The Ghost at the Engagement Party

My aunt Rasema swears to this day that on that Saturday in Brčko a ghost sat at our table. She swears he was pale, that he did not touch the lamb, and that his hand was as cold as a stone taken out of the Sava. I was twenty-two then, I sat two chairs away, and I can confirm only that he was pale. For the rest, my aunt will have to answer.

My cousin Nizama was supposed to get engaged that day to Kerim Bešlagić from Linz. A distant aunt had introduced them, the way it is done these days: first photos, then messages, then video calls on Sunday evenings, when Linz was quiet and back home the rain drummed on the tin roof of the garage. Nizama's father, my uncle Ćamil, had a company with six trucks and an opinion about everything, and his best opinion was of the Bešlagićs, because they ran two restaurants in Austria and had never once asked for a discount. Nizama had seen Kerim only on a screen. She told me he was nice, that he had a lovely smile, that she neither liked nor disliked him, and that the rest, she supposed, could be learned.

The engagement was set for five. From noon a lamb turned on the spit in the garden, Aunt Rasema washed glasses that were already clean, and my uncle called Kerim three times and three times heard a woman's voice saying the number could not be reached. "The border," he kept saying. "At Orašje you can wait two hours." By six there were forty guests in the garden and no groom. At seven a taxi pulled up at the gate, and out stepped a tall young man in a dark suit, with his left hand bandaged and a small blue box in his right.

We learned the rest later. Kerim and his friend Jasmin had set off from Linz at dawn. Not far from Orašje, on a wet road, a truck that had swerved out of its lane slammed into them. Jasmin got away with two broken fingers. Kerim died in the hospital a few hours later, and before that he managed to ask for only one thing: that Jasmin go to Brčko and tell them in person, because news like that is not sent by text. Jasmin took the ring box from Kerim's jacket and got into the first taxi outside the hospital.

Jasmin did know one more thing, though he remembered it too late that evening. His last name was Kapetanović. Twenty years earlier his father and my uncle had been partners at the Arizona market, they had shared a stall selling jeans, and they had split up over a van full of goods whose owner nobody can name to this day. Ever since, the name Kapetanović had been spoken in our house like a curse, and my uncle used to boast that he would not even ride the same bus as one of them.

Jasmin came through the gate and opened his mouth. That was as far as he got. My uncle hugged him so hard that his bandaged hand was trapped between them, and the aunts kissed him on both cheeks and said he was better looking than in the pictures. "What happened to your hand, son?" asked Aunt Rasema. "We had an accident," Jasmin began, "and Kerim is," but my uncle was already shouting across the garden that the boy was alive and well, just a little scratched, and that people drove that road like a racetrack. The photographer wanted everyone lined up beside the lamb. The accordion player started up. Jasmin stood in the middle of the picture, and nobody asked his name again.

They seated him next to Nizama. She looked at him, and something on her face paused, the way a person pauses when it seems they have come to the wrong house. On the screen Kerim had been shorter, with a fuller face and glasses. But screens lie, everybody knows that, and this one was tired and pale and could not take his eyes off her. "You're different," she said quietly. "I know," he said. "I have to tell you something." "Later," she said, because my uncle had just stood up with a glass of juice to make a speech.

The speech lasted twenty minutes. My uncle talked about trucks, about honesty, about how in his life he had met two kinds of people, those who pay their debts and the Kapetanovićs. The guests laughed. Jasmin put down his fork. Three times he tried to stand, and three times Aunt Rasema tugged him back by the sleeve, because you do not stand up in the middle of a speech. I watched and thought he was shy. Nizama thought something else. I saw the way she looked at him: like a puzzle she had decided to solve on her own, without a screen.

After the speech they went out to the fence, where it was quieter. I do not know what they talked about. I know Nizama laughed twice, and she had only ever laughed at Kerim on the screen out of politeness. When the time came for the ring, Jasmin took out the blue box, looked at it and put it back in his pocket. He stood up, and everyone fell silent. "Forgive me," he said. "I don't belong here. At midnight they are expecting me at the hospital morgue." And he walked out through the gate, on foot, toward the main road, while my uncle was left standing with a glass in his hand.

On Sunday morning Kerim's father called. He was crying. He said Kerim had been in an accident near Orašje on Saturday around noon, that he had died in the hospital around five, and that only now did they have the strength to let us know. My uncle put down the phone and sat on the steps. Aunt Rasema knew at once what had happened: Kerim's soul had sat at our table, it had come to keep a promise and then gone back to where it was expected. That was why he was pale. That was why he did not eat. By noon half of Brčko knew. That day Nizama cried for Kerim, honestly, as one cries for a good man she had known only on Sunday evenings. And then, in the pocket of the suit jacket the young man had put around her shoulders by the fence and forgotten to take back, she found a business card: Jasmin Kapetanović, electrician, Linz.

She showed it only to me. Two weeks later, when Jasmin came back from the funeral in Austria, she called him. They met on the embankment along the Sava, and I sat on a bench fifty paces away eating sunflower seeds, because somebody had to keep an eye on things. I saw him talk for a long time, his hand still in its bandage, and I saw her stay silent. Afterward she told me he had explained everything: that the words would not come out that evening, first because of my uncle and the name, and then because of her. "And what did you tell him?" I asked. "That on a screen nobody ever kept such a lovely silence with me," she said.

When my uncle found out, he shouted for two days. On the third day Aunt Rasema reminded him that in front of forty witnesses he had hugged that young man, kissed him and called him son, and that in Brčko such a thing cannot be undone. My uncle was silent for a long time, and then he asked only one thing: did the boy at least know whose van of jeans that had been. Jasmin said he did not. "Good," said my uncle. "Neither do I." The wedding was the following fall. Aunt Rasema sat beside the groom, and all evening, when she thought nobody was looking, she kept pinching his arm.