At my mother's, love was argued about the way prices were: loudly, with examples, and with no hope that anyone would convince anyone. That winter, one Sunday in January, we were sitting in her apartment in Koševo: me, my husband, two of my mother's friends from the pensioners' club, and Ademir, my husband's friend from university, who had dropped by to return a drill and stayed for the pita. On television they were just then talking about a young woman from Tuzla who, two days before her wedding, had left a rich fiancé and gone off with the drummer of some band. My mother switched off the television and said that loves like that last exactly as long as the money they take with them.
Zlatija, my mother, is seventy-three and has the right to the last word in her own home. One of her friends told us about a cousin who married a poor man and held it against him until the day she died. My husband kept quiet, as he always does when something that is not his needs defending. Only Ademir turned his cup on its saucer and smiled. When they had all said their piece, he said that he had once seen a love that lasted fifty years and was paid for at the highest price there is. My mother looked at him over her glasses and told him to go ahead, but not to lie. Here is what he told us, the way I remember it.
Two years ago, in October, I was doing a land survey on Bjelašnica. The Municipality of Konjic was renewing its land registry, and nobody wanted to go to Lukomir, so they sent me, because I was the only one crazy enough to say I loved the mountains. For three days I measured the boundaries between stone houses and sheepfolds and listened to the women on their doorsteps explain whose meadow was whose all the way back to Ottoman times. On the fourth day, around three in the afternoon, fog rose out of the Rakitnica canyon. When I did find my four-by-four half an hour later and set off toward Umoljani, snow began to fall at the first bend, and at the second I ended up with two wheels in the ditch.
I walked back toward the village with the flashlight on my phone and five percent battery. The only house with a light on was the last one in the village, right on the edge of the canyon, low, built of gray stone, with a steep shingle roof that came down almost to the ground. The door was opened by an old woman as small as a child, in a wool sweater, with a headscarf tied at the back. She looked at me, then at the snow behind me, and said, "Please come in, you are wet to the knees." She said it the way people used to speak on Bistrik when I was a child, softly, with that drawl at the end that you never hear in the mountains.
Inside there was a single room, warm as a hammam. A wood stove, two beds under kilims, sheepskins on the floor, a transistor radio on the windowsill. By the stove sat an old man, big, with hands like roots, carving a piece of wood with a small knife. When I came in, he only nodded. "He can't hear," said the old woman. "Not for twenty years now. He doesn't answer me either, and I talk to him all day." On the wall above his bed hung a flute of dark wood, polished by hands. The old woman made coffee and brought it in two cups of thin white porcelain with gold rims, which did not belong in that house, any more than her voice did.
She asked where I was from. When I said Sarajevo, she kept silent until I had drunk half my cup. When I said Bistrik, she set the coffee pot down on the stove so slowly that I thought she had remembered something. She asked whether the big house with the green fence above the brewery was still standing, the one with the linden tree in the garden. All of Bistrik knew the Bakarević house. I told her it was still there and that now it was a small hotel where foreigners ate breakfast under that very linden. The old woman laughed, for the first time since I had come in, and said that her father used to say that as long as he lived, only Bakarevićs would eat breakfast in that garden.
That is how I learned that her name was Nadžija Bakarević. Her father had been a professor at the Faculty of Medicine, and before the Second World War her grandfather had owned three shops on Baščaršija and an apartment in Vienna. She was the only daughter. She studied French, played the piano, and was engaged to the son of an important man, a young man preparing for the diplomatic service. In the summer of seventy-four she went with a group from the university on a trip up to Lukomir. Toward evening a young man drove his sheep up onto the hill above the canyon and played the flute. She stayed to listen until all the others had gone back to the village.
"He played as if no one were there," she said. "I had played all my life so that someone would hear me. My teacher, my father, my fiancé, the guests at my aunt's receptions. And he played to the sheep and to the canyon, and he did not care who was listening." She went back to Sarajevo, to the house with the linden, and for a month she did not sleep. In September she packed one suitcase, left her ring on the piano with a letter under it, and took a bus to Hadžići, and from there went on foot and in a truck hauling timber. When she arrived, the young man with the flute, Sejdija, was at the watering place with the livestock. He looked at the suitcase, then at her, and was not the least bit surprised. He only said that up here a suitcase is not carried in your hand, and he hoisted it onto his back.
The next day, she said, her father told the relatives that he no longer had a daughter. Her mother wrote to her for eight years, through the post office in Konjic, and Sejdija brought the letters once a month, when he went down to sell cheese. Then the letters stopped. She learned of her father's death from a newspaper that a shopkeeper in Konjic had wrapped her sugar in. She did go down for her mother's funeral, in eighty-seven, in rubber boots and Sejdija's coat, and stood by the cemetery wall while the people prayed. No one recognized her. After the war her brother sold the house and left for Canada.
While she talked, the old man carved and did not raise his head. I looked around the room: the skins, the bucket of water from the spring, and that one cup with the gold rim. I asked her what anyone would ask, whether she had ever been sorry. She did not answer right away. She stood up, poured the rest of the coffee for the old man, and brushed the hair off his forehead with her hand, as if he were a child and not a man of eighty. He lifted his head and looked at her. "Fifty years," she said to me, without taking her eyes off him. "I was happy every day. Even on the days when there was nothing in the house but cornmeal, and the snow was up to the window."
Then the old man set down the knife and what he had been carving, which was a new flute, still unfinished, and took the old one down from the wall. He had not heard my question or her answer. But he had seen her face. Nadžija sat down on the bed and folded her hands in her lap. He played for a long time, something slow, with no tune I could repeat, and his hands trembled only at the start. Later she told me, in a whisper, that he played every evening at the same hour, even since he went deaf, because hands, he says, remember what ears no longer can.
I slept on the sheepskins by the stove. In the morning the fog was gone, and from the doorstep you could see the whole canyon, white with snow and red with beech. Two neighbors pulled my four-by-four out with a tractor. Nadžija walked me to the end of the village. When we parted, she asked me for one thing only. That I not tell any of her family that I had seen her, because it would only frighten them. And that when I passed the house on Bistrik, I would look to see whether the linden was still the old one or whether they had planted a new one. "It's the old one," I said. "Then all is well," she said, and went back to the house, where the old man was already standing in the doorway.
Ademir finished and reached for the pita, as if he had just told us how he fixed a water heater. My mother's friends were silent. Then one of them said it was a sad story, a woman from a house like that ending up in a stone hut without water. My husband looked at me. And my mother took off her glasses, which with her always meant something serious. "Nadžija Bakarević," she said. "She sat in front of me at the Second Gymnasium. She had the best handwriting in the class and never once let me copy her homework."
She told us what the gossips of the old town had known in seventy-four. That the Bakarević daughter had run off after a shepherd and would be back before the first snow. That her mother told everyone the girl was studying in Grenoble, and that everyone knew it was not true, but nobody said so to her. That on Bistrik children were forbidden to play the flute, half as a joke, half in earnest. "Fifty years," said my mother, shaking her head. "And we thought she had ruined her life." No one added anything. Ademir put the pita back down on his plate.
When the friends had gone, my mother asked Ademir when the road to Lukomir opens. "At the end of May, if the winter isn't hard," he said. "But there's no shop up there, and no doctor, Auntie Zlatija." My mother said she was not going up there to shop. She took the pen off the fridge, and on the calendar on the kitchen door, between a cardiology appointment and her granddaughter's birthday, in the last week of May, she wrote in big letters just one word: Nadžija.