The door was bricked up in the summer of ninety-eight, and after that nobody in the stone house above the Radobolja ever spoke aloud about what had been behind it. The house had once had one owner and one courtyard with an old pomegranate tree. When the owner died, his heirs sold it in two parts, to two families, and in the very first year the Dizdars and the Hindićs quarreled over the courtyard, over the pomegranate and over the water tap. The court ruled nine years later, and the wire fence ran straight through the tree's crown. Between the room where Amila Dizdar slept and the room where Edvin Hindić slept there remained a wall one brick thick, where the door had once been, whitewashed white on one side and peach on the other.
The crack appeared in June, when Amila was studying for her pharmacology exam. At first it was a thin line in the whitewash, then a groove through which, when she turned off her light, she could see a sliver of someone else's lamp. She studied aloud, because she could not remember things any other way, and one night, after half past one, when she got the name of the same drug wrong for the third time, someone in the wall quietly told her the right answer. She froze. "Sorry," said the voice. "I've been listening for two hours. I thought you'd remember on your own, but you won't."
Edvin worked as a cook at the Lula restaurant, next to the Old Bridge, and came home after midnight smelling of the grill and onions. Amila had known him by sight all her life. She knew how he looked pushing his scooter up the cobblestones and how he lowered his head when he passed her father. She had never heard his voice. That summer she heard it every night. They talked in whispers, their faces against the whitewash, about exams, about customers who sent back their ćevapi, about how Mostar in August was full of foreigners photographing the bridge while nobody photographed their street, and about how their parents had never explained what exactly had happened with that pomegranate tree. "My dad says your dad lied in court," she said once. "Mine says yours did," he said. "Maybe they're both right."
They had exchanged phone numbers by the second night, written on a scrap of paper pushed through the crack. But messages were for the daytime. The night belonged to the wall. At the end she would knock three times, he would answer three times, and both of them, though they never admitted it to each other, would press their lips to the cold whitewash, to the place where the crack was, as if that counted for something. Sometimes Amila scolded the wall, quietly, because it stood between them. Sometimes she thanked it, because it had cracked.
In October Amila's mother heard the whispering. She could not make out the words, only that her daughter was talking to the wall at two in the morning, and in the morning she told her husband. Rašid Dizdar did not shout. He set down his coffee cup and said only that if he ever heard his daughter had spoken a word to any Hindić, he would move her bed into the kitchen and patch the wall with cement. The same week old Ševko Hindić told Edvin almost the same thing, only more briefly. That night, through the crack, they decided they had had enough of whispering.
They agreed on Saturday, at one in the morning, when Edvin finished his shift, by the old pomegranate tree on the bank where the Radobolja flows into the Neretva, below the Crooked Bridge. In the morning, Edvin said, they would knock together, first on one door, then on the other. "Or we'll run away to Sarajevo together," said Amila, and it was not clear whether she was joking.
She left the house at half past midnight, barefoot as far as the gate, her sneakers in her hand. Around her neck she wore her grandmother's silk scarf, a red one, the only thing she wanted to have on when she said something important. There was nobody on the bank. The Neretva was louder than in the daytime, green and black under the single lamp on the bridge. Under the pomegranate tree the ground was covered with fruit that nobody had picked up, split and trampled, and the juice was red on the stone. She sat down on a low wall and waited.
The dog came out of the darkness under the bridge without a sound and barked only when it was close. It was big and yellow, with a torn ear, one of those that sleep by the souvenir stalls during the day and make the rounds of the dumpsters behind the restaurants at night. Amila did not even have time to be properly frightened. She jumped up and ran up the stone steps toward the street above, felt her scarf slide off her neck and her phone fall out of her jacket pocket, and did not stop. She hid in the doorway of a closed souvenir shop and listened to the dog bark, then growl, then fall silent. For a long time she did not dare come out.
Edvin was twenty minutes late, because that very night the owner of the Lula wanted the grill cleaned properly. He did not find Amila on the bank. Under the pomegranate tree he found her scarf, torn and wet with something darker and redder than silk, with paw prints all around it, and two yards farther on, on a stone right by the water, her phone with its screen smashed. He called her. The phone lit up by his feet. That was when he began shouting her name.
He did not think the way he would have thought in daylight. All he saw was the red on the silk and a river that carries off everything that comes to it. He called the police and said something that made no sense: a girl, a dog, the Neretva, the Crooked Bridge. Then he took off his jacket, turned on his phone's flashlight and started climbing down the rocks into the water, holding on to the stone, calling Amila's name into the darkness downstream, where the river foamed around the rocks. The water was October water, cold, and it was already up to his waist. He did not feel it.
Amila heard him from the doorway of the souvenir shop. She recognized her own name, spoken the way only one voice had ever spoken it through the wall. She ran down. Edvin was standing in the Neretva up to his shoulders, one hand on the rock, and the current was pulling at him. She saw his hand slip off the stone. "Edvin!" He turned toward her voice and lost his hold, and in that same instant she was already at the edge of the rock, on her knees, holding him by his shirt collar with both hands. She pulled until he caught hold of the stone, then of her, until they were both lying on the wet steps, breathing as if they had run all the way from the Buna.
For a long time they said nothing. Then Edvin raised the hand in which he was still clutching the scarf. "I thought this was blood," he said. Amila looked at the red silk, then at the trampled fruit under the tree, and began to laugh and cry at the same time. "It's pomegranate," she said. "You fool, it's pomegranate." A police car arrived with its blue light flashing, and the two officers spent a long time looking at two soaking wet people and a yellow dog that sat calmly to one side, as if it had nothing to do with anything.
They got home at three, through the main gate, his jacket on her shoulders. In the courtyard the lights were on on both sides of the fence. Amila's mother had found the empty bed and woken the whole house, and the noise had woken the Hindićs too. Rašid Dizdar stood in his pajamas on one side of the wire, Ševko Hindić in a tracksuit on the other, and for the first time in twenty-seven years both men were looking at the same thing: the torn red scarf in Edvin's hand. Rašid went pale. "It's pomegranate," said Amila before anyone could ask anything. "Just pomegranate." Rašid looked for a long time at his neighbor's soaking son. "Come in and change, son," he said at last. "You'll freeze before you get around to your own door."
The next morning Ševko Hindić brought his son a cup of tea and sat down on the edge of the bed, and then a knocking came from the wall, from Amila's side. Three times, slow and heavy, the way a man of sixty knocks when he does not know how hard you are supposed to hit a wall. "Ševko," said Rašid Dizdar's voice through the crack. "I know you're there. We need to talk about the pomegranate tree." Ševko looked at his son, then at the wall. He set the tea down on the floor, walked over to the wall and, after twenty-seven years, knocked three times.