Ruza came to the traditional-crafts exhibition because her sewing cooperative had received free tickets. She did not expect to find her own wedding dress in a glass case. She recognized the gold thread around the sleeves and one incorrectly embroidered twig she had never fixed. The dress supposedly belonged to the cultural center director Elvira's grandmother and illustrated the work of women from surrounding villages.
Ruza's dress was not even forty years old. She had made it herself in an apartment above the bus station and last seen it in a trunk in the attic. Her husband Branko insisted the trunk had been damaged when the roof leaked. He said he saved the photographs but had to throw away the fabric. Ruza had comforted him then because the loss seemed to hurt him more than her.
She approached Elvira as she adjusted the microphone. She did not shout. She showed her a wedding photograph on her phone and asked her to remove the item from the exhibition. Elvira first said dresses could resemble each other. Ruza described an inside pocket where she had kept a bus ticket during the wedding. The catalog said nothing about a pocket.
The curator unlocked the case and carefully examined the lining. The ticket was still there, faded, with a date matching the photograph. They postponed the opening for half an hour. Elvira took Ruza to her office and admitted that Branko had given her the dress. He said Ruza had no sentimental attachment to objects. Their affair had lasted almost a year, long before the roof leaked.
Ruza leaned against a chair without sitting. Elvira tried explaining that shame had made her invent the grandmother story. "You turned my life into a decoration for your own," Ruza said. She requested the dress back, a correction to the catalog, and the restoration invoice so she could learn what had been changed. For her marriage she had no request that could be settled in that office.
The center published a correction, and Elvira withdrew from organizing the next exhibition. At home Branko tried to discuss love that had happened unexpectedly. Ruza asked him to fetch the ladder first. Together they opened the attic. The trunk was dry, filled with his old magazines. Only then did she cry, angry at the small, practical tidiness of his lie.
She later offered the dress to a craft collection, with her name and the correct date. She did not want it in her bedroom while deciding how to live next. The curator asked whether the incorrect twig should be removed. Ruza slipped her finger beneath the gold thread. "That one is mine," she said. The new label stated that the dress had been made by twenty-four-year-old seamstress Ruza for her own wedding.