The Official Car to the Hairdresser

For thirty years my mother-in-law Zumreta bought bread at the kiosk below her building in Slatina and never asked what it cost, because she knew. She also knew what tomatoes cost at the Kreka market, who in the building was getting divorced and how much her husband Midhat earned as a clerk in the cantonal roads directorate. He earned little and never complained. In the evenings he did crosswords in pencil, so that he could erase. When I married Đenita, she took me in the way you take in an umbrella someone has forgotten: you do not throw it out, but you do not carry it either. I teach music at the high school, and on weekends I play the accordion at weddings, and for her that was a sufficient description of the whole man.

In March two parties in the cantonal government quarreled over one ministry, and neither would let the other have the post. Someone remembered the quiet clerk who in twenty years had never held anything against anyone and did not belong to any party. And so Midhat, at fifty-eight and with a crossword in his pocket, became minister of transport for Tuzla Canton. When he announced it at dinner, my mother-in-law put down her spoon and said only: "I knew it." None of us asked what she had known.

The change began the next day. On the stairs she told her neighbor Safija that from now on she should be addressed as "madam minister." She no longer bought bread at the kiosk but sent the minister's driver for it, Atif, who, in Midhat's words, had been hired to drive the minister, not the pastries. Atif drove her to the hairdresser on the Skver too, and to the tailor, and once, at ten at night, to the Pannonian Lakes, because she wanted to see how they looked lit up when you saw them from an official car.

Within a week the apartment in Slatina had become a waiting room. Relatives I had not known existed began to arrive: Aunt Hikmeta from Živinice, who wanted a job for her grandson, cousin Huso from Lukavac, who wanted a permit for a gas station, and two women from Gračanica who claimed they had gone to elementary school with my mother-in-law. She received them in the living room, in an armchair she'd had reupholstered in burgundy, and promised each of them something. Within a month Aunt Hikmeta's grandson was working at the ministry as an adviser, though he was twenty years old and did not know what he was advising on. My mother-in-law had the cleaning woman, who had worked at the ministry for fifteen years, transferred to the archive, because at the entrance she had not greeted her humbly enough.

Then my turn came. One Sunday she called me into the kitchen, shut the door and told me calmly, as if she were reading the weather forecast. "You are a nice man, Besim. But a minister's daughter cannot spend her life next to an accordion." I told her that Đenita was a chemistry teacher and earned her own money. "She was a chemistry teacher," said my mother-in-law. "Now she is a minister's daughter." She took a piece of paper out of her bag on which, in her large handwriting, were a lawyer's name and phone number. For lunch, she said, she had invited the minister's chief of staff, a young man from Sarajevo who had a future.

His name was Nino, he wore a blazer without a tie and shoes without socks, and at lunch he sat exactly where my mother-in-law had laid his spoon: next to Đenita, and across from me. For an hour and a half he talked about himself. About the party he was in, about the party he would move to, about how in politics nothing happens by chance. Đenita listened to him with the attention she usually saves for students trying to explain why they did not bring their homework. When my mother-in-law brought out the baklava, Nino leaned toward Đenita and quietly asked whether she could ask her father to sign a decision on a tender for asphalt, for his uncle's firm, because that, he said, would be good for all of us.

Đenita wiped her mouth with her napkin and said loudly, so the whole room would hear: "Mom, Nino is asking if Dad can sign the asphalt for his uncle." My mother-in-law turned red, but only for a moment. "Young people have to think about the future," she said, and put another piece of baklava on Nino's plate. Midhat said nothing. That evening in the hallway he came up to me with his crossword in his hand. "Don't worry, son," he said. "Governments in this canton don't last longer than milk in the fridge. I just make sure I don't sign anything."

In May the portal Tuzlanski glas published a photograph of the ministry's official car outside a hair salon on the Skver, with the headline: "Minister of Transport, but Who Is Riding?" Below it were three more: the car at the Pannonian Lakes at ten at night, the car outside the tailor's shop and the car outside the kiosk, with Atif getting out of it with two loaves of bread under his arm. Someone had also dug up the name of the twenty-year-old adviser. The opposition demanded an explanation in the Cantonal Assembly, and one of the parties that had quarreled in March found in the photographs a reason to make peace with the other.

My mother-in-law called the portal a spittoon and all of it envy. She decided to answer as befitted her: with a big dinner in the apartment, twenty guests, catering from a restaurant and me at the accordion, because, as she put it, there was no cheaper music. Aunt Hikmeta baked a pie, and Huso brought lamb and the papers for the gas station, just in case.

The dinner was on the first of June. The guests had only just sat down, and I had only just opened the accordion, when on the television, which my mother-in-law would not let anyone turn off because she was waiting for them to show her, the news appeared: the Assembly of Tuzla Canton had voted no confidence in the Government, three months and two days after it was appointed. Nino's phone rang first. He looked at the screen, stood up, said "excuse me, urgent" and left without even eating his soup. The twenty-year-old adviser left after him, then the two women from Gračanica. Huso gathered up his papers and his lamb.

In the end four of us were left in the living room, plus Aunt Hikmeta, who had no ride back to Živinice. My mother-in-law sat in the burgundy armchair and stared at the dark television. Đenita took off her earrings, one and then the other, the way you take them off a child who has fallen asleep in her clothes. Midhat took out his crossword. Nobody spoke. Then my mother-in-law looked at the accordion on my knees and said my name, for the first time since I had joined the family, without reproach: "Besim, play something. At least you don't leave when the government falls."

I played until midnight, and she sang sevdalinkas, off key and quietly, one after another. The next morning, when I stopped by for Đenita, my mother-in-law was in the kitchen writing a list in a notebook. "Who left before the soup," she said, without looking up. "Governments fall, but they also get made. When Midhat comes back, and he will come back, I will know whom not to call." In the living room Midhat was rubbing out, with an eraser, a word he had apparently filled in too early. My mother-in-law walked to the kiosk for bread, on foot, and, as Safija told it, the whole way there she greeted everyone first and asked everyone about their health, as if the election were tomorrow.