Tea with Honey, Captain

The rain had been falling since Foča, fine and persistent, October rain, and Rade drove slowly, because the Sutjeska below the road was muddy and loud, and trucks came out of the bends without warning. General Dragoljub Šipovac sat in the back, in a gray coat, as upright as if someone were still lining him up. He was sixty-nine, with a white mustache, medals in a drawer, and an apartment in Herceg Novi, bought long ago for a wife who had not spent a single winter night in it. That was where he was going now. Rade, the son of his former driver, talked about football and fuel prices, and the general was grateful to him for not expecting answers.

Near Tjentište Rade said he needed a coffee and that there would be an inn just past the bend. It was a stone house with a wooden upper floor and a porch, with smoke from the chimney and two trucks in the parking lot. The sign over the door said Han pod Magličem, the Inn below Maglić. Inside it was warm and clean: a wood stove, checkered tablecloths, a calendar from a hardware store in Foča, a television with the sound off, and, above the bar, a faded photograph of a man in a fishing vest holding a trout as long as a forearm. A smell of pie and damp jackets. Two truck drivers were eating in silence at a table by the window.

A woman of about fifty came out of the kitchen, in an apron, with a towel thrown over her shoulder, black hair with streaks of gray, a straight back. She asked what they would have to drink. Rade ordered coffee and cheese pie, and the general tea, if they had it, with honey. The woman looked at him a little longer than necessary. She came back from the kitchen with a cup and a jar of honey, set them in front of him, and said: "Tea with honey, Captain. Like before."

Captain. No one had called him that in thirty years. He had been a colonel, then a general, then a pensioner whom people at the market addressed as boss. He looked at her, and the years began to fall from her face one by one, until what remained was a girl of twenty who had carried coffee down to the river for him in the summer of 1990. The inn had belonged to her father then, the man with the trout above the bar. He used to come for the trout, two summers in a row, with a book of poems that he read to her in the evenings on the porch, and in September he had promised to come back at Christmas and take her to the city. "Milena," he said.

He remembered, or thought he remembered, the last morning of that September. Mist over the river, her father carrying his bag to the car in silence, because he knew everything and asked nothing. She on the porch, barefoot, with her hands in the pockets of her father's jacket. She did not wave. She said only that she would wait for him with tea and honey, because the first time he came, soaked to the skin, that was exactly what he had asked for. He sang all the way to Foča. By Sarajevo he was already thinking about the transfer, and by spring he was not thinking about her at all.

She sat down across from him, with the towel on her shoulder, as if she had sat down for a minute, between two orders. She said she had recognized him through the window, by the way he got out of a car, as if someone behind him were standing at attention. Her father had died in ninety-eight, and the inn had passed to her. She had not married. "Why not?" he asked, and was immediately embarrassed by the question. "You were the most beautiful girl from Foča to Gacko." "Because I was a fool who waited for Christmas," she said calmly, the way she would have said what the pie cost.

Rade sensed something and took his coffee over to the truck drivers. The general lowered his voice. He said he had been young, that a transfer order had come, that everything had happened faster than he could think, that he had married. "I know who you married," she said. "A general's daughter, in April. We had newspapers here too, Captain, and a postman, and people who like to talk. I was twenty, and you were thirty-four. You knew what you were doing. I did not even know that it could be done that way."

She told it without hurrying, as if she were reading someone else's letter. For Christmas she had baked the česnica bread and put on a dress bought in Foča. On Christmas Eve snow fell and closed the road near Tjentište, and for a whole week she blamed the snow. After that she blamed the post office, then the army, then herself. In April her father brought home the newspaper, left it open on the table, and went out to the barn, so he would not have to watch her read it. She kept the book of poems for two more years, and then she took it to the village schoolteacher, for the school library. "Let the children read it," she said. "They don't know who brought it."

He was silent, and then he said what he had never told anyone. That his wife had left him after twelve years, for a dentist from Novi Sad, that he had loved her, stupidly and for a long time, even after that. That his son had taken his savings for some business in Vienna and lost them within a year, and now called only when he needed something. That he had an apartment full of things nobody looked at. "I was not happy, Milena. If that means anything to you." She looked at him for a long time. "It doesn't," she said. "I thought it would. For years I thought I would be glad to hear you were doing badly. I am not glad. It does nothing to me."

"Can you forgive me?" he asked. Milena looked out the window, at the road vanishing into the canyon under the rain. "For thirty-five years I have opened the shutters every morning and looked at the road first," she said. "The first years I was waiting. After that it was not waiting anymore, it was a habit, like coffee. You forgive what happens once, Captain. This happened to me every morning." She stood up, straightened the towel on her shoulder, and told him his tea was getting cold.

He reached across the table and took her hand. She did not pull it away at once. For a few seconds she stood like that, with her hand in his, and looked at him the way you look at a photograph you know is the only one. Then she drew her hand back, slowly, and picked up the jar of honey. "The tea is two marks," she said. "Coffee and pie for your driver, four." He gave her fifty marks. She brought him back the exact change, the coins counted out on the tablecloth, and when he wanted to leave something for her, she shook her head. "In my place nobody leaves more than they owe."

In the car Rade was silent for a long time, and then he could not hold out. "Did you see what kind of woman that is, General? The richest from Foča to Gacko. Half the valley owes her, people from Foča and from Gacko too, she lends money and takes interest, but fairly. My father borrowed from her for a roof. He says she has never taken anyone to court, but she has never forgotten a single debt. And she never married, though they say even doctors proposed to her." The general looked out the window at the muddy Sutjeska and did not answer.

He tried to imagine what would have happened if he had come that Christmas. Milena in army apartments in garrison towns, Milena at receptions among the colonels' wives, Milena as the mother of his son, maybe of a different son, one who would not call only when he needed money. Milena in the apartment in Herceg Novi. He could not do it. Every time he put her in one of those rooms, she stood by the window, with a towel on her shoulder, and watched the road. He closed his eyes and shook his head for a long time, alone with himself.

When they had passed the bend, he turned and looked through the rear window. The inn could still be seen among the beech trees, with smoke from the chimney and two trucks in the parking lot. The shutters on the window above the porch were closed. Rade saw it in the rearview mirror and slowed down. "Shall I stop, General?" The general looked a moment longer, until the house disappeared behind a rock. "No," he said. "Drive on."