Hajrudin Mujkić had made kitchens and wardrobes in Tuzla for thirty years and had never been wrong by a millimeter. In his wife, however, he had made a mistake. Ilma was twenty-eight and he was fifty-six, and everything she said to him she said in the polite voice one uses with craftsmen when a bill is late.
In their house in Sjenjak they had a lodger, a student named Jusuf, who was studying electrical engineering and looked at Ilma longer than a good morning requires. And under the bedroom window, every evening around ten, a man named Izet Hodžić had begun to appear, a clerk from the bank, in a coat with fake fur on the collar and with a guitar he did not know how to play. He sang about her eyes. Hajrudin thought it was a cat.
Ilma met Izet one Saturday. She opened the window just wide enough for a face to fit through, and in the dark it could not be seen that she was holding a wet dishcloth. Izet shut his eyes, leaned in, and kissed. He jerked back at once. There was no smell of roses, only dish soap. "What is that?" "Love," said Ilma, and slammed the window. In the kitchen Jusuf was waiting for her, laughing so hard he had to sit down.
The next day Jusuf came to Hajrudin with a serious face. He said he had heard a forecast: on Sunday night the Jala would leave its bed, the water would reach Sjenjak and carry away everything in front of it. "What should I do?" the carpenter asked. "Master, hang a barrel from the beams in your workshop, take some bread and sit in it. When the water starts, cut the rope and you will float." Hajrudin was a man of wood and believed in disasters. By evening he and Jusuf had hung an old barrel under the roof, and beneath it, just in case, they had poured a heap of sawdust.
On Sunday Hajrudin sat in the barrel with a pie and a thermos of tea and pulled up the ladder. Ilma and Jusuf stayed in the house. They sat on the sofa, Jusuf held her hand and finally said what he had kept quiet for months, and she did not pull her hand away. They kissed once, then once more, and that is all the windows of Sjenjak are allowed to know.
Around midnight a guitar rang out under the window. Izet had come back, this time with a gold chain. "Ilma, one more kiss and the chain is yours." Ilma whispered to Jusuf, and Jusuf took a bucket of cold water, opened the window and, while Izet shut his eyes and leaned in, emptied the whole thing over his head. "Water!" shouted Izet. "Water!"
In the workshop that was all Hajrudin heard. He crossed himself, cut the rope with his best knife, and the barrel dropped seven feet into the sawdust with a crash that rattled the windows of the whole street. He climbed out gray in the face, with pie in his hair, and shouted that the flood was coming.
The neighbors came out in their pajamas. They found Izet, soaked to the skin, standing under the window with his guitar, and Hajrudin, waist-deep in sawdust, warning of water that was not there in even a drop. Ilma and Jusuf stood in the doorway and claimed to understand nothing. "This gentleman was singing under someone else's window," said one neighbor. "And this one is saving the neighborhood from dry land." Hajrudin remained convinced until morning that he had saved the house, because Izet had woken him after all. On Monday Izet called in sick, and the bank never learned why.
That Monday Ilma washed the dishcloth at the same window. Hajrudin praised how clean it was. The barrel stayed hanging in the workshop, for the next flood.