A Six-Year Business Trip

I rented him the room in January, without a contract, because he paid six months in advance and because he said he was writing a book. On Bistrik rooms are let to students and tourists, and a man of fifty with a single suitcase struck me as odd, but the money was real, and I am a widow with a pension of four hundred marks. The room is in the attic of my house, with a sloping ceiling and a window that looks down the hill, over the roofs, two streets down to a yellow building with balconies full of geraniums.

The first thing he did was move the armchair. He turned it away from the television and toward the window. The second was to switch off the light. When I went out into the yard in the evening to hang the washing, I would see him up there in the dark, sitting and looking down, and every half hour the glow of a cigarette would light up and then go out. I did not ask. I am from a generation that does not pry into lodgers' business, especially lodgers who pay in advance.

What I did not ask, I found out at the bakery. The women were talking about Nedžla from the yellow building, the third floor. At the beginning of January her husband had gone to Banja Luka for an audit, for three days, with one bag. A week later he sent a message from an unknown number: I am fine, do not look for me, I need time. Nedžla went to the police, and the police told her that a grown man who reports that he is fine is not missing. The women at the bakery knew the rest better than the police. There is, they said, someone over there, a younger one. There is always a younger one. I came home with two loaves of bread and looked at the yellow building, at the third floor, at the kitchen window with the yellow curtain. Then I looked up at my attic, where a cigarette was burning in the dark.

Even then I did not ask him. I asked only in March, when he came down to pay, and I had made coffee for two, so he could not refuse. "Hariz," I said, because I knew the name from the bakery, and he had never told it to me. He did not even flinch. He drank his coffee down to the grounds and told me everything, calmly, as if he were talking about someone else.

He had planned nothing. He went to the bus station, bought a ticket, sat down in the waiting room and suddenly wanted to see what his home looked like without him in it. Just a day or two. To see whether she would notice. He walked back across town, climbed up to Bistrik and rang at the first gate with a sign saying a room was for rent. That was me. "I meant to stay until Friday," he said. "On Friday it was hard to explain three days. Now it is hard to explain three months." I asked him whether he had someone in Banja Luka. He laughed, for the first time since he had been with me. "I have nobody anywhere," he said. "Only her and this window." He had money from some savings his wife did not know about, and at night he did translations on his laptop for some foreign agency. I asked when he would go back. "Tomorrow," he said.

That tomorrow lasted six years. I watched him watching. He knew when she left for work, at seven twenty, and when she came back, and from the way she walked uphill he knew what kind of day she had had. The first winter Nedžla sat up late in the kitchen almost every evening, and her sister came over on Sundays. The second year she took down the yellow curtain and put up a white one, painted the kitchen, and gave his bicycle, which had stood on the balcony for years, to some boy from the street. The third year she got a cat. That same year a man began to come by, on Wednesdays, with a bag of tools. Hariz did not sleep for two nights. It turned out he was a plumber replacing the pipes in her bathroom, that he was married with three children, and Hariz reported this to me with such relief that I felt ashamed on his behalf. Hariz reported all of it to me when he came down to pay, like the news: she painted, she got a cat, her sister got divorced, she bought a new stove. Once I told him that he knew more about her now than when he lived with her. He said that was true, and that it was the worst part.

In the fourth year they met. Hariz rarely went out, and only late, to the corner shop, wearing a cap and the beard he had grown that first winter. That morning he had run out of bread and went to the bakery when everyone else did. Nedžla was standing ahead of him in line. When she turned with her bag, she stepped on his foot, said excuse me and went out. He came back white as a wall and did not turn on the light all day. In the evening he told me she had not recognized him. I thought about how many years that woman had looked at him across the same table, and whether a man can change that much from a beard and a cap. I did not tell him that.

In the fifth year the snow piled up to the gutters, so I called him to help me clear the roof, and that was when I first saw how much he had aged. He was thin and gray, his hands shaking in the cold. I told him he could not go on like this. "I know," he said. "Tomorrow."

In the sixth year, in November, it rained for three days. That evening Hariz came down to me soaked to the skin, because he had gone to the shop without an umbrella, and put the key on the kitchen table. "I am going home, Mukadesa," he said. I asked why tonight of all nights. He shrugged. He said he was wet and cold, and that down there a light was on in the kitchen, and that was all. For six years he had been telling himself tomorrow, and tonight, in the rain, he understood that nobody was going to say that tomorrow for him. I told him to wait until morning, to change his clothes, not to go like that. "If I wait until morning," he said, "it will be tomorrow again." He left the suitcase and the laptop. He said he would send someone for them.

I climbed up to the attic, for the first time since he had moved in, and sat in his armchair. I saw him going down the steps between the houses, stooped, and then the street swallowed him. The door of the yellow building cannot be seen from my window. Only the kitchen window on the third floor, with the white curtain. I watched for half an hour. In the kitchen one shadow moved, then two. Then the light went out, and I did not know what that meant.

Three weeks later Nedžla rang at my door. It was the first time I had seen her up close: small, gray at the temples, in a good coat. She said she had come for her husband's things. She took the suitcase and the laptop, asked how much he still owed, though he owed nothing, and left fifty marks on the chest of drawers for, as she put it, the coffees I had made him. I could not hold back. I asked her what he had told her, where he had been.

"He said he was in Banja Luka," she said. "That a job dragged on." "And you believed him?" She looked at me the way you look at a child who asks why the sky is blue. "I told him I had waited for him," she said. "So we are even."

She took the suitcase and started down the steps, and at the gate she turned and looked up, toward my attic, toward the window without a curtain. "From my balcony you can see your roof, ma'am," she said. "And the glow of one cigarette, every evening. For six years I thought he would get tired of it before I did." Then she closed the gate behind her, slowly, so it would not bang, and went two streets down, home.