On the Una, between Bihać and Kostela, two rafting camps have faced each other for twenty years, and for twenty years their owners have not greeted each other. Ferid Mulalić runs Green Pool on the left bank, Šefko Begić runs Stone Slope on the right. No one remembers how it started anymore: some say it was a parking space by the bridge, others a bad review supposedly written by Ferid's brother-in-law. Whoever eats lunch at Ferid's must not mention Šefko's grill, and whoever sleeps in Šefko's bungalows hears every evening that Ferid would charge for the river if he could.
Ferid's daughter Azra was twenty-three, with a degree in English and a summer that felt too long to her. She washed helmets and kept the booking ledger. Then in July the cook Rasim, who cooked on both banks because at his age nobody asked him anything, brought the news: Šefko's son Nermin had come back from Ljubljana, where he had worked for five years as an engineer. Now he sat on the terrace of Stone Slope dressed in black, read thick books and said that people did not interest him. "What is he like?" Azra asked. "Tall," said Rasim. "And sad the way a young man is sad when he wants everyone to watch him."
Two days later Azra borrowed a red jacket with a faded logo from her cousin Mevlida, a seasonal guide at a small camp in Lohovo. She braided her hair into two plaits and practiced the speech of her grandmother from Kulen Vakuf, with words that four years of Sarajevo had knocked out of her head. "I'm Mina," she told the mirror. "From Vakuf. I lead tours to Lohovo." Rasim, when he saw her on the path, only shook his head and went on peeling potatoes.
Every morning at six Nermin put his kayak in the water alone by the old mill below Kostela, and the whole riverbank knew it. Azra waited for him on a rock with a thermos, as if resting before a tour. Nermin had an opinion about everything: about the Una, which was more beautiful than all the Slovenian rivers but which people did not deserve, about tourists, who took pictures instead of looking, and about love, which was a comfort for the uneducated. Mina listened with wide eyes and finally said that he talked nicely for a man who did not like people. Then Nermin laughed for the first time, a perfectly ordinary laugh, not sad at all.
They saw each other every morning for three weeks. Mina told him about the Dutch tourists who came to the rapids in sandals and about how she wanted to work on cruise ships but could not even write an application in English. Nermin offered to teach her. Azra, who had studied English literature for four years, had to be careful to make enough mistakes. She wrote "I am verry happy" and "the river is beutiful," and he circled the letters in red pencil and said she had talent. They left each other assignments in a yellow dry bag that Nermin hung on a willow above the mill. Soon there were no more assignments in the bag, only letters.
Meanwhile Ferid was saying that Šefko's son was a failed Ljubljana type who had come home to spend his father's pension, and Šefko was saying that Ferid's daughter was surely just like her father, only with a diploma. Then at the end of July Ferid took a group of Germans down the stretch below Štrbački buk himself, because his guide was sick, and at the first big drop he fell out of the raft. The current carried him straight in front of Šefko's raft. Šefko pulled him out by the strap of his life jacket, without a single word, and paddled him to the shore. Ferid had a sprained ankle and half the Una inside him.
Šefko drove him home. For the first six miles they were silent, and then Ferid said that had been a good grab, for a man of Šefko's age. Šefko said it had been a good fall too, for a man of Ferid's age. At the house they drank two coffees, Ferid's sister Zehra brought out apple pie, and by dark they had established that the parking space had been too small for both of them anyway. As they parted, Ferid invited Šefko and his son to lunch on Saturday. "So the children can meet," he said, and Šefko nodded like a man who had just been struck by an idea he had already had himself.
When she heard about the lunch, Azra did not sleep all night. If Nermin recognized her, it was all over: Mina, the letters, the mornings at the mill. In the morning she went into Bihać, to a friend's salon, and came back with false eyelashes, a blond wig to her shoulders, foundation two shades lighter than her skin and her graduation dress. Ferid looked at her from the doorway and asked whether someone had died. Azra said it was fashion. "Whose fashion?" "City fashion," she said, and her father fell silent, because he had never been in a city long enough to argue.
On Saturday a young lady nobody knew sat at the table. She spoke half in English, asked Nermin whether Ljubljana had a proper brunch, laughed three seconds after every joke and looked at her phone. About the river she said it was, like, wet, about books that she did not read them because they hurt her eyes, and about the weather she said nothing, because she was photographing the pie. Under the table Šefko kept nudging his son with his knee. Ferid looked at his daughter as if he did not know her, which was the point. When the guests had left, Azra took off the eyelashes in the bathroom and cried with laughter, and a little from something else.
On Monday, instead of a letter, Nermin himself was waiting at the mill. He told Mina that his father and Ferid wanted to merge the camps, the rafts, the vans and the children, all at once, and that they had called it the business opportunity of the century. "And you?" Mina asked. Nermin said he had seen that girl once and it had been enough. Then he paused, because what came next was harder to say without a book in his hand. "I would marry you," he said. "If you don't mind that I can't even make coffee on a rock." Mina jumped off the rock and ran off without an answer.
When Šefko heard the refusal, he laughed at first, and then he stopped. He said that in his family sons did not choose a guide from Lohovo over half the Una. Nermin said that then he would go back to Ljubljana, but not alone. Next, because he was an engineer and liked things clear, he wrote Azra Mulalić a short, polite letter: he was sorry, but he loved someone else, and he asked her to tell her father herself. He carried it across the bridge in person, so there would be no confusion.
Zehra opened the door and told him Azra was on the terrace. Nermin went through the kitchen, where Rasim was peeling potatoes, and stepped out onto the terrace above the river. At the table sat a girl in a red jacket, her hair in two plaits. A yellow dry bag lay in front of her, and in her hands she held his letter from Friday, the one about the difference between "beautiful" and "beutiful." When she raised her head, Nermin was still holding the letter for Miss Mulalić in his hand.
"Mina," he said. "Azra," she said, in her own voice, without a trace of Vakuf. "The wig was my friend's. The mistakes were on purpose." Footsteps came from the kitchen: Ferid was limping on his bandaged foot, and behind him came Šefko, who had come to apologize on his son's behalf. Azra took the letter from his hand and read it, slowly, to the end. "There is one mistake," she said. "You wrote that you love someone else." "What's wrong with that?" "It isn't someone else," she said. "It's the same girl."
Ferid and Šefko came out onto the terrace just as he kissed her, and for the first time in twenty years both of them went speechless at the same moment, on the same bank. In the kitchen Rasim went on peeling potatoes. He had known since the first morning, but nobody ever asked him anything.