The Nightingale of Onešćukova Street

Onešćukova Street is so narrow that when it rains, the water from the eaves on either side meets above the cobblestones. Nadira knows this because for nine years she has watched it from the window of the front room, on the second floor of the stone house Mensur inherited from his father. Across the street, at the same height, seven feet of air away, is the window of Sejad the coppersmith. Below the windows is the street, and below the street, out of sight, the Neretva roars, and at night its sound is the only sound in the neighborhood.

Mensur is a good man, Nadira tells herself. He runs an auto parts store in Bijeli Brijeg, he does not drink, he does not shout, and every evening, before bed, he takes her phone and reads all her messages, slowly, from top to bottom, as if he were going over bills. He knows the code to her phone, she does not know the code to his. When she objected once, he said she had nothing to hide, so he did not see why she was objecting. After that she did not object again. She had nothing to hide. That winter she did not yet.

The first time they spoke was in March. Nadira could not sleep, so she got up and opened the front room window to let in some air, and across the street, in the dark, Sejad was sitting at his window with a glass of tea, looking at the sky above Hum. "You too?" he asked. She nodded. Neither of them said what that "you too" meant, and both of them knew. Sejad had a shop in Kujundžiluk, where he hammered out coffee cups, coffee pots and plates with the Old Bridge on them for tourists, and he lived with his mother, who had been bedridden for two years. Until then they had greeted each other the way neighbors do: good morning, how is your mother, rain again.

From then on, every night. Once Mensur falls asleep, and he sleeps heavily, on his back, his hands folded over his stomach, Nadira gets up, leaves the bedroom at the back of the house and stands by the open window of the front room. Sejad is already there. They talk in whispers, and the Neretva below covers everything they say. About his mother, who calls him by his father's name at night. About her father, who wanted her to go to university, and she got married instead. About how copper is hammered: slowly, with a thousand small blows, because a single hard one makes it crack. Sometimes they say nothing at all. Once Sejad held a broom handle out across the street, she took hold of it, and they stood like that for a few minutes, each on their own side, holding the same stick. They never even tried anything more than that.

By day they keep to a rule they have never spoken aloud. When Nadira walks through Kujundžiluk to the market, Sejad does not raise his head from the anvil, and she does not slow down in front of his shop window. They have never exchanged phone numbers, because Nadira knows Mensur would find every number, every message and every deletion. Nobody reads a window. Once, in April, Mensur bought a coffee pot from Sejad for his sister's birthday, and Sejad gave him a lower price, as a neighbor. Afterward Nadira looked at that coffee pot on her sister-in-law's shelf and thought of the hands that had hammered it.

In May, in the fig tree that grows out of Sejad's courtyard wall and spreads its branches over the street, below both windows, a nightingale began to sing. It sang from midnight until dawn, louder than Nadira had thought so small a bird could. She never saw it, she only heard it, and one night Sejad told her it was their watchman: as long as it sang, nobody on the street could hear anything else.

One night, when she comes back to bed, Mensur is awake. He is propped on his elbow, watching her. "Where were you?" "At the window." "You get up every night. Did you think I didn't know?" Nadira sits down on the edge of the bed. "Because of the nightingale," she says. "I can't sleep when it sings, and when I listen to it, I can't stop. As if it were the only beautiful thing on the whole street." Mensur is silent. "A nightingale," he repeats. "On Onešćukova Street." "In the fig tree," she says. "Listen to it." Just then the nightingale starts to sing, and Mensur listens to it, and something in his face closes, like a shutter.

In the days that follow, Mensur is the same as always. Every evening he reads her messages, asks what she cooked, watches the news. On Thursday he comes home with something in a black plastic bag and takes it straight into the front room. Nadira hears him open the window. She does not ask. That night she does not get up, because Mensur is not asleep. He lies beside her, still, his eyes open, and listens to the nightingale with her. In the dark Nadira counts his breaths and, for the first time since she has been hearing it, wishes the bird would fall silent and fly somewhere farther off, across the Neretva. Just before dawn the nightingale goes silent in the middle of its song, and she hears Mensur get up.

In the morning, on the kitchen table, next to her coffee cup, lies the nightingale. Smaller than she had imagined it, brown, plainer than a sparrow. It does not move. Beside it lies a rolled-up fine net, the kind sold by people who catch birds, though they are not supposed to. Mensur drinks his coffee and watches her. "Here's your nightingale," he says. "Now you can sleep." Nadira does not ask how it died. Mensur does not explain. He finishes his coffee, picks up his keys and leaves for the store, and only at the door, without turning around, does he say that the net cost him twenty marks.

When the door closes, Nadira sits for a long time. Then she takes from the wardrobe her mother's white silk handkerchief with embroidery along the edge, which she has never used, along with a needle and blue thread. The handkerchief smells of lavender and of the wardrobe in her mother's house in Stolac. The embroidering takes half an hour, and her fingers tremble only on the first letter. In the corner of the handkerchief, in tiny blue letters, she stitches four words: I can't get up anymore. Then she wraps the nightingale in the handkerchief, carefully, as if it were still warm, and ties the ends in a knot.

She opens the front room window in the daytime, for the first time ever in order to say something. Sejad's window is open, as it always is when he is at the shop, so that the house can air out for his mother's sake. Nadira hangs the bundle on the end of her broom handle, leans out over the sill and, across seven feet of air, slowly, as if carrying a full glass, sets it down on his windowsill, between a pot of basil and the frame. Below, a group of tourists passes down the street behind a guide, and nobody looks up.

Sejad comes home at seven. Nadira watches him from behind the curtain. She sees him pick up the bundle, untie the knot, read the corner of the handkerchief and stand for a long time with the bird in his palm, without raising his eyes to her window. Then he closes his own.

For the next three days a knocking comes from Kujundžiluk, from his shop, different from the usual, fine and dense, without stopping, from morning until dark. The neighbor women say Sejad is working on some big order for someone in Sarajevo. On the second day Mensur meets him in the street on his way home from the store, and they greet each other as always. "I hear you've got a big order," says Mensur. "I do," says Sejad. "A small thing, but a lot of work." On the fourth evening, on his windowsill, where the basil used to be, stands a copper box the size of a palm, with a lid on which he has hammered a fig leaf, and on the leaf a small bird. The box is closed. Nadira knows what is inside.

Mensur sees the box the very first evening. He stands at the window for a long time, looking at it, and says nothing. The next day he calls a carpenter, and by Saturday new wooden shutters have been put on the front room window, and the bed has been moved into the room facing the courtyard. But the box stays on Sejad's sill, across the street, on someone else's window, where Mensur can do nothing about it. Every morning, when Nadira opens the shutters to air the room, the first thing she sees is the copper catching the sun.

In June nightingales sing all over the neighborhood, in the gardens toward the Neretva, in the courtyards behind the mosque. Nadira hears them through the bedroom wall, from far away. She lies still beside her husband, her eyes open, and listens, and does not get up.