Neither Hers nor Anyone Else's

I have worked at the Hadžiosmanović publishing house for twenty-six years, in prepress, and I have learned that in this building nothing is ever said directly. Not a mistake in a book, not a salary, not love. The house was founded between the two world wars by the great-grandfather of the present owner, in a building on the bank of the Miljacka, and his portrait in a fez still hangs above the reception desk, next to the portraits of her grandfather and father, Hadžiosmanovićs every one, all with the same look of a man who has just found a mistake in someone else's sentence.

Nasiha Hadžiosmanović took over the firm when her father died. She was thirty-seven, with two university degrees and an Aunt Zarifa who brought a lawyer from a good family to Sunday lunch every week. Nasiha listened to all of them with equal politeness and never invited a single one back. Those of us at the firm knew why. His name was Amer Osmić, he was the editor in chief, and he had grown up in a home for children without parents, with a surname the home's director had given him, because his own could not be found anywhere. He came to the firm at nineteen as a courier. Nasiha's father caught him in the hallway reading a manuscript he was supposed to take to the post office, and in ten years he made him the best editor in the city.

Nasiha loved him, you could tell from the way she corrected his commas. But Hadžiosmanović women do not marry couriers, even a courier who knows half of Mak Dizdar by heart. When Amer started going to lunch at the ćevapi place across the street with Martina, our young designer, Nasiha saw it from her window. The next day Martina was handed a travel order for the book fair in Banja Luka, for seven days, followed immediately by one for a course in Frankfurt. My grandmother had a saying for people like that, about the dog in the hay: it will not eat, and it will not let anyone else eat either.

Then Nasiha came up with the manuscript. One morning she brought Amer a folder with no author's name on it, a short novel in which a woman from an old family loves a man who works for her and cannot tell him so. She asked him to edit the last chapter and to write the man's reply himself, because the author, she said, did not know how such a man would talk. Amer brought the folder to me so I could print the proofs. We read it together, bent over my desk. The heroine had an office with a window onto the Miljacka and wrote with a green fountain pen. "Šerif," said Amer, "this is her."

He wrote the reply that night, in my prepress room, while the machine was running. The man in the novel told the woman he would follow her through fire and through the tax office. In the morning Nasiha read it, blushed to her ears, and gave him back the folder with a red line through the entire page. In the margin she had written: too bold, a man knows his place. That week she took him to dinner twice after book launches, and both times, at the meeting the next day, she addressed him as Mr. Osmić and found a mistake in his imprint page in front of everyone.

Meanwhile Martina called from Frankfurt every evening, and every evening Nasiha happened to have urgent work for Amer just then: a poetry collection that had to go to the printer by morning, a letter to the ministry, a contract with a translator from Ljubljana. At a reception in the City Hall she took his arm in front of half of Sarajevo and introduced him as the right hand of the house. Then the lawyer Aunt Zarifa had brought that month came over, and Nasiha let go of Amer's arm as fast as if it had burned her. Amer spent the rest of the evening standing by the table of little savory pastries, looking out the window at the river. I stood next to him, because one of us had to eat those pastries.

That went on until April. Martina came back from Frankfurt, realized what was going on, and started going out with our accountant, who was at least boring in an honest way. One evening Amer sat down on my chair beside the machine and said he was leaving. He had been offered a job at a publishing house in Zagreb. "I can't go on being a chair she moves around whenever she needs to," he said. "And I can't stop waiting for her to move me, either." I asked him whether he had told her so. "Tell her what?" he said. "That I love her? She knows that. She knows it, and so do the portraits above the reception desk. The problem is not what she knows, it is what her great-grandfather thought of couriers." He typed his resignation on my computer and left it in my drawer, to hand in on Monday. I looked at him and thought of old Lutvo.

Lutvo Begtašević came every Thursday at ten, with an umbrella and a box of cookies for the reception desk. He was eighty-two, and he was paying for the printing of a monograph about his family, the Begtaševićs, who, as the first chapter said, had for three centuries produced judges, merchants, and one bad poet. The monograph lacked only its final chapter. Lutvo had had a son, Amer, born in eighty-eight. A year later his wife left him and went to Istanbul with the child, and he never found them again, although, as he put it, he had spent two cars and one set of health on the search. He told me about it every Thursday while I laid out his photographs.

Same name, same year. The rest I set myself. On an old typewriter from the basement, on yellowed paper I had kept for years from an order in the eighties, I wrote a letter from Lutvo's late sister-in-law in Istanbul. In the letter she confesses that in ninety the child was brought back to Sarajevo and left at the children's home, because his mother could not take care of him. I signed it with her name, which I knew from the monograph, and slipped it into the box of family papers Lutvo had brought me for scanning. I said nothing to Amer. I knew he would stop me.

The next Thursday Lutvo did not bring cookies. He walked into reception pale, with the letter in his hand, and asked where the editor in chief was. He asked him when he had been born and which home he had grown up in. Amer answered and looked at me. He tried to say something more, but Lutvo put a hand on his cheek and said only, "The same chin as my father." Martina dropped a folder, and the accountant picked it up. Then Lutvo embraced him in the middle of the hallway, beneath the portrait of the great-grandfather in the fez, and wept out loud, the way old people weep when they no longer care who is watching. By noon the whole firm knew that Amer Osmić was really Amer Begtašević, the last descendant of a three-hundred-year-old family. Aunt Zarifa found out by lunchtime.

That afternoon Nasiha appeared in Amer's office with two coffees, for the first time in ten years. She said the Begtaševićs were an old house and that her aunt had no objection. Amer put down his cup. He could not do it. He told her the truth: that he was nobody's son, that Šerif had put the letter together in prepress, on old paper, and that he would not build a life on someone else's tears. I heard it because the door was open, and I happened to be carrying proofs down the hallway just then, more slowly than usual.

Nasiha was silent for a long time. Then she asked only one thing: whether Lutvo knew. Amer said he did not, and that he would tell him everything tomorrow. "You will not," said Nasiha. "I saw him in the hallway. That man has been waiting thirty-six years to put his arms around someone. You are not taking that away from him over one letter." Then she closed the door, but not all the way. "You told me the truth before I had asked you anything," I heard her say. "Nobody has ever done that for me. The rest does not interest me. Lutvo has a son, my aunt has a family, and I have you." She came out and stopped in front of me. "You will keep quiet as long as you live," she said. "And you will get a raise, to make keeping quiet easier."

They were married in June, in the garden of the Hadžiosmanović house above Bistrik. Aunt Zarifa cried with pride, Martina came with the accountant, and Lutvo sat in the front row in a suit that, as he said, had been waiting thirty-six years. When the music started, he came over to my table and sat down next to me with a plate of baklava. For a long time he watched the newlyweds.

"There is not a single mistake in your letter, Šerif," he said at last, without looking at me. "My sister-in-law never in her life wrote a sentence without two. I knew right away it had been written by the best proofreader in the city." I had nothing to say. Lutvo finished his baklava and wiped his fingers on a napkin. "For twenty years nobody came to see me on Thursdays," he said. "Now bring me the proofs on Monday. The monograph needs its final chapter, and nobody can set it better than you."