Harun had brought the fan back from Seville, and he gave it to Mirna on Saturday morning, before Adem woke up. It was black silk with painted pomegranate blossoms, and on the first bone rib someone had carved her name in tiny letters. Mirna laughed. Who carries a fan in Sarajevo? "You'll see tonight," Harun said. "The terrace will be like an oven." She was turning twenty-six, she had been married two years, her son was six months old, and for the first time the house on Gorica felt as much hers as his.
Half an hour later Saliha Mulić came by, the wife of Harun's business partner, with a tray of baklava and some news. She refused coffee, then drank two cups, and in between she said what, as she claimed, all of Sarajevo already knew. Since February Harun had been stopping by an apartment in Marijin Dvor, the home of a certain Nora Lindner, who had come back from Vienna last winter and whom no one talked about in front of children. "I'm telling you this as a mother," Saliha said. Mirna had not had a mother since she was two. Her mother, as her father and grandmother told it, had been killed on the road to Mostar, and all that was left was one photograph on the dresser in the bedroom: a young woman holding a child, on the Wilson Promenade.
When Saliha left, Mirna opened Harun's laptop. The password was Adem's date of birth. In the bank statements one name kept coming back: N. Lindner, two thousand marks in March, three thousand in April, five thousand ten days ago and the rent for the apartment, on the first of every month. Harun came home at two, with bags of ice and lemons for the terrace. Without a word Mirna turned the screen toward him.
He did not deny it. That was what hurt most. "That woman has been through a lot," he said. "There is nothing between us, Mirna, I swear on Adem. But I can't tell you any more. I gave my word." Then, as he lowered the ice into the bathtub, he said that Nora was invited tonight. "If people see her in our house, they will stop talking." Mirna picked the fan up off the table. "If she comes, I'll hit her with this in front of everyone." Harun went pale, but he did not take back the invitation.
Viktor Ramljak arrived first, around seven, to help with the drinks. He had a gallery in Kovači and an apartment above it, and ever since Mirna's wedding he had been telling her, half joking, that she had married too young. That evening he was not joking. "If he is doing this to you, don't stay," he said by the railing, above a city lighting up window by window. "I am here. Tonight, tomorrow, whenever you want." He set a key with the gallery's key ring on the railing. Mirna told him the heat had gone to his head. She did not give the key back.
Nora Lindner arrived at nine. She was a woman of about fifty, in a simple dark blue dress, with gray hair she did not dye, and she walked onto the terrace as if she had been coming there all her life. The conversation stopped. Mirna stood by the door with the closed fan in her hand, and everyone was looking at that fan. She raised it, but her hand would not obey her. The fan fell onto the stone tiles, and Nora bent down and put it back in her hand. "It's beautiful," she said quietly. "Take care of it." Someone at once raised a glass to the birthday girl, and the music came back.
Within an hour Nora had won over half the terrace. Muradif Bukvić, a widower of sixty-two with a chain of furniture showrooms from Tuzla to Mostar, laughed at every sentence she spoke. Around eleven Mirna saw Harun and Nora by the potted lemon trees, talking quietly and quickly, and saw Harun take an envelope from his inside pocket and give it to her. Mirna went upstairs, kissed the sleeping Adem, asked the babysitter to stay until morning, and on the back of a birthday card wrote: "Harun, you have chosen her. I am leaving. Don't look for me." She left the card on the dresser, next to her mother's photograph, and went out through the side door into the street. Without knowing why, she took the fan with her.
Ten minutes later the card was found by Nora, who had gone upstairs to look at the baby. She read it twice and sat down on the bed, because her legs would not hold her. Twenty-four years earlier, in an apartment in Ciglane, she had left a note of almost the same words on the kitchen table and gone to Vienna with a saxophone player from a hotel bar, who left her before the end of the year. Her husband told their two-year-old daughter, and then everyone else, that she had been killed. Last winter she came back with no money and no one, but she did not ring her daughter's doorbell. She rang at the door of her son-in-law's studio, with Mirna's birth certificate in her bag. Ever since, Harun had been paying so that Mirna would never learn her mother was alive. Nora pushed the card into her bag, looked at the photograph on the dresser, in which she barely recognized herself, and went downstairs.
She found Muradif by the grill. "Take Harun somewhere for a drink," she told him. "Anywhere. And don't let him come home before one." Muradif promised, happy that she was asking him for something. Nora took a taxi from the corner to Kovači. She did not know that Viktor had just invited the guests who did not want to go home yet to finish the evening at his place, above the gallery, and that Muradif, true to his promise, was the first to take Harun by the arm.
Mirna was sitting on Viktor's sofa with the fan in her lap when the door opened. "What are you doing here? Did he send you?" "Nobody sent me," Nora said. "I read your card." Harun had never been with her, she said, the money he gave her was her shame and not his, and he loved only one woman in this world, and that woman was sitting on the wrong sofa. "You take money from my husband, and now you lecture me about marriage?" "I take it," Nora said. "And that is why I know what it looks like when a woman leaves her house at night. The first night you think you are running from him. After that you run for years, and nobody is chasing you."
Mirna was crying, but she did not move. Nora knelt in front of her, on Viktor's rug. "You have a six-month-old son," she said. "In twenty years he will ask you where you were tonight. To this day I owe someone that answer." Mirna looked her straight in the face for the first time. Then she stood up. At that moment voices sounded on the stairs, Viktor's laugh, Muradif's bass, and one voice Mirna would have recognized among a thousand others. Nora pushed her into the bedroom and went into the kitchen herself. The fan stayed on the sofa.
Five men came in. Viktor poured rakija, and Harun kept quiet and looked out the window toward Baščaršija. When Muradif sat down on the sofa, something cracked under him. He pulled out the fan and laughed: "Viktor, who left this at your place?" Harun turned around. He took the fan, opened it and ran his finger over the first rib. "Where is she?" Viktor said he did not know what he was talking about. Harun started toward the bedroom door.
"The fan is my mistake," Nora said from the kitchen doorway. "I took it from the terrace when I was leaving. I thought it was mine." She stood there calmly, her bag on her shoulder, in an unmarried man's apartment at midnight, and everyone in that room knew what that meant and what all of Sarajevo would know by noon. Muradif set his glass down on the table and walked out without a word. Harun looked at her as if he were seeing her for the first time. No one was looking toward the bedroom, from which Mirna, her sandals in her hand, slipped behind their backs and out onto the stairs.
In the morning Harun brought coffee to the bed and sat down on the edge. He said he had been wrong to bring that woman into the house, that last night he had found her at Viktor's, and that he would never mention her again. "Don't talk about her like that," Mirna said. "Last night you wanted to hit her," Harun said. "Last night I didn't know anything," she said. Just then someone rang at the gate.
Nora had brought the fan wrapped in a paper tissue. She said she was going back to Vienna on Tuesday, together with Muradif, who had knocked on her door at dawn, listened to one short story and decided to believe her. She asked only for a photograph of Mirna and Adem. Mirna gave her the picture from Vrelo Bosne in the hallway, and the fan along with it. "Keep it. Let it remind you of Sarajevo." Nora looked toward the open bedroom door, where the old photograph could be seen on the dresser. "That is my mother," Mirna said. "They say I look like her." Nora was silent for a long time. "You do," she said at last. "Only you are wiser."
Harun walked her to the gate. There Nora said only "Never," and he nodded. Mirna stood on the terrace with Adem in her arms and watched the woman in the dark blue dress walk down Gorica, slowly. Nora did not turn around. At the corner she stopped to let a van pass, took something black out of her bag, spread it open and fanned herself, although a cold wind was already blowing down from Trebević.