The Longest Message

I was nineteen when I wrote the longest message of my life. I wrote it from eleven at night until four in the morning, on my phone, in the upstairs room of our house in Kreševo, while the crickets chirped in the plum orchard outside and my sister Nina, a year younger, slept in the bed by the wall with the smile of a girl for whom everything is easy. For Nina everything really was easy. I practiced on the old upright piano in the living room and dreamed that one day I would stand in front of an orchestra without my hands shaking. I never told anyone that.

That summer Nina was going out with Lovro, a kind, starry-eyed boy from the lower part of town who studied in Sarajevo and wrote lyrics for a band nobody had heard of. One Saturday in July Lovro brought a friend from university to dinner. Arman was twenty-seven, from Sarajevo; he had lived in London for two years and had come to Kreševo to sell the house his uncle had left him, above the town, toward the woods. He talked about everything as if he had already seen it twice and been bored both times. At the table he was the only one who noticed that the music on the piano was Brahms and not a songbook, and he asked who played it. I said I did. He asked why. Until then no one had ever asked me that.

For three days I watched him sit in our garden, turn down brandy and drink water with lemon, and laugh at Lovro's lyrics so that Lovro would not notice. On the fourth night I wrote. I addressed him formally, because he was older and because it seemed to me that this was how women wrote in books. I wrote that I knew I should not, that tomorrow I would be ashamed and that I did not care. I wrote that I had been waiting for him before I knew he existed. I wrote that I asked for nothing, except that he tell me, just once, that he had read it. I deleted it and started over. At twelve minutes past four I pressed send, turned off the phone, and lay listening as the roosters in the village above us, one after another, began the day.

The message was marked as seen at twenty past four. There was no answer that day or the next. On the third day, in the afternoon, Arman came alone. He found me in the orchard behind the house, where I was gathering fallen plums into a basin, because I did not know what else to do with my hands. He stopped two steps away from me, in a white shirt, his hands in his pockets.

"I read it," he said. "Twice. It is the most beautiful thing anyone has ever written to me, and that is why I owe you an honest answer." He spoke calmly and kindly, like a doctor giving a diagnosis to a patient he will never see again. He said he was not a man for a message like that. That in a month I would be dear to him, and in a year boring, and that then he would hurt me, because he always did. That I would love many more times, and better. And that I should learn to be more careful, because someone else in his place would not be this polite. I said nothing. I looked at the plum in my hand, which was overripe and split between my fingers.

My birthday was on the twenty-eighth of August. Mom set up tables in the yard, Dad roasted a lamb, half the street came. Lovro brought Arman, though Arman had not wanted to come, and it showed. Maybe that was why he danced with Nina the whole evening. He whispered something in her ear, she laughed louder than usual, and Lovro stood by the grill turning a piece of meat that had been done long ago. Around midnight Lovro asked Arman to step out to the gate with him. They did not come to blows. It was worse than that: Lovro said something quietly, Arman answered something even more quietly and laughed, and Lovro turned and walked off down the street without his jacket, and he did not come back.

In September Lovro went to his brother's in Canada and never called Arman again. Nina cried until November, and in the spring she got engaged to a policeman from Kiseljak who had nice teeth and no lyrics at all. Arman sold his uncle's house through an agency and did not even come for the signing. Before it was handed over to the new owners, I went up there one afternoon. A neighbor gave me the key from under a flowerpot. In the empty room were the books he had not wanted to take. I leafed through them, and in one, a collection of essays by some English writer, I found underlined the sentences he had spoken to me in the orchard, almost word for word. I sat down on the floor and laughed until I cried. He had turned me down with a quotation.

Twelve years later I stood in front of an orchestra in Vienna, and my hands did not shake. I had graduated in conducting in Sarajevo, won a scholarship to Vienna, and spent five years as assistant to an old maestro who shouted at everyone except me. I had married Konrad, a viola player in the same orchestra, twenty years older than I was, a calm man who every morning set a cup of tea beside my score and never asked for more than I could give him. My name was on the posters at the tram stops: Dora Matić, Brahms, Second Symphony, end of season gala.

I saw him at the reception after the concert, in the foyer, holding a glass he was not drinking. He was thirty-nine, gray at the temples, in the same dark suit as every other man in that hall. He worked, I learned later, for some consulting firm in the First District, and a client had brought him to the concert. He looked at me as if he were trying to remember where he had seen me, and then he remembered, and I watched his face change. It was I who went over to him. I offered him my hand, asked about his health and about London, and introduced him to Konrad. I was gracious. It was the hardest thing I conducted that evening.

After that he began to come. To rehearsals, in the back row of the empty hall, where he thought I could not see him. To receptions he had not been invited to. He sent short, polite messages, and I answered briefly and politely. And then one night in November, at four something, the phone on my nightstand lit up. Konrad was asleep. The message was long. He addressed me formally. He wrote that he knew he should not, that tomorrow he would be ashamed and that he did not care. He wrote that he had been waiting for me for twelve years without knowing he was waiting. He wrote that he asked for nothing, except that I tell him, just once, that I had read it.

I did not answer. I read it on the tram, in the rehearsal break, in the kitchen while the water was boiling. On the third day, in the afternoon, while Konrad was teaching a class, someone rang the bell of our apartment in the Fourth District. I opened the door with the phone in my hand, because I had just been reading it again, and I had not had time to wipe my eyes. Arman stood on the threshold without a coat, although an icy rain was falling outside. He saw the phone. He saw my eyes. He thought, I know, that he had won.

I let him into the hall, no farther. "I read it," I said. "Twice. More than twice. It is the most beautiful thing anyone has ever written to me, and that is why I owe you an honest answer." I saw that he recognized the sentence. I told him I did not hold the orchard against him. He had been honest with a nineteen-year-old girl who knew nothing, and that girl had survived it and made of it a woman who knows how to stand before eighty musicians. But back then I was nobody, a daughter from a house in Kreševo, and he did not want me. Now I am a name on a poster, and I do not know whether it is me he wants now, or the poster.

Then I also told him what I had not wanted to say, because I do not know how to lie, and I would have had to lie if I kept it back. The girl from the orchard had not gone anywhere. She was still here and still listened when he spoke. But I have a husband who sets a cup of tea beside my score every morning and who has never asked me to love him more than I can. I am staying with him. Not because I must, but because I chose it, with my own hand, the way I once pressed send with my own hand. "And please do not come to rehearsals anymore," I said. "The back row is easy to see from the podium."

Just then a key turned in the lock. Konrad always came home ten minutes earlier than he had said. He came in wet, with a bag of mandarins, and stopped when he saw a stranger in the hall. "Konrad," I said, "this is an old acquaintance from Kreševo. He was just leaving." Arman gave Konrad a slight bow, looked at me once more and went out into the rain without a coat, and I listened to his footsteps going down the stairs until they faded away.

Konrad set the mandarins on the table and asked if everything was all right. I said it was. I turned the phone face down onto the score we were to rehearse the next day and went into the kitchen to put the water on for tea, because that evening it was my turn.