An Inheritance for the Younger Brother

On the ship where I work, the infirmary is four decks below the main deck, without windows, and you cannot hear the sea in it. I treat seasickness, sunburn and passengers who have eaten more at the buffet than their hearts can handle. The pay is good, the cabin is small, and the contract runs nine months. My coworkers are Filipinos and one Croat from Rijeka, who calls me Doctor Bosnia. When I signed the contract, the most important clause for me was that here no one knows my parents' names.

It all began with a phone call from Vienna, in April. A lawyer called to say that Sejfudin Kadić had died, the man we called Uncle Sejfo. He was an engineer from Sarajevo who after the war spent three years rebuilding bridges on the Una and lived with us, in the room above the garage. He fished for grayling with my father, he carried me on his shoulders up to the Captain's Tower, and then he went to Vienna, never married, and came for a week every summer. He always slept in the same room above the garage, he always brought my mother the same perfume from the Vienna airport, and he always left on Sunday before dawn, so he would not have to say goodbye. He brought me medical books and my brother Adil a soccer ball. The lawyer said Uncle Sejfo had left everything to Adil: an apartment in Vienna and savings of almost three hundred thousand euros. To me he left nothing. Not a single sentence.

My father was happy. "Sejfo was always an honest man," he said, and went off to the river with two rods, as if nothing had happened, because to him nothing had. My mother spent a long time washing dishes that were already clean. Adil kept blushing. "We'll split it," he told me that evening. I said there was no need and laughed, and that laugh followed me for days. I was thirty-three, with a specialization in internal medicine, a doctor's salary and a room in my parents' house, where I had slept since I was born. Adil was twenty-eight, with a law degree he had barely finished, a girlfriend who adored him and, all of a sudden, an apartment in Vienna.

The first sentence came from the old pharmacist on Bosanska Street, where I had worked summers as a student. He congratulated me on my brother's inheritance and adjusted his glasses. "That was kind of him," he said. "Only, you know how it is in Bihać. When a man leaves everything to one child and nothing to the other, people do not read it as a gift." I walked out of the pharmacy, and that sentence followed me all the way to the river.

The second came from the waitress at the café on the Una, who had known us since grade school. She brought me coffee and smiled. "I hear Adil has come into money. Well, he deserves it, he's just like that engineer of yours, so calm." She meant it as a compliment. I paid and left the coffee untouched.

That night I opened the old album from the cabinet in the living room. Photographs from ninety-seven: Uncle Sejfo on the bridge with my father and their fishing rods, my mother young, laughing, in a yellow dress I do not remember. Uncle Sejfo had fair hair, a gap between his front teeth, and he held his head slightly tilted, as if he were listening to something others could not hear. Adil has fair hair. Adil has a gap between his teeth. Adil tilts his head when he listens. My father is dark, short and has been bald since forty, and I am his copy. I also remembered that a framed photograph of Uncle Sejfo used to stand on the television. When I was ten, my mother put it away because, as she said, it was fading in the sun.

The doctor in me could not stop counting. Uncle Sejfo left for Vienna in the summer of ninety-eight. Adil was born in January of that year. My father had spent all of ninety-seven working on a construction site in Slovenia and came home for Bajram and for New Year's. None of that proved anything. I would have told any patient that it proved nothing. I did not know how to tell myself.

In May I went to Vienna with Adil, because he does not speak German and I had learned it for an exam I never used. Uncle Sejfo's apartment was on the fourth floor of a quiet street behind the Naschmarkt, as tidy as a hospital room. The lawyer gave us the keys and left us alone. On the shelf in the living room stood photographs in identical silver frames: Adil on his first day of school, Adil at his high school graduation, Adil with his first fish, Adil in a gown at his law school commencement. Only one person could have sent those photographs. Twice I ran my eyes along the shelf. There was not a single one of me. Adil said Uncle Sejfo had been sentimental and opened the window.

I began saying things at the table. I asked my mother whether she remembered when Uncle Sejfo left, and whether he had cried when Adil was born. While my father was talking about the huchen season that starts in October, I said it was nice when a man thinks of his children even after his death. My mother put down her fork and left the kitchen. My father noticed nothing. I hated myself as I said it and could not stop, the way you keep pressing a bruise to see whether it still hurts.

One evening in June Adil called me out to the yard, above the river. He showed me a ring he had bought for his girlfriend and the plan for the office he would open on Bosanska Street. For the third time he offered me half. I told him I did not need his father's money. He looked at me for a long time, his head tilted. "What father?" "He left you everything because you are his," I said. Below us the Una flowed as it always had, green and cold, and on the other bank someone was lighting a grill. Adil said nothing. He got up and went into the house.

My room is next to the kitchen, and the wall is thin. It was half past one in the morning. I heard my mother crying, quietly, the way women cry who have practiced it for a long time. I heard sentences I will not repeat. One I do remember. "That year nobody asked me how I was. Only him." Then Adil said something I did not expect, not from him or from anyone: "You are my mother. Dad is my dad. Let the rest stay in Vienna." I heard the chair creak, heard him put his arms around her, and heard her stop crying.

In the days that followed my mother spoke to me as if I were a guest. She asked whether I wanted more coffee and whether I had slept well. Adil was the same as before, except that he no longer looked at me with his head tilted. I understood that in that house the stranger was not him. At the end of June I found a printed ad on my desk: a cruise company was looking for a ship's doctor, a nine-month contract, boarding in Split. The phone number was circled. Adil had ugly handwriting and circled things like a child.

We went to Split together, through Lika. Adil drove, my mother was silent and looked out the window, and my father talked about fish the whole way. "Too bad," he said near Knin, "the huchen season starts in October, and you won't be here." In the harbor stood the Lorena, white as a hotel on the water. My mother hugged me briefly, as if she were afraid it would last too long. "Keep in touch," she said. Adil held out his hand, and then he hugged me after all, awkwardly, the way brothers hug who have never done it before.

From the deck I watched them as the ship pulled away. My father had already turned toward the fishermen on the breakwater. Adil had his hand on our mother's shoulder. My mother was waving a white scarf, and she waved the longest, until nothing was left of her but a white dot, and then not even that.

Every Sunday she sends me a message: how is the sea, am I eating, am I cold in the infirmary. I answer on Mondays. Sometimes she sends a photo too. Last Sunday she sent one of my father and Adil on the Una, with a huchen as long as an arm. My father is holding the fish, Adil is laughing, his head slightly tilted. I looked at that photo for a long time, down here, where you cannot hear the sea. Then I wrote: nice fish.