The woman was waiting for her at the bottom of the steps, where the narrow street from Kovači runs down toward Baščaršija, and she stepped into her path as if they knew each other. She was heavyset, in a brick-red jacket, her hair dyed black, with a cheap perfume that arrived before she did. "So you're the one," she said, loudly enough that a man stacking copper coffee pots in front of his shop turned around. "You're the reason Tin doesn't call me anymore." Lidija tried to get past. The woman moved with her, a step to the left, a step to the right, saying that her name was Gorana, that she had been with Tin for three years, and that a lawyer's wife had no business being in his apartment at four in the afternoon.
Lidija did not remember what she answered. She remembered only that she opened her bag, found two fifty-mark notes in her wallet, and that the woman took them like change, unhurried, looking her in the eye. "That's for today," said Gorana. "We'll be seeing each other." Lidija went down to Baščaršija almost at a run, got into the first taxi by the Sebilj fountain, and only at Marijin Dvor did she realize that she was going home to Mustafa, who thought she was at the hairdresser, without a new haircut.
She had married Mustafa Muratović fourteen years ago, when he was already a lawyer they invited onto television and she was a bank clerk who thought she would always work. She stopped working when Daris was born. Mustafa was good, patient and punctual, and after all those years a little like the furniture in their apartment on Koševsko Brdo: reliable, expensive and invisible. She had met Tin in April, at a concert at the Academy of Music, where he was the accompanist for a violinist. He was ten years younger and looked at her as if she were something still waiting to be discovered. That was all. She did not love him. She loved the way to his apartment, the steps, the key he had given her, and the fact that nobody knew.
For the first few days she did not go out. She told Mustafa she had a headache, and he brought her tea and laid his hand on her forehead like a doctor. Every time the intercom buzzed, Lidija felt her stomach go cold. Every time an unknown number appeared on her phone, she let it ring out. Over dinner Mustafa talked about a case at the Municipal Court, and at one point he raised his eyes to her. "You haven't been yourself these days," he said. "Everything is fine," she said. "Good," he said, and went on eating, and that very good kept her awake.
Gorana got in touch on the sixth day, by text message. She did not explain how she had found the number. She wrote only the amount, five hundred marks, and the place, a bench in the park behind the National Museum, at noon. Lidija withdrew the money from the cash machine by the post office and made sure the card was her own, not the joint one. On the bench Gorana counted the notes slowly, like a woman selling at the market, and said Tin had always had a weakness for women with something to lose. "I have nothing," she said. "That's why I don't have to be nice." After that came a thousand marks, then another thousand, then a message at eleven at night, while Mustafa sat in the same room reading a case file: Friday, noon, same bench.
That week Daris broke the side mirror on a neighbor's car in front of the building with his ball and said it had not been him. Mustafa did not shout. He sat down beside his son on the couch and told him he had until bedtime, that he did not have to say anything if he did not want to, but that he knew what it was like when a person carried something inside. Daris held out until ten. Then he came into the living room in his pajamas and told everything, crying, and afterward he fell asleep in two minutes, arms spread wide. "You see," Mustafa said quietly, switching off the light in the children's room, "the punishment is not the worst part. The worst part is waiting for it. Once you confess, it gets easier right away." Lidija stood behind him in the hallway and could not swallow.
On Friday at noon Gorana did not ask for money. She sat on the same bench and looked at Lidija's hand. "The ring," she said. "The one with the emerald. I'm tired of paper." Lidija said it was the ring her husband had given her when he proposed, and that he would notice by evening. "Then tell him you lost it," said Gorana. "Or tell him the truth. It's all the same to me. You have until Monday."
Lidija went straight to Kovači. Tin opened the door in a T-shirt, sheet music spread across the floor, and he was not glad to see her. While she told him, he looked at her as if she were retelling a movie. He said he did not know any Gorana. His exes, he said, were two students and a cellist who now lived in Graz, and none of them wore a brick-red jacket. Then, instead of putting his arms around her, he went to the window and looked down into the street. "Maybe it's better if you don't come for a while," he said. "For your sake, you understand. Because of your husband." Lidija understood. She went down the same steps, and this time nobody was waiting for her, and that was worse than if someone had been.
That evening Mustafa came home early. He made coffee, which he had not done in years, and sat down across from her at the kitchen table. He talked about his father, who had kept a goldsmith's shop in Tešanj and used to say that you recognize real gold because you are not ashamed to show it. Then he fell silent and looked at her for a long time. "Lidija," he said, "is there something you want to tell me?" Her mouth had already opened. She saw Daris in his pajamas standing in the living room doorway. She saw herself saying Tin's name in this kitchen, under the clock they had received as a wedding present. "No," she said. "I'm tired, that's all." Mustafa nodded and washed his cup.
She did not sleep. At four in the morning, while Mustafa breathed evenly beside her, she understood that she could not hold out until Monday. She could not hand over the ring, she could not not hand it over, she could not listen to the intercom anymore. She dressed in the dark, took the phone with Gorana's messages and went out. She had decided to go to the police and report the blackmail, and let whatever came out afterward come out. She walked through the empty city, past shuttered shop windows and the Eternal Flame, because she thought she would change her mind if she got into a taxi. A light was burning in front of the police station. When she put her hand on the door handle, a car stopped behind her. It was Mustafa's car.
He did not get out. He rolled down the window and told her to get in, that she did not have to go in there, and he said it so calmly that she knew at once. She sat down beside him. Only then did her hands begin to shake. Gorana, Mustafa said, was really named Zrinka and acted in the puppet theater at Skenderija, mostly wolves and witches. He had paid her. In May he had seen Lidija coming out of the building in Kovači, and for a week he had thought about what to do. He did not want a scandal. He did not want a divorce. He had wanted, he said, for her to come to him herself and tell him, like Daris, because he thought it would be easier for her then.
Lidija was silent for a long time. "A month," she said at last. "For a month I haven't slept." "I know," he said. "Neither have I." He took an envelope out of the box between the seats. In it was all the money she had paid, note by note, and a slip of paper on which Zrinka had written down the dates in neat letters. The ring had not been his idea, he said, but Zrinka's, to speed things up, and he had agreed. Lidija looked at the envelope on her knees. She wanted to say that what he had done was worse than anything she had done, and she did not know whether that was true. "And if I had gone in?" she asked. "Then I would have gone in after you," said Mustafa, "and told the officer on duty that my wife had reported an actress."
They got home at five, before Daris woke up. Mustafa fell asleep at once, fully dressed, like a man who had closed a long case. Lidija did not. In the morning she wrote to Tin that she would not be coming anymore and deleted his number, and that was the easiest thing of all and meant nothing to her. A week later she bought a ticket for a children's show at Skenderija and sat in the back row among the grandmothers and nannies. Zrinka played the wolf. She had the same black hair, but without the perfume and without the brick-red jacket she looked smaller and younger. When she came out at the end to take her bow, her eyes found Lidija across the hall in the back row and stopped. Lidija stood up and clapped, for a long time, until the children around her began to turn and look.