Belma is thirty-two, and sometimes, as today, climbing to the fourth floor of an old building in Bistrik, she has to stop on the stairs, because something inside her is so full that she cannot go on. It is not tiredness. It is not happiness either, or it is, but too big for that word. She feels like a glass someone keeps pouring into and pouring into, and she must not move her hand or it will spill. She cannot find her key for laughing. The woman on the third floor is watching her through the peephole, Belma knows it, and that seems to her both funny and touching.
The flat smells of the lamb Haris put in the oven on low this morning before he left for the office. Belma takes fruit from the Markale market out of a bag: mandarins, green apples, grapes as dark as plums. She arranges it on a blue ceramic plate, then takes it all off and arranges it again, until the mandarins lie beside the grapes exactly as they should, as if the blue plate and the new dark purple carpet in the living room had to say something to each other. She looks at her work and laughs out loud. Let it be, she thinks. Let it be funny, too.
The nanny, Behija, is feeding little Asja in the bathroom, because that is what she is used to, and when Belma comes in, she looks at her the way you look at a guest who has turned up unannounced. Belma takes the spoon and feeds her daughter herself. Asja laughs at her and grabs her hair. Belma would like to stay there all evening, on the cold tiles, with that small warm thing in her lap, but the phone rings. Haris says he is running ten minutes late and asks whether everything is all right. Everything is fine, she says, and she would like to tell him something more, but she does not know what, and he has already hung up.
From the bedroom you can see the courtyard, and in the courtyard a pear tree that, they say, was planted by some Austrian clerk long ago. This year it bloomed all at once, in two days, and now it stands white to the last branch, still, against the green wall of the house next door. Belma looks at it and thinks that this is her life, that pear tree: full, in blossom, without a single bare branch. She has Haris, she has Asja, she has a flat with a new carpet and friends who talk about films, she has just enough money not to have to think about money. And she has Biserka, her new friend, who is coming to dinner for the first time tonight.
For dinner she puts on a white dress, green shoes, and a necklace of green stone her mother brought her from Istanbul. Only when she stands in front of the big mirror by the front door does she notice that she is dressed like the pear tree, and she laughs again, alone, in the hallway. From the bathroom Behija asks what is funny. Nothing, says Belma. Nothing is funny. Everything is just too lovely.
She met Biserka in March, at the opening of an exhibition on Ferhadija. They were both standing in front of the same painting, for too long, and Biserka said the painting was sad and Belma said it was cheerful, and that was enough. Biserka is blond, quiet, a little absent, as if she were always listening to music from another room. Belma knows almost nothing about her: that she lives alone somewhere in Ciglane, that she translates from French, and that she drinks no coffee after five. She likes not knowing more. Belma attaches herself to new friends that way, at once and completely, and Haris laughs at her for it. He says Biserka is boring, that she only smiles and keeps quiet and surely has nothing to say. Belma does not believe him. She knows he always talks that way about people he does not know yet.
Tijana and Dino arrive first, she an interior designer, he a director at a small theater, both in clothes that you can tell at once are expensive and were meant to look cheap. Dino talks about a play nobody comes to see, Tijana about a client who wants a kitchen the color of salt cod. Then Vedad arrives, a young film critic, pale, and straight from the door he talks about the taxi driver who drove him from Skenderija as if he were running from the police. "I thought it was the end," he says. "The whole way I held on to the handle above the door." Haris arrives out of breath, his scarf over his shoulder, kisses Belma on the hair, and goes straight to the kitchen to check the lamb.
Biserka arrives last, in a silver dress, her hair pinned up, and when Belma takes her coat, she feels that her hands are cold. At the table Biserka says little. She smiles, listens, eats slowly. Only when Tijana says that the fruit on the blue plate looks like something out of a Dutch painting does Biserka look at Belma and nod, as if she knew who had arranged it and how many times. Haris sits across from her and behaves, Belma thinks, almost rudely: he does not look at her, does not speak to her, asks Vedad about films and Dino about the stage. Belma would be angry with him, but she cannot be, because she is too proud of everything: of the lamb, of the fruit, of the people at her table, of the way the candles are reflected in the window. Every few minutes she looks at Biserka and waits for a sign. She does not know what kind.
After coffee, while Dino and Tijana are arguing about some review, Biserka leans toward Belma and quietly asks her whether the flat looks out on the courtyard. And that is the sign. Belma gets up without a word, leads her down the hallway to the bedroom, does not turn on the light, and draws back the curtains. Below, in the moonlight, stands the pear tree. It is so white it seems to shine by itself. The two women stand side by side and say nothing. It seems to Belma that something binds them, that they are both inside that white tree, that they understand each other without a single word, and that this moment, when everything else has passed, will keep coming back to them both.
They return to the table, and no one has noticed anything. Vedad reads a line of poetry from his phone, and Tijana teases him. Haris pours the wine, and Belma watches him pour. She watches his hands, the back of his neck, the way he laughs at Dino's joke, and for the first time in many years she feels that she can hardly wait for the guests to leave. For the two of them to be alone, she and he, in the flat with the candles burning down. The feeling is so new that she is embarrassed and blushes, and Tijana asks her whether she is too warm. Belma says she is. She thinks: all of this is because of Biserka. She gave me this, there by the window. She will tell him, she thinks, tonight, when they turn off the lights. She does not know what yet, but she will tell him.
Shortly before midnight Tijana and Dino get up, because early in the morning they are driving to Mostar. Vedad calls a taxi and is frightened at once. Biserka says she will go with him, that it is on her way, and that she will hold his hand if the driver is crazy. Vedad asks them to wait while Belma finds him the book she promised him, an old poetry collection signed by the author. Belma goes into the living room, to the shelf. The book is on the second row, where it has always been. She turns with it toward the door.
From the living room you can see part of the hallway and the big mirror by the front door. In the mirror is Haris. He is holding Biserka's coat, but he is not handing it to her. Biserka steps up to him, puts her hands on his shoulders, and he draws her close and kisses her, unhurried, like a man who is not doing it for the first time. Then he whispers something to her. Belma cannot hear, but she sees his lips in the mirror and knows what he said: tomorrow. Biserka touches his cheek with her fingers, briefly, the way you touch something that is yours, and takes her coat.
When Biserka comes into the living room to say goodbye, her face is as calm as it has been all evening. She takes Belma's hands in hers. Her hands are still cold. "Thank you for everything," she says. "And for the pear tree. How lovely your pear tree is." Vedad is already at the door, his cap in his hands, calling that the taxi is waiting and the meter is running. Haris sees them out to the stairs. Belma hears the elevator going down, the building door closing below, and Haris coming back, whistling.
Belma walks to the bedroom window. The curtains are still drawn back, the way she left them. Below, the pear tree stands in the moonlight, white to the last branch, perfectly still, and nothing about it has changed. From the kitchen comes the sound of Haris stacking glasses in the sink and asking her whether he should put out the candles. Belma does not answer. In her hand she is still holding the book Vedad asked for. No one took it.