No one greets you here

The husband, or not, was staring at me in Dubrovnik traffic. It was the husband. I decided that within the first thirty seconds. And yet, at the Ploče Gate, I also had to admit that in a line of overheated cars everybody starts to look familiar. The translation of “Ploče” is boards. I liked that redundant fact immediately. Maybe because of the whole crowded scene: scooters, motorbikes, e-bikes, regular bikes, Yugos, Fiats, Maseratis, hotel vans, and his assertive SUV with aggressive Belgrade plates wedged into the old Croatian stone. He sat in the white leather back seat, wearing a white linen shirt, one hand resting lightly behind him. The sunglasses were pushed up on his forehead, the way local men wore them, just above the eyebrows, but he was a foreigner here, just as I was. His entire posture had been spared of inconvenience. He did not look away when I looked back from my cheap rented car.

Around us, small boys in Luka Modrić jerseys circled the cars, jumping from customer to customer, leaning their heads into open windows, preying on their basic needs. They were selling tissues and bottles of water. Some carried little paper cups of raspberries already gone soft in the heat. Vespas grazed my mirrors from both sides, urban kamikazes slapping the hoods as if to say, “I’m here, don’t kill me. That is my job, you mind yours.” The old city glowed to the right in its expensive certainty, all stone and history and moral alibi. A child somewhere behind me was crying in French. I switched off my engine. The man kept looking.

He had the kind of face that did not need introduction because the world had been introducing itself to it for years. Silver at the temples. A wedding ring that caught the light once. The settled calm of a man whom nobody had ever asked twice. He was the one placing demands. If you could not read that in the way he carried himself, then you were either ignorant or not from around here.

He looked, I thought, like the sort of man she would marry.

I never found a good word for her. Lover was too ornamental, as Stefan would say. Like a main character from a Mexican soap opera. “La Usurpadora,” he would solemnly declare, then stop in the middle of a sentence, raise one hand, and let the stare do the rest while I tried to dissect whatever it was between us. Mistress belonged to another century, with pre-communist furniture and cigarette smoke at the bar. My woman was ridiculous. And untrue.

She was from Belgrade, older than me by a decade and some. Tall, beautiful, well-spoken. She entered cities as if they had already been briefed on her arrival. When I first met her in a glass meeting room in Skopje, she corrected my director in front of everyone without raising her voice. He brought it on himself, of course. He was smiling with too many teeth and touching his chest lightly every time he said welcome. My presentation on stakeholder communication went on without interruption. Afterward she gave me her card as though she were selecting a collaborator rather than beginning an affair.

A week later a fountain pen arrived at reception. I knew enough at once to know it was a serious object, to call it that. Black resin, understated gold trim, balanced in the hand with that deceptive lightness good things often have, as if somebody had already removed all strain from them. There was also a card in an envelope the colour of old bone: “Honesty looks good on you. XO.”

It came in a matte grey bag with black rope handles and no logo on the outside. That was the first sign: she offered luxury before anything else.

Stefan said, “That’s not a gift, my boy. That’s a Trojan horse.”

Stefan had come to Skopje from Sarajevo as a child in the nineties and mistrusted beautiful arrangements on historical principle. Hidden things always grew crooked, he used to say. They adapted themselves to whatever space they had been given permission to grow in. He borrowed the sentence from his mother, who had brought him out during the siege with two suitcases and a framed photograph of her parents that she refused to put in the trunk. In any conversation lasting more than twenty minutes Stefan would eventually make a joke that was hilarious, but only if you ignored the fracture inside it.

He was my best friend and my most exhausting confidant, my brutal witness.

“She’s married,” I told him after the first night in her family apartment in Dorćol, where the windows were tall, the books expensive, and there were two toothbrushes in the bathroom. Her family didn’t live there anymore. They had moved out to a village, thirty kilometers from Belgrade, years before the children were dispatched to boarding schools and international universities. Now her place served as a convenient layover between missions and strategic meetings.

“Yes, my boy,” Stefan said. “That was always the genre. The married one.”

That day in Dubrovnik I was already late meeting him. I had ditched my panel on “international partnership synergy”, and now his messages kept buzzing from the passenger-side floor where my phone had landed after a lady in a straw hat decided she was above the pedestrian law.

What happened between me and her was not exactly passion. It was education. I learned which restaurants in Belgrade had no sign on the door and the longest reservation queues. Which hotel entrances in Skopje were bribable enough to make secrecy pass for discretion, to soften the sound of the heels striking marble at the entrance. Which city was hosting her and which company would host me on those same nights. Rarely days. From Sofia to Slavonia, from Soho to Strumica, I learned which evenings belonged to her and which belonged to her family. Family was a word she used the way our governments use economy. Very broadly. Usually when the bill had already been settled. Expenses are a bitch, as their chief of staff would say.

