The One Who Turns Off the Radio

The first time, a mistake sent me. Rifka at the Jasika Taxi dispatch mixed up two numbers, so that Friday at six thirty, instead of going to Ilidža for a man with two suitcases, I pulled up in front of a building in Dobrinja. Standing by the entrance was a woman in her forties with a brown bag over her shoulder and a folded blanket under her arm, even though it was May. All she said was: "Koševo, dialysis, the side entrance." She sat in the back and fastened her seat belt before I had pulled away.

Some folk song was playing on the radio, and I, out of habit, started talking about the traffic by the Holiday. At Marijin Dvor she interrupted me. "Could you turn off the radio? You go ahead and talk, just no music." I turned it off. I talked all the way to the hospital, and she looked out the window. At the side entrance she took an envelope out of her bag with the date written on it in pencil. In the envelope there were exactly eleven marks. The meter showed twelve forty. "It has always been eleven," she said. "Eleven is fair," I said, because at Skenderija, I admit, I had turned where I should not have.

The next Friday Rifka called me at ten past six. "The one from Dobrinja is asking for you," she said. "She says, the one who turns off the radio." I did not explain to her that it was not me who had turned off the radio, it was her. I was glad that somebody was asking for me in particular. In nineteen years of driving that had happened to me maybe three times, and each time it was someone whose forgotten wallet I had returned.

That was how my Fridays began. Her name was Munira. Until four years ago she had worked as a bookkeeper at a printing house in Stup, until her kidneys failed, first one and then the other. She went to dialysis three times a week. On Mondays and Wednesdays her brother-in-law drove her, but on Fridays he worked in Kiseljak. Somewhere between the Airport neighborhood and Čengić Vila, I told her my own story: divorced for twelve years, a daughter in Graz, I live alone in Hrasno and on Sundays I cook beans for three days.

I quickly learned things I had not known existed. That people on dialysis may drink only a little liquid a day, a pint in her case, and that this includes soup and coffee and every ice cube. When I once offered her coffee at a gas station, she said: "I have half a cup left for today. I am saving it for the evening, with the news." I learned that I must not touch her left arm, because that was where they put the needles in for the machine, and that after four hours on the machine she was as cold as in January. From June on, on Fridays at a quarter past eleven, I turned on the heat and waited for her outside the hospital, sweating, with a second blanket on the passenger seat.

Between morning and noon I could have done six or seven fares. For the first few weeks I did them. Then I started staying in the parking lot below Koševo, reading the newspaper down to the last page and working on a crossword I had never known how to finish. Rifka noticed. "Džemal, what are you doing on Fridays from seven to noon?" I told her my clutch was giving me trouble and I could not drive around town. "For three months?" she asked. "It is a bad clutch," I said.

Munira talked about what she would do when she got a kidney. She was on the list, and her brother in Klagenfurt was going for tests, but she did not like to talk about that, as if everything would go wrong once it was said aloud. She talked about small things. That she would eat watermelon without a scale. That she would go to Vrelo Bosne and drink from the spring out of her palms, as much as she wanted, until her throat ached from the cold. "I will not count the sips," she said once near Skenderija. "Never again." I watched her in the rearview mirror, and that was the first time I thought I would like to be there when she drank.

In October, one Friday, Rifka did not call. I called her at six thirty. She said someone had phoned to cancel the ride, a woman's voice, but not hers. I drove to Dobrinja anyway and stood in front of the building until seven. No one came out. The next Friday, the same. That was when I realized I did not have her number. I had driven her for five months, I knew how many sips she had left until evening, and I did not know her phone number, because she always called the dispatch, as if that too were part of the rules.

The third week I went to Koševo and climbed up to dialysis. The nurse who met Munira at the door on Fridays recognized me by the blanket, which, I do not know why, I had brought along. She said she could not tell me anything because I was not family. "I am the taxi," I said. She laughed, for the first time since I had seen her. "Then I can tell you only one thing. You do not have to come on Fridays anymore." I must have gone pale, because she added at once: "That is good news, sir. The best we have here."

Her brother from Klagenfurt had given her a kidney, I learned later, and the operation had been at Koševo, a few hundred yards from the parking lot where I used to read the newspaper. I was happy. And on Fridays I still woke up at six, turned on the heat at a quarter past eleven, and sat in the car in the parking lot in Hrasno, not knowing where to go. Rifka would not give me her number. "I can't, you know that yourself," she said. "If she needs you, she knows where you are."

Apparently she did not need me. November, December and January went by. In February I stopped getting up at six. Then one Friday in April, at ten past six, Rifka said over the radio, in a voice as if she were reading the news: "Dobrinja. That address. She is asking for the one who turns off the radio."

She came out without the blanket and without the thermos, in a light coat, with color in her face I had never seen there before. This time she sat in the front. "Where to?" I asked, even though I knew, and something tightened in me when she said: "Koševo." Then she laughed. "A checkup. Once a month. But not until nine. Until then you are driving me to Vrelo Bosne, if you have nothing better to do."

I had nothing better to do. I did not even turn on the meter. At Vrelo it was cold and empty, and the first horse carriages were only just coming down the avenue. Munira knelt by the spring, rolled up her sleeves and drank from her palms, for a long time, with pauses. I stood behind her with the blanket over my arm. I had not even noticed I had brought it until she said: "Leave that in the car, Džemal." "Habit," I said.

She stood up and wiped her hands on her coat. When we started back toward the car, she held out her left arm to me, the one where the hard mark of the needles could still be seen under the skin. "You may touch this one now," she said. I took it carefully, as if I still was not allowed to. When we sat down, the radio crackled. "Džemal," said Rifka, "are you free? I have Ilidža, two suitcases." I looked at Munira, who was looking out the window and smiling as if she were not listening. "No," I said.