walked him to the bus station. The bus to Graz was twenty minutes late, and for those twenty minutes they stood side by side and kept silent about everything. When the driver started the engine, Arnes said: "I have something to tell you. In two years, when I finish." She nodded and did not ask what. He took that as an answer.
That fall his mother told him that Senahid had proposed to Selvedina and that she had turned him down. In March she wrote that Selvedina had turned him down a second time, and that Ifeta was telling the whole town her daughter had no sense. In June a message of three lines arrived: there had been a wedding, on the terrace above the fish ponds, Ifeta had cried with happiness, and the bride had been beautiful, only pale. Arnes read the message in the cafeteria and ate everything to the last bite. A week later he passed his hydraulics exam with the best grade in his year, and he told no one.
Six years later Senahid called him out of the blue. He had heard Arnes was in Bihać to take measurements at the springs, and he said it was out of the question for him to sleep in a hotel while his friend had a house with six rooms. "I won't say a word to Selvedina," he laughed into the phone. "Let it be a surprise." Arnes wanted to refuse. Then he stood in front of the hotel for half an hour with the room key in his hand, and in the end he got into the car and drove down the Una toward Kostela.
The house was bigger than he remembered, with a new terrace and concrete tanks for fry along the bank. Behind the house, under the old willows, the pond where Senahid's father had started the business was still there, still and dark. Senahid called it the lake. Selvedina came out onto the terrace wiping her hands on her apron and stopped in the doorway. Then she came over and held out her hand to him, as if to a man from the municipality. When it got dark, Senahid remembered he had heard about some notebook of songs and asked to see it. Selvedina went to fetch it and came back quickly, as if she had not had to look for it.
Arnes read, and Senahid asked for more and slapped the table with his palm. On one page was a song his grandmother had sung more quietly than the others, about a girl whose mother gave her to the man the mother wanted, and the girl kept silent and looked across the water. Arnes read two lines and stopped. Selvedina stood up, said she had to check the pantry door, and went down the steps toward the willows. Senahid poured more rakija. "Women can't stand sad songs," he said. "Mine doesn't have to, at least. She has everything."
Shortly before midnight Arnes went down to the pond. In the middle of the water, far from the bank, he could see one white water lily, open, alone among the broad leaves. Arnes took off his shirt and went into the water, which was colder than he had thought. He swam toward the flower, and it seemed close, and then far again. Long stems wound around his legs and pulled him down, softly and stubbornly. When he stretched out his hand, the lily was still two strokes away. He turned around and swam back. For a long time he sat on the bank in the dark, watching the flower, which had not even moved.
The next day, while Senahid was at the vet's, Selvedina asked him to drive her to her mother's in Golubić. They walked along the bank, then uphill by the old path. The ferns were the same, only lower, or they were taller. At one spot Selvedina stopped and said this was it, this was where he had claimed back then that there were as many strawberries as you could want. This time they showed red in the knee-high grass. Neither of them bent down. "Where did all of it go?" she asked, and she did not mean the strawberries. Arnes looked across the valley, toward Plješevica, beyond which lay the border and the road to Graz, and he did not know what to answer.
He left the following morning, before the house woke up. When he opened the gate, Selvedina was standing behind him, with Senahid's jacket over her shoulders and her arms crossed as if she were cold. "You won't come again," she said. She was not asking. "I won't," he said. She nodded, just as she had that morning at the station, and this time he knew what it meant. At the bend he turned around once more. She was standing in the same place, and behind her mist was rising over the pond.
The light from the tram stop has fallen lower, and the photograph is left in the dark. Arnes does not need to see it. In the darkness of the room he sees the white water lily, alone on black water, and the stems that wind softly around anyone who comes near it. The refrigerator hums in the kitchen. Out on the street someone is calling a dog. Arnes gets up, turns on the lamp on the desk, and opens the report on the water levels of the Mur that he has to hand in by Friday. He works until past midnight.