What the Wind Said

My daughter Mia thinks I learned to sled as a child, on the hill behind my grandmother's house in Pale. I do not correct her. I learned to sled at twenty, on Jahorina, the winter the gas ran out in the middle of January and half of Sarajevo kept warm with space heaters, and the man who taught me is not the man I married. I was not even with him, if by that you mean what people usually mean. There were only a few rides down one hill and two words, and to this day I do not know who said them.

My uncle had a small wooden weekend house below the ski run, with a wood stove and three beds upstairs. My cousin Vesna came up from Sarajevo with two friends from university. One of them was Srđan, a fourth-year architecture student, tall and quiet, in a cap his mother had knitted. He said little and looked at people as if he were measuring their rooms. I was studying English in Pale then, and I was afraid of everything that slides: skis, ice, the stairs in the student dorm.

Behind the house a long hill ran all the way down to the forest road, and the children from the nearby houses sledded on it from morning till dark. My uncle's old wooden sled with red runners hung in the woodshed. On the third day Srđan took it off its nail, shook off the cobwebs, and said, "Let's go." I said I was scared. "That's exactly why," he said. I sat in front, he sat behind me, and his hands held the rope next to mine.

The first few yards were bearable. Then the hill tipped, the sled jumped, and the world turned into white noise. The wind hit me in the face, snow got into my eyes and down my collar, and the pines on both sides ran together into one dark strip. I was screaming, I think. And right there, on the steepest part, where I was sure we would end up among the trees, from behind me or from the wind itself, came the words: "I love you, Isidora."

The sled stopped in a drift at the bottom. I sat there out of breath, and Srđan stood up, shook the snow off his cap, and looked toward the hotels as if checking whether it would snow. "Still alive?" he asked. I looked at his face. There was nothing in it, no smile and no shyness, only red cheeks and snow in his eyebrows. In the pines above us the wind was still roaring, and I had known since childhood that this wind could make whatever it liked out of any sound: your name, a dog barking, your mother's voice from the kitchen. "Shall we go again?" he asked. "Let's," I said, though I was shaking.

It took us twenty minutes to drag the sled back to the top. Srđan talked about whether the bus to Pale would run with chains, about a hotel that had lost power, and about the new apartments by the road, which in his opinion were badly built. About the other thing, nothing. The second time, in the same spot, I heard the same words. The third time as well. By the fifth ride I was no longer afraid of the hill. I was afraid it would stop.

In those days I became someone I did not know. I would wake up and look out the window first to see if there was wind. At breakfast I asked Srđan, as if in passing, whether we were going sledding, and Vesna gave me an odd look, because she remembered how I had once cried at the ice rink in Skenderija. In the evenings we played rummy with my uncle, Vesna fried uštipci, and Srđan beat everyone in turn and wrote the scores in a notebook in tiny letters. Later I lay upstairs listening to the wind in the chimney, and every gust sounded as if it were about to say something.

One morning, while everyone was asleep, I took the sled out alone. I climbed up, sat down, and pushed off. The slope, the noise, the snow, and the pines were all the same. On the steepest part I held my breath and listened. Nothing. Only the wind, and the wind said nothing. At the bottom I sat in the snow for a long time, until a boy from the house next door asked if I had hurt myself. I said I had not. I put the sled back in the woodshed and told no one.

That afternoon I went down again with Srđan, and in the same spot I heard it once more: "I love you, Isidora." At the bottom I grabbed his sleeve. "Srđan, did you..." "What?" He looked at me with that measuring look of his. Behind him the wind was lifting snow off the drifts and carrying it toward the forest. "Nothing," I said. "I'm cold." "Then let's go have tea," he said, and took the rope out of my hand.

On the last evening the others were watching the news about the gas, and my uncle commented on it louder than the anchorman. I went out onto the terrace. The wind was coming down from the summit and carrying a fine snow that stung my face. I stood leaning on the railing and looked at the lights on the slope. Then, out of the dark, from the side of the woodshed or from the wind itself, came the words: "I love you, Isidora." There was no sled, no hill, no speed in which a voice could hide. I did not turn around. I smiled, at God knows whom. When I went inside, Srđan was sitting at the table shuffling cards. His hands were red from the cold, but in that house everyone's hands were red.

The next day he left. He had landed a job at a design firm in Ljubljana and had to be there by Monday. My uncle drove him to the bus station in Lukavica. Beside the car he held out his hand to me. "Take care of the sled," he said. All that winter and part of the spring I waited for a message on my old Nokia. Only one came, from Vesna: Srđan says hello to everyone.

I finished university, and today I teach English at an elementary school in Pale. I married Boško, a calm electrician who fixes everything in the house and never asks what I am thinking when I look out the window. We have two children. Once, a few years ago, I found Srđan on Facebook: Ljubljana, a wife, a big gray dog, photographs of buildings. I wrote to him, "Was it you who said it, back then on Jahorina?" I looked at the message until the screen went dark, and then I deleted it letter by letter. I did not feel I was betraying anyone. There was nothing to betray. There was only a question that, after so many years, you do not ask anyone.

Last January we went up to Jahorina with the children. The hotels are new, the road is wider, and my uncle's weekend house was bought long ago by some people from Belgrade. But the hill behind it is still there, and children still sled down it. Mia wanted me to ride down with her. Boško stayed at the top with our son and the thermos. I sat behind her, the way Srđan once sat behind me, and held the rope next to her small gloved hands.

The hill tipped, the sled jumped, and the world turned into white noise. On the steepest part I leaned down toward her cap. At the bottom Mia turned around, covered in snow, her eyes wide. "Mom, did you say something?" Above us the wind was roaring in the pines, as it always had. "No," I said. "That was the wind." She gave me a suspicious look, then grabbed the rope. "Shall we go again?" "Let's."