We married her off. Nobody in Gračanica says it out loud today, but each of us knows which of us said what and who called whom. She arrived in October, with one suitcase and a red coat, and began singing on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at the Sokoluša café, above the river. Her name was Merdžana. When someone asked her where she was from, she would say she was from the road, and laugh in such a way that nobody asked again. She was thirty-something, with her hair gathered in a knot and a voice of a kind, our husbands said afterward, that you no longer hear even on the radio.
At first they went out of curiosity, the way people go to look at a new bridge. Then they began going every Thursday. Our pharmacist, the director of the high school, two men from the municipality, half the men in Gračanica who had a business and a name. Merdžana did not sing what gets sung in cafés. She sang old songs, slow ones, that their grandmothers had sung in the courtyard, and toward the end of the night she would switch off the microphone and sing without it, and then everything in the café would go quiet, the glasses, the phones and the waiters. My Enver, a dentist, a man who in thirty years of marriage had not sung at a single wedding, came home at three in the morning and sat for a long time in the dark on the edge of the bed.
The worst of it was Derviš Kapidžić. He was sixty-three, with the biggest factory in town, grandchildren, and a name spoken with respect from Doboj to Tuzla. He sat at the front table, by the wall, and requested songs through the waiter, always the same ones. He missed his granddaughter's birthday. He missed a board meeting. And then someone, at two o'clock one night, filmed him standing in front of Merdžana and dropping hundred-mark notes at her feet, one by one, while she sang and did not look at him. By morning eight thousand people had watched the video on the Gračanica Live page. The workers in his factory watched it during their breakfast break.
That same week his son Ishak sat down at the same table, Ishak who was engaged to a girl from Doboj and was supposed to marry in the spring. He sat on the other side, facing his father, and both of them watched the same woman. On Saturday they quarreled in front of the whole café over which of them would drive her home. Merdžana called a taxi and left alone. But the whole old town saw and heard the quarrel, and what it did not see, it filled in.
That Saturday morning we gathered at the Behar hair salon. Derviš's wife Lutvija sat under the dryer hood and cried without a sound, and we stood around her with curlers in our hair and all talked at once. We could not get her fired, because the owner of the Sokoluša had never earned as much as he did that autumn. We did not want to threaten her, because we are not that kind of women. In the end the hairdresser, who had listened to all of it with scissors in her hand, said what all of us were thinking: "A woman like that doesn't leave town until somebody takes her away. She has to be married off."
In Gračanica nothing can be done without the council. That is what we call the seven older men who drink tea every morning in the garden below the clock tower and decide who will chair the neighborhood assembly, whose field will be sold and who is not to be lent money. Lutvija and I went on Monday. Derviš, of course, was sitting at the table too, along with three others we recognized from the video. They listened to us with their eyes lowered. When we had finished, Derviš stirred his tea for a long time and said, without raising his head: "She has to be married off." The others nodded with relief, like men who have had a load lifted off their backs. Not one of them asked what she thought about it.
After that everything moved fast. The landlady gave Merdžana notice on her room above the bakery. Inspectors came to the Sokoluša twice a week and asked about the license for music after midnight. Cafés in Lukavac and Tuzla suddenly had no need of a singer. And the council found a groom: Hajro from Srebrenik, a widower of forty-five, a beekeeper, who sold honey at our market on Tuesdays and who had once stood in the doorway of the Sokoluša one evening and listened, without coming in. The council promised to pay for the wedding. Hajro said only that he did not court a woman through a council, and that he would wait for her to invite him for coffee herself.
She invited him three days later. And the two of us, Lutvija and me, she invited the day before that. We sat in her room, among the boxes, and drank coffee from cups she had already wrapped in newspaper. "You married me off before you ever met me," she said, without anger. "Do you know why they come? They don't listen to me. They listen to themselves at twenty." Then she said she agreed. She liked Hajro, she said, because he never shouted at the market. She had only one condition. "At the wedding, I sing."
The night before the wedding Ishak came to the bakery with a ring in his pocket. The baker's wife heard everything through the window, and by noon the whole old town knew it. He begged Merdžana to marry him and not the beekeeper. He said he would leave both his fiancée and his father. She heard him out in the doorway. "You have a fiancée and a father," she said. "I have a voice and one beekeeper. Go home, Ishak." And she closed the door.
The wedding was on Saturday, at the Biser hall, and the whole town came. We sat beside our husbands and held their arms, as if they might run away from us. Derviš sat beside Lutvija in a new suit, and Ishak across from them, with his fiancée from Doboj, who knew nothing. Hajro wore a borrowed jacket, red in the face, and kept straightening his tie. Merdžana wore a simple white dress and did not smile. After dinner she rose from the bridal table, took the microphone from the band's singer and told the musicians to stop. She sang alone, without music.
It was an old song, slower than any she had sung at the Sokoluša, about a girl being married off across the water. Nobody in the hall ate. Derviš's hand on the table began to tremble, and Lutvija, without looking at him, pushed a napkin into his fist. Ishak got up and walked out. My Enver closed his eyes, and I saw his lips moving. He knew all the words. For thirty years I had not known that he knew a single song. We looked at our husbands, one after another, and saw faces we had not seen since they were young men, before they had us.
When the song ended, nobody applauded. Merdžana raised the microphone to her lips once more. "Thank you, Gračanica," she said, "for marrying me off." She set it down on the table, took Hajro by the hand and walked out of the hall. Through the window we watched her get into his van, decorated with a towel and ribbons, and watched the van turn onto the road toward Srebrenik. Only then did the band, uncertainly, strike up a kolo.
Since then Gračanica has been quiet. Our husbands come home by ten. A new singer has come to the Sokoluša, a young one with a synthesizer, and on Thursdays they go, have one drink each and come back before the news. Derviš has signed the factory over to his son and no longer sits on the council. Only sometimes, when the kitchen is empty and nobody can hear, one of us catches herself humming that song. None of us knows all the words. Only our husbands know them, and we have never asked them.