For twelve years I drove Velid Hrustić, and in that time I learned three things: not to turn on the radio while he was talking, not to talk while he was silent, and that he was never silent. Hrustić Construction had put up half the new buildings between Slatina and Sjenjak, and on every billboard along the road to Lukavac Velid smiled beneath the slogan "Building Tuzla to Measure." Whose measure, it did not say, but anyone who knew him knew. He was forty-two, with three cars, an office on the fourteenth floor of his own tower and a habit of sometimes speaking about himself in the third person, as of someone he held in high regard.
Ibro Salkić had been the firm's storekeeper since the days when the firm had two trucks and one cement mixer. That March they were tearing down an old house in Džindić mahala, so that something with an underground garage could rise in its place, and in the rubble, under the rotten floorboards, Ibro found a mortar. It was brass, as heavy as a one-year-old child, with engraved flowers and a year nobody could read. He took it home and spent the whole evening cleaning it with lemon and vinegar, until it shone like new.
His daughter Nejra was twenty-eight and had lived with him in Slavinovići since her mother died. She made crosswords for a Tuzla news site, and in the rest of her time, as Ibro used to say, she put him together as well. She looked at the mortar on the kitchen table and said: "Dad, don't take it to him." Ibro said it was the honest thing, that the mortar had been found on the building site and belonged to the firm. "It does," said Nejra. "But I know Hrustić from the papers. If you bring him the mortar, he'll ask for the pestle." Ibro waved her off. A mortar without a pestle is still a mortar, he said, and the boss knows how to appreciate a beautiful thing.
The boss appreciated the beautiful thing for exactly four minutes. I was in the office when he lifted the mortar to the window, turned it in the light and said it would stand on his desk, where the investors from Vienna could see it. Then he set it down. "And the pestle?" Ibro said there had been no pestle. "There's no mortar without a pestle," said Velid. "Whoever found the one found the other. What were you thinking, Ibro, selling it at Baščaršija?" He called accounting and told them to stop Ibro's pay until the pestle turned up, and told the gatekeeper not to let him onto the site.
Ibro sat down on the bench in the hallway, under the framed photograph of Velid cutting a ribbon, and began to speak aloud, to himself: "My daughter told me. My daughter told me." He repeated it ten times, loud enough to be heard through the door. Velid came out. "What daughter?" Ibro told him everything, from the kitchen table to the lemon. Velid listened with the smile of a man whose move someone had guessed in advance. He did not like that. "Zoran," he said to me, "bring me a brick from the warehouse."
I drove the brick to Slavinovići, with a note written in Velid's fountain pen: by Monday his daughter was to build a house out of this brick, and then he would take her father back. Nejra opened the door in a tracksuit, with a pencil behind her ear. She read the note in the doorway, laughed, went into the house and came back with a single match and a sheet of paper from a notepad. "First let him make me a crane out of this match," it said. "I don't build without a crane." She gave me a coffee too, for the road. Velid looked at the match on his palm for a long time, and then he laughed too loudly, the way people laugh when they do not know what else to do.
The next day he ordered thirty hard-boiled eggs from the canteen and sent them in cartons, with a note saying that by Saturday Nejra was to hatch thirty chicks from them for the opening of the shopping mall, because it would look nice on television. I came back with a pot of beans, still warm, wrapped in a kitchen towel. A note was taped to the lid: "Cooked beans. Let him plant them on the roof of his tower, so the chicks will have something to eat when they hatch." I drove that pot more carefully than I had ever driven the director. At the traffic light by Kapija I tried one spoonful. It was good.
Velid ate the beans himself, at his desk, beside the empty mortar, and did not say a word through the whole lunch. It was the first time in twelve years. Then he took his fountain pen and wrote for a long time, crossing out and writing again, as if drafting a contract. The third note was short: Nejra was to come to him in the tower neither by day nor by night, neither on foot nor by car, neither with a gift nor without one. When he sealed the envelope, he laughed properly for the first time that day. He was sure he had caught her. Nejra read the note in the doorway, said nothing, and this time she did not give me a coffee.
The next day, at dusk, when the streetlights had already come on in the city but the sky above Ilinčica was still light, Nejra rode up to the tower on an electric scooter. A red balloon on a string was tied around her wrist. The gatekeeper called upstairs, and Velid came down in person, in his jacket, and looked at his watch, as if a watch could settle it. "Neither day nor night," said Nejra, and pointed at the sky. "Neither on foot nor by car," she said, and tapped her foot on the scooter. Then she untied the balloon from her wrist and held out the string to him. "And this is the gift." When Velid reached for it, she let it go.
The balloon rose past the fourteen floors of the Hrustić tower, past the billboard with his face, and Velid watched it until it vanished above Ilinčica. I stood by the car and watched him not knowing what to say. "All right," he said at last. "You win. What do you want?" Nejra said she wanted her dad's pay, her dad's job and an apology in front of the whole warehouse. "And the pestle?" Velid asked. "There never was a pestle," she said. "And you knew it from the first day."
He rehearsed the apology in the car, at every traffic light from the tower to the warehouse, and I pretended not to listen. In front of twenty workers he told Ibro that he had been wrong, and he said it once, without the third person. Ibro got his pay and his chair back. On the first morning the gatekeeper greeted him as if he were back from a trip. The mortar stayed on Velid's desk, empty. But Velid was not finished. A week later he sent me to Slavinovići with a new envelope. Inside was a sheet with an empty crossword, clumsily drawn in marker, and a single clue: "Twelve letters, across: a man one woman outwitted three times."
Nejra filled in the squares in a minute. Underneath, in small letters, she added a clue of her own: "Five letters, down: the word this man never says before he asks for something." Velid spent the whole afternoon over it. He tried "hitno," urgent, and "odmah," right now, two five-letter words he said every day. Around six he stood up, put on his jacket and told me to drive to Slavinovići, but this time not to carry anything, because he would carry it himself.
Nejra opened the door with a pencil behind her ear. Velid stood in front of the door without his fountain pen and without any papers, with hands that did not know where to go. "Molim," he said, which means please. Nejra waited. "Please, come out to dinner with me. You choose the place." She looked at him for a long time, and then she said: "Correct. Five letters." She took her jacket from the coat rack. I drove them to the ćevapi place by Kapija, because that was what she chose, and waited outside for three hours. For the first time in twelve years I turned on the radio, because there was nobody in the car to talk to me.
In September I drove them to the municipal hall. Nejra carried a pencil in her bag, just in case. As a wedding present Ibro brought a package wrapped in newspaper. Inside was a brass pestle he had turned himself on the lathe in the workshop behind the warehouse. It was a little shorter than it should have been. Velid set it in the mortar and said it fit, and nobody contradicted him, not even Nejra.