The first note was stuck to the mixing desk, yellow, written in a small hand that slanted to the left: "Microphone two crackles on the letter š. Avoid plums, sugar and the head of marketing." Dalila read it twice, laughed out loud in the empty studio, and only then realized she was laughing with a man she had never seen.
Radio Ćuprija broadcast from two rooms on the fourth floor of an old building by the Stone Bridge in Zenica. Dalila hosted the show "Before Midnight," from eight to twelve, and Faris the night program, from midnight to six. Ever since a reporter had slipped on an icy sidewalk last winter, the director, Ešref, had made a rule that anyone leaving at midnight went home by taxi at the station's expense. The taxi arrived two minutes before midnight and waited exactly two minutes. Faris came in on the last bus from Kakanj, which stopped by the bridge at five to midnight, and it took him another three minutes to reach the elevator. So every night at three minutes to twelve Dalila played the jingle and the news, took her jacket and went down the stairs, while he rode the elevator up. For two months they passed each other somewhere between the ground floor and the fourth.
At first the notes were about work. That the left earphone was weaker. That someone had left coffee on the desk again. Then one evening Dalila left half a zeljanica wrapped in foil and wrote underneath: "From my mom. I can't roll out the dough." The next day a new slip was waiting on the desk: "It was salty. I ate the whole thing. Your mom knows what she is doing." Within a month the desk was covered in yellow slips, and in the drawer beneath it a pile had grown of the ones neither of them wanted to throw away.
Soon they began to talk in songs as well. The last song of her show was a message, and the first song of his was the answer. When one rainy evening she ended with "Snow Fell on the Blossoms and the Fruit," he opened with an old jazz song about rain that will not stop. When she played "Beside the Slender Fountain," he answered with something quick and cheerful, as if asking her why she was sad. Neither of them ever said any of it into the microphone. But people heard.
The first to notice was Mejrema, a nurse on the night shift at the hospital in Crkvice, who called Faris every night around two to request a song for the patients who could not fall asleep. "What was she telling you tonight?" she asked on air. Faris laughed and said he did not know who she was talking about. Then the truck drivers on the highway called in, then the bakers from Pehare, then a retired man from Vranduk who wrote his messages only in capital letters. They all wanted to know the same thing: when would the two of them finally meet.
Dalila did not know what Faris looked like. She imagined him tall and thin, with a beard he shaved only on Sundays. She knew he drank mint tea, because she found the tea bags in the trash, that he wrote with his left hand and that he lowered the chair so far that every evening she had to crank the handle. She knew how his voice sounded at three in the morning, because sometimes she could not fall asleep without it. About her he knew that before the last song she always sighed softly into the microphone, because he had once left her a note: "You sigh before the last song. Don't stop." They could have met whenever they wanted. All it would take was for her to miss the taxi once. She never missed it, because she was afraid the man from the elevator would not be the man from the notes.
One Thursday in October there was a note on the desk different from the others, written carefully, almost upright, as if he had written it several times. "They called me from Sarajevo, for a morning show. I start on the first, if I say yes. Ešref knows. I wanted you to hear it from me." The first was ten days away. Dalila put the slip in her jacket pocket and ran the whole show as if she were reading someone else's script. That night she played no message at the end. She played the weather forecast, and that was worse than any song.
On Friday at half past eleven she called the taxi company and said nobody needed to come tonight. The dispatcher asked if she was sure, since Ešref was paying. Dalila said she was sure. The last song that evening was "Emina," the old song about a girl who walks past the poet's garden and does not turn around. When the song ended, she did not play the jingle. She left the microphone on and said, in her eight-to-twelve voice: "I am staying a little longer. Whoever is waiting for the elevator, hurry up."
The elevator creaked two minutes before midnight. The doors opened slowly, as always, and out stepped a man shorter than she had imagined, with glasses that fogged up in the warm air of the hallway and a paper bag from the bakery in his hand. His hair was wet and he did not know where to put the bag. She did not know where to put her hands. He came into the studio, sat down at microphone two, and the first thing he said was: "What is this?" In Bosnian it starts with š, and the microphone crackled. They both burst out laughing, and that was how two people met in front of several thousand listeners.
That night they ran the program together. They did not talk about Sarajevo. They talked about zeljanica and mint tea, about how he had imagined her taller and she had imagined him without glasses. Mejrema called at two and said only: "Finally," and hung up. The retired man from Vranduk sent a message in capital letters that Faris refused to read aloud, and Dalila read it. At three they played "Emina" once more, and before the song they both sighed into the microphone. The truck drivers honked on the highway, though no one in the studio could hear them.
At six the morning host relieved them and looked at them as if he had walked into the wrong room. They left together and crossed the Stone Bridge while fog lay over the Bosna and the steelworks smoked behind it. On the way they ate poppy seed rolls from his bag, long gone cold. Halfway across the bridge Faris said he had not yet signed the contract in Sarajevo. Dalila did not ask why. She said only that the first bus to Sarajevo left at six twenty, because she had checked on Thursday, and that you could see the station from the bridge. Faris looked toward the station, then at her, and asked where a person could get mint tea at this hour.
When she came to work at eight that evening, the doorman told her that a man with glasses had stopped by at noon and would not say what he wanted. A yellow note was waiting on the desk, slanting to the left like all the ones before it: "Microphone two still crackles on the letter š. I am not going anywhere until we fix it together."