Ismeta sewed in the room above her shop, on a street that climbs from the Colorful Mosque toward the old fortress, and from her window she could see the Lašva, the rooftops, and, on clear days, the first slopes of Vlašić. That Saturday afternoon she hemmed a wedding dress for a girl from Novi Travnik, hung it on the dress form, swept up the threads, and arranged the needles in their little box by thickness, from the finest to the heaviest. She changed the canary's water. In a one-cup džezva she made coffee and drank it sitting down, her hands in her lap, the way coffee had been drunk in her house since she was left alone: slowly and without conversation.
Fourteen years earlier Rifat had gone to Germany, to the construction sites around Ulm. They had gotten engaged two weeks before he left, in a garden café at Plava Voda, and agreed they would marry when the house in Dolac was finished and the loan paid off. They thought it would take three years. Rifat came every August, for twenty days, brought her chocolates and perfume she did not wear, and every year said there was only a little left to go. In all that time Ismeta sewed. She sewed wedding dresses for other people's daughters, prom dresses, curtains for half the neighborhood. She learned to live so that she lacked nothing, and she did not notice when she had learned it.
In March Rifat came back for good. The house was finished, the loan paid off, and the wedding was set for the first Saturday in June. He came every evening, big and kind, with cement in the creases around his eyes, and always sat in her chair by the sewing machine. He leafed through her fashion magazines and put them back upside down. One evening he knocked over the button box with his elbow, and while he was apologizing, the buttons rolled under the wardrobe. When he had gone, Ismeta knelt down with a flashlight, gathered every one of them, and sorted them by size, the way they had been. It took until midnight. She was not angry. She only noticed that she felt easier once he had gone.
In the yard, on a chain, lived Medo, an old yellow dog, who had bitten the mailman fourteen years ago and had not been off the chain since. The neighbors were more afraid of him than he deserved. Every evening Ismeta brought him a bone and water and talked to him as if to a child. "Once we are married, we will let him loose," Rifat said. "A dog has to run." Ismeta pictured Medo running down the street toward the old town, and the mailman, and the children coming out of Quran school, and said nothing.
Rifat's mother in Dolac was ill, and since the autumn she had been looked after by Adela, a neighbor's daughter, a twenty-nine-year-old nurse, tall and loud, who drove an old Golf and laughed so that you could hear it two gardens away. Ismeta had seen her a few times and liked her. Adela wore whatever suited her without a second thought, and there were few customers like that. In May Ismeta took her own wedding dress out of the wardrobe, sewn ten years before and wrapped in tissue paper. She tried it on. It fit her as it had the day she made it. She looked at herself in the mirror and wondered where her sewing machine would stand in the house in Dolac. Rifat had said: in the basement, there is room, and anyway you will not need it anymore, you will not have to work.
A week before the wedding, at dusk, she took a basket and walked up below the walls of the old fortress, where every spring she picked elderflowers for syrup. That year the elder had bloomed late and thick. When the basket was full, she sat down on a stone wall behind the bushes to rest her legs and watched the lights come on below. On the path beneath her she heard footsteps and two voices. She recognized them before she understood the words.
"I am going to Vienna in July," said Adela. "I got a job at a hospital." "Do not go because of me," said Rifat. "It is exactly because of you. I cannot watch you with her at the market every Saturday." For a long time they were silent. Then Rifat said, quietly, as if to himself: "She waited for me for fourteen years. She sewed wedding dresses for others and waited. I cannot break that." "I know you cannot," said Adela. "If you could, I would not even love you." The footsteps moved off toward town. Ismeta stayed on the wall until it was completely dark, the basket of elderflowers in her lap, and she did not cry. She felt, and this surprised her, easier than she had all spring.
That night she made the syrup, as she did every year. She washed the blossoms, sliced the lemons, measured the sugar, and as the kitchen filled with the scent, she thought calmly, the way she cut cloth: first measure, then cut. Rifat is a good man. Adela loves him. He will marry her, Ismeta, because he promised to, and he will live with her honestly and unhappily in the house in Dolac, and she will be hunting for a place in the basement for her sewing machine. Before dawn she filled the bottles, stuck a slip of paper with the date on each one, and lined them up in the pantry, one beside the other.
The next evening she made coffee for two. When Rifat sat down in her chair, she sat across from him, in the customers' chair, and told him she could not marry him. She said she had lived alone too long and had gotten used to her own ways: the shop, the sewing machine, the quiet after eight, the buttons being where she had left them. She said she would not know how to live in Dolac and that she was afraid of what Medo would do without his chain. She mentioned neither the elderflowers nor Adela. Rifat looked into his cup for a long time. "Ismeta, I came back because of you," he said. "I know," she said. "And I will never forget that."
He tried to say something more, but it would not come, and Ismeta saw his shoulders, for the first time since he had come back, drop the way a man's shoulders drop when a load has been taken off them. At the door he stopped. "You are a good woman," he said. "A good seamstress," she said, and laughed, and he laughed too, with a relief he did not know how to hide. In the yard he bent down and stroked Medo's head. For the first time in fourteen years, Medo wagged his tail for someone other than her.
Travnik talked about it until Kurban Bajram. Her sister in Zenica called her twice to ask whether she had lost her mind, fourteen years, and then nothing. Ismeta returned the deposit to the restaurant at Plava Voda and let the musicians know. She wrapped the wedding dress in tissue paper again and put it on top of the wardrobe, where it had sat for ten years. In July she heard that Adela had not gone to Vienna. In September she heard that Adela and Rifat had married in Dolac, quietly, because of his mother.
That autumn Ismeta sewed two prom dresses and a coat for a woman from Turbe. In the evening she covered the sewing machine with a cloth, gave the canary water, and took Medo a bone. Medo barked once, just like that, out of habit, and lay down. Ismeta sat by the window with coffee in her own cup. Above the Lašva the lights were coming on, one by one, and she watched them until the last one was lit, and then she got up and washed her cup.