Aunt Zlata and Aunt Munevera had been seeing in the New Year at their flat in Bjelave for thirty years, and in thirty years nothing had changed except the guests. The same embroidered tablecloth, the same spinach pita and the same Russian salad in the crystal bowl, the same radiator that knocked as if someone were calling from downstairs. Every year at midnight Rešad, as their eldest nephew, gave the toast. This year too he carried a slip of paper with notes in his jacket pocket, and all evening he wondered whether the line by a Sarajevo poet that he had put at the end was too bookish for people who had come to eat roast meat.
Aldina was in the kitchen with the aunts, her sleeves rolled up to the elbows, laughing at something Munevera was telling. She was from Foča, from a house above the Ćehotina, and after twenty years of marriage and two children Rešad still liked to watch her move around someone else's kitchen as if it were her own. The children were at her mother's that night. The forecast had called for snow, and taxi drivers struggled to climb up to their apartment in Sedrenik even on dry roads, so Rešad had booked a room in a small hotel near Baščaršija. He was pleased with himself for it, the way he was pleased with most of the things he planned in advance.
At midnight he stood up, tapped his glass with a fork, and spoke about hospitality, about the aunts who had taught half the city solfège and piano, about the people who had once sat at this table and were here no longer. The guests grew serious in the right places and laughed in the right places. The line at the end went over better than he had feared. Fireworks were bursting over the city, from Bjelave you could see the light falling across the rooftops all the way to Marijin Dvor, and through that light the first snowflakes began to fall. Aunt Zlata kissed him on the forehead and said he spoke just like his late father. Rešad knew it was not true, but he was glad.
After two o'clock the guests began to leave. Rešad stood in the hallway of the building with the coats over his arm, waiting for Aldina, who had gone back for her scarf. When he turned toward the stairs, he saw her on the landing above him, standing in the half dark with one hand on the railing, not coming down. From the flat, through the door left ajar, came the voice of old Mirsad Begović, once a member of the radio choir, who sang only when he thought no one was listening. He was singing quietly, to himself, as he looked for his cap in the kitchen: Snijeg pade na behar, na voće.
Rešad was not listening to the song but to the woman listening to it. He looked at her blue scarf and her head tilted a little, the way you tilt it in a crowd when you try to make out who is calling you, and he thought that if he were a painter, he would paint her just like that, on the stairs, her face turned toward a voice that could not be seen. He wanted to take out his phone and photograph her, but he felt ashamed. The song broke off in the middle of a line, because Mirsad had found his cap. Aldina came down slowly and took her coat from his hands as if she did not recognize it right away.
The taxi barely made it down from Bjelave. The city was white and empty, except by the Cathedral, where some young men were pelting each other with snowballs and wishing a happy New Year to every car that passed. Aldina was silent and looked out the window. Rešad held her hand and remembered their first winter, the apartment in Grbavica with no heating, and the night they missed the last tram and walked from Skenderija under one umbrella. He felt tenderness and something warmer than tenderness, and he was looking forward to the room, to the quiet, and to the door he would lock from the inside.
The room had a wooden ceiling and one window onto the street. Below they could see the Sebilj under the snow and the empty square where by day the pigeons will not let you pass. Aldina did not turn on the light. She stood by the window, still in her coat, and when he came up to her and put his hands on her shoulders, she did not turn around. He asked her what was wrong. For a long time she did not answer. "That song," she said at last. "What about it?" "A boy in Foča used to sing it, when I was seventeen."
Rešad laughed, briefly, and heard how his laugh sounded. He asked who the boy had been. His name was Nihad, she said. He was two years older than she was, worked in his father's watch repair shop by the bridge, and had been born with a weak heart, so he was not allowed to play football with the others. He sang instead. They used to walk along the Ćehotina, and he would sing her that song and a few others, quietly, the way Mirsad had tonight. "Did you love him?" Rešad asked, and heard himself asking in the voice he used at the university to ask students why they had not done the assigned reading. "We were going out," she said. "It was a long time ago."
Then, with her back to him, she told him the rest. In November of that year her father had found a job in Sarajevo, and the family was to move. Nihad was ill in those days, just out of the hospital with pneumonia. The night before the move someone threw a handful of sand at her window. It had been raining since noon. She looked down and saw him in the garden, without an umbrella, soaked to the skin, standing under the apple tree and looking up. She went down in her slippers and begged him to go back home, because he would only get sicker. He told her he would, that he had only wanted to see her before she left.
A week after they arrived in Sarajevo, a girl from her class called to tell her that Nihad had died. His heart had not held out against the infection. Aldina told it calmly, and then she turned around, sat down on the bed, and wept into her palms, like a child afraid that someone will hear. "I think he died because of me," she said. Rešad sat down beside her. He did not know what to say, so he said nothing. He held her hand until she stopped crying, and then until she fell asleep, still dressed, on top of the covers.
For a long time he sat in the half dark, under the light of the streetlamp, looking at her face, which showed years he had never noticed at home. He thought about his toast, about the slip of paper in his pocket, about the line he had spent a whole week choosing. He thought about his proposal: a restaurant in Vratnik, a ring he had picked from a catalog after checking the price twice. Everything he had ever done out of love he had done in the dry, with a reservation. No one had ever waited for him under a window, and he had never waited for anyone in the rain. And in this room, with them, there was a boy of nineteen with whom he could never quarrel and never make peace.
He got up and went to the window. The snow was falling thick and slow now, and Baščaršija looked as if no one had ever walked on it. The roof of the Sebilj was white, and down below the Miljacka could not even be heard. He thought about the road that runs south, over Trnovo and Miljevina, where surely no one was driving now. He thought that the same snow was falling tonight on Foča too, on the bridge over the Ćehotina, on the gardens above the river, on an apple tree he had never seen, and on the cemetery on the hill, on a gravestone bearing a name he had not known until this night.
He took off his jacket, carefully, so the slip of paper in the pocket would not rustle, and hung it over the back of a chair. He covered Aldina with his coat. He drew the curtain halfway, so that the light from the street would not fall on her face, and lay down beside her, at the very edge of the bed, careful not to wake her.