Three Women in the Bread Van

I loaded the van that Friday, so I can say I was there first, and what happened afterward all three of them told me, each in her own way: one at the post office counter, one at the hair salon, and one across the counter at the bakery. I have worked at the Kruna bakery in Sanski Most for twenty-two years, and I know every driver who has ever passed through our yard. Elvir was the only one to whom women brought coffee at the loading ramp without being asked. He was twenty-seven, with hair he combed in the rearview mirror and a fiancée, Mirsada, who worked at the post office and whom he was to marry in September.

The van was white and old, with the bakery's name on its sides and a handbrake that for eight months had held only when it felt like it. Everyone at the bakery knew it, and every month the boss promised he would have it fixed. That Friday I stacked empty crates in the van for Elvir, along with the flour sacks we send back to the mill, and told him to leave it in gear on a slope. He winked at me. "Hajrija," he said, "I'm like that handbrake. I hold when it counts." He set off for Ključ singing along with the radio, and I just waved him away.

In Ključ, at the market, he ran into Una, a hairdresser from the salon by the bus station, who needed to get to her sister's in Sanski Most. Una was one of those girls who laugh before they hear the joke. She sat up front, took off her sunglasses, and told him the whole market had told her he was getting married. Elvir said nobody asked the market anything. By Vrhpolje he had already told her she had the most beautiful hands in the Krajina and that, if she wanted, he would marry her tomorrow, just so she would do his hair every morning.

At the bus stop by the bridge in Vrhpolje stood Mirsada, with a bag full of cakes from her aunt. Elvir, as Una told me later, went as pale as if he had seen a traffic patrol. He pulled over before the stop, around the bend, and told Una that it was Mirsada, that she was jealous of everything that breathed, and that there would be a big scene if she saw Una in the van. He asked her to hide in the back for five minutes, under the sacks. Una laughed, but she went, because, as she said, she liked the game even more than the ride.

Mirsada sat up front and started on the wedding right away. The restaurant on the Sana was booked, but the band was not, and neither was the number of guests on his side, because he kept forgetting someone. Elvir said yes to everything, his eyes on the road. Mirsada told me later that something rustled in the back and she thought it was mice, so she did not turn around, because she was more afraid of mice than of a mother-in-law. She asked him whether something was bothering him. He said the handbrake was bothering him.

And then, in front of a house in Hrustovo, they saw Anela taking laundry off the line. Anela was the girl Elvir had been sighing over since high school, and she had never looked at him twice. Now she looked at him and waved. Elvir stopped. He told Mirsada that Anela's mother was the biggest gossip in Hrustovo, and that if she saw the two of them alone in the van before the wedding, she would talk about it until Bajram, so he asked her, for the sake of both families' good name, to tuck herself into the back for five minutes. Mirsada grumbled, but she went.

It was dark in the back and smelled of flour. Mirsada lay down under the sacks beside the crates, and in the dark her foot struck somebody else's foot. Somebody whispered to her: "Quiet." Mirsada, as she told me, wanted to scream, but she was too curious. Una, as she told me, could barely keep from bursting out laughing. And so two women lay side by side under the flour sacks, neither quite sure who the other one was, and both perfectly sure what they were about to hear.

Anela sat up front. Elvir, they say, spoke without joking for the first time in his life. He told her he had waited ten years for her to look at him, that Mirsada was a good woman but he would not be a good husband to her if he was thinking of someone else, and that if Anela agreed, he would marry her before September. "You're engaged," said Anela. "That can be fixed," said Elvir. In the back, two flour sacks stopped breathing. Anela said she would think about it, and that was the worst possible word, because it sounded like a yes.

On the bend above the meadow they saw Elvir's father waving from his tractor. A wheel of his hay trailer had gotten stuck in the mud, and the old man was trying to pull it out by himself. Elvir stopped the van on the downhill slope, forgot everything I had told him about leaving it in gear, and ran toward his father. Anela got out to watch. The handbrake held exactly as long as it felt like, which was about half a minute.

The van started rolling backward, slowly, almost with dignity, went over the edge of the road, and settled into the ditch beside the meadow. The back doors, which had never closed properly, swung open on their own. Out of the van tumbled two empty crates, five flour sacks, and two young women, white from head to toe, one in a summer dress, the other in her blue post office suit. They sat on the dry grass facing each other and looked at each other. Anela screamed. Elvir's father switched off the tractor.

Una laughed first. Mirsada did not. She stood up, shook the flour off her skirt, and said she had heard everything. Una said she had heard everything too, and a bit more before that, from Ključ to Vrhpolje, if Mirsada was interested. Anela stood on the road with her arms crossed, looking at Elvir as if she were seeing him for the first time. Old Alić climbed down from the tractor, looked at the van in the ditch, then at the three young women, then at his son. "Son," he said, "what is this?" "This, Dad," said Elvir, "is one long ride."

What he did next, the whole of Sanski Most admits, took courage. He turned to Anela and proposed again, in front of everyone. Anela said she would not be the third woman in a bread van, and that now he could do the thinking by himself, because she had already done hers. Just then her father arrived on his bicycle, having seen from far off that something was going on, and took her home without asking a thing. Elvir then turned to Una. Laughing, Una told him she had a boyfriend in Linz and a client coming in for highlights at five, and she got into a neighbor's Golf that happened to be passing.

That left Mirsada. She was standing by the ditch shaking the flour out of her hair, and Elvir walked up to her like a man going to collect his punishment. He said nothing. She looked at him for a long time, and then she said that a woman does not get proposed to with flour in her hair, shook the last of it out, and told him that now he should ask properly. Elvir knelt in the grass, muddy as he was, and asked properly. Mirsada said yes, but on two conditions. The first was that the wedding stayed in September. The second was that from that day on, she would carry the keys to the van.

In October Mirsada quit the post office, and the boss hired her on the spot, because she had held a driver's license longer than Elvir and had never paid a fine. The handbrake was fixed the first week after the wedding, and Mirsada paid for it, out of the wedding envelopes. Today she drives, and Elvir sits beside her and carries the crates. Una still colors my hair when I come to Ključ, and she always asks about them. I tell her they are fine. And that whenever Elvir waves at someone by the roadside, Mirsada pulls the handbrake without a word.