For a year Dženana wore black and did not open the windows at the front of the house. Everyone in Gradačac knew it, from the baker by the clock tower to the women who walked around Lake Hazna on Sundays. Some said it was love. Others, more quietly, said it was spite. Her husband Edin had not been a man worth losing your breath over: he loved bars, trips he took alone, and cars more than any person. Dženana knew all of that while he was alive. When he died, she decided she would be more faithful to him than he had ever been to her. Let him see, she told herself, if he has anywhere to watch from at all.
The only thing she brought out of the garage was Edin's old cream-colored Mercedes, its seats still smelling of his cigarettes. Edin had called it the Pasha. Every Saturday her neighbor Hamid, a retired postman of seventy, washed the Pasha in front of the garage, because she had ordered it, then rolled it back inside and covered it with a tarp. Nobody drove it. Every Saturday, along with soup, Hamid brought his opinion, just as free of charge. "You are a young woman, Dženana. Forty-four is not old. At least go down to the lake." She would answer that he should wax the Pasha too, because Edin had liked it to shine.
That Tuesday, a little after noon, someone began banging on the gate as if the house were on fire. Hamid went to see and came back pale. He said a man from Brčko was standing outside, a car mechanic, and he would not leave until he had spoken to the lady in person. "Tell him I am not receiving anyone," said Dženana. "I told him," Hamid answered. "He says he does not receive refusals either."
The man came in behind Hamid without waiting to be asked. He was big and broad-shouldered, in a leather jacket that remembered better years, with hands from which no soap on earth could lift the traces of oil. He introduced himself as Safet Kurtović. The late Edin, he explained in a voice that filled the whole hallway, had owed him two thousand four hundred marks, for the Pasha's gearbox and two major services. He had the paperwork too. He took it out of his inside pocket and smoothed it on the chest of drawers, right over Edin's photograph.
Dženana moved the papers off the photograph as if she were brushing away crumbs. "My husband was an orderly man," she said. "If he owed you, I will pay. My accountant comes on Thursday, and you will get the money then." Safet shook his head. He needed the money today, he said, because tomorrow the bank would take his workshop if he did not pay the installment, and he would not be troubling her if he had anyone else to turn to. "In this house we do not talk about money," she said. "In this house we mourn." "Then I will sit down and wait while you mourn until Thursday," he said, and sat down in Edin's armchair.
What followed Hamid later retold to half the neighborhood, each time with some new detail. Dženana said Safet was a boor. Safet said he might be a boor, but at least he was honest, which could not be said of people who spent a year acting out grief for a man who had cheated on them with half the Posavina region. Dženana went pale. Safet, realizing he had gone too far, turned red, but he did not back down. Instead of apologizing, he began to deliver a speech about women.
The speech was long and, he claimed, based on experience. Women, he said, were either crocodile tears or a calculator. He had had two fiancées and one wife, and all three had explained to him what love was, each in her own way, and not one had stayed to see what it looks like when something really gets repaired. Only a car, he concluded, was an honest creature, because when it was broken, it told you so. "If you know women that well," said Dženana, "then God has spared you from knowing them any better."
Safet said he had no intention of leaving. Dženana said he was a bear. He admitted he was a bear, but a bear who worked. She said no one in any town would speak to a widow like this. He replied that, as far as he could see, she was not a widow but a museum attendant, and he pointed through the window toward the garage, where the roof of the Pasha showed under the tarp. That was when Dženana did something she had not planned.
"You think women are good for nothing but tears and bills," she said calmly, with a calm Hamid, standing in the kitchen doorway, had not heard since the day of the funeral. "Fine. Let us see. Edin taught me one thing while he was alive, because he could not be bothered to get his hands dirty. How to change a wheel. If I change one on the Pasha faster than you, you will wait for your money until Thursday and never again say a word about women in my house. If I lose, I will pay you today, out of my own money, and you can sit in that armchair as long as you like." Safet looked at her for a long time. "You would fight me in a duel?" "In a duel," she said. "Hamid, take off the tarp."
It was the first time in a year that the Pasha had left the garage for anything other than a wash. Hamid brought two jacks and two wrenches and stood between them like a referee, with a stopwatch on his old phone. Two neighbor women appeared on the next terrace, then three more. Dženana took off her black sweater, stayed in her black blouse, and rolled up her sleeves. Safet took off his jacket. Only then, for the first time since he had walked in, did he look at the woman in front of him and not at the debt.
When Hamid told them to start, Dženana knelt beside the front left wheel faster than anyone expected. She loosened the nuts while the car was still standing on the ground, the way Edin had always said to, set the jack in the right place, and turned the wrench with an anger that had been gathering for a year. Safet worked on the other side with calm, practiced movements, and yet he was slower. Not because he did not know how. Because he kept lifting his head to watch her.
He saw a strand of hair that had slipped from her clip and that she kept blowing away like a little girl. He saw the sweat on her forehead and her lips moving without a sound as she counted the nuts. Above all, he saw that she was as angry with him as she had never dared to be with the dead man. When she pulled the wheel off and rolled it toward Hamid, Safet was still holding his second nut. He set it down on the concrete and stood up. "I surrender," he said. "Nobody surrenders in the middle of a duel," she said. "I surrender," he repeated. "But not because of the wheel."
The neighbor women on the terrace fell silent all at once. Dženana stood up, wrench in hand, and said she did not understand what he wanted. Safet said he did not understand either. He had come for two thousand four hundred marks, and now it seemed to him that nothing would be honest unless he said that he had never met a woman like her, not in Brčko, not anywhere else, and that if she let him, he would take her fishing on Lake Hazna this very Sunday. He said he knew he was a bear, and that bears in love did not know how to behave, but at least they did not lie.
"Get out," said Dženana. "I am going," said Safet. He picked up his jacket, headed for the gate, stopped, and came back. "You forgot something. You have three more wheels." "Get out!" He walked to the gate and turned around. She was standing beside the Pasha, wrench in hand, watching him. He came back once more, and this time he said nothing at all.
In the meantime Hamid had run across the street for help, because it seemed to him that the woman was finally either killing someone or saving herself, and he did not know which was worse. He came back with two neighbors. One carried a rake, the other a monkey wrench. They found the widow and the mechanic kissing beside the front wheel, clumsily and stubbornly, like two people who had been quarreling a minute ago and were still not sure who had won.
Dženana pulled away first. She looked at the neighbors, then at the rake, then at Hamid, and tucked back the strand of hair. "Hamid," she said, "you don't have to wash the Pasha this Saturday." Hamid lowered the wrench. "And Thursday? The accountant?" "Let him come," she said. "Somebody in this house has to keep track of the bills." That Sunday, for the first time in a year, the cream-colored Mercedes left the garage and set off toward the lake. She was driving, and the mechanic from Brčko sat beside her and kept quiet the whole way, which, Hamid insisted, was the greatest miracle of all.