In Neum they called the doctor's wife a mermaid, and it did not always sound like a compliment. From May to November, every morning at six, Nikolina walked into the sea below the house and swam straight out, past the buoys, toward Pelješac, so far that from the shore she could be seen only as a dot. She came back only when Doctor Pavao, on the terrace, put down his cup and stood up. He never told her she swam too far. He just left a towel on the chair by the steps every morning.
Pavao was the family doctor at the health center, a widower twenty years older than her, a man who knew half of Neum by its blood pressure. He had married her eight years earlier, when she was thirty and he was treating her mother. His daughter Rina, who studied in Mostar and spent her summers at home, called her stepmother a mermaid out loud and kept the rest to herself. "Our mermaid is staring at the open sea again," she would say at breakfast, and Nikolina did not get angry, because it was the truth.
The open sea had a name. When Nikolina was twenty, she worked summers at the front desk of a hotel above the beach, and Frane was a ship's mechanic on leave between two contracts, ten years older, with hands that smelled of diesel and salt. At night they sat on the rocks below the old road. One night he took off his ring and she took off hers, and he threaded them onto the same piece of fishing line and threw them into the sea. "Now the sea has married us," he said. "And the sea does not grant divorces." He left on a ship bound for Singapore and sent three letters. Then word came that the ship had been held in some African port over smuggled cargo and that the mechanic had disappeared before the trial. He never got in touch again.
She told Pavao all of it one night before the wedding, from beginning to end, and he listened the way he listened to patients, without interrupting. All he said was: "That was before me." She thought that was enough. But even after eight years she slept with the window open and stayed in rooms only as long as she had to. She said she could not breathe under a ceiling.
The yacht sailed into the bay at the beginning of September, when the tourists had already gone. It was white, under a Maltese flag, too big for Neum, and it anchored between the hotel and Klek. The next morning, when Nikolina came out of the sea, a man with gray temples was standing on the pebbles beside her towel. He did not need to say anything. She recognized him by the way he stood, legs apart, as if even the land were rocking.
"I said I would come," said Frane. "I have come." He explained to her calmly, as if reading a weather forecast, that he was the chief engineer on the yacht, that the yacht was sailing tomorrow at eight in the evening for Kotor, and then for Greece, and that he would not try to talk her into anything. "You will come by yourself, or you will not come at all. The sea married us, not I." He did not touch her. He walked off down the beach toward the dinghy. Nikolina stood with the towel in her hands and shook, and she knew it was not from the cold. She was afraid. Not of him, but of how much she wanted to go.
She told Pavao that same noon, in his office, between two patients. Pavao took off his glasses and, for the first time since she had known him, raised his voice. He said she was going nowhere, that the man was a fugitive and that he would go to the police, to the border, to whoever he had to. Nikolina let him finish. "You can lock me in," she said. "But if I stay because you locked the door, I will spend my whole life on that yacht. And you will know it every morning, with a towel in your hand."
That night no one in the house slept. Through the wall Rina heard her father pacing the kitchen, so she went downstairs and found Nikolina on the terrace in the dark, watching the lights of the yacht. She sat down beside her, for the first time without a single word about mermaids. "I thought you did not love us," she said at last. "But you are just afraid." Nikolina did not answer. Rina put a hand on her shoulder and kept it there a long time, as if holding on to something that might float away.
The next day Pavao saw twenty-two patients, took twenty-two blood pressures and did not remember a single one. At seven he locked his office and went straight to the pier. The dinghy from the yacht was already waiting, and Frane stood at the end of the pier, without a bag, like a man who needs nothing. Nikolina came ten minutes before eight. In her hand she had a small travel bag.
Pavao went up to her before Frane could say anything. His voice was quiet, the one he used when giving test results. "Nikolina, I forbid you nothing," he said. "I am not going to the police. I am not locking anything. If you go, I will send your things wherever you say, and I will tell Rina it was your decision, not running away. If you stay, let that be yours too. You are free. Choose for yourself, and let no one choose for you, not me, not him, not the sea."
Nikolina looked at him as if she did not understand the word. "Free?" she asked. "Free," he said. She looked at the sea, which in the dusk was calm and gray, then at the yacht, then at Frane at the end of the pier, who held out his hand to her. For eight years she had thought it was Pavao's house that held her. Now no one forbade anything, and the sea was suddenly only the sea, wet and cold, full of other people's ships.
She set the bag down on the concrete. "The ring is on the bottom," she said to Frane. "Let it stay there." Frane looked at her for a long time, then at Pavao, then at the bag. "So someone finally let you choose," he said. He turned, stepped down into the dinghy and did not look back. The motor hummed, and within a few minutes the lights of the yacht began to slide toward the mouth of the bay. Nikolina did not watch them to the end. She took Pavao's arm, and he carried the bag.
Rina was waiting for them on the terrace with three cups of tea, even though no one in that house drank tea in September. "You stayed," she said. "I stayed." Rina nodded and pushed a cup across the table to her. "Tomorrow morning I am going swimming too," she said. "If you will wait for me at the buoys."
In the morning the sea was as smooth as oil. They swam together, and at the buoys Rina stopped, out of breath, and said she could not go any farther. Nikolina looked toward Pelješac, then toward the shore, where Pavao, on the terrace, was just pouring his coffee. She turned and swam toward the house, for the first time before he had stood up.