The Building with Blue Balconies

Two hours before he died, in the hospital in Brčko, my father gave me an address in Tuzla. The nurse had just gone out, the machine above the bed beeped steadily, and he waved me closer with his hand, as if he were about to tell me where he had buried gold. The tractor had rolled over with him on the steep boundary strip behind the plum orchard, early in the morning, while the fog was still lying over Bijela. The doctors told me there was nothing to hope for. He knew that better than they did, so he did not waste time.

"In the desk drawer, under the account book, there's an envelope," he said. "Five thousand marks. Take it to Tuzla, to the building with the blue balconies behind the Pannonian Lakes, third floor. The doorbell says Kovač. To a woman named Mirjana." I asked who she was. My father closed his eyes, not from weakness, but the way he used to close them when he was haggling over a heifer at the market. "Ten years," he said. "Every Thursday. Be decent to her, Josip. None of it is her fault." I wanted to ask something more, but the nurse came in, and after that my father did not speak again.

Half of Bijela and a good part of Brčko came to the funeral. People said that Mato Perić had been an honest, hardworking man, that after my mother's death he had not wanted to remarry, that he had given everything for his son and for his plums. I nodded and shook hands. At home I took the envelope out of the drawer. In its place in the drawer I put my father's phone, which the hospital had given back to me in a plastic bag together with his watch. The screen showed eleven messages from a contact saved as "Tuzla Cooperative." The last one said: "Are you okay? The little one is asking for you." I did not read the others.

On Thursdays my father always went to Tuzla. For the bank, he used to say, for the cooperative, for tractor parts. He came back late, calmer than when he had left, and he never brought back a single part. For ten years I never wondered why. The next Thursday I put on a white shirt, as if I were going to a job interview, and drove for an hour and a half. The building with the blue balconies was where he had said. The doorbell said Kovač.

The door opened before I had taken my finger off the bell. "You're late," said the woman, laughing, and then she saw me. She was perhaps thirty-five, with an apron over a tracksuit and flour up to her elbows. The apartment smelled of cheese pie. She looked at me for a long time without a word, and I realized she knew me, although we had never met. "Josip," she said. It was not a question. I told her in the hallway, because I did not know how to walk into a stranger's apartment with news like that. She leaned against the doorframe and stayed like that, her hands full of flour, until a child's voice came from the room.

The boy was perhaps six and carried a green plastic tractor in his hand. "Is that Uncle Mato?" he asked. Mirjana said it was not, that it was a guest, and sent him to wash his hands. Before he went, the boy looked at me seriously, from under his brows, and scratched behind his left ear. My father used to scratch like that when he was thinking about the price of plums. I scratch the same way, people say.

Mirjana let me in and put on coffee, because that was the only thing her hands knew how to do at that moment. I sat down on the couch and only then saw the apartment. By the door stood my father's slippers, brown, with the heels trodden down. On the television lay his reading glasses, the ones I thought he had lost three years ago. On the kitchen shelf stood four little jars of plum jam, with labels I had printed in Brčko for the market. Here my father had his own cup, his own side of the couch and his own hour of arrival. He had a whole Thursday I had never seen.

She spoke quietly, so the little one would not hear. They had met at the bank, where she worked at the counter, when he came in for a loan for a new plum orchard and did not know how to fill out the form. She was alone, twenty-five years old, with an apartment she could not pay off. They never married. "He said you didn't need a stepmother," she said. "That it was enough that you had lost your mother, and that the village didn't have to know everything." I asked whether Tomo was his. She looked at me as if I had asked whether the sky was blue. "Tomo knows that Uncle Mato loves him," she said. "We never got around to explaining more than that."

I took out the envelope and put it on the table. She pushed it back toward me. She did not need his money, she said, she worked and had a salary, and she had not been with him for money. I told her that it had been his last wish, and the last thing my father ever ordered me to do, and I had never known how to refuse him. She looked at the envelope for a long time. Then she picked it up and put it on top of the fridge, behind the jars of jam, the way you put things out of a child's reach. "For him," she said. "For school."

I stayed for dinner because I did not know how to leave. The pie had been made for three, because it was Thursday. Without thinking, Mirjana set my plate at the place by the window, and only when I sat down did we both realize whose place it was. She said nothing. Tomo ate and told me about tractors, which one was the strongest and which had the biggest wheels, and how Uncle Mato had promised to take him to the orchard in September to pick plums and ride in the trailer. "Do you have a tractor?" he asked. I said I did. I did not tell him that it was lying overturned on the boundary strip and that I would not be fixing it again.

At the door Mirjana handed me my father's glasses. I told her to keep them. Tomo slipped under her arm and asked whether I would come on Thursday, because Uncle Mato always came on Thursday. Mirjana pulled him back, and I could see in her face that she did not know what she would like me to say. I did not know either. "I'll come," I said. "The plums are in September."

I got back to Bijela after midnight. The next Thursday, as I was starting the car in front of the house, my neighbor Ruža asked me over the fence where I was going so early, and in a white shirt at that. "To Tuzla," I said. "For the bank." She nodded and went back to her peppers, because she had heard that sentence from my father for ten years.