Selver Kurtić put on the suit he had graduated in, took his blood pressure twice, once on his left arm and once on his right, and crossed the stream that separates his yard from Salko's. It was Saturday, around ten, in Arnautovići near Visoko, and a morning haze was rising off the Bosna. At the gate he was met by Salko's tornjak sheepdog Mrki, who sniffed his trouser leg and walked off, as if he had seen everything that interested him.
Salko, a retired leatherworker who had tanned hides for forty years in the Visoko factory, sat under the grapevine shelling beans. When he saw the suit, he stood up and wiped his hands on his trousers. "Selver, son, what happened? Has somebody died?" "Nobody has died, Uncle Salko," said Selver, and sat down, then stood up, then sat down again. "I have come with a request. I just hope I do not get sick while I say it. My left eye has been twitching since this morning." Salko poured him water from the jug. Selver drank it, took heart drops out of his pocket, put twenty into the glass, drank that too, and then said, looking at the beans, that he would like to ask for Amina's hand.
Salko dropped the beans into the bowl and hugged him so hard that they both nearly fell off their chairs. He said he had been waiting for this since Selver learned to walk, that his late wife had always said the two of them would marry, and that he would call Amina right away. "Please do not tell her," Selver begged. "I will do it myself. I have to do it myself." Salko went into the house, and Selver stayed under the vine and took the pulse at his wrist, counting out loud.
Amina came out in a tracksuit with gardening gloves on, because she had been transplanting peppers. She was thirty-one, worked at the pharmacy in Visoko, and was the only person in the village who did not believe Selver when he said he was ill. "Why are you all dressed up?" she asked. "Going to court?" Selver stood up, straightened his tie and began from a distance, the way he had practiced in front of the mirror for two weeks. He said they had known each other since childhood, that their houses stood side by side, and that their gardens, as everyone knew, were separated only by the stream and a strip of land under the old walnut tree, which had been his since time immemorial.
"What do you mean yours?" said Amina, and took off her gloves. "The walnut is ours. My great-grandfather planted it." Selver said that his great-grandfather had planted the walnut, and that her great-grandfather had only stood next to him giving advice. Amina said the land registry said otherwise. Selver said the land registry knew nothing, because it had been drawn up by a man from Kakanj who was tipsy by noon. Amina said it was a disgrace, that he came into their house in a suit to steal their walnut, and that she would not give it up even if he dug it out himself with a spoon. "I did not come because of the walnut!" Selver shouted, clutching his heart. "Then what for?" Amina asked. Selver opened his mouth, felt his left leg go numb, and said he would not stay there another minute.
He went back across the stream limping, with one leg wet to the knee, because he had missed the stepping stone. Salko burst out of the house with coffee on a tray and asked where his son-in-law was. "What son-in-law?" said Amina. "He came to take our walnut." Salko set the tray down on the table so hard that the coffee spilled. "He came to propose to you, you poor fool! He practiced for two weeks. Half the village knows, only you do not!" Amina went pale, then red, then ran to the stream and started calling for Selver, in the voice you use to call a cow that has run off.
Selver came back slowly, with a wet trouser leg and the blood pressure monitor in his hand. He sat down under the vine. Amina brought him a towel and said, calmly, that the walnut, if he really insisted, was perhaps half his. Selver said she was a very reasonable woman and that he had always known it. They were silent. Salko watched from the kitchen window and waved at Selver to begin. Selver took a breath, said "Amina, I would like," and at that moment his Garo, an old barak hound, ran under the table and lay down at Amina's feet.
"Look at him," said Selver, touched. "The best hound from Visoko to Kakanj. Last autumn he chased a fox out of Meho's henhouse all on his own." Amina laughed. She said Garo was a good dog, but old, that he limped on a hind leg and his lower jaw was short, while their Mrki was a real dog, a tornjak, purebred, with papers from Livno. Selver said Mrki was not a dog but a rug that barked. Amina said Garo could not find his own tail. Selver said Mrki's mother had been an ordinary mutt from Kralupi. Amina jumped up from her chair.
The quarrel that followed could be heard as far as the bus stop. Salko came out to calm them down and within five minutes was shouting louder than both of them, because he had been giving Garo bones for years and knew that Garo did not limp, he was faking it. Selver said his heart was stopping. Nobody heard him. Then he stopped in the middle of a sentence, went pale, sat down on the ground and slowly leaned back against the trunk of the walnut. His eyes closed.
"He is dead," said Amina. "He died because of a dog, before he asked me." She knelt, unbuttoned his collar, felt for his pulse the way they had taught her in the first aid course, and told her father to bring water. The pulse was there, fast and offended. Salko brought the water and poured it over Selver's head with all the love he had. Selver opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was Amina, who was holding his hands. "Selver," she said, "ask what you came to ask, while you are still alive."
"Will you marry me?" asked Selver, his hair dripping. "I will," said Amina. Salko said "Thank God," kissed them both on the forehead, then made them kiss properly, because, he said, this village had waited long enough. They kissed under the walnut, briefly and a little awkwardly, in front of Salko, Garo and Mrki. Selver said he did not feel the least bit ill, for the first time in his life.
"But Garo is still the better dog," he added. "He is not," said Amina, still holding his hands. "He is." "He is not, and the walnut is ours." Salko went into the house for fresh coffee, shaking his head, and did not come back for a long time, because he was calling his sister in Visoko to tell her. When he returned, the two of them were still arguing under the walnut, now about whose house they would live in. Garo and Mrki lay side by side in the shade, right on the boundary, and neither of them cared whose it was.