The two pharmacies in Gradačac stand facing each other on the same street below the clock tower, so close that a pharmacist in one can read the prices in the other's window without glasses. In the one on the left, called Kamilica, Ratko Ćirić has worked for twenty years. In the one on the right, Žalfija, Nenad Spirić has worked just as long. For twenty years the two men played chess on Thursdays in the garden of the café Kod Lipe, their wives Gordana and Smiljka traded cake recipes and curtain patterns, and their daughters Tamara and Kristina went to the same class and shared the same desk. People said the Ćirićs and the Spirićs were one family with two cash registers. So it went until June, when the engineer came to town.
His name was Saša Mirković, he was twenty-nine, he was from Bijeljina, and he had come with the company building the new water main toward Pelagićevo. He rented the attic room above the bakery, exactly between the two pharmacies, which the whole čaršija later considered a joke on God's part. On his first morning he walked into Kamilica with red eyes and sneezed three times in a row, because he was allergic to linden, and the street smelled of linden trees in bloom. Behind the register stood Gordana, who was not a pharmacist but knew everything there was to know in town. While she bagged his tablets, she found out that he was not married, that he had no girlfriend, that his mother lived alone in Bijeljina, and that he had a permanent contract. Before he left, she gave him a free nasal spray as well. Half an hour later Smiljka, across the street, knew all the same things, except the price of the spray.
The next day Tamara, on her mother's orders, carried a jar of honey and a little bottle of propolis up to the attic. Tamara was twenty-six, with a pharmacy degree from Tuzla and no desire at all to carry honey to strange men, but there was no arguing with Gordana. The day after that, Kristina knocked, twenty-four, a dentistry student home on summer break, with a pan of potato pie and a box of allergy tablets, stronger, as her mother had instructed her to say, than the ones across the street. Saša thanked them both, blushed in front of them both, and understood nothing. He thought the people of Gradačac were simply hospitable.
By the end of June the two families had stopped greeting each other. Gordana put a sign in Kamilica's window saying their vitamin C was cheaper than anywhere in the Posavina. The next day a sign appeared in Žalfija's window saying theirs was cheaper than anywhere in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Ratko and Nenad sat down to chess one more Thursday, but the game ended before the tenth move, when Nenad said Ratko pulled his pieces around the way his wife pulled other people's customers. "That Kristina of theirs smiles like she is on clearance," Gordana told her husband over dinner. "And that Tamara of theirs looks at a man as if she were writing him a prescription," Smiljka told hers, across the street, at the same moment.
Saša started coming home the long way, through the park behind the municipal building, and climbing the stairs without turning on the light. It did not help. For the same Sunday he got two lunch invitations and, not knowing how to say no, accepted both. At one o'clock he ate stuffed peppers, pie, and three pastries at the Ćirićs', while Gordana explained how Tamara ran half the pharmacy by herself. At five he ate veal baked under the sač, pie, and four pastries at the Spirićs', while Smiljka explained how Kristina had the steadiest hand in her whole faculty. On Monday morning he could not button his trousers. He bought something for his digestion, but not at Kamilica and not at Žalfija: at the new pharmacy in the shopping center by the bus station, where nobody asked him about his mother.
In those days Tamara and Kristina met in secret, late in the evening, on a bench by Lake Hazna, like two conspirators. Neither of them wanted the engineer. "He's nice," said Tamara, "but he sneezes the moment he sees a tree." "And he eats as if that were his job," said Kristina. They laughed until tears ran down their faces, and then they agreed to keep quiet. They thought their mothers would tire sooner or later. They did not know their mothers as well as they thought.
In July old Milorad Tešić, godfather to both the Ćirićs and the Spirićs, celebrated his first grandson's christening. The lunch was at the Labud restaurant on the shore of the lake, for sixty guests, with a three-tier cake. Saša was on the list too, because Tešić's son worked with him on the water main. Gordana arrived half an hour early, walked between the tables, and moved the card with Tamara's name to the seat beside the engineer. Smiljka arrived twenty minutes early and found Tamara beside the engineer. She put the card back where it had been and set Kristina's in its place. The waiter laying out the glasses watched the cards travel across the table and said nothing, because nobody was paying him to talk.
The cards kept traveling until the guests arrived. When everyone had sat down, it turned out that there was one empty chair beside Saša and that both mothers were standing behind it, each with her hands on the backrest. "Tamara sits here," said Gordana. "Kristina sits here," said Smiljka. At that moment Tamara and Kristina were sitting at the far end of the table, side by side, pretending to look at their phones. Saša stood up, muttered that he had to call the construction site, and went out onto the terrace. The mothers did not notice. Gordana pulled the chair toward herself. Smiljka pulled it toward herself.
Ratko got up to calm his wife, Nenad to calm his, and within three steps the two of them were arguing about vitamin C. The chair traveled left and right, like the cards before it, until Smiljka's hand slipped off the backrest. Gordana, with the chair in her arms, flew backward, straight into the table with the cake. The three-tier cake tilted slowly, with dignity, as if it were thinking it over, and then it fell. Smiljka tried to catch it and ended up on the floor beside Gordana, both of them up to the elbows in white cream, with a sugar dove left sitting in Gordana's hair. The baby started to cry. Old Tešić put down his glass. At least ten guests were filming on their phones.
By evening the video had gone around every Viber group in Gradačac. Somebody named it the Battle of Labud, and the name stuck. On Monday both pharmacies were closed, with the same sheet of paper on their doors: closed for inventory. Gordana did not leave the house, Smiljka did not go near the window. Only Tamara and Kristina went out, together, for coffee in the čaršija, where people looked at them with the kind of respect usually shown to survivors.
At the end of August the town learned that the engineer was getting married. Gordana was sure it was Kristina's doing, Smiljka was sure it was Tamara's, and for the first time in two months both called their daughters at the same moment. The daughters, each in her own room, said the same thing: it isn't me. The bride's name was Amra Mujkić, and she worked at the new pharmacy in the shopping center by the bus station. Saša had bought his allergy tablets from her since his first day, because it was the only pharmacy in Gradačac where nobody offered him lunch. When he told her about that Sunday with two lunches, she laughed and told him there was no medicine on earth for that.
The wedding was in September. The line of cars drove down the street below the clock tower and slowed down right between Kamilica and Žalfija, because a flour truck was parked in front of the bakery. Gordana stood in the doorway of her pharmacy, Smiljka in the doorway of hers. They watched the white car carrying the pharmacist from the shopping center, in a dress that both of them, each privately, judged to be modest. When the line had passed, Gordana was the first to speak across the street. "The third pharmacy," she said. "I always told you that woman was dangerous," answered Smiljka, although she had never said it.
That evening, for the first time since June, they had coffee together in the garden of Kod Lipe. At the next table Ratko and Nenad spread out the chessboard and played a game all the way to the end, without a word, and then another. Tamara and Kristina sent the newlyweds a joint present, a box of allergy tablets wrapped in cellophane, with a card signed by both pharmacies. And in October Gordana and Smiljka, arm in arm, went to the shopping center by the bus station to see, as they put it, what kind of prices that woman was charging.