The menu of the Behar eatery in Bistrik was typed every morning by a woman who had never once walked into the Behar as a guest. Fehim Čaušević, the owner, said it was the smartest deal he had made since he inherited his father's cooking pots and his debt to the suppliers. By eleven o'clock Sumeja Kadrić would type and print the day's offerings for him, in Bosnian and in English, for the tourists who came down from Baščaršija and asked what klepe were. In return he sent her food twice a day in a sefertas, an old one, with four pots. The sefertas was carried by Fehim's grandson Ajdin, a mechanical engineering student, up the steep stairs of a house in Sagrdžije, where Sumeja had been renting an attic room since March.
She earned the rest of her living by typing other people's words. For a translation agency she transcribed recordings of court hearings, for students she typed theses, for pensioners petitions to the municipality. They paid her when they remembered. Her laptop was eight years old, and the printer swallowed every third sheet, so she had learned to pull the paper out of it with two fingers, slowly, like a bone out of a fish. She spent her days at a window that looked out on rooftops and on a piece of Trebević, with headphones over her ears and other people's lawsuits in her head.
Last summer she had not been here. Her grandmother had died in April, and Sumeja spent the whole summer in Nišići, on the plateau above Srednje, emptying her grandmother's house and answering the neighbor women who asked why she still was not married. Asim Mehić was the son of the next-door neighbors. She remembered him as a boy who threw pine cones at her, and she found a man of thirty, with shoulders as wide as a barn door, with forty sheep, with bees and with a habit of keeping quiet until he thought of something worth saying.
In June, when the dandelions are just opening on the plateau, because up there spring runs a month behind Sarajevo, Asim took her to the meadow above the village. They sat down in the grass, and without looking at her he wove a wreath of dandelions and set it on her head. He said the dandelion was the first green to come out of the ground after winter, and that every spring his mother picked it for a salad with a boiled egg, to wake up the blood. Then, in the same voice, he said he would marry her when the snow melted and the ewes had lambed, if she was willing to wait. Sumeja said she was. She dried the wreath between the pages of a book and brought it to Sarajevo.
All autumn and winter he called her every evening at nine, from an old phone he kept in a plastic bag in the barn so the damp would not harm it. The calls were short. Asim reported how much snow had fallen, which ewe had fallen ill and that he had been thinking of her, in that order. In December he even sent her a real letter, four pages long. And then in March, in a single week, everything shifted. Her landlady in Hrasno raised the rent, and Sumeja moved to Sagrdžije. Two days later, in the crush of a tram at Marijin Dvor, someone pulled the phone out of her jacket pocket. Asim's number was in it, the only copy. She did not know it by heart. She could not find him online, because Asim had neither a profile nor any intention of ever opening one.
She wrote him a letter at the only address she had: Nišići, the Mehić house, for Asim. She wrote her new number at the end in large digits and underlined it twice. One week passed, then another. The phone stayed silent. Sumeja transcribed court records and in every stranger's quarrel looked for an explanation of her own silence. Maybe Asim had read it and decided he had more peace with his sheep. She made up her mind to get on the bus on Saturday and ask him herself, to his face. Until Saturday there were three days left and one menu.
Fehim called on Tuesday morning, in the mood of a man who has made a good purchase. "As of today it is spring," he said. "Strike the beans and the cabbage. Write: zeljanica, sirnica, nettle soup, wild garlic with potatoes and dandelion salad with a boiled egg. This morning a man brought me a whole sack of dandelions, he says he picked them at dawn above the city, the dew is still on them." Sumeja said the menu would be ready in half an hour, opened a blank document and started typing.
She typed the way she always did, fast and without looking at the keyboard. Zeljanica. Sirnica. Nettle soup. Wild garlic with potatoes. When she reached the dandelions, her fingers stopped above the keys. She saw the meadow above Nišići, the grass that smelled of honey, and Asim's big hands braiding stem into stem, clumsily and patiently. Her eyes clouded over. No longer seeing the screen, she typed the line to the end, printed five copies and went back to the court record before she had a chance to read what she had written. A tear fell on the first sheet just as it was coming out of the printer and spread across the middle line into a small gray stain. When Ajdin came for the menus at eleven, Sumeja was knee-deep in someone else's lawsuit and did not look up.
At noon the man from the mountain was sitting in the Behar, at the table by the window, because Fehim, pleased with the dandelions, had invited him to lunch. He was big, in a work jacket, with a folded sack under his arm and the face of someone who had not slept well for a long time. It was his eleventh day in Sarajevo. He slept at a cousin's place in Rajlovac, picked dandelions at dawn in the meadows above the city, in the morning sold the cheese he had brought from home at the Markale market, and in the afternoon went around Hrasno, building by building, asking about a girl who typed on a laptop. The neighbors only knew that she had moved somewhere in the Old Town. The Old Town, a pensioner on a bench told him, has more gates than you have sheep.
While he waited for his zeljanica, he slid the menu out of its plastic sleeve and began to read, slowly, the way people read who do not read often. Zeljanica. Sirnica. Nettle soup. Wild garlic with potatoes. And then, under the gray stain, a line that read: Dearest Asim, with a boiled egg. He read it three times. Then he got up, went over to the register and showed the sheet to Fehim. Fehim turned red to the ears. "I am sorry, this is a mistake. My typist never makes mistakes, I don't know what is wrong with her today." "She did not make one today either," said Asim. "Where does she live?"
At half past six someone knocked on the attic door. Sumeja thought it was Ajdin with dinner, so she opened it in her socks, with a pencil behind her ear. Asim was standing at the door, holding the sefertas. Behind him, two steps lower, Ajdin was pretending to look out of the window on the landing. "This is for you," Asim said, and held out the pot. "The kid says there are klepe inside." Sumeja did not take the sefertas. She stood on the threshold and looked at him as if he too were one of those recordings that have to be transcribed exactly, word by word, so that nothing gets lost.
"I called you," he said. "Every evening at nine. A woman's voice tells me the number does not exist. I wrote to Hrasno twice, and both letters came back. Nobody in the village knew where you were. Eleven days ago I left the sheep with my brother and came." "My phone was stolen," she said. "I wrote to you in the village." "Then the letter is waiting for me there," he said. "And I am here."
From his jacket pocket he took the folded menu, the one with the stain, and showed her the middle line. Sumeja read it, and for the first time in two weeks she laughed, the way a person laughs who has been caught red-handed. "This is a mistake," she said. "The boss says the same," said Asim. "He says tomorrow you will type a new one, the right way. I asked him to give me this one. Nobody has ever put me on a menu before." Then he added, seriously, as if he had been thinking about that for days too: "Only, I am not bringing the egg. The eggs are in the village. The hens are waiting for you."
Sumeja took him by the sleeve of his jacket and pulled him into the room, together with the sefertas and the sack. She hugged him the way you hug someone you have already begun to mourn, hard and angrily, and he stood there with the pot in his hand, not knowing where to put it down. Ajdin quietly went back down the stairs. On the table, next to the laptop, lay a book with a dry brown wreath sticking out of it. Asim kissed her only when he finally put the pot down, and he put it down on a stack of printed court records.
In the sefertas there were two portions of klepe, two spoons and a slip of paper in Fehim's handwriting: "For two. You type the menu until May, without mistakes. After that I am looking for a new typist." They were married in May, in Ilijaš, and the wedding lunch was held in the village. Whenever a guest orders the dandelion salad, Fehim still tells them it is the most expensive dish he has ever had on his menu: it cost him the best typist in Sarajevo. Since then Ajdin types his menus, with mistakes.