"Twenty thousand," said retired Colonel Hodović. "In the account. Not in plans, not in ideas, not in anybody's promises. When I see twenty thousand, we will talk about a ring." He sat in his armchair on Koševsko Brdo, beneath a glass cabinet of badges and medals, and looked at Alem the way you look at a recruit who has shown up for inspection in slippers. Iman brought coffee from the kitchen and set it down in front of her father without a sound, the way one learned to in that house. Alem said that was fair. The colonel said he knew no other way.
Alem was twenty-nine, with a nice smile, lots of friends and not a single job that had lasted longer than one season. He had sold insurance, guided tourists around Baščaršija, worked at an apartment rental agency, and for three months offered solar panels to people who gladly bought him coffee and bought nothing else. Everyone loved him. Nobody paid him. When he left the colonel's, he had one twenty-mark note in his wallet, and it had to last until Friday: for the tram, for bread and for one coffee with Iman.
Iman taught Bosnian at an elementary school in Breka and graded homework with a green pen, because red, she said, frightened the children. "Dad is not mean," she used to say. "Dad is just a colonel." She said she would wait. Alem knew she would, and that was exactly what made it hard. At his pace, by the colonel's estimate, it would take him roughly seventy years to reach twenty thousand marks.
That evening they sat on a bench in the garden of the National Museum while the guards were already jangling their keys. Iman showed him her savings account on her phone: three thousand four hundred marks, put aside since her first paycheck. "This is a start," she said. Alem handed the phone back and closed her fingers over it. The colonel, he reminded her, had said in his account, and the colonel did not like people interpreting his orders. Iman said he was the most stubborn poor man in Sarajevo. Alem said it was his only asset and he did not intend to sell it.
The next day he went to see Jakša, a friend from high school, who had a photo studio in the attic of an old building behind the Cathedral. Jakša was preparing an exhibition of portraits called Faces of the Čaršija, and for it, as he put it, he was looking for faces that had survived something. When Alem came in, an old man was sitting on a wooden chair under the spotlight. He wore a coat torn at the elbows and a cap faded by the sun, held a paper cup with a few coins in it, and had a face Jakša had already been photographing for three hours.
"Don't move, grandpa," said Jakša. "A little more light from the left." Alem sat down on a box of cables and watched. The old man's shoes were split at the toes, and one lace had been replaced with string. His hands lay quietly on his knees, like the hands of a man used to waiting. While Jakša was changing lenses, Alem quietly asked him how much he paid his model. "Thirty marks for the whole afternoon," said Jakša. "And a burek." To Alem that seemed terribly little for a man who could not even scratch his nose for three hours.
Then Jakša's phone rang, the gallery calling, and he went down to the courtyard to hear better. Alem and the old man were left alone. The old man looked at him from under his cap and asked what he did for a living. "I am a millionaire without the millions," said Alem. "I have everything but money." The old man laughed, quietly, like a man who does not laugh often. Alem took out his wallet, pulled out his only twenty and dropped it into the paper cup. "It is not much," he said, "but you need it more than I do." The old man looked at the note for a long time, then at him. "Thank you, son," he said. "I will remember this."
He walked home to Vratnik, because he no longer had money for the tram. An April rain was falling, and the climb up Kovači was so steep that he had to stop twice. The rain got into his shoes, and still he whistled the whole way without knowing why. That evening Iman paid for the coffee, and he told her he had forgotten his wallet, and that was the only lie he ever told her.
Later he dropped in on Jakša at the little café below the studio. Jakša laughed so hard he had to put down his glass. "You gave twenty marks to Abdurahman Tabaković?" Alem did not know who Abdurahman Tabaković was. Jakša explained: for forty years the man had made watch parts in Switzerland, had owned three factories, and had the largest private collection of old Sarajevo photographs in the world. He was Jakša's best client. For the exhibition he himself had asked to be photographed as a beggar. "He says it is the only role he has never tried in his life."
Alem put his forehead down on the table. "I gave a millionaire money for the tram," he said. "He will think I am an idiot." Jakša said the best part was still to come: after Alem left, the old man asked about him. Everything. Who he was, what he did, why such a cheerful man was so poorly dressed. "And you told him?" "Everything," said Jakša. "About Iman, about the colonel, about the twenty thousand. What was I supposed to tell him? He asked nicely." Alem said he had to go and apologize to him. Jakša said the old man was flying back to Geneva soon and, as far as he knew him, did not need an apology. Alem ordered another coffee, and Jakša paid for it.
In the morning someone knocked on the door of Alem's room. A young man in a dark suit stood outside with an envelope in his hand, and behind him, on the stairs, the landlady with her arms crossed. "Mr. Tabaković sends you this," said the young man, and he left before Alem could ask anything. Alem thought the old man was returning his twenty. Inside the envelope was a white card, written in fountain pen: "For the ring. Returning your twenty, with interest. The old man from the paper cup." As he was reading it a second time, his phone vibrated. The banking app was reporting a deposit of twenty thousand marks. Alem sat down on the stairs, next to the landlady, and for a long time said nothing at all.
The colonel did not ask where the money came from. He took Alem's phone, put on his glasses, looked at the screen, took his glasses off and put them on again. Then he handed the phone back and said that June was a good month for a wedding, because it was neither too hot nor too rainy. In the kitchen Iman laughed so hard it could be heard all the way down the hall. Alem wanted to explain, but she would not let him. "Later," she whispered. "First let him get used to the number."
The next day Alem and Iman went to the hotel on Bistrik where the old man had been staying, to thank him. The receptionist said Mr. Tabaković had left for Geneva that morning and had left a message for Alem. On hotel stationery, in the same fountain pen, it said: "Don't thank me. Invite me to the wedding. I will come dressed the way you know me." Iman asked what that meant. Alem said she would see, and that for now the colonel did not need to be told anything.
The wedding was in June, at a restaurant by Vrelo Bosne, under the big plane trees. Jakša was the best man and photographed everything except himself. The colonel stood at the entrance in his best suit, with a small badge on his lapel, and greeted the guests as if he were receiving reports. He shook each one's hand and told them their table number. There were ninety guests, half of them the colonel's former colleagues, who sat up straight and ate as if someone were grading them.
Around eight, when the music was already playing, the old man appeared on the path from the parking lot. He was wearing the same coat torn at the elbows, the same cap, and he carried a plastic bag. The colonel reached him before he got to the door. He pressed ten marks into his hand and quietly, politely, said that this was a private celebration. The old man looked at the ten-mark note and nodded gravely. "Thank you, Colonel," he said. "You are the second man in this city to give me money this year. The first one gave more." And he walked past him.
Alem got up from the newlyweds' table so suddenly that he knocked over a glass. He embraced the old man in front of all the guests, and Iman, without asking anything, pulled a chair up next to hers. From the plastic bag the old man took a small framed photograph and set it down in front of the bride and groom. It showed him under Jakša's spotlight, with the paper cup in his hand, and in the cup a single twenty-mark note could be clearly seen.
Meanwhile the colonel asked the best man who that man was. Jakša told him. The colonel stood by the entrance for a long time with his wallet open in his hand, as if he were still calculating something. The old man, in the meantime, had stood up, tucked the colonel's ten-mark note under the accordion player's strap, and requested Emina.