The door of the director's office at the public utility Grijanje Tuzla, the city heating company, was, as he liked to say, always open. Jusuf Pralić had said so at the management meeting, at the opening of a new heating substation, and at a roundtable on modern management, where he added that a director who did not know the cleaning lady's name did not deserve his chair. He did not know the cleaning ladies' names, but he intended to learn them. He was forty-nine, with a well-tailored suit, seven months in the post, and the conviction that one sincere gesture was worth more than ten rulebooks.
One Saturday in October he was developing this thought at the table of Munib Kunosić, his predecessor, in a house above the city, with a view of the Pannonian Lakes and the chimneys of the power plant. Munib had been director for twenty-two years, had survived five governments and two floods, and considered humanity a disease that kills you in office. "People can't stand it, Jusuf," he said, pouring him a third glass of red wine. "When a director comes down among them, they are not happy. They get scared. They think someone has died or layoffs are coming." Jusuf said that was the old mentality. Munib said it was the old salary. He told how once, out of respect, he had gone to the funeral of a locksmith from the boiler room, and the family had thought the whole time that he had come for the apartment the company had once given the deceased. "The widow brought me the keys," he said. "At the cemetery." Jusuf then delivered another speech about humanity, this time without an audience, but with rakija.
Just before midnight he got up and remembered that he had sent his driver home at ten, out of pure humanity, because the driver had small children. He decided to walk. The night was warm for October, the city smelled of coal and roasted chestnuts, and he walked down toward Batva, composing sentences for Monday in his head. He crossed Freedom Square, where two girls were eating burek out of paper, and went through streets where the lights were already going out. Then he heard an accordion. In the yard of a house with an unplastered facade stood a white tent, a sign on the gate said Congratulations to the newlyweds Nezir and Dženita, and a young man smoking outside the gate told him that Nezir Mušić was getting married, the one from Grijanje, the clerk in accounting. Jusuf remembered him vaguely. Thin, with glasses. In July he had asked for a salary advance for the wedding, which Jusuf had refused, according to the rules.
He stood in front of the gate and felt that an opportunity was presenting itself such as no roundtable could offer. He would go in. He would sit with them for five minutes, drink one to the newlyweds, say a few warm words, and leave. That young man would remember it his whole life. So would his children. On Monday the whole accounting department would know what kind of director they had. He straightened his tie, which was no longer there, and went in.
The accordion stopped in the middle of a bar. About sixty people sat under the tent: relatives from Lukavac and Živinice, three colleagues from accounting, neighbors, children who had fallen asleep on their chairs. Everyone stood up. Nezir, in a suit borrowed from his brother-in-law, went so pale that every freckle showed. The bride, Dženita, turned toward her father. Rešid, a retired miner from Kreka, was the only one who did not stand. He looked at the director the way you look at a new crack in the roof of a mine shaft.
Nezir's mother Rukija recovered first. She brought the best chair from the house, the one with a cushion, wiped a plate with a napkin, piled it with sarma and roast meat, and poured rakija. Jusuf remained standing and gave a speech. He said they were all one family, that the company was not pipes but people, and that tonight he was here only as a human being. He promised an open door day, a trip to Mount Konjuh in the spring for everyone, the cleaning ladies too, and a new coffee machine in accounting. Someone clapped once and stopped. Nezir said "Thank you, Director," quietly, as if apologizing. The colleagues from accounting looked at their plates and took their phones off the table. The accordion player asked if he was allowed to play. "Play, play," said Jusuf, "as if I weren't here." The accordion player played, but nobody danced. Half an hour earlier Dženita was supposed to have danced with her father to a song she had chosen herself. Now she sat upright, as if at the photographer's, with her hands in her lap.
At the table next to the bar sat Arnel, Dženita's cousin, who wrote for the Solana news portal and held his phone low, next to his glass. It was then that Rešid spoke for the first time. "Is that the director who wouldn't give Nezir his advance?" he asked, looking at no one. Under the tent you could hear the refrigerator humming in the garage. Jusuf explained that rules were rules, but that he was here now as a human being. "As a human being, then, drink," said Rešid, and filled his glass to the brim. Jusuf drank. A human being does not refuse. So he drank a second, to the bride, and a third, to Nezir's mother, and a fourth, though nobody could later remember who the fourth was for.
What followed was retold afterward in Batva in several versions, but they all agreed on the main points. The director told them how he himself had gotten married, then how as a student he had picked raspberries in Germany, then again how he had gotten married. Twice he called the groom Nedim. He joined the kolo dance with Rukija, lost a shoe, and went on dancing in his sock, repeating that this was true humanity. When at midnight they brought out a three-tier cake from the best pastry shop in town, he stood up to make one last toast. He swayed. He fell face first right into the second tier, and the cake took it better than he did. Dženita's friends screamed, and the accordion player, out of habit, played the end of the song.
They could not send him home, because nobody knew where he lived, and he only mumbled blissfully about open doors. Rešid would not let them put him in a car. There was only one bed made up in the house, in the room Rukija had spent a month preparing for the newlyweds, with new sheets, lace pillows and the bride's bouquet on the nightstand. "Where else can we put him," said Rukija. Four cousins carried the director up the stairs. Rukija sat beside him all night with a basin and a wet towel, because it seemed to her that the worst thing of all would be for him to be taken ill in that very room. The newlyweds spent their wedding night in the kitchen, on two chairs. Dženita cried a little, then laughed, then cried again, and Nezir counted the gift envelopes until dawn, just to have something to do with his hands.
Jusuf woke at six, in a room with pink curtains. A veil hung on the chair. There was frosting in his hair. Rukija was asleep in the armchair, the towel in her lap. It took him half a minute to realize where he was, and another half to wish he were not. He crept downstairs on tiptoe. In the kitchen the newlyweds were asleep on their chairs, her head on his shoulder. Rešid stood by the window, smoking. "Good morning, human being," he said. "Want some coffee?" "No, thank you." "Smart," said Rešid. The director could not find his other shoe. He walked home across Batva in one, on a Sunday at seven in the morning, while people were going out for bread.
On Monday at nine the Solana portal published the video under the headline Grijanje Director at the Wedding of a Clerk He Refused an Advance. The part with the cake was watched most. By noon it had forty thousand views, by evening a member of the cantonal assembly had shared it with the question of who was running the public companies, and the supervisory board requested a written statement. Jusuf took sick leave. For eight days he did not turn on his phone, and in the evenings his wife read him the comments, even though he begged her not to. The comment with the most likes was a single sentence: His door really is always open, he just doesn't know whose.
On the ninth day he went back to work. On his desk Nezir's request for a transfer to the plant in Lukavac was waiting for him, neatly typed, without a single mistake. Next to it lay a small package wrapped in foil and a slip of paper written in large letters: Director, this is from the cake, you didn't get to taste it that night. Rukija. Jusuf signed the request without reading it to the end. He put the package in a drawer. Then he got up, walked across the office and, for the first time since March, closed the door.