The Garnet from Mostar

In the drawer with my tax papers, under an old passport, I found Grandma's garnet last week. That was what Elma called it: a small red stone on a thin chain, which her grandmother had worn until she died, and which she pressed into my palm at the bus station in Mostar, in August of two thousand three. "So you'll have something heavy in your pocket while you're in Neum," she said. I was twenty-nine, with an apartment in Grbavica, a fiancée in Mostar and three days to turn all of it into one life. Today I am fifty-two, with a room in Ottakring and the garnet. The rest I sold, myself most cheaply of all.

Elma's father, Ragib Bajrić, ran a pastry shop on the corner by Kujundžiluk. Tufahijas were made on Saturdays, rose pastries every day, and baklava only when Ragib was in a good mood. I had come to Mostar for my company, for ten days, to set up a network at a bank, and on the third day, in the pastry shop, I caught Elma's brother when he collapsed from the heat behind the display case. Elma brought me a tufahija for it and would not let me pay. The next day I came back to pay for it. I came on the tenth day too, and the eleventh, when the company was already asking me to come back. The Old Bridge was still being rebuilt then, so in the evenings, once Elma had closed the till, we stood by the scaffolding and watched the stones the masons were marking with numbers, one by one.

She was half engaged to an insurance agent who talked about interest rates the way other men talk about soccer. She broke it off with him on Thursday, told me on Friday, and on Saturday, while she was making tufahijas with her niece, she agreed to marry me. Ragib was silent for two days, and then he told me that a son-in-law who lives in Sarajevo is not a son-in-law but a guest. I promised to move. I would sell the apartment in Grbavica, I said, and invest in a second shop, by Musala. That was the first time Ragib nodded.

I found a buyer faster than I had hoped, and that should have been a warning. Davor Polić, whom I had gone to high school with, had married rich. His wife Marijana had a real estate agency, two hotels on paper and a summer house in Neum, and she bought apartments in Sarajevo the way other people buy shoes. Davor told me over the phone to come to Neum, that Marijana would look at the papers, and that he personally did not even know how many apartments they had, because it tired him. Elma saw me off at the bus and gave me the garnet.

Davor met me on the terrace above the sea, in a bathrobe, with a plate of prosciutto on his knees. He was fat, kind and showed interest in nothing except lunch. He talked about high school as if it were the only job he had ever done. Marijana appeared only toward evening. She was two years older than me and no more beautiful than Elma, but she looked at people as if she knew their price and was ready to pay more. She leafed through the papers in five minutes and said she would take the apartment, but that she did not discuss price when she was tired. "Stay until the day after tomorrow," she said. "Davor has no one to be quiet with anyway."

I stayed. On the first day I told her about Elma, about the tufahijas and about Ragib, who had been silent for two days, and she listened carefully, her elbows on the table, and asked the kind of questions an agent asks when she appraises an apartment: how many square feet, how much damp, what kind of view. On the second day she took me in a speedboat to a cove where there was no one. She swam far out and came back only when I had begun to worry. Afterward, on the warm rocks, she told me that I was made for a bigger city than Mostar and a bigger life than a pastry shop. I told her she was wrong. She said that perhaps she was wrong, but that I did not look like a man who was sure of it. On the way back she let me drive the speedboat.

That night Elma sent me a message: "How's the sale going?" I answered: "Slowly. Tomorrow." It was the first lie, and it was small, and it was easy. On the terrace Davor, sprawled in an armchair with his hands on his stomach, said to Marijana, loudly enough for me to hear: "This one's in love. This one will hold out." Marijana laughed. Only much later did I understand that they had made a bet. The stake was a weekend in Vienna, and Davor lost it on Thursday evening, when Marijana closed the door of her room and I stayed on the inside.

That night the garnet was in the pocket of my jacket, on the hook in the hallway, and in the morning it was still there, heavy, the way Elma had wanted. I did not take it out. On Friday Marijana signed the contract and paid more for the apartment than I had asked, and then she told me she was going to Vienna for a week and that she was taking me with her, because she needed someone who knew computers and knew how to keep quiet. Davor paid for Vienna. From the gas station on the way out of Neum I sent Elma a message of three sentences. She called twice while we were waiting at the border, and I let it ring. I do not remember exactly what the message said, and that may be the only mercy I have allowed myself.

The week in Vienna lasted two years. I carried Marijana's bags, fixed her laptop, went with her to real estate fairs in Munich and Milan and kept quiet, which was what I was best paid for. In that time I learned enough German to understand when people were talking about me. Then one morning, at breakfast in a hotel, she told me she did not need me anymore, the way you tell a waiter your plate is empty. She gave me three months' pay in advance. She was always correct about money. I stayed in Vienna, because I had nothing to go back with, and no one to go back to.

For twenty years I worked night shifts at the front desk of a hotel near the Westbahnhof. I married once, briefly, a woman who said, rightly, that I lived with her like a lodger. Every year in August I promised myself I would go to Mostar, sit down in the pastry shop and order a tufahija, and every year I found a shift I could not swap. Once, at the Brunnenmarkt, I saw tufahijas in the window of a Bosnian bakery and did not buy any. All that time the garnet lay in the drawer with the tax papers, under a passport that had long since expired.

When I found it last week, I sat down at the computer and searched for the Bajrić pastry shop. It exists. It even has a website, with photos of the display case and one picture I sat in front of for a long time: Elma behind the counter, gray at the temples, laughing at someone out of the frame. Next to her stands a girl of about twenty, with her eyes and in a white apron. Under the picture it said that the shop is run by Elma and her daughter and that tufahijas are made on Saturdays, as in Ragib's day.

I wrote an email. I wrote it all night, between guests asking for their keys, and deleted it four times. What I finally sent was shorter than the message I had sent her from the gas station in Neum. I wrote that I was sorry, that I had the garnet and could return it if she wanted it.

She answered two days later. She wrote calmly, as if writing about the weather: that she had married two years later, an engineer from Konjic, that she had a daughter and a son, that her daughter made tufahijas better than she did, that her father had died six years ago and had said to the end that the guest from Sarajevo had at least paid for that first tufahija. She wrote that the garnet need not be returned, because she had given it, and what is given is no longer hers. At the end she added one sentence, without any explanation: "Tufahijas are on Saturdays."

I bought a bus ticket for Friday evening. It arrives in Mostar on Saturday morning, at ten past seven, when the shutters of the pastry shops are just going up. I do not know whether I will go in. The garnet is in my jacket pocket, and it is heavy, exactly the way Elma wanted.