The Wife Sold at the Mowing Fair

The mowers left Strljanica around four, when the grass already lay in swaths and the music from the tents had begun to drown out the bells from the pastures. That July Nusret Hendo was twenty-six, with a wife of nineteen and a daughter of eight months, and in the mowing contest he had come second, behind an old man from Kupres whose grandson he could have been. Second place brought nothing but a certificate. He left the certificate on the bench by Mejra's tent, where she sold thyme tea, and under the counter, for those who knew to ask, something stronger.

Sabina sat at the end of the bench with the baby in her lap and watched Mejra top up his cup for the third time. Nusret talked louder and louder. About Germany, where he could have gone if he had not married. About an apartment in Bugojno he would never have. About how a man with a family was not even allowed to dream, because someone would immediately ask him for diaper money. The people around the tent laughed, because they talked that way themselves, only more quietly. Then Nusret stood up, slapped his palm on the counter and said he was selling his wife and child. "Who will give more?" he shouted. "We start at fifty marks."

They laughed at that too. Someone offered ten marks and a goat. Sabina quietly told him to stop, and he, precisely because she had said it in front of everyone, repeated the offer, seriously now, looking over their heads as if at a livestock market. That was when a man nobody knew stood up at the far end of the tent, tanned, in a white shirt, with a coastal accent. He counted five hundred mark notes onto the counter. "If she is willing," he said. Sabina looked at Nusret for a long time. Then she took off her wedding ring, laid it beside the money, picked up the baby and the diaper bag and followed the stranger toward the parking lot, without turning around once.

Nusret woke at dawn, in the hay behind the tent, with dew on his jacket and five notes in his shirt pocket. The ring was with them. All day he went around Kupres, Šuica and the gas stations as far as Bugojno asking about the man in the white shirt. Nobody knew him. All he learned was that he was a seaman from Makarska named Jure, because Mejra had heard that while she poured his tea. In the evening he stood at the edge of Strljanica, where he had mowed the day before, and in front of the empty field he swore out loud that for twenty years he would not taste a drop of alcohol. Twenty, because any smaller number seemed cheap to him. He put the notes and the ring in an envelope and never touched them.

Between that dawn and his second term as mayor of the Bugojno municipality stood twelve years on building sites in Germany, a company that built schools from Gornji Vakuf to Donji Vakuf, and the reputation of a man who did not drink. At every reception he held a glass of mineral water, so behind his back people called him Fizzy. It was said that he had divorced young and that his former wife was somewhere in Croatia, and nobody asked any more. Two years ago that woman came back. Jure had died of a heart attack on a ship near Malta, and Sabina came to Bugojno with Ilda, who was eighteen then, because she had nowhere else to go. Nusret married her again in the municipal hall, quietly, one Thursday. They told Ilda only that they had divorced when she was a baby.

For the first months Ilda called him by his first name. He became Dad one Sunday on the Vrbas, when he was teaching her to cast a line and he, the mayor of the municipality, waded into the water up to his knees to untangle her line from a willow. From then on she brought him coffee in his office and told everyone at the municipality that her father was the most honest man in Bugojno. He listened to it and never once corrected her.

The Bugojno market had been under renovation for two years. A new roof, numbered stalls, certified scales, and a rule Nusret had written himself: no permit, no selling. Mejra had no permit. She was the only person in Bugojno who knew what the mayor looked like drunk. She was seventy-four and had cheese from a wooden tub, eggs from her own hens and, as people whispered, a bottle of homemade brandy under the cheese. The municipal inspector had fined her twice. The second time she spilled a bucket of whey in front of him and sent word to the mayor that she remembered him from his younger days.

The opening was on Saturday, with a ribbon, speeches and a live stream by the local television on the internet. Ilda stood in the front row filming her father on her phone, proud the way only someone can be who got a father just two years ago. Nusret spoke about order. He said a market was not a fair, that at a market you knew who was selling and at what price, and that Bugojno would no longer be a place where all sorts of things were sold under the counter. People applauded. Then from the back, under the old roof that had not yet been torn down, came a voice that drowned out the loudspeakers.

"You talk to me about fairs, Nusret?" Mejra was walking through the crowd with a bucket in her hand, and people stepped aside for her as if she were carrying something scalding. "I poured for you at Strljanica, son. Under the counter. Remember? And at my counter you sold your wife and child to a seaman. For five hundred marks. I counted them for you so he would not cheat you." She looked toward Sabina, who was standing behind the podium in a sand-colored coat. "There she is. Ask her what she cost."

The cameraman did not lower his camera. Nobody lowered a phone, except Ilda, whose hand dropped by itself. From the left the adviser whispered to Nusret to say the old woman was drunk, or ill, or taking revenge over the fine. Nusret did not listen to him. He leaned toward the microphone. "It is true," he said. "I was drunk and I sold them. Mrs. Mejra's fines are canceled." Then he stepped down from the stage and walked through the crowd the same way she had come. By midnight the video had more views than Bugojno has inhabitants.

For two nights Ilda did not come home. When she came back, she did not ask him but her mother. Sabina told her everything, sitting on the edge of the bed: that she had been nineteen, that on that night she had believed that what is sold in front of witnesses cannot be taken back, and that Jure had been a good man who never once reminded her how much he had paid for her. "And why did you go back to him?" Ilda asked. Sabina opened a drawer and put an old envelope on the bed. Inside were her ring and five hundred mark notes, all folded the same way. "Because for twenty years he never spent them," she said. Ilda picked up the ring, turned it toward the window and put it back in the envelope.

Nusret resigned on Monday, before the opposition could call a session. The news sites wrote about it for a week, and then they found something else. Bugojno did not forget, but it grew tired of remembering. At the new market the vendors stopped weighing when he walked by, and someone wrote on a pillar of the roof with a marker: who will give more. Nusret did not let them wipe it off. He leased three meadows below Kupres and took down from the attic the scythe he had not touched in twenty years. He did not call Ilda, because he did not know what he would say to her, and she did not call him either.

In July, twenty years after that night, he stood in the line of mowers on Strljanica, the oldest but one, and came third. He mowed slowly, in a straight line, and nobody laughed. His vow had run out that morning. Mejra's tent stood in the same place, her granddaughter ran it now, and when Nusret sat down on the bench, the granddaughter asked him what he would have. Before he could answer, someone sat down at the end of the bench, in the spot where Sabina had once sat. Ilda put the old envelope on the counter, without the ring now, and pushed it toward him. "Mom says this is yours," she said. "Your treat." Nusret looked at the envelope for a long time, then at the granddaughter. "Two teas," he said. "Thyme. And nothing from under the counter."