The Accordion Across the Bregava

I wanted to buy that accordion for twenty years. My café stands on the left bank of the Bregava, below the Vidoški fortress, and across the water, a little upstream, is the stone house of Asaf Krehić. In summer, when the road goes quiet, you can hear everything: Asaf watering his tomatoes, Asaf coughing, Asaf opening the accordion at nine in the evening and playing until his hands grow heavy. Red and old, its keys yellowed like a smoker's teeth, it had come to him from his father. Every year I offered him more for it. Every year he shook his head. "When I sell that, Hido," he used to say, "I have nothing left to sell."

Few people today remember that Asaf was once the second richest man in these parts, right after Abid with the quarry. He had a restaurant called Šipak, the Pomegranate, in an old watermill on the Bregava, with trout from his own pool and veal baked under a sač lid that brought people in from Mostar, Dubrovnik and Sarajevo. He had two cars, a house in Neum and fourteen waiters. He also had, unfortunately, eyes, and one summer those eyes fell on Džemila, Abid's wife.

Džemila was not a woman anyone would call a beauty. She was tall and calm and looked at people as if she were counting them. But Asaf saw no one else. He courted her the only way he knew, with food. When she came on Saturdays with Abid and their friends, dishes nobody had ordered arrived at their table: trout stuffed with walnuts, stuffed peppers, baklava he had baked himself at five in the morning. For her birthday he brought musicians from Mostar, and one August night he set off fireworks over the Bregava, so that half of Stolac thought somebody had lost his mind. Each time Džemila thanked him, politely and briefly, and went home with her husband. She never gave him half a reason. Abid laughed. He said Asaf was the cheapest cook in the world, because he only charged for the drinks.

In six years Asaf spent everything on those lunches and fireworks: his money, the house in Neum, the cars, and in the end Šipak itself, which a man from Čapljina bought and turned into a pizzeria. What he had left was his father's house upstream, a garden with figs and pomegranates, two beehives and the accordion. In the old town they said that was what a man gets for loving another man's wife. I thought it was what a man gets for not knowing how to love halfway.

Two years ago Abid died of a heart attack in his office at the quarry. Džemila was left with ten-year-old Jahja, with money nobody could see the end of, and with Abid's brothers, who from the first week began worrying about whom she would marry next. She moved with the boy from Mostar into the family house on the Bregava, three houses from Asaf's. And there something happened that neither she nor he had planned: Jahja heard the accordion.

The boy started coming every evening. He would sit on Asaf's stone wall with his legs over the water and listen. After a week Asaf put the accordion in his lap and showed him how to hold the bellows. By the end of the summer Jahja could play the old sevdalinka Sejdefu majka buđaše, wrong, but all the way through. I listened from the café and dried the glasses more slowly than usual. Džemila called him from the window when it got dark. She never once crossed those thirty meters to Asaf's yard.

In October Jahja fell ill. It started as a cold, turned into pneumonia, then into complications that kept him in the hospital in Mostar for three weeks. When they let him go home he was pale and light as paper and would not eat. He lay by the window that looks out on the Bregava. When his mother asked him what he would like, anything at all, he said he would like Uncle Asaf's accordion. If he had it, he said, he would get up right away.

Zulejha, Abid's sister, told me later that Džemila paced the house for two nights. She could have bought twenty new accordions. She bought one, German and expensive, and Jahja turned it to face the wall. I want Asaf's, he said. Džemila knew what it meant to ask for that. That man had given her everything he had, and she had never given him so much as a coffee. Now she had to go and take from him the only thing he had left. On Saturday morning she got dressed, brought Zulejha along for company and crossed those thirty meters.

Asaf was in the garden, in old trousers, when they appeared at the gate. Zulejha says he put down his hoe and stood there as if he were looking at a ghost. Džemila held out her hand. "We came to return at least one lunch," she said. "If you will have us, we would like to eat with you today. Nothing special. Whatever you have." Asaf said it was an honor, seated them on the terrace in the shade of the fig tree and went into the kitchen. In the kitchen, as he told me afterward, he had half a loaf of bread, three eggs, a jar of fig jam and an onion. In his wallet, twenty marks. In his head, twenty years of lunches he had carried to her table.

Ten minutes later he walked into my café with the accordion on his back. He did not sit down. He set it on the bar carefully, like a child being laid on a bed. "How much was it you offered, Hido?" I told him. He said he would take twelve hundred, if I had it right now, in cash. I did. I asked him what had happened. "Džemila came to lunch," he said, and on his face was something between a funeral and a wedding. He took the money and ran across the bridge toward the butcher's, and I was left with the accordion I had bargained over for twenty years, not even daring to open it.

The lunch, they say, was like the best days of Šipak. Trout from the fish farm on the Bregava, grilled, with chard and potatoes. Lamb chops, a salad of tomatoes from the garden, bread he had bought still warm. To finish, figs stuffed with walnuts, with kajmak, and coffee in a džezva he brought out on a tray, the way he used to. Džemila ate slowly and talked about Jahja, about school, about Abid's brothers, and Zulejha says that for the first time since she was widowed she laughed out loud.

When she had drunk her coffee, Džemila set down her cup and said she had not come only for lunch. She told him about the hospital, about the German accordion turned to the wall, about the boy lying by the window who would not eat. "I know how much I am asking, Asaf," she said. "I know what you gave me, and I gave you nothing. I have no right. But he is my only child. Give him the accordion to hold until he gets better. I will pay whatever you say, or I will give it back, as you wish." Asaf was silent for a long time. Then, Zulejha says, he burst into tears like a child, his hands on his knees. Džemila thought it was hard for him to give it up and began to apologize.

"It is not that," said Asaf, when he could speak. "I do not have it anymore. I sold it this morning to Hido, to make you lunch. I had nothing else to set in front of you. For twenty years I waited for you to sit at my table, and when you did, I had three eggs." He pointed at the empty plates. "There is your accordion. You ate it." Džemila looked at the plates, then at him. She said nothing. She stood up, touched his shoulder and went home with Zulejha, and Zulejha says she was silent the whole way, the way people are silent when they are deciding something.

That evening the accordion sat on my bar and I could not look at it. Before dawn I picked it up, crossed the bridge and knocked on Džemila's door. She opened it in her bathrobe. I said this was Jahja's, from Uncle Asaf, on loan until he was well, and that there was nothing to discuss about money, because the accordion was mine now, and I give my things to whomever I like. She took it in both hands and said only: "He will not forget this, Hido." I did not ask whether she meant Jahja or Asaf.

Jahja played all winter. First lying down, then sitting up, and in February standing on the terrace in his jacket while his mother shouted from the door for him to come inside. In March he went back to school. In April Abid's brothers came from Mostar with a proposal: a widower with two hotels in Neum, decent and well off, had asked about her. Džemila heard them out and said she was marrying Asaf Krehić. The older brother laughed and said Asaf did not even have an accordion. "He does," said Džemila. "Jahja has it. For twenty years he fed me, and I never made him so much as a coffee. Let us see how it goes the other way around."

They married in June, in Asaf's garden, under the fig tree. There was no music except Jahja's: he played Sejdefu majka buđaše, wrong, but all the way through, and Asaf stood with his hand over his eyes. The accordion has been in their house ever since, and all that is left to me is to listen across the water to the boy practicing. Nobody ever paid me back, and I never asked. But on Saturdays I eat lunch at their place and they never let me pay, so I have worked out that, God willing, I will have eaten that accordion by next fall.