The death notice pasted on a post in front of the Šarena Mosque said that Zarfa Kurspahić had passed into the next world on Sunday evening, in her eightieth year, and that the funeral prayer would be held today, Monday, at two in the afternoon. Below that were the names of the bereaved: son Vahid, daughter-in-law Sabira, granddaughter Ilhana, sisters Hata and Šuhra, brother Šaćir, other relatives, neighbors and friends. Naida read them twice, the way she used to read the list of admitted students at school. Then she stood on the sidewalk with her car keys in her hand and thought that if she was here at all, she was in that last line, between the neighbors and the friends, where anyone fits who is no one.
For six years Vahid had come on Mondays. He worked in Sarajevo as a site supervision engineer, went back to Travnik on Fridays, to his wife and daughter, and on Monday at seven in the evening he rang her doorbell in Grbavica. Always with the same canvas bag: inside it a pie from his mother, a piece of Vlašić cheese, sometimes a jar of plum jam. "Mom sent it for the colleague," he used to say in the first months, laughing, because once at home he had said there was a colleague at the office who lived alone and ate from the bakery. From then on Zarfa baked one extra tray every Sunday. In time Naida learned to guess from the pie what was going on in Travnik: potato pie in January, spinach pie as soon as the first spinach reached the market, cheese pie when Zarfa's knee hurt and she did not feel like stretching the dough for long.
Naida heard her only once. It was the second winter. Vahid was in the shower when his phone rang, the screen said Mom, and it rang a third time, so Naida answered, thinking something had happened. "Are you that colleague, dear?" asked a voice that sounded as if it were stirring something on the stove at the same time. "Was the pie salty? Vahid always says it's just right, and he would say it's just right if it had as much salt as the sea." Naida said it had been just right. It had been too salty, it was always too salty, but Naida said it the way she would go on saying, for years, that empty weekends did not bother her.
At six this morning a message had come: "My mom died." Nothing after that. Until eleven she sat in the office staring at the screen, and then she took the day off and set out for Travnik, through Kiseljak and Busovača, behind a truck loaded with firewood. In Vitez she stopped at a florist and bought white roses. Only when she parked below the Old Fortress and saw people walking silently toward the mosque, empty-handed, did she remember that nobody brings flowers to a Muslim funeral. She left the roses on the back seat, under her jacket, as if she were hiding them from someone.
The women stood along the wall of the mosque courtyard, apart from the rows of men, in dark coats, with headscarves tied under their chins. Naida took her own silk scarf out of her bag, too bright a blue for this day, and tied it the way they did. The coffin was covered with a green cloth. Vahid stood in the first row, and she recognized his neck, but not his shirt. Someone had ironed it for him in Travnik. Among the women, two steps away from her, stood Sabira, upright, with her hand on the shoulder of a girl of seventeen who had Vahid's eyebrows. "Whose are you, dear?" the older woman next to Naida asked quietly. "I'm from work. Vahid's work." "That's kind of you. Zarfa fed half of Travnik." "I know," said Naida, and regretted it at once, because the woman looked at her more carefully.
After the prayer the men lifted the coffin onto their shoulders and carried it toward the cemetery, quickly, taking turns as they walked. The women stayed behind. As he passed along the wall, Vahid saw her. On his face she saw something she had not seen once in six years. It was not grief. It was fear. He looked away and shifted his shoulder under the coffin, and Naida understood that he was afraid of her, here, on the day he was burying his mother.
She should not have gone to the house. But the women slowly set off down the street toward the Lašva, toward the Kurspahić house, and she went with them, the way a crowd carries you. In front of the door the shoes stood in rows, flat, black, worn. She took off her heeled boots and put them at the end of the row, where they stood like a guest who had come to the wrong address. Inside, the women sat on the built-in bench along the wall and on chairs brought over from the neighbors. On the wall above the bench hung a photograph from someone's wedding, in which Vahid, younger and thinner, stood between his mother and Sabira. An older woman was quietly reciting prayers, and the others were silent and looked at their hands.
Sabira went around the room with a tray of small coffee cups. When she reached Naida, she stopped. "And you are?" "Naida. I work with Vahid." Sabira looked at her for a long time, calmly, the way you look at a bill you already know is wrong. "Ah," she said. "You're that colleague from Sarajevo." She put the tray down on the table, went into the kitchen, and came back with a plastic container wrapped in a dish towel. "Mom baked yesterday, before she was taken ill. She said this one was for you, so you wouldn't be alone on Monday." She handed her the container. Then she added, more quietly, without changing her expression: "Take it. I don't bake for Sarajevo."
Naida took the container and said "May God have mercy on her soul," as the others were saying, and the words sounded borrowed in her mouth. The girl with Vahid's eyebrows watched her from the window. Naida got up, found her boots at the end of the row, and went out without anyone stopping her. Nobody had to.
At Plava Voda she sat in the car and set the container on her knees. The water rushed under the bridge, tourists were eating ćevapi at the tables, someone was laughing. She unwrapped the towel. Inside was zeljanica, spinach pie, cut into even pieces, and on the lid was a slip of paper on which, in large, crooked letters, was written: For the colleague. Her phone buzzed. "Thank you for coming. You shouldn't have." She read it twice and could not tell whether it meant thanks for the kindness or that there had been no need for her there. She did not answer. At a gas station in Kiseljak she gave the white roses to the girl at the register, who held them for a long time and did not know where to put them.
That evening at seven, when he had always rung on Mondays, nobody rang. Naida sat at the table by the window and ate the last piece of Zarfa's zeljanica, slowly, to the end. When she had swallowed, she said out loud, in the empty kitchen, what she had not told anyone for six years: that it was too salty.