The Mistress Who Won

A mistress has rules, and for four years I knew them by heart. You do not call after eight in the evening. You do not call on weekends. You do not post pictures together, and it is best not to have any. You celebrate your birthday a day late, in Laktaši or at some restaurant on the road to Jajce, where nobody knows you. When one of his colleagues runs into you on Gospodska Street, you are the dental technician from the clinic he sells equipment to, which, after all, was true. That was how we met: Nikola Vuković delivered a new ceramics furnace to our clinic and stayed for coffee longer than a furnace requires.

The promises changed, but they always came down to the same thing. When the boy finishes elementary school. When Biljana gets over her mother's death. After New Year's, after the summer, after the season. My sister Dragana, married to a man who had never had to hide anyone, used to say that men like that do not leave, they only run late. I used to tell her she knew nothing. I was thirty-four, with an apartment in Borik on a mortgage and one man twice a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays, when he told them at home that he was out in the field.

On my thirty-fifth birthday, a day late as always, at a fish restaurant on the Vrbas below Karanovac, I told him it was enough. I did not shout. The trout was good, and it would have been a shame to spoil it. I said only: by New Year's or never. Nikola put down his fork, went pale, then red, like a man who has just been told the total at the checkout. "All right," he said. I did not believe him. That night I texted Dragana, "I told him," and she answered with one heart and three question marks.

Six weeks later, on a rainy November night, someone rang the bell at eleven. Nikola stood at the door with two suitcases and a cardboard box of vinyl records, soaked to the knees. "I told her everything," he said. "It's over. If you'll have me." I cried in the hallway as if someone had died, not as if I had gotten what I had waited four years for. I made him mint tea, and while he slept on my side of the bed, I sat in the kitchen and looked at the suitcases. In the morning I sent Dragana just two words: "He left."

In the first weeks everything was new to me, even the things that got on my nerves. He made his coffee far too sweet. He left his socks by the couch as if he would come back for them. He put his records on the shelf where my books had been, and I moved the books into the wardrobe and did not complain. I bought a label for the mailbox, "Kos and Vuković," and stuck it on one Saturday, and on Sunday he peeled it off. He said his lawyer advised that his new address should not be visible until the divorce was final, because Biljana could use it. I understood. I was an expert at understanding.

He still left his phone face down on the table. When I joked about it, he said it was a four-year habit, and we both laughed, I a little longer. He still went out in the field to Prijedor on Tuesdays and Fridays, only now he came back to me. I wanted us to go up to the Kastel on Saturdays, to walk down Gospodska like people with nothing to hide. He said not yet, because of the children and because of the lawyer, that Biljana was sensitive and should not be provoked. One Friday, at nine in the evening, I called him in Prijedor. He answered in a whisper and said he could not talk now, he was at dinner with a client.

At the beginning of December it turned cold, and Nikola's winter coat had stayed at Biljana's, in the apartment in Starčevica, along with his car registration papers. He said he could not go for it. Biljana would not open the door to him, there would be a scene in front of the children, and he did not want that for them or for himself. "You go," he said. "She doesn't know you. Say you're from the company." I looked at him and waited for him to laugh. He did not laugh. The worst of it was that I agreed, and not because of the coat. I wanted to see the woman I had beaten.

Biljana opened the door in a gray sweater, with reading glasses pushed up into her hair. She was in her forties and had the face of someone who had not slept through the night in a long time. The apartment smelled of sarma. I said I was from the company and had come for Nikola's coat. She looked me over from head to toe, slowly, as if reading a bill. "From the company," she repeated. "Come in. The coffee's made." In the kitchen a child's soccer cleats were drying on the radiator. The coat was already packed in a big bag by the door, with a folder of papers on top of it, as if someone had been waiting a long time for them to be collected.

She poured coffee into two cups and sat down across from me. "You're not from the company," she said. "You're Maja." I did not know what to say, so I said the only thing I knew: "Who is Maja?" Biljana took her glasses out of her hair and set them on the table. She looked at me for a long time. Then she told me, calmly, as if telling someone else's story. On the second of November she had found messages on his phone from Maja, a pharmacist in Prijedor. For a year, on Tuesdays and Fridays. That same evening she threw him out of the apartment. For two weeks he slept at his cousin's in Lazarevo, and then he told the children he had found an apartment.

"You didn't throw him out because of me?" I asked, and only when I heard my own voice did I realize how stupid the question was. "I don't know anything about you," said Biljana. "Who are you?" I told her: Borik, the clinic, four years, Mondays and Wednesdays. Biljana laughed briefly, almost as if she were coughing. "On Mondays and Wednesdays he was out in the field," she said. "For four years I washed his shirts for the field." Then we were both silent and drank our coffee, in the kitchen where he had eaten breakfast for sixteen years.

At the door she handed me the bag with the coat. "Check the inside pocket," she said. "I couldn't." On the bus to Borik I sat in the back seat and opened the bag. In the inside pocket was a small box of blue velvet. Inside it was a thin gold ring, and on the inner side, when I turned it toward the light, a single letter was engraved: M. Under the box was a folded receipt from a jeweler in Prijedor, dated the third of October. That was the day I had told him, at the fish restaurant below Karanovac, that it was enough.

I got home at eight. Nikola was lying on the couch, one of his records was playing on the turntable, and his phone lay on his stomach, face down. He got up as soon as I came in. "Was there trouble?" I said there was not. "What did she say?" "She said you left her for me." Nikola breathed out, smiled and said: "Well, I did." Then he took the bag, pulled out the coat and, before he had even shaken it out, pushed his hand into the inside pocket.

The box was with me, in my hand. He looked at it for only a second. "Who is it for?" I asked. "For you," he said without a pause. "For New Year's. I wanted it to be a surprise." I opened the box and turned the ring toward the lamp, so he could see the letter. Nikola glanced at it briefly, like a man checking his change. "M," he said. "As in mine." I have to admit it was good. In four years I had heard a great many sentences from him, but this was the fastest.

I closed the box, put it back in the coat pocket and draped the coat over his arm. "It's an hour's drive to Prijedor," I said. "If you leave now, you'll be there before midnight." He packed the suitcases himself, while I stood in the bedroom doorway and looked at the clock. I carried his records out to the stairwell in the same cardboard box they had come in. At the door he tried to say something more, warm and convincing, as always, but I closed it before he got to his second word. It was nine in the evening. I called my sister and talked loudly, from the hallway, so the whole building could hear me.