Permission from Vienna

For twelve years Ramiz sold tomatoes and peppers at Markale, at the stall next to mine, and in all those twelve years I never saw him lift his eyes above the prices written on cardboard. That winter he started looking up. Across the street from the market, on the third floor of a building from Austrian times, a lamp burned at five in the morning, and behind the curtain sat a woman. She sat like that every morning while we unloaded crates from the vans, and she stayed until it was light. "She doesn't sleep," Ramiz said one morning, more to himself than to me. "She never could sleep when she was alone in the house."

That was how I found out he knew her. Her name was Mersiha and she was from Haljinići, the same village near Kakanj that he drove his tomatoes in from every morning. At twenty-two she had gone to Sarajevo to cook and clean for a widower, a law professor, in a big house on Logavina Street. Her second winter there she slipped on the icy steps in front of that house and broke her leg so badly that she always limped a little afterward. Professor Mulabegović, a man of fifty-eight, would not let her go back to the village. He married her. Half of Sarajevo talked about it for a whole autumn, and then a son was born and people found something else to talk about.

"And you?" I asked him. Ramiz was arranging peppers, red ones on one side, green ones on the other, as if something important depended on it. He said he had asked her to marry him before she left. She had asked him to wait a year. He went to a construction site in Slovenia to earn money for a house, and when he came back, she was already Mrs. Mulabegović. "I didn't hold it against her," he said. "The professor had a library. I had half a greenhouse."

The rest I learned from her, later, when she started coming down to the market. The professor had died seven years before. Her son Imran had finished law school in Vienna and stayed there, at a law firm with a brass plate at the entrance, and he had gotten engaged to the daughter of one of the partners. He sold the house on Logavina right after his father's death, because he needed money for an apartment in Vienna, and he left his mother the flat above Markale, registered in his name, and the professor's small pension. Mersiha had spent her whole life working or waiting for someone to come home. Now she had neither.

The first time she came down was in February, in a camel-colored coat, leaning more on her left leg. She stopped in front of Ramiz's stall and looked at the tomatoes for a long time, as if she did not see them. "Ramiz," she said, "đe have you been all this time?" She blushed at once and corrected herself: "Gdje." Ramiz laughed, for the first time since I had known him, the way people laugh when they are not thinking about selling. She explained it to me later. Imran called her on video on Sundays, and while she talked, he corrected her. You don't say đe, you say gdje. You don't say šćela, you say htjela. You don't say vako. "He's right," she said. "He's a lawyer. His mother can't talk as if she came from Haljinići yesterday."

From then on she came down every morning. She brought coffee in a thermos, for him and for me, and stood between our stalls until the first customers arrived. One Saturday, as we were closing, Ramiz asked her if she wanted to come with him to the village. She came back in the evening with mud on her shoes and a bag of spring onions, and on Monday she told me how she had seen the house she was born in, without a roof now, and the Bosna River near Kakanj, muddy from the rain, and Ramiz's four greenhouses, which were as warm inside as May. She said đe and šćela and vako, and nobody corrected her.

In April Ramiz proposed to her, between the crates, in front of everyone. He did not kneel, because afterward, he said, he would need help getting up. "I have a house, I have four greenhouses and, God willing, another twenty years. I don't have a library." The woman at the stall across the way started clapping, then stopped when she saw that Mersiha did not answer right away. Mersiha said yes. She also said that first she had to talk to Imran. The flat was in his name, the pension was small, and he was all she had. "I won't get married behind his back," she said. "He hasn't deserved that."

She talked to him that Sunday. On Monday she came down later than usual, with eyes that would not look at Ramiz, and she told me about it, because she could not tell him. Imran had been silent for a long time. Then he asked if she was serious. A vegetable seller from Markale, he said, and from the very village she had barely gotten out of. His wedding was in June. His fiancée Katharina's father knew who Professor Mulabegović had been, and people had been invited from Sarajevo and from Vienna. What was he supposed to tell them? That his mother was marrying a man who sold tomatoes under her window? "He said under your window," Mersiha repeated. "As if that was the worst part."

In July Imran came to Sarajevo for three days. He refused to meet Ramiz. On the last day he took his mother to Bare cemetery, to his father's grave, and there, while she brushed the leaves off the marble slab, he asked her to promise him something. That she would not marry without his permission. Not for his sake, he said, but for his father's. Mersiha promised. Imran hugged her and flew back the next day, and she carried that promise the way she carried that leg, without complaining in front of others.

Ramiz waited. The first winter, then the second. Every morning, as we unloaded the crates, he lifted his head toward the third floor, and she still came down, only less often, and the coffee in the thermos was colder and colder by the time it reached us. Every Bajram she called Imran and asked again. In the meantime Imran had a daughter, and then his own name on the brass plate. Each time he gave the same answer: "Mom, not again." "I'll wait," Ramiz would say when I asked him how long. "I'm used to waiting for things to ripen."

The third winter Mersiha fell ill. She lay in the hospital at Koševo for two weeks, and I brought her soup and whatever Ramiz sent from the greenhouses, though she could not eat. Once she told me she would like to be buried in Haljinići, next to her mother, where you can see the river. She died in March, at fifty-three. Imran arrived from Vienna the next day and decided she would lie at Bare, beside his father, because the family grave was there and because, as he put it, she had been Mrs. Mulabegović after all.

The funeral set off at ten, from in front of the building across from the market, when Markale was at its most crowded. Ramiz covered the tomatoes with a white cloth and stood in front of his stall in a dark jacket, his cap in his hands. The hearse moved slowly, because people with shopping bags were slow to get out of the way, and three cars followed it. In the back seat of the first one sat Imran, in a black coat, and as they passed us, he turned his head and looked at Ramiz. He looked at him briefly, the way you look at a crate someone has left in the middle of the sidewalk, and then he turned to face forward.

The lamp on the third floor was never lit again. In May a young couple moved into the flat and hung white curtains. Ramiz still sells at the stall next to mine. Every morning at five, as we unload the crates, he lifts his head toward that window, and I have learned not to ask him anything then.