Since lunch Aunt Rejhana had dusted the piano three times, the piano nobody in the house in Vratnik ever played, and Hatidža knew it was not because of the dust. "He will come tonight at eight," her aunt said at last, without turning around. "Just to say hello. Sixteen years have gone by, my dear." Hatidža put down her tapestry, the sky above Vrelo Bosne that she had been working on since spring, and said she knew how many years had gone by. She had counted them better than her aunt.
In the autumn of two thousand seven she was twenty-six years old and the only child of Professor Hazim Muftić, a heart surgeon whose name opened every door in Sarajevo. Her mother had died when she was two. Her father loved her the way one loves a neatly performed operation: with satisfaction, but without surprise. He used to say she was as good as bread, and he did not mean it as a compliment. Hatidža was quiet and broad-faced, worked in the administration of a private clinic, stitched tapestries, and at weddings did not know what to do with her hands.
At a cousin's wedding, in a hotel in Ilidža, Tahir Dautbegović asked her to dance three times and talked with her until the music stopped. He was thirty-one and as handsome as the actors in the series her aunt watched. He had come back from Vienna, where, as he said, he had studied and worked. He talked about museums and about the Danube, and he listened better than he talked. The next day he came to Vratnik with flowers. It was Aunt Rejhana who opened the door to him.
Rejhana was her father's sister, a widow, and she believed in love the way she believed in Turkish television series: in installments. She left the two of them alone in the parlor, brought coffee and Turkish delight, and whispered to Hatidža that a man like that comes once in a lifetime. Hatidža believed her, because it was the first time anyone had told her such a thing.
That winter Tahir took her walking on Wilson's Promenade and bought her popcorn as if she were a little girl. He asked about her tapestries, and, blushing, she showed him the Old Bridge she had stitched over two winters. He looked at it for a long time, traced the stitches with his finger and said it showed the kind of patience nobody had anymore. Nobody before him had looked at her tapestries for longer than a second. When he kissed her for the first time, under the chestnut trees by the National Museum, Hatidža thought that her father, for the first time in his life, had been wrong about her.
The professor watched Tahir over two dinners, and then he made inquiries about him the way one makes a diagnosis. He went to Hrasnica, to Tahir's sister Azemina, a widow with three children, in whose apartment Tahir was living. Azemina turned her coffee cup around for a long time, and then she admitted it. In Vienna Tahir had spent everything their parents had left them, his share and hers. Now he lived with her and borrowed from the neighbors. She asked the professor not to tell her brother who he had heard it from.
The professor received Tahir the next day in his study and did not offer him a seat. Tahir sat down anyway. He said he loved Hatidža, that money had never mattered to him and that he would prove it. "Prove it by leaving," said the professor. Tahir smiled, stood up and said that he did not give up on people as easily as some fathers did. The professor saw him to the door, and then stood at the window for a long time, watching that handsome, straight back move away down Vratnik.
That evening her father called Hatidža into his study. "He does not love you," he said calmly. "He loves this house, the apartments in Ilidža and my savings." If she married him, he would leave everything to a foundation for heart surgery, and all she would have left was her mother's small apartment in Marijin Dvor. Hatidža was silent for a long time. "Then we will live in Marijin Dvor," she said. Her father looked at her as if he were seeing for the first time that she had a spine, and it did not please him.
He took her to Toronto, to his brother's, for a year, until she got over it. Hatidža went because she was obedient, but she did not get over it. She wrote to Tahir through her aunt, every week, long and clumsy letters. In the meantime Tahir came to Vratnik to visit Rejhana, sat in the professor's armchair, drank his coffee, read his newspapers and smoked on his balcony. Rejhana considered this proof of devotion. One evening in February her father took Hatidža out to the shore of Lake Ontario, which was frozen all the way to the horizon. They stood in the wind for a long time without speaking. "Have you given up?" he asked. "No." "I have spent my whole life looking at hearts from the inside," he said. "Yours is good. His is empty." Hatidža said she was cold and would like to go back.
When they came back, neither father nor daughter had changed their minds. Hatidža told Tahir she was ready and that they did not need her father's money. Tahir was silent for a long time. Then he said there was no need to rush, that a daughter must not lose her father because of him, that the professor might soften with time. He spoke beautifully, as always, but while he spoke he looked out of the window, toward the garden and the house, and not at her. A week later he said he had been offered a job in Munich, temporarily. He promised he would come so they could say goodbye. He did not come. Hatidža waited at the window until two, watching a street where nothing moved. He left by bus from the main station. The next day a message came: "I do not want to be the reason you lose your father. Forgive me." Hatidža read it once, deleted it and went back to her tapestry.
"I told you so," her father said at dinner. "You did," she said. She never forgave him for being right, just as she never forgave Tahir for not being what he had said he was.
Others came afterward: a widower, a dentist from Grbavica, then a professor from the Law School, polite and dull. Hatidža turned them down kindly, each one over coffee. Her father fell ill with his heart, which he himself considered a bad joke. Before he died, six years ago, he asked her to promise that she would never marry Tahir Dautbegović. "I have no intention of marrying him," she said. "But I will not promise either." He changed his will. The largest part went to the foundation. Hatidža was left the house in Vratnik and her mother's apartment. It was enough for her.
At eight the doorbell rang. Tahir was forty-seven, with a thicker neck, thinner hair and an expensive coat that remembered better seasons. His voice was the same. While he talked, his eyes went twice to the piano and to the paintings on the wall, as if he were counting them. Her aunt, as in the old days, left them alone in the parlor. He said he had divorced in Munich, that he had come back to Sarajevo and that not a day had passed without him thinking of her. He had been young and foolish, he said, and her father a strict man, God rest his soul. "Can we at least be friends?" he asked. "And in time, who knows."
"No, Tahir," said Hatidža. She said it quietly, without anger, the way you say what time it is. He smiled his old smile. "Rejhana told me you were alone." "My aunt watches television series," she said. "I have changed, Hatidža." "I know. So have I." She stood up and opened the parlor door for him. On the threshold he paused, as if waiting for her to change her mind, the way she had once waited. She did not change her mind. "Good night," she said, and closed the door.
Her aunt was crying in the kitchen. "My dear, he came back for you!" Hatidža did not answer. She went back to the parlor, sat down by the lamp and picked up her tapestry. She threaded the needle with blue thread and went on with the sky above Vrelo Bosne, stitch by stitch, slowly, as if she had her whole life for it.