In July, when even the lizards in the rocks around Ljubuški do not move before five in the afternoon, Cvita sat under the grapevine in front of her house and cleaned green beans. She had been a widow for two years. The late Pavo had left her a house in Vitina, the last one in the village, right above the gravel road that runs down to the river. He had also left her a vineyard of two hundred vines, their son Stipe and a wardrobe full of suits he had never worn, because, as he used to say, a suit needs an occasion, and there are no occasions in a village. Stipe worked at the quarry above the village and came home at seven. Until then Cvita talked to the hens, to the radio and sometimes to Pavo, at the cemetery, where she brought him fresh flowers every Saturday.
That day a young man with a backpack came to the gate, tanned, with sunglasses pushed up into his hair and the kind of smile that sells vacuum cleaners. He asked if there was any water. He drank slowly and looked around the yard, like a man who knows the price of everything he sees. Cvita brought him water, then pomegranate juice, then prosciutto and cheese, because in Herzegovina a traveler is not sent away hungry even when he looks suspicious. He introduced himself as Ero. "And where are you from, son?" Cvita asked. Ero looked toward the hills to the west, where there was nothing but rock and sky, and said what he said everywhere: "Oh, from the other world, ma'am. From far away."
Cvita put down her knife. "From the other world?" she repeated quietly. Ero made his living by listening to what people wanted to hear, so he heard at once that she had misunderstood him and that it would pay to leave it that way. "Then did you see my Pavo there?" she asked. "Pavo Šimić from Vitina? Tall, mustache, wears a cap even when it's hot." Ero took off his sunglasses. "Pavo?" he said. "How could I not have seen Pavo? Pavo is my neighbor." Cvita still looked him over. "And what are his eyes like?" "Blue," Ero said without thinking. "They're brown," said Cvita. Ero was not thrown. "They used to be brown. Over there everyone's are blue, from all that sky." Cvita sighed. That made sense.
In the next half hour Cvita learned everything. Pavo was fine, but he was short of all sorts of things. The suit they had buried him in had worn out quickly, because over there you walk a lot. His shoes had fallen apart. He was smoking other people's cigarettes. In the evenings they played trešeta, and Pavo, just like here, lost and ended up in debt. Worst of all, his phone had died in the very first week, so he could not call home, and there were no chargers over there, nobody had thought of it. "That's why you dreamed of him looking so sad," Ero said, and Cvita, although she had never once dreamed of him looking sad, nodded at once.
She packed as if for a trip to Germany. Into a big blue market bag she put Pavo's navy suit, two white shirts, his Sunday shoes wrapped in newspaper, a carton of cigarettes Pavo used to hide in the shed thinking she did not know, a jar of fig jam and a piece of prosciutto. From the tin cookie box where she kept money for a rainy day she counted out eight hundred marks. Then she stood over the drawer for a long time and finally added her own charger. Ero helped her close the zipper. "When he charges his phone, tell him to call me," she said. "Only not after nine, Stipe is home then."
Ero promised to deliver everything personally, in three days, when he went back. He kissed her hand, slung the bag over his shoulder and set off down the gravel road toward the Trebižat, whistling something that Cvita later, in front of the whole village, called a very beautiful song for a man from the other world. Once he was around the bend, he stopped whistling and quickened his pace.
Stipe got home at seven, dusty and hungry, and the first thing he saw was the empty cookie tin in the middle of the table. Cvita, overjoyed, told him everything. "There was a man here from the other world. Your dad is fine, he just has no shoes. I sent him his suit." Stipe grabbed his head. Eight hundred marks was all they had until the grape harvest. "Mom, what other world! Which way did he go?" "Toward the river," said Cvita. "On foot. Over there you walk a lot." Stipe got into his old Golf Two and raced down the hill, raising white dust behind him.
Ero heard him from far away. In that heat and silence a Golf with a holed muffler can be heard all the way to Ljubuški. It was not the first time someone had chased him, but it was the first time a Golf had. He did not have to think for long. He pushed the blue bag into a gap in a dry-stone wall under a fig tree, took someone's straw hat off a fence post, pulled off his shoes and sat down on a rock by the water, with his feet in the Trebižat, like a man who had been sitting there since noon and meant to sit there until dark.
Stipe braked right next to him. "Did you see a guy with a blue bag?" Ero took his time. He looked at the car, then at Stipe, then at the slope across the river. "I did," he said. "Ten minutes ago. He crossed the river on the stones and went up through the brush, toward those houses. You can't get there by car." Stipe looked at the brambles, the rocks and the sun that was still not setting. "Watch my car," he said. "The key is in the ignition. If anyone comes, honk." He pulled off his shoes too, crossed the river jumping from stone to stone and disappeared into the brush.
Ero waited until Stipe was a dot among the pomegranate bushes on the slope. Then he took the bag out of the wall, set it on the back seat, put the hat back on the fence post and sat down behind the wheel. Before he drove off, he honked twice, politely, as agreed. On the slope Stipe turned around, because the horn meant someone had come, and saw his Golf leaving in a cloud of white dust toward the main road to Mostar.
He came home at ten, on foot, scratched, sunburned and one shoe short. No one on the road would give him a ride, they only asked him where his Golf was. Cvita was waiting for him at the gate, and behind her the neighbor Anica, who had heard about the suit and come to see how it ended. "Well, did you catch him?" Stipe looked at his mother, then at the empty cookie tin visible through the window, then at the neighbors' windows, behind which the flicker of the television had suddenly stopped. He thought of tomorrow's coffee in the village and of everyone who would sit down to it. "I caught him, Mom," he said. "And I gave him the car. So he can get to Dad faster."
Cvita clasped her hands. "Well, now I can rest easy," she said. "Pavo never liked walking." Since then she has carried her phone in her apron pocket, and when an unknown number calls, she answers before the second ring.