Sunday, 20 June 1999

Today is Father's Day. Selma gave Emir a card and a necktie with small yellow taxis on it. He will wear it. I know him. He will wear it to weddings and to the mosque and he will explain it to everybody.

On the television all week: the people of Kosovo going home. The NATO soldiers went in last Saturday, and already the families are on the roads with their tractors and wagons, going back, before anybody tells them it is safe. Nobody can stop them. I understand this so well that my chest hurts.

Emir watched for a long time, and then he said, very quietly, "They are going home." Only this. He did not say the rest, and I did not say it either. We cannot. Our town is on the other side of a line on the map now, and our house has another family in it. In 1996 Emir's cousin went to look, and a woman he did not know opened the door, and closed it.

I am happy for them. I want to write it clearly, so nobody thinks I am not. A people who were pushed out are going back. It is what should happen. It should happen to everybody.

This morning I made the coffee and brought it to Emir on the tray, with the sugar cubes and the rahat lokum and a glass of water, the way you serve a guest. He said, "What is the occasion?" I said, "You."

Thursday, 3 June 1999

Tonight Selma finished the eighth grade. There was a ceremony in the gymnasium with balloons in the colors of the school and a man playing the piano too fast. Every child walked across and took a paper and shook a hand. Selma wore a blue dress she chose herself, at the mall, with her own money from babysitting, and she walked across like she was born on that floor.

After, one of her teachers found me and said, "Selma is a joy. She's so American already!" She meant it as a compliment. I said thank you. It is a compliment. I think it is a compliment.

In the car Emir asked Selma something in Bosnian, and she answered in English, and neither of them noticed. I noticed.

Also: I finished Level 4. In September begins the last level, Advanced Conversation. Mrs. Oberle says my journal is her favorite homework in the school. She is very kind. She also says I use too many commas. In Bosnian we are generous with commas, as with everything.

Sunday, 30 May 1999

On Wednesday a family from Kosovo moved into the apartment across the street. The agency, the same agency that met us at the airport in 1997, asked some of the Bosnian families to help them the first week, because we know what is the first week.

The father is Agim, the mother is Drita, and there are two small boys and a grandmother who speaks very little and watches everything. They came from the camps in Macedonia, and then to a military base in New Jersey, and then here, all in a few weeks. The boys have new sneakers that light up when they walk. They cannot stop looking at their feet.

Agim speaks some of our language, from the army in the old Yugoslavia. Drita speaks only Albanian. So Drita and I spoke with our hands, and with coffee. I brought my second džezva, the small one, and a bag of coffee, and I made coffee in her new kitchen on the American stove. When the foam came up, she started to cry, and then I started to cry, and the grandmother watched us and said one sentence in Albanian. Agim translated, embarrassed: "She says, too much water."

I have not laughed like that for a long time. The grandmother was right. I was nervous.

Sunday, 25 April 1999

Every night the news shows the border between Kosovo and Macedonia: people in a field of mud, waiting in the rain with plastic bags. Old women sitting on their bags. Children asleep on the ground under a sheet of plastic.

I cannot stop watching, and I cannot watch. Selma goes to her room and plays her music very loud, Britney Spears, the same song again and again, and I understand. I do not tell her to turn it down.

Because I know that field. Not this one. Ours was a road, in the spring of 1992, and we had one bag each, and in my bag were Selma's winter coat and my diploma and the džezva. And I know the other place, the airfield in Tuzla in July 1995, where the buses brought the women from Srebrenica. I found my mother there, sitting on the ground with her scarf over her face, and she looked up at me and said, before hello, "Is Nermin here?"

It all comes back now. It is like when you move a heavy cupboard and find the dust of years under it, all at once. I did not know it was all still there. Of course it is still there.

Thursday, 1 April 1999

One week of the bombing. My feelings are not simple, and I will try to write them in English, which makes them simpler than they are.

First: something in me is glad that this time the big countries did something. In 1995 the world watched. There were soldiers of the United Nations in Srebrenica, and it happened anyway. So when I see the airplanes on the television, I feel something hard and glad.

Second: I am ashamed to feel glad about bombs. I lived three years in Tuzla with shells falling. I know what a bomb is from underneath.

Third: I am afraid for the Albanian people, because now they are being pushed out faster, all at once, whole towns in a day, and I know what that is too.

Emir watches CNN until four in the morning when he is not driving. He does not talk. He smokes on the porch. He stopped smoking in 1996.

Wednesday, 24 March 1999

Tonight NATO began to bomb Yugoslavia, because of Kosovo. Emir called me from the taxi and said, turn on the television. We watched without talking. Selma came and sat between us on the sofa, which she has not done since she was ten years old.

Sunday, 14 March 1999

A new word from the television: "closure." On the afternoon talk shows everybody needs closure. A woman's husband left her; she needs closure. A man's dog died; closure.

I asked Mrs. Oberle what it means exactly. She said it means an ending that lets you go on with your life. Then she looked at me and was sorry she said it. I could see.

For the families of Srebrenica there is no closure, because there is no ending. There is only a door that is open a little, always, and a cold wind comes through it, and you cannot close it, because what if he is on the other side.

I do not blame the talk shows. It is a good word. I only think it is a word for people who have the body.

Sunday, 14 February 1999

Valentine's Day. We did not have this in Bosnia. On Friday Selma came home with a card from a boy in her class, a small card with a cartoon dog, signed only with his first name. She threw it on the kitchen table like a bus ticket, like it was nothing. Later I saw it in her room, pushed into the frame of the mirror. I did not say anything. I am learning.

Emir and I don't need Valentine. This morning he came home at four o'clock like always, and I was at the stove, and he took the džezva out of my hand and said, "Sit. Today I make it." He put the sugar inside the pot, like the Turks do, and there was no foam at all. It was terrible coffee. I drank every drop.

Sunday, 24 January 1999

New year, new name. My journal is not "Amra's English Journal" anymore. Now it is "Bosnian Coffee," because Mrs. Oberle says I write about coffee in every entry, even the ones about something else, so I should admit it.

Selma chose the colors. She said the old page was "so boring, Mama, it's white." Now it is the color of coffee with milk, which I never drink, but she says it is pretty, and she is fourteen since November, so she is the expert of pretty.

I read my first entries from last February. So many mistakes! "I live in St. Louis since October." Selma says it must be "I have lived." I did not correct them. Let them stay. That was me in February 1998, and she was trying.

Something I did not expect: people read this, not only my teacher. A woman in Germany who was a nurse in Tuzla during the war wrote to me. A Bosnian man in Chicago wrote to ask if I knew his cousin (I did not; I asked everybody at the store). A girl in Texas who must write a report about Bosnia for school asked me what we eat. I answered all of them. I told the girl: coffee first. Then everything else.

It snowed all week. Emir says St. Louis drivers in snow are like chickens in a kitchen. He had three passengers who wanted to pay him to drive them to work and then stay and drive them home, because they were afraid of the ice. He took them. Then he came home and slept eleven hours, and I let him.