Sunday, 26 September 1999

Sunday morning. No factory, no bus. Emir is asleep after a long Saturday night of driving. In the pantry are thirty-one jars of ajvar in rows, red, like books in a library.

Agim and Drita and the boys and the grandmother leave on Tuesday. The boys came yesterday to say goodbye to Mr. Kraus's cat. Drita gave me a scarf she embroidered. I gave her the small džezva. She said, "We have džezva in Kosovo." I said, "Not this one."

The call has not come. My mother says the woman in Tuzla now says "maybe October." In July it was "maybe autumn." I understand. There are many families and few people to do this work, and it is slow, careful work, and it should be careful. But "maybe" is a heavy word to carry for four years. I carry it. Everybody on our street carries some word.

And now the thing I want to write down before I forget one detail of it.

At seven o'clock, which on a Sunday is a miracle, Selma came into the kitchen in Emir's old T-shirt and sat at the table and watched me make the coffee. She watched the whole thing, the water, the foam, the waiting. Then she said, "Mama, can I have one?"

She has never asked. She drinks Coca-Cola and something from the gas station with too much whipped cream. I did not say anything, in case she would change her mind. I took down a second fildžan and put the foam in first, the right way, and poured.

She took a sugar cube and held it in her teeth and drank the coffee through the sugar, the way my mother does, the way Nermin did. Nobody taught her this. I don't know where she saw it. Maybe she was six years old and watching him, and she kept it all this time.

She made a face and said, in English, "It's so strong." And then, in Bosnian, "Hvala, mama."

We sat ten minutes. It was a good ten minutes.

Sunday, 19 September 1999

Yesterday was the day of ajvar. If you don't know ajvar: it is a spread of red peppers, roasted and peeled and cooked for hours with oil and a little salt, and every Bosnian family makes it in September and eats it all winter on bread, and every family's is the best.

My garden gave me maybe sixty peppers, which is not enough for anything, so Emir and I also bought two bushels from a farmer at the market downtown. Then at seven in the morning the women from our street came with their pots and their big spoons, and Emir and Mr. Kraus's grill were in the yard, and Emir roasted peppers all morning until the skins were black and his arms were red, and the smell went up and down the whole street. Two American men walking a dog stopped to ask what is burning. We gave them bread with last year's ajvar. They stayed an hour.

We put the hot peppers in paper bags to sweat, and peeled them, and took out the seeds, and ground them, and then the cooking: a big pot on the stove and somebody must stir it always, three hours, four hours, so it doesn't burn. Drita came to help, and her grandmother, who sat by the pot on a kitchen chair and stirred for two hours without stopping, like a machine, and at the end tasted it and said one sentence in Albanian. Agim was not there to translate. We all knew. Too much salt.

She was right again.

Monday, 6 September 1999

Labor Day. The Bosnian families had a picnic in the park, and the men grilled ćevapi, and somebody brought a cassette player with sevdalinke, our old slow songs, and the old people sang along and the young people went to play volleyball far away where they could not hear it.

Tomorrow Selma begins high school.

We had a fight on Saturday, and I will write it because it is true. I asked her something in Bosnian, and she answered in English, like always, and I said, "Selma, answer me in our language, please." And she said, "Mama, you should speak English at home. You need the practice."

She is right. And it is a knife anyway. Both things.

Later she came into the kitchen and put her arms around me from the back, the way she did when she was small, and said in Bosnian, "Izvini," sorry. Her Bosnian has an American accent now. It is still the most beautiful word I heard this year.

Thursday, 26 August 1999

Two pieces of news, one small and one bigger.

The small one: on Tuesday the big machine at the start of our line started to make the noise, the one I know. I went to the supervisor and said, in my best English, "Excuse me, I think the temperature in the second zone is too high. Could someone please check it before the bottles come out bad?" He looked at me a long time. Then he checked. It was too high. In February 1998 I wrote here that first I will learn the polite way, and then I will tell him. It took eighteen months. Now he asks me, "Amra, what do you hear?"

The bigger one: Mrs. Oberle's husband knows a man at an engineering company. I met him for coffee (American coffee, a big cup like a vase). He was kind and honest. He said: send your diploma to be evaluated, it takes some months. Take a course in computer drafting, AutoCAD, at the community college, starting in January. Then come to see me again.

I sent the diploma papers yesterday. It is the same diploma that was in my bag in 1992, with the džezva and Selma's coat. It survived a war. It can survive the United States Postal Service.

Thursday, 19 August 1999

Nermin is thirty-three today. In Yugoslavia we call thirty-three "the years of Jesus." A man at thirty-three should do something important with his life, the old people say.

This evening I put a bowl of sugar cubes on the table, only that, for him. Selma saw it and knew. She took one and ate it plain, like he did, and said, "Mama, that's gross," and ate another one.

