My husband Elvedin has been driving a taxi around Tuzla for twenty-two years, and in all that time he has not learned one thing: a phone you leave on the charger in the kitchen lights up even when you are not there. That is why I knew about his jealousy long before he worked out how to hide it. He asked his passengers about me. He asked the neighbor on the third floor what time I went out to the market. Once he tried to work out how many miles I had ridden on my bicycle, and my bicycle has no odometer.
In October a page called Honestly, Emela, advice for women who have no one to tell, began appearing on my Instagram. The profile picture showed a gray-haired lady in glasses, the kind each of us imagines as the aunt who knows everything. The page had eleven followers, one of them Elvedin's cousin Zuhdija from Lukavac, and its ad kept popping up between pie recipes and videos from the Pannonian Lakes as if someone were looking for me personally. Someone was. For a whole week before that, Elvedin had been watching videos on YouTube with the sound off and putting his phone away whenever I walked in.
I wrote to Emela that same evening, out of curiosity, something harmless about my mother-in-law. The answer came in two minutes, and at the same moment I heard the fan running in the bathroom. Emela called me "my dear," which Elvedin calls everyone, from me to the air conditioner repairman, she wrote "sta" without the little hook over the s, and spelled "naravno," which means of course, with two r's, the way Elvedin has spelled it since grade school. Below it said: Greetings from the heart. The same words had been on every birthday card I ever got from him. I turned off my phone and laughed into my pillow until he came out of the bathroom, as serious as if he had been at a meeting.
That was when I decided to give him what he was looking for. The next evening, while he was sitting in the bathroom, I wrote to Emela that I had a problem I could not tell anyone about. That a man came to me every night. That he had his own key. That he arrived around half past nine, took off his shoes in the hallway, ate out of the pot whatever I had left for the next day, lay down beside me and snored until morning like a truck climbing toward Ilinčica. That his feet were always cold and he put them on mine. That I did not know how to get rid of him, or whether I even wanted to.
The fan in the bathroom ran for a long time that evening. The answer came twenty minutes later and was full of questions. What did this man look like? How long had he been coming? Did my husband know about him? I answered that my husband knew nothing, because my husband never noticed anything, and that the man had been coming for years, that he was of medium height and hid a bald spot on the crown of his head under a cap. When Elvedin came out, he had a cap on his head, as he always did when he was cold, and it never occurred to him to look in the mirror. The next day he told me the company had given him night shifts, the whole week, from nine to six.
That night the taxi stood in front of our building in Slatina, between the dumpsters and the transformer station, with its headlights off. I saw it from the balcony while I was taking in the laundry. Elvedin sat behind the wheel and watched the entrance as if he were watching a match. Around midnight he ate a burek out of a bag, around two he fell asleep, at four he jerked awake and stared at the entrance again. I slept the way I had not slept in years, in the middle of the bed, with both pillows. Nobody put cold feet on mine.
At seven in the morning Emela asked whether he had come. "He didn't," I wrote. "For the first time in I don't know how long. Strange, and I had left him sarma." Elvedin came home at eight, gray in the face, and said it had been a quiet night, no passengers. He ate the sarma. The second night he sat in front of the building again, and the third. Every morning I wrote to Emela that the man had not come, that my bed was too big, and that maybe he had grown tired of me and found someone younger who did not hold his snoring against him.
On the fourth morning Emela asked the question I had been waiting for. Was it possible that this man got in some other way? Through the basement, say, or through the garage? I wrote that it was possible, because he was very resourceful and had keys to everything. That night the taxi moved behind the building, to the basement ramp, and after midnight Elvedin walked around the building twice on foot, with the light on his phone, and frightened Sadudin, a retiree who was out walking his dog. In the morning Sadudin told everyone in the elevator that a man in a cap was walking around Slatina at night checking the doors.
On the fifth day the rain started, that October rain in Tuzla that does not fall so much as hang in the air. I think by then Elvedin could barely see from exhaustion. In the evening I packed him a thermos of tea and two sandwiches, kissed him at the door and wished him a quiet shift. He said that if things were quiet, he might stop by around midnight. I said he did not have to, that he must not leave his work, that I had gotten used to being alone. The look on his face at that moment was worth all five nights.
At ten I turned off the light in the bedroom and stayed in the kitchen, in the dark, with my phone. Through the window I saw a screen light up in the taxi by the ramp. I wrote Emela one last message. "My dear Emela, I don't need advice anymore. I have figured out why the man doesn't come. For five nights he has been sitting in a taxi behind the building, eating burek out of a bag and walking around the basement with a light, because he is afraid his wife has someone else. If you see him, tell him the door is unlocked, the sarma has been warmed up, and he is the only one with a key. Greetings from the heart."
The screen in the taxi stayed lit for a long time. Then it went dark, the car door opened, and Elvedin, without an umbrella, a cap on his head, ran across the parking lot. I heard him in the elevator, then outside the door, then the key in the lock. He stopped in the hallway and did not dare turn on the light. "Adisa," he said into the dark. "I didn't even know I snored." I turned on the light over the stove. He was soaked to the skin, a thermos in his hand, and he looked like a man who had spent five nights guarding his house against himself. "Take your shoes off in the hallway," I said. "The sarma is on the stove."
The page Honestly, Emela disappeared from Instagram the next morning. Around noon Zuhdija from Lukavac called and asked Elvedin what had happened to that lady, because he had really wanted to ask her something about his wife.