The Key to the Mailbox

The mailbox in entrance number seven, in a building behind the Eternal Flame, had two keys, and both hung on Samir Ćatić's key ring. Nura had never asked for her own. Samir liked to carry the mail up to the third floor himself, open it at the table while she poured the coffee, and read her the electricity bill aloud, like an item from the newspaper. When he was appointed manager of the Kapija Bank branch on Ferhadija in November, he brought that letter up too, opened it with the bread knife, and read it twice. "No more scraping by, my little mouse," he said. "From January we live like people."

Nura laughed and said nothing. For eight years, once Samir was asleep, she had sat in the kitchen with her laptop translating Turkish series for a production company in Ilidža: loves, revenges and lost sons, at four marks per minute of subtitles. Samir thought she did it out of boredom and spent the money on herself. On the fifteenth of every month the money went to the installment on a loan he knew nothing about. Of the thirty thousand marks, six were still left.

Eight years earlier Samir had fainted at the tram stop by Skenderija. At Koševo they said a heart valve was failing and the wait for surgery was a year, while a clinic in Istanbul could take him in three weeks. Samir worked in debt collection then and liked to say that he collected debts, he did not make them. Nura went to Kapija Bank on her own. The loan was handled by Muhamed Rizvić, Samir's friend from the Second Gymnasium, and he asked for a guarantor. Her father in Zenica agreed over the phone. He died the night before the papers reached him. Three days later Nura signed his name at the kitchen table and wrote the date beneath the signature. She told Samir the money was her father's inheritance.

Two weeks after Samir's appointment, Branka Ćorić turned up at the door, the woman Nura had shared a room with in the student dormitory in Nedžarići. Branka had a suitcase, gray streaks she did not dye, and a husband she had buried in Mostar the year before. She needed work. Nura made her coffee and, while Branka talked about the years spent caring for her sick mother and her brothers, felt the urge to show something of her own. She told her about Istanbul. "You pulled that off by yourself?" Branka asked. "By myself. And he must never find out. Samir would rather die than live on his wife's debt."

Samir hired Branka that same day, because a position was opening up at the branch. In the evening he explained which one. Muhamed Rizvić had a disciplinary case in his file from ten years back, over a contract with a date filled in after the fact. That was enough. But Samir also admitted what rubbed him the wrong way even more: in front of the staff Muhamed called him Samko, the way he had in school. "I cannot be the manager of a man who calls me Samko in front of the teller window," he said, and laughed at his own honesty.

Muhamed rang the bell the next day at ten, when he knew Samir would be out. He did not sit down. From a folder he took a copy of the guarantor form and set it on the coffee table beside the little bowl of dried figs. "Your father died on the third of March," he said calmly. "He signed on the sixth. I saw it eight years ago and kept quiet, because I knew why. Now I am asking you to do something for me. I have two children and one stain on my record. If I lose this job, nobody in this city will hire me. Tell your husband to keep me on. If I go down, madam, I do not go down alone."

That evening Nura begged Samir as she had never begged him for anything. He listened to her with a pen in his hand, then opened his laptop and, right in front of her, sent Muhamed his notice of dismissal. "So that nobody at the bank says the manager is led around by his wife," he explained. Then, while taking off his watch, he gave a short lecture about people who forge signatures. People like that, he said, poison the house they live in, and their lie seeps into the walls like damp. Nura sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her own hands.

On Thursday, through the glass of the mailbox, she saw a white envelope with Samir's name on it, written in Muhamed's hand. The key was on Samir's ring. On Saturday the bank was celebrating thirty years at a hotel near the City Hall, and Samir wanted his wife to sing a sevdalinka, because Nura sang well and because he liked it when other people looked at her. Nura asked him to rehearse with her all day Friday and not to open the mail until the party, not the bills, nothing. "No bank, no mail," she said. "Just me." Samir was flattered. "I open nothing until my wife sings," he said.

Meanwhile Branka sat with Muhamed in a café by the Latin Bridge. Fifteen years earlier, in Mostar, they had been together, and she had left him for a man who could pay for her mother's medicine. She told him so now without apologizing, like a bill finally being paid. She also said she was alone and tired of a house where nobody needed her work. Muhamed was silent for a long time, then offered to get the letter back tomorrow, somehow, through the building caretaker. Branka shook her head. "Let him read it," she said. "That house has lived on a lie for eight years. That costs more than any loan."

On Saturday Nura sang "Moj dilbere" before two hundred guests, too loud and too fast, as if she were defending herself against someone. They gave her a standing ovation. Samir led her from table to table and introduced her as if she were a prize that came with the manager's job. They got home after midnight. In the entrance hall, still in his coat, he unlocked the mailbox.

He read the letter at the kitchen table, twice, the way he had read his appointment. Then he stood up. Nura waited. For eight years she had imagined this moment, and in every version he said the same thing: that he had signed, that he was to blame, and let them come for him. Samir said something else. He said he had been sleeping beside a forger. That she had ruined him now of all times, just when he had finally become somebody. That he would stay in the marriage for the sake of appearances, but from today she had no business in his affairs, his money or his name. "I did it for you," she said. "For me?" he shouted. "Who asked you to?"

Then the intercom buzzed. Branka was standing downstairs in the snow and would not come up. She gave Nura an envelope and left. Inside was the original guarantor form and a slip of paper on which Muhamed had written only: "This never existed." Samir read the slip over her shoulder, snatched the form out of her hand and began tearing it up over the sink, smaller and smaller, laughing. "It's over," he kept saying. "No harm done." He ran the water. Then he hugged her and said he had forgiven her, that she had been like a child who did not know what she was doing, and that from now on he would do the thinking for both of them. "My little mouse," he said. "You got scared."

Nura went into the bedroom. When she came back she was no longer in the long-sleeved dress but in jeans and her coat. Samir looked at her as if he had misheard something. "Sit down," she said. "Now I will talk, and you will listen." She told him she had been waiting for one sentence. Not for him to actually go to prison in her place, only for him to say that he would. She said that the man who had been shouting a moment ago and the man who was hugging her now were the same man, and she did not know which of the two she had been living with. Samir said she was tired and that tomorrow everything would look different. "Tomorrow it will," she said.

Samir asked where she was going at two in the morning. To Branka's, to begin with, she said, and after that she would see. He said they were husband and wife, that it meant something. She said it had meant something to only one of them. She did not slam the door. She walked down the three flights, and in the entrance hall she stopped at the mailbox. She took the apartment key off her ring, then the cellar key as well, and dropped them through the slot. She heard them land at the bottom, among the flyers for New Year discounts. Samir had both keys to the mailbox. When he opened it tomorrow, he would find hers too. On Ferhadija the snow was falling, and no one had yet walked there ahead of her.