Sunday, 15 August 1999

Agim came over tonight to tell us: they are going back to Kosovo, at the end of September. The agency says there is a way to help them with the travel.

The boys do not want to go. They like school, they like the sneakers with lights, they like cartoons in the morning. Drita wants to go. The grandmother wants to go most of all; she wants to sleep in her own house again, she says, even with no roof. Agim is not sure. A cousin told him on the telephone that their house was burned. He will build it again, he says. He is a mason. He sat at our table and turned his coffee cup around and around in his fingers, and I saw that he was ashamed to be so happy in front of us.

I told him, go. Build. Don't be ashamed. I meant it, all of it.

After he went home, Emir and I sat on the porch without talking for a long time. Then Emir said, "A mason. Good. They will need masons." And we went to bed.

Saturday, 7 August 1999

The garden is a jungle now. For people who are new: in April our landlord, Mr. Kraus, who lives upstairs and is eighty-one and a widower, said I may dig the yard behind the house. He watched me from his window the first day like I was digging for oil.

Now I have twenty pepper plants, for ajvar. Eight tomato plants. Beans climbing up strings on the fence, the way my father did it. Onions, parsley, and one rose bush, dark red, for my mother, which I will describe to her on the phone because she cannot see it.

I am an engineer, so of course I made a system. The water from the roof gutter goes into a barrel, and from the barrel a hose goes along the rows with small holes I made with a hot nail. Mr. Kraus came down to inspect it. He said, "Well, I'll be." I asked Selma what this means. She said it means he is impressed but he is from Missouri.

When I kneel in the dirt in the morning before the heat, and I pull a leaf from the tomato and smell my fingers, I am nine years old in my father's orchard. It lasts only one second. I go out every morning for that second.

Emir says Mark McGwire hit his five hundredth home run on Thursday. Emir now follows baseball. He says it is good for business; the passengers talk about it. I think he likes it.

Tuesday, 27 July 1999

My mother called on Sunday. She never calls; from there it is too expensive, so I call her. When the phone rang at six in the morning and it was her voice, my heart stopped.

It was not the news. It was news about the news. A woman from the office in Tuzla that works on the missing came to the meeting of the women's association and said that they are working on remains found near the villages around ours, and that some families will be called "maybe in the autumn" to look at things: clothes, a watch, a belt, a key. They do not know yet whose. My mother wanted me to know, she said, "so you will be ready."

Ready. How do you get ready? I told her I am ready.

These are the things my mother described to them in 1996, and I know them like a prayer. Nermin had our father's watch, a Russian watch with a red second hand. He had a gray sweater with a brown stripe that our mother knitted for him. I think about the sweater more than anything. I think of it in the forest, in July, too warm, and him not taking it off, because she made it.

Every time the telephone rings early now, I think, this is it. It is never it. It is the factory, or a wrong number, or a man who wants to sell me long distance. I am very polite to the man who wants to sell me long distance. He does not know that for one second he was my brother.

Sunday, 11 July 1999

Four years today.

This morning I made coffee in the big džezva, for four: Emir, me, Selma, and one more. I poured the fourth fildžan and put it at the empty place at the table, with two sugar cubes on the saucer. Selma came in and saw it and did not ask. She sat down next to it. After a while she said, in Bosnian, very softly, "Za dajdžu," for my uncle. Dajdža is the word for your mother's brother. I did not know she still had that word.

In the evening we went to the mosque. There were many families. Many women I know from the bus stop and the factory and the store, and I did not know, until tonight, that they also are waiting for somebody. We stand together at the bus stop every morning like birds on a wire and we never said. We prayed. Nobody made a speech that I remember. We held hands, the women, in a long line, some of us strangers.

When we came home, the fourth coffee was still on the table, cold. Emir drank it standing up, all at once, like medicine. Then he washed the cup and put it away himself.

Saturday, 3 July 1999

Summer in St. Louis is like living inside a teapot with the lid on. In the factory it is so hot that the supervisor put two big orange coolers of ice water by the time clock, and they are empty by noon. At night I sit on the porch with a wet towel on my neck and do my English homework on my knees.

My garden is growing faster than my English. The first small peppers are on the plants, green and hard like thumbs.

Three more families from Kosovo came to our neighborhood this month. The agency asked again for help, and again the Bosnian women went, with blankets and pots and coffee. I am the expert now, Drita says, of the first week. It is a strange thing to be the expert of.

Tomorrow is the Fourth of July. Selma goes with her friends to see the fireworks at the Arch. Emir works; holidays are good for taxis. I will watch from the porch with Mr. Kraus, who says he has seen seventy-some Fourths and this will be one more. He brings the beer and I bring the coffee. Neither of us drinks what the other one brings.