I answered the ad for the pay and for the mountain. It said: tutor of German and English wanted for an eleven-year-old girl, housing provided, a house above Travnik. I was twenty-seven, with a degree in German from Sarajevo, two years of substitute teaching in schools around the Lašva valley, and a room at my mother's in Vitez where you could not even start crying without being heard. The house stood on a bend of the road up to Vlašić, built of stone, three stories high, with a view of the fortress. In November the housekeeper Bahra welcomed me there with a pie and a question about whether I could drive in snow.
The girl's name was Nika, and she spoke German like a native, because she spent every summer with her grandmother in Graz. She was clever, thin, and so polite that I found it suspicious. In the first week she told me her mom was in Graz, the way children say someone is at work, and changed the subject. In the kitchen Bahra told me not to ask about it. I concluded what any woman from Vitez would have concluded: a divorce, an ugly one, and a wife who had gone back to her own people. It never occurred to me to ask what kind of leaving it was.
I met her father only in the third week, on the road, in the dark. I was walking back from town when a black SUV skidded on an icy bend and slid with its rear wheels into the ditch. The driver got out swearing, limping on one leg, and told me to keep going. I did not keep going. I held the flashlight for him while he pushed branches under the wheel, and I pushed when he told me to push. Only at the gate did he realize who I was. "You are that teacher," he said. "I thought you would be older." "And I thought you would be kinder," I said.
Zvonimir was forty-five, with a furniture factory in Turbe and a habit of saying nothing at dinner. After dinner, though, he began calling me into his study. He asked me what I was reading, what I thought of his daughter, why I was not married, and he listened to my answers as if he were checking them. He laughed when I snapped back at him. He said everyone in Travnik listened to him, and I was the only one who contradicted him free of charge. On the first Sunday of every month he left before dawn and came back late, without a word, and on those evenings he called no one in.
On the third floor there was one room that Bahra never opened, even when she dusted the whole house. Once, looking for Nika's dictionary, I found the door unlocked. Inside there was a wardrobe of women's coats, a table with a few books in German, and a white sweater folded on the pillow, as if someone might come for it at any moment. Nika stood behind me and said, quite calmly, that it was her mom's room and that her dad did not like anyone being in it. I closed the door. That evening Zvonimir did not call me into his study, and I thought it was because of me.
In the spring, the daughter of a Sarajevo investor started coming on Saturdays, a tall woman in a white coat who called Nika little one and me miss. In Travnik people said it was a settled matter. I sat with Nika over irregular verbs and taught myself that it was none of my business. It did not work. One Saturday, for the first time since I had arrived, I went to my room early and locked the door, even though no one tried to come in.
In June, one evening after a storm, he found me in the garden under the old walnut tree. He said the investor's daughter would not be coming anymore, and that it was the easiest thing he had ever told anyone. Then he said he wanted me. Not for Nika, but for himself. I asked him about his marriage, because I had to ask. He looked at the walnut tree while he answered. "My marriage ended nine years ago, one night on the highway near Zenica," he said. "I have been alone since then." I thought he was talking about a quarrel and a divorce. I said yes. That night, in a second storm, lightning struck the walnut tree and split it in two. In the morning Bahra stood under it for a long time and said nothing.
We set the wedding for September, at the municipal office, with no music and two witnesses. In August a car with Austrian plates stopped outside the gate. A tall, fair-haired man got out and talked with Zvonimir in German for twenty minutes over the fence, quietly and angrily. I stood at the window and made out only one word: Schwester, sister. Afterward Zvonimir told me it was a business partner from Graz whose delivery was late. I believed him, because I wanted to.
In the hall of the municipal office the registrar read out our names, and just as she asked Zvonimir whether he consented, the door opened. The fair-haired man came in, and with him a lawyer from Zenica with a folder under his arm. The lawyer apologized to the registrar very politely and said the groom was already married. He had married Brigita Haas in Graz sixteen years ago, that marriage had never been registered in Bosnia, and that was why the papers here said he was single. Brigita was living in a care home in Graz. The fair-haired man said something in German, looking at me, not at him. I understood him. "My sister is alive."
Zvonimir denied nothing. He sat down on the witnesses' chair, took out his phone and showed me a photograph: a woman in a white sweater, in an armchair by a window, looking somewhere past the camera. That night near Zenica she had been driving. Since then she recognized no one, neither him nor Nika. On the first Sunday of every month he drove six hours to Graz, sat beside her for two hours and drove six hours back. He had not asked for a divorce because he could not sign a paper saying he was leaving a woman who did not even know her own name. He had not told me, he explained, because he wanted at least one life that was not a care home corridor.
That night he begged me to stay. Without papers, without the municipal office, however I wanted it. No one in Travnik had to know, he said, and if they had to, let them know. We stood in the kitchen, Bahra had gone home, Nika was asleep. I told him I loved him, and that this was exactly why I could not be the second wife of a man who drove six hours to the first one every month. He said that was cruel. I said I knew. He did not try to stop me. Later, that was the hardest thing to forgive him.
At five in the morning I walked down to the bus station with the same suitcase I had come with. I left the ring on the kitchen table, under Bahra's cup, because she was always the first to arrive. The first bus to Sarajevo left at ten past six. As it was leaving town I turned around and saw that in the house up on the bend the only light on was in the study.
Now I teach German at a high school in Sarajevo. Nika writes to me, in German, because she says she makes fewer mistakes that way. Last winter she sent me a photograph from Graz: she and her father sitting on either side of a woman in a white sweater, who is looking somewhere past the camera. On the back it said only Mama, Papa und ich. I keep it in a drawer, face down, and I take it out on the first Sunday of every month, around noon, when I know he is just driving past Maribor.