401: Chapter 401 Suffering from the East

In late September, dawn breaks slowly in Sarajevo.

Before the mist had fully cleared from the hillsides, the sound of slippers scraping against the floor echoed through the apartment hallway, steady and rhythmic.

Mrs. Zola woke up at six o'clock sharp.

She took an old rag from the closet, knelt down, and wiped the wooden floor of the hallway section by section, not missing a single crack between the boards.

When she reached the dining room door, that fat cat named Berger was on its tiptoes, craning its neck toward the glass jars on the cupboard.

"Berger!"

Zola slapped the floor with her palm, the sound crisp and sharp.

Berger leaped away like a projectile, landing and turning back to glare at her with reproachful eyes for three seconds.

Then, it reluctantly slunk into a corner, pretending nothing happened as it began to lick its fur.

"That's my freshly made jam; I haven't even brought myself to eat it yet."

She glanced at the fat cat and couldn't help but scold it with a smile.

"If you ate even two bites less of canned food, you wouldn't have ended up in this fat state."

Mrs. Zola pushed the glass jar further into the cupboard.

The fig jam jar was sealed tightly; light filtered through the glass, revealing the amber pulp settled at the bottom.

Her fingers paused on the lid for a beat, but without much further thought, she turned and headed out.

The morning market at Baščaršija Bazaar begins to bustle at seven o'clock.

Mrs. Zola walked through the stalls with a mesh bag, her fingers pressing against several onions.

She picked out ones with tight skins and good weight. Before she could even begin to haggle, a man's loud voice drifted over from nearby.

Popovich stood in front of his messy electronics stall.

Surrounded by three or four old men of a similar age, they were arguing about something, their voices loud enough to startle the flies overhead.

"I'm telling you, these Easterners only know how to farm! Everything they write is about the mud. Who in Europe cares to read that?"

Popovich waved his hand in the air as he spoke, disdain written all over his face.

"That Anthony from the bookstore has lost his mind, putting those books in the most prominent spot in the window. Does he think they're some kind of treasure?"

Several stall owners joined in the laughter. Someone chimed in saying Eastern literature has no logic to speak of, while another said people only buy them to let them sit unread.

Being egged on by the others, Popovich's voice grew louder:

"What is European literature? It's hundreds of years of philosophy and aesthetics!

What can they have over there? Emperors, the smell of dirt, and landscape poetry!"

"Popovich."

The voice came from behind and to his side, not loud, but it pierced through the laughter and noise with precision.

Several heads turned simultaneously.

Mrs. Zola stood at the edge of the stall, her mesh bag hanging from her wrist, her gaze behind her glasses falling flatly on Popovich's face.

"That radio from last time—how long did you spend reading the manual?"

Popovich's mouth hung open.

"You flipped through it four times, and it still took a young man ten minutes to fix it for you."

Mrs. Zola paused, shifting the mesh bag on her wrist.

"For someone who can't even understand a manual to be here critiquing another country's literature—just what are you critiquing?"

The surrounding laughter cut off.

Popovich's red, bulbous nose twitched twice.

"Mrs. Zola, we were just chatting..."

The other old men looked at each other, their gazes drifting elsewhere.

"Just chatting?"

Mrs. Zola didn't look at him again; she had already bypassed the stall and arrived at the vegetable stand next door.

She picked up a whole bundle of onions she had selected and tossed them into her mesh bag, then pulled coins from her apron pocket, counting them out one by one and lining them up by the stall owner's hand.

After paying, she passed the fat man who was still standing there dazed.

Without stopping, she simply tilted her head and looked at Popovich through her thick lenses.

"Go fix your radio, Popovich.

When it comes to literature, it's not the place of someone who can't even read a manual to butt in."

With that, she turned and walked with steady steps into the crowd deep within the market.

"That old woman..."

Popovich muttered as he watched that short but ramrod-straight back disappear into the crowd.

As she stepped out of the market canopy, sunlight leaked through the gaps in the clouds, shining on the stone pavement of the old street.

Zola's pace was a bit slower than when she arrived.

She had originally planned to go straight back to the apartment.

There was half a pot of leftover soup in the fridge from yesterday; heating it up would suffice for lunch.

But when she reached the corner of the main street in the city center, her steps stopped.

Anthony's Bookstore.

This bookstore had been open in Sarajevo for over forty years.

