From the terrace of a small hotel at Ploče you could see the whole old harbor, the city walls and, a little farther off, the dark patch of Lokrum. It was late afternoon, at the end of July, and the tourists were already coming down off the walls like water down a staircase. At a table by the railing sat two women of fifty-eight, both in linen dresses, both widows, both from Sarajevo. At noon their daughters had taken a boat to Lokrum with two young men from a sailboat out of Split and said they would be back before dark. Ljiljana was doing the crossword from Oslobođenje. Nermina was looking at the sea.
They had known each other since the first year of high school. Nermina had always been the one people looked at, Ljiljana the one who stood beside her and held her bag. Nermina married Zlatko Mutevelić, the architect half of Sarajevo had dreamed about, and Ljiljana, in a hurry, that same autumn, married Predrag, a quiet engineer nobody remembered. Predrag had died five years earlier, Zlatko three. At both funerals the two women stood side by side, as always.
Nermina looked at Lokrum and thought about their daughters. Her Lamija was clever, good, and sensible, the kind people call when a form needs filling out. Ljiljana's Katarina sang in Vienna, laughed out loud, and walked into a room as if the room had been waiting for her. When the girls were small, Nermina had enrolled Lamija in piano lessons, and Katarina, on a visit, sat down at the same piano and played by ear what Lamija had been practicing for a month. Nermina had been measuring this for years and had never understood it. How had quiet Ljiljana and Predrag, whom nobody remembered, ended up with a child like that?
"Do you remember the first time we were here?" she said. Ljiljana looked up from her crossword. It had been the summer of ninety-seven, the first summer after the war. They had come by bus with a group of students and slept in a room with four other girls above a tavern on Prijeko. Zlatko had arrived a week later, as Nermina's fiancé, with a ring in his shirt pocket. "I remember," said Ljiljana. "You fell ill back then," said Nermina. "That night when it rained. You were in bed for a week with a high fever."
That summer Dubrovnik still smelled of fresh plaster. The roofs in the Old Town were covered with new tiles, bright orange among the old ones, and on the Stradun you could see patches in the stone. Zlatko took them to Lokrum, paid for their ice cream, carried their towels. In the evenings the three of them walked the city walls until the guard chased them off. Nermina talked, Zlatko laughed, and Ljiljana was silent. Only later did Nermina notice that Zlatko fell silent whenever Ljiljana did, as if the two of them were listening to something she could not hear.
Ljiljana put down her pencil. The sun had dropped behind Mount Srđ, and the terrace turned blue. The waiter brought two glasses of white wine, although nobody had ordered them, because that was what they did every evening. Nermina took a sip and decided that thirty years was enough. "Do you know who wrote you that note?" she asked. "What note?" "The one at the front desk. I will wait for you at midnight on Porporela. Z."
Ljiljana was silent for a long time. "Zlatko," she said at last. "No," said Nermina. "I did." She explained it calmly, as if she were talking about a recipe. She had Zlatko's letters, she knew how he wrote his capital Z and how his hand drifted to the right at the end of a line. She had seen the way he looked at Ljiljana on the Stradun, that first day, while Ljiljana, as always, was carrying her bag. All she had wanted was for Ljiljana to wait one night alone on the stone pier, in the wind, and come back in the morning looking ridiculous. She had not known it would rain.
Ljiljana opened her wallet and took a folded piece of paper out from behind her identity card, yellow along the creases. She unfolded it on the table, between the two glasses. Nermina recognized her own handwriting, which for thirty years had been Zlatko's. "I kept it," said Ljiljana. "I thought it was the only thing he ever wrote me." Nermina felt something like shame and pushed it down at once. "I'm sorry," she said. "It was a stupid joke. You waited all night alone in the rain, and he was asleep at his hotel."
"I didn't wait alone," said Ljiljana. Nermina laughed. "I answered him," Ljiljana went on. "That afternoon I left a note at the front desk of his hotel. I wrote: I'll come. He came." Nermina stopped laughing. She remembered the morning after that night, Zlatko at breakfast, his hair wet and strangely quiet, saying he had gone for a walk because he could not sleep. She had thought it was nerves before the wedding. She remembered, too, that the next day she had carried tea up to Ljiljana in the room above the tavern and been unusually tender with her, because underneath it all she had felt a little sorry.
For a long time she stared at the paper on the table. Then she drew herself up, the way she had drawn herself up all her life whenever someone in the room mattered more than she did. "So what," she said. "He came out of politeness, because he thought you were calling him. I had him for thirty years. The house in Koševo, two people at the table every morning, a funeral where everyone knew whose wife I was. You had one night on Porporela and a note that I wrote for you." She stood up and threw her cardigan over her shoulders, as if the conversation were over.
Ljiljana did not stand. Slowly she folded the paper along its old creases. "Katarina was born in April, Nermina," she said. Nermina stopped with her hand on the back of her chair. She did not understand at once, and then, as with everything in her life, she counted. July. April. The hurried wedding in September, which all of Sarajevo said had happened because Ljiljana had realized late that the years were passing her by. Katarina's laugh. Katarina's eyebrow, which went up when she did not believe someone. Katarina's hand, which drifted to the right when she signed a greeting card. "Predrag knew?" asked Nermina, and her voice sounded like someone else's. "Predrag knew from the first day," said Ljiljana. "And he loved her more than any of us did."
Just then the boat from Lokrum came into the old harbor. Two young women stood at the bow, waving toward the terrace. One waved modestly, from the wrist. The other waved with her whole arm, above her head, the way Zlatko used to wave from the platform whenever he left on a trip. Ljiljana stood up, put the note in the pocket of her dress, and went down the steps toward the harbor, unhurried, like a woman who had known for thirty years where she was going.
Nermina was left alone on the terrace, with two glasses of wine and her hand on the back of an empty chair. Below her, on the stone pier of Porporela, the first lamp came on. She watched Katarina jump from the boat onto the quay and hug Ljiljana, and then Lamija too, and for a long time she still saw that waving before her eyes, although the boat had long since been tied up.