A Carnation from the Charity Ball

That evening, in the garden of a café on the Vrbas, the young people were arguing about how much a man needs to know about the family he marries into. Some said it was enough to know the girl, others that you always marry her father too. Miloš Vujić, who was seventy-two and had been listening in silence until then, his hands resting on his cane, said at last that it was not a matter of how much you know, but of which morning you happen to see. When they asked him what he meant by that, he ordered another coffee and told them this.

I was twenty-four and head over heels in love. Don't laugh, that's how people put it, but with me it was literal. I had finished mechanical engineering, was waiting for a job, and lived with my mother in Borik, and everything I did, I did in order to see Natalija Kosorić. She was tall, she had a long neck and a smile that started in her eyes and only then came down to her mouth. Half of Banja Luka was in love with her. I was only the most persistent. And her father liked me, or so it seemed to me. He invited me to Sunday lunches, asked me about machines, poured my rakija himself, from his own bottle, and promised me a place in the company's design office as soon as my diploma arrived.

The ball was a charity ball, for the children's hospital, in February, in the great hall of an old hotel near Gospodska Street. The orchestra from the cultural center was playing, the women wore long dresses, and the men wore suits that were tight across the shoulders. Natalija was in white, with a carnation pinned below her shoulder. I danced a waltz with her, then a tango, then a waltz again, and whenever someone else came up to her, she would say she had already promised that dance to me. I drank nothing. I was drunk on her and on the music, and on the way the hall smelled of cologne, of wax, and of the snow people brought in on their coats.

Near the end, around two o'clock, the organizers asked Director Kosorić to open the last waltz with his daughter. Velimir Kosorić was the director of the largest wood products company in the city, a man whose name was spoken with respect in the bars and in the city offices alike. He was as tall as she was, gray-haired, upright, with a mustache he groomed as if it were part of his job. People stepped back and made a circle. He held out his hand to his daughter, bowed slightly, and the orchestra began.

He did not dance much, but he danced precisely, with the old-fashioned seriousness of people who had learned to dance at a class in their youth. I looked at his shoes. They were black, old, resoled many times and polished to a shine, and that moved me more than anything, because I knew the man had money for a hundred new pairs. Later I heard he wore them on purpose, because he liked to say he came from a working family and did not forget where he came from. When the waltz ended, he brought Natalija over to me, as if handing her over, said, "Take care of her for me, young man," and went back to his table. People applauded him. I applauded hardest of all.

When we said goodbye, on the hotel steps, Natalija gave me her carnation. She told me to put it in water and said she would come and check whether I had kept it. It was, I think, the happiest moment of my life, and I know that so surely because it lasted only three more hours.

I could not sleep. At home I put the carnation in a glass, changed my clothes, and went out again, at five in the morning, because my room felt too small. A fine snow was falling. I walked along the Vrbas, across the bridge and on down the bank, and my feet carried me on their own toward the Kosorić house, which stood just past the factory grounds of the wood company, by the river. I only wanted to see her window. I imagined that she could not sleep either and that she was thinking of me.

When I came near the fence around the factory grounds, I heard voices. In the yard, under a floodlight, between stacks of planks, stood two rows of workers in blue coveralls, facing each other, like a line of guests at a wedding. Between them, at the head of the rows, stood a man of about sixty, without a jacket, in his shirt, holding his cap in his hand. Next to him, on the snow, lay a sack from which pieces of firewood had spilled. And in front of them all, in a long black coat over his evening suit, stood Director Kosorić.

Later I found out what had happened. Mićo Gajić, the night watchman, twenty years with the company, had been caught carrying a sack of scrap wood out of the grounds. At home he had a sick wife and a cold stove. Someone had called the director at four in the morning, and the director had come straight from the ball, without changing. He lined up the first shift that had arrived and ordered Mićo to walk between them, slowly, from the beginning of the rows to the end, and every worker, as he passed, was to say one word to his face. Thief.

And that is how it went. Mićo walked step by step, his head bowed, his cap pressed to his chest as if in church, and the men spoke, one after another, some loudly, some quietly, some looking down at the snow. Thief. Thief. Thief. The director walked beside him and listened. When they reached a young man near the end of the row, the boy mumbled something no one could hear. Kosorić stopped. He stepped so close that their faces almost touched and said calmly, in the same voice in which he had told me three hours earlier to take care of his daughter: "Louder. Or tomorrow you will be standing in his place." The boy said it louder. His voice broke in the middle of the word.

Then the director turned and looked toward the fence. He saw me. I know he saw me, because I was standing under a streetlamp, in the same coat I had worn at the ball, and because for a moment something shifted in his face. But then he looked away, as if I were anybody, a passerby, a dog, and told the foreman to see Mićo to the gate and not to pay him his wages for that month. He took his gloves out of his coat pocket and pulled them on, finger by finger. That is how I remember him. The gloves, finger by finger.

I don't remember how I got home. I remember feeling sick, the way you feel sick when you have eaten something spoiled, except that I had eaten nothing. My mother asked me what was wrong, and I said I was tired from dancing. The carnation stood in the glass on the table. I looked at it for a long time. I did not throw it away. But that day I did not go to the Kosorićs' for lunch, although I had been invited, and I did not go the following Sunday either.

Love, children, does not end all at once. It goes out like a stove. I saw Natalija a few more times that spring. She knew nothing, she was guilty of nothing, and she was as beautiful as before. But whenever she smiled, with that smile that started in her eyes, I saw the yard, the snow and the gloves, finger by finger. Once we were walking below the Kastel fortress, by the river, and she told me her father was asking why I no longer came and that the job in the design office was still waiting for me. She asked me what was wrong. I did not know what to tell her. How do you tell a girl you have fallen out of love because of her father? In the fall she married a doctor from Prijedor. I heard she was happy. I hope she was.

"And me?" Miloš laughed, when one of the girls in the group asked him what had become of him. "I didn't go to work for the wood company, even though a job there had already been promised to me. I went to a small workshop in Laktaši and stayed there thirty years. Kosorić got a medal, and later a street, not here, but in the town where he was born. I don't know whether he was a bad man. Maybe he believed that was how things should be done. Maybe he knew something I didn't." He fell silent and looked at the river. The young people were silent with him. In the end someone asked what had happened to the carnation. "It stood in the glass until it wilted," said Miloš. "Then my mother threw it out. I didn't tell her not to."