In Jajce people spoke about Božidar Lončar quietly and always in the same way: that he had driven off three assistants in a single winter, that he did not return a greeting, and that he lived in a stone house above the mills on the Pliva because nowhere else would put up with him. Albina Pitić, twenty-four, had never seen him. She knew only that because of him her father had spent the last seven nights sleeping in a chair.
In December Alija had stopped his van on the road toward Šipovo when a blizzard closed the pass. The only light on the hill came from that house. Nobody answered his knock, so he broke the pantry window, climbed in, and kept the stove going all night. He fed it with oak planks stacked against the wall. In the morning he learned that they had been drying for eight years, meant for the new wheel of the old mill. Božidar worked out the damage at three thousand marks, on paper, without one curse. Alija, a carpenter whose hands had given out from inflamed joints, did not have a third of that.
"I will work it off," Albina said at supper. "You can't even hold a spoon." Her father said nothing until morning, and then only: "If he says anything ugly to you, come home that very minute."
Božidar met her at the door, tall and gray, with an old scar on his right arm from elbow to fingers. He looked at her boots, then her backpack, then the bus already turning around. "You are coming instead of him." "I am coming because of the debt," she said. He gave her a list: measure and mark all the remaining planks, clean the axle bearings, do not enter the workshop after eight. He did not say welcome. He did not say anything.
For the first two weeks they talked only about wood. Albina learned to tell oak from Vlašić from oak from the valley, and he stopped checking her numbers. In the third week she noticed that the flour sacks in the hallway got fewer every Wednesday. One night she followed him to the village below the hill and saw him leave one on the doorstep of each old woman, knock, and leave without a word before the light came on. She looked at his scar with different eyes.
"Why do you let people say what they say?" she asked him the next day. He did not lift his head from the axle. "Whoever goes to ask already knows. And whoever does not ask, I have no need of." "And me?" "You asked." For the first time she saw him smile, briefly, as if afraid someone would remember it.
In February, when the first water started down from Vlašić, Božidar called Albina into the workshop after eight. On the table lay a paper with her father's signature. He tore it in two. "The wheel is turning. The debt was paid, I would say, a long time ago." "That is not true," she said. "It is not," he admitted, "but I am the one counting." He told her she could go home, that her father was waiting, that she did not have to stay because of a piece of paper. Albina stood for a long time with her palms on the oak. She left without a word.
At home she sat over Alija's coffee and did not know what she was missing. Her father watched her for three days, and on the fourth he said: "The wheel does not turn itself." In April she got on the first morning bus, a sprig of flowering quince in her sleeve. Božidar was standing at the gate as if he had been waiting there the whole winter, and he would never admit he had. "Is there anything left to measure?" she asked. "There is," he said. "All spring."