Family Secrets from Velenje

My brother Ensar has a flaw that our family calls a talent: he cannot let a good joke die on its own. Throughout our childhood Grandpa Sulejman told us that our line went back to a sultan's gardener from Istanbul, a man who, in Grandpa's words, could make a rose bloom in January. The story changed every winter. Sometimes the gardener fled the Bosphorus for love, sometimes because of a debt, and sometimes the sultan himself sent him to Bosnia to plant tulips around Travnik. For Grandpa's eightieth birthday Ensar bought an ancestry test, a box with a tube you spit into, and wrapped it in paper with gold flowers. "So we can finally meet that gardener," he said.

We celebrated in Banovići, in the house with a yard above the old coal separation plant, where Grandpa and Nana have lived since the sixties. Nana Fadila had been rolling out pita since dawn, Aunt Zumra brought tufahije in the glass bowl we remember from every wedding, and Uncle Šemsudin, as every year, was fixing a grill that refused to be fixed. When Grandpa opened the present, everyone laughed, he loudest of all. He read the instructions aloud, his glasses on the tip of his nose, as if he were reading out a verdict, and then in front of the whole family he spat into the tube and raised it like a glass. "To the gardener," he said. Nana did not laugh. I thought she was angry about the pita, because Grandpa had spat before he tasted it.

Grandpa spent thirty years underground. Mostly in Banovići, but from seventy-four to eighty he worked in the mine in Velenje, when our miners went to Slovenia because the pay was better. From those years he kept a few Slovenian words, one photograph in a miner's helmet, and a cup with a blue rim that he drank his coffee from every morning. Nana never let anyone else use that cup. She washed it herself, by hand, and put it back in the same spot in the glass cabinet. We thought it was out of respect for a miner's bread.

The results came six weeks later, to Ensar's email. He called me at half past ten at night, while I was grading chemistry tests in Tuzla, and at first he was laughing. Balkan sixty-one percent, Central Europe twenty-two, and Anatolia, he said, a full three percent. "The gardener was a small man," he said. Then he went quiet. I asked him what was wrong. He said that under the ancestry there was a section for relatives, for people who had taken the same test, and that only one name stood there. Andrej Golob, Velenje, Slovenia. Relationship: father or son. Shared DNA: forty-nine percent.

At first I thought it was a mistake. Ensar spent half the night reading forums and in the morning sent me a message of one word: no. Later he explained that among cousins the number runs around twelve percent, and that forty-nine means a parent, a child or a brother, and Grandpa was an only child. Andrej Golob had a profile with a photograph. A man in his forties, going gray, in a hiking jacket, in front of some lake. He had Grandpa's ears and Grandpa's habit of never quite finishing a smile in front of a camera, as if waiting for the photographer to give in first. Under the picture it said, in Slovenian and in unsteady Bosnian: I am looking for my father. My mother was Majda Golob, she worked in the mine canteen. I am asking for nothing but a name.

We agreed to keep quiet until we figured out how to say it. We lasted until Sunday. At lunch Aunt Zumra asked about the gardener before Nana had even brought out the soup, and the whole table turned toward Ensar. He said the results were late. My cousin Ilma, who is fifteen and has had a phone in her hand since she learned to walk, said they were not late, because she had seen him looking at them in the car that morning, and before anyone could stop her she took his phone from the edge of the table. She knew the code. Everyone knows Ensar's code, it is Grandpa's birthday. She read it out loud, in the voice used for reading homework: Balkan sixty-one, Anatolia three, and then, more slowly, the name from Velenje and the two words beneath it.

The silence lasted as long as it took Uncle Šemsudin to put down his spoon. Then Aunt Zumra said they were crooks, that those companies sell data and invent relatives so people keep paying. Uncle added that it was surely someone who had heard about Grandpa's pension. Ilma started crying because she did not know what she had read, and Ensar stared at his plate and did not touch it. Only Grandpa said nothing. He took off his glasses, folded them, and set them beside his plate, the way he lays them down before bed. He was looking at Nana.

When he spoke, he was not speaking to us. "Majda cooked beans on Thursdays," he said. "I was alone, Fadila. You know how alone I was." Nana did not answer. Grandpa said he had known Majda was pregnant when he quit in eighty and came home. He said he had written to her twice from Banovići and that no answer had ever come. He thought she had married and that the child did not need to know about him. "So I stopped writing too," he said, "and pretended I had never started."

Nana stood up, went into the bedroom, and came back with a tin box from old candy, the one she had kept buttons in for as long as I can remember. She set it beside Grandpa's glasses and opened it. There were no buttons. There were letters, about ten of them, with stamps that said Yugoslavia, and on the last one Slovenia. They had all been opened, neatly, with a knife along the top edge. "The mailman came at ten," Nana said. "You were on the six o'clock shift. I had three children and this house, Sulejman. I had no one to go to."

Grandpa took out the first letter but could not read it, so he handed it to me. Majda wrote briefly, in a Slovenian I half understood: the boy is called Andrej, he was born in March, he has your ears. In the second letter there was a photograph of a baby in a knitted cap, in the fifth a boy on a bicycle with training wheels, and in the last, from ninety-one, a serious boy at a school desk, his hands folded the way Grandpa folds his when he is waiting for news. On the back it said: This is the last one. If you won't, neither will I. Aunt Zumra looked at that photograph for a long time and said, quietly, that the boy had Ensar's forehead. Ensar said he had Grandpa's. It was the first thing they had agreed on all day.

Grandpa asked her later why she had not burned them, when only the three of us were left in the kitchen. She said she had wanted to, every autumn, and could not, because in the photographs it was not that woman but a child. She also said she had washed the blue-rimmed cup herself ever since that autumn when he came back and she unwrapped it from a paper that said, in Majda's handwriting: for my miner. "My whole life I have been washing someone else's cup," she said. "You could have told me once whose it was."

That night Ensar wrote a message to Andrej. Grandpa dictated, I translated with the help of my phone, and Nana sat with us and corrected Grandpa whenever he got a year wrong. The answer came in twenty minutes, as if the man had been sitting by the screen for years. Andrej wrote that his daughter, who studies in Ljubljana, had bought him the same test for his birthday as a joke. He also wrote that his mother used to tell him his father descended from a sultan's gardener, and that all his life he had thought she made it up.

He came in May, by car from Velenje, with his wife and that daughter. Nana had been rolling out pita since dawn, as for a birthday, and she set the table for eleven. When Andrej sat down, she put the blue-rimmed cup in front of him. Grandpa saw it and said nothing. Andrej turned the cup in his hands, looked at the bottom, then at Nana, and said in his unsteady Bosnian that his mother had six of these in her kitchen and that one had gone missing the autumn his father left. "I know," said Nana. "It is with me. Drink it while it is hot."