Long-Distance Love at Nine O'Clock

For three years, every evening at nine, I propped my phone against the sugar jar and waited for Mirza to pick up. Nine o'clock in Stuttgart is the same as nine o'clock in Bihać, and that was the only way in which the distance worked in our favor. I knew him from the waist up, with sawdust in his hair and a workshop behind him that ended where the screen ended. I knew which nail his saw hung on and that the calendar on the wall came from a tile showroom in Cazin. I did not know what was to the left of the door.

We met one summer, when he delivered a new cherrywood kitchen table to my mother. He carried it in by himself, and while my mother made him coffee, he ran his palm over the top as if checking whether it was still warm. That evening we sat near Kostela with our feet in the Una, which even in August was so cold it hurt. He told me he did not believe in long-distance love, that it was like ordering furniture from a picture. Two days after I went back to Germany, he called for the first time.

Our conversations had their own order. First he would show me what he had worked on that day: a walnut board he had just planed, the corner of a sideboard, hinges for the doors of an old house in Ripač. He would hold the wood up to the camera as if I could smell it. I showed him the kitchenette on the ward, the coffee machine that swallowed coins, the window facing the Neckar, and Mrs. Kessler from room twelve, who knitted socks for her grandchildren and called me Nurse Ida. Sometimes I fell asleep in the middle of a sentence, and he would not hang up. I would wake at three in the morning, and the screen would show the ceiling of his room.

Long-distance love, I came to understand, is a love of edges. I knew his voice and his hands, but I did not know how he walked when he thought nobody was watching. He did not know the smell of disinfectant that stayed in my hair, or the S-Bahn train at five twelve, full of people sleeping on their feet. Twice a year I came home, for Bajram and in the summer, for two weeks each time. We met in town and by the river, never in the workshop, because he said it was too much of a mess for guests. Every time we were as shy as strangers on the first day, and by the time we had gotten used to each other, it was time to go back.

In September the head of the ward, Dr. Hollweg, called me into his office. The head nurse, Ulrike, was retiring, and he wanted me to take her place. A permanent contract, a third more pay, and an apartment with a balcony in Bad Cannstatt that the clinic rents to its staff. He gave me until the first of October. My colleague Teodora, a Romanian woman who had arrived the same year I did, said I was crazy if I thought about it for even a moment. On the phone my mother only sighed: stay, daughter, while they want you.

I told Mirza that same evening. He was sanding something out of frame, and for a long time there was only the whisper of paper on wood. Then he said it was lovely and that he congratulated me, in the voice you use to congratulate a neighbor on a new car. I asked him what he really thought. He put down the sandpaper and looked straight into the camera, which he never did, because he always looked at me on his screen, a little lower down. "I could come," he said. "They need carpenters there. Ćamil from Cazin has been working at a shop in Esslingen for two years."

I had imagined so many times that he would say it, and now that he had, I felt something cold, the way you do in the middle of a shift when you realize you forgot to check an IV drip. I asked him about the workshop, about his mother. He said a workshop was not a home and that his mother had a sister across the street. Then, a little embarrassed, he pulled a thin book with a yellow cover out from under the table. Since spring, he admitted, he had been going to German lessons on Tuesdays with a teacher in town, and he had not wanted to tell me until he passed. He read to me from the first page, slowly and carefully: "Ich heiße Mirza. Ich bin Tischler."

As he put the book back, his elbow caught the box of screws the phone was leaning against. The phone fell onto the workbench, slid against a can of glue, and stayed leaning on it, turned the other way. For the first time in three years I saw the rest of his workshop, at a slant. I saw a window facing the Una that I had not known existed. I saw a half-finished walnut table, long and wide, for six people. And I saw cardboard boxes along the wall, tools wrapped in newspaper, and a sheet of paper taped to the band saw, with words written in marker: for sale, cheap. Mirza quickly picked up the phone, and again I had him only from the waist up.

That night I could not sleep. I put a jacket on over my pajamas and went down to the Neckar. I imagined him in Esslingen, in a big hall under neon light, assembling the same particleboard kitchen units from someone else's drawings and coming home in the evening to the apartment with the balcony that I had not even moved into yet. I imagined asking him how his day had been, and him saying nothing, because he had nothing to show. And then I imagined myself in that apartment ten years from now, with a third more pay, and I could see nothing but the ceiling.

The next day I went to Dr. Hollweg and said I could not accept. He thought it was about money and started working out figures on a sheet of paper. I told him it was about a table. He looked at me over his glasses, shrugged, and said the door would stay open for me for a year. That same evening I wrote to Senka, who had finished nursing school with me and now worked on the internal medicine ward at the cantonal hospital. She answered within five minutes: they needed nurses, the pay was a third of mine, and the shifts were worse than I thought. And come, she wrote, there are hardly any of us left here.

I told Mirza nothing. For the first time in three years I lied to him and said I had signed. He looked at me for a few seconds, then laughed and said that in that case he would keep studying. Every evening I listened to him read me sentences about the weather and about traveling by train, and he thought I was laughing at his accent. I asked him for only one thing, not to sell anything until I came home in December. He promised and did not ask why. The sheet on the band saw was no longer in view, but I did not know whether he had taken it down or only turned the camera.

I handed in my notice and worked until the end of November. Teodora was angry for two weeks, and then she helped me pack the apartment into six boxes. On my last day Mrs. Kessler gave me a pair of gray socks and said they were for a man, because my feet were not that big, and somebody would surely wear them. The bus left at seven in the evening, crossed Austria, Slovenia and Croatia while I slept against the window, and at noon entered Bosnia at Izačić, where a customs officer went through my boxes and asked whether I was coming back for good.

I let my mother know only from the border and forbade her to tell anyone. Bihać was foggy, and under the bridge the Una was green and loud, as it always is after rain in the mountains. I left the boxes at my mother's, drank coffee at that same cherrywood table, and waited for it to get dark. At half past eight I went out. I walked toward Harmani along the river, and on the way I realized I did not know the way to his workshop, because I had only ever seen it from the inside. I asked a man outside a shop. He knew at once.

The workshop door was ajar, an old sevdalinka was playing on the radio, and it smelled of walnut, the smell I had been watching for three years. The boxes were still standing along the wall. Mirza had his back to the door and was sanding the long table, the one for six. He did not hear me. I watched how he moved when he thought nobody was watching: a little stooped, a pencil behind his ear, humming along with the radio and getting the words wrong. Then he looked at the clock, wiped his hands on his trousers, took out his phone, and leaned it against the box of screws. It was nine.

The phone rang in my coat pocket. Mirza turned at the sound. I took out the phone and answered, and for a while we stood like that, he by the table, I in the doorway, looking at each other across two screens and across a workshop full of sawdust. "I lied to you," I said into the phone. "I didn't sign." I heard him twice, once from the phone and once from across the room, when he said: "I can see that." He did not move, as if he were afraid I would step out of the frame if he took a single step.

I walked over to the table and ran my palm across the top, the way he used to do on the screen. It was warm from the sanding. Later I gave him Mrs. Kessler's socks, and they fit him just right. The last thing I remember from that evening, before he turned off the radio and took the paper off the band saw, is our two phones on the workbench, facing the ceiling. Neither of us ended the call. For a long time they went on showing each other the same ceiling.