Half of its wall had been blown down during the siege, and after the war, it was rebuilt brick by brick.

Like most things in this city, the patched parts were sturdier than the originals.

Zola passed by every week.

She never went inside, only occasionally glancing at the new books displayed in the window.

She had rarely bought books since retiring; the prices of those beautifully packaged new editions of European literature were becoming increasingly outrageous, enough to buy her two months' worth of onions.

But today's window was different.

The complete works of Camus that usually sat in the center had been removed, replaced by a massive poster.

The poster depicted a Loess Plateau crisscrossed with ravines, with warm-toned light hitting the cracked earth and a line of text printed in bold French at the bottom.

ordinary world.

The bookstore owner, Anthony, was standing at the door, stopping a passing middle-aged man and gesturing incessantly as he spoke.

"Milo! You have to read this book!

I've been a bookseller for thirty years, and no foreign novel has ever made me stand behind the counter and read it all in one go!"

Anthony's bald head shone exceptionally bright in the sun, and his whole being was in a state of extreme excitement.

"There's a kid in it who waits for everyone to leave the cafeteria before going to get his food.

Do you know what he gets? The worst black flour buns! No side dishes!

But the way he stood there, Milo—I almost had to put the book down to blow my nose."

The middle-aged man named Milo looked helpless as his arm was gripped.

Zola had intended to lower her head and bypass them.

"Mrs. Zola!"

Anthony's radar clearly had a wide coverage area.

He let go of Milo's arm and rushed to Zola in a few quick steps, pulling a stack of flyers from his pocket and handing her one.

"Mrs. Zola, you must read this book.

It's written by an Eastern author about the lives of the poor over there.

I know you lived through the siege; the suffering those people endured in this book is the same flavor as the suffering we went through."

"I don't need anyone to tell me what suffering tastes like,"

Zola said coldly.

But her hand had already taken the flyer.

Old habits die hard.

Having been a literature teacher for twenty years, seeing a paper with printed words triggered a reflex to read.

The flyer featured an excerpt.

The sentences translated into French were simple to the point of being coarse, lacking the sophisticated rhetoric common in European literature.

It wrote of early spring in China, 1975,

where the ice and snow on the Loess Plateau had not yet melted, and a gray sky pressed down on a barren village.

In the large courtyard of the county middle school, rainwater mixed with mud flowed across the uneven ground.

Zola's eyes lingered on that passage for three seconds.

The rhythm of the prose was like someone crouching in the mud, carving word after word into the ground with their finger.

There was nothing flashy; every sentence was as heavy as a stone.

For some reason, an image surfaced in Zola's mind—

a rainy night, dim lamplight, and that Eastern lad hunched over a table,

his pen scratching across the paper, saying he was a "collector of stories."

She had thought then that it was just the usual flowery language of youth.

"How much?"

Zola folded the flyer twice and tucked it into her apron pocket.

Anthony's eyes lit up: "Fifteen marks for the hardcover. The paperback is eight marks."

Zola fished out the coin purse she had used for over a decade from her inner cloth bag.

She counted the coins and small bills inside, picking out exactly eight marks.

"Books aren't bought to be enshrined."

Anthony hurried into the shop and wrapped the paperback. When he came out to hand it to her, he didn't use just one hand.

Those hands were rough and calloused, cradling the thin book as if it were a heavy brick.

He looked up at Mrs. Zola and placed the book steadily into her hands.

Zola tucked the book under her arm, picked up her mesh bag, and walked toward her apartment without looking back.

A cold rain began to fall at night.

Rain in Sarajevo after the onset of autumn is different from summer; it's not urgent, falling slowly, but it can strip away a significant amount of warmth.

Mrs. Zola sat in that velvet sofa with an old wool blanket over her knees; at her feet, Berger was curled into a ball, purring softly.

The repaired vintage radio was on, playing a low folk song at a very low volume, just to provide some sound in the air.

She took the book from the low cabinet by the dining table, felt the cover, and opened it.

Her reading glasses had thick lenses, so she habitually brought the book a bit closer.

Before she had even finished reading the first line, her finger paused at the edge of the spine—

she wasn't even sure what she was waiting for.

The rain outside fell unhurriedly, Berger's purring was faint,

and the folk song on the radio was so low it almost vanished into the sound of the rain.

She looked down at the next line.

...