The Turkish Delight Tin

That evening, on a terrace above the Drina, they were arguing about whether a person can love only once in a lifetime. It was the end of August, below us swimmers were still sitting on the town beach, and the hostess, the widow of a judge, brought out an apple pie and said that these days love lasts about as long as a phone battery. Her grandson said that for older people it had lasted just as long, only they had no phones. Then everyone turned to me, because I had worked at the hospital for forty years and because old doctors, as the hostess put it, have seen everything. I said I had seen one love like that, only one, and that it was not beautiful the way they imagined. So I told them about Raza.

Raza and her parents mended umbrellas and shoes at the markets. They had an old white van, and on Mondays they were in Foča, on Tuesdays in Čajniče, on Thursdays in Goražde, and on Saturdays in Rogatica or Višegrad, depending on the summer. Under a tarp her father glued soles and nailed on heels, her mother replaced umbrella spokes and sewed the fabric, and Raza, from the time she could walk, sat on a crate between them sorting tiny nails into Turkish delight tins. They slept in the van or in rented rooms, and by the age of fifteen Raza had changed schools seven times.

When she was eight, one Thursday, she came across a boy crying on the low wall by the river. It was Vehbija, the son of the man who ran the hardware store by the market, clean, his hair combed, in a white shirt, and some older boys had just taken his ice cream money. Raza pulled out of her pocket everything she had, the coins her father gave her for sorting, and poured them into his palm. He stopped crying, went for an ice cream, and, because he felt awkward, let her sit beside him on the wall while he ate it. That was all. But from that day on Raza saved coins all week and brought them to him every Thursday, and he took them and let her sit beside him.

It went on like that for years. Vehbija grew up and cried less and less, and he kept taking the money, until he started at the gymnasium and began to be ashamed for his friends to see him with a girl from the market. Then he went to Sarajevo to study pharmacy. Raza was fifteen, and she kept coming on Thursdays. In the summers, when he came home, she waited for him on the bridge, and he would walk past her with his friends as if past a lamppost. Once he nodded to her. That day, she told me later, she remembered better than the days her parents died.

Vehbija came back with his degree, opened a pharmacy on the main street, and married Rubina, the daughter of a department head at the municipality, a tall, proud woman who wore a white coat herself and stood at the register. By then Raza had a van of her own, her parents had died one after the other, and she worked alone. Every Thursday, when she had packed up her tools, she went into the pharmacy and bought something she did not need: aspirin, bandages, cough syrup, hand cream. She paid in coins. Vehbija would give her the change without raising his head, and Rubina would say something about umbrellas after her and laugh. Around town people said Raza was a little odd. Back then I knew her only from the market, because she had mended my umbrella twice and would not take any money.

One winter, four years ago, the man who runs the gas station at the edge of town called me. He said the woman from the van had not come out for three days and was coughing so hard you could hear it at the pumps. I found her in the van, under two blankets, with a fever and lungs that sounded like wet paper. She was sixty-two and looked older. She would not go to the hospital until she had told me what she had to say. So she told me, there in the van, over the tea I poured for her from my thermos: about the wall, about the coins, about the bridge, about that one nod. She spoke calmly, as if she were talking about the weather, and not once did she say she loved him. She did not have to.

Then she pulled a Turkish delight tin out from under the seat, scratched and dented, and gave it to me along with the keys to the van. In the tin there were twenty-three thousand four hundred and sixty marks, in tens and twenties folded in half, and some coins at the bottom. She had saved it, she said, her whole life, from umbrellas and soles. "Give it to him," she said. "He does not have to say anything. Just let him know that someone did." That night I drove her to the hospital. She died on the third day, at seven in the morning, during the shift change. The municipality paid for the funeral, and there were five of us there.

A week later I went to the pharmacy with the tin under my arm. Vehbija and Rubina received me in the little room behind the medicine shelves, among the cardboard boxes, and I told them everything just as it had been told to me. Vehbija turned red to his ears. He said he had exchanged maybe two sentences with that woman in his whole life. Rubina stood up. "That tramp?" she said. "For forty years she stares at my husband across the counter, and I know nothing? Why, it is a disgrace, Doctor. What will people say? That he promised her something?" Vehbija stared at the floor as if someone had robbed him rather than given him a gift.

I set the tin down on a box of vitamins and said how much was in it. The little room went quiet. Rubina sat down. Vehbija lifted the lid, looked at the folded bills, and put the lid back. "Well," Rubina said after a while, much more calmly, "we can hardly leave it out on the street. We will give part of it to the mosque, for her soul." Then she asked about the van. Did it run, did it have its papers. They had a weekend house near Ustikolina with a big garden, and they really needed something to keep their tools in.

I left the keys on their table. The next spring I drove past their weekend house. The van stood at the end of the garden, without plates, its back doors open, full of tomato stakes and sacks of fertilizer. The Turkish delight tins with Raza's tiny nails and spokes lay in a pile by the fence, set out for the trash. That same year the pharmacy got a new sign, with a green cross that lights up at night and can be seen from the bridge.

One Thursday that fall it was raining, and I was walking across the market. Rubina, a black umbrella over her head, was passing the spot where the white van used to stand. I recognized the umbrella by its new fabric and by one spoke that was lighter than the others. Raza had mended it for herself that last winter and left it on the seat of the van.

When I finished, nobody at the table said a word. The grandson held his phone in his hand but did not unlock it. The hostess got up, gathered the pie plates, said she would go and make coffee, and was a long time coming back from the kitchen. When she returned, she brought, along with the džezva, her own old umbrella, with one spoke hanging loose, set it down beside my chair, and asked whether I knew anyone who could fix it. I said I did not. I still do not.