The real humiliations were never cinematic. They came through ordinary upgrades: perfect seating at the opera, excellent service in local resorts, and easy access to business class. Her driver opening the rear door for me but not the front, even when I asked. A waiter handing her the wine list and glancing through me. A hotel manager who knew exactly how to welcome me only after he had measured my “rapport” to her. Every room around her already knew what I was before I did.

Mostly we met in Belgrade, in her inherited apartment where I would sometimes leave a razor, or a shirt, or a tie. She had bought me my own toothbrush. I kept it in the drawer. One summer night she showed me fireflies in a courtyard behind the building. I saw nothing at first.

“There,” she said, pointing into the bushes. “Not the reflections. The fireflies.”

They blinked above the hedges, appearing and disappearing low in the dark. She laughed at how long it took me to see them, then kissed me in the kitchen while the windows stood open to the summer heat.

“They’re beetles, you know, not bugs,” she said. Later, in bed, when her phone blinked a new message I was not meant to notice, she told me that when threatened, fireflies release bright drops of bitter, poisonous blood from their small bodies. Reflex bleeding, she explained.

“Even light, it seems, survives by carrying something dark within it.” Then, before she made love to me, she made a silly private joke. “You are the moth to my firefly,” she said. “UMF.”

“Oh, you mean like You, Motherfucker.” I was being ironic, but she laughed so much that I let it become ours. From that moment on, we began signing mails and messages with UMF. That felt, to me, like proof. My mistake. I mistook the absurdity of us for exclusivity.

In Dubrovnik, I discovered she used the same sign-off with her husband. I saw it briefly on his phone screen when he brought it up to check the time. UMF. That was the beginning of the end, though by then the husband had already looked at me in traffic and smiled with the smallest possible acknowledgment, as if a private confirmation had just settled behind the dark sunglasses on his forehead.

The night after I found out, she met me on a terrace above the harbour. Candles. White wine. Salt in the night air, subtle but everywhere. Metal chairs. Silky cushioning. The old city lit across the water like somebody else’s conscience.

The young server addressed her first, of course. There are waiters in bars like this who can read a table the way priests read sin. I asked her why they never greeted me properly when we were seated at the same table.

She said, “That is not about you. Or the greetings. It’s routine.”

“Please,” I said. “It is exactly about greetings. He already knows where the money sits, where permission begins, where the evening is decided, and by whom.” Her eyes stayed on me as she dismissed the boy without even lifting the hand that rested over her other wrist.

I saw her looking tired for the first time. Truly tired. I saw the woman underneath the structure, and what struck me was not fragility, but her effort not to make it visible. Until then I had mistaken her beauty for blessing. Now I saw the silent work inside it.

Then the waiter came back, brave in the way underpaid men sometimes have to be, balancing the bottle on a platter in one hand as though nothing in the world had shifted. He turned toward her with that polished little half-bow of professional offering, as if she were not merely ordering wine but conferring meaning on the table.

For one second, I felt outside myself. I watched the whole all-gesture scene as though from some balcony seat. It was almost comic in its precision. If there had been an award for the best supporting performance in my humiliation, he would have won it with ease: the perfect timing, the lowered eyes, the instinctive deference, and the briefest pause before remembering that another body was seated at the table and might still require the fiction of acknowledgment, as a guest if not quite as a customer.

Then came the delayed “sir.” The second pour. Not to include me, no. Only enough to make my exclusion deniable.

I watched his hand move between our glasses and thought that this was how my life with her had been arranged. By sequence. By timing. By the exact moment at which I was allowed to become visible.

“I bought you a car,” she said.

I laughed. Only because there was nothing else left to do. Of course she had. To her, care translated naturally into compensation. A pen. A drink. A suite. A small adjustment here, a bigger arrangement there. I do not think she wanted to degrade me. She simply made sure nothing threatened her acknowledged structure.

Back in Skopje, I let the anger leak into office life. I argued over birthday cakes and collective gifts. Over the junior staff who always had to serve the slices, and the women in admin who were expected to pass the envelope for every ritual: weddings, baptisms, circumcisions, funerals... I fought with my boss about his management prayers. Stefan watched me with the expression of a man observing a bad match he had predicted months earlier, not because of the players, but because of the terrain.

“You’re bringing your dick to work, my boy,” he said. “You’ve put it on the same table where you earn your bread. You’re turning private things into labour politics. What the hell is wrong with you?”

He was right.

