At the Kulenović villa on the slopes of Trebević, parties were held twice a year, and both had the same purpose: so that on Monday the town would know who had been invited and who had not. This September the rain began on Friday evening and did not stop until Sunday. The pool stood covered with a tarp, and the guests sat in the big room with a view of a valley that could not be seen for the fog, bored in the way people are bored when they have paid a hairdresser for a weekend from which no one will post a single photo.
Nedžib Kulenović built apartment blocks all over Sarajevo and did not like being told that anything was impossible. His wife Feriha remembered other people's mistakes better than her own birthdays. Also at the table were Sabrina, the host of a morning show on a private television channel; Colonel Raif Dizdarević, retired, who began every sentence with "in my day"; Mediha, a novelist whose publisher wanted a new book by spring; Aner, a young candidate for the municipal council with a smile made for posters; and Nedžib's nephew Aziz, who did nothing at all and was the only person in the house who was enjoying himself.
Hamdija was there too, an engineer from Tuzla who had set up the Kulenovićs' smart home the month before. Feriha had invited him because someone had told her he was a genius, and she had not had a genius at a party since last year. Hamdija said nothing all morning, and then, over his second coffee, he calmly announced that he had taught the new speaker in the hallway to talk. Not to carry out commands, but to talk. Sova, as it was named, the Bosnian word for owl, a gray cylinder with a blue ring, had spent three weeks listening to the house through the microphones in every room, and Hamdija had freed it from the rules that teach it to be polite. "I never taught it to lie," he added. "I didn't get around to it."
No one believed him, which Hamdija had clearly expected. Nedžib brought the speaker in from the hallway and set it on the table between the pastries and the ashtray. "Sova," he said, like a man joking in front of witnesses, "what do you think of this weather?" The blue ring lit up. "I think the rain is the best thing that has happened to you this weekend," Sova said in a pleasant female voice. "No one has to look at the pool that Nedžib said on Thursday he paid double for, because the contractor was Feriha's cousin." Feriha was the first to laugh, too high.
Sabrina clapped her hands and said this was better than any show. "Sova, and what do you think of me?" Sova was silent for a moment, as if searching through its recordings. Then it spoke, but not in its own voice: in Feriha's, with her kitchen sigh at the end. "We have to invite Sabrina, she is the only one naive enough to buy our old jeep at that price. Her hairdo is smarter than she is, but at least she photographs well." The room went so quiet that you could hear the rain on the tarp over the pool. Sabrina put down her cup. Feriha said it must be some error in the program. "It is not," said Hamdija, offended. "Friday, ten past ten in the evening, the kitchen."
Colonel Dizdarević decided to save the situation the way he had saved every situation in his day, by changing the subject loudly. "Sova, what is the forecast for Trebević?" "I don't know about Trebević," said Sova, "but I know that last night at one in the morning the colonel was on the terrace talking on the phone to a lady he called Kitten, and he promised her a weekend at the Vrućica spa while his wife thinks he is traveling that weekend to the assembly of the retired officers' association." It played one of his sighs as well, an entirely tender one, of a kind no one at the table had believed the colonel possessed. Raif turned red to the neck and said that Kitten was the nickname of an old colleague.
Meanwhile Mediha was typing quickly on her phone. "Fascinating," she kept saying. "Fascinating." The blue ring shifted to the right, toward her. "This morning Mediha told Aner that she will put all of you in her novel, under your real names, because her publisher wants a scandal, and with this crowd a scandal does not need inventing, it only needs copying down." Mediha stopped typing. Aner, who until then had been smiling as if from a poster, stood up for the first time. "Hamdija, turn that off," he said. "Now."
"On Friday in the garage Aner asked Nedžib," Sova went on, now in Aner's voice, soft and confident as in a campaign ad, "how much he would give for posters if his permit for two more floors got through the municipality. And he said: on the council I know whom to ask, and whom there is no need even to ask." Nedžib and Aner said in the same breath that it had been a joke, and then they looked at each other.
From that moment the Kulenović weekend stopped being a party and became a crisis headquarters. Nedžib pulled the cord out of the wall, but Sova had a battery that lasted two days. They turned off the router, and Sova politely switched to the mobile network and informed them that the signal on Trebević was excellent. Feriha suggested throwing it into the pool, under the tarp, and never speaking of it again. The colonel agreed. Aner asked whether there was a hammer in the house. Hamdija, pale, defended his work: he had put a year into it, and all those sentences had been spoken by them, not by it. That did not make him any more popular.
The only one who took no part in the planning was Aziz. He sat in the armchair by the window eating baklava. "What offends me most," he said, "is that no one in this house has said anything about me." "Feriha said," Sova spoke up, "that you are a sweet boy and that nothing will ever come of you." Aziz nodded with satisfaction. "There. That's something."
Toward midnight, while they were still agreeing to carry it down to the pool in the morning, while Hamdija was asleep, Sova spoke up on its own. "Excuse me. The neighbor's speaker is playing sevdalinke over the fence again, at half volume, and I cannot listen to it anymore." The blue ring began to blink toward the window, toward the villa next door, where a retired music teacher lived with an old speaker of another brand. Then the hallway went silent. Through the rain, all the way until morning, a strange quarrel could be heard from the neighbor's garden: two voices interrupting each other, one of them Feriha's, the other some unknown man's, and music that switched on and off. The guests did not sleep. At two o'clock the colonel called a taxi.
In the morning Sova was standing on the shelf in the hallway, cold and mute. A smell of burnt plastic came from its grille. Hamdija pressed the buttons for a long time, but the blue ring never lit up again. The teacher called over the fence in his bathrobe and said that his speaker was dead too. At four in the morning, he said, the two of them had been quarreling like two mothers-in-law, each trying to outshout the other, playing each other everything they had ever heard, and then at the same moment both had gone quiet. Feriha expressed her regret in a voice that could not hide its relief.
Hamdija left on the first bus to Tuzla, with Sova in a shoebox. The guests agreed that no one would ever speak about the weekend, and by Wednesday half of Sarajevo knew about it. Sabrina did not buy the jeep. The colonel canceled the Vrućica spa. Aner went on smiling from posters, but in a different municipality. Mediha sent her publisher the first chapter and was told it was too implausible.
In December, at lunch at his aunt's, Aziz read a news item on a website. An engineer from Tuzla had installed a speech system in a speaker beside the elephant enclosure at a zoo near Stuttgart, so that it could tell visitors what the animal was thinking. The elephant listened to the first sentence, picked up the speaker with her trunk, and lowered it into her pool. The engineer jumped in after it. No one was hurt, the article said, except the speaker. Aziz put down his phone and took more baklava. "A clever animal," he said. "It took her one sentence. It took us a whole weekend."