The parrot first greeted her with, "Nera, where are you?" Vesna laughed, and Alen explained rather too quickly that Nera was his former wife. They had been divorced for five years; the bird simply remembered. Vesna was forty-eight and owned things she had not replaced after her divorce either. She understood. She just had not expected one of his belongings to turn every arrival into a roll call for an absent woman.
On the third Saturday the bird added, "My darling." Alen covered the cage with a thin cloth and asked whether she wanted more tea. Vesna said there was no need to darken an animal's world in the middle of the day on her account. She felt embarrassed even to notice whose name it said. Nera lived in another city and had remarried. Yet in this room somebody kept calling for her, in a voice far gentler than Alen's current way of speaking.
The next time, a slip of paper bearing Vesna's name lay on the table. Alen admitted they had been practicing. Every morning he told the bird, "Vesna is coming." It answered with the old sentence, followed by the sound of the kettle. Vesna laughed so hard that the parrot paced uneasily along its perch. She pictured this serious man negotiating before work with a little green creature indifferent to the sequence of his romantic life.
Still, she told him that something else had hurt. She wanted to hear him speak tenderly, rather than persuade the bird to change its repertoire. Alen studied the paper for a long time. In his previous marriage he had said those words automatically, he explained, and now he feared promising things he might not know how to sustain. Vesna asked for no grand speech. She simply asked whether he looked forward to Saturdays. "I start looking forward to them on Wednesday," he replied.
They stopped training the bird. Vesna brought mandarins, because Alen always forgot to buy fruit, and sat farther from the cage. Sometimes Nera entered their conversation as a person, with an amusing habit or a bad recipe. Then her name in the parrot's beak no longer occupied the entire room. It had a place among the other things they had both brought from their lives before that small table.
One Thursday Alen called and let Vesna listen. The parrot clearly said, "Vesna is coming." Then it imitated the kettle three times. Vesna looked at her pile of unwashed dishes and the clock above the window. "It has the wrong day," she said. "Perhaps it doesn't have to," Alen replied. She arrived without mandarins, carrying an ordinary loaf of bread. This time the man who opened the door was the first to say her name.