Notary Prelević read our father's will slowly, as if he were dictating. We sat in his office above the square, three people who had not been in one room together since our mother's funeral, and looked at the plane trees through the window so that we would not have to look at one another. The house in the Old Town, with its courtyard, its fig tree and its cellar, belonged to Nebojša, to me and to Dušan in equal shares. On one condition. For thirty nights, starting on the first of August, all three of us had to sleep in it. Whoever missed even one night would lose their share to the others.
Nebojša laughed the laugh he had brought back from Linz along with his leather bag. "Even dead he found a way to give us orders." Dušan said nothing. Dušan had stayed in Trebinje when we left, worked at the winery below Crkvina, cooked for our father when he was unwell and, as Nebojša and I had told each other over the phone for years, slowly turned him against us. I said I had a pharmacy in Bijeljina and shifts that no one would take over for me. Then I asked who was even going to witness that we had slept in the house. "Your neighbor," said the notary. "Mrs. Olivera. Your father chose her himself. Every morning you will sign a list for her."
On the first of August at nine in the evening we stood in the hallway with our bags, like guests at a hotel someone else had booked. The house smelled of our father's cologne and of stone that had been warming all day. Nebojša took the big room because he was the oldest. Dušan stayed in his own, where, it was plain to see, he had slept before. I got our mother's sewing room, with a couch shorter than I was and a machine covered with a crocheted cloth. Nobody slept that night. The cicadas in the fig tree worked like a factory, and I listened to my brothers in their two rooms pacing from wall to wall, each to his own rhythm.
At seven in the morning a woman of about forty knocked on the kitchen window, in an apron, with a plate of figs and a sheet of paper. "Olivera," she said. "Please sign, all three of you. That is what was agreed." We signed below the date. She left the figs on the windowsill and went back to the house next door with the blue shutters, just behind our courtyard wall, which I remembered from childhood only as the house where women lived. Our mother never let us play there. She said they had a vicious dog, though none of us had ever seen a dog.
The first week passed in a war over the bathroom. Nebojša showered for twenty minutes and said that was normal in Austria. Dušan smoked under the fig tree and flicked his ash into our mother's pot of geraniums, which Nebojša called desecration. I cooked because nobody else would, and I cooked what our mother had cooked: green beans, stuffed peppers, cicvara on Sundays. We ate in silence. Every morning a plate of figs waited on the windowsill, and the list gained three new signatures. On the fifth day Nebojša said he felt as if he were in a prison where the guard was kinder than the prisoners.
The fight broke out on the tenth, when I found our father's winter coat in the wardrobe and in its pocket a key that opened no door in the house. Long, iron, old. At the table I asked whose it was. Dušan said he did not know, too quickly. Nebojša heard it just as I did. "You know everything about this house," he told him. "You were his only child, weren't you? We were pictures on the fridge." Dušan stood up and said that at least the pictures on the fridge called once a month, and the picture in Linz did not even do that. Then he went out, and that night he did not come into the house but slept in the courtyard, on a lounge chair.
In the morning all three of us argued with Olivera over whether the courtyard counted as the house. She looked at the lounge chair, then at Dušan, then at the two of us. "I will sign," she said. "Your father often slept under the fig tree in summer. He said he could not breathe in the house." Nebojša asked her how she knew where our father slept. She shrugged and said you could see over the wall from her window. That was when I noticed that she listened with her head tilted, just like our father, and I forgot it at once, the way you forget things that are not convenient.
In the third week something shifted. One evening Nebojša brought up our father's vranac from Popovo Polje out of the cellar, and we drank it in the courtyard until the Trebišnjica below the Arslanagić Bridge had gone completely dark. We talked about our mother. How she wore her glasses on a little chain, how she licked her finger to turn the pages of the newspaper, and how every summer she fell silent for three days, always at the same time, around Ilindan, and we had thought it was the heat. Dušan said that on those days our father always went to the market and came back with nothing. For the first time we laughed about it. Later I remembered that Dušan had not drunk a single glass that evening.
On the last night, the thirtieth, I could not sleep. I took the key from the coat and went out into the courtyard. Behind the fig tree, in the stone wall facing the house next door, there was a small door that I had all my life believed was bricked up, the ivy had covered it so thickly. I pushed the leaves aside. The key went in as if someone had oiled the lock the week before. On the other side were narrow stone steps, and on the steps a plate from our mother's gold-rimmed set, a set that, as she used to say, had lost two pieces long ago.
In the morning, in the office above the square, Prelević took out a second envelope. He said our father had ordered him to open it only if all the lists were complete. They were. The house, he read, was to be divided into four equal shares. The fourth belonged to Olivera Kecman, daughter of Spasoje Šarenac and the late Mileva Kecman, born on the second of August, nineteen eighty-two. Olivera sat at the end of the table with her hands in her lap. She was not surprised. Neither was Dušan.
Nebojša stood up so suddenly that his chair fell over. He said this was a performance, that our father had kept us under one roof for a month only so that she could watch us over the wall, and that he would contest the will in Mostar, in Sarajevo, in Strasbourg if he had to. Then he turned to Dušan. "You knew." "Since I was fourteen," said Dušan. "I saw him going through that door. Mom told me to keep quiet so I would not lose you. So I kept quiet. I lost you anyway."
Nobody said anything. Through the window we could see the plane trees and the market beneath them, the women with cheese aged in sheepskin and honey in jars, the same view as on the first morning. Olivera stood up, told the notary she would sign a waiver if we asked her to, and walked out. Nebojša left for Linz that same afternoon. From the border he sent me a message saying he had not contested anything and did not know whether he would. Dušan stayed in the house. I stayed two more days, on the excuse that I had to wash the bedding.
The next morning nobody knocked on the window. The list was no longer needed, and the figs, I supposed, were ripening and falling in the other courtyard. I took the plate that had stood on our windowsill all month, washed it, and went out behind the fig tree. The key was in the lock, where I had left it. I opened the small door and climbed the stone steps. Olivera was sitting at the top with a coffee, as if she had been waiting for me since the second of August. "I brought you your plate," I said. She moved over and made room for me on the step.