Bajro Kajtaz was buried on Thursday afternoon, and by Friday morning his stone house in Bjelušine had more guests than it had seen in the last ten years of his life. The notary was not due to read the will until Monday, so the family decided to spend those three days under one roof, as Huško, the eldest nephew, put it, "so the deceased will not be alone." The deceased, admittedly, was in the cemetery, but nobody wanted to be the first to say so.
Also in the house, as for the previous six years, was Vinka, a woman from Čapljina who had cooked for the old man, given him his medicine, bathed him and got up at night when he called. She was forty-seven, with a little room next to the kitchen and a habit of walking quietly. The relatives greeted her the way one greets furniture. Huško's wife Fahra immediately handed her a list: coffee for everyone, pie for lunch, bedding for the guests, and she was not to forget the lemons, because Huško drinks tea with lemon when he grieves.
Huško, as a retired bank clerk, believed that grief did not rule out order. By noon on Friday he had made an inventory. He walked from room to room with a notebook and wrote down: wall clock, one; rugs, four; copper ewers, six; television, one, new. Meanwhile, in the kitchen, Fahra counted the silver spoons. She counted them twice: the first time there were eighteen, and the second time, after she had closed her handbag, seventeen. She told Huško eighteen, and that was what he wrote down.
Hajrunisa, the deceased's niece, arrived from Vienna on Friday evening with her son Mido and two empty suitcases. She cried louder than anyone, at the gate, on the stairs and again in the living room, in front of Bajro's photograph, until she found out that the two apartments on Šantićeva Street were rented out to students. Then she stopped and asked how much they paid. Mido, who was twenty-five, filmed everything on his phone for the relatives in Austria who could not come.
The quarrel began on Saturday at breakfast, over who had loved the deceased more. Hajrunisa said she had called him every Bajram. Fahra said Hajrunisa had called him once, five years ago, when she needed a guarantor for a loan. Hajrunisa said Fahra had neither come nor called, but had sent Huško to check whether the old man was still alive. Huško said those had been visits. Vinka brought the coffee and, as usual, kept silent. She was the only one who knew that none of them had called the deceased even on the last Bajram, when he lay sick with pneumonia.
On Saturday afternoon Avdo arrived too, a distant cousin from Bijelo Polje who had called the deceased uncle even though he was not. He came in a van, with two friends and plastic sheeting for wrapping furniture. He said his uncle had promised him the Mercedes and the fishing gear twenty years ago, and he had only come for what was his. Huško stood in front of the garage with his notebook. Avdo said a notebook was not the law. Huško said order was the law. In the end Huško blocked the gate with his car, and Avdo honked for half an hour, until the neighbor women appeared on their terraces across the Radobolja.
That evening the family sat down to come to an agreement calmly and like decent people, as Huško had proposed. Huško believed the house belonged to him, as the eldest. Hajrunisa believed the apartments belonged to her, because she had children. Avdo believed the commercial space on the Rondo belonged to him, because he had nothing. By ten o'clock they were shouting so loudly that above the Radobolja they could be heard over the water. At eleven Mido, thinking he was filming only for the cousins in Linz, accidentally streamed the quarrel live on Facebook, and by midnight half of Mostar knew how long each of them had been waiting for Bajro to die.
By morning the video had eleven thousand views. Under it people wrote things that in Mostar are usually said only behind someone's back. The baker in Carina asked Huško, as he wrapped his bread, whether it had been decided who would get the rugs. Huško's former colleagues from the bank sent him messages full of emojis he did not understand. Hajrunisa said she would sue Facebook, and Mido, without looking up from his phone, explained to her that it did not work that way.
That Sunday they agreed on only one thing: Vinka had to go. Fahra said women like that knew how to get close to old men. Hajrunisa said she had seen in Vienna what caregivers get up to. Huško generously decided that she should be paid two months' wages from the common fund. Before that, Fahra had asked where the deceased's gold watch was, and Vinka had opened the drawer of the nightstand and shown it to her, exactly where Bajro had always kept it. Fahra said she had only been asking. When they told her in the kitchen that she had until the end of the month, Vinka nodded and said she had packed her things back on Thursday.
On Monday at ten the notary arrived, Branimir Lasić, a thin man with a leather briefcase and glasses on a chain. The family sat in the living room, in black. Hajrunisa held a handkerchief at the ready, Avdo wore a borrowed blazer and had parked his van outside the gate just in case, while Mido filmed until the notary told him to stop. Vinka stood in the doorway with a tray, as always. The notary asked her to sit down. Fahra said she was staff. "She is in the will," said the notary, and Vinka sat down on the edge of a chair by the door.
The notary opened the envelope and read slowly, as if afraid someone might miss even a single word. The house in Bjelušine, with everything in it, both apartments on Šantićeva Street and the savings in his account, Bajro Kajtaz left to Vinka, "who for six years fed me, bathed me and listened to me, and who was the only one who came even when I had nothing to give." The commercial space on the Rondo he left to the soup kitchen in Mostar, so they could cook there for the people nobody comes to see.
He had not forgotten the family either. To Huško he left the wall clock, "since he has already put it on his list anyway." To Hajrunisa he left the family album, "so she can see what I looked like." To Avdo he left the fishing gear, but not the Mercedes, "because I never had a Mercedes, only a Golf, and I sold that too." The will had been drawn up four years earlier, before two witnesses, with a doctor's certificate that the deceased was fully of sound mind. The notary read all of it in the same tone he had used for the rest, and took off his glasses.
For a while nobody said anything. Then Fahra was the first to stand up, walk over to Vinka and embrace her. She told her she had considered her a sister from the very first day, and that she had always told Huško what a pure soul Vinka was. Hajrunisa invited her to Vienna for New Year's. Avdo asked whether such a big house needed a man's hand, since he was fifty-eight, divorced and could fix any faucet. Huško offered to help her with the bank, since he understood such things.
Vinka set the tray down on the table. She picked up Huško's notebook, which was lying next to the notary's briefcase, and leafed through it. "You made a nice list," she said. "Wall clock, one. Rugs, four. Ewers, six. Silver spoons, eighteen." She went into the kitchen, opened the drawer and did not have to count for long. She came back, stood beside the open door and said that there were seventeen spoons in the drawer, and that she would be glad if the eighteenth were back in its place before the guests left.
Nobody moved. Mido, for the first time in three days, put down his phone. Then Fahra, looking at neither her husband nor Vinka, opened her handbag.