The bus from Zagreb reached Bihać at noon, and Sinan took a taxi on to Ripač and got out by the bridge, not by the house. Ilijaz's café stood in the same place, above the Una, with the same plastic chairs and the same accordion hanging above the bar. Ilijaz recognized him only when he spoke. "Twelve years," he said, "and not even a postcard." He made him coffee and sat down across from him. He talked about everything, about the river that carried more plastic every year, about the tourists with their kayaks, about Sinan's sister, who was getting married on Saturday, and about the wedding that would be held in Ćerim's new barn. About Džejla he said nothing. Sinan did not ask either. He knew, of course. His mother had told him in a single sentence, eleven years ago, in the same message in which she told him the cow had calved.
His mother met him at the gate, dry and upright, her hands in her apron. She kissed him once, on the forehead, as she had when he went off to school, and immediately said he had lost weight and that nobody fed him in that Canada of his. Ćerim came out of the barn wiping his hands. He was heavier than Sinan remembered, slower and more serious, and within the first ten minutes he had told him how much the steel for the roof had cost, how much he had received in subsidies and why in the autumn he would get onto the municipal council. Their youngest brother Jasin, who had been eight when Sinan left, was now taller than both of them. He stood to one side and looked at Sinan's shoes, his watch and his jacket as if he were looking at a map of the world.
Džejla came toward evening with a baking pan of pita for the wedding. She had the same hair, black and unruly, and the same laugh, only a little shorter. She set the pan on the table and looked him straight in the eye. "You came to your sister's wedding," she said. "You didn't come to mine." Ćerim laughed, thinking it was a joke, and said Džejla had always had a sharp tongue, and that Sinan had done well not to come, because it had been snowing then and the road was blocked. Džejla said Ćerim remembered the weather for every day of the last twenty years. "He gets it from the council," she said. "Everything gets written down there." Ćerim nodded, pleased.
The next day Sinan found her on the bank below her father's café, where as a girl she used to throw bread to the trout. She was throwing it now too. She did not turn around when he sat down beside her. "I waited for you for two years," she said. "You wrote to me three times. About the snow, about your pay, and about how polite Canadians are. Not once did you write come." Sinan said that for the first two years in Hamilton he had slept in one room with five bricklayers and had been ashamed to invite her into that. "You should have asked me what I am ashamed of," she said. She had married Ćerim because he asked and because his mother wanted it. They had no children. Ćerim said they would come when the barn was finished, then when the road was finished, then when he got onto the council. "Your mother kept me in the family," she said, "like a field."
The wedding began on Saturday at five. The barn smelled of new concrete and roast lamb, strings of lights hung from the beams, and the tables were lined up where the cows would stand in the autumn. Ilijaz played the accordion with two young men from Cazin, the groom's relatives danced the kolo, and between two courses Ćerim gave a speech about the asphalt road to the school and how much of the credit was his personally. Jasin sat beside Sinan all evening and asked him how much an hour on a roof paid and whether it was true that the snow there came up to the windows. Their mother sat at the head of the table and watched everything. She also watched Džejla, who carried plates, laughed with the guests and did not once look toward Sinan.
Just before midnight Ilijaz began a slow song, and Sinan asked her to dance, in front of everyone, because he could not do it any other way. She danced stiffly, as if with a stranger. "Come with me," he said quietly. "Tonight. We'll spend two days in Zagreb, and on Monday I have a flight. I'll buy you a ticket too." Džejla laughed, the way a person laughs when something hurts. "You're crazy." "At three o'clock, by the bridge. I'll wait until four." "And if I don't come?" "Then at least I'll know I asked." The song ended. Džejla stepped back, fixed her hair and went to fetch another pan of pita. Their mother watched them from the head of the table.
Sinan left the wedding at two, and nobody stopped him. It was cold on the bridge, mist was rising from the Una and swallowing the lights of the village. He stood leaning on the railing and listened to the accordion drifting from the barn, quieter and quieter. He thought of Hamilton, of the roofs he had walked on for twelve winters, of the lake that froze along the shore in winter, and of how every year he had told himself he would write to her once he had something to offer. At three there was no one. At three twenty he began to think that this was fair, that a twelve-year debt is not repaid in a single evening. Then headlights appeared through the mist. Ilijaz's old Golf stopped in the middle of the bridge. Ilijaz sat at the wheel, and beside him sat Džejla, in a jacket over her party dress, with a single bag on her lap.
"If it were anybody else, I wouldn't drive him," Ilijaz said through the window. "But I waited for her mother on this very bridge, and she came." Sinan opened the back door. Just then Jasin came running out of the mist along the road, without a jacket, out of breath. He had seen Sinan leave the barn and had gone after him, but had lost him in the mist. He asked nothing. He said only: "Take me too." Sinan held him by the shoulders for a long time. "Not now," he said. "Somebody has to stay with Mother. When I get settled, I'll send you a ticket." He took off his own jacket and put it around his brother's shoulders. Jasin stood on the bridge until the Golf's lights disappeared toward the border.
He walked home along the river, in his brother's jacket, which smelled of airports and a foreign city. The lights were still on in the barn. Lamb bones, empty juice bottles and crumpled napkins were left on the tables, and Ćerim was asleep at the head of the table, his head on his arms and the speech for the next council session in his pocket. He knew nothing. Jasin did not wake him.
Their mother was already in the kitchen, as she was every morning at five, making coffee in the big džezva. On the table stood three cups, hers, Jasin's, and the old one with the faded flower that Sinan had drunk from as a boy. She looked at Jasin, then at the jacket he was wearing, then at the road behind him. She asked nothing. She poured coffee into two of the cups. The third she wiped with the corner of her apron and put back in the cupboard, on the top shelf, behind the jars of fruit preserves.