Thursdays at the Mahmutovićs

When Kenan Selimović got a job at the family medicine clinic in Crkvice, he was twenty-eight and had one suitcase, a secondhand Golf and the advice everyone in Zenica gave him, from the nurse at the front desk to the pensioners who were the first to come in for prescriptions. If he wanted to know what culture looked like in this town, they said, he should go to the Mahmutovićs on a Thursday. The town was gray with smoke from the steel mill, and in winter the Bosna carried ice and plastic bags. Still, people were proud of one house by the river, where, they claimed, life was lived differently.

He went for the first time in November. Esad Mahmutović, a retired engineer from the steel mill, met him at the door with the words: "Welcome, doctor, and may we never need you, except on Thursdays." Esad had a joke for every occasion and not a single new one. He liked to say that the only clean air in Zenica was kept in his refrigerator. His wife Nevzeta had been writing a novel for nine years, and after dinner she read the guests two new chapters. The novel had a great deal of rain, carriages and letters in it, and a countess in Vienna who never told anyone what she felt, and nothing of what could be seen through the window: no chimneys, no market, no line outside the clinic. "Why don't you publish it, Nevzeta?" someone asked every time. "It isn't finished yet," she answered every time.

Then the daughter sat down at the piano. Ajla was nineteen, with short hair and a habit of biting her lower lip while she played. Her father called her Kitten. She played something long and difficult, striking the keys as if she wanted to drive them into the wood, and Kenan, listening, thought of stones rolling down a slope with no idea where they would stop. When she finished, everyone applauded. She bowed only halfway, like someone who knows she deserves more. Nevzeta explained that Kitten would take the entrance exam at the academy in Graz in the fall.

That night Kenan walked home along the Bosna and hummed the whole way. He felt warm, even though a fog that smelled of coal was rising off the river. Then came the kind of months that come to every young doctor: flu, blood pressure, diabetes, house calls in high-rises where the elevator does not work, and he did not make it back to the Mahmutovićs until March. When he came again, Ajla herself took him out to the garden to show him the cherry tree her father had planted on the day she was born. She told him about Liszt, about concert halls where no one dares to cough, about how Zenica was too small for people who feel something. Kenan told her about his patients. She looked at the cherry tree.

From then on he came every Thursday. He fell in love the way people do who spend all day listening to other people's ailments: quietly, stubbornly and without much hope. They walked across Kamberovića polje, and he carried her sheet music under his jacket so it would not get wet. He told her that nothing had to be big to be good, that he was happy when an old woman from Crkvice came back for a checkup after a month and told him she felt better. Ajla laughed. "You are like my father," she told him once. "Everything is enough for you."

At the end of May she sent him a message: "Tonight at eleven on Smetovi, by the lookout. Come alone." Kenan knew it might be a joke. All the same he shaved, put on his only jacket and drove the Golf up the switchbacks, through darkness that smelled of cut grass. There was nobody at the lookout. Below it lay the whole town, the orange lights of the steel mill, the bridges over the Bosna, the windows of the high-rises. He waited until half past one, listened to the dogs in the villages and asked himself what he really wanted from her and what she could possibly want from him. Nothing was clear to him, except that it was cold and that he was glad to be waiting. He drove back into town before dawn.

The next day Ajla told him she had only wanted to see whether he would come, and she laughed so honestly that he could not get angry. On Thursday, before Nevzeta could reach a new chapter, Kenan took Ajla by the hand in the hallway and proposed to her. While he talked, a small, cold voice in his head kept counting: the house by the river, Esad's two apartments in town, a piano worth as much as a car. He was ashamed of that voice, but the voice did not stop. She heard him out to the end. She said she respected him and that he was a good man, but that she did not want to spend her whole life listening to talk of other people's blood pressure and blood sugar. "I want to be a pianist, Kenan. Not a doctor's wife in Zenica." In September she left for Graz.

For three days Kenan was sick with shame. On the fourth day he saw forty patients at the clinic, and that evening, sitting in the Golf outside the building, he imagined what it would have been like if she had said yes: a wedding at a hotel, her concerts where he would sit in the front row and understand nothing, Esad at the lunch table every day. He imagined it with relief, and that frightened him more than the refusal. He stopped going to the Mahmutovićs. Through acquaintances at the market Esad sent him greetings and a joke about how doctors, like the electricity, come back when you least expect them. Kenan would smile and buy another bag of potatoes.

Four years went by. Kenan opened a private practice in the center of town, next to a bank. His patients liked him, because he wrote fast and asked little. He bought an apartment on the street behind the theater, then another one, and rented both to students. He traded the Golf for a big black SUV in which he sat alone, sprawled back, with a belly that touched the steering wheel. He had put on weight, he breathed hard climbing to the third floor, and in the evenings, instead of reading, he counted the cash from the practice and stacked it in drawers, sorted by the color of the bills. On Thursdays he played rummy at the club for retired engineers, where he was the youngest and the angriest man at the table.

One June Nevzeta called him. Ajla had come home, she said, and had asked about him. Kenan went. Esad met him at the door with the same joke, only now he added: "And may we never need you privately." Nevzeta was writing the same novel. Ajla was thinner and more serious, with glasses she had not worn before. She played the same long, difficult piece, but more softly, as if she were apologizing to the keys. Kenan listened and thought about the students on the street behind the theater, who were late with the rent again.

Afterward she asked him to step out into the garden. The cherry tree was bigger, the bench beneath it the same. Ajla told him that in Graz she had realized she was not as gifted as everyone here had thought. There were girls from Korea and Ukraine who at sixteen played better than she ever would. "Starting in September I teach at the music school here," she said. "I have no regrets. But I often thought about you. About what you told me about the old woman from Crkvice. You were the only one of us doing something real." Kenan tried to remember that old woman's name and could not. Still, he felt something warm inside, like embers that stir when you open the door of an old stove, and he waited for it to catch.

Then Esad called out the joke about doctors and electricity from the window. From the house came the sound of Nevzeta leafing through her manuscript. Kenan thought of all those Thursdays, of the rain and carriages in the novel, of the applause after every performance, and the embers went out as quietly as they had stirred. It seemed to him that her refusal in the hallway had saved him. If he had come into this house, he too would be telling the same joke every week by now. Ajla watched him and waited. He said it was late, that his practice opened at seven the next morning, and he got up from the bench more heavily than he meant to. "Call me sometime," she said. "I will," he said.

That summer Ajla sent him two messages. In the first she wrote that she would like to sit under the cherry tree again. The second said only: "Are you all right?" Kenan read both in the SUV, in the parking lot outside the bank, and did not answer. It was not anger. He simply did not know what to write to a woman who was speaking to the man he used to be.

Several more years have passed since then. Kenan owns three apartments and has his eye on a fourth, in a new building near Kamberovića polje, because the air is better there, he says. At the practice he shouts at patients who are late and at those who ask too many questions, and among themselves the nurses call him the Till. He lives alone. When he drives past the Mahmutović house on Thursday evenings, a piano can be heard through the open window, sometimes Ajla, sometimes one of her pupils striking the keys as if trying to drive them into the wood. Kenan turns up the radio then, keeps his eyes on the road and works out how much rent he could ask for the fourth apartment.