The carousel in the amusement park beside the Mostar fairgrounds turned until midnight, and the music from its loudspeakers could be heard across half the town. Edita Pehar went to fetch Anđela at half past eleven, because the doors of the Kameni Han hotel were locked at midnight and Ante did not give the staff a second key. She found her on a plastic horse, her hair loose, laughing every time she swung past a tall young man in a dark jacket. The young man stood by the railing and looked at nothing else.
Edita stood behind him and waited for the carousel to stop. In the crowd someone pushed her against him, and he caught her hand so she would not fall and held it a moment longer than he needed to. He apologized and laughed in such a way that she could not be angry either. His name was Eldin Zubović, he was a lawyer from Sarajevo, and he had a trial at the Cantonal Court in Mostar. He was staying at their hotel, in room seven. All the way back Edita could feel his fingers on her wrist, like the mark left by a watch she had taken off.
She was forty-one and eighteen years into her marriage to Ante, who was twenty years older than she was and owned, besides the hotel, a wine shop near the Old Bridge. Ante talked about the prices of Žilavka and Blatina the way other people talk about the weather, and that was almost all he talked about. They had no children. Anđela had worked for them as a chambermaid since the spring. She was twenty and had come from a village near Stolac, with eight years of school, one suitcase and handwriting she was ashamed of: she wrote slowly, letter by letter, without the accent marks and with mistakes that had made her stand in front of the blackboard at school.
Eldin stayed three days. Anđela brought his breakfast to room seven and came back red in the face. On the third evening they walked to the Old Bridge, and she came back late, with the key Edita had left for her under the flowerpot and a business card in her pocket. On the back it said: Write to me. Anđela showed the card to Edita as if it were a document she could not read. Then she asked her: "You write so nicely, ma'am. I'll write nonsense, with mistakes, and he'll laugh at me."
They wrote the first message together, at the reception desk, after midnight, on Anđela's phone. Anđela said what she wanted to say, and Edita arranged it into sentences. It was short and polite. Eldin replied that same night, at length, about Sarajevo in the rain and about the cases he lost because his clients were right and the law was not. The next evening Anđela fell asleep on the sofa in the lobby while Edita was still searching for a word. Edita finished the message by herself. She wrote that the swifts had come back and were circling the bridge so fast that it seemed they were the ones holding it up in the air.
From then on she wrote every night. Sometimes Anđela dictated, but more often she only asked what he had written. Edita retold it to her, and then she began to retell less. She read Eldin's messages twice, at the reception desk and then in bed, while Ante watched the news beside her with the sound turned low. She wrote him things she had never told Ante: that at twenty-three she had wanted to study literature in Sarajevo, that she loved the rain on the stone roofs of Kujundžiluk, and that she was afraid of the silence in big houses. Eldin wrote that he had never met a woman who saw things this way. Edita knew he was writing it to Anđela and knew he was writing it to her, and she did not know which was worse.
In June Eldin came for a weekend. Anđela was happy and awkward, telling him about her village, her brothers and her boss, who was strict but kind. Eldin listened to her with a smile and now and then looked at her as if he were searching her for the woman in the messages. "In person you talk less than you write," he said. Anđela said she was shy. Edita spent the whole weekend in the office, behind a closed door, and for the first time she wished he would leave.
In July Anđela's father let her know that he had found her a job for the season at a hotel in Austria and that the bus left on the fifteenth. Anđela cried in the laundry room, among the clean sheets. That night Edita wrote only that to Eldin, without any ornament: that she was going and did not know whether she would come back. The answer arrived ten minutes later. "Don't go. Marry me." Edita looked at those words for a long time. Then she went to the laundry room, woke Anđela and showed her the screen. Anđela shrieked and hugged her. In the end it was Edita who typed the answer, "Yes," because Anđela's hands were shaking.
They were married in August, at the registry office in Mostar. Eldin's mother was ill and could not come from Sarajevo, and Anđela chose Edita as her witness. Edita, in a blue dress, stood beside the bride and signed the register right after her. Anđela signed slowly, the tip of her tongue between her teeth, as she had at school. Eldin's witness, a colleague from his office, took photos on his phone the whole time. Lunch was on the terrace of a restaurant above the Neretva, and Ante argued with the waiter about whether the Žilavka was cold enough.
After lunch Eldin took out of his pocket a greeting card his mother had given him, and a pen. "Write Mom a few words," he said to Anđela. "I read her your messages while she was lying in bed. She thinks I married a poet." Anđela took the pen and wrote for a long time. When she had finished, Eldin read: dear mom many regards from yor daugter in law see you insarajevo. No accent marks, no commas, letters of different sizes. He looked at Anđela, who was smiling proudly, then at Edita, across the table. Edita did not look away.
He found her later at the end of the terrace, by the stone railing where you could see the bridge. He did not ask her anything. He said only: "The swifts." Edita said that she had written all of it, from the first message to that one word, Yes. She said she had not wanted to, and then she had wanted to, and that she was not asking him to forgive her. Eldin said he had married one woman and fallen in love with another, and that he did not know how to spell that. He kissed her once, briefly, as if he were signing something that could no longer be withdrawn. Edita was the first to step back. "She loves you without a single word," she said. "I never knew how to do that."
In the evening the newlyweds left by train for Sarajevo. Before Jablanica Anđela fell asleep on his shoulder, the bouquet in her lap. Eldin opened his phone and read the messages from the first one on, while outside in the dark the Neretva flowed past. They were as beautiful as before. He read the one about the swifts three times. A later message had said that swifts never land and that they sleep on the wing. He had looked it up back then, and it was true. Anđela stirred in her sleep and murmured his name. Eldin locked the screen and stayed like that, his hand on her hair, all the way to Sarajevo.
Edita walked home, across the bridge. Ante was already asleep, and on the table he had left the restaurant bill, with the price of the wine underlined. She sat down in the kitchen and opened the messages on her own phone, empty, because she had never written to Eldin from it. She typed: The swifts flew low tonight. She looked at the sentence for a long time. Then she deleted it, letter by letter, slowly, the way Anđela writes, until the screen was empty.