The tunnel to Orlovac is a hundred and twenty paces long and has no sign at its entrance, but everyone in the village knows whose it is. The first ninety paces are rough, full of chisel marks, as if someone had written on the rock by hand. The rest was drilled smooth by machines. Every driver who goes through it gives one short honk, and few people still remember who started it. Before the tunnel, the only way to Orlovac, the last village on the Prenj side above the Neretva, was a goat path over Greda, which in winter no one crossed except the postman, and only when he felt like it.
Šejla was twenty-seven and the youngest resident of Orlovac. She kept thirty goats, made cheese and carried it down to the market in Jablanica on Saturdays, an hour and a half downhill, two hours back up. Her mother Ziba had a weak heart. When she fell ill one February night, the ambulance stopped where the asphalt stopped, and Šejla and two neighbors carried her over Greda in a blanket. The next day Šejla went down to the municipal office, sat in front of the clerk who was showing her the same project for the third time, and said, loudly enough to be heard in the hallway: "I will marry whoever brings a road to Orlovac." The clerk laughed. So did the hallway.
The only one who did not laugh was Fahrudin Kolaković, who was waiting in that hallway for his turn about a permit. He was a stonemason, he had a workshop next to the quarry and he cut Jablanica granite for headstones and kitchen counters. He knew Šejla from the market. Every Saturday he bought a piece of cheese from her that he did not need and said only "good morning" and "thank you." When she came out, he went in to the clerk and asked how much rock was left. A hundred and twenty paces, they told him, and there was no money until next year, or the year after that. Fahrudin said he would cut through it for the cost of materials.
He started in April, with a compressor, a hydraulic hammer and two young men from Jablanica. The young men left after a month, when it became clear there would be no pay. Fahrudin stayed. He slept in a shipping container below the rock face, drilled from dawn to dark, and stacked the stone he broke off into a dry wall along the road, neatly, as if someone were going to inspect it. At noon Šejla came with a thermos of coffee and cheese wrapped in a cloth. She would sit on a rock while he ate and look at the Neretva far below, green as bottle glass. They did not talk much. Once she ran her palm over the chisel marks, as if over a crust of bread, and said nothing.
In the evenings, after she left, Fahrudin used a small chisel to carve a profile into the rock beside the entrance: a woman with a headscarf tied at the back of her neck and a goat pushing its head under her arm. When Šejla saw it, she laughed and said it looked nothing like her and the nose was too big. The next day she stayed until dark. That summer the tunnel grew by a pace or two a day, and the old men of Orlovac began walking down to the container just to see how far it had come.
In July Husref Karadža also reached the rock face, an investor from Mostar in a black SUV that he had to leave behind for the rest of the way. He built apartments in Mostar and holiday flats on Blidinje, and now he wanted to buy the land above the village, where you could see the whole valley. When he saw Šejla, he wanted her too. He brought her flowers from town and offered to take her mother to doctors in Sarajevo. Šejla gave the flowers to the goats, and when her mother needed to go, she took her herself. Husref promised that his machines would cut through the rock in a month, if only the village would sell him the land. "It is already being cut," Šejla told him, and pointed toward the container.
By the end of October thirty paces were left. Šejla had not come for a whole week, and there was no signal in the container to call her. One afternoon Husref came to the rock face and handed Fahrudin his phone. In the picture was Šejla, in a long pale dress, holding a bouquet, beside a young man in a suit, in front of a restaurant on the Buna. "She got married on Saturday," said Husref. "To my cousin. I thought it was only fair for you to know, master, so you don't break your hands for nothing." Fahrudin looked at the picture for a long time. Then he gave back the phone and said thank you, the way he did at the market.
That night he loaded the compressor, locked the container and left the key under a stone. He did not write a word. Ten days later he was working in Salzburg, for a firm that clad facades in granite. He got an Austrian number and never switched on the old one again. Meanwhile Šejla came back from Mostar, where she had rushed with her mother one night, where she had spent seven days at her bedside after an operation, and where, between two hospital visits, she had been a bridesmaid at her cousin's wedding. She found a cold container and a key under a stone. Husref told her the stonemason had found a better job, that was craftsmen for you. Fahrudin's number could not be reached.
She waited two winters. Every evening, after milking the goats, she walked down to the rock and sat beside the profile with the headscarf. She did not sell Husref the land and did not open her door to him. The following year the municipality was shamed by the newspapers, which wrote that one stonemason had done what the state would not, and it brought in the machines. They drilled the last thirty paces in three weeks. The first bus through the tunnel was driven by Zijo Musić from Jablanica, a big, cheerful man, who honked in the middle of the tunnel, just like that, out of joy, and from then on he honked every time.
Fahrudin learned the truth in his third winter in Salzburg, from a man from Jablanica who showed him a video on his phone during a break: a bus coming out of the tunnel, children and goats waiting for it in Orlovac. Under the video someone had written that the road had been started by a craftsman because of a girl. "She got married," said Fahrudin, "two years ago, on the Buna." The man laughed. "It was her cousin who got married on the Buna. Šejla was her bridesmaid. She waited two years for you, all of Jablanica knows it. She only got married last spring, to Zijo the bus driver."
In July he came home. He drove slowly through the tunnel, over his own ninety rough paces and the thirty smooth ones that belonged to someone else. In Orlovac Šejla was standing in front of her house, with cheese laid out on a table for the people who now came by bus. She was pregnant. They looked at each other across the table for a long time, as if across a gorge. "Why didn't you ask me?" she said. "I was proud," he said. "And you?" "I waited," she said. "Two winters. Then Zijo started honking in the tunnel, every day, and one day I got on the bus." He bought a piece of cheese. She would not take his money.
On his way out of the village he stopped in front of the tunnel. The profile with the headscarf was still there, and the nose that was too big had been touched by children so many times that it had turned smooth and shiny, the only smooth spot on his part of the rock. Fahrudin touched it too. Then he got into the car, drove into the tunnel and somewhere in the middle, like everyone else, gave one short honk.