I ended it in a bad café in Aerodrom, next to my old school. Aerodrom is to Skopje what Stratford’s East Village likes to think it is to London. She would have preferred Mayfair, of course. What she got was my neighbourhood, plastic chairs, and a café without coffee. I made her come onto my terrain, sit in my poorly arranged daylight, and hear me say what had taken me too long to understand.

An older waiter, probably the owner, came to our table in slow motion.

“Two?” he asked, not even looking at either of us, trying to hit a fly on the wall with his apron.

“Yes,” I said first.

“What can I get you?”

“Coffee.”

“We are cleaning the machine. Something else?”

She answered, “Tea. Mint, please.”

“Two?” He raised two fingers toward both of us at once. Then he disappeared.

“Alright, talk,” she said, with that assertive gaze she used on everyone. “It’s been so long since Croatia, I missed you.”

“As what?”

“As you. As my relief.”

She didn’t blink, but something about her was different.

“I can’t do this anymore.”

“Do what?” she asked, her eyes still fixed on my face. “But I understand.”

“I can’t go on disappearing in public just because I exist for you in private.”

She didn’t deny it. That was the difficulty with her. She rarely denied the truth. She simply remained composed inside it.

The waiter returned with the tea in large colourful mugs. He set them down carelessly enough to slosh both and left without asking whether we needed anything else.

“If you leave,” she said, playing with the string of her tea bag, “leave cleanly. Don’t keep one hand on the door.”

“I will,” I said, trying to pull out my teabag, but the string snapped and all I could do was watch it drown in the hot water.

So I did.

The first message came that same night, just after midnight:

“Are you home?”

I read it and said nothing.

The next morning:

“We need to speak when you are calmer.”

Later, during lunch break:

“This is childish. If you want to end this, use language.”

Stefan said I already had, between two bites of his tuna sandwich, but if I felt there was more to say, I could always try again.

I did not.

For a while, nothing happened. Endings do not always arrive with cast appearance and closing music. Often they remain hidden in laundry, parking tickets, and corporate meetings.

Your hands continue certain habits before the mind revokes their permissions.

Your body wakes at the same dark hour, trained for a message from a deleted number.

One Saturday, while I was attending the lavish outdoor wedding of my director, who had invited me only because he invited everyone else, she wrote:

“UMF. I hate fireflies now. This is on you.”

A tear dropped into my salad. Stefan asked me to step outside and look for his lost car keys, excusing us both from the table. Here, if somebody is publicly falling apart, everyone silently agrees to ignore it. So we went out, circled his car, hitting pebbles with our shiny shoes. We didn’t say a word. Then he called his fiancée, asking if the keys were in her purse. She confirmed. I wiped my nose with the inside of my mulberry silk tie, a birthday gift from her. Then we went back.

Less than a year later I saw her again at a forum in Skopje. She crossed the long hotel lobby, and we shook hands like two people who had once known one another in a room without witnesses and three toothbrushes: hers, his, and mine. She wore a navy skirt suit and a white silk shirt tucked in, three buttons open. I wore the same colour suit, with my pen in the upper pocket as if it were a handkerchief. She pulled it out, smiled, and placed it back, grazing my chest.

I still notice fireflies sometimes in summer, usually in places too ordinary to deserve them. A garden behind a bar. A field beyond the ring road. A dark patch near the river where my hometown forgets to perform itself. They appear briefly, pulse once, disappear, then return elsewhere.

That seems right to me now.

On the last workday before New Year, someone brought cake again.

My director looked around and said, with performative enlightenment, “Who would like to cut and serve?”

No one moved.

Then I stood, took the knife, and said, “I will. I have always supported redistribution.”

People laughed.

This time, I did too.

The traffic had started to loosen. A scooter squeezed between us and vanished downhill. Somewhere behind me, somebody leaned on a horn with the hopeless insistence of a person who still believed honking might reunite the Balkans.

The black SUV passed in front of me. The chauffeur kept his hands on the wheel. The lights turned red again. A boy appeared at his window with strawberries in one hand, and the husband dismissed him with a small, practiced gesture, one hand resting over the wrist of the other, still hooked around the grab handle above the door. It looked less like refusal than habit. The sea flashed once between two stone walls. For a second nothing happened. I could hear my own pulse more clearly than the traffic.

Then the husband turned his head without leaning forward. The sunglasses fell from his forehead to cover his eyes without any movement that suggested alarm. Sunlight touched one side of his face, and the reflection of his gold rims hit my windscreen.

His expression did not change. That was what undid me most: the terrible stillness of a man who had long ago learned that power did not need to answer.

He turned back toward the road, toward the chauffeur who once made me sit in the back, toward the beautiful coast opening ahead of him.

Not everything that lights up is meant to guide you.