The little bakery below Gradina opens at five thirty, half an hour before Antea finishes her night shift in radiology at Gradina. The first time she stops by it is by chance, in February, because it is cold, because the bus is late and because from the bakery, on the street that runs down from the hospital toward town, steam pours out onto the sidewalk as if from a bathhouse. Behind the counter stands a woman of about fifty, with glasses on a chain and flour up to her elbows, and sevdah plays quietly on the radio. "What will the doctor have?" the woman asks, as if she has known her for years.
"I'm not a doctor," says Antea. "I only take the scans." Still, the woman hands her a burek, hot, from the first batch, and won't let her pay more than half. "Anyone who looks inside people is a doctor," she says. Her name is Suada. She runs the bakery on her own, with one helper, and gets up at four, every day except Sunday, for twenty years now. On the wall behind her hang the first banknote she ever earned, in a frame, and a calendar from a flour company in Gradačac.
By March it has become a habit. Antea comes in at six, Suada makes her coffee in a džezva behind the counter, and for ten minutes, until the first rush arrives, they talk. About people who buy bread as if they were punishing it. About Suada's knees. About Antea's mother in Brčko, who asks every Sunday when she is going to get married. One morning, tired after a hard night, Antea says what she has told no one. That she has a man. That he is married. That he is fifty-two, that he has beautiful hands and bad jokes and laughs like a boy when something works out for him, that he sells medical equipment to hospitals and says his marriage is over in everything except on paper, because his wife lives only for her business, gets up before dawn and never asks him anything.
Suada does not interrupt her. She washes the džezva for a long time, as if it were the most important job in the world. "And does he come?" she asks at last. He does, says Antea, on Thursdays, after his rounds, and he always brings poppy seed rolls, warm, which he buys somewhere along the way. Suada laughs. "Mine travels too," she says. "He also sells something to hospitals, I never remember what. On Thursdays he's late. He says he was in Doboj." Then she adds, wiping her hands on her apron: "He loves my poppy seed rolls more than he loves me. Every Thursday he takes six and says he's taking them to his colleagues." Antea asks her whether it isn't hard. "It's hard when you wonder," says Suada. "I stopped wondering."
At the time Antea makes no connection. In Tuzla there are many men who sell something to hospitals, and every bakery makes poppy seed rolls. She thinks only that Suada is a good woman and that her husband is a lucky man, whatever he is like. In April she tells her that she is going to ask her man to choose. Suada nods. "If he loves you, he will choose," she says. "And if he doesn't choose, he has chosen."
On the Saturday before Bajram, Suada's helper falls ill, and the line outside the bakery stretches to the corner. Antea, free that weekend, pulls an apron over her head and steps behind the counter, though she does not know the difference between somun and pogača. Suada shows her how to pick up a roll so it doesn't get squashed and how to twist a bag shut in two turns, and praises her in front of the customers like a daughter. They laugh all morning. At nine the back door opens and a man comes in with a folder of invoices under his arm. "Suada, has that flour from Gradačac arrived?" Antea recognizes him by his voice before she raises her head. Sabahudin. Saba, as she calls him when they are alone. "Saba, meet my doctor," says Suada, without stopping cutting the pita. "Antea, this is my husband."
Sabahudin stands in the doorway and does not move. Antea is holding a pair of tongs with a roll in them, and the only thing she can think is that she must not drop the roll. "Nice to meet you," he says, and the hand he holds out across the counter is cold. "The pleasure is all mine," says Antea. Suada puts six poppy seed rolls into a bag. "For the colleagues," she says, and hands the bag to Antea, because she is closer. Antea passes the bag across the counter to the man with whom, last Thursday, she lay on the couch watching a film. Sabahudin takes the bag and goes out the back door without asking anything about the flour.
Antea stays until noon. She sells bread, takes money, gives change and smiles at people whose faces she does not see. On her break she goes into the little kitchen behind the bakery, rests her forehead against the cold tiles and counts to a hundred, the way she does when she waits for the machine to finish a scan. Suada talks about Bajram, about the baklava that has to be baked for tomorrow, about a daughter-in-law who is never on time. If she has noticed anything, she does not say. At the end she kisses Antea on the cheek and says she saved her day.
The next Thursday Sabahudin rings the intercom at seven. Antea does not let him in. "Take the rolls back to your wife," she tells him through the speaker. "She bakes them at four in the morning." He calls her twice more that evening and once the next day. Then he stops calling, as if that too were something he had long known how to do. That night Antea sleeps badly, and in the morning she feels lighter than she expected.
Antea changes her way to the bus. She takes the upper street, around the park, ten minutes longer. She buys bread at the supermarket, wrapped in plastic, and eats it without appetite. The hardest thing is not Sabahudin. The hardest thing is six in the morning, the džezva behind the counter and the ten minutes in which someone asks her how the night went and waits for the answer.
In May, after one long night, her feet carry her down the old street on their own. The bakery is lit, and steam pours out onto the sidewalk. Suada sees her through the window, taps on the glass and waves her in. Antea goes in. Suada is thinner than in April, and on her left hand there is no wedding ring anymore, only a pale mark on the skin. Without a word she makes her coffee. They ask each other about their health, about the knees, about the mother in Brčko. Then Suada, wiping her hands on her apron, says: "You know what's funny? For twenty years I've been baking him poppy seed rolls, and he never liked poppy seeds. They always get stuck in his teeth."
Antea looks at her. Suada does not look away. She takes six rolls from the display case, still warm, puts them in a paper bag and pushes it across the counter. "These are not for him," she says. "You like them." Antea takes the bag. Neither of them says anything more. The radio behind the counter plays something old, the first customers come in from the street, and Suada goes to meet them, as she does every morning.