On Thursdays at nine Emsuda gets on the bus at Marijin Dvor with a cloth bag on her knees. In the bag are a bottle of water, a small rake, rubber gloves, a rag for the headstone and something wrapped in a kitchen towel, depending on the week: zeljanica, apple pie, once sarma in a jar. From the stop she walks uphill, between the plots, past the fountain that does not work in winter, to the row where Džafer is buried. She crouches by the stone border, wipes the headstone, recites the Fatiha, and then quietly tells him about her week: how much the electric bill came to, what the doctor said, that Adna called from Hamburg at the wrong time again.
Beside the next grave, on the left, Abdulah sits every Thursday. He brings a folding chair and a thermos of coffee. He drove a tram for thirty-eight years, on the line from Baščaršija to Ilidža, and he still sits upright, hands on his knees, as if waiting for a green light. When he cleans the headstone of his Sejda, he talks to her the way he once talked to passengers: briefly, kindly, with the occasional joke nobody else would understand.
Džafer and Sejda died in the same week, in November of twenty twenty, when burials were quick, with masks and ten people at the funeral. They were buried a day apart, side by side, because that was how the row came up. Emsuda remembers nothing of that day except the mud and a man who held her elbow as she went down the slope. A year later, one Thursday, the same man held her water bucket for her and said: "We have already met, we just did not have the time."
Since then they have greeted each other. In the second year they began to talk, across the low stone edge that divides the two graves, each turned toward their own headstone. He told her how for forty years Sejda corrected him whenever he said ja bi instead of ja bih, and she told him how Džafer whistled while he shaved, always the same song, off-key. In the third year Abdulah began bringing two cups. Emsuda began bringing pie. Neither of them mentioned it. The agreement they never spoke aloud went like this: Thursday, from ten to twelve, here. They never sat together on the bus. Once, on a Tuesday, she saw him at Markale picking out leeks, a shopping bag over his arm, and she turned off among the apple stalls before he noticed her, without knowing why herself. She would not have known what to say to him without headstones between them. On Thursday Abdulah, pouring the coffee, remarked that the leeks had been good on Tuesday and the apples expensive. They said nothing more about it.
In the spring Emsuda planted marigolds on both graves, because Abdulah had once said Sejda loved them, and he had never known what to plant or when. In summer he carried water for both, two buckets from the fountain, and left her bucket full beside Džafer's headstone before she arrived.
In October Adna calls. The baby is due in December, her husband works shifts, and she does not know how she will manage alone. "Come at least for the winter, Mom. The ticket is bought. The second of November, from Sarajevo through Vienna." Emsuda agrees, because what else would she do, and only when she puts the phone down does she remember that tomorrow is Thursday.
She tells him while she pours the coffee, so she does not have to look at him. Abdulah is silent for a long time. He wipes Sejda's headstone with the rag, though it is already clean. Then he asks only: "And who will look after Džafer?" Emsuda had not thought of that. She looks at the rake, at the marigolds the frost has already scorched, at Džafer's name carved in gold letters that have begun to darken. "I will," says Abdulah, before she can say anything. "Every Thursday. If you will let me. I will send you a picture, so you can see it is not neglected." She hands him the rake, as if handing over the keys to her house. On the last Thursday before the trip she dictates to him what is needed: boxwood, not marigolds, because marigolds cannot take the frost, water only if it is not raining, the headstone wiped with a dry rag, never with detergent. Abdulah writes it all down in a small squared notebook, neatly, in columns, like a timetable.
Hamburg is gray and wet, and the sky is so low that every morning Emsuda thinks she will hit her head on it. The fifth-floor apartment is warm, the baby arrives three days early, and Emsuda cooks, washes and carries the child up and down the hallway, from the kitchen to the window that looks out on the Elbe. There is no time to think. But on Thursday at ten fifteen her phone buzzes and she drops everything. The picture shows Džafer's grave, cleaned, with a sprig of boxwood on the edge. Nothing is written. Just a picture.
The next Thursday, again. And the one after. Emsuda begins to notice things that are not on the grave. First a shadow, long, a November shadow, falling across the headstone and wearing a cap. Then the tip of a black shoe in the corner of the picture. Then a thermos left on the edge and two cups, one of them empty. In December the snow falls knee-deep, and under the picture, for the first time, a message arrives: I cleared both graves. Sejda would say I write like a tram driver. Emsuda laughs out loud, alone in the kitchen with the baby on her shoulder, and does not know whom she could explain it to.
One Thursday in January there is no picture. Ten fifteen, ten twenty, ten thirty. Emsuda stands by the window with the baby, who has finally fallen asleep, and stares at her phone like a clock at a station. She thinks of the ice on the path between the plots, of his knees, of the fact that she does not know his surname or where he lives, or whom she would call. At two minutes past eleven the phone buzzes. The grave is cleaned, and under the picture it says: Bus was late. A tram would have been on time. Emsuda sits down on the nearest chair and only then feels that her hands are cold.
Adna notices before she does. One Thursday, while Emsuda holds the phone and looks at the picture a little longer than anyone looks at a grave, Adna sits down across from her. "Who is it that sends you the cemetery every Thursday?" Emsuda tells her. Everything: the water bucket, the marigolds, the two cups. Adna listens, then asks how old he is. Sixty-seven. She asks whether he is a good man. Emsuda says she does not know, she only knows him on Thursdays, from ten to twelve. "Mom," says Adna, "a man has been clearing Dad's grave in the snow for three months and sending you pictures so you will not worry. I do not know what that is, if not a good man." Then she adds, more quietly: "And when that picture comes, you smile the way you used to, when Dad was alive."
Emsuda comes back at the end of March, a week earlier than she said. She does not let Abdulah know. Sarajevo greets her with rain and the smell of coal from the houses around the airport, and for the first time in five months she sleeps through the night. On Thursday morning she gets off the bus with the cloth bag holding a thermos, two cups of real glass wrapped in a towel, and an apple pie. She walks uphill slowly, because Hamburg has made her forget how to climb. Bare is green and wet, and on some graves the first violets have already appeared. From a distance she sees him: he is sitting on his chair with his back to the path, holding his phone out in front of him, framing a shot.
Emsuda stops behind a tall headstone, takes out her own phone and photographs him just as he is: bent over, in a gray jacket and a cap, with the thermos by his foot, above Džafer's grave, where the marigolds have been replaced by boxwood and two white hyacinths. She sends the picture before she can change her mind. She writes nothing. Just a picture.
Twenty meters away Abdulah's phone buzzes. He looks at the screen and keeps looking at it for a long time, longer than anyone looks at a single picture, as if he were reading. Then he slowly lowers the phone to his lap and turns around. Emsuda is already walking toward him, up the last stretch of the path, the cups clinking in her bag. "The coffee is mine today," she says. Abdulah stands and offers her his chair, and he himself sits on an upturned bucket, right against the stone edge between the two graves, where for three years the border had been.