The Brother I Did Not Make Up

There were forty-one names on the list of the rescued, and I read it eleven times, always from the bottom up, as if Armin could have hidden among the letters. The excursion boat Galeb left Neum for Ston at ten in the morning, with tourists who wanted to eat oysters and with the two of us, who only wanted one day of not thinking about Sarajevo. The jugo wind met us off Klek. The engine died, the boat lay down on the rocks, and of all of it I remember an orange life vest, my brother's hand on my shoulder, and the wave that carried that hand away. A police boat from Neum pulled me out. Nobody pulled him out, at least not on that list. We were born eleven minutes apart and had never been separated longer than one summer camp.

For the next few days I had no phone, no wallet, no ID card. The sea had taken those too. Divers went in and came out, every morning the inspector told me the same thing, to wait, and I waited, in a room I rented from a lady above a bakery. I called my mother in Sarajevo from someone else's phone and lied that we were staying another week because the weather was so nice. She asked me to put Armin on. I said he was at the beach. Afterward I sat for a long time on the steps in front of the bakery, because I did not know how you tell someone something you do not want to know yourself.

The phone I borrowed belonged to Dijana, a receptionist at the Hotel Modra Uvala, who did not like it when someone cried alone. On the third day she told me there was work, if I knew how to write. I did. In Sarajevo I wrote ads for yogurt and insurance. The job was for Orsat Lučić, a singer who sang every evening on the hotel terrace and made women forget why they had come with their husbands. Orsat had a voice for stadiums, and he wrote messages like a boy late for class: no commas, two mistakes in every sentence, and a rose at the end. He was in love with Klara, the owner of the Plima café on the promenade, who had lost her brother last winter in a car accident on the coastal highway. Since then Klara had worn black, turned off the speakers in the café, and sent back every flower Orsat sent her.

Klara had blocked his number, so Orsat came up with letters, real ones, on paper, that someone would deliver to her in person. He paid fifty marks a letter. We wrote at his kitchen table, in an apartment above the marina. He walked from the refrigerator to the balcony and dictated: "Write that she is like the sea. Write that without her I cannot breathe." I wrote that he had seen her wiping the terrace tables herself in the morning, though she had a waiter, and that since then he too had started washing his own cups. He read it, said nothing, and signed. By the third letter I knew that he hummed when he was nervous, that he warmed up my coffee and never his own, and that I was writing what I would have liked to read myself, and from him in particular.

The Plima was empty when I brought the first letter. Klara was behind the bar counting receipts, in a black sweater with the sleeves rolled up. She read the letter standing up, twice, and put it down on the bar. "Orsat did not write this," she said. "Orsat spells volim, I love, with two l's and puts a rose at the end." I said I was only the courier. "A courier who does not look you in the eye," she said. "Tell whoever writes this to come himself." She did not give the letter back.

I brought her letters for seven days, every morning at nine, when she opened. She read them, and then she began asking questions Orsat had no answers to, so I answered them, over coffee she never charged me for. She told me about her brother, who used to fish off the pier and sang worse than Orsat. I did not talk about mine. On the sixth day she said: "Tell him to stop writing Orsat's letters and start writing his own. Who is he?" And I said it was my brother. That his name was Armin Zukić, that we were twins, that he was just like me, only taller, and that he was not in Neum at the moment. Maybe I said it because I could not bear to think of him in the past tense for one more day. Klara laughed for the first time. "When he comes back," she said, "let him come himself. Without letters."

Orsat was overjoyed that Klara was keeping the letters, and he decided to sing under her window on Saturday, with a guitar, like in the movies nobody watches anymore. That evening, while we were reworking the song on his balcony, he asked me in the middle of a sentence: "And you? Do you have someone you would write to like this?" "I do," I said. "But he loves someone else." "Idiot," said Orsat, sincerely angry at a man he did not know, and went on tuning the guitar. I looked at the sea below the balcony and thought how that sea had carried Armin off somewhere and left me to write love letters for a man who could not even read me.

Armin turned up on the tenth day, a Tuesday, with a bandage over his eyebrow and in someone else's tracksuit. It turned out later that fishermen from Ston had pulled him out, that he had spent two days in a hospital in Dubrovnik without documents and without a single phone number in his head, and that someone had entered him on the list of the rescued as Armin Žunić. As soon as he was back on his feet, he took the bus to Neum and went from café to café asking if anyone had seen a woman who looked like him. He walked into the Plima around noon. Klara looked at him, saw my face on a taller man, and dropped a glass. "Zukić?" she asked. "Zukić," he said, carefully, because lately he had not been sure even of that.

What happened next I know in three versions: Klara's, my brother's and the waiter's. Klara told him she had known he would come. Armin said he had not known it himself. Klara said she had read every one of his letters ten times. Armin, who had never in his life written anything longer than a text message without vowels, decided not to argue with a bruised head. And then Klara told him his sister had been there that morning, at nine, as she was every day. Armin jumped up, hugged her across the bar and kissed her, first on the cheek, out of happiness, and then, as the waiter claimed, no longer only out of happiness. Klara did not protest.

Just then Orsat was walking along the promenade with his guitar, to see where he would stand under the window on Saturday. Through the glass he saw Klara in the arms of a man with my face. Within ten minutes he was standing in my room above the bakery, red to the ears. "You were writing letters for your brother," he said. "With my money. With my words." "Your words?" I asked. "You dictated the sea and breathing." "I saw him!" I stopped listening. I ran barefoot down the stairs.

When I walked in, nobody in the Plima was talking. Armin got up from the table. We stood in front of each other, him a little taller, and then I hit him on the shoulder, hard, like when we were children, and only then hugged him. "Žunić," he said into my hair. "They put me down as Žunić." Klara kept looking from him to me and back. "Which of you two was writing?" she finally asked. "Me," I said. "He writes text messages without vowels." Armin nodded, red in the face. "I did not write a single letter," he told Klara. "But since this morning I think I would like to."

Klara laughed, the way, the waiter told me later, she had not laughed since last winter, and went behind the bar to turn on the speakers. Orsat stood in the doorway with his guitar. He looked at me, then at Armin, then at me again, and I watched everything cross his face: the kitchen table, the cups he had started washing, the letters he had signed without understanding them. He came over and asked quietly, so Klara would not hear: "That one of yours, who loves someone else. Who is he?" "Someone who spells volim with two l's," I said.

He was silent for a long time, too long for Orsat. Then he took a napkin from a table, borrowed a pen from the waiter, and wrote something, covering the paper with his palm like a schoolboy. He gave me the napkin folded in four. I did not open it in front of him. My mother called Dijana's phone that afternoon, and without a word I handed it to Armin. "There he is," I told her when he gave it back to me. "He came out of the sea." That evening Orsat sang on the terrace of the Modra Uvala, and Klara, for the first time since she started wearing black, came down to listen, with my brother at the table by the stage, while I sat at another table holding in my pocket a napkin on which, without a single comma and without a rose, was written volim, with two l's.