Bakers do not cheat on their wives, my mother-in-law used to say, because they do not have the time. Željko has been a baker for twenty-two years. He goes to bed at nine, gets up at three, and at four he lights the oven in the small bakery in Mejdan that he inherited from his father. I am a pharmacist, and when I am not on the night shift, I cannot fall asleep before two. We spent eighteen years of marriage like two clocks that agree only at noon. While our son was at home, nobody noticed. When he left last autumn to study in Novi Sad, our house in Paprikovac became as quiet at night as a pharmacy after closing time.
It was Nataša, a colleague from my shift, who brought me into the Midnight League. The league was run by a retired geography teacher named Milutin, every Wednesday at midnight, over a video call: twenty questions and twelve teams from all over the Krajina region. Nataša's team, which was called Gornji Šeher, was short a fourth member, because one of the girls had had a baby. "We need someone who knows the Latin names and does not sleep," said Nataša. "You meet both conditions." On the first night I sat at the kitchen table with headphones on, so I would not wake Željko, and I knew two answers: the Latin name for chamomile and the name of the river that flows into the Vrbas in Banja Luka. Nataša screamed quietly, the way people scream at midnight.
Besides Nataša and a student from Laktaši, the team included Siniša. His camera was always off, the screen showed only the word Kastel and a black square, but his voice was deep and slow, the voice of a man who works nights. He knew everything about old films, about the songs our parents listened to and about the bridges on the Vrbas. That first night, at half past one, while I was washing my cup, a message came: "Chamomile. I thought nobody knew that by heart anymore." I answered that it was my job. He asked what a pharmacy looks like at three in the morning. Nobody had ever asked me that.
Within a month we were writing to each other every night. I learned that he worked as a sound technician at a local radio station, that he was divorced and that he lived alone, in an apartment with a view of the Kastel fortress. He wrote long messages, without a single mistake, with a period at the end of every sentence, and he always knew where I had left off the night before. He learned more. He asked what I had wanted to be when I was a girl in Kotor Varoš, and I wrote him what I had never told Željko: that I had wanted to study music and that my father talked me out of it with one sentence over lunch, and I obeyed. I wrote to him that sometimes, on the night shift, I stand behind the counter and imagine getting on a night bus to the sea and not calling anyone. He answered: "You talk like someone nobody listens to until the end." I read that sentence ten times.
I had rules, and I repeated them to myself the way I repeat a dosage to patients. I had never seen him. I had never sent him a single photograph. I had never told him my address. Infidelity, I thought, was something you do with your hands. What I did not repeat was that I took my phone into the bathroom, that I had changed my passcode, that I deleted the messages before going to sleep and that I laughed quietly, into a towel, so I would not wake my husband. One night Željko got up at ten to three and found me in the kitchen laughing at the screen. "Who are you laughing with at this hour?" "With Nataša. The quiz." He nodded, put on his jacket and left. He did not ask again. That, I admit, offended me a little. In the morning I found two warm kifle wrapped in paper on the table, as I had every morning for eighteen years, and I ate them without thinking about them.
Siniša never asked to meet. I thought it was consideration. Later I realized it was skill. In May, Milutin the teacher announced that the season final would be played live, at the Lampa café on Gospodska Street, for the eight best teams. Gornji Šeher was in third place. I told Željko I would be with Nataša, and it was the truth, just not all of it. I bought a new green blouse and hid the receipt in the drawer with Željko's warranties, where he would never look for it. "Bring me whatever you win," he said, and went to bed at nine.
The Lampa was packed. The teacher had a microphone and a bow tie, and on the bar stood a tin trophy and two bottles of wine. Siniša arrived last. He was taller than I had imagined, gray at the temples, in a dark shirt, and he smiled at me as if he had known me for years. He touched my elbow and said: "At last." Then he went over to the table of the team called Mostovi, touched the elbow of a blonde woman in red and said something to her. I did not hear what. I only saw her blush. Under the table Nataša squeezed my hand and whispered that I was as red as a traffic light. I told myself it was a café, that people were friendly and that I had no right to anything.
During the break before the last round I found the blonde woman in front of the mirror in the restroom. Her name was Slađana and she was a teacher from Prijedor. She watched me in the mirror while I washed my hands, and then she said, as if apologizing: "Don't take this the wrong way. Did he say at last to you too?" We stood there for a while in silence. Then she took out her phone, and I took out mine. The same sentence, word for word: You talk like someone nobody listens to until the end. Hers had arrived at one forty, mine at one forty-two, on the same night in March. Slađana said there was another one on the team from Gradiška, who had stayed home tonight with a fever. We both laughed, the kind of laugh that makes your ribs ache, and Slađana's mascara ran.
The last question decided between Gornji Šeher and Mostovi. The teacher read it out slowly, enjoying himself: from the bark of which tree was a substance extracted in the nineteenth century that later gave rise to aspirin? Siniša picked up the pencil at once. "Cinchona," he whispered. "I am sure, I read about it." Nataša nodded, because she always nodded when he was sure. I took the pencil out of his hand, crossed out cinchona and wrote willow. "Danica," he said, saying my name out loud for the first time, "don't be stubborn." "Cinchona is for quinine," I said. "That is why I am writing willow."
We won by one point. The teacher handed Nataša the tin trophy, and I took my jacket and left while they were still taking pictures. I walked along the Vrbas, past the Kastel fortress, where students with a guitar were sitting on the walls. At one forty a message came: "Where did you disappear to? You were brilliant tonight." I pictured Slađana in a car on the way to Prijedor, reading something very similar, and the woman in Gradiška reading it with a fever. I blocked him and stood on the bridge until my hands stopped shaking.
I got home at half past two. At ten to three Željko came into the kitchen, dressed, and put the džezva on the stove. "Did you win?" "We did." "I knew it." He poured two coffees, even though I never drink coffee at that hour. I sat down across from him, in the green blouse, and told him everything in five sentences, because I had been putting them together the whole way home. That for half a year I had been writing to a man, every night. That I had not seen him until tonight. That I had never sent him a photograph. That I had told that man things I had never told my husband. That tonight I was not the only one he had been writing the same sentences to.
Željko was silent for a long time, looking into his cup. Bakers have big hands, and his looked on the table as if they did not know what to do with themselves. "I knew there was someone," he said at last. "You were laughing in the bathroom. The same way you laughed twenty years ago, when I was the one writing to you." I did not understand. He got up, went into the bedroom and came back with a shoebox I had not opened since we moved. Inside were his letters from Innsbruck, where he had worked for two years in a bakery before our wedding. "You read them in the bathroom so your mother would not see," he said, "and you laughed into a towel." He set the box on the table, put on his jacket and looked at the clock. "The oven has to be burning by four."
I read until morning. He wrote in big, clumsy letters, with mistakes, about flour, about the snow on the Alps, about a boss who shouted in German, and in every letter he asked twice whether I was sleeping well. At the bottom of the box was my photograph from the graduation dance, folded in half, which he had carried in his wallet for two years. Not one sentence was beautiful. Not one could he have sent to anyone else.
At half past five I wrote him a message, the first in many months that was not about bills: "I am not sleeping well. Can I come?" He answered within a minute, from the bakery, surely with a floury finger: "The oven is warm."