My memorial service, they say, was one of the nicer ones that fall. It was held in the hall of the faculty where I used to teach lab sessions, and Ermin Šarac, my best friend, spoke for twenty minutes without notes. Edna stood in the front row, in the black coat we had bought together in Vienna. People cried. I read all about it on my phone seven days later, in a hostel in Ljubljana, and I admit I cried a little myself, not for my own sake, but because of Ermin's speech, which was far better than I would have expected from a man who had owed me five hundred marks for three years.
I fell on Treskavica in October, in fog, above the lakes. The rescuers searched for nine days and found only my backpack at the edge of a scree slope, and below that slope there is nothing but rock and wind, so they concluded what any reasonable person would. I, however, had slid down the other side, sprained my ankle and limped for two days to a shepherds' hut, where an old woman gave me thyme tea and asked me nothing. I had time to think. The night before the trip, on the family tablet, I had read the messages between Edna and Ermin. The last one said: "When he gets back from the mountain, we'll tell him." Lying on the old woman's hay, I decided to spare them that conversation.
I rode down to Foča in a dairy truck, went on from there by bus through Montenegro, and a month later I was working night shifts at a factory in Augsburg, maintaining machines that make parts for other machines. In Germany I was alive, with my own passport and my own name, and in Bosnia I was dead. Between the two there was only a border, and nobody had any reason to compare the paperwork.
Three years later, during a break, my coworker Mevludin from Tuzla handed me his phone. "Look at this guy from back home," he said. The picture showed Ermin Šarac in Brussels receiving a European innovation award, a glass plaque in his hands, and beside him stood Edna, now his wife. The caption said that the Sarajevo inventor had developed a ceramic filter that cut the smoke from coal stoves by two thirds, and that this winter the canton would install ten thousand of them. The filter had my ribbed honeycomb, my casing and my mistake in the layout of the holes, which I had corrected only in the week before the mountain. Mevludin said our people were clever. I said they were and took some days off.
I reached Sarajevo in November, when the city can only be seen from the inside. The smog lay over the valley like a lid, and in Breka it smelled of coal and roasted chestnuts. The house was the same, only the gate was new, and the mailbox said Šarac. I rang the bell. Edna opened the door with a bag of mandarins in her hand, and the bag fell. The mandarins rolled down the steps, and we both watched them, because that was easier than looking at each other. "You're dead," she said. "Not exactly," I said.
We stood like that for a long time. Then Edna sat down on a step, among the mandarins, and asked where I had been. I said: on the mountain, then in Germany. She asked why I had not gotten in touch. I said that the night before the trip I had read the messages on the tablet. She nodded, slowly, as if it were a relief, and said she had sold the tablet long ago. Then she took out her phone and called Ermin. "Come home," she told him. "We have a problem." For three years I had been a dead man, and now I was a problem again.
Ermin arrived ten minutes later, white as a wall, and the first thing he did was call a lawyer. The lawyer brought my father-in-law Muris, because my father-in-law was sitting in his car, and my father-in-law called Mr. Tufo from the Cantonal Fund for Clean Air, because this, as he put it, was a matter of public interest. By eight in the evening, in the living room next to the new kitchen with its gray tiles, five men and one woman sat discussing me like a fault in the wiring.
The lawyer, Kreso Bilić, spoke first. Legally, he explained, I had died. The court had declared me dead, the registry office had entered it, the insurance company had paid out. To come back to life I would need a procedure that took a year or two, and during that time Mrs. Edna would be married to two men, which was a criminal offense, while Mr. Šarac would be, and there he paused, because he could not find the word. "The second," I suggested. The lawyer thanked me.
Mr. Tufo spoke about the air. The fund, he said, had received European money in Mr. Šarac's name, and European money does not like surprises. If it came out that the inventor was not the inventor, the money would go back to Brussels, the filters would stay in a warehouse in Rajlovac, and Sarajevo would stay in the smoke. "You, Mr. Bašić, would have the lungs of the whole city on your conscience," he said. My father-in-law Muris spoke about the kitchen. The insurance had paid a hundred and twenty thousand marks, and that money had gone into the kitchen, the car and an apartment in Stup, and if I really wanted to come back to life, I could also pay it back.
Edna said I had always been impractical. Ermin said that he had in fact saved my invention, which would have sat gathering dust in my garage for another ten years, and that I ought to be grateful to him. Then they offered me twenty thousand marks, a ticket to Augsburg and a paper stating that I had no rights of any kind to the filter. I said I would think it over until morning. At the door I added one more thing, just as an engineer: that in a real Sarajevo winter the core of that filter cracks, because the holes are laid out wrong, and that only I knew the correction. Ermin laughed. "The dead man wants to sneak in through the back door," he said. Mr. Tufo said the filter had been tested in Brussels. In Brussels, I knew, it had been tested in a laboratory, at room temperature.
That night I walked around the city. At the faculty, in the hallway on the second floor, hung my photograph in a hiking hat, and under it the year of my birth, the year of my death and a line of verse about summits. Students walked past it eating burek out of paper. In a ćevapi shop on Ćumurija a waiter looked at me for a long time and then said I looked like that late engineer on the plaque, and that if I wanted, the portion was on the house, for his soul. I ate it. In Sarajevo, I realized, the dead man was more respected than I had ever been alive.
In the morning I went to the municipal registry office anyway and told the clerk that I wished to report that I was alive. She looked at the computer, then at me, then at the computer again. She said there was a form for death but none for this, and that I would need a court ruling and two witnesses to confirm that I was me. I called Edna and Ermin. Both of them said they were not allowed to see me, because that, as the lawyer had explained to them, would mean acknowledging a fact. In the afternoon I signed their paper at the lawyer's office. I left the envelope with the money on his desk, unopened. The paper spoke about the filter as it was. About the filter as it ought to be, it said nothing.
In January a winter came such as Sarajevo had not had in ten years. In a single night eight thousand ceramic cores cracked, the stoves went back to their old smoke, and on television Ermin Šarac, in a suit, explained that it was sabotage. The reporters asked what kind. He did not know. I watched it in Augsburg, during a break, on Mevludin's phone. The canton suspended the installation. Mr. Tufo stated that the fund had never really believed in ceramics. Edna sent me one message, the first in three years: "You knew." I replied that I had told them at the door, but that nobody listens to the dead.
Ermin called me at three in the morning, at the number I had left with the lawyer just in case. "Edo, brother, please," he said. "Tell me where the holes go." I told him I was sorry, but I could not. "I'm a dead man, Ermin. You have it on paper, with a stamp." I hung up and went back to sleep. In the morning I took the train to Munich, and at the patent office I filed the corrected honeycomb under my own name, which in Germany was still very much alive.