In the window of my shop in Trebinje, between the wedding bands and the little crosses, a flowerpot of baked clay has stood for three years now, glued together in four places. Customers ask how much it costs, and I tell them it is not for sale, because it is the most expensive thing I have ever sold. Then I let them think old Simo the goldsmith has gone a little soft in the head, and I tell them how my apprentice Uroš married the daughter of the merchant Momo Kecojević.
Uroš came to me from Ljubomir at twenty, with hands bigger than my molds and a patience that cannot be taught. In five years he learned everything I knew and a few things I did not. He was quiet, wore the same navy jacket winter and summer, and sent every mark he earned home. When Miss Ksenija Kecojević first walked into the shop in March, with her grandmother's bracelet whose clasp had broken, Uroš froze with the loupe in his eye as if someone had nailed him to the chair.
Ksenija was twenty-four then, had studied economics in Belgrade, and had come back to keep her father's books, although her father still kept them himself, in his head. Momo owned a wholesale business on the edge of town, three grocery stores, and a stone house by the Trebišnjica, with a high wall and a fig tree peeking over it. He guarded his daughter like the company seal. Ksenija looked at Uroš's hands and said: "Master, this is a delicate clasp, please don't fix it with a hammer." Uroš repaired the clasp so that the joint could not be found even under the loupe, and when she came for the bracelet, he would not take any money.
From then on Ksenija passed our window every morning, on her way from the square with the plane trees to her father's office. For the first few weeks she did not even turn her head. Then she began stopping to look at earrings she did not need. In July she came in once to ask the price of a silver chain and stayed half an hour, because Uroš was explaining to her how wire is drawn, and I went into the storeroom so as not to be in the way. She told him he was boring. The next day she came again, to tell him once more how boring he was.
Momo heard about it from someone, because in Trebinje everything is heard from someone. He came into the shop, bought a gold pen for his best man and, while I was wrapping it, said loudly, so that Uroš at his bench would hear: "Simo, tell your apprentice to look at the gold, not at my house. My daughter is marrying a doctor." The doctor was Vojin, a dentist from Belgrade, with a practice in Vračar and a mother who was already choosing the hall. The engagement was set for the first Saturday in September.
Uroš worked all through August without a word. On the Thursday before the engagement he asked me to lend him the ladder. I did not ask why. For forty years I have watched gold melt, and I know there are things you should not touch until they cool.
On Friday, at six in the morning, when the bakeries on the square raise their shutters and the women from Ljubomir lay out cheese and kajmak at the market, Stojanka Bodiroga, the Kecojevićs' neighbor, went out for bread. First she heard barking, and then she saw the goldsmith's apprentice in his navy jacket climbing down over the Kecojević wall, through the branches of the fig tree. Behind him he knocked a pot of basil off the wall, and it shattered on the sidewalk. Uroš jumped down, buttoned his jacket up to his throat, looked at Stojanka, and said: "Good morning, Aunt Stojanka. I only beg you, not a word to anyone." Then he walked off down the street, unhurried, like a man with a clear conscience and something valuable in his pocket.
Stojanka kept her promise until seven. By seven the baker knew, by eight the market, by nine the taxi drivers in front of the bus station, to whom Neđo, Uroš's friend, confessed over coffee that around midnight he had driven the apprentice to the Kecojević gate and that the boy had asked him to keep quiet. By noon half of Trebinje knew that Ksenija Kecojević was letting the goldsmith in over the fig tree, and by evening that it had been going on since spring.
Ksenija burst into the shop at noon with the shards of the flowerpot in a plastic bag and shook them out onto the glass above the wedding bands. "Are you out of your mind?" she asked Uroš, and did not even look at me. "You have never been in our garden. I have never let you in. Half the town is looking at me as if I were out of a soap opera." Uroš put down the loupe. "I was in the garden," he said. "From five to six. I sat under the fig tree and waited for Stojanka. Your family was asleep, you were asleep, and the dog has known me since July, because I've been bringing it bones from the ćevapi place." Ksenija said she would tell everyone the truth. "Tell them," said Uroš. "Who will believe you? Stojanka saw me." She grabbed the largest piece of the flowerpot, and I feared for the window, but she only put it in her bag and slammed the door behind her.
She came back an hour and a half later. She was no longer angry, or she was, but in a different way. She sat down on the customers' chair and told us that on her way three people had asked her when the wedding was. The woman at the market had given her a bag of figs and said "for the bride, from the heart." By the cathedral the priest's wife had asked her whether the wedding would be up at Hercegovačka Gračanica. And at the pharmacy she had heard the newest version, in which Uroš came into the garden over the fig tree and left through the gate, while Momo, in his pajamas, held the ladder for him. That was when she began to laugh. She laughed so hard that I brought her a glass of water, and Uroš stood behind the counter, red to the ears, not knowing where to look.
"You are crazy," she told him when she caught her breath. "You are crazy and you lied to all of Trebinje." "I only lied to Stojanka," said Uroš. "Trebinje made up the rest on its own." Then he took a little box of red velvet out of the drawer and set it in front of her. Inside was a ring of gold he had bought out of every paycheck, with a fig leaf engraved so finely that it showed only when the ring was turned toward the light. "I started making it the day you told me not to fix things with a hammer," he said. "If the doctor had come on Saturday, it would have stayed in the drawer." Ksenija turned the ring toward the window and looked at the leaf for a long time.
Momo came at five in the afternoon. The doctor's mother had called him from Belgrade at three, because someone had sent her a message on Viber, and told him that her son was not a man who got engaged to a girl all of Herzegovina was talking about. Momo came in stooped, sat down on the customers' chair, and was silent for a long time. Then he said to me, not to Uroš, that the Kecojević house had always been a clean house and that a shame like this could be washed away by nothing but a wedding. "Let them marry by Mitrovdan," he said. "And let no one say I did not give them my blessing."
Ksenija, who was standing by the window, said she would think about it. Her father looked at her as if he were seeing her for the first time. Uroš searched under the counter for a cloth for the glass, because his hands were shaking. "I have thought about it," said Ksenija after a minute, and put the ring on her finger herself, before anyone could put it on for her. Momo let out a breath, stood up, straightened his tie and, like a true merchant, asked me how much the wedding bands would cost him and whether there was a discount for the Kecojević house.
I told him there was, but that he was paying for Stojanka's new flowerpot. Ksenija took the largest piece out of her bag and put it back among the shards on the counter, and that evening I glued the pot together in four places. That is why I say it is the most expensive thing I have ever sold: for it I gave away the best apprentice I ever had. Uroš and Ksenija have their own shop now, on the other side of the square. When some tourist asks me why an old flowerpot stands in a goldsmith's window, I just point past the plane trees, to where Ksenija Bjelica, once Kecojević, is waving to me through the glass.