“Hey, bro’,” he said before Yane’s head appeared from the cabin. “Oooh,” my father said again, “there you are.”
Yane was wearing a white shirt with some sort of pockets, there were four little buttons on the collar that could be attached to the bottom of the shirt if he got really, really hot. He had an olive-green sweater tied around his neck, and his pants, like his shirt, were white, with small pockets that matched those on the shirt. On his feet were the navy-blue canvas shoes that older Italians usually wore on twenty-meter ships. On his wrist, he wore a new watch that showed the time from faraway Iraq. When my father locked the door of the cabin, Yane carefully began to walk along the dock, and then we all slowly approached the shore together. My father cradled him on the dock with his hands, and Yane held on to the rope above his head. When my father got up to jump on the dock, the boat together with Yane somehow lifted. The more he pulled on the rope, the more the boat rose and rose, and Yane was falling further and further into the sea on his back.
“Put the rope down!” my father screamed, and Yane was pulling on the rope with his hands as if it was for his life.
He wide opened his eyes and stared at us in astonishment as he held tight to the rope. Now my mother started shouting too.
“Put the rope down! Drop the rope!”
And then we could see our Yane slide at a snail’s pace and with his eyes still wide open into the biggest junk on the dock. There was a “pop!” and Jane disappeared under the seaweed and all the debris that was there. It was quiet for a while, and then my sister and I almost peed ourselves laughing.
Mom Tanya was saying, “Hush, Dare help him, you see he can’t get out of there,” and my dad was also laughing, so people passing by started to stop and observe my Iraqi uncle floating, nicely dressed, and smelling like one of Rovinj pig farms and swearing like never before.
After a few days, Yane returned to Ljubljana, and we returned to Capodistria. My father tied the boat on one side to the concrete part of the seabed and on the other side to the dock. My mother packed our clothes and when she put everything in the long white car, my sister and I sat in the back seat and waited for my father to lock the boat and get behind the wheel.
When he came, my mother, Tanya said to him: “Well, Darko, the end of summer has come.”
My father started the engine, the car seemed to lift a little and our old four-wheel, as we called it, took us a few meters from the building. It was my last summer before elementary school started.
Translation from Slovenian: Dragana Evtimova