Some people want money, some want love, and some want only that someone, once, call their name from a stage. Hilmija Telalović, a senior clerk at the city water company, belonged to the third kind, and had since the fourth grade, when he won a commendation for the neatest notebook and the teacher forgot to read out his name at the school assembly. He had been waiting ever since.
He was a member of six associations, from the Friends of the Vijećnica to the Sevdah Lovers' Club, where he did not sing. For twenty years he had measured the temperature of the water at Sarajevo's public fountains, on the first of every month, and written it down in a notebook that had grown to three hundred twelve pages. Every year, when the newspapers published the winners of the Ministry of Culture Charter for Contributions to Heritage, he read the list aloud at breakfast, slowly, like an indictment. "That fellow with the photographs again," he would say. "And I have measured the Sebilj a hundred and eighty times."
His wife Elzana was eleven years younger and ran the Tulip flower shop on the street behind the government building, where the ministries ordered wreaths, bouquets and flowers for ceremonies. She knew the names of all the secretaries and the birthdays of half the assistant ministers. One of them, Ćemal Kulašin, ordered from her more often than the rest, always white tulips and always without a card. "Your turn will come, Hilmija," she would say, straightening his tie. "You just must not chase it."
One Tuesday in March a heating pipe burst at the water company and everyone was sent home at ten. On the way Hilmija bought a pound of baklava to surprise his wife and walked up to their apartment in Džidžikovac. The key went into the lock, but the door caught on the chain. He rang. For a long time nothing happened, and then Elzana opened the door, in her bathrobe, her hair wet, her face flushed. She said she had just come back from the wholesale market and had been in the shower.
In the hallway, on the coat rack, hung a coat. Navy blue, of heavy English wool, much longer than any Hilmija had ever worn. He might even have walked past it if there had not been a small gold badge pinned to the lapel: an open book with a quill across its pages. He knew it the way other people know their mother's face. That badge was worn only by winners of the Charter.
"Elzana, whose coat is this?" he asked quietly. Elzana did not pause for a second. "Yours," she said. "You have ruined my surprise." She took the baklava out of his hands, as if the baklava were to blame for everything, and lowered her voice. The decision, she explained, had already been made, but it could not be announced before the sixth of April. A man from the ministry, who bought flowers from her, had brought her the badge early, so that Hilmija would have it on his coat for the photograph, and she had bought the coat herself, because he could not go in front of the cameras in his old one. "Me?" said Hilmija. "For what?" "For special merit," said Elzana. Hilmija sat down on the shoe cabinet.
He put it on at once. The sleeves came down to his knuckles, and the hem to the middle of his calves. "Italian cut," said Elzana, looking somewhere behind him, toward the bedroom door. "They wear them longer now." Hilmija turned in front of the mirror, left and then right, and then he said he had to go straight down to Đulaga, the barber on the ground floor, because Đulaga found out everything first, and it would not be fair for him to find out this last.
At Đulaga's he sat for half an hour in the coat, even though the shop was hot. Đulaga congratulated him twice, once as a neighbor and once as a citizen. Somewhere between the two congratulations both of them saw through the shop window a tall man in a suit come out of their entrance, without a coat, hands in his pockets, and walk off quickly toward Koševo. "Look at that one," said Đulaga. "March, and him without a coat." Hilmija buttoned his own up to the throat. "People no longer know what is proper," he said.
For the following weeks Hilmija did not take the coat off. He wore it to the water company, to the Markale market, to the meetings of all six associations, and in every conversation he turned his left lapel, as if by chance, toward whoever he was talking to. He told his colleagues in confidence, each one separately. At the meeting of the Sevdah Lovers' Club he stood up to make a toast, although no one was making toasts, and said only: "I will say nothing. You will see on the sixth." The only place he did not call was the ministry, although he picked up the phone three times. Elzana explained to him that nominees who called and gave thanks ahead of time were struck from the list, without explanation. "Those are the rules," she said. "I do their wreaths. I know."
That same week Elzana called Kulašin from the flower shop. He answered in a hoarse voice and sneezed into the phone. "I have had a cold since Tuesday," he said. "I know," said Elzana. "You have until the sixth of April to give my husband the Charter. Otherwise I will send your wife a coat, in cellophane, with a bow." Kulašin was silent for a long time. "What for?" "For special merit," said Elzana. "You know his merits better than anyone."
Kulašin chaired the committee, and the committee, as always, had more candidates than ideas. At the meeting he took out Hilmija's notebook of three hundred twelve pages, which Elzana had brought in a bag from the flower shop, and said it was work of a kind rarely seen: twenty years of quiet, selfless care for this city's water. None of the committee members read past the first page. One professor asked why water of all things, and Kulašin answered that without water there was no culture either, which sounded serious enough that no one asked again. They voted unanimously, because Kulašin was smiling the way assistant ministers do not smile without a reason.
The ceremony was held on the sixth of April in the ministry hall, with a sound system that squealed and with wreaths from the Tulip flower shop. Hilmija would not leave his coat at the cloakroom. Elzana sat in the second row, in a new dress, and did not once look toward the stage. Hilmija sat in the front row, in the coat, and when his name was called, he walked past the whole row like a man who had waited forty-seven years, because he had waited exactly that long. Kulašin pinned the new badge on his lapel, right beside the old one, and his hand trembled a little as he did it. "A fine coat," he said. "Italian cut," said Hilmija loudly, so the whole hall could hear. "My wife chose it." "Your wife has taste," said Kulašin, and shook his hand for a long time.
That evening, at the kitchen table, Hilmija took off both badges and laid them side by side. They were exactly the same. He looked at them for a long time. Then he pushed one toward Elzana. "This one should go back to that man from the ministry," he said. "It must be his. What kind of man, Elzana, gives his own badge to someone else and asks nothing in return?" Elzana was wiping the table and did not look up. "A modest one," she said.
"He must be a very modest man," said Hilmija, thoughtfully stroking his sleeve, which still came down to his fingers. "Very," said Elzana. The next day she took the badge to the ministry in a little box, with a bouquet of white tulips, and the coat to a tailor on Ferhadija, to have the sleeves shortened.