We did not look like people doors are opened for. We were soaked, muddy to the knees, and I was carrying my bag as if I had stolen it from someone. At the time I had been working as a doctor at the health center in Jajce for only four months, having come from Sarajevo to the first job I was offered, and nobody in those villages knew me. Zdravko was a medical technician, fifty-eight years old, and he had spent thirty of those years in ambulances on the roads around Jajce. We were driving back in my car from a training course in Banja Luka when the radio announced that the Vrbas was rising and that a landslide had closed the road through the canyon.
Zdravko knew the old road over the hill. The rain was falling so thickly that the wipers only smeared the water around. Above the hamlet of Rastovac the car slid into a ditch and stayed there, tilted, with a front wheel in the water. It was nine in the evening. Jajce was three hours away on foot, the phone had no signal, and the village had maybe twenty houses, with lights on in most of them.
We knocked on the first house, the one with new aluminum windows. A man in a tracksuit opened the door, looked at us, looked at the mud, and said his children had come from Austria and he had no room to put even a cat. At the second house the light went out as we approached the gate. At the third, a woman told us through the window that she had heard on the news about people who pretended to be doctors and robbed houses while everyone was rescuing their livestock. I showed her my official ID. She said you could buy that too these days and closed the window. At the fourth a dog barked and no one came out. At the fifth Zdravko did not knock anymore, he only stood in the rain and laughed, the way people laugh who have driven an ambulance to those same villages for thirty years.
The last house stood at the very top, above the road, small, with a tin roof and smoke rising from the chimney. In front of the gate grew a linden and an oak, so close to each other that their crowns had long since grown into one. An old man in a wool sweater opened the door, and behind him appeared an old woman holding a lamp. They did not ask anything. "Come in, children, you are soaked," she said, and he was already stepping out of his slippers to offer them to Zdravko.
Their names were Tadija and Stana. They had been married fifty-four years and had no children, and from the pension Tadija received from the forestry office they bought medicine and sugar, and everything else they had of their own. Stana put polenta and milk on the stove, took cheese out of the tub, and sliced it thin so it would look like there was more of it. Tadija said this was no supper for guests and went out into the dark. He came back wet, with a hen under his arm, but the hen wriggled free, flew across the table, and hid under my chair. Tadija knelt to pull her out. "Leave her, please," I said. "I will not let a guest eat nothing but polenta," he said. In the end we settled on eggs, and the hen stayed under the chair until morning.
Over supper Tadija told us how they had met. He worked for the forestry office, and on Saturdays she sold cheese at the market in Jajce, below the fortress. For two years he bought cheese every Saturday, even though he did not like it, until she told him that if he did not speak up she would stop selling it to him. He planted the linden and the oak the year they married, one tree for each of them. "So we would not fight over the shade," he said. "And we fight anyway," said Stana.
She poured us cornelian cherry juice from a big glass bottle, and the bottle stayed full all evening. Zdravko drank four glasses, I drank three, and the juice never went down. Only in the morning did I understand why: every half hour Tadija had gone out, as if to look at the rain, and gone down to the cellar with the bottle under his sweater. In the cellar I later saw the empty bottles, one beside the other along the wall, everything they had put up for the winter.
They gave us their bed, and they lay down in the kitchen, on the bench by the stove. I could not sleep for the rain on the tin. Around midnight I heard them talking quietly. He was telling her to cover herself, because her blanket had slipped off. She was telling him he had not taken his blood pressure pill. They argued in whispers, as if they had done it every night for fifty-four years, and then they fell asleep, she first, then he.
In the morning the rain stopped. From the yard you could see the whole village and, below it, the Vrbas, brown and wider than ever. The lower houses, the ones along the stream, stood in water up to their cellar windows. The man in the tracksuit was bailing out water with a bucket, and the woman from the window stood in rubber boots in front of a barn that the wind had stripped of half its roof. No one was hurt, but everyone was on their feet. Zdravko put on his wet jacket and went down to help them, and I went with him. The woman with the barn recognized me only when I bandaged the hand she had cut on the tin.
Before noon an excavator came and pulled out my car. As we said goodbye, I asked Tadija and Stana what I could do for them. Tadija said they needed nothing. Stana was looking at the linden and the oak in front of the gate. "We need only one thing," she said, "and you cannot do it, child." "What?" "That neither of us has to bury the other. That neither of us is left alone in this house." I said I could not promise that. "I know," she said. "I told you that you cannot."
In March I was given the area above Jajce, seven hamlets and not a single clinic. I told the director of the health center that I needed a room in Rastovac, and he asked which one. I said I knew a kitchen. Since then I have gone up there on the first Tuesday of every month, and Tadija and Stana's kitchen has become the clinic for the whole village, because theirs is the only house you can reach even when the Vrbas floods. In April Zdravko came with his son-in-law and replaced the tin on their roof. He would not take any money. He said he had already drunk four glasses of juice.
The first to sit down on the bench in front of the house was the man in the tracksuit, with blood pressure like I had only ever seen in textbooks. He could not look Stana in the eye. She poured him some juice and asked about his children in Austria. After him came the woman from the window, then the others, and now on the first Tuesday of every month half of Rastovac sits on that bench, under the linden and the oak, while Stana brings coffee and makes sure no one jumps the line.
What Stana asked for I cannot give to anyone. I can only make sure that neither of them gets sicker than the other. When everyone has gone, I check the two of them: first Tadija, then Stana, and I write them into the same notebook, on the same line, one beside the other. Every time, Stana asks whose blood pressure is better. "The same," I tell her. Most of the time it is even true.