Two Euros for My Uncle

In our house, Uncle Kasim was like the weather forecast: he was talked about every day, and nobody ever saw him. We lived in Zenica, on the seventh floor of a high-rise above the Bosna River, where you could see the smoke from the steelworks in which my dad had worked shifts for thirty years. Mom sewed curtains at home for half the neighborhood, and at the end of every month she sat down at the kitchen table with a notebook and a calculator. When the numbers came out badly, and they almost always did, she would sigh and say the same thing: "When Kasim comes, things will be easier." Dad would nod, as if he had heard good news on the radio.

It had not always been like that. Before I was born, my uncle was the family disgrace. He sold the house in Nemila that he and Dad had inherited from my grandmother and spent Dad's share on bars, cars, and business ideas that collapsed faster than he could think them up. For years Dad also paid off a loan he had cosigned for him. Then Kasim, as Mom tells it, realized that nobody in Bosnia would lend him anything anymore, and through some cousin he left for Australia. They thought they would never hear of him again.

But two years later a letter came, a real letter with Australian stamps and a photograph. In the photograph my uncle stood in front of a white house with a swimming pool, tanned, in a light shirt, with his hand on the roof of a big SUV. He wrote that he had started a tiling company in Perth, that he had six workers, and that he was doing well. "Brother, forgive me for Nemila," it said. "When I come back, I will repay you everything and buy the children apartments." After that he never wrote again, but no one took it as a bad sign. A rich man has no time for letters, Mom used to say. The letter lay in the drawer with the passports, and whenever someone visited, she would take it out and read it aloud, always the same part about the apartments. The neighbors called my uncle the Australian.

My sister Merisa was twenty-seven and had a university degree, and Mom counted those two things like two illnesses. Young men came and went, because in our house, Mom said, you could tell right away there was no money. Then Elmedin appeared, a chemistry teacher at the high school, a cautious man who brought an umbrella even when he came for coffee. He came for a year and never asked anything. One evening Mom took out the letter. Elmedin looked at the photograph of the swimming pool for a long time, and a month later he proposed to Merisa. I am not claiming it was because of the letter. I am only saying which came first.

The wedding was in May, at a restaurant on Bistričak, and Dad took out a new loan for it. Then, for the first time in my life, he decided we would go to the seaside like gentlefolk: not to Neum, where we went every third year, but to Korčula, for seven days, with the newlyweds. He rented an apartment in Vela Luka. We packed ourselves into Dad's old Golf, the five of us and two bags of food, and set off at four in the morning to catch the ferry from Split. Dad put on his only light-colored suit, and Mom wore a straw hat she had bought for the occasion, which the wind tried to snatch from her from the first minute on deck.

On the upper deck there was a small bar under an awning, where an old man in a white shirt with yellow stains poured coffee from a big thermos and sold doughnuts. Dad wanted to show his son-in-law how one travels. He got up from the bench, straightened his jacket, and said, "Five coffees and five doughnuts, my treat." He went over to the bar, and I saw the old man say something to him, saw Dad nod, and then saw him suddenly freeze, wallet in hand. He came back without the coffees and without the doughnuts, white as a wall. He sat down next to Mom and said quietly, "That man looks like Kasim."

Mom looked at him as if he had lost his mind. "Don't be silly," she said. "Kasim is in Perth." But Dad was gray and his hands were shaking, so, to avoid having to look at him, she sent him to ask. Dad went over to a young sailor who was coiling a rope by the railing. I was standing close enough to hear. "The old man at the bar?" said the sailor. "He's a Bosnian. Says he was in Australia, who knows. Three years ago they put him off some ship in Split, with no papers and no money, and the captain took him on so he would not end up on the street. He sleeps down below, by the engines. Says he has a brother in Bosnia but he can't show his face to him, he owes him money. Why do you ask, do you know him?" "No," said Dad. "I thought I did."

By the time he sat down, Mom knew everything. Elmedin and Merisa were standing at the bow, taking pictures of themselves with the sea behind them. Mom leaned close to Dad and whispered, because she could not shout. "I knew it. I knew he was a good-for-nothing and that one day he would land on our backs. And now of all times, in front of our son-in-law, just when we have married off our daughter." Dad said nothing. "He must not see us," said Mom. "And Elmedin must not find out. We will sit on the other side." Then she looked at me and took twenty euros out of her wallet. "You go and pay, so he does not think we ran off. And if he asks whose you are, you are nobody's."

I walked slowly, because I wanted to see him. He was shorter than Dad and looked older than him by far more than the three years between them. His hair was white and thin, his neck red from the sun, and his hands were cracked, with white traces of old mortar in the creases, the hands of a man who really had laid tile once. As he poured the coffee, he ran his thumb over his eyebrow, just like Dad does when he is doing sums in his head. "Five coffees and five doughnuts?" he said. "Eighteen euros, young man." I handed him twenty and told him to keep the change. He looked at me as if I had given him much more. "Thank you, son. Where are you folks from?" "From Tuzla," I said. "From Tuzla," he repeated, and laughed, as if he knew I was lying, or as if it made no difference to him where anyone was from. He gave me a tray and held it steady until I had my balance.

When I brought the coffees back, Mom immediately asked how much it had been. I told her. "Twenty for eighteen?" she hissed. "Are you out of your mind? A two-euro tip for some..." She stopped, because Elmedin was just sitting down beside us. "For some waiter," she finished. Elmedin sipped his coffee and said it was surprisingly good for a boat. Merisa was watching Dad, and Dad was looking at the sea, holding his cup without drinking. Mom put her hat in her lap so the wind would not carry it off. All the way to Vela Luka we sat on the other side of the deck, our backs to the bar, and nobody turned around, except me, twice.

For seven days at the apartment Dad never went into the sea. He sat on the balcony in his undershirt and watched the harbor, where the same ferry docked every morning. Mom bought fish and talked about prices. Elmedin learned to dive headfirst off the rocks, and Merisa laughed the way she never laughed at home. On the last evening Mom said we would not go back by way of Split. We would take a different ferry to Orebić, then cross the Pelješac Bridge and drive up the coast. Elmedin said the return tickets by way of Split were already paid for. Mom said it was prettier by way of Pelješac, and that he could not know that because he had never seen Pelješac. Dad paid for the new tickets and the gas and was silent the whole way back to Zenica.

Two years have passed since then. Merisa and Elmedin have a little daughter, and they gave her our grandmother's name. Dad retired last winter. Once I asked him whether we could find out the name of that ferry, just so we would know. He said he did not know what I was talking about. And the letter from Perth still lies in the drawer with the passports. When one of the neighbors asks about the Australian, Mom takes it out and reads aloud the part about the apartments, and Dad gets up, goes out onto the balcony, and stands there until she puts the letter back in the drawer.