Two workers carried in the walnut sideboard, and behind them into the workshop came a woman in a gray coat, a phone at her ear, telling someone that she would file the appeal by Friday even if she had to write it in the car. Bojan Lukić recognized the voice before the face. Six years earlier that same voice, in a courtroom in Banja Luka, had said his name forty-one times, he had counted, and had taken from him the apartment in Borik, the 2009 Golf and half his savings. The lawyer Snježana Ilić. She had represented his ex-wife.
Snježana did not recognize him. She ended the call, slipped the phone into her pocket and looked at the sideboard the way, he supposed, she looked at case files: from the top, then from the side, then by the dates. It had been her mother's sideboard, from Jajce, she said, and she needed it for her new apartment in three weeks. Bojan said five. She said five was unreasonable and that he knew it. They settled on three and a half, and only after she had left did Bojan realize that he had given in to her again, and in his own workshop at that.
Six years after the divorce he lived in a rented apartment above his workshop in Starčevica. Svjetlana had married a dentist and sent him a photo from the wedding so he would not hear it from others. His daughter Ana was studying in Novi Sad and called on Sundays. Everyone, as his friend Dejan said in a bar on Gospodska Street, had moved on with their lives, except Bojan, who had only moved on with his working hours. Dejan had three divorces and a great many opinions. Once, at his urging, Bojan had gone to dinner with a bookkeeper from Laktaši and talked to her all evening about varnishes. Bojan had one sentence he could not get out of his head: that he was emotionally unavailable, as Snježana Ilić had told the judge, calmly, looking down at a paper.
Snježana came by on Tuesdays and Fridays, after court, to see how the work was going. They argued about everything. She wanted the sideboard to shine like something in a shop window. He said walnut needed wax, that wood had to breathe, and that gloss from a can turned a sideboard into office furniture. "You are stubborn," she said. "I am a carpenter," he said. "It's the same thing." One Friday she stayed an hour longer and drank coffee from his mug with the chipped rim, sitting on a toolbox, in a coat that cost as much as his monthly rent.
She told him about her mother, who had taught music in Jajce for forty years and kept sheet music in this sideboard instead of plates. She told him too that she was divorced, for eleven years now, and that divorce lawyers had the worst marriages in town, because they knew too much about marriage. Bojan listened, sanded a drawer and said nothing about himself. He did not know how he would begin. Every time she laughed, he thought of the apartment in Borik, and every time, to his surprise, a little less.
In the third week she came for the estimate. Bojan gave it to her, written by hand, with the workshop's stamp. Snježana read the name and did not look up for a long time. "Lukić versus Lukić," she said at last. "Borik, third floor. A 2009 Golf." "And I thought you didn't remember me," he said. "I don't remember faces," she said. "I have had four hundred divorces. I remember cases." Then she set the paper down on the sideboard and looked at him differently, as if she were searching his file for something she had overlooked long ago. "You're the one who asked for Sundays," she said.
He remembered too. When the judge asked him what he wanted regarding the child, Bojan said Ana should live with her mother, because it was closer to school, and that he asked only for Sundays, to take her up to the Kastel. He asked for nothing else. Snježana now told him that after that hearing she had sat in her car in the parking lot outside the court and cried, for the first and only time in twenty years of practice. Her own father, she said, had never asked for a single Sunday. "That is why I was even harder on you back then," she said. "I was ashamed."
Then Bojan said out loud what he had been carrying for six years. "Emotionally unavailable." Snježana looked at him without understanding, then remembered and blushed, for the first time since she had walked into the workshop. She said it was a phrase from a form. That she had written it in forty petitions, maybe fifty, that her trainee kept it in a template and that nobody ever read it. Bojan burst out laughing. He laughed so long that he had to put down the sandpaper. For six years he had carried inside him one sentence from a template. "I'm sorry," Snježana said, laughing herself. "For this I really don't have a form."
The sideboard was finished on Friday, as they had agreed, waxed and matte, with drawers that closed by themselves with a soft sigh. Bojan and the two workers carried it into her apartment on the second floor, with a balcony facing the Vrbas, and set it against the wall, between the window and her mother's upright piano that nobody ever opened. Snježana looked for a long time at the walnut without its shine and said he had been right, but that she would not repeat it in front of witnesses. The workers left. She made coffee and set two cups on the table, both of them whole.
Bojan turned his cup in his hands for a long time. Then he asked what she was doing on Sunday. Snježana said she had a hearing on Monday and that she spent Sundays writing briefs. He said he understood. When he was already at the door, she said: "I write until eleven. After that I'm free." She asked where. He said that on Sundays he went up to the Kastel, he had for six years, even when Ana did not come. That evening on Gospodska Street Dejan said it was a textbook conflict of interest and ordered two rakijas to celebrate it.
On Sunday it was cold, and the Vrbas was as green as the glass of an old bottle. Snježana arrived at ten past eleven with a folder under her arm, because she had had to finish something after all. They walked along the ramparts to the spot where you can see the whole river. She told him about her mother and the sheet music, and he told her about Ana, who had sent him a message that morning: "Dad, are you at the Kastel?" Bojan replied: "I am. I'm not alone." Ana asked at once who he was with.
Bojan wrote: "With a lawyer." Ana sent three question marks and asked which one. Bojan showed the message to Snježana, not knowing what to answer. She took the phone, thought for a moment, as if over a brief, and wrote: "The one for the other side. The old case is closed." She handed the phone back to him and took his arm, the way you pick up from a desk a file you have yet to read.