The Room in Velešići

I had not seen Mithat in eleven years, since I moved to Ljubljana, and when I ran into him on the Obala embankment in November, I recognized him first by his walk. At the First Gymnasium he had been the most honest of us, the one who answers a question at once and does not understand why the others beat around the bush. Now he had gray at his temples, a good coat and the look of a man who has lost something in his pocket and cannot stop searching for it. We sat down in a café across from the Miljacka. We each drank a coffee and talked about people we both barely remembered, and then Mithat took out his wallet and from it a photograph, a real one, printed, the kind nobody carries anymore.

The photograph showed a woman in a light-colored coat on the Latin Bridge, half turned away from the lens, as if someone were calling her from the other side of the river. She was beautiful the way women are who have known it for a long time and no longer care. But it was not her eyes that stopped me, it was her mouth. It was pressed together slightly, as if she were holding something she must not let fall. "What do you think of her?" Mithat asked. I said she looked to me like a woman with a secret. Mithat looked at the photograph for a long time, then called the waiter and ordered two more coffees, which with us had always meant the story would be a long one.

Her name was Elena Filipović. He had met her three years earlier, at a reception during the film festival, where he was because his firm was restoring an old cinema, and she was because she was invited everywhere. She was the widow of a diplomat, lived alone in a large apartment behind the Cathedral, and spoke softly, as if in the next room there were someone who must not hear. Mithat brought her a glass of water and asked her something about the film. She answered him with a question. When they parted she did not give him her phone number, but told him to leave her a note with the flower seller on Ferhadija. When he brought the flower seller an envelope the next day, she took it without a word, as if she did this every week.

They saw each other all autumn and winter, but always the way she arranged it. She never invited him to her place. She never let him call her. She wrote to him from a number that changed every few months and told him where she would be waiting. In the waiting room of the railway station. In a cabin of the cable car to Trebević, up and down twice in a row. In the old Jewish cemetery, at ten in the morning, in the fog. She always arrived on time and always left first, and always, before she turned the corner, she looked back once, not toward him but over her shoulder, as if checking whether anyone was behind her. Mithat thought it was style. Then he thought it was fear. In the end he decided he did not care and that he would ask her to marry him.

It was in March, in the rain. Mithat was in Velešići because of a house that had to be reinforced before they added a floor, and he was standing under the eaves of someone else's yard, waiting for the rain to ease a little. Then Elena came down the street. She wore a scarf over her hair and dark glasses on a cloudy day, she walked fast, looking down at the cobblestones, and she did not see him. She stopped in front of an old house with a green gate, took a key out of her bag, glanced over her shoulder in that way of hers and went in. Mithat stayed under the eaves until the rain stopped, and then for another half hour. She did not come out.

That evening they had dinner in a small restaurant below Vratnik, which she had chosen. She was especially beautiful and especially calm, and the whole time Mithat kept his hand on the pocket where he carried the ring. He asked her what she had done that day. She said she had been at home, that she had had a headache and had not gone out. "I saw you in Velešići," he said. "You were going into a house with a green gate. You had a key." Elena put down her fork. She did not turn pale and she did not laugh. "I wasn't in Velešići," she said. "And don't ask me about things that are none of your business."

Mithat said that everything was his business if he was going to marry her. He said he could not spend his life with someone who had a key to a house he was not allowed to enter. Elena listened, and then said only that it was late and that she would like to go home. He drove her to the Cathedral and she got out without saying goodbye. A week later Mithat left for Doha, for a project he had been weighing for months, and he got in touch with her only once, with a message to a number that had already been disconnected. The ring stayed in the pocket of the coat he did not take, because in Doha it was over a hundred degrees.

He came back in December. The first thing he saw, when he went down to the old town to buy tobacco for his father, was a death notice on the wall by the Cathedral, among the other death notices. Elena Filipović, passed away suddenly. In the photograph she was looking straight into the lens, which she had never done. From a friend of hers, who barely recognized him, he learned that in November she had walked out of a premiere at the National Theater into the sleet without a coat, because, as she said, she had left it at someone's place, and that the pneumonia had been stronger than she was. Whose place she had left the coat at, the friend did not know.

The next day Mithat went to Velešići. The green gate was opened by an older woman in a wool vest, Mrs. Sejfija, and when she heard the name, she stepped aside to let him in. The upstairs room, she said, had been rented to Mrs. Elena since the autumn before. She came twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays in the afternoon, always alone. Mrs. Sejfija made her tea. Elena sat by the window, read or looked down toward the station and the trains that rarely passed, and around six she would leave. "And did anyone come?" Mithat asked. "Who would come?" said Mrs. Sejfija. "She came here so nobody would find her. That is what she said when she took the room. She paid until the end of the year."

They went upstairs. The room was small and clean, with two armchairs, a table and a single window. On the table stood a cup, turned upside down on its saucer, and a book with a pencil in place of a bookmark. On the hook behind the door hung the light-colored coat from the photograph. "She left it the last time," said Mrs. Sejfija. "It was warm when she came, and when she left it started to snow. I told her to put it on. She said she had to stop somewhere and would pick it up on Tuesday." Mithat stood in front of the coat and did not touch it. He asked if he could sit down. He sat in the armchair by the window until it grew dark and saw nothing but the station, the rooftops and one train for Konjic that was running late.

Mithat fell silent and laid the photograph on the table, face toward me. His coffee had gone cold. "What do you think?" he asked. I told him what I thought. That there had been no one. That Elena had not needed a lover but a door nobody knew about, and that the door was dearer to her than any man who might walk through it. That the secret was all she had, and that was exactly why she could not give it even to him. Mithat nodded, as if he had already heard this from someone. "That's what I think too," he said. "Almost always."

He paid the waiter and, as we stepped out onto the Obala, he told me, without looking at me, that he had taken that room from Mrs. Sejfija himself. He pays in advance, as she did, always to the end of the year. He goes there on Tuesdays and Fridays after work, drinks tea, reads, watches the trains. The coat still hangs on the hook behind the door. Nobody knows where he is, he said, not his mother, not the people at the firm, not the woman he sometimes sees, who has already asked him twice where he disappears to. I asked him what he tells her. "Nothing," said Mithat. "I tell her not to ask me about things that are none of her business."

We parted at the Latin Bridge. I watched him walk away along the Obala, his hands in the pockets of his good coat. Before he turned the corner, he looked back once, not toward me but over his shoulder, as if checking whether anyone was behind him.