Infidelity on the Banks of the Una

"I don't know if you remember me. I still remember the linden in front of the high school and your red jacket, the one you wore even when it was warm." The message arrived on Sunday evening, while Sanida was in the bathroom taking off her makeup after a colleague's wedding. She read it twice, sitting on the edge of the tub with a cotton pad in her hand. The profile picture was old and blurry, taken with her father's camera: a young man of twenty standing knee-deep in the Una and waving to someone out of the frame. Sanida knew who that someone had been. Under the picture it said Almedin Midžić, St. Louis, Missouri. She did not reply. She switched off her phone, lay down beside Mersad, who was already asleep facing the wall, and until three in the morning listened to the trucks rolling toward the border.

She was forty-two and had been married for twenty years. She worked at the pharmacy near the Fethija mosque, where the older women from Ozimice called her doctor, though she had explained to them countless times that she was not one. Mersad was a lineman for the power company. He climbed poles in snow and rain, came home with scratches on his hands that she never knew the cause of, and ate in silence in front of the news. He was a good man. Everyone told her so, her mother, the neighbor women, and she told herself, the way people say of a winter that it could have been worse. In twenty years he had never written her a single letter. When she gave birth to their son, he sent a three-word text to the maternity ward: "Is it okay?" He was asking about the baby.

She replied on Wednesday, from the pharmacy, between two customers. She wrote only: "I remember." The answer came within a minute, as if someone had been waiting with the phone in hand, although in St. Louis it was six in the morning. He wrote at length and beautifully, at greater length than Almedin had ever spoken. He remembered how they had jumped from the rock into the cold water at the Kostela falls, how she had once patched his jacket with thread of the wrong color, how the rain in Bihać always fell slanting, off Plješevica mountain. He asked whether she still drank her coffee without sugar. He asked whether she was happy. To that she did not reply.

From then on they wrote to each other every evening. Sanida learned to delete the conversation before bed and to leave her phone face down on the table. When Mersad asked from the living room who she was writing to, she said it was Hedija from the pharmacy, who was getting divorced and needed support. Mersad would nod and go back to the game. Never in her life had she lied so easily, and that frightened her more than the messages themselves. Her daughter, who was finishing high school that year, noticed that her mother was wearing earrings to work again and humming while she ironed. "What's with you?" she asked. "Spring," said Sanida, though it was already June.

In the messages she said things she had never told anyone. That in her house people talked only about bills and repairs. That Mersad could fix every outlet on the street but had never asked her what she dreamed about. That sometimes, when he fell asleep, she went out onto the balcony and watched the lights from the bridge break up in the Una, and that it seemed to her then as if someone else had decided her whole life for her. Almedin answered carefully. Once he wrote: "Maybe he doesn't know how to ask. Some people only know how to fix things." Another time: "I can see you standing on that balcony, waiting for the rain to stop." Sanida looked at that sentence for a long time. She did not know where he had gotten the rain.

At the end of July he wrote that he was coming. He had bought a plane ticket, he wrote, for the very days of the regatta, like in the old days, when they had watched from the bridge as the boats came into town. He suggested they meet on Saturday at five, in the garden of the Mlinica café, on the bank below the Captain's Tower. "Sit at the table by the water," he wrote. "I will find you. I always found you." Sanida did not sleep for two nights. On the third night she wrote "I'll come," was immediately ashamed and deleted it, then wrote it again and sent it. She told Mersad that on Saturday she was covering for a colleague at the night pharmacy until ten. Mersad said that in that case he would cook beans.

On Saturday Bihać was full of people. The regatta boats were coming down the Una, trout was grilling on the bank, music blared from the speakers by the bridge, and children stood waist-deep in the water shouting at the rowers. Sanida put on a blue dress she had bought in Zagreb and never worn, because Mersad had said it was beautiful, which with him meant too expensive. Over the dress she wore her white pharmacy coat, so that in the street she would look as if she were hurrying to work, and she took it off only in the café garden. At the Mlinica she sat at the table by the water, ordered a coffee without sugar and set her phone in front of her. Her hands were cold, although the heat was making the asphalt stick to the soles of her shoes.

At ten past five someone pulled out the chair across from her. It was not Almedin. It was Mersad, in the white shirt she had bought him for their anniversary and that he had worn only once, at their son's high school graduation. Sanida felt the blood drain from her face. She began to talk fast, about her colleague, about the night shift, about how she had only stopped for a coffee. Mersad let her finish. Then he took out his own phone, typed something with his thick, cracked finger, and her phone vibrated on the table. The screen said Almedin Midžić: "I'm here."

For a long time she could not speak. She looked now at the screen, now at his hands. Mersad spoke quietly, as if he were explaining a fault in the wiring. In March, when the wind lifted the roof tiles, he had climbed into the attic and found a shoebox with her name on it behind the chimney. Inside were the diary she had kept until her wedding, two postcards from America and the photograph of the young man in the Una. He had read it all in one night, in the attic, by flashlight. "You didn't write a single page about me," he said. "Not even when we met. About him you wrote a hundred." "I was twenty." "I know. That's why I wanted to find out whether you would leave when he got in touch."

"And him?" she asked. "Where is he?" Mersad shrugged. The real Almedin Midžić, he said, drove a truck around Missouri, had three children and a wife from Sanski Most, and had no profile on any network. He had found him through his sister, in a photo from someone's birthday: balding, smiling, holding a plate of cake. He had photographed the picture in the Una from her album with his phone. Everything else had been in the diary: the linden, the red jacket, Kostela, the thread of the wrong color. Sanida felt shame, then anger, then shame again. "You read my diary and wrote to me as another man," she said. "And you lied and came," he said. Neither of them went on.

The boats passed below the tower, and people on the bridge applauded the last rowers. Sanida thought about the messages. About the linden and Kostela, which he had copied out. But also about the other things. "And the balcony?" she asked. "The rain? That isn't in the diary." For the first time Mersad looked away. "I saw that," he said. "I don't sleep when you go out. I lie there and wait for you to come back." "And the part about some people only knowing how to fix things?" "That was me too." The waiter brought him a coffee. Mersad dropped two sugar cubes into it, as always, and did not drink it.

"Why didn't you ever tell me?" she asked. "Under your own name." He turned the cup on its saucer for a long time. "It was easier to be him," he said at last. "He is twenty and hasn't broken anything. I am forty-six and I keep quiet." He said he would understand if she wanted him to leave. He had already packed a bag and left it at his brother's in Žegar. The beans were on the stove, just in case.

Sanida took his phone. She opened the profile with the young man in the Una and deleted it, slowly, confirming every step, while he watched her. Then she gave the phone back to him. "Write me something," she said. "Now. Under your own name." Mersad typed for a long time, deleting and typing again, carefully, as if he were splicing live wires. Her phone vibrated. She read the message and did not tell him what it said. She said only that it was shorter than Almedin's. "I'm a shorter man," he said.

He paid for both coffees. They walked home through the crowds around the regatta, each on their own side of the street, like two people who had just met and did not yet know whether they were allowed to approach each other. On the bridge Sanida stopped. Mersad stopped too, on the other side, and waited. She crossed over, between two families with children and a balloon seller, and took his arm. That night they ate the beans cold, after midnight, on the balcony.