The train for Ploče left Sarajevo twenty minutes late, at half past nine in the evening, and there were five of us in the compartment. An older woman with a bag of mandarins, on her way to her daughter in Ploče. A young couple from Konjic, she a lawyer, he something at a bank, engaged since spring. A gray-haired man in a dark coat, neatly shaven, who had been looking at his reflection in the glass since the station. And me, with a laptop I never opened. Near Hadžići the woman with the mandarins started talking about how people used to know better: you marry, you put up with it, and in the end you come to love each other. The lawyer said that a marriage without love was a lie and that divorce was at least honest.
That was when the man by the window turned around for the first time. "And how long does that love last, miss?" he asked calmly. "A year? A week? Until the first electric bill?" The lawyer said love lasts as long as people take care of it. He laughed, without malice, as if he had heard a good joke in the wrong place. "People do not take care of love," he said. "People take care of the fear that someone will take it from them. I tended that fear for twenty years, like a garden." Nobody said another word until Konjic. The young couple got off there, she without saying goodbye, and the woman with the mandarins fell asleep near Jablanica, the bag on her lap.
Only the two of us were left awake. The train was descending through the canyon, the Neretva below was black and here and there white with moonlight, and he poured me coffee from his thermos into its cap, as if we knew each other. "I am sorry about that," he said. "It is not her fault she is young. I am Miodrag. If you like, I will tell you why I do this. Every year, on the same night in October, I get on this train, ride to Ploče, and come back on the first morning train. That night I cannot be in the apartment." I said I would like to hear it. I think he would have told me even if I had not.
"I got married at twenty-nine," he began. "Her name is Iris. She taught piano at the music school, and when I first heard her play, at some recital I had gone to because of a cousin, I thought: I want that. Not her, that. I wanted it to be mine. That is how I married, as if I were buying something. The first year we quarreled about everything, about salt, about her mother, about who had turned off the light last, then we made up, then started all over again. Two children were born. I worked as an engineer on construction sites, earned good money, and was jealous. Of the piano tuner. Of the fathers of her students. Of the neighbor who once helped her carry in the shopping bags."
"When the children grew up, she went back to the piano. Seriously, not just with students. Then Krešimir came back from Vienna, a violinist, her classmate from the academy, and suggested they form a duo. Rehearsals were on Wednesdays, at our place, because the piano was at our place. They were preparing Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata for a concert in November. Do you know it?" I did not. He took out his phone and, quietly, so as not to wake the woman with the mandarins, played the first bars, and in the dark compartment the violin sounded like someone looking for something they had lost. Then he stopped the recording. "Enough," he said. "The rest is too fast."
"On Wednesdays I sat in the armchair and watched. That is the worst thing a husband can do. I watched how they looked at each other before every entrance, how she nodded, how he breathed together with her, and I could not stand that there was something between them that I did not understand. That music makes you feel something you did not choose yourself. That is what I thought back then: that the two of them were feeling something together that I had not allowed. Musicians have to look at each other, she told me once, or they drift apart. To me it sounded like a confession. I welcomed Krešimir with a smile, offered him rakija, asked him about Vienna, and at night I lay awake counting how many times she had nodded to him, as if I were keeping minutes."
"Once I told her I did not like the way he looked at her. She closed the lid of the piano and said: fine, I will stop, I will tell him tomorrow. That is where I made my biggest mistake. I would not let her stop. I said I was not some primitive, that I did not want to be the husband whose wife gives up playing because of him, and the next Wednesday I invited them both to dinner myself. I wanted them both to see how generous I was. But really I wanted to watch them up close, at the same table, and wait for them to slip. The children felt it. On Wednesdays our son went over to a friend's, and our daughter shut the door of her room and played her own music loud, so she would not hear ours."
"In October I had to go to Banja Luka for three days. I came back after two, at night, without calling. I told myself I wanted to surprise her. I knew I was lying. From the street I saw the light on in the kitchen. There was no music, and it was that silence that finished me. I went in and found them at the kitchen table, after rehearsal, with a plate of cheese, a bottle of wine, and sheet music on the chairs. They were laughing at something. Iris had her hair down. To this day I do not know why that, of all things, was the worst."
"I do not remember everything I said. I remember that I shouted, and that I threw Krešimir's violin case out onto the stairwell, and that it echoed down every floor. I remember that my daughter came out of her room in her pajamas, fourteen years old, and heard words a father should not say even in his sleep. Krešimir said nothing. He picked up his case and left. Iris stood by the sink and looked at me as if she were seeing me for the first time. All she said was that now, she supposed, I was satisfied. That same night she took the children to her sister's in Grbavica. Within a year we were divorced."
"Was there something between them?" I asked, because it seemed to me that he was waiting for the question. He looked out the window for a long time, past which the lights of Mostar were sliding by. "She swore there was not. She swore on the children. Krešimir sent me a letter, a real letter, on paper, and wrote the same thing. They canceled the November concert. She does not play with anyone anymore, only with her students. The piano stayed with me, she never came to take it. I cannot play. Every Saturday I dust it." He said it like a man who was used to not being believed, or who no longer believed himself. I could not tell which of the two it was.
After Čapljina we did not talk anymore. At the border they checked our passports, the woman with the mandarins woke up, asked where we were, and fell asleep again. Miodrag closed his thermos, wiped the cap with a tissue, and put it back in his bag. Through the window we could already see the Neretva delta, flat and gray, with canals reflecting the pylons of the power lines. We reached Ploče at ten past two.
He got off first. On the platform he did not turn around, only turned up the collar of his coat and set off toward the port, where cranes stood under floodlights. He walked slowly and hummed something, off-key, and only when he disappeared behind the first warehouse did I realize what it was: the opening of that sonata, those few bars he had played for me in the canyon, before it got too fast.