On the third floor of an old Austro-Hungarian house in Bistrik lived two young people who shared one hallway. Cecilija sold cheese at the Markale market and smelled of the Travnik mountain. Bahrudin was a chimney sweep, one of the last four in the city, and smelled of soot that no soap ever fully removed. They said good morning on the stairs, and later, without agreeing to, more and more often in the evening as well. He fixed the latch on her window, and she left a piece of cheese outside his door, wrapped in paper, for him to find when he came down from the roofs.
Their landlord was Čedomir Vukelić, a widower from the first floor. In his room, on the sideboard, stood a wooden goat with carved hooves, left over from some village shop, and Čedomir said it was the only one in the house who understood him. What he loved most was his hallway: he sat behind the curtain and knew who came in, who went out, and who stayed how long. He knew Cecilija's schedule to the minute.
One evening he knocked on her door with a plate of cookies. "My nephew is an engineer," he said. "A decent man. He's coming Friday for coffee." "I know who I drink coffee with," she answered. Čedomir smiled, politely and for too long. "So do I. A chimney sweep is no company for you. After him even the stairs are black." The next day he stuck a notice on Bahrudin's door ending his lease, effective the first of the month.
That night Bahrudin knocked on the wall three times, as they had agreed for emergencies. Cecilija pulled a jacket over her pajamas. "I know a way the landlord doesn't," he said, and led her up the attic stairs and through a hatch in the roof, which he opened with one hand, like a man for whom this was work.
Sarajevo lay beneath them in lights, from the City Hall to Trebević, quiet as a great ship, and the wind off the Miljacka was cold and clean. Bahrudin pointed at the chimneys as if at relatives. "This is Bistrik, these are Kovači. Each one has a name. Follow me and don't look down." Cecilija walked, step by step, over tiles that still held the warmth of the day. Twice she slipped, once he caught her by the sleeve, and both of them laughed quietly, because there had been no time to be afraid.
Before dawn they reached a house where a single small window was lit. Inside sat an old woman in a wool vest with a thermos of coffee. Her name was Aiša. Bahrudin had cleaned her chimney for nine years, and he was the only one who came when she was left alone. "I knew you would come through the roof one day," she said. "I have two rooms in the attic and nobody to walk over my head." She looked at their hands, then the soot, then the piece of cheese Cecilija had carried in her jacket pocket out of habit, and asked nothing. She only said there were no clean sheets in the house, but there were warm ones.
They drank coffee sitting on thick blankets, and soot fell on the white bedspread, and nobody said a word. On the third floor in Bistrik, Čedomir knocked in the morning on an empty door. On the sideboard the wooden goat stared into the closed room and could not stop anyone.