On a plateau above the Drina, between the Ćosić and Pašić houses, lay a field that no one plowed. It belonged to Hilmo Ličina, who had left for America thirty years earlier and never been heard from again, and in that time it had grown over with wild rose, brambles and two wild pear trees. Šaban Ćosić and Nurija Pašić each plowed their own land on either side of it, and when they stopped to light a cigarette, they looked at each other across that wilderness as if into a mirror. Their children, Almin and Zerina, picked strawberries in it and built a house of branches on the heap of stones in the middle, which they called the fortress.
One fall Šaban's plow took a furrow across the boundary. Nobody said anything. The next fall Nurija took two. It went on like that for years, quietly and neatly, as if they had agreed on it, and the field narrowed from both sides until all that was left was a thin strip of wild rose and stones with the fortress in the middle. The children grew up. The brambles retreated before the plows, and the strawberries were the first to disappear.
When Almin was sixteen, the municipality announced that it would sell the ownerless field at auction. In the hall by the bridge in Višegrad, Rizo turned up too, an accordion player who played weddings from Rogatica to Rudo and who was said to be Hilmo's grandson. He said so himself, loudly, but he did not have a single paper, because his mother, who had given birth to him far from here, had never registered him. People laughed. Šaban bought the field. The very next day Nurija said that the triangle on his side, which he had been plowing for years, had long been his, and Šaban said he had bought what was written in the papers, and not an inch less.
That was how the lawsuit began. It lasted nine years. There were lawyers from Foča and Sarajevo, surveyors who arrived with instruments and left with money, expert witnesses, appeals, and hearings that were postponed because the judge was ill. Šaban sold his cows, then his tractor, then the woods above the stream. His wife went to her sister in Sarajevo and did not come back. Nurija took out a loan against his house and twice had to renegotiate it. In the end Šaban was running a café next to the bus station in Višegrad, where he sat alone more often than with customers, and Nurija came down to town every day, sat in the café across the street and stared at Šaban's door. Both of them forbade their children to greet each other.
After high school Almin went to Slovenia to work on construction sites. Zerina stayed with her father and sewed in a workshop in Višegrad, dresses for some boutique in Vienna that sold them as if they came from Paris. For eight years they did not speak. They knew about each other what is known in a small town: that he was building some hotel on the coast, that she had broken off with a fiancé from Goražde two weeks before the wedding. When he came home for Bajram, she would happen to have work at the workshop that very day.
Last June Almin came because his father needed his signature on the final appeal. Before going down to town, he climbed up to the plateau. All that remained of the field was the stones in the middle, overgrown with wild rose, and everything around them had been plowed to the last hand's breadth. Zerina was sitting on the stones. For a long time they said nothing. Then she said: "The fortress has fallen." He sat down next to her. He did not know what to do with his hands after eight years, so he put them on his knees. The sun was setting behind the hills across the Drina, she told him about the dresses for Vienna, he told her about scaffolding and the wind on the tenth floor, and both of them found it strange how easy it all was.
That was how Nurija found them. He saw them from the road below and climbed up the field faster than he was able. He shouted at Almin that he was a thief's son, and at Zerina that she was shaming her mother's grave. Almin did not move. He said only: "Uncle Nurija, sit down, you will make yourself ill." And he did fall ill, in the middle of a sentence. He sat down on the stones and could not move his left arm. Almin carried him to the road, and Zerina called an ambulance. At the hospital they said it was a stroke, a mild one, but that he would no longer be able to live alone. His sister came from Sarajevo to fetch him. Because of the loan, the bank had already taken the house. Zerina had to move out by Monday.
On Saturday evening Almin came to the empty house. Zerina was sitting on boxes of dishes. Nothing of what they wanted to say made any sense, so he said something else: that there was a fair in Višegrad the next day and they could go. One day. As if there were no fathers, no field, no bank and no Monday. Zerina looked at him as if he had lost his mind. Then she opened one of the boxes and took out her mother's dress, blue with white polka dots, which she had never worn because it was too beautiful for a workday.
They went down on the first bus. Višegrad smelled of the grill and the river, and under the bridge people crowded around stalls of honey, leather opanci, plastic toys and cotton candy. They ate ćevapi on a bench by the water and watched the children swimming under the stone arches. From one vendor they bought two rings of white metal, five marks each, and put them on each other's fingers, laughing, as if it were a joke. A photographer on the bridge asked them to stand by the railing, because newlyweds at a fair, he said, brought him luck too. They did not correct him. An old woman at a stall selling socks wished them as many children as there are stars in the sky.
In the evening there was music on the flat ground by the river, and people danced the kolo. Almin and Zerina danced until they were out of breath, and then once more. The accordion player was Rizo. When he recognized them, he stopped playing in the middle of a song, looked at them for a long time, and then began to play something old, slowly, just for the two of them. Afterward he sat with them on the wall by the water and drank juice from a bottle. "Children," he said, "your fathers ruined themselves over my field, and it never even crossed my mind to plow it. What would I do with it? I have this." And he slapped the accordion with his palm.
He offered to take them with him. He had a van, two musicians and weddings every Saturday from Foča to Zvornik, and he needed someone who could sing, and he remembered that as a little girl Zerina had sung at every village gathering. They would sleep wherever they ended up, eat wherever people treated them, and never have a field, or a loan, or a court. Almin looked at Zerina. She was silent for a long time, and then she said thank you to Rizo, but that all her life she had watched two men circle around one piece of land, and now she wanted to stop somewhere where she knew where the door was. Rizo laughed and said she was smarter than both fathers.
They stayed on the riverbank until dawn. They sat beside one of the wooden boats waiting for the regatta, watched the lights from the bridge break up in the water, and decided, slowly, the way you decide about a house. Almin has a room in Ljubljana and a job from Monday to Saturday. Zerina knows how to sew, and you can sew anywhere. On Monday at nine, when the court in Višegrad reads out its verdict, they will be on the bus to Sarajevo, and from there farther on. Each of them wrote the same letter to their father, on the back of one of the photographs from the bridge: that they did not need that field and would never ask for it.
On Monday the verdict was read out in front of an empty bench. The field went to Šaban. Šaban learned it in the café, from his lawyer; that morning he had already found under the door the photograph his son had left at dawn, and he sat with both pieces of paper until closing time. That fall no one plowed a single furrow. By the next year the plateau had grown over with grass from both sides, the brambles had come back, and in June strawberries appeared again around the stones in the middle. Sometimes, when there is no wedding, Rizo sits on those stones and plays, alone, for no one. Sometimes Šaban joins him and says nothing.