Lilacs Without a Card

Velibor Ristić turned fifty on a Tuesday in mid-May, and the National Theater celebrated by putting his name over the entrance in letters three feet high. After the performance there was a dinner at a restaurant on Ferhadija, with toasts, colleagues who cried at the right moments, and a message from the ministry read out by the director. He got home to Mejtaš after two, with an armful of flowers that he left in the bathtub. On the chest of drawers in the hallway, among the birthday cards, lay a thick envelope with no return address, his name written in a slanted, unfamiliar hand. He was too tired to open it.

In the morning Kosara came, the woman who had cleaned his apartment for fifteen years and was the only one who did not admire his voice. As she put the coffee on, she asked where the lilac was this year. Every birthday, early in the morning, a bunch of white lilac would appear outside his door, without a card, and Kosara would put it in the blue vase in the hallway. Velibor had long ago stopped wondering who it was from. Some admirer, he thought, of whom there had been many. This year there was nothing outside the door. "Maybe she got old," he said, and shrugged. Then he opened the envelope.

Inside was a short note on a sheet from a notepad and some fifty pages torn from a school notebook, lined, written on both sides. The note read: "Dear Mr. Ristić, my sister Tanja died on the twelfth of April at the Koševo hospital. She asked me to send you this for your birthday, not a day sooner. I have not read it. Vlasta." Below it was a phone number. Velibor began reading standing up, by the window. When he got to the third page, he sat down. The coffee went cold, and Kosara vacuumed around his feet as if around a piece of furniture.

You don't remember me, the letter began. Don't try, it is not your fault, and I am not writing to blame you for anything. I am writing because in a few weeks I will be dead, and I do not want to go without at least one person knowing what I have known for twenty-four years. I was nineteen when you moved into the apartment across from ours, in Čengić Vila, with two boxes of books, a guitar with no strings, and a coat that was too big for you. You were twenty-six. Since that day, not one has passed without my thinking of you. I tried. It did not work.

Through the wall I listened to you learning your lines. Hamlet, then Platonov, then that peasant from Kočić, and I learned them better than you did, because inside my head I prompted you every time you got stuck. I brought you your mail when the mailman left it with us. Once you said "thanks, kid" and shut the door, and I carried that thanks around with me for a whole week. Mama sewed for half of Čengić Vila and used to say that actors are not people but weather forecasts. I bought tickets out of my scholarship and sat in the Chamber Theater, in the seventh row, always in the same seat. You never once looked at the seventh row.

A year later you moved to Mejtaš, to the apartment where you still live. Two years after that I came up to you in the lobby after a premiere, and you looked at me as if you were seeing me for the first time. You asked my name. For five evenings we walked from Skenderija to Wilson's Promenade and back. You bought me chestnuts by the Skenderija bridge and said I had a face for silent films. You talked about the roles you would play, and I knew all your roles by heart and kept quiet, so it would not give me away. On the fifth evening I stayed with you until morning. In the morning you left on tour for Ljubljana and said you would call me as soon as you got back.

You did not call. I am not angry. After Ljubljana came Zagreb, then a film, then that actress from the papers, and I followed all of it from the seventh row and from the papers. I had the library in Hrasno, where I worked for twenty years, and Mama, who fell ill, and a lilac bush in the yard of our building, which I planted the autumn you moved away. Mama died, and the lilac stayed, and I stayed with it. Every May, for your birthday, I cut its branches and carried them to your door, early, before you woke up. I never put in a card. What would I have written? That it was me? You did not know who I was.

Five years ago I waited for you outside the theater, after Uncle Vanya. It was cold, I had on a beige raincoat and a program in my hand. You took it, smiled the way you smile at everyone, and asked, "Who should I make it out to?" I said, "To Tanja." You wrote "To Tanja, with love," signed it, and were already looking over my shoulder at the next woman with a program. I did not hold it against you. I walked home, all the way to Hrasno, and laughed the whole way, I don't even know at what. That program is still on my nightstand.

I am writing to you from a room at Koševo, with a window facing the Bare cemetery, which, you will admit, is bad staging. The doctors are kind and they don't lie to me, which is more than I asked for. On my windowsill there is a branch from the yard, still in bud. Vlasta thinks I am writing my will. I asked her to send you this only on your birthday, so you would not have to decide whether to come to the funeral. I ask for nothing. You don't have to remember me. Only, if you ever look at the seventh row while you are playing, seat twelve, know that it is mine and that it is empty only because I can no longer come. Your Tanja, from the apartment across the hall.

Velibor put down the last page and tried to remember. Čengić Vila he remembered: the building with the broken elevator, the damp stain on the hallway ceiling, the seamstress across the hall whose machine ticked through the wall at night. The seamstress he remembered. The girl he did not. He tried with those five evenings. The line about a face for silent films, he realized uneasily, he had said to others too. In those years there had been many evenings on Wilson's Promenade and, he was ashamed to admit, many girls waiting for him in the lobby. The tour in Ljubljana he remembered for the rain and a bad review. There had been thousands of signatures with love. Not one of them had a face.

He called the number under the note. A tired woman answered. He said who he was, and there was a silence in which he could hear a television on somewhere in her home. He said he had received the letter. He did not know what came next. He asked whether Tanja had been ill for long. "A year," said Vlasta. "Don't worry, she never mentioned you. She only asked me to bring her notebooks." He asked where she was buried. "At Bare," said Vlasta. "She could see the spot from her window." Then he asked whether she had a photograph. An hour later it arrived on his phone: a woman of about forty, in a beige raincoat, at a tram stop in Hrasno, with a sprig of lilac in her hand, smiling at someone outside the frame.

He looked at it for a long time. He enlarged her face with two fingers until it broke apart into little squares. He looked at the eyes, the mouth, a small white scar above one eyebrow. He waited for something to move inside him, the way an actor at rehearsal waits for the lines to pass from his head into his body. Nothing moved. He did not know her.

That evening he played as he did every other evening. When he left the apartment, the blue vase stood empty on the chest of drawers, and he did not put it away. In the dressing room he put the letter in the inside pocket of his costume, without knowing why himself. In the second act, for the first time in thirty years on the stage, he looked at the seventh row. Seat twelve was empty. He looked at it a second too long and forgot his line, something that had never happened to him before. From the prompter's box someone whispered him the word. Velibor repeated it and played on, and the audience noticed nothing.