My grandmother kept the record in a pillowcase, between two starched sheets, at the bottom of a wardrobe that smelled of soap and quinces. I found it in April, when my mother and I were clearing out her apartment in Slatina, a month after the funeral. It was heavy as a plate and black as coal, with a fine crack running from the edge toward the center. On one side there was a printed label: Kad ja pođoh na Bembašu, sung by Hivzo Turbić, accompanied by accordion and violin. On the other side the label was blank. Someone had only written on it in pencil, in small slanting letters: For H., Tuzla, 1957.
My mother turned the record over in her hands as if it were hot. My grandmother had never owned a record player. She did not sing at weddings, or at evening gatherings, or in the kitchen, and whenever someone on television started singing a sevdalinka, she would get up and go put the water on for coffee. "Maybe it's from someone at the factory," my mother said, because my grandmother had worked at the salt factory for thirty years, and everything my mother could not explain came from there. I work as a sound technician at a small Tuzla radio station, and when I put the record in my bag, my mother said nothing. She only watched me wrap it in a scarf.
For a seventy-eight rpm record I needed a record player of the kind nobody has anymore. I found one at Uncle Avdija's, who sells old radio sets at the flea market on Saturdays and lets nobody touch them. He let me, once he saw the label. He said Hivzo Turbić had sung in the fifties at a café near Freedom Square, and that he had a voice that made the waiters forget to collect the bill. Then he disappeared, Uncle Avdija said, the way singers disappeared in those days: he got married and fell silent. He lent me the player for a week, on condition that I bring him a recording.
I recorded at night, after the last show, when only I and the automated system that plays music until morning are left in the studio. Side A was scratched but whole. The cleaning software stripped off the crackle layer by layer, like old paint coming off a wall, and underneath it a voice appeared. It was a young man's voice, high, a little husky on the long notes, and he sang Bembaša as if someone had just told him something funny and he was trying to keep a straight face. I played it five times. Then I turned the record over.
I had never heard the song on side B. It was not in any collection, on any recording, or in the songbook my mother had kept since music school. It began with a violin, alone, as if someone were quietly opening a door, and then the same voice came in, only without the laughter: Habiba, salt on your lips, whoever loves you, loves you bitterly. My grandmother's name was Habiba. The song had three verses. In the middle of the third, exactly where the crack cut across the groove, the needle skipped. A second and a half of silence, then the final chord. I tried everything I know. The groove was simply not there anymore. Whatever had been in that second and a half had gone with the crack.
The internet knew little about Hivzo Turbić: three records between fifty-five and fifty-eight, titles without years, and one photograph as blurred as if seen through steam. And one comment, four years old, under a recording of Bembaša by some other singer: My grandfather Hivzo Turbić sang this too. If anyone has a recording of him, please get in touch. We don't have a single one at home. Selim. I wrote to him at two in the morning. He answered within four minutes, as if he had been sitting by the phone for four years. He was a piano tuner in Sarajevo. On Saturday he arrived on the first bus.
He was tall and thin, with a canvas bag over his shoulder and hands that did not know what to do with themselves until they touched something that made a sound. From the bag he took a wooden box with his own headphones. He said he did not trust other people's headphones, just as he would not trust another man's hammer. In the studio I played him Bembaša. He listened with his eyes closed, and when the song ended, he did not open them right away. "That's how he sang when he was old, too," he said. "Only quieter. And only in the bathroom." In fifty-eight, he told me, his grandfather had moved to Sarajevo, married, and worked for thirty years as a bookkeeper at a tobacco factory. He never talked about the records. When his grandchildren asked whether it was true that he used to sing, he would say that had been some other man.
Then I played side B. Selim did not move until the second line. On the second line he began to hum, ahead of the voice on the record, half a beat early, like a man who knows the way by heart. He took off the headphones and looked at me. That tune, he said, his grandfather hummed every morning while he shaved, without words, always up to the same place and then from the beginning again. When they asked him what it was, he would say: a song I gave away. Nobody knew to whom. I asked what his grandmother's name had been. "Mersa," he said. "And yours?" I showed him the label and that penciled H. For a long time we were silent, each with our own grandmother.
We knew nothing. We knew only that in fifty-seven my grandmother was twenty and worked at the salt factory, that in fifty-eight she married my grandfather, a miner from Kreka, and that she never owned a record player. We knew that Hivzo left for Sarajevo that same year and fell silent. What remained was the song, and without its ending. Selim asked if he could hear the place with the crack. I played it for him five times, ten times. Each time he hummed across the gap, because he knew the tune, his grandfather had repeated it for him every morning, but he did not have the words. That was when I thought of my mother.
I called her at noon and told her to listen. Selim, a little embarrassed, hummed the last line into my phone without words, the way he had heard it over the bathroom sink. On the other end there was a silence so long that I thought the call had dropped. Then my mother, who does not sing even at birthdays, began to sing softly and hoarsely, as if afraid of waking someone: sing, my love, when I am gone. My grandmother, she said afterward, sang that to her every night until she fell asleep. Only that one line, always the same, to a tune my mother had never heard anywhere else. She had thought it was some old song from my grandmother's village.
My mother promised to come to the studio at seven. Until then Selim and I walked around the city. We had ćevapi for lunch near Freedom Square and then went to the salt lakes, empty in October, with the showers turned off and the kiosks locked. Selim dipped his hand in the water and licked a finger, seriously, as if he were tuning a piano. He said the water was salty and that now he knew where his grandfather got his first line. I laughed, and he looked at me as if he had heard a note he had been searching for a long time. He asked me why I hum when I think nobody can hear me. I had not known that I hummed.
At seven my mother came, in her best coat, as if for a doctor's appointment. She stood in front of the microphone and said she could not sing. Then, when I gave her the signal, she sang that line three times, each time a little louder. Selim stood behind the glass with his hands in his pockets. When my mother came out, she looked him over from head to toe and told me, loudly enough for him to hear, that my grandmother had never trusted a man with ugly hands.
I set my mother's voice into that second and a half of silence. It took me two hours to bring it down to the same pitch, to give it the same crackle, and to make sure the seam could not be heard. Then the three of us sat down and I played the song from the beginning. The violin, the door, the voice of a young man who is not laughing. Habiba, salt on your lips. Three verses. In the middle of the third the voice for a moment became older and lower, a woman's, a little unsure, and sang what someone had given away in fifty-seven and someone else had kept for almost seventy years in a single line. My mother looked at the floor. Selim looked at me. Nobody said anything until the end began to crackle.
The last bus to Sarajevo left at nine. I drove Selim to the station and gave him a USB stick with the song, and he gave me his business card, as if I did not have it. He said that in Sarajevo he had his grandfather's piano, out of tune for twenty years now, and that he had been saving it for some special occasion. The bus pulled out. Somewhere near Živinice a message arrived with three words: whoever loves you. I knew how the line went on. I wrote back that this time it did not have to be bitter.