In Pencil on the Wall

The flat on the third floor of the house above the sea had one flaw, which Mrs. Stanka mentioned only once they had carried in their suitcases: someone already lived in it. From October to June it was home to the poet Slaven Kordić, who every summer moved in with his sister in Hutovo, because in winter Stanka charged him half the rent on condition that he cleared out the flat for tourists in summer. His books stayed on the shelves, his clothes in a locked wardrobe. "He won't bother you," Stanka said. "It's as if he weren't there." Ismar laughed and said nobody bothered him as long as the air conditioning worked.

Amira and Ismar had been married for twelve years. He had a small firm in Tuzla that made aluminum windows and doors; he was a good, punctual man who made his living measuring openings and believed that everything could be measured. She worked in the library of a high school and wrote poems at night at the kitchen table, once the children were asleep. She published them rarely, in a literary magazine in Tuzla, signed only with her initials. In the same magazine Kordić's poems appeared on the first pages, with a photograph that was always too small to show his face. For two years Amira had envied him without knowing what he looked like.

On the first evening, while Ismar was watching a match on the balcony and the children were asleep, she discovered the wall. Behind the curtain, beside the bed, on the white paint, someone had written in pencil in small, slanted letters: half a line, a single word, then half a line again, as if he had written in the dark without turning on the light, so the thought would not get away. "At night the sea has no color, only a voice." "Someone in the next room is turning a page, and it is the rain." Amira stood with her hand on the curtain until Ismar shouted from the balcony that they had scored. She lay down and looked at the wall for a long time, though nothing could be seen in the dark.

On the fourth day Ismar got word that the biggest order of the year had come in, a school in Živinice, and that he had to come and take measurements. He said he would be back in ten days, kissed the children and left with a colleague who picked him up on the coastal highway. Amira stayed with her daughter, her son and the poet's things. In the mornings they went to the beach, after lunch the children slept, and she read his books, his notes in the margins, his underlined sentences. She dusted his desk as if it were her job. Behind the glass of a framed old postcard of Neum, on the wall by the door, she found two photographs of him, tucked one behind the other. A thin face, dark eyes a little too big for that face, the head tilted like that of a man listening to something far away.

Mrs. Stanka liked to talk, and Amira asked. Kordić was from Mostar, quiet, paid on time, and worked as a proofreader for a newspaper over the internet. His heart had been weak since childhood, and he climbed the stairs slowly, stopping on every landing. Every morning he went down to the bakery for the paper and a burek, and he always bought two rolls, though he lived alone. He had never married. "He says he never found a woman who would want to listen to what he hears," Stanka said, and shrugged, as if it were an illness like any other. Then she remembered: on Thursday at five he would come by for a dictionary he had forgotten.

On Thursday Amira sent the children off for ice cream with Stanka's granddaughter. She washed her hair, put on her blue linen dress, set two cups on the table, then put one back in the cupboard because it seemed ridiculous, then took it out again. At half past four Stanka came up, out of breath, with her phone in her hand. He had called. His sister's car had broken down in Hutovo, he could not come, he would send someone for the dictionary. Amira said it did not matter and laughed. Then she went into the bathroom, turned on the tap and cried so that no one would hear, the way women cry when they do not know why they are crying.

That night she wrote a letter to the magazine, asking them to forward it to the author. She wrote about one of his poems, about the rain that turns pages, and signed with her initials. The answer came the next day, two lines: he thanked the unknown colleague, whose poems he had noticed in the same magazine, and thought she had a good ear for silence. She read it thirty times. Stanka had left her the key to the wardrobe so she could take out blankets, and Amira took a blanket, but also his old linen jacket, and sat in it on the balcony until two, looking at the lights on Pelješac and the bridge, which in the dark showed only by its lamps.

On Saturday evening she walked along the waterfront with the children. The children were eating ice cream, and from a bench Stanka waved. "There he is, he just went by, the one in the white shirt!" Amira turned around. A hundred men in white shirts were walking along the waterfront toward the hotels, all with their backs to her. She ran a few steps, pulling her son by the hand, then stopped, because she did not know which back was his. Her son dropped his ice cream and began to cry, and she knelt to comfort him, and as she knelt on the warm stone, she knew she had just lost a man she had never had.

Ismar came back pleased, tanned from the building site, with a contract in his bag. He noticed that she was sunburned and absent, and put it down to the sea. On the last night she did not sleep. By the light of her phone she read the wall, line by line, while he breathed beside her, calmly, like a man who had measured everything. She added nothing. In the morning, while Ismar was loading the suitcases into the car, Stanka promised to tell the poet that the lady from Tuzla had liked his poems very much.

In November, in the library, between two classes, she read the news on a website. Slaven Kordić had died in the hospital in Mostar, at the age of thirty-nine. His heart had given out in his sleep. A month later a friend published his last poems in the magazine, with a short note from the poet's notebook: all his life he had written for a woman he had invented, he had left the door unlocked for her, and she had not come. Amira locked herself in the archive and sat among the old school reading books until the bell rang for the long break.

She wrote to Stanka. Just before New Year an envelope arrived: the two photographs from behind the glass of the postcard and a note written in large letters. "I told him about you in September. He asked what you looked like. I said you were blond and quiet and read standing up. He said you should come next summer and have coffee on the balcony. There." Amira put the photographs in the folder with her poems, at the bottom of the wardrobe, under the winter sweaters. That same week she learned she was pregnant.

The boy was born at the end of April. He was calm, rarely cried, and would look at the window for a long time, as if listening to something far away. He had dark eyes, a little too big for his face. Amira saw it on the very first night in the maternity ward and told no one, not even herself.

Four years later Ismar was looking for the papers for the house, because the firm needed a loan, and at the bottom of the wardrobe, under the sweaters, he found the folder. Inside were her poems, signed with initials he recognized from a magazine he had never read, a clipping from the magazine with a poet's last poems, and two photographs. He looked at the face in the photograph, and then at the boy, who was building a tower on the carpet out of aluminum profile samples. The same eyes. The same head, tilted toward the window. He sat down on the bed and began to count. August. Ten days in Tuzla. The poet in Hutovo, fifteen minutes from the sea.

When Amira came home from work, the folder lay open on the table. Ismar asked quietly, the way he had always asked everything. She told him the truth, the only one she had. She had never seen him. Not once. For three weeks she had lived among his things, read his wall, worn his jacket on the balcony, and written him one letter, to which she got two lines. That was all. Ismar looked at her for a long time. "Nobody keeps pictures of a man they have never seen," he said. "I do," she said, and only then did she understand that for something that never happened there is no proof at all.

He did not shout. He closed the folder and put it on top of the wardrobe, where she could not reach it without a chair. The boy came running with his tower in his hands and wanted to be picked up. Ismar picked him up, as always, and held him for a long time, looking out the window over his shoulder. From that day on he carried him on his shoulders to the market and bought him ice cream, just as before, but when the boy told him something, Ismar looked at his hands, at his shoes, at the tower of profiles, anywhere but into his eyes.