A Report in Two Sentences

"Two thousand marks," said the lawyer Rajić, and he said it again, because it seemed to him the young man had not heard. Aleksa Despotović had heard him. He just did not know what to do with a number that was too large for one night and too small for anything else. His uncle Svetozar, owner of a printing house behind Banski Dvor, had died in March, at eighty, and left his nephew exactly that much, in an envelope, with one condition: that within seven days he write to the lawyer how he had spent the money. In writing and signed. "My uncle was a joker," said Aleksa. "Your uncle was a printer," Rajić answered. "He liked things written down."

Rajić read the rest of the will quickly, as if he were ashamed of it. The printing house, the house in Starčevica and the savings were waiting, it said, on a sealed addendum, which would be opened when the nephew turned in his report. To Vanja Ćulibrk, who had lived with Svetozar since she was fifteen, when she was left without her parents, and who for the last three years had worked as a proofreader at the printing house and brought him soup when he would not eat, the uncle left one hundred marks and his old fountain pen. Vanja said thank you, took the fountain pen and left the office before they did.

Aleksa was twenty-nine and had been studying economics for nine years, with two exams left to go. On weekends he played music at a club below the Kastel fortress, and until now his uncle had paid his rent. His uncle called him a journeyman with no trade, and on the first Wednesday of every month, over coffee, asked him what he meant to do with his life, and every first Wednesday Aleksa had a different answer. All of Banja Luka knew him and nobody took him seriously, himself least of all. He had loved Vanja since she was twenty, ever since one summer he saw her on his uncle's terrace correcting other people's mistakes with a red pencil and swearing quietly, through her teeth, so that nobody would hear. He never told her. She thought that everything in his life happened by accident, and she was right.

Since he did not know what to do with the money, he decided to ask other people. First he asked a taxi driver at the stand by Krajina Square. The driver thought for a long time and then said he would buy four new tires and take his wife to Neum for the weekend. "In Neum you can spend two thousand in two days," he said. "That is the best investment in a marriage there is." Aleksa thanked him, paid for a ride that had never happened, and walked down Gospodska Street on foot.

The waiter at the café across from Banski Dvor advised him to open a tab with them and drink until Christmas. In Petar Kočić Park, by the chess tables, old Boro, a retired history teacher, heard him out without lifting his eyes from the board. "Your uncle wanted to tell you that you are a fool," he said, moving a bishop. "And he gave you two thousand so you could prove it yourself." Aleksa said that was harsh. Boro said that history was always harsh and that it was his move.

In the end he went to Kaja, who sang on Saturdays in the bar of a hotel on the Boulevard and went out with him when she had nothing better to do. Without a word Kaja took him to a shop window on Gospodska Street and showed him a handbag that cost one thousand nine hundred fifty marks. She said she could carry him around in it too, if he were a little smaller, and that it was the only thing in Banja Luka that would not bore her within a month. Aleksa went in and took the bag in his hands, and then, in the mirror by the register, he saw himself holding someone else's bag and thought of Vanja, with a hundred marks and a fountain pen, packing books into boxes. He gave the bag back to the saleswoman, apologized to Kaja and took a taxi to Starčevica.

In the living room Vanja was packing books into cardboard boxes printed with the name of the printing house. The old man's armchair stood turned toward the window, with a blanket over its back, and the room still smelled of the printing ink he used to bring home on his hands. Until the envelope was opened, the house belonged to nobody, and she did not want to wait in a house that belonged to nobody. She had found a room with a woman in Borik. Aleksa stopped in the doorway and said he had come from Rajić. The lawyer, he said, had forgotten to read something out: Uncle Svetozar had left her another two thousand marks, here they were, in an envelope. Vanja looked at him for a long time. "Rajić forgot?" "Lawyers are people too," said Aleksa. She took the envelope, but she did not open it.

"And one more thing," he said, because it seemed to him he would not have the courage a second time. "I love you. Since you were twenty. You don't have to say anything." Vanja put a book down in the box. She said she was sorry, and that she was truly sorry, because he was a good man. "But everything happens to you by accident, Aleksa. And I don't know how to live by accident." He said he knew. He also said the money was hers either way, that the one thing had nothing to do with the other, and he left before she could add anything.

In the morning he sat down in Rajić's office on the second floor of an old building on King Peter Street, where the cabinets were full of folders older than he was, and wrote his report on a sheet of paper in two sentences: "I gave the two thousand marks to Vanja Ćulibrk. I did not know anything smarter to do." He signed it and pushed the paper across the desk. Rajić read it, raised his eyebrows, opened a drawer and took out a sealed envelope. He slit it open with a paper knife, slowly, like a man who has been opening other people's secrets for some thirty years and is no longer surprised by any of them.

The addendum was written in the uncle's hand, on printing house paper. If the nephew had spent the money wisely, or had given it to someone who needed it, he was to receive the printing house, the house and the savings of one hundred fifty thousand marks, because then he was a Despotović after all. If he had squandered it, like everything else until now, all of it belonged to Vanja Ćulibrk, the only one in that house who had ever worked. Rajić folded the paper, took off his glasses and held out his hand to congratulate Aleksa.

Aleksa did not take the hand. He was looking at his report on the desk. He thought about the boxes printed with the name of the printing house, about the room in Borik, and about how Vanja had said she did not know how to live by accident. "Can I fix this?" he asked. "I made a mistake." He took the paper, tore it in half, then in half again, and laid the pieces on the desk. Then on a new sheet he wrote: "I lost the two thousand marks at a betting shop, on Sunday, on the Borac match." He signed this one too.

Rajić looked at the new sheet for a long time. "On Borac?" "Against Borac," said Aleksa. "You are from Banja Luka and you bet against Borac?" "That is why it all went." The lawyer was silent. Then he said he was obliged to record what his client told him, not what he thought, and that Mr. Despotović surely knew what that meant. Aleksa said he knew. Vanja would get everything. Rajić stamped the paper, and the pieces of the first report he did not throw in the bin but, out of the habit of an old man who throws nothing away, put them in his drawer.

Aleksa walked out whistling. On the stairs he met Vanja, whom Rajić had asked to come at noon. In her hand she held that envelope, unopened. "Rajić did not forget anything," she said. "I typed your uncle's will." "You didn't type all of it," said Aleksa, and went down the stairs faster than she could hold out the envelope. On Gospodska Street he spent his last five marks on a burek and ate it standing up, for the first time pleased with something he had done himself.

In the evening he was sitting in a café below the Kastel, by the Vrbas, with a single coffee he had stretched over two hours. Vanja came in, sat down across from him and laid on the table the uncle's fountain pen and four pieces of paper stuck together with tape. Rajić had given them to her, she said, and had told her he was not supposed to, but that he was old anyway. For a while they both looked at the paper. "I did not know anything smarter to do," she read aloud. "Against Borac, Aleksa?" "Somebody had to."

Vanja said she could not take something that was his. Aleksa said it was not his, that it was there in black and white, signed, and that nobody argues with Rajić. Vanja was silent, turning the fountain pen in her fingers. Then she said that the printing house needed someone who knew how to talk to people, because all she knew was commas, and that yesterday, perhaps, she had been wrong about that word, accident. Aleksa opened his mouth to say something, and for the first time since they had known each other, she told him to be quiet and let her finish her sentence. She paid for the coffee.