The Investor in Someone Else's Coat

The coat was dark gray cashmere with a wine-colored lining, and it did not belong to Jasmir. A gentleman from Vienna had brought it in during the spring to have the sleeves shortened, paid half in advance, and never come back. Jasmir's shop by the bus station in Doboj closed in July, and the coat stayed on its hanger, with white thread on the sleeves, where Jasmir had tacked the new hems in place. In December he was called in for a job interview at a uniform factory in Brčko. His only jacket had a hole in the elbow. He put on the coat just for that day, he told himself, and he would have it back on the hanger by evening.

The bus to Brčko stopped in Gradačac for a half-hour break. Snow was falling. The driver, Hamdo, who had been watching the coat in the rearview mirror the whole way, got off first and went into the café at the station, where he liked to trade jokes with the owner. Jasmir stood by the door in the coat, holding an old leather bag that held scissors, chalk, and a tape measure, because a tailor does not go even to a job interview without a tape measure. "Watch out for this one," Hamdo told the owner, loudly enough. "Investor from Vienna. Looking for land for a plum drying plant." The owner repeated it to the man at the next table. That man was Mehmedalija Ćurić, who owned forty dunums of plum orchard, a small jam factory, and a bank debt that was growing faster than his plums.

Within ten minutes Mehmedalija was sitting at Jasmir's table, and in front of Jasmir stood a coffee he had not ordered. Jasmir tried to explain, but every sentence he spoke took on a new meaning with Mehmedalija. "I am not here on business." "Of course, of course. You are looking around. Smart." "I am just waiting for the bus." "A modest man. I like modest people." When Hamdo honked the horn, Jasmir half rose, and Mehmedalija put a hand on his shoulder. "What bus? I will drive you wherever you want." The bus left for Brčko, and the job interview went with it.

That evening at Mehmedalija's house there was sarma, pita, two cousins, and an adviser from the municipality. Everyone asked about Vienna, and Jasmir, who had been to Vienna once, on a school trip, talked about the only thing he really knew something about: cloth. He explained how wool behaves in the rain, why English worsted should not be pressed with heavy steam, and how you can tell from a seam who made a man's suit. The guests nodded and whispered to one another that you could see his refined taste. Then Mehmedalija's daughter Medina, an agronomist, came in from the orchard in rubber boots and said the only sensible sentence of the evening. "Dad, investors do not come by bus." Silence fell over the table. Mehmedalija laughed. "You see how modest he is."

Jasmir decided to leave in the morning. But in the morning Medina, who did not believe a word he said, took him out to the plum orchard so that he could see, as she put it, what he was planning to invest in. Snow lay on the branches. She showed him the old trees her grandfather had planted and the young ones she had grafted herself, and she waited for him to make a mistake. He made none, because he was not pretending anything, he only listened and asked questions. When she caught the pocket of her jacket on a branch and tore it, Jasmir took a needle out of his lapel, because a tailor always keeps a needle in his lapel, and sewed it up in two minutes, with stitches so small that afterward she could not find them. She looked at him for a long time. "You have hands like you have done some work," she said. "I have," he said, and she laughed for the first time.

That was how a week went by. Every day Jasmir meant to tell the truth, and every day the lie grew a little bigger. The local radio mentioned an Austrian investor. The bank director called Mehmedalija twice. When his host took him to the only men's clothing store in town to buy him a new suit, Jasmir could not hold back and showed the saleswoman how to raise a trouser hem properly, and she said only a real gentleman would know something like that. In the evenings he walked with Medina around Lake Vidara, along the frozen shore. She told him she would never let anyone cut down her grandfather's trees, no matter how much money they offered. "Neither would I," he said, and she took his arm.

Mehmedalija saw his daughter's face and decided there was nothing to wait for. He booked the engagement party for Saturday at the hotel below the fortress tower: eighty guests, live music, and a projector for pictures of the couple. On Friday evening Jasmir finally told Medina that he had to tell her something. She put a finger to his lips. "If it is something nice, tell me now. If it is something ugly, tell me after the engagement." Jasmir said nothing. Medina looked at him for a long time and did not ask anything.

The only one who had disliked the investor from the start was Dževdet, the bookkeeper at the jam factory, who had been courting Medina for three years, mostly with spreadsheets. Dževdet had noticed what no one else had: on the sleeves of the expensive coat you could still see white thread, the temporary kind tailors use to hold a hem in place before sewing it. On Thursday he got in his car and drove to Doboj. At the station he showed people a picture on his phone, and within five minutes he was standing in front of a pulled-down shutter that read: Tailor Jasmir, repairs and alterations.

At the engagement party, after the appetizers, Dževdet asked for the microphone to say a few words as a man from the firm. He said that in their part of the country there was a saying that clothes make the man, and he signaled to the young man at the projector. On the screen, instead of pictures of the couple, there appeared the pulled-down shutter in Doboj, then the sign, then Jasmir with a tape measure around his neck, measuring a trouser leg on some heavyset man. "And this coat, ladies and gentlemen," said Dževdet, "still has thread on its sleeves. It is not finished. Just like the investment." Someone laughed, then went quiet. The musicians lowered their instruments. Mehmedalija turned red to the tips of his ears.

Jasmir stood up, slowly took off the coat, and hung it over the back of the chair, the way he used to hang jackets in the shop while a customer tried on trousers in the fitting room. "It is true," he said. He went out into the snow in his shirt and walked to the bus station, where the last bus to Doboj left at ten forty.

He had been sitting on the bench for twenty minutes when Medina arrived, in her party dress and rubber boots, with the coat over her arm. "You forgot your coat." "It is not mine." "I know. I read the label." She sat down beside him. "What else was a lie?" He listed it: Vienna, the investment, the drying plant. "And the orchard? When you said you would not cut down my grandfather's trees?" "Not that." "And what happened by Vidara?" "Not that either."

Medina looked at the snow for a long time. "Then listen," she said. "Dad has an orchard and a debt. I have a degree and my grandfather's trees. We need someone who works with his hands and who will not sell anything just because it looks nice." "I am a tailor." "Then you will be a tailor in Gradačac. People wear trousers here too." The bus stopped in front of the bench and its doors opened. Hamdo was at the wheel. He looked at Jasmir in his shirt, then at the girl in boots, then at the coat. "Mr. Investor, are you coming?" "He is not," said Medina, and she put the coat around Jasmir's shoulders.

For a month Mehmedalija did not say a word to his son-in-law, and then he came into the young man's small shop on the main street, below the tower, to have his trousers shortened, and haggled as if he were buying an orchard. The coat from Vienna still hangs in the window, its sleeves finally sewn, with a piece of cardboard on which Medina has written: Not for sale, waiting for its owner. When people around town ask what his son-in-law does, Mehmedalija says he is an investor. "In thread," he adds, "and the domestic kind."