The train from Mostar was forty minutes late, and Anisa Ramić did not mind. She had spent three days at her brother's house in Bijeli Brijeg, where her sister-in-law Ajša was stuffing Rusmir's shirts into garbage bags, while Rusmir, caught exchanging messages with a colleague from the bank, sat on the stairs as if he were the one who had been betrayed. Anisa talked her sister-in-law into staying at least until the end of the school year. She was good at repairing other people's marriages. She had never had to repair her own. Across from her on the train sat an older lady from Trebinje who talked from Jablanica to Konjic about her son, a captain, who called her every day, did not drink, and was not yet married, which was her only worry in the world.
At the Sarajevo station the captain was waiting for his mother with a bouquet of yellow roses. He was tall, with close-cropped hair, and as he kissed his mother on the cheek, he looked at Anisa over her shoulder one second longer than he should have. He carried her bag to the taxi, though no one had asked him to. "Thank you, Captain," she said. "Ognjen," he said. "I am only a captain at work." In the taxi Anisa laughed at herself, the way a woman laughs when someone notices her who should not, and by the time she reached Marijin Dvor she had forgotten about it.
Zijad Ramić was waiting for her at the door of their house on Koševsko Brdo, his glasses pushed up on his forehead. He was the director of the Office for the Oversight of State Funds, a man ministers called before they signed anything. That evening, for the first time, his ears bothered her, sticking out from under his short hair like the two handles on a pot. "Has your brother come to his senses?" he asked, and without waiting for an answer he went back to his laptop. Mak was already asleep, a plastic locomotive under his pillow. Anisa tucked him in, turned off his light, and stood for a long time in the dark of the child's room.
Sarajevo is a small city for people who go to the same receptions. That winter Captain Vranješ appeared everywhere she did: at an exhibition opening at Collegium Artisticum and at a reception in an embassy in Bistrik. He never approached her first. He stood by the window with a glass of juice and waited. Vildana Kapić, who always knew who had arrived with whom and left with whom, said to her at the coat check: "That captain of yours is either in love or ill." "He is not mine," said Anisa. "Then he is ill," said Vildana.
Zijad noticed only when others had noticed. One night he sat down at the kitchen table, took off his watch, and laid it beside him, as if he were opening a session. "I am not asking you what you feel," he said. "That is a matter for your conscience. I am asking you what other people see. My wife cannot stand in a corner with an officer for forty minutes while half the city watches." Anisa laughed, and that offended him more than anything. He stood up, because his meeting was at eight. It was exactly eleven.
In February she went for the first time to Ognjen's apartment in Ciglane, and she was back home before Mak got out of school. She did not have to lie, because no one asked her anything. After that she went every Wednesday. Ognjen made bad coffee and told her about exercises at Manjača. She told him about Mak. They did not mention Zijad, as if he were the weather forecast: something that exists and that you keep an eye on, but that nobody talks about.
In March a winter competition for military teams was held on Igman, and Zijad was among the guests of honor on the stand near Malo Polje. Anisa sat beside him. Ognjen's team led until the last descent. On an icy curve below the ski jumps Ognjen lost his balance, hit the fence, and lay still in the snow. Anisa stood up before she realized she was standing and said his name, not Captain, but Ognjen, loud enough that two rows in front of her turned around. Zijad took her by the elbow. "Sit down," he said quietly. Ognjen got up, waved the medics away, and reached the finish last, limping.
In the car, on the curves down toward Hrasnica, Zijad said nothing until the first traffic light. "You behaved improperly," he said then. "People saw." Anisa looked at the wet roofs of Butmir. "You are not mistaken," she said. "I have been with him since February. Do what you like." Zijad did not take his eyes off the road. Near Stup he said calmly, as if reading out the conclusions of a session: "Nothing will change. You will live in your house, you will go with me wherever necessary, and you will not bring him anywhere near Mak. I am not changing my life because of some captain." At home he made tea, as he did every evening.
She held out until May. One morning, after Mak had left for school, she packed a suitcase and waited for Zijad in the hallway. He said she could go wherever she liked, but the child would stay in his own home. "If you want to go to court, go. You will see whom the judges know." She thought it was anger and that within a month, through lawyers, everything would be settled the way it is between normal people. Zijad was not angry. Zijad simply opened a new file.
They spent the summer in a rented house in Herceg Novi, and those were the two happiest months of her life, if you did not count the evenings. By day they swam and ate fish below the fortress. In the evenings Anisa opened her email. The lawyer wrote that the divorce was in process, that the father was asking for the child to be placed with him, and that the social services center was proposing visits "under supervision, once the expert team judges the child to be ready." Mak could be ready tomorrow or never. That was decided by a psychologist whom Zijad, as it turned out, knew from university.
In October she wanted to go to a premiere at the National Theater. Ognjen said it was not a good idea, and she replied that she had not committed a crime. She sat alone in a box on the first floor, in the dark blue dress from Zijad's jubilee. Mrs. Bećirbegović, the wife of a judge, stopped at the entrance to the box, looked Anisa up and down, and said to her husband, loud enough for half the orchestra seats to hear: "I will not sit here." They moved two rows back. Anisa stayed until the end of the first act, looking at a stage on which she saw nothing. At the intermission she went out onto the Obala and called Ognjen. "I told you so," he said, in the same voice Zijad had used to say it for years.
Mak turned nine in December. At seven in the morning Anisa stood in front of the house with a box under her arm, and Aunt Mevla, the Ramić family cook, opened the door for her and wiped her hands on her apron. "Ten minutes, ma'am. He gets up at half past seven." Mak was sleeping on his stomach, as always. When she touched him, he opened his eyes and was not surprised. "Dad says you are on a long trip." "I was," she said. She gave him the box: a model of the old Ćiro, the narrow-gauge locomotive that used to run from Sarajevo to the sea. Mak set it at once on the tracks he had laid across the floor. "Will you come for the cake?" he asked. There were footsteps on the stairs.
Zijad stopped in the doorway of the child's room, in his bathrobe. He did not shout. He looked at her, then at the locomotive, then at his son, and Anisa saw that his lower lip was trembling, which had not happened to him even at his mother's funeral. She kissed Mak's hair, which smelled of sleep, and walked out past Zijad without touching him. In the kitchen Aunt Mevla was crying into her apron. At the gate Anisa turned and saw the curtain in Mak's window move and fall back into place.
In January Ognjen was given two years with a military mission in Brussels, and he begged her to come with him. She knew that leaving the country two months before the hearing would look in the file as if she had given up her son herself, and she stayed. That winter she began reading his messages and asking who that colleague from the ministry was. One evening, with his suitcase by the door, Ognjen said: "I cannot be everything you have lost. Nobody can." She did not see him off at the airport. The first week he called every evening. By March, every other.
In March the court ruled that Mak would stay with his father and that visits with his mother would be arranged "when the child is ready." The psychologist wrote that the boy did not want to talk about his mother. Anisa read it three times and did not cry, because it seemed to her that crying belonged to someone who was still waiting for something. That evening she went up to Koševsko Brdo and stood across the street from the house, under a linden tree that had not yet come into leaf. At nine o'clock the light in Mak's room went out, exactly when she used to turn it off herself, after the third story. She stood there a long time, as if someone might turn it on again. Then she walked down the steep street, carefully, because of the ice, and at a bakery near Markale she bought half a loaf of bread for one person.