The video runs two minutes and fourteen seconds. Arnela, our youngest dancer, posted it on the ensemble's page at twelve minutes past one in the morning, somewhere between Ptuj and the Croatian border, with the caption: Heading home, thank you, Slovenia! I opened it at seven, over my first coffee, because since I stopped dancing I am the one who reads the comments and answers the relatives in Germany when they ask about the next performance. In the video the whole bus is singing Moj dilbere. Someone is beating the rhythm on the back of a seat. Bahrija, our choreographer, conducts from the front row with a bottle of water, as if she were holding a baton.
I danced in that ensemble for sixteen years. I met Asmir at a rehearsal, in the hall of the Cultural Center where the heating works only when someone from the District comes by. We danced together at weddings, at festivals in Tuzla and Bijeljina, once even in Vienna, in front of our own people, who cried from the first song to the last. Then three years ago my knee gave out, on the steps outside the market, with two bags in my hands. After the operation the doctor said I could walk, but that I was finished with the kolo. Asmir wanted to quit along with me. I told him not to be ridiculous, that one of us had to stay. Bahrija gave him a new partner, Slavica Tomić, the wife of Dražen Tomić, who runs a tire shop near the bridge over the Sava. At the spring festival in Tuzla they were named the best pair. I framed that certificate and hung it in the hallway.
I watched the video once for the song, and a second time for Asmir, because the first time I had not found him. The camera moves from Bahrija toward the back of the bus, past the children from the junior group asleep on each other's shoulders, past the accordion player who plays and yawns at the same time. At fifty-one seconds it passes the second to last row. Asmir and Slavica are sitting there. They are not singing. Asmir is peeling a mandarin the way he always peels it, in one piece, so the peel stays whole like a spiral, and without looking he holds a segment out to the side. Slavica takes it without looking. The camera moves on. The whole thing lasts maybe two seconds.
For twenty-two years he has handed me mandarins like that. On the couch while we watch the news, in the car on the way to Tuzla, in the hospital after the operation, when he would not let me sit up. I never look at his hand and he never looks at mine. I thought it was ours, the way a word is ours or an old nickname. I took the video back to fifty-one seconds. Then again. I watched those two seconds eleven times, until my coffee went cold and I began to hear, in the sound of the accordion, when the accordion player took a breath.
By eight o'clock there were a hundred and some comments under the video. Well done, the pride of Brčko, God bless you all. Some aunt in Sweden wrote that she had cried. Dražen Tomić left a heart. I looked at his name under the heart and understood that he had seen nothing, and that nobody had seen anything, because nobody but me knows how Asmir peels mandarins. There was nothing in the video you could show a court, or the relatives, or Bahrija. There was only one hand that knew where the other hand was.
The bus was due around two. Before that I went to the market and bought two pounds of mandarins from the Neretva, from the same man I buy from every autumn. He asked whether our people were back from Slovenia. I said they were, almost. Then, for the first time since I stopped dancing, I went to meet the bus in front of the Cultural Center. I stood among the mothers of the children from the junior group, in the wind that came off the Sava. Asmir was among the first to get off, with the big bag that held the costumes, and he was glad when he saw me. That was honest, I have to give him that.
Slavica got off after him and went straight to Dražen's car. They did not look at each other. Not once. I danced in a pair for sixteen years, and I know that partners look at each other at least once after a tour, if only to say it went well. They parted like two people who had never met, and that was exactly how I knew they had met very well.
At home he talked about Ptuj. About the stage below the castle, about the hosts who treated them to sausages and white wine that Bahrija would not let anyone touch before the performance, about a Slovenian man who came up after the kolo to ask where he could buy opanci. He told it well, as always. I put a mandarin on the table between us. He picked it up without breaking off his story, peeled it in one piece, left the peel like a spiral beside the plate, and held a segment out to me, looking out the window. I did not take it. The segment stayed in the air. Several seconds passed before he turned his head.
"How long?" I asked. "How long what?" I showed him the phone, the fifty-first second, and played it twice, so there would be no confusion. He looked at the screen, then at the segment still in his hand. "Sanela, it's a mandarin," he said. "People eat on the bus." "People eat on the bus," I said. "But you gave her a segment and you did not look. You don't do that with people. You do that with me."
He was silent for a long time. Then he set the segment down on the peel and said it had started last winter, during rehearsals for Tuzla, when they stayed after everyone else to practice that turn in the second part. He said he had not planned it. He said it was not what I thought, and when I asked him what I thought, he could not say. He also said he would quit, the ensemble and everything, if that was what I wanted. I asked whether Dražen knew. He said nobody knew. I asked whether Arnela knew, since she had filmed it. He said Arnela films the song, not the people.
When he went to take a shower, the way you go when you do not know what else to do, I picked up my phone and opened Arnela's video. Below a hundred and fifty comments I wrote my own, publicly, under my own name: You sang beautifully. Asmir, I bought mandarins. For Brčko it was the most ordinary comment from a woman waiting for her husband to come home from a trip. A neighbor liked it within four minutes. Within seven minutes the video had disappeared from the page. Later Arnela sent me a message saying someone had asked her to take it down, supposedly because you could see the children sleeping with their mouths open, and she asked whether anyone had saved it, because it was her favorite video from the tour.
I had saved it. I did not send it to anyone. I sat at the table while the water ran in the bathroom and peeled a mandarin myself, for the first time in many years, and it did not go well. The peel tore into small pieces, my fingers smelled bitter, and I ate the segments one by one and looked at each before I put it in my mouth. In the ensemble's group chat, meanwhile, Bahrija had asked who was coming to rehearsal on Monday. Asmir answered first, as always. Under his reply I wrote that I was coming too. Not to dance. Just to watch.