The first time, she ran off to her parents in Memići, and nobody counted that as running away. It was seven weeks after the wedding, on a Tuesday in July, and Lejsa walked half an hour down the gravel road with a bag over her shoulder, came in through her father's gate, and told her mother she would not be married anymore. Her mother asked whether Kadir was rough with her. He was not. Did he shout? He did not shout, he barely even talked. Did he drink? He did not even drink coffee in the afternoon. "Then what is it?" her mother asked. Lejsa could not say. It was not Kadir who bothered her. What bothered her was that she was now a wife: that in the morning someone asked her what they would have for lunch, that his socks lay on the chair beside the bed, that he said "our house" and "our cow" as if she too had come with papers. The next day her father brought her back on the tractor, in silence, and Kadir met them at the gate and helped her climb down.
Kadir was thirty-six and had twelve cows in Vukovije, a house with a new facade, and his mother's old house across the road, empty. He was a widower. His first wife had died of an illness five years earlier, and for a long time he had not looked at anyone, until one Saturday at the market in Kalesija he heard a girl behind a cheese stall laughing right in a customer's face. He married her within three months. He got up at five, milked, waited for the dairy truck at six, then went out to the raspberries, and in the evening he collapsed onto the couch with hands that smelled of milk and hay. When Lejsa, after she came back, looked at him across the table, he asked what he had done wrong. "Nothing," she said. "That is the worst part."
The second time, her brother helped her. Džemo worked in a building supply warehouse in Tuzla, was twenty-four, had a used Golf, and had never liked Kadir's silence. "If you don't want to stay at Mom's," he said, "there is a woman by Kapija who rents out rooms. Nobody will look for you there." On Thursday, while Kadir was at the cattle market in Kalesija, Džemo drove the Golf up to the house. Lejsa stuffed two dresses, a hair dryer, and the money her grandmother had given her for the wedding into her bag, and on the kitchen table, under the salt shaker, she left a note: "Don't look for me. It is not you." All the way to Tuzla Džemo hummed, as pleased as if the two of them had robbed a bank.
Kadir found the note at dusk, after the milking. He read it twice, put it in his shirt pocket, and sat down on the steps. He remembered his mother. When he was nine, his mother had gone to her brothers in Srebrenik, and his father had gotten into the old Mercedes and brought her back the next day. She lived with them another thirty years, cooked, washed, raised the children, and Kadir never once heard her sing again. He had not even known she used to sing until his aunt told him at the funeral. He sat on the steps until the cows in the barn began lowing for their evening water. Then he sent Džemo a message: "Tell her I won't come for her. When she comes, let her come on her own. The cows are fine."
Đurđa was seventy and had two rooms to rent and a balcony facing Kapija, where she smoked thin cigarettes and commented on the passersby. The apartment was on the second floor of an old Austrian building, and the floor in the hallway tilted slightly, like half the old town, because Tuzla stands on salt that has been dissolving beneath it for years. "Don't be afraid," Đurđa said when Lejsa stopped on the threshold, "it sinks slowly. I have lived here fifty years and I am still on dry land." The other room was rented by Dalibor Šešlija, a journalist at the local radio station, a man of thirty-four who read in the kitchen in the evenings and drank tea from a mug printed with the name of some long-ago Olympics. He offered right away to show Lejsa around town, because new people in Tuzla, he said, always get lost on the Korzo first.
For the first few weeks Lejsa was happy in a way she could not explain even to Đurđa. Nobody asked her what she would have for lunch. She ate burek standing up, by Kapija, and sat for hours on a bench by the Pannonian Lakes, watching children splash in the salt water. She applied for a job at a bakery, but they wanted someone with experience. Dalibor took her up Ilinčica to see the town from above, explained why the buildings in the center were leaning, and she laughed that the town was just like her, standing on something that was slowly dissolving. She told him about Memići, about the market, about her grandmother. She told him, without noticing, about Kadir too: how he called every cow by name, how in the first week he had fixed the bathroom door for her because it would not lock, how he went quiet when he was tired, and he was always tired.
In the third week Dalibor realized that he loved her, and at about the same time that she did not see it and would not. He said nothing to her. He was a man who had read enough novels to know how such things usually end, and he was decent enough not to try. Sometimes, while she talked about the raspberries in Vukovije, he looked at her hands on the table and thought that if she ever reached across that table on her own, he would take her hand and ask nothing. She reached across only for the sugar. Đurđa watched them from the balcony, blew smoke toward Kapija, and kept quiet, which was not usual for her.
In August the smell of coffee began to bother Lejsa. Then the smell of Đurđa's cigarettes, then the smell of burek, and one morning she could not get up for the nausea. Đurđa sat on the edge of the bed, looked at her the way women of seventy look at girls of twenty-one, and said: "Child, you are not sick." Lejsa went to the pharmacy on the Korzo, bought a test, and took it in Đurđa's bathroom, behind the door that would not lock. She sat down on the edge of the tub. The first thing she felt was not fear. It was something warm and large that climbed from her stomach to her throat and stayed there, and in that warmth, for the first time since she had left, was Kadir. Not marriage, not socks, not the question about lunch. Kadir standing in the barn door in the morning, calling the cow Zekula by her name.
She told Dalibor that evening, in the kitchen, while he was pouring tea. That she was pregnant and that she was going back home, tomorrow, on the first bus. She spoke quickly and laughed, and she did not see him set his mug down on the table slowly, as if it were made of glass. "Home," he repeated. "Home," she said, and blushed, as if she were saying the word for the first time. He congratulated her. In the morning he carried her bag to the bus station, bought her water and cookies for the trip, and stood on the platform until the bus pulled out onto the road toward Kalesija. He waved only once. She waved until she lost sight of him, and then she forgot about him before Živinice.
From the main road to Vukovije she walked, her bag over her shoulder, along the same gravel road she had run away on the first time. It was time for the evening milking. Kadir was in the barn, in rubber boots, and did not hear her come in. She watched him from the door as she had never watched him before: the broad back, the hands dripping with milk, Zekula turning her head toward her before he did. Then he turned too. He asked nothing. He set down the pail, wiped his hands on his trousers, and stood still, as if afraid he would frighten her off if he moved.
Lejsa went up to him and told him, there in the barn, beside Zekula, what she had been putting into sentences the whole way and what came out in the end as one single sentence. Kadir was silent for a long time. Then he took her in his arms, clumsily, careful not to get her dirty, and she pressed herself against him and, for the first time, did not think about being married. She thought only that he smelled of milk and hay, and that it was, suddenly, her favorite smell in the world.
When they came out of the barn, it was already dark. Kadir stopped on the threshold of the house, turned to her, and asked quietly, as if asking something terrible: "Are you hungry?" Lejsa laughed, the way she used to laugh behind the stall at the market in Kalesija. "I am," she said. "Starving. What is there for dinner?"