Dušica was crying quietly, in the bathroom next to the kitchen, with the tap running, and Jelica might not have heard it at all if she had not stayed home that Saturday with a migraine. The Topalović house in Starčevica was quiet anyway. Professor Budimir Topalović liked quiet, the way he liked starched shirts and lunch at two, and for twenty-five years all of it had been provided for him. Jelica was fifty-two, with a doctorate in chemistry that hung framed in the pantry and a son in Vienna who called on Sundays. Budimir was spending those ten days in Novi Sad, at a conference on ethics in public office, where he was giving the keynote. Jelica knocked on the bathroom door. The water stopped running, and the crying did not.
The girl was sitting on the floor, leaning against the bathtub, white in the face. She was twenty, had come a year earlier from a village near Kneževo, and cooked, washed, ironed the professor's shirts, and at night, with Jelica's old textbooks, studied for the pharmacy entrance exam. Jelica had given birth to one child, and it did not take her long to understand. She sat down on the edge of the tub. "What month?" she asked. Dušica closed her eyes. She said she would be gone by Monday, that she would go back home, and that she begged only one thing of her: not to ask anything.
Jelica did not ask. She made mint tea, settled the girl into the bed in the small room behind the kitchen, and drew the curtains for her. When she went back into the kitchen to turn off the stove, Dušica's phone had been left on the table. The screen lit up. The message was from a contact the girl had saved under the name Professor. "Don't say anything to Jelica. I'll sort everything out when I get back, I'll find you a job in Belgrade. Delete this." Jelica read the message twice. The second time slowly, the way you read a prescription with something wrong in it. Then she turned off the stove.
The first thing she felt was anger at the girl, so pure she could almost touch it. She went up to the study, sat down at Budimir's desk, and began typing on the laptop. Pay her a month in advance. Buy her a bus ticket to Kneževo. Write a reference, a short one, without any words that could be misunderstood. She thought of the girl's hands on her pots, of her laughter at dinner when the professor told stories about his students, of her own pillow, which the girl shook out of the window every morning. In my house, she thought. Under my roof. The list was done in ten minutes.
That night she did not sleep. She lay under the lamp and, as she once had in the laboratory, added and subtracted. Dušica: twenty years old, her first job, her first time in the city, a mother who sells milk in the village. Budimir: fifty-seven, a professor whose name appears in the papers, who had asked the girl how her studying was going and once brought her a chemistry book with an inscription. Jelica remembered herself at twenty-four, a teaching assistant at the Faculty of Technology, and the young lecturer Topalović, who listened to her as if every word she said mattered. She remembered how that listening had ended, and what she had given up after it. The anger did not grow any smaller. It only changed its address.
In the morning she found Dušica packing her bag, the same one she had arrived with. Jelica sat down on her bed. "You are not going to Kneževo," she said. The girl burst into tears again and said she had not wanted it, that the lady had to believe she had not wanted it. "I know who wanted it," said Jelica. She asked what he had promised her. A job in Belgrade, said Dušica, far away, and that no one would ever have to know. And money. "He won't find you anything," said Jelica. "I will." She took the bag from the girl's hands and set it down on the floor.
A friend from university, Stanojka, had for ten years been the principal of a high school in Bijeljina, and every September she called Jelica to come and teach chemistry, because there were no chemists to be had and Jelica still remembered formulas better than anyone. Jelica called her at eight in the morning. "Do you still need a chemist?" Stanojka was silent for three seconds and then said that the apartment above her sister's had just come free. Jelica withdrew the money from her own account, where for twenty years she had kept her inheritance from her mother and never touched it. She did not touch the joint account. By noon two suitcases, a box of textbooks, and Dušica's bag were in her old Fiat.
Before she left, she cleaned the house better than ever, because that was how she had been raised. She emptied the fridge. She went through the rooms one more time. From the bedroom wall she took down only one photograph, the one in which she was twenty-four and wearing a lab coat, and put it in her bag. On the kitchen table, exactly where Budimir read the paper every morning, she left her house keys, Dušica's little apron folded in four, the printed message from the girl's phone, and a sheet of paper that said: "Budimir, Dušica is with me. Do not look for her through me, or for me through her. Lunch is not made. R." She went out and pulled the door shut behind her.
Budimir came back on Friday evening, with a box of chocolates for Jelica and a silk scarf in his coat pocket that he had not yet decided whom to give to. The house was dark. There was no smell of lunch. He called Jelica, then Dušica, and heard his voice come back to him off the empty walls. On the kitchen table he found the keys, the apron, and his own words, printed on Jelica's printer, which now looked as if someone else had written them. Jelica's phone was switched off. Dušica's number no longer existed. In the fridge there was mustard and a bottle of mineral water. He sat down at the table in his coat. It was the kind of quiet he had always demanded.
In the weeks that followed he did what men do when nothing has ever happened to them. He called his son in Vienna, and his son said only, "Dad, leave me out of this," and hung up. He called Jelica's sister, who told him that Jelica was alive and well and that this was all he needed to know. He told his colleagues that his wife was visiting their son. He boiled eggs and ate them out of the pot. He took his shirts to a dry cleaner's on Gospodska Street, where they recognized him from television and asked after his wife's health. On Tuesday he was a guest on a program about morality in public life and spoke well, as always.
In Bijeljina, in a third-floor apartment near the city park, Jelica walked back into chemistry as into an old house where the furniture had never been moved. In the mornings she taught the juniors, and in the afternoons, at the kitchen table, Dušica. She taped the periodic table to the fridge. The girl studied stubbornly, with a hand on her growing belly, and once told her that no one had ever studied with her before, not at school and not at home. Stanojka brought pastries and never asked anything. In February Dušica for the first time correctly solved an organic chemistry problem that Jelica used to give her university students, and Jelica went into the bathroom so the girl would not see her cry. The neighbor from their floor called them mother and daughter. Neither of them corrected her.
He found them in March, through the list of new teachers on the school's website. It was raining, Semberija lay flat and gray, and as he climbed the stairs he heard two women's voices through the door. "Sodium," Jelica was saying. "Eleven," Dušica answered. "Magnesium." "Twelve." He rang the bell. Jelica opened the door and did not move from the threshold. Behind her, at the kitchen table, sat Dušica, heavy, with a textbook in front of her, and she did not get up.
"I have come to take you home," said Budimir. "Both of you." He paused. "I mean, so we can talk." Jelica looked at him like a man who had wandered onto the wrong floor. "Dušica has her entrance exam in June," she said. "We are studying." Dušica raised her eyes from the book. "Good afternoon, Professor," she said, the way one says it to a stranger in a university hallway. Jelica closed the door. Budimir stood on the landing, a wet umbrella in his hand, and through the door he heard Jelica say "Aluminum," and Dušica, without a pause: "Thirteen."