In July I started seeing a man in a black suit. That week Sarajevo was burning, the asphalt went soft under your shoes, and he wore a black suit buttoned up to the throat, a straw hat, and a plastic bag in his hand. The first time I saw him was on Ferhadija, in front of a jeweler's. The second time at the tram stop by Skenderija. The third time at Markale, between the tomato stalls, and that time he looked me straight in the eye and immediately turned his head away, as if someone had caught him at something. On the fourth night he was standing under my window on Vratnik. I knew that face from somewhere, like a word that sits on the tip of your tongue and will not come any further.
I had not slept well since I turned forty, and those nights I did not sleep at all. I lay there, listening to the cats calling to each other across Vratnik, and remembered things I had not remembered in years. Travnik most of all. Ten years earlier I had spent a year there as the supervising architect on the restoration of an old house in the old town, which the municipality was turning into a museum. I lived in a room above a bakery, ate ćevapi at Plava Voda, and on weekends hiked up Vlašić. I was thirty-eight and convinced I was a good man, because no one had told me otherwise.
Selvija taught music at the elementary school and came to the site to ask whether there would be a piano in the museum. There was no piano. There were nine months in which I wrote her letters, though we lived ten minutes apart, because she said that words vanish on the phone and stay on paper. One July morning she came to my room above the bakery and said it was over, that I should go back to Sarajevo, and not write and not call. For a week I was hurt, and for a year I was relieved. I never asked why. What I could not remember was her husband's face.
He rang at three in the morning. I opened the door in my pajamas and knew before he spoke. "Zehrudin," he said, and took off his hat. "From Travnik. You don't remember me, architect?" I remembered. The clerk from the municipal tax office who brought receipts to the site sorted by date, who twice invited me to lunch and said "my Selvija" in every sentence. He stood on the doorstep sweating, with the plastic bag in his hand, smelling of rakija. "Selvija died in March," he said. "I thought you ought to know." I let him in, because I did not know what else to do.
He sat in my kitchen until nearly dawn. He drank my rakija, cried, laughed, apologized for the hour, then apologized for apologizing. He drank half a bottle and looked no drunker than when he had come in. He talked about her illness, about the hospital in Nova Bila, about how at the end she asked only for cold water and the radio. Then, as if in passing, he said that while sorting her things he had found a box of letters. "You write beautifully, architect. I never knew how to write like that." He laughed, and I could not tell whether it was humility or a threat. "I have been following you for nine days," he said. "I wanted to see how you live. You live well. Alone."
At the door, his hat already on his head, he said he was in Sarajevo with his daughter, at a hotel near the train station, and that she had never seen Sarajevo. He asked whether they might stop by the next day, so she could see what an architect's apartment looks like. I said they could before I had time to think. "Her name is Rijana," he said from the doorway. "She is nine years and five months old." When he said the months, he looked me in the eye, and I understood that he had counted them many times before I did. I spent the rest of the night on the balcony, watching the sky lighten over Trebević, and tried not to count.
They came at noon. Rijana was thin and serious, in a party dress meant for some other occasion, with a backpack bearing a faded cartoon rabbit. She sat on the edge of the sofa and looked at the drawings on my table. Whenever she was thinking about something, she rubbed her left eyebrow with her thumb. I do that. My mother did that. On my sketchpad she wrote her name, with her left hand, and drew a house next to it. Zehrudin watched me watching her. "Left-handed," he said. "No one in my family was ever left-handed. Nor in Selvija's. Interesting, isn't it?" In my head I was counting the months. He saw that I was counting.
For the next few days he played with me like a cat with a mouse. He left the child alone in the hotel room with the television while he drank at the hotel bar or sat in my office and said nothing. When he did bring her, he would say in front of her, "Mama had a lot of friends, didn't she, Rijana?" and she would look at the floor. Once, while he was in the restroom, she whispered to me that Daddy cried at night in the bathroom and then in the morning made her pancakes as if nothing had happened. I asked him to let her stay a few days with my sister in Butmir, where there was a garden and children. He agreed at once, too quickly, as if he had been waiting for it.
My sister Azijada asked nothing. She looked at the child, then at me, and set another plate. Within two days Rijana was climbing the old walnut tree behind the house with my sister's sons and drawing houses for me, and every one of them had one window too many. On the third evening, as we sat on the steps, she asked me whether I had ever been to Travnik. I said I had, long ago. She said that on their fridge there was a drawing of a house, with a signature in the corner, and that Mama used to say it had been drawn by someone who did not know what a house is. The signature was mine. I did not tell her.
The night before they were due to go back to Travnik, Zehrudin came to my place around midnight, drunk. I had been lying in bed since evening with a high fever, one of those summer infections that make you shiver under two blankets. As soon as he saw me, he sobered up. He made tea, soaked towels in cold water, changed them on my forehead all night long, and hummed something I did not know. Once, half asleep, I heard him say, not to me but to someone in the room, "You see, Selvija, I'm doing this too." At dawn I opened my eyes. He was standing beside the bed, holding a bundle of my letters to Selvija tied with a hair ribbon, and reading one under his breath, in my words but in his own voice.
When he saw I was awake, he folded the page. "I came to give her to you," he said calmly. "I decided on the bus, near Kaonik. I thought: let her go to the one she belongs to, I am tired." He set the letters down on the nightstand. "And then I saw you counting the months. Like change at a shop counter. For nine years I have braided her hair, architect. I have been there for every vaccination and every school show, and I know which song she sang in first grade. You counted." He picked up his hat. "The letters are yours. She is mine." I tried to get up and could not.
I went to the bus station the next afternoon, still weak, with a drawing in my hand, because Rijana had left one of hers at my place. Zehrudin was standing by the platform in his black suit, with her backpack over his shoulder, almost cheerful. He was still carrying the plastic bag, and now I saw what was in it: Rijana's slippers and a box of cookies. He told me he was getting married in the autumn. A widow from Vitez, a quiet woman, with a house and a garden. "And she has a family friend who drops by often," he added. "A nice man. An engineer." He said it without irony, or with an irony so deep that I could not reach it. Rijana stood between us, holding his hand.
I gave her the drawing. She shook her head and pushed it back into my hands. "It's yours," she said. "So you have one real house." Then they got on the bus. As it pulled out, Rijana waved to me through the window, with her left hand, and right after that, already thinking about something else, rubbed her eyebrow with her thumb. Zehrudin did not look at me. He was straightening her collar. I stood on the platform until the driver of the next bus honked at me to get out of the way.