At dinner at a friend's home, Lidija put the stress in the wrong place in a word she had never previously needed to think about. Everyone laughed, including her. Then they asked her to say it again. After seventeen years abroad, she had returned for a job she wanted, not because of the failed life acquaintances enjoyed speculating about. Yet at dinner tables she constantly had to prove how much she still belonged to them.
Armin sat opposite her that evening. He asked whether she liked her new job and then remembered the answer. That was enough for her to accept his invitation for coffee. They discussed apartments, buses, and his habit of forgetting a tangerine in every bag. Lidija stopped halfway through a sentence, searching for a word. He supplied it without mockery. She thanked him, although the familiar feeling of an examination remained.
The third time they went out, Armin said he found the way she pronounced his name sweet. He asked her to repeat it. She put down her cup a little too loudly. He looked surprised, so she had to explain something she did not want to explain on every date. Her speech was not a souvenir from another country. Not every unusual syllable meant she was playing a game or trying to attract attention.
Armin did not defend himself by citing other people who surely did it out of love. He said he liked her voice but should not have placed her in front of a little microphone. Afterward he became stiff himself, as though he now had to watch every word. Lidija teased him about that. She did not want a different kind of examination taking place beside her. She only asked that they not repeat her past every time she opened her mouth.
One morning they went shopping for curtains for her apartment. Lidija could not summon the name of the small plastic piece used to hang them. She began describing the hook with her hands, and Armin showed the seller an old example he had brought in his pocket. Along the way they argued about color. To him they were all gray; to her they were very different. She bought the ones she wanted and invited him to help hold the ladder.
While hanging the last curtain, she called him over to the window. In one short sentence she mixed two accents and a word from the other country. Armin understood that he needed to catch the end of the fabric. He came over, lifted it, and stayed beside her looking at the street. Lidija rested her head on his shoulder. Her apartment was not fully unpacked yet, but that morning nothing in her voice was being asked to go backward.