Always he was worried about something, studies, his parents, the sinister rumblings of politicians, things I paid no attention to.

—

We took the bus to Foča, and with our parents and a few old neighbours, we had a ceremony at the town hall. I asked our neighbour’s little daughter, Hana Begović, to hand a flower to each guest. After the certificates were signed, everyone had dinner in the restaurant near Lepa Brena, and while we danced, I told him, Volim te.

Then he said, We will be married again tomorrow with our friends in the city. We will be married every day of our life together.

Kosmos was waiting for us at the bus stop in the city with a borrowed green car covered with red paper roses. He opened the door and said to Ivan, Off to the hanging.

He drove us up to the abandoned bobsled track where our friends were waiting with music playing on cheap speakers and champagne and šljivovica and cans of spray paint. They’d been spraying poetry on the cement walls and handed us paint cans. Ivan sprayed a big heart and put our names inside. I wrote underneath, Zauvijek, to tell him that we would be together always.

One boy was already drunk and he shouted, He who heeds the first word of his wife must listen forever to the second, and his girlfriend punched his arm and he pretended to fall over and someone put a traditional folk dance on the cassette player and everyone scoffed at something so old-fashioned, but we all knew the simple peasant steps and danced along the length of the bobsled track. At sunset, Kosmos called to the men, Time for akšamluk!

I told them, No men’s drink time on my wedding day, and my friends said, No drinks without wives or we’ll leave you and have our own drinks.

Then the men complained, But you won’t marry us!

Kosmos pulled Ivo and me away to his decorated car and he drove us to the elegant Osmice hotel along the mountain ridge where none of us had ever stayed. He stopped at the front doors and said, Tonight I leave for Paris. When I am finished my play I will come back and hold your babies. There’s a room in there for you. Happy wedding night, a gift from your friends. Go, enjoy. There is only one first time. May you have it over and over.

And then he sang for us a popular song, “Volim Te Budalo Mala,” and he took his strangled heart away.

—

It was sometimes painful for me to hear Edina tell such intimate stories about Kosmos. I knew so little about him. Nothing of his youth. Nothing of who he was before he was an expatriate in Paris. Never could I love him with the familiar tenderness that Edina must have felt for Ivan, who she had seen grow from a boy into a man. But I loved Kosmos. And he loved Edina.