When my father died, Branislav was the first to arrive and the last to leave. It was February, rain had been falling on Trebinje for days, and the plane trees on the square stood black and leafless. My father had been a surgeon at the hospital and everyone in town knew him, so the house below Crkvina hill was full of people I had never seen before. Branislav had been his friend from university, an agronomist with a vineyard above the Trebišnjica and forty years that seemed to me then neither young nor old, simply someone else's. He stood in the hallway and opened the door to everyone who knocked. I was twenty-two, and I had my aunt Kosana and a piano that had been my mother's.
After the funeral he came on Sundays. He brought papers from the bank and the pension award, opened the electricity bills I had left unopened and sorted them out at the kitchen table while Aunt Kosana fried uštipci. He called me little one. It made me angry, and yet by Thursday I was already thinking about what I would wear on Sunday. One Sunday he opened the piano, wiped the dust off the lid with his handkerchief and said: "Go on. Your father would have wanted it." I played badly, my fingers were stiff from the winter. He lay on the sofa with his eyes closed, and whenever I rushed, he would say only: "Slower."
In July the figs ripened in our yard. I climbed the old fig tree behind the house, and Branislav stood below with a basket and pointed out the ripe ones, because you see better from below. It annoyed me that he told me even that. Then my sandal slipped off, straight into the basket, onto the figs, and he laughed like a boy. I had never seen him laugh like that before. I sat on the branch with one bare foot and understood that I loved him, completely and foolishly, the way you love for the first time, at twenty-two. For the rest of the summer I did not know how to do anything else.
At the end of August we were sitting on the terrace, and without looking at me he told me about an acquaintance of his. This man, he said, was forty and had fallen in love with the daughter of his best friend. He said nothing to her, because he knew how these things go. She was young and sad, she was grateful to him, and gratitude is easily mistaken for love. In ten years she would want to dance and he would want to sleep, and she would resent him for every year she had given him. "Your acquaintance is a coward," I said. "Or a wise man," he said. "A coward," I repeated, and then for the first time he looked at me the way a man looks at a woman, not at a little one.
We were married in October, after the harvest, in the church on Crkvina, and I moved in with him, into the stone house above the vineyard. We brought the piano over in a neighbor's pickup, wrapped in blankets, and set it by the window that looked out on the river. That first year I lived as if I were always a little drunk, though I drank nothing but grape must. In the mornings we walked the vines together, he explained the diseases of the leaves and I pretended to listen. In the evenings I played, he lay on the sofa and said: "Slower." The world ended at the vineyard gate, and it seemed to me that this was quite enough world.
In the second winter I began to listen to the silence. The rain beat against the stone, the refrigerator hummed, Branislav read, and every evening was the same as the one before it. Everything he loved, order, quiet, the vines that are pruned in February, suddenly looked to me like old age that had come before its time. One evening I said I wanted to go to Sarajevo. That I wanted to see people, the theater, concerts, that I was twenty-four. I thought he would object, and I had already prepared everything I would say back. He said only: "All right. Let's go." That hurt me more than any objection.
In March we rented an apartment in Bistrik, with a balcony facing the City Hall. During the week Branislav worked as a consultant for a company that was planting orchards across Semberija, and I discovered that people in Sarajevo like new faces. They invited me to gallery openings, to premieres at the National Theater, to dinners in Kovači that lasted until dawn. Women asked who that young woman from Trebinje was, men brought me drinks I had not asked for. Branislav went with me the first few times, stood by the wall with a glass of water and smiled politely. After that he stayed home and read. He never reproached me for anything. His silence was worse to me than any reproach.
In October a neighbor called from Trebinje to say the vranac grapes were ripe and the rains were coming. Branislav packed a bag and asked whether I would come with him for the harvest. On Saturday there was a party at the close of the theater festival, to which I had been invited for the first time, and I said I would not. I said more than that. I said he had married me so that I would play for him in the vineyard until I grew old like him. He looked at me for a long time, then said quietly: "I married you so that you would be happy. If you are happy here, stay." And he left alone, at night, by way of Stolac.
At that party I met Lorenzo, a director from Milan, with gray hair and young eyes, who talked about my dress as if it were a play. All evening he did not leave my side. Just before midnight he took me up to the Yellow Bastion, to show me the city as Sarajevans no longer see it, because they have grown used to it. Below us lay the city, all lights. It was cold, he put his jacket around my shoulders, and then he kissed me. For one moment I did not move. Afterward I was more ashamed of that moment than of anything else. Then I pushed him away, left his jacket in his hands and ran down through Vratnik, over the cobblestones, in heels, all the way to Baščaršija.
At two o'clock I sat down on the stone by the Sebilj fountain and called him. He answered at the first ring, as if he had not been asleep. "Come and get me," I said. He asked nothing. At half past six, when the pigeons were starting to land on the square, his old Passat pulled up on the embankment by the City Hall. He got out in muddy shoes, with a vine leaf stuck to his sleeve, and opened the door for me. All the way to Trebinje we were silent. Near Stolac he bought two coffees at a gas station and handed me one, the way you hand a coffee to a fellow traveler.
After that came many years that I would find hard to tell apart. A son was born to us, then a daughter. Branislav was a good father, patient and attentive, the way he had been with me that winter after my father died. With me he was now kind. We talked about the children, about the vineyard, about the roof that leaked, and never about that night. The piano stood closed. Sometimes I thought he no longer loved me, and sometimes that he had never loved me at all, only looked after me, the way he had looked after my father's papers. I did not dare to ask.
One evening in October, after the harvest, the children fell asleep early and the rain beat against the stone just as it had in that second winter. I opened the piano and began to play the Moonlight Sonata, for the first time in many years. He came in and sat down on the sofa. I stopped in the middle of a bar. "Why didn't you stop me?" I asked. "Back then, in Sarajevo. Why weren't you jealous?" He was silent for a long time. "I was," he said. "Every night. But if I had stopped you, you would have spent your whole life thinking you had missed something. You had to leave on your own and come back on your own. All I could do was come and get you."
"And our first summer?" I asked. "The figs, the sandal in the basket?" "That happened," he said. "And it will not happen again. You are no longer twenty-two, and I am no longer the man who holds the basket and is afraid of losing you." "Then who are you?" "The one who stayed," he said, without any sadness, the way he says how many barrels he filled that autumn. For the first time in many years he seemed to me neither old nor a stranger. He was simply my husband, gray at the temples, with hands cracked from the vines.
Our daughter came out of her room, barefoot, in pajamas, woken by the rain. She climbed onto the piano bench beside me and put her little finger on one key, then on another, the wrong one. I started again from the beginning, with her finger among mine. From the sofa, without opening his eyes, Branislav said: "Slower." Our daughter laughed, and I laughed with her. We started over, slower, and that time we made it to the end.