On Kazandžiluk, where we had our shop, you could tell the day of the week by the sound. On Mondays my father hammered out the bottoms of coffee pots, on Tuesdays the delivery man came with sheets of copper, and on Thursdays at ten old Zaim stood in front of the shop and tapped twice on the doorframe with one finger. He never came in. My father would give him five marks, I would bring out coffee in a small cup, and he would drink it standing, his hand on his heart, and say: "Thank you, daughter, may it come back to you at your exam." I was studying pharmacy, and there was always an exam.
He sat on a stone bench by the fence of the Baščaršija mosque, but he did not beg the way the others did. He did not hold out his hand to tourists, he did not sing for them, and he did not show them wounds. He had a pressed gray coat, a clean-shaven face and a hat he lifted to every woman of the bazaar. He also had a schedule, like a clerk. On Mondays Nusmir from the bakery gave him a somun, on Wednesdays he got half a portion of ćevapi at Refik's, and on Fridays after Friday prayers someone always left him a mark or two. He never took money from children; instead he gave the children candy from his coat pocket. People loved him because nobody had to feel ashamed around him. Giving to Zaim was like paying a bill you were glad to pay.
For thirty-two years he had worked at a furniture factory in Stup. When the factory went under, it turned out that nobody had ever paid his contributions, so at sixty-six he received a paper stating that he had no pension. He carried that paper in his inside pocket, folded in four, and once he showed it to me, not to complain, but so that I would explain a word to him. The word was "unfounded." He lived in a basement room on Vratnik, with a widow who charged him no rent as long as he chopped her firewood.
Fikreta Pašalić ran a souvenir shop across from the Sebilj fountain and sold factory-made coffee pots as handmade. She had a voice that carried all the way to the Bey's Mosque, and she knew everything about everyone, and what she did not know she made up by the evening prayer. She also ran a Facebook group called "Čaršija Live," with eleven thousand members, where she announced funerals, lost cats and who had sold out whom. Under every post she asked people to share it, and people shared. My father said Fikreta was the only radio in Sarajevo that could not be switched off.
One Thursday in March Fikreta stopped by our shop and, still in the doorway, told my father she had seen Zaim at the post office on the Obala. "At the counter he counted out one thousand two hundred marks, Suad. In hundreds. I'm standing right behind him, counting along with him." My father said Zaim was probably changing his coins, because everyone who lives on small change does that. "What coins," said Fikreta. "I saw hundreds." By evening a photo of Zaim on his bench had appeared in the group, and under it a sentence: "This gentleman from Baščaršija takes home more each month than a doctor at Koševo. You can give, I won't anymore." Below it there were four hundred comments.
The following week the story rose like dough. Zaim had an apartment in Bistrik that he rented to tourists. He had a son in Germany who sent him euros. He had a house in Hadžići, and some people even knew the color of its facade. A news portal picked up the post and put his face under the headline "Millionaire Beggar of Baščaršija?", with a question mark, so that nobody would have to answer for it. Tourists began filming Zaim on their phones, and one young man asked him in English how much he made per hour.
Zaim did not have a smartphone, and he was the last to hear about the post. A young waiter from the teahouse across the way showed it to him, thinking it was a joke that would make him laugh. Zaim looked for a long time at his own photo, then at the comments, and asked for the letters to be made bigger. Then he handed the phone back, said thank you and sat down on the bench as he did every day. He sat straighter than before, like a man waiting for his name to be called. Nobody called it. People only looked, some for a long time, and some in such a way that he could see them looking.
Nusmir was the first to stop. "I'm not going to feed a landlord," he said, and the somun stayed on the shelf. Refik said he would give his ćevapi to those who really needed them. On Fridays after prayers people walked past the bench as if it were empty. And my father, who for nine years had given Zaim five marks every Thursday, said on the third Thursday after Fikreta's post: "I don't know what the truth is anymore, daughter." When the double tap came, he was bent over the anvil with his back to the door. I took the coffee out myself. I had five marks of my own in my pocket and did not give them, because I was ashamed to let my father see that I was better than him. Zaim drank the coffee standing, his hand on his heart, and this time he did not mention the exam.
He tried to explain. He went to Fikreta with his paper from the pension fund, and she read it aloud in front of two tourists who were choosing magnets and said anybody could print a paper like that these days. He went to the post office and asked the clerk to tell people what he had been changing at the counter. The clerk said she was not allowed to talk about customers. Then he stopped coming to the bazaar. He tried Marijin Dvor, near the shopping center, where nobody knew him, but a woman there recognized him from the portal and told her child loudly not to go near him, because that was the rich one.
I went to see Fikreta. I waited until the customers had left and asked her to delete the post. Fikreta was arranging scarves on the counter and did not look up. "I only write what I see, sweetheart," she said. "Is it my fault people read?" Then she offered me a discount on filigree earrings, because I was Suad's daughter, and said she had known me since I was this high. I left without the earrings and without anything else. The post stayed up, and the number of comments kept growing.
In December I went up to Vratnik with a bag holding a somun, cheese and chamomile tea. At the gate the widow told me Zaim had not chopped wood since the autumn and that he coughed all night. The room was clean, the bed made, the gray coat on a hanger. On the table stood a jar half full of coins. "Now I have nothing to change," he said and laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough. He asked me, as a future pharmacist, which tablets he should buy. I called an ambulance even though he had forbidden me to.
At Koševo they said he had pneumonia. I visited him twice. The second time he asked me whether anyone from the bazaar had asked about him. I lied and said Nusmir had. He was as pleased as a child. "Nusmir is a good man," he said. "He just got scared." He asked me to bring him the gray coat, because he did not want to be led out of the hospital in pajamas. He died on the third of January, in the morning, before the doctors' rounds. The doctor told me his heart had been tired, and his lungs, and everything else, as if it could all be written on one paper.
That same day Fikreta announced the funeral, with a black ribbon across that same photo of the bench. Within two days the bazaar had collected four thousand marks for the funeral and the headstone. Nusmir gave two hundred, Refik three hundred, my father five hundred. It was more than Zaim had received in the whole of the previous year, and everyone knew it, and no one said it out loud. In the group Fikreta wrote that the bazaar never forgets its own, and that post got two thousand likes.
At the Bare cemetery there was a large crowd. Fikreta stood closest to the grave and cried the loudest. Afterward she told the women that Zaim had always said she was the best woman in the bazaar. Nobody could check that. My father said nothing the whole way back, and the next day, Thursday, at ten, he lifted his head from the anvil and stared for a long time at the empty doorway.
The widow gave the jar of coins to me. I took it to the post office on the Obala and stood at the same counter. Behind it sat the same clerk who was not allowed to talk about customers. The clerk poured the coins into a machine that counts them, and the machine hummed for a long time, as if it could not make up its mind. It came to thirty-seven marks and forty fenings. I got a twenty, a ten, a five and the rest in change. Nobody was standing behind me, and nobody was counting along with me.