At a Bosnian wedding two people never sit down: the singer and the photographer. Minela and Hamza met in May, at a restaurant on the Una below Bihać, by getting in each other's way. She was singing for the first dance, he was kneeling on the dance floor looking for a frame with nothing in it but the couple, the river and the sky. In every frame, behind the bride's shoulder, stood the singer in a green dress. Near the end of the song Hamza waved at her to move to the left. Minela nodded, smiled, and for the next verse stood even closer.
During the break he found her at the bar. "The couple is paying me to shoot them without the band," he said. "They are paying me to be heard," she said, "and what is seen is heard best." She was drinking water with lemon and did not even look at him. Hamza left convinced he had met the most conceited woman in the Una-Sana Canton. At home in Travnik, while he was choosing photographs for the album, he stopped at one he had not planned: the couple sharp in the foreground, and behind them, blurred and green, the singer with her head thrown back in the middle of a high note. He did not send that photograph to the couple.
Two weeks later, in a hall on the bank of the Neretva in Mostar, he caught his foot on her cable and the microphone flew out of her hand in the middle of a chorus. The band kept playing, and Minela picked the microphone up off the floor and said into it: "The photographer always hits the dance floor first, a round of applause for the photographer!" The hall clapped. Hamza, red to the ears, took a bow. Later they realized that the same agency, Bijeli Veo from Zenica, had hired them both, and that they would see each other often that season. At midnight he brought her a glass of water with lemon. In return she told him which song the band played when the bride was supposed to cry, so he would be ready.
In June, in Brčko, the wedding had six hundred guests and went on until four in the morning. The musicians and the photographer eat last, that is a rule nobody ever wrote down, so at one past midnight Minela and Hamza sat in the restaurant kitchen, between the dishwasher and crates of empty bottles, eating cold sarma off the same plate, because the cook said there were no clean ones left. That was where they talked for the first time without the noise. She had finished a degree in solo singing at the Academy of Music in Sarajevo and had once wanted to sing Puccini. In that month alone she had sung Kad ja pođoh na Bembašu fourteen times, and that, she said, was not the worst thing that could have happened.
Hamza said he had studied architecture in Banja Luka and had never built anything but albums. He shot weddings for the money, and for himself, when everyone had gone, he shot the empty halls: chairs upside down on the tables, confetti in a puddle of juice, balloons sinking down on their own. She said she would love to see that. Then she fell asleep, sitting up, with the plate on her knees, while he was telling her about a hall in Doboj that in the morning looked like an abandoned cathedral. He photographed her before the accordion player Šućro came to wake her for the last round.
The rest of the summer went by on a schedule. They sent each other their Saturdays in advance, and the Saturdays matched more and more often, partly because Hamza always recommended the same band to couples who asked him about music. Tešanj below the fortress. Livno, where in August hail the size of hazelnuts came down. Gradačac, Jajce, Gračanica, two weddings in Sarajevo in the same week. They had an agreement they never quite put into words: at every wedding he would take one photograph of her, and at every wedding she would sing one song for him, unannounced, the old Emina, no matter who had requested what.
Away from weddings they never saw each other once. They had no time. On Saturdays they worked, on Sundays they slept until noon, and on weekdays he edited photographs in Travnik while she gave singing lessons to children in Doboj. Hamza did not know what her voice sounded like when she was not singing into a microphone. She did not know what he looked like without a camera around his neck and without the black suit he wore to every wedding, a suit which, as she told him, ought to retire before the two of them did. One Tuesday in July Hamza got into his car and set off toward Doboj, for no reason he could have put into words, and got as far as Žepče. There he drank a coffee at a gas station and turned back, because he did not know what he would say to her in the quiet, without a band behind her.
At the end of September, at a wedding in Zvornik, Šućro, while tuning his accordion, told Hamza what Minela had kept to herself. She had signed a contract for the winter season at a hotel in Tyrol, she would sing every evening for tourists who would not understand a single word, and she was leaving on Monday. This was her last wedding until spring. "You didn't know?" asked Šućro, pausing with his hand on the bellows. "Well, I thought the two of you," he began, and did not finish. Hamza said he had not known and went off to photograph the groom's family on the staircase, where twelve people were waiting for him.
That evening he worked badly. He missed the cutting of the cake, and the bride's mother scolded him in front of everyone. Twice he forgot to take the cap off his lens. The groom asked him whether he was all right. Minela was on the stage all evening, and between her and him there were three hundred people, a kolo and two families competing over who could request the same song more times. There was no kitchen and no plate of sarma. At midnight he realized there was only one way to reach her, the way everyone else did.
He made his way through the kolo, climbed onto the stage and tucked twenty marks into the microphone stand, the way guests do when they request a song. The drummer stopped playing because he was laughing. "The photographer is paying," Šućro said into the microphone. "This has never happened before." Hamza said only: "Emina." Minela looked at him for a long time, and then she gave the band a signal. She sang it more slowly than ever that summer, looking straight at him, and the guests kept turning to see who she was singing to. The bride's aunt asked out loud whether that was her husband. Hamza did not photograph that song.
At five in the morning, in a parking lot above the Drina, the band was loading speakers into the van. Hamza gave her an envelope. Inside were twenty-six photographs, one from every wedding they had worked together, and on the back of each the town and the date, written in his small architect's lettering. Bihać, Mostar, Brčko, Tešanj. Minela leafed through them under the light from the van. In every one she was singing. In the last one she was not: she was asleep on a chair in the kitchen in Brčko, with a plate of sarma on her knees and her mouth open. Šućro was coiling cables and pretending not to look.
"This is not for the album," she said. "No," said Hamza. "That one is for me." Šućro shouted from the van that they were leaving. Minela put the photographs back in the envelope, all but one, the one from Bihać, where she was blurred and green behind other people's backs. That one she put into the pocket of his black suit. "Give this one back to me in May," she said. "The first wedding is on the eighth, in Visoko. The agency has already signed you up." Then she got into the van, and Hamza was left standing in the parking lot, in a suit that was due to retire, with his hand on his pocket.