The ad cost me twenty-eight marks and three days of second thoughts. My daughter Dženet said that these days you do this kind of thing on Facebook, that there are groups where people look for everyone, from lost cats to old army buddies, and that she would find me the woman from eighty-four in a single afternoon. I told her that woman does not sit on Facebook. That woman reads newspapers, and she reads them from the back page. Dženet sighed exactly the way her mother used to and took my text to the classifieds desk of "Novi glas," because I no longer knew how it was done.
The text went like this: "Looking for a woman named Ranka, who on Saturday, February 11, 1984, at the party for Olympic volunteers in the Youth Center, wore a blue cap and danced with a driver from the motor pool. I did not come on Sunday at five to the stop by the National Museum. There was a blizzard on Bjelašnica. Reply under the code word Bjelašnica." Dženet wanted to add "widower, sixty-seven, nonsmoker." I would not let her. I was not offering myself. I wanted only one thing: for someone to forgive me for being forty-two years late.
That winter I was twenty-five, and I drove a white van for the organizing committee, with the Olympic rings on the doors. I drove journalists from the hotel to Bjelašnica and back, the same bend a hundred times over. I went to the party at the Youth Center only because it was free. Some band from Zenica was playing, a band that knew only the songs everybody knew, and that was enough. She was standing by a pillar, in a blue cap she did not take off even inside the hall, and laughing at the way I danced. I told her that she should show me how it was done, then. We danced three songs in a row, and the fourth one, a slow one, we did not even notice was slow. She said her name was Ranka, that she was from Tuzla, and that she was working as a hostess at the press center because she spoke French. She also said that she read newspapers from the back, because the last pages held the real stories: who had been born, who had died, who was looking for whom.
I walked her to the tram at Marijin Dvor. Big flakes of snow were coming down, the kind that do not fall but hang in the air. We agreed to meet the next day, at five, at the stop by the National Museum. On Sunday at six in the morning they sent me up to Bjelašnica for the downhill, with a van full of Austrians. They postponed the downhill because of the wind, and then the snow closed the road, and we were stuck for two days in the hotel on the mountain. The Austrians played cards. One of them, a photographer from Innsbruck, asked me why I kept looking at my watch. I told him somebody was waiting for me. "Then she will wait," he said, as if that were a good thing. At five o'clock I stood at the window and watched the snow go sideways. When I came down into the city on Tuesday, they told me at the press center that they had three Rankas and not one of them from Tuzla. I left a letter with the porter. Nobody ever got back to me.
Three years later I married Nesrin, a nurse from Koševo hospital, and we were married for thirty-seven years. I am not telling this so that anyone will think Nesrin came second. She did not. She baked the best hurmašice in Grbavica and quarreled with the neighbors over parking, and I loved her for the one as much as for the other. But she knew about Bjelašnica, because I told her about it that very first winter, and every February, when the television ran old footage from the Olympics, she would say, "There it is, Taib, your blizzard." She was not jealous. She used to say that a man who tells his wife about another woman has nothing to hide. She died two winters ago. In the hospital, in her last week, she said to me, "Don't sit alone in the kitchen listening to the clock."
I listened to the clock for two years, and then I placed the ad. It came out on a Wednesday. I bought five copies and stuck one on the fridge, like a greeting card. Every morning I called Dženet to stop by the newspaper office and ask whether anything had come under my code word. In the first week two letters came. A lady from Zenica wrote that she was not Ranka but would gladly be, and enclosed a picture of herself at the seaside. A man from Vogošća wrote that he had also driven a van that winter and asked whether I remembered a certain Mile to whom he still owed fifty dinars. Dženet laughed until she cried. In the second week nothing came. In the third week I stopped asking.
Then one Monday Dženet brought home an envelope with a Tuzla postmark, addressed in a hand that slanted to the right. The letter was short, and I read it in the hallway without taking off my jacket. "Dear driver, the cap was not blue, it was green. The blue one belonged to my roommate, Ranka, from Doboj. That evening I introduced myself by her name, because my mother had told me never to tell drivers what my name was. My name is Zdenka. On Sunday I waited for you until six. Afterward I read the newspapers from the back for a whole year, thinking you would get in touch. It took you a little longer."
Below that she had written that her husband had died four years ago, that she had three grandchildren and bad knees, and that, if I was still up for it, she would wait for me on Sunday at five, at the same stop. I sat down on the chair in the hallway. Dženet took the letter out of my hand, read it twice, and said, "Dad, three Rankas, and not one of them was her." I told her I had figured that out myself. For the rest of the day I walked around the apartment straightening the pictures on the walls, even though every one of them was hanging straight.
On Sunday I left the house at three, even though you can get from Grbavica to the museum in twenty minutes. Dženet drove me and said she would wait in the car and pretend to look at her phone. A fine snow was falling, the kind that melts the moment it touches your coat. I had shaved twice and changed my shirt twice, and in the car I realized I had forgotten my gloves, so I kept my hands in my pockets like a young man.
She was already there. At four o'clock, an hour before we were supposed to meet, she was standing under the shelter, in a green cap, a little stooped, with a bag from the bakery, and looking at her watch as if I were late again. I recognized her by the way she laughed, before I even saw her face. "This time I didn't want to wait," she said. "So I came first." I held out my hand to her, the way I had back then in the hall. A tram came, then another. We did not get on either of them. Dženet later insisted that from the car she had counted seven.