The Clock Taken Down Before Dawn

Doctor Brkić came across the yard that night in his slippers and the suit he had worn to a wedding in Visoko. He was a retiree of seventy-one and had treated half of Kakanj for forty years, so it occurred to nobody to contradict him. He bent over Grandma Hanifa, who was lying on the low sofa in her room upstairs, felt her hand, pressed two fingers to her neck, waited a little and straightened up. "It's over," he said. "Eighty-six years old, her heart. A beautiful death, in her sleep. Call the coroner in the morning, there's no point waking him now." Then he drank a glass of water, offered his condolences and went home to bed.

Fuad, Grandma's son, sat down on the stairs and stared at his hands for a long time. He had worked thirty years at the power plant, in shifts, and he did not know what a man does at midnight when his mother dies. His wife Remza knew. First she covered Grandma with a sheet, and then she stood in the middle of the room and looked at the clock on the wall. It was an old Austrian pendulum clock in a walnut case, which Grandma's late husband had brought from Sarajevo in sixty-one and which struck every hour so loudly that it could be heard all the way to the railway tracks. Under it stood the carved dowry chest in which Grandma kept her sheets, her holiday dimije and, as the family believed, her gold coins.

"Sadeta will take everything," said Remza. Sadeta was Fuad's sister, married in Zenica, and she came to see Grandma for Bajram, with baklava from the bakery and a question about how Grandma was sleeping. "This isn't the time," said Fuad. "This is the only time," said Remza. "When she gets here, it'll be too late. Grandma told me the clock is mine. She said it in front of you, last Bajram." Fuad did not remember that. But he got up, because in thirty years of marriage he had never once managed to stand up to Remza when she stood like that, hands on her hips.

They took down the clock first. The pendulum clanged when Fuad unhooked it, and they both turned toward the sofa, as if Grandma were about to scold them. She did not. Carrying the chest down the stairs took them half an hour, because it was heavier than it looked and because Fuad stopped on every second step to rest his back. They left it in the living room, between the television and the armchair, and Remza covered it with a crocheted tablecloth, so that it would look as if it had always been there. They hung the clock above the couch, on the nail where an aerial photograph of Kakanj had hung until then. There were no gold coins in the chest. They went through every sheet.

Mahir, their twenty-one-year-old son, watched all of this from the kitchen doorway, his phone in his hand. Remza told him to make himself useful, so he wrote a post. At ten past one, Grandma's photograph appeared on Facebook, taken in the garden among the pepper plants, with a text Mahir had rewritten twice: that our dear Grandma Hanifa had passed on to the next world in her eighty-sixth year and that the funeral would be tomorrow at two in the afternoon. By two in the morning the post had sixty comments. By three Mahir had printed thirty death notices on the home printer, with a black border and Grandma among the peppers.

Sadeta and her husband Halil arrived from Zenica at half past two. Sadeta ran upstairs straight from the door and two minutes later came back without tears, but with a question. "Where is the clock?" Remza said she did not know what clock she was talking about. Sadeta lifted the crocheted tablecloth off the chest and looked at Remza the way you look at a neighbor who has put on your dress. Meanwhile Halil took a tape measure out of his jacket pocket, the yellow kind that rolls up, and began measuring the hallway. Later he claimed he had done it out of nerves.

The quarrel began quietly, because of Grandma upstairs, and then, like every quarrel in that family, it quickly forgot why it was supposed to be quiet. Sadeta said Grandma had promised her the clock back when she got married. Remza said that for twenty years she had bathed Grandma, fed her and taken her to the clinic, while Sadeta came for Bajram with baklava from the bakery. Sadeta said that twice the baklava had been homemade. Fuad said the house was his anyway, according to the agreement of two thousand nine. Halil, without looking up from the tape measure, asked what agreement, when there was no paper anywhere.

Then it was the gold coins' turn. Each of them thought the other had taken them. Remza asked Sadeta what exactly she had been doing for those two minutes upstairs. Sadeta asked why the chest was already downstairs if nobody had been looking for anything. Fuad said that was enough, and nobody heard him. Mahir sat at the table and read the comments aloud, because it seemed to him that it would calm everyone down. May God have mercy on her soul. She was a wonderful woman. I remember how she used to hand out apples to us when we were kids. Sincere condolences to Fuad and Sadeta. Not one of the four of them went upstairs to sit with Grandma. Grandma was alone, under the sheet, and no clock was ticking in her room, because it was downstairs.

At five Mahir took the death notices, the glue and his bicycle and went into town. He pasted them on the notice board at the bus station, on the post in front of the market, on the wall next to the mosque and on the window of the bakery where Grandma bought half a loaf of bread every morning. The baker came out in his white apron and asked when she had died. "Last night," said Mahir. The baker said he had seen her yesterday on the bus from Visoko, arguing with the conductor, and that she had looked healthier than he did.

Mahir got back a little before six, while the dawn call to prayer was sounding from the minaret, and found the family in the kitchen, right where he had left them. Halil was measuring the window. Sadeta was crying, for the first time that night, but because of something Remza had said to her about the baklava. Fuad was making coffee for the third time. And then footsteps sounded on the stairs. Slow, familiar footsteps, with that small pause on the fifth step, where the board sagged.

Grandma Hanifa walked into the kitchen in her dimije and a blue sweater, her headscarf tied the way she had tied it every morning for sixty years. She looked at Halil with the tape measure, then at Sadeta in her coat, then at Remza, who dropped her spoon. "What is this?" she asked. "Who died?" Nobody answered. Grandma looked through the open door of the living room, where her chest peeked out from under the crocheted tablecloth and her clock hung above the couch, stopped at twelve twenty. "Aha," she said. "Me."

Fuad was the first to speak. He said Doctor Brkić had come, that there had been no pulse, that she had looked as if she were. Grandma waved her hand. Brkić, she said, could not even take his own blood pressure. Last night she had taken two sleeping pills instead of one, because the new doctor at the clinic insisted the old ones did not work, and she had slept as never before in her life. What woke her was the call to prayer, and the cold, because somebody had pulled a sheet over her head. Then she sat down at the table, in her own place, and told Fuad to pour her a coffee, since it was already made.

She drank slowly. Nobody sat down. When she set down her little cup, she slipped her hand into her sweater pocket, took out a handkerchief tied in a knot, and shook seven gold coins out of it onto the table. "This is what you were looking for," she said. "I've slept with them ever since Sadeta first asked me how I was sleeping." Sadeta blushed to the roots of her hair. Remza stared at the floor. Halil slowly, inch by inch, rolled up the tape measure. Grandma put the coins back in the handkerchief and the handkerchief back in her pocket.

Then she called Mahir over and asked him how many people had read that thing on the phone. Mahir looked: six thousand and something. And the death notices? Thirty, he said, all over Kakanj. Grandma nodded, as if this were good news. "Then write this," she said. "Grandma Hanifa is alive and well and thanks everyone for the kind words. There will be no funeral today. At two there's lunch, at our house, for everyone who wrote." Mahir asked what he should do with the death notices. "Nothing," said Grandma. "Let them hang. Let people see who in this house was in a hurry."

At two in the afternoon, when the funeral was supposed to take place, some fifty people were standing in front of the house above the railway tracks. Remza had been rolling out pies since seven in the morning, Sadeta was frying dough puffs, and Fuad and Halil, slowly and without a word, had carried the chest back upstairs. Grandma Hanifa sat on a chair by the gate and asked everyone who came in whether they had seen the death notice at the station and whether she had come out well in the picture. The clock hung on the wall of her room again. When it struck two, it could be heard all the way to the railway tracks.