My father's funeral was last November, at Bare cemetery. I stood among the men, hands folded the proper way, and I should have been thinking of him. I was thinking of one summer in Ilidža, of the hedge between two gardens, and of a woman in a dark green headscarf who stood by the cemetery fence, far from everyone, and left before the imam had finished. My mother saw her. I recognized her by the way she held her head, a little tilted, as if listening to someone telling her something funny.
That summer, in two thousand seven, I was nineteen and had just passed every exam of my first year of architecture. Our apartment in Grbavica was being renovated, so my father rented a house in Ilidža, two hundred yards from the Great Avenue, with a garden where old pear trees grew. My father was a civil engineer, a tall, calm man who spoke to my mother politely, as if to a client. My mother, Zejna, spent the whole summer baking cakes nobody had asked for. I read, rode my bicycle to Vrelo Bosne and back, and waited for something to happen to me.
It happened in July, when the villa next door, an old Austrian house with a yellow facade and a wooden veranda, was rented by a woman from Mostar and her daughter. The woman was divorced and in debt, that was known within two days, because at the gate she begged the mailman not to bring her the letters from the bank. The daughter's name was Ilijana. She was twenty-three, with short black hair and a voice that carried over the hedge even when she whispered. The first time I saw her, she was on the veranda tossing crumbs to the pigeons, and the pigeons, like all of us later, did not know what to do with so much attention.
In the evenings a crowd gathered on her veranda. Samed, a dentistry student, who brought watermelons. Rijad, who wrote poems for a website and read them aloud, though no one had asked him to. Stjepan, a married lawyer from Sarajevo, who came by car and said every time that he was only stopping by. And Muhidin, the son of a carriage driver from the Avenue, who drove her to Vrelo for free whenever she liked. Ilijana called them all by their surnames and humiliated all of them a little, and they came back every evening, at eight sharp, as if to work. One day she called me over the hedge. "You are Muamer," she said. "I heard your mother calling you to lunch. From today you are my aide-de-camp."
Being her aide-de-camp meant carrying her umbrella, buying her ice cream on the Avenue and standing behind her chair while they played a game she had invented herself. Each of them would write one wish on a slip of paper, she would mix the slips in a straw hat and draw one. That was how Samed won the right to take her up Igman. Rijad won the right to have her listen to a poem all the way to the end. I was not allowed to write. "Aides do not wish," she said. "Aides serve." Everyone laughed, and I laughed with them, and at night I could not sleep for happiness that she had noticed me at all.
One afternoon, at Vrelo, she sat on a rock above the water and said men only talked. She asked me whether I would wade across, for her sake, a channel where the water was so cold it made your teeth ache. I went in with my clothes on, up to the waist. When I came out, my teeth were chattering and I could not say a single word. Ilijana laughed, and then she stopped, came over, wiped my face with her scarf and kissed me on the forehead. "You are crazy," she said. "Never love anyone like this." At the time I did not understand that the warning was not meant for me.
At the end of July she changed. She stopped playing the game with the slips of paper, so her admirers sat alone on the veranda and looked at one another. By day she slept, and in the evenings she walked alone down the Avenue and came back when the carriages were already empty. Once I found her crying in the garden, among the pear trees, and when I asked her what was wrong, she said a wasp had stung her. I knew she was in love, because I was too, and I began trying to find out who he was. I suspected Stjepan, because of the car. I suspected Muhidin, because of the horse.
A week later I could not fall asleep and went down into the garden. I sat under a pear tree and looked toward the villa. Around midnight our back door creaked. Someone passed ten feet from me without noticing me and slipped through the gap in the hedge that I myself had made on the very first day, so I could bring her ice cream faster. There was moonlight. I knew the white shirt, I knew the way he threw back his shoulders when he walked, I knew the smell of the cologne my mother bought him every year for his birthday. On the veranda of the villa a light came on and went out.
Two days later my father said he had to go into Sarajevo, to a building site. I rode my bicycle to Vrelo and saw his car in the parking lot by the entrance. I found them on the little wooden bridge over the stream. Ilijana was speaking quickly and quietly and holding him by the sleeve. My father slowly shook his head, the way he did on a site when he told a worker that a wall had to be torn down and built again, and he removed her hand from his sleeve. She took that hand of his and pressed it to her face. She stood like that, eyes closed, until he looked away. I went home and did not leave my room until evening.
My mother found out the way everything in Ilidža gets found out: from the woman at the bakery, whose sister cleaned at the villa. She did not shout. She closed the bedroom door and spoke quietly, and my father said nothing, and that silence was worse than any quarrel I had ever heard. In the morning she said the apartment in Grbavica was finished, though it was not, and that we were going back. My father spent the whole day carrying boxes to the car and did not look at me. There was no one on the veranda of the villa, neither the admirers nor Ilijana, only the straw hat full of slips of paper, forgotten on the table.
Before we left I went to the hedge. Ilijana came out as if she had been waiting for me. She did not justify herself and explained nothing. She said only: "You were the best of them all, my aide." Then she kissed me, not on the forehead this time, briefly and seriously, as if she were signing something, and went into the house. I stood there with my arms full of my mother's jars of fruit preserves. Later I heard she had married in Split, then divorced, then gone back to live in Mostar. I never looked for her.
After that summer my father lived with my mother for another sixteen years, courteously, as if with a client, and never once mentioned Ilidža. Nor did I to him. At the funeral, when people had dispersed, my mother came up to me at the cemetery exit and took my arm. She was looking toward the fence, where there was no one anymore. "Who was that?" she asked. I could have said I did not know. I said: "Someone from Ilidža." My mother nodded and squeezed my arm. "I know," she said. "For sixteen years I imagined her. I thought she would be prettier."