The Only Honest Minister

I am a man nobody trusts with anything serious, and that is why people trust me with everything. Officially I work at my father's insurance company, but in reality I drink coffee on Wilson's Promenade and watch who walks with whom. Nijaz has been my friend since elementary school. He is the only one who calls me Orhan in that tone when he is angry, and he is rarely angry. The papers called him the only honest minister in the Federation government, and his wife Edina, who runs an association that publishes politicians' asset declarations, believed it more than the papers did. On him she built her proof that a person could stay clean in politics. I had known him too long to build anything on him.

On his fiftieth birthday, at the house on Koševo Hill, there were forty guests, two ambassadors, a theater director and a baklava Edina's mother had been baking since morning. Nives Kalaba turned up too. She had not been invited, but she had a business card from a consortium in Vienna and the smile with which, back in high school, she used to copy other people's tests and get better grades than the people she copied from. She took Nijaz out to the terrace for ten minutes. He came back gray in the face and did not let go of his glass of water for the rest of the evening.

When the guests had gone, he told me everything in the kitchen. In 2003 he had been a young adviser at the privatization agency. He had written a letter by hand to the late Teufik Arnautović, with the lowest price the commission would accept for a factory in Ilidža. Teufik bought the factory for pocket change and gave Nijaz money, which paid for his first campaign and half of this house. Nives had been Teufik's assistant, and after his death she kept his papers. On Thursday the government would decide on a concession for six small hydropower plants on the Neretvica. The consortium's studies were fake, and Nijaz knew it. If he spoke for the concession, she would give him the letter back. If he did not, the letter would be on the news sites by Friday.

"Tell Edina," I said. "Edina doesn't love me," he said. "Edina loves a man she invented, and for twenty years I've been pretending to be him." He said that on Thursday he would speak the way Nives wanted, then quietly withdraw, and Edina would never have to know why. I told him that women always find out why, only sometimes from the wrong person, and that women who love invented men are rare, so they should not be wasted on a lie. He did not laugh. I laughed for both of us and went home, and in my pocket I carried something that should have stayed on the sofa.

It was a gold bracelet in the shape of a snake, with a clasp that opens only when you press the snake's eye. I knew this because I had bought it myself, for my cousin Maida's wedding. At that wedding, in a hotel in Ilidža nine years ago, the bracelet vanished from Maida's handbag, and the police report was still on file. I found it on Nijaz's sofa right after Nives had left.

The next day Nives went straight to Edina. What they said to each other, I do not know. I know what Nijaz told me later, over the phone, in the voice of a man who has fallen down a flight of stairs. Edina asked him if it was true, and he said it was. She asked how much money there had been, and he told her. She asked whether anyone besides Nives knew. He said Orhan knew, and she said that was the same as the whole of Baščaršija knowing. She said he had been the only proof she had. He said he had never asked her to hang him on the wall like a diploma, and that he was a man, not an annual report. Then she sat in the car in front of the house and for an hour did not start the engine.

That evening Nives came to my place. The doorman let her wait in the apartment, because she said she was an old friend, which was half the truth. She asked whether I had happened to see a bracelet at Nijaz's. "This one?" I said, and before she could answer, I fastened it around her wrist. She tried to take it off. She could not. I told her where and when the bracelet had disappeared and that Maida still kept the receipt. I picked up my phone. Nives looked at the snake on her wrist for a long time. Then she took an envelope out of her handbag. I set the letter on fire over the sink, and only when it had burned down to the last letter did I press the snake's eye.

Only after she had left did I see that a piece of paper was missing from the chest of drawers. That afternoon, while I was out, Edina had left a note for me with the doorman, and he had put it on the chest of drawers when he let Nives in. It was handwritten and without a name: I can't do this alone anymore, you are the only one who knows everything, I'm coming at ten. She did not come, because, as I later found out, Nijaz had gotten home early. Nives took the note with her. The next day she sent it in an envelope to the ministry, to Nijaz, with a slip of paper saying where she had found it.

The minister's envelopes were opened by his secretary Rahima, who for twenty years had thrown anonymous slips into the bin without reading them. She threw the slip away. She recognized the note by Edina's handwriting and put it on the minister's desk. Nijaz called me around noon. "Edina wrote to me," he said, and his voice sounded as if someone had given him back something he had lost. "I can't do this alone anymore, you are the only one who knows everything. I thought she would never need me again." For the first time in my life, I said nothing.

On Thursday, at the government session, Nijaz stood up against the concession. He spoke for twenty minutes, without notes, and said which studies had been copied and from whom. Two ministers stared at their phones, and a third stepped out into the hallway. The concession fell. On Friday the news sites wrote about him, but not what Nives had wanted. The prime minister offered him the post of his deputy. Edina asked him to refuse and to withdraw from politics, so that, as she put it, he could spend the rest of his life honestly.

I went to see her at the association, among the folders full of other people's asset declarations. I told her that if she made him leave now, she would not be punishing him for what he had done, but for not being the man she had believed in. "And what do I do with what I know?" she asked. "Keep it," I said. "You know better than anyone how to keep papers."

Nijaz accepted the post. That same evening Edina made him write a resignation, with no date, and sign it. She put it in the drawer of her desk at the association, between the asset declarations of two ministers she had already driven to resign. "If you ever become ideal again," she told him, "I will hand it in." When she told me this, she laughed for the first time since that birthday. As I was leaving, she gave me the spare key to that drawer, in case one day she was the one who became ideal.