Erol Halilović loved the moment when his car, in second gear, made it up the last steep stretch of Mejtaš and his house appeared around the bend. It was an old house with white walls and a new roof, with a view over the whole valley, bought six years ago and restored exactly the way he had imagined it. That Thursday in October a fine rain was falling, the lights of the city were coming on below him one by one, and Erol, switching off the engine, felt what he felt every evening: that everything was in its place. He was forty-two, the regional director of an insurance company with offices from Bihać to Trebinje, the chairman of the board of a tennis club, and a man of whom no one could say he had ever raised his voice.
His marriage was as well ordered as his house. Ines was ten years younger, translated from German, dressed well, and at receptions knew whom to talk to and for how long. They never quarreled. Erol considered this proof that they had chosen well, and when his friends told him about their marital troubles, he listened with the pity of a man who has put his affairs in order in good time. On Thursdays Hašima, the woman who looked after the house, did not come, so he was not surprised that the ground floor was dark.
The letter was on the dressing table in the bedroom, propped against a bottle of perfume, with his name written in Ines's upright hand. He read it standing, in his coat. Ines wrote that she was leaving tonight, with Mirnes Beširević, and that she would not be coming back. She wrote that she did not hate him and held nothing against him, except one thing she could not explain, which was that in this house everything had always been correct and nothing had been alive. At the end she wrote that a lawyer would be in touch about the papers and that she had left him the keys to her car in the drawer in the hallway.
He read the letter once more, more slowly, the way he read contracts with an unclear clause. The first thing he felt was not pain but shame, so strong that he turned toward the window as if someone were watching him. Mirnes Beširević. A columnist for a weekly that stayed in print only because Erol's company paid for two pages of ads in it every month. A man who wore a scarf even in May and talked about poetry at receptions. Erol saw how it would look: the board meeting on Monday, the glances across the table, his mother asking what he had missed, the people at the tennis club who would fall silent when he walked in. He saw himself in the mirror of the dressing table, in a good coat, graying at the temples, and that man suddenly seemed ridiculous to him.
He went down to the living room without turning on the light and sat in an armchair. He began working out what he would say. That Ines had gone to her sister in Vienna, say, for a few weeks. That they had agreed to separate, calmly, like adults. Every version sounded better than the truth, and every one had the same flaw, because in each of them he remained, alone, in the house on Mejtaš, while someone in town told how it had really been. He crumpled the letter in his fist, and then, without knowing why, smoothed it out on his knee and put it in the inside pocket of his coat.
That was when he heard the key in the lock. The door opened, someone set something heavy down in the hallway, and the light came on. Ines stood in the doorway of the living room, her hair wet, and behind her, by the front door, stood a small suitcase. She had not expected him to be there, in the dark, in his coat. They looked at each other for a long time. "I couldn't," she said at last. Mirnes had been waiting for her in his car by the Eternal Flame, she told him, and when they started down Titova Street, at the traffic light by Marijin Dvor she had gotten out of the car and taken a taxi back. She explained nothing to him. Nor to herself.
Erol stood up. What he felt at that moment was so close to relief that he himself called it that. But beneath the relief, like water under ice, something else rose, small and hard, and he gave himself over to it because it was more familiar to him than anything else: the feeling of being in the right. "Sit down," he said, in the voice he used at meetings to open the difficult items on the agenda. Ines did not sit down.
He talked for a long time, calmly and in good order. He said he understood her better than she thought. That people were weak and that even the best of them sometimes made mistakes. That the only thing that mattered was that she had come back, because it meant that in the end she had understood what duty was and what was owed to the house, to the name, to him. He said that no one ever needed to know about this. That he would be generous, because he could afford to be. He spoke of Mirnes as an error in the accounts, to be corrected and forgotten, and of himself as a man who had been wronged and who, in spite of that, was ready to forgive. The longer he talked, the more he liked the way it sounded.
Ines listened to him standing, without taking off her wet jacket. When he paused for breath, she said: "I didn't come back out of duty, Erol. I came back because I'm a coward." He waved his hand as if shooing away a fly. He said that this did not matter now and that what mattered was what she would do from tomorrow on. She asked him whether anything at all had hurt him while he read the letter, other than what people would say. Erol opened his mouth and realized he had no answer he could speak without lying. So he said the question was unfair, considering who was asking it and after what.
"You're right," said Ines. She said it without irony, and that was worse than irony. She took off her jacket, hung it on the coat rack in the hallway, as she did every evening, and went into the kitchen. Erol heard her open the refrigerator, take out the dish of sarma Hašima had left on Wednesday, and turn on the burner. He heard the clink of two plates. Ten minutes later she called him to dinner, in the same voice she had used to call him for six years.
They ate at the kitchen table, under a lamp he had picked out in Graz. Ines asked how work had been. Erol answered. She nodded in the right places. She said that on Saturday she would of course come with him to the reception at the chairman's house and would wear the green dress, because that was the dress he liked. She said she would never mention Mirnes again. "I'll be everything you want," she said, stacking the plates in the sink. "Everything I was before. Just don't ask me for more than that."
Erol sat at the table and watched her back. Only then did he understand what she was offering him. She was offering him exactly what he had been demanding a little while ago: a house where everything was in its place, a wife who knew whom to talk to and for how long, a marriage without quarrels. She was offering it to him completely and honestly, and he knew it would last for years, that every evening she would set out two plates and smile at receptions, and that he would never again know what she was thinking as she looked out the window toward the city. He tried to remember a single evening before this one when he had known what she was thinking. He could not remember one.
"This isn't fair," he said. His voice was quieter than he had meant it to be. "I did nothing wrong. I was here. I did everything the way it should be done." "I know," said Ines. "You always did everything the way it should be done." She turned toward him, a dish towel in her hand, and in her eyes there was neither defiance nor remorse, only tiredness. Erol waited for her to say something more, anything, to accuse him or to plead with him, because then he could be in the right one more time. She only hung the towel on the oven handle.
He got up and went into the hallway. He still had his coat on. He touched his pocket and felt the paper. Ines came to the kitchen doorway and asked him where he was going. He said he did not know. "I came back," she said quietly, as if reminding him of something he had forgotten. "You did," said Erol. "You did." He opened the door and went out into the rain. He left the car in the yard. He walked down the steep streets of Mejtaš, toward the lights of the city, with the stride of a man who is late for a meeting.
He never went back to the house on Mejtaš. That night he slept in a hotel near Skenderija, and a week later he sent a driver from the company for his suits and books. Hašima packed everything into three boxes and in the last one, on top, she put the tennis trophy, because the lady had told her he loved it. Erol later rented an apartment in Grbavica, with a view of the same city, only from the other side. He kept the letter. It lay in the drawer of his nightstand, folded in four, and sometimes he took it out, not to read it, because he knew it by heart, but to check whether that sentence about a house where everything was correct and nothing was alive was still there.