The Price Tag on the Sleeve

Mladen Kovačević, senior associate at the Banja Luka City Administration, forty-one years old, lay on the couch in his apartment in Borik on Saturdays and thought about marriage. He had been thinking about it for six years, always on Saturdays, always lying down. "Stana," he called to the woman who cleaned his apartment, "did the tailor ask why I needed a dark suit?" "He did." "And what did you tell him?" "That you are getting married." "And he?" "He said it was about time." Mladen closed his eyes contentedly, and then opened them again at once, because it seemed to him the tailor had said too much.

At noon Aunt Milka arrived, a hairdresser from Starčevica who had married off half the town between two blow-dries. She took a notebook out of her bag and read: Tihana Marić, thirty-four, daughter of the late Jovan, who had kept two hardware stores, a house in Petrićevac with a walnut tree in the yard, says little and has a lovely laugh. "That sounds lovely," said Mladen. "Let's wait until spring." It was October.

Just then Žarko Babić walked in without knocking, Mladen's friend from high school, who sold insurance and talked as if he were selling it even when he was off duty. When he saw Milka, he turned red. Nine years ago she had married him off, as he liked to put it, and promised him a quiet wife. "Quiet!" he shouted. "She gives instructions in her sleep!" Then he heard about Tihana and about spring, and all at once he calmed down. "There is no spring," he said. "You, Mladen, are getting married this week. You are a couch in a suit. Somebody has to do something with you." And he dragged him off to Petrićevac.

Three men were already sitting in Tihana's living room. The bailiff Rajko Pržulj had a folder on his knees and was asking Aunt Rosa whether the house was registered in the land books and how many square feet the attic had. The tax adviser Vedran, in shoes that squeaked, was explaining that he was moving to Graz and needed a wife who knew German. Đorđe, a cook who had sailed on cruise ships for twenty years, was talking about Palermo and mentioned to everyone in passing that seventeen women had turned him down, as if he were giving a reference. When Tihana came in with the coffee, they all stood up. Rajko asked Mladen where he worked. "At the City Administration," said Mladen. "Which department?" "Municipal fees." Rajko wrote that down in his folder, as if one day he would collect on that too. Tihana asked whether anyone wanted more coffee. Everyone said yes, except Mladen, who did not know whether he did. He did not say another word and was the first to leave, with the excuse that he had left the iron on.

That evening Tihana sat at her laptop and made a spreadsheet. Rajko was serious, but he looked at the walls as if he were appraising them. Vedran had nice hands and no sense of humor at all. Đorđe had made her laugh twice, but it was clear that one day she too would be on the list he recited to someone. The quiet one, Mladen, had said almost nothing, and that, oddly, she had liked. She wondered what it would be like if she could take Rajko's seriousness, Đorđe's laugh, Vedran's hands, and Mladen's silence and put one man together out of them. The spreadsheet did not add up. She shut the laptop and went to bed, annoyed with mathematics.

The next day Žarko took matters into his own hands. He came to Tihana's at nine in the morning and told her, with regret, that Rajko was up to his neck in debt, that Vedran had learned his German off the internet, and that Đorđe snored like a ship's foghorn. He knew none of this. "And your friend?" she asked. "Pure gold," said Žarko. "Serious, thrifty, doesn't drink, loves children and flowers." Mladen had never owned a flower. Then Žarko called Rajko and told him the house was mortgaged, and told Vedran that Tihana spoke only Russian. Tihana sent Đorđe his refusal by text message. It was his eighteenth, and he took it calmly, like a man who knows his statistics.

That same evening Žarko drove Mladen to Petrićevac, sat him in an armchair next to Tihana, and went out into the yard, on the pretext of looking at the walnut tree. For a long time they were silent. Then Mladen said that the Vrbas was cold in the summer, and that he liked that. Tihana said she liked it too. He said he did not like it when people talked a lot. She said she did not like it either. They were silent again, but this time differently. Mladen thought he could sit like this for years. It was the longest thought he had ever had about a woman.

Žarko burst in with a walnut in his hand and asked whether they had come to an agreement. They had not. "So what are you waiting for?" he said to Mladen. "Kneel." Mladen said he would think about it. Žarko took him by the shoulders and lowered him to his knees, the way you lower a suitcase. From his knees, Mladen asked Tihana whether she would marry him. She said she would. Žarko was already calling a cousin at the City Administration. Somebody had canceled for Friday at noon. "Why wait?" he said, and went off to buy flowers, because he had promised.

On Friday the wedding hall was full. Aunt Rosa came, and Aunt Milka, and Tihana's cousins, but also half of Mladen's department, because the hall was on the same floor as his office. Tihana arrived in a simple white dress and smiled at him from the doorway, just as Milka had promised. Mladen thought she was beautiful, and that frightened him more than anything so far. The registrar sent the groom to a small room behind the hall to wait ten minutes while the witnesses signed. Mladen sat down, stood up, and sat down again. Now everything is decided, he thought. A minute ago it was not, and now it is. Forever, and every day, coffee in the morning and coffee in the evening, for forty years. He looked at the window. It was an old window on the raised ground floor, nobody had shut it all the way, and below it was a flowerbed of begonias, barely five feet down.

He climbed onto the radiator, then onto the windowsill. A price tag hung from his sleeve, because he had bought the suit on the condition that he could return it. He jumped into the begonias. A worker from the city parks department, who was raking leaves at that moment, looked at him and said nothing, because in Banja Luka he had already seen everything. Mladen brushed the soil off his trouser legs and set off quickly, then more quickly still, toward the bus stop by the Vrbas.

When Žarko opened the door of the small room, he found an open window and a begonia petal on the sill. He shouted so loudly that the cousins took out their phones. Tihana went to the window in her white dress and saw, far down the street, a man in a dark suit running, with a white tag fluttering from his sleeve. "Is this the first time?" she asked the registrar. "The third this year," said the registrar. "But the first through the window." Aunt Rosa burst into tears, Aunt Milka was crossing something out in her notebook, and Tihana, to everyone's surprise, laughed. "Lunch is paid for," she said. "Let's go and eat."

By evening the video bore the headline Groom Flees Through the Window of His Own Building and had gone around every news site in Banja Luka. On Monday his colleagues taped a begonia to Mladen's office door. But Mladen did not know that yet. On Friday, at half past twelve, he was sitting on a bench at the bus stop by the Vrbas, with the tag on his sleeve, watching the river.

He was breathing, he was free, and for the first five minutes he felt like a man who had escaped a disaster. Then he remembered how Tihana had said that she did not like it either when people talked a lot. He thought that perhaps he ought to go back. He thought that perhaps he ought to go back tomorrow. From the left came the bus toward the center, from the right the bus toward Borik. Mladen stood up, planted himself exactly in the middle of the stop, and waited for the first one to arrive, the one that would decide for him.