The Envelope He Never Opened

The restaurant on the hill above Slana Banja is called the Old Saltworks, and Sadik Mujagić has had dinner there every Friday for twenty years. Always at the same table in the corner, always the same thing: soup, ten ćevapi, mineral water. The waiters changed, the menu got an English translation, televisions appeared on the walls, and he stayed, like a piece of furniture no one moves. That Friday in November, as the waiter was bringing his soup, someone at the table by the window laughed, loudly, throwing his head back. Sadik put down his spoon. He knew that laugh before he saw the face. It was Faik's laugh.

Three people sat at the table by the window. A gray-haired, heavyset man in an expensive sweater. A woman in a green coat, her hair dyed the color it had once been on its own. And a young man of twenty-five, tall, who was laughing at something on his phone. The woman's name was Melita, and for twelve years she had been Sadik's wife. The man was Faik Hrnjić, Sadik's best friend from high school. The young man was Semir, whom Sadik had walked to kindergarten every morning until he was five.

Twenty years ago everyone said Sadik was a good man, and no one meant it as a compliment. He worked as an accountant at the salt factory, returned borrowed things before they were due, and remembered other people's children's birthdays. Melita was better-looking than he was, and she knew it. He adored Semir. They built towers of blocks all over the living room, on summer Sundays they went to the Pannonian Lakes, and he carried him on his shoulders across Freedom Square, though the boy had long since learned to walk. Faik, a dentist with an office near Kapija, came to lunch every Sunday, brought Semir chocolate, and called him champ. At the table he always sat in the same place, across from Melita, and he was always the first to praise the pie. When Semir fell off his bike on Ilinčica, Faik was the first to pick him up, because Sadik ran more slowly. Sadik loved all three of them and had no reason to doubt anyone.

Hasnija, the housekeeper, a widow from Simin Han, came three times a week to clean and look after Semir. She had a sharp tongue and did everything properly. One Tuesday in March Sadik came home from work early with a fever and found her in the hallway, already in her coat, her bag on her shoulder. She told him she could no longer work for them. Puzzled, he asked whether he had been paying her too little. "It's not about money, Mr. Sadik," she said. "I can't stand watching them make a fool of you anymore."

Then she told him, standing up, as if afraid she would lose her nerve if she sat down. Faik came on Tuesdays and Thursdays, while Sadik was at work, and they sent her to the park with the child. It had been like that since she started working for them, and she had worked there for six years, since before Semir was born. "And the child," she said, and here her voice trembled for the first time. "Look at his ears. Look at how he laughs. I kept quiet because I love that child. But I can't anymore." She left her key on the shoe cabinet and went.

Sadik sat in the hallway for an hour with her key in his hand. When Melita brought Semir home from kindergarten, he looked at his son's ears for the first time. They were small and set close to his head, like Faik's. From that moment on he could not stop seeing them. That night he took a few hairs from the boy's brush and put them in an envelope. In the morning Melita made him coffee and asked how his fever was. He looked at her and saw nothing. Maybe Hasnija is jealous, he thought, maybe she is mad, maybe they had not paid her enough. At noon he called Faik and said he had a toothache and would stop by on Thursday. "Thursday's impossible," said Faik. "Patients all day. Come on Friday."

On Thursday he left work at eleven instead of four. Faik's car was parked in front of the building. He unlocked the apartment with his own key. They were in the living room. Faik's jacket hung over the armchair, Melita's hair was down, and there was nothing a court would accept as evidence, and everything a husband needs. Faik stood up. "Sadik, this is not what you think." Sadik did not even look at him. "Is Semir mine?" he asked Melita. She looked at Faik. Faik looked at the floor. "I don't know," said Melita. That "I don't know" was worse than any yes.

Then Sadik, a gentle man, shouted for the first time in his life. He shouted until the neighbor upstairs banged on the radiator. He told them to leave, both of them, and not to come back while he was alive. That afternoon Melita picked Semir up from kindergarten and went to Faik's, and three months later they moved to Sarajevo. The divorce took half a year. Sadik did not fight for custody, because every time he saw the boy in the courthouse corridor he saw Faik's ears, and then hated himself for seeing them. The last time, Semir waved to him from that corridor, his hand in his mother's.

A week after they had gone, he sent the hairs, together with his own sample, to a laboratory in Sarajevo, and no one knew about it. The answer came two weeks later. Sadik put the envelope in the drawer of his desk, under the warranty for the washing machine, and did not open it. He told himself he would open it when he was strong enough. For the first three years he sent Semir birthday cards at the address in Sarajevo. None came back, and none got an answer. Twenty years went by. He stayed in the same apartment, at the same job, on Fridays he had dinner at the Old Saltworks, and in summer he went alone to the Pannonian Lakes and watched fathers teaching their children to swim. He opened the drawer only when he was looking for the warranty, and he replaced the washing machine twice. Once his colleagues in accounting introduced him to a widow from Lukavac. They had coffee on a terrace on the Korzo, and for an hour he told her about a little boy who could count to a hundred. They never had a second coffee.

Now he got up from his soup and went over to their table. Faik was gray and heavier, with glasses he had not needed when he was young. Melita went pale and put down her fork. The young man looked up from his phone, politely, the way one looks at a waiter. "Can I help you?" Sadik was looking at Faik. "You raised him well," he said. "He laughs like you." Faik stood up. "Sadik, please. Not here."

"Not here?" Sadik did not shout. He spoke quietly, in the voice in which for twenty years he had read balance sheets. "For twenty years I've had nowhere. You took my wife, and that I might have forgiven you. You took my Sundays. You took the child I carried on my shoulders across Freedom Square." The young man put his phone down. "Mom, who is this?" "Sadik, he doesn't know," said Melita, so quietly that he barely heard her. Sadik turned to the young man. "I am the man who taught you to count to a hundred. Ask your mother whose son you are. Maybe she can tell you. She couldn't tell me." Semir looked at his mother, and Faik sat down heavily, as if his legs had given way. Then Sadik left money on his own table, for the soup he had not eaten and the ćevapi he had not even waited for, and walked out.

Outside there was fog, the Tuzla kind, thick and salty, through which the city lights look as if seen through milk. Sadik walked down the hill on foot, past the closed lakes, past Kapija, where Faik's old dental office was now a phone shop, and past the building where they had once lived, where on the third floor a kitchen light was burning for some other family. His hands were not shaking. He was surprised by that. For twenty years he had imagined this meeting, and in every version his hands had shaken.

At home he opened the drawer. The envelope had yellowed, and the laboratory's stamp had faded, but the name and the date could still be read: April 2004. He held it for a long time. Then he went to the kitchen, took the bread knife, and opened it the way he opened all his bills, neatly, along the long side. Inside was a single sheet of paper, with a table he did not understand and one sentence beneath it, which he understood at once.

Probability of paternity: ninety-nine point nine eight percent.

He read the sentence again, and again, as if it were a balance sheet with an error hidden somewhere. There was no error. He got up, went to the bathroom, turned on the light, and looked at himself in the mirror, for the first time the way Hasnija had looked at the boy. His ears were small and set close to his head. He had never looked at them. A man does not look at his own ears.