Four Nights by the Miljacka

For four years Halim had lived in the attic of an Austro-Hungarian building on the riverfront, in a room with a view of the Miljacka and, if he leaned out of the window, the roof of the City Hall. He translated from German: manuals for washing machines, lease agreements, pension decisions from Austria. He worked from morning until dusk, and then he went out for a walk. He knew every facade from Skenderija to Baščaršija, every balcony with geraniums. The city knew nothing about him. There were weeks when he spoke only to Zijah at the kiosk by Ćumurija and to the woman at the bakery, and both conversations would have fit on a single page.

That June the nights were warm and long, and the river was shallow and green, the way it always is at the start of summer. On Thursday, a little after ten, near the Šeherćehaja Bridge, he saw a young woman leaning on the railing. Her shoulders were shaking. He walked past her, stopped, then went on, angry with himself. A few steps further he heard a car slow down. A black Golf was rolling along beside her at walking pace, and the driver was leaning out of the window: "Want a ride, gorgeous? Don't cry, he's not worth it." She walked faster. The Golf sped up with her.

Halim was not a brave man, but he crossed the street before he had time to think about it. He stopped beside her and said loudly, as if annoyed, "There you are! I've been waiting for you by the City Hall for half an hour." The driver snorted a laugh and drove off toward Bistrik. The woman wiped her face with her sleeve. She was maybe twenty-three, with short hair and a faded denim jacket. She thanked him and said her name was Amna. They walked to the Latin Bridge and back, and Halim, to his own surprise, talked the whole time. He told her he had never walked with a woman at night. That was when she laughed for the first time. At the corner of her street she stopped. "Come tomorrow at nine, to the same place. I'll tell you something. But don't fall in love with me. That you must not do." He promised. They exchanged numbers, just in case.

The second night he came half an hour early. She arrived at nine on the dot and immediately asked him to talk first. He said there was nothing to tell. He lived on other people's sentences, translated other people's lives at eight marks a page, and on his walks he invented the people behind the windows: in one lived a retired tram driver who counted the trams every evening, in another a woman who knitted socks for her grandchildren in Sweden. He had fallen in love a few times, but always with someone from a book he was translating, and always until the last page. Amna laughed out loud. "So you've never even lived," she said. "I haven't," he admitted. "That's why I talk for so long."

Then she told him her story. Her parents worked in Linz, and since the age of ten she had lived with her grandmother in Bistrik. Her grandmother saw poorly in one eye and did not trust the other, and she did not let Amna out of the house after dark. In the afternoons Amna read her the newspaper, and her grandmother kept a hand on her knee, to know she was there. When her grandmother dozed off, the hand stayed, and Amna would not move for an hour. Two years ago her grandmother had rented the upstairs room to a young doctor named Ahmed, who was doing his residency at Koševo. He was quiet, carried her grandmother's bags home from the market and brought Amna books. Once he bought three tickets to Hasanaginica at the National Theater. Her grandmother went with them and held Amna's hand through the whole play, while on the other side Ahmed's knee touched hers, and Amna did not hear a single word from the stage.

Last June Ahmed had gotten a job at a hospital in Freiburg. The evening before he left, Amna went up to his room with a packed bag and told him to take her with him. He sat her down on a chair, sat across from her, and was silent for a long time. He said he had nothing but a room in a dorm and a one-year contract. "I'll come back in a year," he said. "If you still want me then, I'll marry you." At first he wrote every week, then less often, and in January he stopped. Four days ago, on a friend's Instagram, Amna had seen a photograph from a café terrace on Ferhadija. In the corner, laughing, sat Ahmed. He was in Sarajevo. He had not come by and had not been in touch. "That's why I was crying on the bridge last night," she said. "Now you know everything."

Halim said she should write to him. She shook her head: she would not write first, she was not the one who had made a promise. "Then I'll deliver the letter," said Halim, and surprised himself. "You write it, and I'll take it to him. That way you won't be writing first, you'll be sending an answer." Amna looked at him as if he had invented fire. She wrote the letter on a page from his notebook, leaning on the railing, and he looked at the water so as not to see the words. The next morning he took it to Grbavica, to Ahmed's parents. His mother opened the door with flour on her hands and took the letter the way you take one from the mailman.

On the third night Amna was as cheerful as a child before Bajram. She talked fast, held his arm, and looked at her phone every few minutes. "You're so kind," she told him twice. "If only he were a little like you." Halim said nothing. He had known since the night before that he had broken his promise, and she did not see it, because she was looking past him, toward the Latin Bridge. Ten o'clock passed, then eleven. Ahmed did not come. Amna went quiet, and then she said, "Maybe the letter didn't get there." Halim did not say that he had put it in his mother's hands. At midnight she left without saying whether she would come the next day.

On the fourth day it rained from morning on. Halim went out anyway and stood under the awning of a closed café by the bridge. She came at ten, soaking wet, with no umbrella. Ahmed had neither shown up nor been in touch. Amna had called his family's house in Grbavica, and his mother told her she had left the letter on his desk the same day. Amna cried and said she hated him, then that she loved him, then that she no longer knew anything. Halim gave her his jacket. Then, because he no longer had anything to lose, he said, "Amna, I love you. Since the first night. I know you forbade me."

She looked at him for a long time. Rain dripped from the awning between them. "Why didn't you tell me sooner?" she finally asked, quietly. "You were busy," he said. She laughed through her tears. Then she said something he had not expected: that maybe she could love him, if he gave her time, because Ahmed had left and he was here, and because in four nights he had learned more about her than Ahmed had in two years. "May I stop being so formal with you?" she asked. She could.

The rain stopped. They set off upstream and talked like children planning their summer. She would bring her grandmother, and her grandmother would get the room with the window facing the river. He would translate in the kitchen. Her grandmother would hold his hand too while they read her the newspaper, and when she dozed off, he would not be allowed to move either. Halim laughed louder than he had in all his four years in Sarajevo. In the window of a closed shop he saw two people under one jacket, and it took him a moment to realize that one of them was him.

On the Latin Bridge stood a man in a light-colored jacket, with a travel bag at his feet, looking toward Bistrik. Amna stopped. Her hand slid off Halim's arm. "Ahmed," she said, very quietly, and then loudly. The man turned around. She ran. He dropped his bag on the wet stone and met her with open arms.

Then, in the middle of the embrace, she tore herself away and ran back. She threw her arms around Halim's neck, kissed him, quickly and clumsily, said "Forgive me," and went back to the bridge. They walked off toward Bistrik under Ahmed's jacket. Halim's stayed on her shoulders. He stood on the riverbank until the bridge was empty, and then a little longer.

In the morning a message came. It was long, full of typos. Ahmed's phone had been stolen in Munich, and he had not wanted to show up in Bistrik empty-handed, before he got the lease for an apartment in Freiburg, with a room for her grandmother. He had read the letter only last night, when he came back from his brother's in Mostar. "I'll return your jacket," Amna wrote. "And come to the wedding. Nana already loves you, and she's never even seen you." Halim read the message several times. He wrote, "Be happy, Amna." Then he deleted the name, typed it again, and sent it.

That evening he went out for a walk again. The river was muddy from the rain. At Ćumurija, Zijah was closing up the kiosk, and when he saw Halim, for the first time in four years he said something to him other than a price. "What's up, neighbor? She's not with you tonight?" Halim stopped. "No," he said, and bought a newspaper he did not need, just to stay a little longer.