For twenty years Omar had been reading lines that other people do not see. At the land registry office of the Novo Sarajevo municipality he drew property boundaries, compared old Austrian plans with new surveys, and argued with people who were certain their neighbor's garage stuck into their garden. He knew that a line on paper never lies on its own. The people who draw it lie, and even they usually give themselves away at the corners.
Larisa had started running two years earlier, the autumn her mother died. First a loop around Koševo Stadium, then the whole length of Wilson's Promenade, then on Sundays Vrelo Bosne, the entire avenue and back. She joined a running club that met near Skenderija and got a coach, Dženis Hamzić, a former track athlete of thirty-four, who sent her training plans in the app along with comments full of exclamation marks. She lost weight, quit smoking, and started sleeping. Omar was happy for her the way he was happy about a good weather forecast: contentedly, from a distance.
For her birthday he installed the same app and followed her, so he could send her applause. Larisa laughed. "You and running," she said, but she followed him back so as not to hurt his feelings. Omar liked looking at her lines. They were orange, tidy, always the same length for the same day of the week. Tuesdays and Thursdays training with the club, Saturdays easy, Sundays long. He knew her pace better than any coach, because he knew what it meant when a line thickened on an uphill and stretched out on a downhill.
They had been married seventeen years. Their daughter was studying in Graz and called on Sundays, always at the same time, like a bus. Omar was not a jealous man. He did not read other people's messages and did not ask where anyone had been, because he believed that the truth, like a boundary line, shows itself in time. In their early years Larisa used to tease him about it. She said he would accept even being cheated on only if it was properly drawn up and stamped by the municipality.
He noticed it one Tuesday in March, entirely by chance, while he was waiting in the kitchen for the rice to cook. Under the map it said: moving time forty-eight minutes, elapsed time one hour and forty-one. For fifty-three minutes Larisa had not been running. He looked at the Thursday before: fifty-one. The Tuesday before that: fifty-five. Sundays were clean, Saturdays too. Only the club days had that hole in the middle, like a bill on which someone had neatly entered everything except one item.
The hole had a place, too. When he zoomed in on the map, he saw that the orange line ran from Hrasno down Wilson's Promenade to Skenderija, where the club met, then came back to Grbavica and, on a street behind the stadium, made a small tangle. Omar saw tangles like that every day at work. When a device stands still on a tripod, the satellite signal does not: the points scatter on their own and gather into a little knot, as if the instrument were thinking. Larisa's knot was not on the sidewalk, not in the park, not by the fountain. It was on a building. On the third entrance of a six-story apartment building.
Omar told himself everything a man is obliged to tell himself. That they stretched at the home of someone from the club. That one of the runners had a birthday. That the app got confused when it was cold. Then he opened Dženis's profile, which was public, because Dženis made his living from his running. That Tuesday Dženis had run with the club until six fifty-two, and his line ended at the same spot. His next activity, an easy twenty-minute run, began at seven forty-five, from the same entrance. The two lines touched at a single point, like two pencils laid down on the same desk.
At the registry he could have checked in two minutes whose apartment was at that entrance. He did not do it. Some things a man must not find out with an official password. Besides, there was no need: in Dženis's profile picture, behind his smiling face, you could see a balcony with a green awning and part of a stadium floodlight.
That week, for the first time in twenty years, he made a mistake at work. On a plan in Hrasno brdo he joined the wrong two points and, on paper, cut half a plum orchard away from some pensioner. A colleague from the next office brought him coffee and asked if he was ill. He said he was not. He said he was not sleeping well, which was true, and that it was because of spring, which was not.
On Thursday Larisa came home at ten past eight, her hair wet. "How was it?" he asked. "Hard," she said, and kissed him on the forehead. "Dženis made us run all the way up to Vraca." Under the table, on his phone, Omar looked at her Thursday. There had been no climb up to Vraca. There had been Wilson's Promenade, straight as a ruler, and the tangle in Grbavica, fifty-two minutes. Her hair smelled of a shampoo they did not buy. Over dinner she talked about the half marathon in September and how Dženis said she could finish in under two hours, if she did not give up halfway. He asked if she wanted tea. She said she did.
On Saturday he went to the shopping mall at Marijin Dvor and bought running shoes. The salesman asked what kind of surface they were for, and Omar said asphalt and standing. The salesman laughed, thinking it was a joke. On Sunday, while Larisa was out on her long run to Vrelo Bosne, Omar went over her Tuesday in the app twice more. He memorized the streets she took, the corner where she turned, and the number of the entrance. He did not have to. He already knew them by heart.
On Wednesday after work Larisa went to her sister's in Ilidža, as she did every Wednesday. At six Omar put on his new shoes and set off, not after her, but after her line from the previous Tuesday. He did not know how to run. He ran to the first bench, then walked, then ran again, down Wilson's Promenade to Skenderija and back, past kids on rollerblades and pensioners with dogs, until his lungs began to burn as if he were breathing sand. In Grbavica he turned onto the street behind the stadium, went up to the third entrance, and read the name Hamzić on the intercom. Then he went back across the street and stood under a linden tree. He left the phone running in his pocket. He did not look at the windows. He looked at his watch.
He stood there for fifty-three minutes. A woman went by with bags from the bakery, then a boy with a ball, then the same woman without the bags. He remembered that they had gone out for the first time right along here, eighteen years ago, down Wilson's Promenade to the Vrbanja bridge and back, so slowly that an old woman pushing a stroller overtook them. Larisa had said then that she liked how he was never in a hurry. The streetlights came on. When the fifty-three minutes were up, Omar ran back the same way, more slowly than on the way there, and at home he saved the activity. He gave it a name: Tuesday, Grbavica. On the map was Larisa's line, the same down to the last corner, and at the third entrance a small, dense tangle of fifty-three minutes, like a fingerprint. He pressed the button to post it.
He sat down in the kitchen, still in his running shoes, his legs trembling. Within three minutes his phone buzzed with a notification: Dženis Hamzić gave you applause. Omar stared at the screen until the applause disappeared. It lasted forty seconds, as long as it takes a man to look at a map all the way to the end.
Larisa came home at ten past eight. She did not take off her shoes. She stood in the hallway with her phone in her hand, and the screen lit up her chin. "You never told me you run," she said. "I didn't really run," said Omar. "Mostly I stood." Larisa sat down on the shoe cabinet, jacket still on, and for a long time she said nothing. Omar got up and put the water on for tea. Out of habit he took two cups from the cupboard. Then he put one back.