Down the switchbacks from Banj brdo it was Marina who drove, because she was the only one of the four who had drunk nothing that evening. The colonel's SUV slid on every curve, and she gave it gas instead of braking and laughed whenever Savka shrieked from the back seat. Colonel Vladimir Stanivuk slept beside Savka with his cap over his eyes, like a man who had survived worse drivers in his life. In the passenger seat, his elbow on the window, sat Dr. Vladimir Grahovac, saying that if she kept this up he would see all four of them at his clinic, only from the other side of the bed.
In Banja Luka people called them Big Vlado and Little Vlado. The big one was fifty-four, with a gray mustache and the rank of colonel, and he had been a friend of Marina's late father. The little one was thirty-three, with a specialization in internal medicine and a smile that, as Savka, the colonel's cousin, claimed, had cured more nurses than patients. Marina had been married to Big Vlado for exactly one month. She had grown up with Little Vlado in the same building on Gospodska Street, but that was not talked about now.
When she was nineteen and he came back from his specialist training in Belgrade, she fell in love with him the way people fall in love with someone they have known all their lives: all at once and with no way back. She wrote him messages she never sent, and one that she did. He answered with a smiley face and invited her for coffee, to which he brought an anesthesiologist. Four years later, when the colonel asked her at a family slava whether she would marry an old soldier, Marina said she would. She said it loudly enough for Little Vlado, who was sitting two seats away, to hear.
At the last curve, where the city opened out below them with the river like a black ribbon, Marina pulled onto the shoulder and stopped. She said she had to rest her eyes. Savka lit a cigarette and got out. The colonel was snoring. "Shall I tell you why I got married?" Marina asked quietly, without looking at the doctor. "Out of spite. To spite you." Little Vlado laughed, that laugh of his that always came before thought. "You don't get married out of spite, Marina," he said. "Out of spite you buy an expensive handbag, and the next day you take it back to the store."
The house in Starčevica was big, warm, and full of the colonel's things: fishing trophies from the Vrbas, framed diplomas, and photographs from barracks all over Bosnia. The colonel was as careful with Marina as with an expensive watch. In the mornings he brought her coffee in bed, in the evenings he fell asleep in front of the news on television, and in between he was at headquarters. He never asked her anything. In one month Marina had moved every chair and every vase in the house, just to see if anyone would notice. Only Savka noticed.
The next day she went with Savka to a convent in the hills above the Vrbas, where her friend from high school, Darinka, had been living for two years, now with another name and a black habit. Darinka met them in the courtyard, as calm as water in a barrel. She offered them thyme tea and asked nothing. During the evening service Marina stood by the wall, watched the candle flames, and cried, without knowing why. When they were leaving, Darinka only straightened her scarf. Marina envied her that peace so much that she was ashamed.
Little Vlado began coming to Starčevica more often. The colonel was fond of him, played chess with him, and called him son-in-law, though he was nothing of the kind. At the end of January the colonel went to Sarajevo for a week, to a conference at headquarters. On the second evening Little Vlado came with a bottle of wine and a story about a patient who insisted he was healthy because his grandmother had told him so. Marina was not listening. She stood in front of him in the middle of the living room and said that for four years she had waited for him to look at her as a woman and not as the neighbor girl from the fifth floor. He stopped talking. He kissed her, at first as if he were joking, and then not. The living room door closed behind them.
That week Marina was happy in a way that seemed suspicious even to her. She bought new curtains. She sang while she cooked. She made plans, the way people make them who have never planned anything: a divorce, a small apartment in Borik, the seaside in June. Little Vlado came every evening after his shift, tired and witty, and to all her plans he said "we'll see," in the tone in which he told patients they would get better. She took it as a yes. Savka, who lived in the little house at the far end of the yard, would light a cigarette on her doorstep every time his car turned into the street.
The colonel came back on Sunday, with a box of pastries from Sarajevo and a story about generals who could not park. Little Vlado came to lunch, ate two plates of sarma, and praised the colonel for his chess and Marina for her sarma, in the same voice. The following week he did not get in touch for three days. When she sent him a message, he replied that he had a lot of work and added a smiley face. On the fourth day, through the window of a café on Gospodska, Marina saw him laughing with a young doctor in a green coat, with that same laugh that came before thought.
In the evening she asked him to come over, because the colonel was at a celebration at the officers' club. He came. He was kind, tender, and distracted, like a doctor visiting a patient he cannot help and cannot stop visiting either. When she asked him what they were to each other now, he shrugged. "Marina, you're a married woman, and I am who I am," he said. "What did you think? That we'd run off to Vienna and open a practice? It was lovely. Don't spoil it now." He kissed her on the forehead, the way you kiss a child before bed, and left before the colonel came home.
In the morning Savka came in without knocking, sat on the edge of the bed, and lit a cigarette, even though nobody in that house smoked. She said Little Vlado had a heart like a waiting room: everyone goes in, nobody stays. She said it had been the same with the sister of one of his colleagues, and with a violin teacher, and with the wife of a lawyer, who to this day believes she was the only one. "None of this is your fault," she said, and flicked her ash into Marina's coffee cup. "You were just the next one."
That day Marina went to the convent alone. Wet snow was falling and the road along the Vrbas was empty. Darinka was clearing snow from the path in front of the church and did not stop when she saw her. Marina wanted to tell her everything. She sat down on a bench, watched Darinka's hands in their wool gloves, and said nothing. Darinka said the evening service was at five. Marina stayed until five, stood by the same wall, and this time she did not cry. When she came out, she was colder than she had ever been.
Little Vlado kept coming. The colonel would not let him go without a game of chess, nor Savka without a round of rummy. They sat in the living room, under the chandelier Marina had chosen in the first week of her marriage, and laughed, and Marina brought coffee and pastries and sat down by the window. When he arrived, Little Vlado would kiss her hand, the same as Savka's, and ask how she was, in the tone in which you ask a patient in the next bed. The colonel would laugh loudly and say it was nice to have both Vladimirs in the house, the big one and the little one, so that his young wife would not get bored.
That evening Little Vlado won game after game and, as always, said it was luck. The colonel demanded a rematch. Savka smoked in the doorway to the terrace. Marina sat by the window watching the snow fall into the yard, on the colonel's SUV and on the doctor's car parked behind it, and silently counted how many evenings were left until spring. She had not got halfway when the colonel shouted for her to bring his glasses, because the little one had come up with something again. She got up and brought them.