A Song Over the Low Wall

For forty years I have been playing other people's songs in Mostar. I wrote only one of my own, in the summer of 2008, when I was fifty-two and should have known better. At the Two Mills restaurant on the bank of the Neretva, where I played the saz and the guitar from May to October, the waiters called me Professor, because once, long ago, I had enrolled at the music academy in Sarajevo and never finished. My name is Rizah, but few people knew it.

I lived alone in a small stone house below Brankovac, with a courtyard where one grapevine grew and nothing else. The women in the neighborhood said I had married my saz, and they were not far from the truth. I had one love, in my twenties, who went to America and sent me only one postcard, with a bridge much bigger than ours and much uglier. Over the low wall was the house of Hafiz Šukrija, who had been imam of the small mosque down the street for thirty years, and was now retired and hard of hearing. That spring his daughter Emina had come back to him, twenty-four years old, with a nursing diploma from Sarajevo, and she had taken a job at the hospital.

Every evening around seven, when the stone in the courtyard begins to give back the heat of the day, Emina came out into the garden and watered the roses. Her father had a hose, but it did not reach the corner by the wall, where the oldest roses grew, the dark red ones her late mother had planted, so she carried water there in an old copper ibrik. She wore hospital clogs, her hair pinned up, earbuds in her ears, and she watered slowly, as if every rose were a patient. Sometimes she would stop, pick off a wilted petal, and put it in her pocket, as if she were not allowed to drop it on the ground. I sat on my doorstep with my coffee and tuned the saz. "Good evening, Uncle Rizah," she would say over the wall, always the same, kindly, the way you greet an older neighbor. Every time, the word uncle stung me.

I did not intend to write a song. It wrote itself, the way a grapevine grows, a little each day. First came the melody, while I watched the water trickle from the spout of the ibrik. I wrote at night, on the backs of restaurant receipts, and crossed out half of it in the morning. Then the line came: "Water me too when you water the roses, for I am wilting across the wall." I laughed at myself, a man of fifty-two wilting across a wall. But I kept the line. By the end of July the song had three verses and a refrain, and I knew it was the best thing I had ever made and that it was for no one.

I played it at the restaurant. Tourists from Korea and Germany filmed the bridge over my shoulder and clapped when I finished, the way you clap for a waiter who has not dropped his tray. The head waiter told me, "It's nice, Professor, but play the old one, about Emina. That's what they ask for." I played the old one too. People sang it with me, and mine no one did.

In the evenings I played it on my doorstep, louder than necessary, so the sound would carry over the wall. Emina watered the roses. She did not turn around. Once she began to hum, and I stopped playing to hear what she was humming. It was some song from the radio, the one that came out of every car on the Boulevard that summer. At the end of July I copied the lyrics onto a clean sheet of paper, folded it, and left it on the wall, under a stone, in the spot where she set down the ibrik. The next day the paper was gone. I waited a whole week for her to say something. She said nothing. I thought the wind had carried it into the Neretva, or that the hafiz had thrown it out with the old newspapers.

Hafiz Šukrija, who was hard of hearing, heard it all the same. One evening he leaned on the wall, prayer beads in his hand, and asked, "That's a lovely song of yours, Rizah. What does it say?" I told him. He was silent for a long time, and then he laughed softly. "I wrote songs to her mother for four years. She never read a single one, or so she always said. And she married me." Then he went into the house and turned off the light on the porch.

One evening in August I gathered my courage. I took the saz and went over to the wall while she was watering. "Emina, I wrote something. For your roses." She took one earbud out. "Sorry, Uncle?" I said it again. She smiled, politely and tiredly, because she had come back from a night shift that morning. "That's nice. Record it and send it to me." She put the earbud back in and poured the rest of the water from the ibrik under the dark red rose by the wall. I stood there with the saz in my hand like a man who has shown up at the wrong wedding.

I never recorded it. In September a young doctor from Vienna started coming to see her, a Mostar man who worked there, with a white car and Austrian plates. At the end of October there was a wedding in the courtyard. I played at it, because the hafiz asked me to, and I played everything except that song. Emina danced with her husband under the vine that reached over the wall from my side, and once she looked at me, briefly, over his shoulder. I thought she was looking at the vine. The next day she left with her husband for Vienna. When the car set off down the street, she waved through the window to the whole neighborhood, and to me as well.

Hafiz Šukrija died four years later. The house was bought by a man from Split who turned it into vacation apartments, and the roses were dug up to make room for parking. That year I stopped playing my song, both at the restaurant and on my doorstep. The restaurant closed during the pandemic and never reopened. These days I play only at small weddings, when someone remembers me, and my fingers do not obey me as they once did. I am sixty-nine and have a cane that I shyly hide behind the door.

Last June, one evening, I walked slowly down to the Old Bridge. Kujundžiluk was crowded, the copper shops were calling to tourists in five languages, and the smell of grilled meat spread down the cobblestones. The divers were collecting money from the tourists, as always, and at the very top of the bridge, where the stone is polished smoothest, stood a girl of maybe fifteen, with a guitar too big for her and an open case for coins. Tourists walked past her and looked down into the Neretva. I stopped to catch my breath, and that was when I heard: "Water me too when you water the roses, for I am wilting across the wall."

It was my song, my melody, only slower, and in the second verse she had changed one word, so that it was better than mine. I had sung that the water was cold, and she sang that the water was warm, and she was right: the water from the ibrik was always warm from the sun. I stood there until she finished. Then I put a twenty-mark note in the case. "Uncle, that's too much," she said. That word again. I asked her where she had learned the song. "From my mom. She sings it every evening when she waters the flowers on the balcony." "And where do you live?" "In Vienna. In the summer we come to stay with my aunt." "And what is your mom's name?" "Emina."

She was tuning a string as she talked, without looking at me. "Mom says a neighbor wrote it when she was young. She says she pretended all summer not to hear it, because she was embarrassed, and he was much older. But she remembered every word." She looked up. "I think he's dead. Mom says he must have died a long time ago." "He probably has," I said. "Would he be angry that I sing it?" she asked. "No," I said. "You sing it better than he did."

I set off across the bridge, toward home. Behind me the girl began the song again, from the beginning, for the tourists or for no one. I did not turn around. I walked slowly, the way she used to water the roses, and I listened to it all the way to the end of the street.