The Mentor in the Guest Room

At fifty-three my father discovered that he had an inner child, and that the child was hungry. He discovered it at a seminar called Wake the Lion Within, in the conference room of a hotel in Ilidža, where his cardiologist had sent him after his blood pressure jumped past two hundred for the second time. The cardiologist had meant walks along the Miljacka. Father, who owns a small air conditioning company in Stup, went to the seminar because it lasted only one weekend, and he does not work weekends anyway. From that weekend he came back with a signed book, a bracelet of wooden beads and Sanin Tafro.

Sanin was forty, with white sneakers, linen shirts and the voice people use to talk to frightened horses. He spoke slowly, with pauses in which a person began to doubt himself. At his first dinner with us he said the house had blocked energy, that you could see it in the way we sat at the table, and that Mom's sarma, although excellent, was cooked out of fear. Mom, Mirha, put down her spoon. Father said that was true, that Mom did everything out of fear, and asked Sanin if he would stay for coffee. He stayed for coffee, then for breakfast, and within a week he had moved into the guest room for twenty-one days of intensive mentoring. That was in March. In June he was still there.

In the mornings he did breathing exercises on the terrace, so loudly that the neighbors on Mejtaš thought our water pump had broken. At the table he took everyone's phones, so we would be present, except his own, because he had to be available to clients. He talked about modesty and ate the last piece of pita before anyone could offer it. He called me little one and advised me to read less, because books bury your intuition. Father paid him three thousand marks a month, sold his old Mercedes because it tied him to the past, and stopped seeing the friends he had played giant chess with on Liberation Square for thirty years.

My brother Sabit, who is twenty-six and has an opinion about everything, called Sanin the lodger from the first day. Mom did not call him anything. She watched him walk around the house in his socks and measured him with the look she gives a piece of veal at the butcher's before saying she does not want it.

The first real blow came one Sunday at lunch. Father tapped his glass with a fork and announced that Bakir and I were not energetically compatible. Bakir is a sound engineer at a studio in Marijin Dvor, we had been engaged since November, and the wedding was set for September. Father said Sanin had analyzed our birth dates and that the marriage would be draining in the long run. Then he added, looking at his plate, that a mature man who had already walked his path would suit me better. Sanin modestly lowered his eyes. It took me half a minute to understand that the mature man was him. When I told Bakir, all he asked was whether mature men paid rent.

That evening Sabit said enough was enough. Coming home late, he had found Sanin on the terrace with Mom: he was holding her by the wrist and telling her that her husband did not see her, but he did. Mom pulled free and went into the house. Sabit told Father everything in front of Sanin. Sanin only folded his hands and said he understood Sabit's anger, because it was the anger of a son who feels he is losing his father. Father threw Sabit out of the house. That same night, to prove that nothing material bound him, he said he would sign the house on Mejtaš over to Sanin with a deed of gift. The notary was booked for Monday at nine.

On Saturday afternoon Mom went into Father's study and closed the door. I listened from the hallway. She told him she was asking for nothing but one evening. She also said that in twenty-eight years she had not lied to him even about the price of shoes, so she was not going to start now. That he hide behind the curtain in the living room, the heavy wine-colored plush one her mother had sewn and that Father had been wanting to throw out for years, and listen. If he heard nothing, he could sign on Monday, and she would stay silent for the rest of her life. Father agreed, he said, only to prove to her how wrong she was.

At ten in the evening he stood behind the curtain, in his slippers, his arms at his sides. I was in the kitchen, by the door that had been left ajar. Mom invited Sanin for tea. She had put on a green dress she had not worn since Sabit's graduation and set candles on the coffee table, which Sanin did not fail to notice. At first he was careful. He said the walls had ears. Mom said Sead was asleep, that he had drunk the valerian tea Sanin himself had recommended. Sanin smiled and moved closer.

What he said then he said in a different voice, faster, without pauses. He said Sead was a good man but naive, like a child holding an open wallet. That from Monday the house would be his, and they could stay in it as long as they behaved nicely. That the wedding to Ajna was a formality, for the papers and for Sead's peace of mind, and that what he really wanted was her, Mirha, ever since he had first tasted her sarma cooked out of fear. Mom cleared her throat. The curtain did not move.

Sanin took her hand. Mom cleared her throat louder and said there was a draft. The curtain did not stir. Sanin said she did not need to pretend to be shy in front of him, because he was above such things, and he tried to put his arms around her. Mom coughed a third time, the way people cough at a residents' meeting when someone starts talking too long, and Sanin asked her anxiously whether she was ill. "I am allergic to the dust in the curtain," she said. "Then that will be the first thing we throw out," said Sanin, "once the house is mine."

Only then did the curtain move. Father stepped out with dust in his hair and the face of a man who had slept for three months and woken up in someone else's house. He told Sanin to leave. Sanin did not get up. He straightened the sleeve of his linen shirt and calmly said that it was Father who was leaving, not him. That he had his word in front of witnesses, and he had something else: recordings. All their sessions of radical honesty had been recorded, for Sead's progress, and on them Sead, among other things, talked about how his company paid half the workers' wages in cash. "On Monday at nine you sign," said Sanin, "or the recordings go to the Tax Administration."

That night nobody in the house slept except Sanin, who, as he said, had a clear conscience. Mom called Sabit to come back. He came with Bakir and with a laptop. In three weeks of exile he had found two women who had written under other names beneath Sanin's old posts: a widow from Travnik who had given him her apartment and a dentist from Tuzla who had lost her practice because of him. Both were afraid to report him. Father sat at the kitchen table, in the same slippers, and looked for a long time at Sanin's message with the recording, which had arrived at midnight, so that he would not forget.

On Monday at nine Father was not at the notary's. He was at the tax office in Čengić Vila, with his accountant and two binders, and he reported himself. He told the clerk that for eleven years he had been paying half the wages in cash and asked how much that would cost. The clerk first called her supervisor, because in twenty years on the job that had never happened to her. It cost as much as a weekend cottage on Trebević and all the money he had set aside for my wedding. At ten he was at the police with Sabit, with the message in which Sanin threatened him and with the numbers of the two women, who, when they heard that someone had spoken first, agreed to come.

Sanin waited at the notary's until half past ten, with his lawyer and a new planner. Instead of Father, two inspectors walked into the waiting room. The notary told us later that he stood up calmly, straightened his sleeve and said that this too was just one more lesson in attachment. The inspectors let him finish his sentence. The lawyer, they say, left before they did. In the guest room they found four more deeds of gift, unsigned, with a blank space for the name.

Bakir and I were married in September, more modestly than we had planned, in the garden of the house on Mejtaš that had stayed ours. Father drank mineral water all evening and did not move from the table. When Mom walked past the living room for the third time, I asked her why she still had not thrown out that curtain, when its dust bothered her so much. "Let it hang," she said. "So we remember where he stood."