Tulips Under the Zenica Smog

In Zenica they call me a wizard, but I am only a gardener. For fifty years I have had a nursery in Nemila, by the Bosna, and I sell pepper, tomato and cabbage seedlings to people who still believe something can be grown under the chimneys of the steelworks. I am seventy-one, with bad knees and good hands. My late wife used to say that I talked to plants more than to her, and she was right. For the fact that they named me a wizard, an engineer is to blame, and a woman, and most of all one January.

The engineer's name was Tomislav. He had come back from Stuttgart to work on the heating at the steelworks, and the first time he came to me was in November, after dark, when I was already closing. He did not ask about prices. He asked whether I could, in the middle of January, in Zenica, make a garden that looked like May. I told him I could not, because nobody could. Then he told me why he was asking.

For two years he had been courting Emira, a librarian at the city library, the wife of the physics teacher Musa. He left flowers for her on the counter, waited at the bus stop, wrote her letters that she returned unopened. Emira was a woman who did not laugh without a reason and who put books back on the shelf exactly the way they had stood. She was known for her garden in Mokušnice, for the roses that in summer hung over the fence halfway across the street. One evening, when she had had enough, she told him in front of the library, so that the doorman heard too: "When my garden blooms in January as it does in May, I will be yours. Until then, leave me alone." She thought she had shut the door on him. Tomislav took it as a contract.

"I am not asking her to love me," he told me. "I am only asking her to see that it can be done." He had bought the empty lot across the street from her house, with a collapsed shed and two wild plum trees, and he offered me money for which I would normally work three seasons. I told him he was mad. He said he knew, and that he would pay half in advance.

We worked from December. We put up a greenhouse as long as a city bus, with double glass, and Tomislav himself installed a pellet boiler in the shed and pipes under the soil, the way a floor is heated in a house. I had kept tulip and hyacinth bulbs in cold storage since October, so they would think winter was over. I cut lilac branches in Nemila and kept them in warm water, as my father had taught me. I brought roses in pots, strawberries, violets, and one old cherry tree in a tub, which I kept under lamps for two weeks and coaxed like a child. On the outside we covered the greenhouse with boards, so no one could see what was growing. One night, just before New Year, the power went out in half of Zenica. Tomislav woke me at two in the morning. Until dawn we fed the boiler with wood from the collapsed shed and covered the beds with blankets from my van, and he, I swear, was whispering something to the cherry tree in German.

The neighborhood talked. Some said Tomislav was building a café, others that he was building a gym. Once Emira stopped by the fence, with a bag from the bakery, and asked me what we were building. I told her I was building a business for my old age. She looked at the boards, then at me, and walked away. I never saw Musa once. People said he was a man who read a lot and went out little.

We took the boards down on the fifteenth of January, at six in the morning. Outside there was the kind of frost that bursts pipes, the smog lay over the town so thick that the steelworks chimneys could not be seen, and the snow on the lot was gray. But inside the greenhouse, under the lamps, it was May. Red and yellow tulips, hyacinths whose scent reached the street, lilac, roses, strawberries with their first white blossoms, and the cherry tree, all in bloom, as if it had not heard what was outside. Tomislav stood in the greenhouse doorway holding his phone. He sent her a single line: "Look out the window." Behind us, in the street, a taxi driver stopped and got out of his car without turning off the engine.

I saw the light come on upstairs. I saw her pull back the curtain. She stood there for a long time. Then she came out, in her bathrobe and slippers, crossed the street over the snow and walked into the greenhouse. She said nothing. She walked between the beds, touched a tulip, as if checking that it was not plastic, and looked at the cherry tree. Tomislav said only: "I have done my part." She nodded, turned and left, leaving slipper prints in the snow.

For the rest of the day she did not appear. Tomislav spent the night in the greenhouse, on a camp bed by the boiler, so the pellets would not run out and the cherry tree would not freeze. I came the next day at seven to top up the pellets. Emira came in a few minutes after me, dressed, in a coat, with a small bag in her hand. She was pale and calm.

"I have come," she told Tomislav. "I said January. It is January." Tomislav got up from the camp bed. For a moment I saw on his face the thing he had built all this for. Then it was gone, and for a long time he only looked at her. He asked whether Musa knew. "He knows," she said. "I told him everything last night. He listened to the end and said that my word is his word too. That he cannot live with a woman who does not keep her promise, and I could not live with having deceived you. He said: go, and I will wait for you. Whatever happens, I will wait." Her voice did not tremble once. Mine did, and I had not even said anything.

Tomislav was silent for a long time. He looked at the cherry tree, then at her, then at the cherry tree again. Then he took the greenhouse key off its nail and put it in her hand. "Go home, Emira," he said. "You came, and your word is kept. A man who lets you go because of a word is better than I am, who asked for you because of a word. The garden is yours. Let Musa water it." Emira closed her hand around the key, wanted to say something, and did not. She went out, and this time the prints she left in the snow were from shoes.

Then Tomislav turned to me. He took out an envelope with the second half of the money and asked whether it was the right amount. I took from my pocket the invoice I had written him in November, in my crooked handwriting, and tore it into four pieces. Tomislav protested and said that business was business. "Business is business," I said, "and this was not business. If he could let his wife go, and you could let her go, then I can let the money go. I am seventy-one. This was the most beautiful garden I have ever made, and nobody owes me anything for having seen that it can be done."

Tomislav went back to Stuttgart in February. The greenhouse stayed with Emira and Musa, and to this day, every December, I come to Mokušnice and light the boiler. Musa holds the ladder for me and says nothing, like a man who reads a lot. On the fifteenth of January we take down the boards, and half the neighborhood comes in their slippers to look at tulips under the smog. And about ten days later a postcard arrives from Germany, addressed to me, at the nursery in Nemila, always with a single word: "Bloomed?" I answer him by text, also with a single word. So far it has always been the same one.