Dear Dževad, I am writing you a letter, on paper, the way you like when something has to be serious. Dženita sends her greetings. I am sitting on her balcony and below me are the roofs of the old town, orange and wet from yesterday's rain. I am writing from here because at home I never had enough quiet to finish a sentence.
First, to put your mind at ease: I am not leaving you. You have done nothing terrible to me. You have not even looked at me badly in twenty-six years. If anyone asks, say I am at my sister's for my knee and the sea, and it will be true, because my knee has been better since the third day.
But here is what I understood the day before yesterday, at the market. The woman selling figs asked me my name, to write it on the receipt, and I stopped. I truly stopped, Dževad. I almost said: Dževad's. That is what they have called me in Zenica for so many years that I forgot how it sounds when it is said without you.
Look at what you all call me. The neighbors say: Dževad's wife. The children say: Mom. Your mother used to say: that one of yours. You say: woman, is lunch ready, woman, where are my glasses. None of those names is ugly. But not one of them is mine. Mine is Džana. My mother gave it to me in Travnik, in the summer when the lindens bloomed, and I was happy with it until the day I stopped hearing it.
Do not think I blame you. I also called my house by your name. Once I said "ours" about everything I earned, and forgot what had been mine. The days went by like trains that do not stop at our station, and I stood on the platform with a frying pan in my hand and waved.
I have been here seven days and nobody has asked me to carry, fix or iron anything. I walk up to the fortress alone, buy myself coffee and hurry nowhere. Two days ago I sat down and wrote a list: songs I love, books I have not read, places I have not been. The list is long. Not one item on it contains the word "lunch."
I remember that at the beginning, that first winter, you left me a note on the refrigerator. It said only: Džana, buy bread. Three words, and I kept it for months. I did not know I would one day envy that woman on the refrigerator, who still had a name and someone who called her by it, even when bread needed buying. Dženita laughs when I tell her this and says a name is like an umbrella: you do not notice it until you need it.
I will come back on Saturday, by bus to Sarajevo, then on to Zenica. I will hope you meet me at the bus station, but not because you have to. Only to see whether you will say good afternoon to me and whether that will be enough for me. And if it is hard for you to find the words, learn them slowly. I learned from you to keep quiet for twenty-six years, so I can wait a little longer for you.
Answer me if you wish, at my sister's address. But on the envelope write Džana, with nothing before or after it. If you write only that, I will know everything I need to know, and I will come home.