The mayor of Stolac, Galib Tatarević, had a hat. Gray, felt, from Vienna. He wore it to every ribbon cutting and to every interview for the cantonal television, so in Stolac, behind his back, they called him simply the Hat. Under that hat the Hat also carried a weakness, which the town knew better than it knew his budget. Her name was Hanka, and she was the wife of the miller Šećo Mlivo, whose mill on the Bregava, below the old fortress, still ground corn on stone, for housewives from the surrounding villages and for tourists.
Šećo was the ugliest man between Stolac and Čapljina, and he knew it better than anyone. He was short, one of his shoulders sat higher than the other, and his nose looked like a pear someone had forgotten in the sun. But he was also the cleverest, and when he talked, people forgot what he looked like. Hanka was a head taller than he was, laughed loudly, and was the most beautiful woman on the Bregava. They loved each other in a way the town could not forgive: without quarrels, without secrets, and without any interest in other people's opinions. When the mayor came on Saturdays for flour he did not need, Hanka laughed in his face and Šećo laughed behind the millstone, and in the evenings they retold it as the best comedy in town.
At the end of October the Hat grew tired of comedy. His adviser Uzeir, a man who knew a regulation for every misfortune, reminded him that the mill's water permit was expiring. One rainy Wednesday, at ten at night, Uzeir called the miller. His voice was officially worried. An inspector from Mostar had just arrived at the municipal building, he said, and if Šećo did not sign a statement tonight, they would close his mill in the morning. Hanka looked at the clock. "Who in this country works at ten at night?" she asked. "Someone who wants something else," said Šećo, but he put on his jacket all the same, because without the mill they had nothing.
At the municipal building he was met by the night watchman Idriz, with a thermos in one hand and a remote control in the other. Idriz showed him into an office on the second floor, under a framed photograph of the mayor in his hat, made him coffee, and said the inspector would be there any minute. Uzeir vanished down the hallway. Šećo sat, looked at the photograph, and counted. At eleven he drank a second coffee. At half past eleven he realized that the photograph on the wall was the only representative of authority who would appear in that office that night.
At the same time the mayor was walking down the path beside the millrace toward the mill, in a long camel-hair coat, with the hat on his head and the flashlight on his phone. On a wet slab by the sluice the Hat slipped and fell into the millrace up to his waist. He climbed out, but he did not let go of the hat, and like that, soaked, with water running out of his sleeves, he knocked on Hanka's door. She opened it with a broom in her hand. Through chattering teeth he explained that Šećo would not be back before morning, that the inspector was a serious man, but that everything could be arranged with him, if only Hanka would be a little kinder to the one who arranged such things.
Hanka put down the broom, took her phone out of her apron, and started recording. "Say that again, Mr. Mayor," she said. "The part about the inspector. Slower." The Hat repeated it, because he was cold and because he did not understand right away. By the time he understood, it was too late. Hanka put on her coat, told him to sit by the stove if he did not want to die on her doorstep, and set off along the cart track toward town to fetch her husband. By the stove sat the mayor of the municipality, with water in his shoes.
Uzeir had been waiting in the car up on the road, and after half an hour he came down to see why there had been no call. He found his boss blue with cold. He peeled off his wet clothes as if he were a child, hung the suit and the coat on the chairs around the stove with the hat on top, and tucked the mayor into the only bed in the house, under Hanka's quilt, with a hot water bottle at his feet. Uzeir went back to the car and fell asleep himself to the radio.
Meanwhile Šećo opened the office window, because Idriz had fallen asleep in front of the television and the doors were locked. He jumped into the bushes in front of the municipal building, scratched himself on a rose the mayor had personally planted on Municipality Day, and set off for home by the shortcut, across the old bridge and along the other bank of the Bregava. At the same time Hanka was walking the cart track on the opposite side of the river. They passed within fifty yards of each other. When Šećo got home, the door was unlocked. By the stove someone else's camel-hair coat was steaming. On a chair sat a gray hat. From the bedroom came a snore that all of Stolac knew from sessions of the municipal council.
Šećo pushed the bedroom door ajar. Under Hanka's quilt, on his pillow, slept the mayor, red in the face, as content as a man for whom everything has gone according to plan. Šećo closed the door and sat down on a sack of flour. He sat for a long time. Twice he got up and started toward the door, and twice he sat back down, because he had never hit anyone and did not intend to start with a man who snored. Then he looked at the coat and the hat and laughed, but it was not his laugh. "The mayor has a wife too," he said out loud. "And they say she is beautiful."
He put on the mayor's coat, which came down to his ankles, with the sleeves reaching his fingertips. The hat kept falling over his ears, so he padded it inside with newspaper. Dressed like that, he walked through sleeping Stolac all the way to the mayor's big house above Begovina. The neighbor's dog, which barked at every passerby, recognized the coat and only wagged its tail. At the door appeared Hatira, the mayor's wife, who never fell asleep before her husband came home. She looked at the small man in her husband's coat. She had been buying flour from him for twelve years.
"Mrs. Hatira," said Šećo, taking off the hat, "your husband is sleeping in my bed. I have come to his." Hatira looked at him for a long time, the way one looks at news one has long been waiting for. "Come in," she said. "Into the kitchen. The coffee is just ready." She sat him in her husband's chair and made him tell everything from the beginning, from the Saturday flour to the snoring. Only when he got to the millrace did she have to stand up and turn toward the window, and her shoulders shook, and Šećo could not tell whether she was crying or laughing.
The mayor woke up at two, thirsty, in a stranger's bed. By the stove there was no coat, no suit, no hat. On the chair lay only Šećo's work trousers, white with flour. When Uzeir woke up in the car, he barely recognized him. They drove to the house above Begovina, where the mayor rang the bell at his own door. Hatira appeared at an upstairs window. "Who is it?" "It's me, Galib!" "My husband has been home for an hour," said Hatira calmly. "There's his hat on the coat rack." In the neighboring houses the lights began to come on, one by one.
At that moment Hanka arrived too, having found only Idriz and an open window at the municipal building, and having seen from the bridge Uzeir's car go by with someone white with flour in the passenger seat. Only then did Hatira open the door and let them all into the living room. She sat down in an armchair like a judge. Šećo came out of the kitchen in the mayor's coat, and the mayor, in Šećo's trousers, went as white as flour. "What was this man doing in my house?" "The same thing you were doing in his," said Hatira. Šećo looked at Hanka like a man who had lost everything. Without a word, Hanka took out her phone and played the recording.
The whole room, and with it the neighbors who had gathered under the open window, heard the mayor's voice chattering on about the inspector and about kindness. Šećo lowered his head and laughed, this time his own laugh, and Hanka went over to him and buttoned up the coat that did not belong to him. Hatira stood up. "Uzeir," she said, "by nine in the morning the water permit for the mill is to be signed. And you, Galib, are not a candidate in the next election." The mayor asked what, then, had happened here tonight while he was asleep. "We drank two coffees," said Hatira. "The rest you can wonder about until you retire."
Šećo and Hanka walked home at dawn along the bank of the Bregava, he in a coat down to his ankles, she laughing so hard that twice she had to sit down on the low wall. The water permit arrived at half past eight, stamped and signed. They returned the suit the same day, washed. The hat they did not. At the next election Stolac got a new mayor. The hat still hangs on a nail above the millstone, and when tourists ask whose it is, Šećo says the mayor left it the night he slept at their place, and he explains no further. Stolac explains the rest by itself.