to form a following among the younger guslars. He still lacked the means, however, to move to the City; and, even if he had been better funded, he was reluctant to leave Amana behind, and he could not ask for her hand without having something to offer in return. Around this time, there appeared in Sarobor a soft-spoken, bearded scholar named Vuk, who, according to the town gossips, had been traveling from town to town for almost ten years, listening to songs and stories and writing them down.
“He is a thief of music,” said those on the bridge who refused to speak to him. “If he comes to you, you send him to hell.”
The scholar cornered Luka in the tavern one night and explained to him about the School of Music that had recently been founded in the City. In an effort to gain more popularity and support, the School had begun a collaborative program with the government: any traditional musician from a municipality outside the City would be awarded a small fee for any song he consented to submit for a recording. Luka, the scholar informed him, was the man he wanted to sing for Sarobor; Luka and that charming young lady of his, even though it was not traditional for women to participate in gusla playing.
Luka had seen his first radio earlier that spring; this, combined with his encounter in the tavern, was enough to make him dream. He couldn’t see how he would get them there, himself and Amana—how a journey like that could be justified at all. The solution came one week later, in the form of a letter from Luka’s younger sister. She was writing on the pretense of informing him of her recent marriage to a man whose father owned a car factory in Berlin. Her actual goal, however, was to break the news of their mother’s death to him gently, and to negotiate his conditional return to Galina at the behest of his father, who had found himself alone and helpless. She wrote to him with news of his only remaining brother, the firstborn: he had died of pneumonia the previous winter. Two of the four who had gone into the army had died long ago, in the service of the kaiser; the second-youngest had just been killed in a fight over a woman outside a tavern two towns over. No one knew the whereabouts of the fifth brother, but some people said that he had fallen in love with a gypsy, and had gone to France with her many years ago. His father, she said, was on the brink of death. And now, despite the unfortunate incident with the bull, despite what may or may not have been said about Luka over the years, it was up to him to carry on the family name and business.
Luka, who had for so long resisted his past, suddenly found himself contemplating a strategic return to Galina. His father was old, grief-stricken. He knew that there would be no love between them upon his return; but he also knew that his father could not live long, and after that, the inheritance that would have otherwise been split between six brothers would fall to Luka alone. If he sacrificed two years now—spent them perfecting his songs in Galina while he waited for the old man to die—he could make his future with the earnings of the man who had made him wretched, use Korcul’s own fortune. The closeness of that possibility, the reality of it, made it fragile.
For a few days, he hardly spoke to anyone. Then, just after nightfall, he climbed the lattice up to Amana’s room and asked for her hand.
“Well, I knew you were mad,” she said, sitting up in bed. “But I didn’t realize you were a fool.”
Then he explained it all to her, explained about his father and his fortune, and about the radio in the City, waiting for their songs—songs they would sing together, because he could not see himself pursuing this without her. And when he was finished, he said: “Amana, we’ve been good friends all these years.” He had been kneeling by her bed. He pushed himself up and sat down on the covers beside her. “Your father will charge you, one way or another, to marry somebody someday—wouldn’t you rather it be me than some stranger who will force himself on you? I promise not to touch you, and to love you as I love you now until the day I die. No other man who comes into this room asking for you will ever make that promise knowing with certainty that it will be kept.”
It was the first time he had voiced anything close to a confession of himself, and even though she had known for a long time, Amana put a hand out and touched his face.
They began to plan their marriage. Amana agreed to confine herself to the house and avoid jeopardizing their situation; and for two months Luka made himself presentable every night and appeared at her house and ate and drank with Hassan Effendi, and the two of them smoked
If Luka had been a slightly better judge of character—if he had realized that Hassan Effendi was sold at a month and a half, and asked for Amana’s hand almost immediately—this story might have turned out quite differently. Instead, while the two of them were playing at social graces, strumming away on Hassan Effendi’s balcony and listening to each other’s opinions, they left Amana entirely out of the proceedings, left her to her own devices, left her to wait. And while she was waiting, contemplating her future as Luka’s wife, anticipating their eventual move to the City, it began to occur to her that the life of virginal solitude she had so publicly laid claim to on so many occasions had been secured. It was done. She no longer had to fear, as she had feared all her days, the presence of a domineering, oafish husband, the ordeal of the wedding night, the drudgery of marriage, the gruesome prospect of childbirth. A single decision, and those possibilities had vanished. Her life lay before her without them, and at first she was glad. But then she began to think about what a long life it was, and how the way she pictured herself lay in the presence of those fears, in the conflict they provided; it occurred to her that the struggle had not been nearly as great as the struggle for which she had steeled herself, and that, above all, with it had gone that other possibility, the unnamed one: the possibility of changing her mind. It suddenly seemed to her that her whole life had come and gone.
Two weeks before the wedding, Amana fell into bed with a fever. News concerning the severity of her illness spread around town. People said that her curtains could not be opened, that she clutched at her bedclothes, sweating and raving, that the mere act of nodding her head caused her excruciating pain.
Luka was not a friend, not a family member, not yet even an official fiance. He listened for news of her welfare in the market and on the bridge, and this was how he found out that physician after physician came and went from Hassan Effendi’s house, and that his girl was still no better. From Hassan Effendi, he was able to extract only hopeful news—
No one in town saw the miracle worker arrive; no one would have been able to recognize him in the street. It was well known that for three days and three nights, the miracle worker stood over Amana’s bed, holding her wrist, wiping her brow. It was also soon evident that this miracle worker, with one or two earnest glances, and hands that unsteadily ran the cold sponge down her neck, obliterated all of Amana’s notions of virginity and scholastic isolation, all her lifelong plans, her devotion to music and to Luka. As soon as she had begun to recover, she was sneaking out of her bedroom to meet with the physician who had saved her, just as she had snuck out to play with the guslars—except now, she was sneaking around abandoned mills and barn lofts with dots of perfume on her wrists and navel.
