In Mostar, in July, at two in the afternoon, nobody with any sense walks down Onešćukova Street. Klaudija is twenty-six, works at a travel agency and knows by heart how many stone steps lead up to the Old Bridge, but today she is counting nothing. She walks, because she has just read a message from Leon in Munich: "I can't come this summer, don't be mad." At a hundred degrees and with that sentence in her head, in front of Smajo's copper souvenir shop by the Crooked Bridge, the world spins around her and she falls straight into Smajo's arms. Smajo, sixty-two, with a mustache and two spinal operations, has not caught anything since eighty-seven. This time he catches.
He carries her into the shade of the shop, sits her on a little stool and fans her with a big copper plate engraved with the Old Bridge, the one that costs a hundred and twenty marks. He tells her to sit as long as she needs, and it is the first sentence he has ever spoken in the shop that was not about a price. In two minutes Klaudija comes to, apologizes, says she lives nearby and leaves, without noticing that her phone has slipped out into a basket of embroidered purses. Upstairs, at the window of the apartment above the shop, Hidajeta sees only this: her husband, a young woman, his arms, and a plate swinging back and forth. Hidajeta has seen enough.
She comes down slowly, to gather evidence, but finds only a phone in the basket. The screen lights up. On it is a young man, tanned, with an oar over his shoulder and the kind of smile you see in ice cream ads. Hidajeta has had a hard day and looks at him longer than she should. "Oh, my boy," she sighs, "if only I were twenty-five." At that moment Smajo comes in with a new bottle of water and sees his wife, phone in hand, sighing over the picture of an unknown young man.
"Who is this?" asks Smajo. "And who was she?" asks Hidajeta. "Who?" "The one you were holding in your arms and fanning with a plate!" "The woman fainted!" "I would faint every day if I knew you would fan me." Smajo snatches the phone from her. "And this one? What is he doing in your hand?" "I found him in the basket!" "In the basket! Thirty-five years of marriage, and a lover in the purse basket!" Hidajeta picks up her bag and says she is going to her sister's in Bijeli Brijeg and does not know when she will be back.
Smajo is left alone with the phone and with his honor. Honor demands that he find this young man and tell him everything to his face. Smajo looks at the picture once more: the young man is broad in the shoulders, and his arms, from rowing, are as thick as Smajo's legs. Smajo looks at his own arms. He concludes that honor can also be defended with words, and from a decent distance, preferably across the river. He sits down on the doorstep and starts working out a speech. The first sentence goes: "Sir, you are a scoundrel." The second: "Sir, you are a shameless scoundrel." The third is so sharp that he says it out loud, to hear how it sounds.
Just then Leon walks across the Crooked Bridge. The message about the summer was a lie: he came on the night bus from Munich to surprise Klaudija, and now he is heading toward her building with a backpack and flowers from a gas station. In front of a shop he sees a man with a mustache waving a phone in a case with a sticker of the Old Bridge and a ladybug. Leon bought that case. And on the screen, when the phone lights up, he sees his own face. "Excuse me," says Leon, "where did you get that phone?"
Smajo lifts his head and sees the young man from the picture, alive and taller than he had thought. "From my wife!" he shouts. "From what wife?" "From my wife, and you're on her screen! Have you no shame!" Leon goes pale. Klaudija's phone, from somebody's wife. Klaudija's messages had been getting shorter and shorter these last months. "Your wife," Leon says quietly, "does she have shoulder-length hair? Blond?" Smajo, who does not even know what size shoes Hidajeta wears, but does know that she gets her hair dyed at a hairdresser's on Musala every other Saturday, says, "She does! Blond! So what?" Leon sits down at the other end of the doorstep. Eight months in Munich, and Klaudija has married a man who sells plates.
At that moment Klaudija comes back, because at home she realized she did not have her phone. She sees Leon on the doorstep and stops. "You're in Munich!" Leon stands up, as cold as the Neretva in May. "And you're married. Congratulations." Klaudija does not understand a word, but she understands one thing: he said he was not coming, and he came, and he did not let her know. "Who did you come with?" she asks. "Who is she? Is that why you lied?" Leon says she is changing the subject. Klaudija says he is the one changing it. Smajo stands between them with the phone and does not know whom to reproach first.
And then Hidajeta comes back from Bijeli Brijeg, with her sister, because her sister said such things are not to be left for tomorrow. She sees the same young woman in front of the shop and Smajo beside her. "There she is again!" she shouts. Within five minutes four people are shouting by the Crooked Bridge, tourists are filming on their phones, and the waiter from the café terrace across the way brings out chairs for those who arrived late. A tourist from Japan asks him whether this is a show and how much a ticket costs. The waiter says that for now it is free. Smajo has been betrayed by his wife and by the young man in the picture. Hidajeta has been betrayed by her husband and by the girl with the plate. Leon has been betrayed by Klaudija and by the man with the mustache. Klaudija has been betrayed by Leon and by a woman nobody has seen.
Then the phone in Smajo's hand rings. The screen says: "Aunt Marica." Smajo answers and, in his fury, presses the speaker button. "Who is it now?" A woman's voice comes out of the phone, cheerful: "Klaudija, sweetheart, has Leon arrived? He said he wanted to surprise you, and I didn't tell you a thing, did I?" By the Crooked Bridge a silence falls such as nobody there can remember. "That's his mom," says Klaudija. Leon points at Smajo. "Then who is this?" "The man who fanned me with a plate when I fell." "Fell?" asks Hidajeta. "From the heat," says Klaudija. "And from his message."
Leon first hugs Klaudija, then apologizes to Smajo, then hugs Klaudija again. Smajo hands him back the phone with dignity, as if he were returning a sword, and when he hears that the young man rows for a club in Jablanica, he concludes it is just as well that the speech went unspoken. Then he turns to Hidajeta. "And the picture? Why were you sighing over it?" Hidajeta looks at him as if he had asked what time it was. "I was sighing over you, you fool. Over the one from eighty-seven, who caught me when I slipped at the dance in the community center." Smajo opens his mouth, then shuts it. Her sister says she knew it all along.
By evening the video from the Crooked Bridge had forty thousand views. The next day tourists from three countries stood in front of Smajo's shop asking for the plate from the video. By Saturday Smajo had sold twenty-seven of them, at a hundred and twenty marks apiece, and showed every customer how to fan a woman who has fainted. Hidajeta sat on the little stool and counted the money, and whenever a tourist asked who that woman was, Smajo would say, "The first one I ever caught."