You Dreamed It All, Uncle

In Bijeljina everyone knows who the first lady is, even though it is written nowhere. It is not the mayor's wife or the bank director, but Dobrila Savić, with her yellow-fronted house two streets from King Peter Square, with roses like no one else's in Semberija, and with a husband, Ljubiša, who keeps quiet about everything. At Dobrila's, on Fridays over coffee, it is decided whose wedding was beautiful, whose cake was dry and whose son is not fit to marry. Whoever was not at her slava might as well not have existed that year. Those of us who came, came out of fear and out of curiosity, which are, as we say here, the two strongest loves.

Only one thing never went Dobrila's way: her daughter Sofija. Twenty-six years old, the most beautiful girl from the Drina to the Sava, a piano teacher at the music school, and unmarried. She had turned down three men, among them the lawyer Vladan Stanković, whom Dobrila had considered adequate, but no more than that. Sofija, people said, was still waiting for a music teacher who had left for Germany two years earlier and stopped getting in touch. Dobrila never mentioned it. We did.

Then on a hot day in June, Vladan drove his uncle into town. Radomir Jeremić, eighty-four, had left Semberija in the sixties, built a trucking company of forty trucks in Chicago, sold it, and now, as he said at the gas station at the edge of town, wanted to see once more the fields where he had herded cows as a boy. At that gas station the heat made him ill. Vladan was two streets from Dobrila's house and had nowhere else to go. Dobrila opened the gate before he could knock.

The old man was small and neat, in a white suit, with a dyed mustache and a hearing aid that whistled now and then. He called everyone dear, half in English, and remembered names exactly as long as a sentence lasted. Dobrila sat him in the best armchair, sent her husband for ice and a doctor, and sent herself to the stove. By evening the old man was eating her pita, weeping over pictures of old Bijeljina in her album, and promising to come back for dinner the next day. Vladan drove him to a hotel near the square, scowling, because until then he had kept his uncle all to himself.

That night, in the kitchen, Dobrila told her daughter everything she had worked out between the pita and the coffee. The old man had no children. The old man had a house on a lake in America and money nobody could count. The old man was eighty-four. "Two years, Sofija. Three at most. After that you can go wherever you like, even after that one of yours in Germany." Sofija said it was disgusting. "Disgusting," Dobrila answered, "is sitting in Bijeljina at thirty, waiting for a message that never comes." Sofija looked at the phone on the table for a long time. No message came that night either. She said yes.

The next evening she played for him. The old man asked for something old, something his mother used to sing, and Sofija found the song at the piano and sang it softly, the way you sing to someone who is ill. Radomir wept. Then he got up with difficulty, took her hand, kissed it and asked, in two languages at once, whether she would be his wife and come with him to the lake. Sofija said she would. In the hallway Dobrila squeezed a dish towel. And behind the curtain at the terrace door, where he had come to collect his uncle, stood Vladan Stanković, hearing every word.

Vladan did not sleep that night. In the morning he sat down to breakfast with his uncle at the hotel and began slowly and patiently, the way you talk to children and witnesses. "Uncle, what did you dream last night?" The old man laughed and said he had dreamed he was proposing to a lovely girl at a piano. "There you go," said Vladan. "At the Savićs' you fell asleep in the armchair after the pita, and I drove you back. You dreamed the rest." The old man said he remembered the song. "The song was on the radio." Radomir was silent for a long time, and then he admitted that lately he dreamed all sorts of things, last week even Chicago under snow, though it was June.

For that afternoon Dobrila invited everyone. The doctor's wife, the bank director, the owner of the bridal salon, and Mrs. Nedeljković, who had waited twenty years for Dobrila to make a mistake. She told them only that they would hear something lovely. On the table were Russian caps, tulumbe and coffee in the porcelain that comes out only for the slava. When Vladan brought his uncle in, they all stood up. Radomir was in high spirits, kissed each of them on the hand, and sat down next to Sofija, who looked as if she had not slept for three nights.

Dobrila tapped her teaspoon against her cup and said that their dear guest had something to say. Radomir beamed. "I do," he said. "Last night I had the most beautiful dream of my life. I dreamed I was proposing to your Sofija. Vladan says it was a dream, and he is a lawyer, he knows." Mrs. Nedeljković put down her tulumba. Dobrila laughed, too loudly, and said it had not been a dream, that Uncle Radomir had kissed Sofija's hand so sweetly, right there, by the piano. "My uncle is tired, ma'am," Vladan said calmly. "He fell asleep in your armchair. My uncle dreams."

What followed we still retell today, each of us a little differently. Dobrila told Vladan he was a liar and that he was sore because Sofija had turned him down. Vladan said he would rather be a liar than a mother who sells her daughter to an old man for a house on a lake. The bank director took out her phone, then put it back in her bag, ashamed. Radomir looked from one to the other, and then, quietly, like a child lost at the market, he asked, "Please, was it a dream? Somebody tell me. I no longer know what I dream."

That was when Sofija stood up. She looked neither at her mother nor at Vladan, but at the old man. She said it had not been a dream. That her mother had talked her into it, and she had agreed, and that while he wept over his mother's song, she had been thinking about how much time he had left. She said it in front of everyone, clearly, as if dictating a record. Then she knelt beside the armchair and asked him to forgive her. Radomir stroked her hair. "You sang beautifully, sweetheart," he said. "That much I did not dream." Then he asked Vladan to drive him to the hotel, and at the door he did not turn around.

By evening all of Bijeljina knew, from the square to the market. That autumn, for the first time, Dobrila's slava was empty, the Russian caps dried out on the table, and Mrs. Nedeljković took over her Fridays. Radomir Jeremić flew back to Chicago two days later. He died that winter, in his sleep, as some neighbor of his let people know. In his will, people said, he left everything to the children's ward of the hospital in Bijeljina, except for one line: to Vladan Stanković, who had explained to him what he dreamed, he left nothing, so that he too could dream a little.

The next spring the Savićs sold the yellow-fronted house and moved in with Ljubiša's brother in Novi Sad. Sofija left before them, for Graz, for a music school there, and people say she plays in some hotel on Sundays. Vladan still insists it was all a dream. And we in Bijeljina, when someone promises something and then changes his mind, say he dreamed it like Jeremić, and we laugh, and we make sure nobody hears us.