Zineta was a butcher's daughter from Bjelave, and she knew how to separate meat from bone, in the shop and in life. She married her father's assistant, who, as soon as the old man died, started sitting in bars and handing out meat on credit. Zineta put up with it for three years. Then she sold the shop, paid off the debts and, with the help of a lawyer, left him, taking the children and what was left of the money. Today he watches a parking lot by the stadium and sometimes comes to the gate to ask for twenty marks.
With that money she bought an old three-story house above Koševo and rented the rooms to students and to young people in their first jobs. In the house lived two medical students from Nikšić, a student from the Music Academy who practiced the trumpet only when she was at the market, and a few young office clerks. Rent was paid on the first of the month, breakfast was at seven, and on Sundays there was pita. Zineta knew when to give credit and when to look the other way. Behind her back the lodgers called her the Minister.
Her daughter Erna was twenty-one. She had worked at the register of a supermarket in Alipašino, but the manager talked to her too much, so her mother brought her home to help around the house. Erna had gray-green eyes that she lifted toward the ceiling when she talked, as if she were checking on something up there. On Sunday evenings, when the students brought a guitar into the parlor, she sang old sevdalinke in such a way that every line sounded like a joke at somebody's expense. Zineta watched and kept quiet. None of the students was serious, none of them had money. And then she noticed that in front of one man Erna no longer sang in jest.
Seid Hadrović was thirty-five and the oldest lodger in the house. For twelve years he had worked as an accountant at the Velagić and Sons publishing house, which printed primers and readers for half the canton. He wore glasses, paid on time, did not smoke in his room and had, as Zineta had heard, a nice sum in savings. She watched Erna and him until spring and said nothing. She let the thing take its course, like dough you do not touch until it has risen. When even the medical students began making jokes at breakfast, she sat down with Erna in the kitchen and asked her three questions. Erna answered all three, honestly, looking at the ceiling.
On Sunday morning the windows were open, and the smell of zeljanica came from the oven. Zineta looked at the clock: seventeen minutes past eleven. She had time to settle the matter and still catch the twelve fifteen tram to Ilidža, where she had lunch at her sister's every Sunday. She was sure she would win. Seid was not a student who could excuse himself with youth. He was a serious man in a house where a mother took in serious people, and he had abused her trust. Some mothers would ask for money over a thing like that and forget it. Zineta was not one of them: for a daughter's good name there was only one compensation. And Mrs. Velagić bought tufahije at the same pastry shop on Ferhadija as Zineta, every Saturday at ten. Last year old Velagić had fired a salesman just because the man's divorce was being talked about in the schools.
That morning Seid tried to shave three times, and three times his hand shook. He had not slept all night. He kept seeing Velagić's face the way he had seen it with that salesman: cold, polite, silent. "In this house we make primers," the old man said at every meeting. "Whoever does not know what decency is cannot sell it to others." Sarajevo is small, and the schools are even smaller. He thought of his cousins in Munich, of the bus, of a new start. But who there would give him twelve years of seniority and an office with a window on the Miljacka?
He remembered how it had started. One evening in February the power went out on the whole street, and Erna knocked on his door with a candle in her hand and wet hair and asked if he had a lighter. She came in to wait until the power came back. The door closed. After that she would leave a plate of warm pita covered with a napkin in his room and whisper on the stairs: "Just so you know, Mama doesn't know a thing." He believed her, because he wanted to believe her.
He also thought about the things that bothered him. She said "ja bi" instead of the correct "ja bih." Her father watched a parking lot. Her mother was the Minister. His people in Zenica, he knew, would remember every one of Erna's mistakes at the wedding. And then he would remember the way she laughed, with her head thrown back, and how on that February night she had whispered that next to him she was not afraid of the dark. He knew he was to blame. He also knew how it would all end, he just had not said it to himself yet.
Erna came in without knocking, in tears. "Mama knows," she said. "She knows everything. What do we do now?" She put her arms around him, and he told her not to cry, that everything would be all right, though he did not know what that meant. Then one of the medical students knocked on the door and said, looking at the floor: "The lady asks you to come down to the kitchen." On the stairs he passed Senaid, Erna's brother, who coaches boxing in a gym at Skenderija. Senaid only looked at him, from above, even though he was standing a step lower, and kept going up the stairs.
In the kitchen there was coffee in a džezva and a plate of zeljanica. Zineta sat up straight, as if behind an office counter. "You are a serious man, Mr. Seid," she said. "That is why I am speaking to you seriously." She did not raise her voice. She mentioned the pastry shop on Ferhadija and Mrs. Velagić, just in passing, the way one mentions the weather. "I am not a woman who talks," she said. "But women talk. I am only asking you what you intend to do." Seid took off his glasses, wiped them on his shirt and put them back on. The kitchen smelled of zeljanica. "I intend," he said, and his voice caught. "I intend to marry her."
Upstairs, in her own room, Erna sat on the bed. She had washed her eyes with cold water, fixed the clip in her hair and looked at herself in the mirror for a long time. She tried out how Erna Hadrović sounded, first in a whisper, then out loud. Then she lay back, lifted her eyes to the ceiling and began to think about an apartment in Grbavica with a balcony, about a white dress, about how one day she too would make coffee for someone in a džezva. Her thoughts flowed calmly, one after another, and she forgot completely that she was waiting for something.
At last she heard her mother's voice from the stairs. "Erna! Come down, dear. Mr. Seid wants to tell you something." Only then did she remember what she had been waiting for.