The Copper Jug from Bembaša

My grandmother's copper jug survived fifty-two years in Stuttgart, three moves, and two grandsons who kept tadpoles in it. When I sold the apartment last spring, I divided everything else between my sons or gave it to the neighbors, but the jug I wrapped in a towel and carried on my lap all the way to Sarajevo. The flight attendant asked if it was an urn. I said it was not, it was for water. She did not believe me, I could see it on her face, but she did not ask any more. At my age people let you carry whatever you want.

When I was nineteen, my grandmother claimed that real coffee could only be made with water from the fountain by the weir at Bembaša. The water from the kitchen was lukewarm and tasteless to her, as if, she used to say, someone had already drunk half of it before us. So every evening that summer, when the sun went down behind Hum, I took the jug and walked down from Kovači over the cobblestones to the river. My mother grumbled that it was a waste of time. My grandmother said that a girl who goes for water has a right to half an hour nobody counts.

That summer Tefik was the lifeguard at the bathing spot below the weir. He studied mechanical engineering, wore a red cap, and used his whistle to chase off the boys who jumped from the wall. In the evenings, when the bathing spot had emptied, he sat on a stone by the fountain as if he were resting, though anyone could see he was not resting. The first evening he only held the jug steady while I filled it. The second he asked whose daughter I was. The third he took the jug out of my hand and carried it uphill, to the corner of our street and not a step farther, because Dževida lived on the corner, and she saw everything and repeated everything.

That was how it went all summer. We talked about everything that means nothing: exams, the heat, how shallow the Miljacka gets in August and whether the fish from it can be eaten. Every evening a radio in the garden of a café across the river played that old sevdalinka about the girl who goes down to Bembaša, and Tefik whistled it all the way uphill with my jug in his hand. Once I told him to stop, that he was embarrassing me. "The song isn't about you," he said. "It's about every girl who goes for water." Then he stopped to catch his breath. "A little more about you."

One evening, at the end of August, he dropped the jug. He slipped on the cobblestones because of me, because I had turned to ask him something just when he should have been watching his feet. The jug rolled down the steps and struck the curb. The water ran into the drain, and on the belly of the copper there was a dent the size of a thumb. Tefik apologized as if he had broken someone's window. The next day he wanted to take it to a craftsman in Kazandžiluk to have it straightened. I would not let him. I said my grandmother would think I had dented it myself, and in a way that was true.

In September a friend of my father's came to visit from Foča with his son Razim, who had been working for five years at an auto parts factory near Stuttgart. Razim was big, calm and polite, and he looked at me as if everything had already been agreed. It turned out it had. My father said it was the kind of chance you do not turn down, and that in Germany a woman does not have to go down for water. That evening I went down anyway. Tefik was waiting on the stone. He carried the jug to the corner, and the whole way I waited for him to say one single word. He said: "Careful, it's full." And he handed it to me.

I married in October. Razim was a good man, I have to say that, and now that he is gone I will say it even louder. For thirty-eight years he worked in the same factory hall, he never raised his voice, and he bought our sons bicycles before they knew how to ride. I cleaned offices, then worked in a bakery for a Greek man, then looked after the grandchildren. The jug stood on a shelf in the kitchen, with the dent turned toward the wall. Razim once asked me why I would not have it straightened. I said it was my grandmother's. That was the truth, but not all of it.

Razim died three years ago, in his sleep, quietly, the way he had lived. My sons wanted me to stay with them, a week with one, a week with the other, like a parcel sent back and forth. I said I had a house in Sarajevo. I did not. I had my brother's apartment in Kovači, empty since he had gone to his daughter in Canada, and a key he had mailed me with a note asking me to water the plants, if there were any left. There were no plants. There was dust, a view of Baščaršija and, down below, the river.

For the first weeks I did not go down. The city was mine and it was not: along the river there were new benches now, a walking path to Kozija ćuprija, people with dogs and children on scooters. The old bathing spot was gone. The fountain had stayed, with new stone around the spout, but it was the same. One evening in October, when I caught myself dusting the jug for the third time, I put on my coat and went down. The cobblestones were the same, and my feet remembered them better than I did. I felt as foolish as a little girl. Seventy-one years old, and going for water.

At the fountain an old man was filling plastic bottles. He had five of them, lined up on the stone, and he filled them slowly, one by one. I waited behind him with the jug in my hand. When he had screwed on the last cap and turned around, he did not look at me. He looked at the jug, for a long time, his head tilted, like a craftsman judging someone else's work. Then he reached out a finger and touched the dent in the belly of the copper. "This is mine," he said.

Tefik, as it turned out, had stayed in Sarajevo all his life. He had worked as an engineer at a design firm and married late, at forty, a woman who taught chemistry at a high school and who had died five years ago. They had no children. "And the bottles?" I asked. He shrugged. He said it was something left over from a girl who used to claim that real coffee could only be made with this water. "For fifty years?" "Not quite every day," he said. "Sometimes I was sick."

We sat down on a bench above the weir, because his knee asked for it, and I was glad not to have to get up right away. The water murmured over the weir just as it had back then, only the people around it were different. He asked me about Germany, and I told him without dressing it up: about the factory hall, the bakery, about Razim, who cooked beans every Sunday and burned them every Sunday. Tefik listened and nodded. Then he said he had seen me once, in eighty-five, at Baščaršija, in front of the Sebilj. I was leading two little boys by the hand and wearing a blue coat. "Why didn't you come over?" I asked. "You had two little boys and a blue coat," he said, as if that explained everything. And it did.

When I had filled the jug, he offered to carry it. I said I had carried it myself for fifty years and could manage a little longer. "You didn't carry it," he said. "It stood on a shelf. You can tell by the copper." He took it out of my hand, just like back then, without asking, and I let him, just like back then. We went up the cobblestones slowly, because of his knee and my breath. I asked him why he had not said anything that summer. He stopped to rest. "I did," he answered. "Every evening I carried your water up the hill. What else was I supposed to do? Sing?"

I did not know what to answer, so I said that Dževida from the corner had been gone a long time and there was no one left to watch. Then he laughed for the first time, and only then did I fully recognize him, more than by his finger on the dent. At the corner, where he had always stopped, he did not stop. He walked past my brother's gate as if he passed that way every day, climbed the stairs with me to the second floor, and set the jug down on the kitchen table with the dent turned toward me.

I made coffee with that water, in my brother's coffee pot, on a stove that first had to think about whether it would light. Tefik drank slowly and said nothing. Then he said the coffee was no better than with water from the kitchen, that he had known that for fifty years, and that he had gone down every evening anyway. I asked if he would come tomorrow. He said it was going to rain tomorrow. I said I had an umbrella. All the way down the stairs he whistled, and I knew which song, even though he was off key, the same as back then.