The number three tram runs from Ilidža to Baščaršija and back, through the whole city, in a little over an hour. Anyone who drives it in winter knows where ice gathers on the rails, at which traffic light at Marijin Dvor the passengers start pushing, and which stop in Alipašino Polje has a shelter that shelters you from nothing. The women who worked the three line, drivers and ticket inspectors, knew all of it by heart. They also knew Riad Pobrić, the dispatcher in the glass booth at the depot, whose voice they heard over the radio every day, from the first morning shift to the last tram.
Riad was thirty-eight, had never married, and had a voice that made passengers ask who that was when they heard it from the driver's cab. "Three seven, you're two minutes late, but you're forgiven," he would say, and the driver of three seven would smile all day. On night shifts he brought burek from the bakery near Stup, remembered birthdays, and knew whose husband worked in Germany and whose child was sick. He had an old red Golf and a habit of taking someone to Vrelo Bosne on Sundays. Nobody at the depot could say exactly whom, because it kept changing.
Anesa Mujanović had been working as a ticket inspector for three years and for a long time would not give in to him. She was twenty-seven, with short hair and a voice she used in a packed tram to say "tickets, please" in a way that made even the loudest young men reach for their wallets. She laughed in Riad's face. But he was patient. In October he waited for her outside the depot after her shift with two coffees, in November they went to Vrelo Bosne for the first time, and while they watched the swans from the little bridge, he told her she was the only one who understood him. That was when she kissed him, on the little bridge, and all winter after that she believed it had been her decision.
In January something changed. Riad still greeted her when she passed his booth, but he gave her night shifts, stopped answering after eight, and one Sunday he did not show up, because, as he wrote, his mother was ill. That same Sunday Ankica, a driver with fifteen years on the job, saw the red Golf in the parking lot at Vrelo Bosne, and in it Riad and little Belkisa, who had only come to the depot in December.
Anesa asked him only once. She waited until he was alone in the booth, knocked on the glass, and asked him what had happened. Riad took off his headset, smiled at her the way he smiled at passengers, and said he was tired, that he had a lot of work, and that she should not make scenes at the workplace, because she was smarter than that. Then he pressed the button on the radio and said: "Three two, go ahead, you've got green." Anesa stood in front of the glass until it became clear to her that the conversation was over.
In the break room, over tea, Ankica told them what she had seen at Vrelo Bosne, without looking at Anesa. Then Jadranka Pejić, the oldest driver on the shift, laughed in a way nobody liked. She took out her phone, scrolled back two years through her messages, and read aloud: "You're the only one who understands me." Ankica turned red and took out her own phone. The same sentence, from last spring, with the same flower at the end. Anesa did not need to take out hers. She knew it was the same. Belkisa, whom they called in the next day, cried for ten minutes and then showed them her message too, exactly seven days old.
"He's not going to pick our shifts for us," said Jadranka. "We'll pick his." Ankica was afraid for her job, because she had a loan and two kids in school, but Jadranka told her nobody got fired over a conversation in the break room. She also told them something she had never talked about: that Riad had written to her the winter she got divorced, when she had no one to say a word to, and that for two years she had been ashamed of believing him. The plan was simple and had nothing in it that could be reported to management. On Friday Belkisa would ask him to stay in the break room after the last tram, because she had something to tell him. The others would already be there. Jadranka said nobody would so much as touch him. "He'll just choose," she said. "One of us. In front of everyone. Let him see what it's like when a person has to make up his mind."
On Friday it snowed. The last number three came into the depot a little before midnight, and the yellow trams stood in rows with their lights off, like a herd asleep. The break room was on the second floor, above the workshop: an old radiator, a coffee machine that worked when it felt like it, a table covered with oilcloth, and a faded poster of Vučko, the Olympic wolf. When Riad came in, smiling, with a box of burek and snow on his shoulders, Belkisa was standing by the window. Ankica, Jadranka and Anesa were sitting at the table. Jadranka stood up, locked the door, and put the key in her jacket pocket.
"What's this," Riad laughed, "a union meeting?" Nobody laughed. Jadranka pointed him to the chair at the head of the table, and he sat down, because he was a man who always sat down when a woman pointed him to a chair. Then Ankica read her message. Then Jadranka hers. Then Belkisa, in a voice that trembled. The same words, the same flower, the same promised weekend in Mostar, which none of them had ever seen. Anesa read nothing. She looked at him across the table, and for the first time that evening he looked away.
He tried the way he had always tried. He told Ankica she had been special to him, Jadranka that she had been like an older sister to him, Belkisa that she was still young and did not understand what she had read. Jadranka cut him off. "Riad," she said, "you didn't call us to a meeting. We called you. And you're not leaving here until you choose. One of us. Out loud." He stood up and started for the door, then remembered the key and stopped. He said he would call the security guard. He reached for his phone on the table, but Ankica was faster and dropped it into the tin tea caddy.
"You don't need the guard," said Jadranka. "We have a Viber group. The depot, all shifts, three hundred people. I'm the administrator." She held up her phone. "Four messages, the same sentence, the same flower. Either you choose, or I hit send, and from Monday on every driver in the city who hears you on the radio will know who the only one who understands you is." Riad looked at Jadranka, then at Ankica, then at Belkisa by the window, and his face changed. It was no longer charming. It was tired and mean, and suddenly older.
"Fine," he said. "You want me to choose? I'm choosing." He leaned across the table and pointed at Anesa, the way you point at a tram that is running late. "Her. Anesa. Are you happy now?" He said it without looking at her, in the voice of someone buying a ticket, and the room became so quiet that they could hear the radiator.
They all turned toward Anesa. By the window Belkisa held her breath. Anesa slowly stood up. She looked at Riad, at his hands on the oilcloth, at the snow melting on his collar, and something in her face closed, like the doors of a tram as it pulls away. "I don't want you," she said. She said it calmly, in the voice she used to say "tickets, please." "Jadranka, give him the key."
Jadranka gave him the key. Ankica took the phone out of the tea caddy and set it on the table. Riad picked up his phone and his jacket and left without a word, leaving the door open. They heard him going down the metal stairs, his footsteps crunching on the snow between the trams, and the red Golf in the parking lot starting only on the third try. Nobody rejoiced. Ankica laughed, too loudly, then fell silent. Belkisa cried. Jadranka put water on for tea and stood with her back to them for a long time, although the water had long since boiled.
Anesa sat at the table, in front of the box of burek he had brought, which was growing cold, unopened. She did not cry. On Monday she worked the first morning shift on the three line, from Ilidža toward the city. At Marijin Dvor a young man in a leather jacket got on without a ticket and gave her the kind of smile that makes everything easier. Anesa wrote out the fine without raising her eyes, tore off the slip, and handed it to him, and only when the young man got off two stops later did she notice that her hand was shaking.