In Vienna there is a station that no longer exists. They tore it down some fifteen years ago, and in its place today stands a large glass building with escalators. Last night my daughter Esma sent me a photograph from that building, her first day in Vienna, with a suitcase up to her knees and the kind of smile only eighteen-year-olds have. Below it she wrote: "Dad, is this where you studied?" I answered that it was, but that I had never been where she was standing. I had been a little farther off, on the third platform of the South Station, one December evening in two thousand six, and I had not gone back since.
I arrived in Vienna in the autumn of two thousand, with a scholarship from the municipality of Maglaj and one suitcase my mother had spent three days packing. The scholarship came with a condition in small print: once I graduated, I would work five years at the health center in Maglaj or pay back everything down to the last mark. I signed without thinking. I was nineteen, and five years seemed like something standing on the far side of a mountain. I rented a room in Favoriten, from a widow named Gruber, on the second floor of an old building where at night you could hear the trains creaking at the South Station. Mrs. Gruber had a cat, two house rules and a daughter.
The daughter's name was Theresa, but everyone called her Resi. She worked as a gardener in the city parks and came home with soil under her nails and the odd leaf in her hair. The first winter we did not exchange even twenty sentences, all of them on the stairs and all of them about the cat. The second autumn she found me on the balcony studying anatomy and drying laundry at the same time, and without asking she turned my shirts inside out so they would not fade. She sat down next to me and asked what the word I kept muttering meant. I told her it was the Latin name of a bone in the hand. She laughed and said Latin was her job, not mine, because every plant in Vienna has two names, one for people and one for her.
From then on we walked. She took me around the parks the way you take a guest around to meet your relatives: here lives a linden that survived two wars, here a plane tree that sheds its bark every summer the way a snake sheds its skin. I told her about Maglaj, about the Bosna River that carries off half a mountain in March, about the fortress above the old town and about my mother, who rolled out pastry dough so thin you could read a newspaper through it. She learned to say "Maglaj" without a foreign accent, then "hvala," thank you, then "ne znam," I don't know. In my third year, one rainy Sunday, she kissed me in the entrance hall, under the mailboxes, and said she had done it for practical reasons, because it was raining outside.
My mother wrote to me every other week. The phone was expensive, so she wrote by hand, in blue ballpoint on graph paper, with margins full of afterthoughts. She wrote about my father, who had started coughing at night, about the neighbor woman who had bought a washing machine, about how the Bosna had once again carried off a piece of the bank under the bridge. At the end of every letter, after the greetings and before the signature, stood the same sentence, like a seal: "Just don't bring me home a Švabica." She knew nothing about Resi. That was what people in Maglaj called any foreign woman from the north, without malice, the way you say of rain that it is cold.
Once Resi picked up a letter from the table and asked what it said at the bottom. I lied that my mother was asking whether I was eating enough. Slowly she repeated the word "Švabica," like the Latin name of a new plant, and I said it meant something like "darling." From then on she left me notes on the fridge in her funny Bosnian: "Švabica cook soup." "Švabica go to work at six." I knew that each of those slips of paper was one lie I owed her.
The summer before my last year she wanted to come to Maglaj. She bought a map of Bosnia and circled the town in red pencil, then the fortress, then Mount Ozren, only because she liked the name. I told her summer was too hot where I came from, that we were renovating the house, that my mother did not know a single German word. All of it was true and all of it was an excuse. Resi folded the map and put it in the drawer with her gardening gloves. She did not ask again. At the time I thought she had forgiven me. Today I think she had only started counting.
In October of that last year a letter came that was different from all the others. My mother wrote neither about the neighbor nor about the river. My father had fallen in the garden, between two rows of peppers, and spent three days in the hospital in Doboj. He survived, but the doctors forbade him to lift anything heavier than a spoon. "The house has been left without hands," she wrote, "and the health center is expecting you in January. They told me at the municipality that they are holding your place." At the bottom, after the greetings, that sentence was missing this time. As if my mother knew everything and no longer felt any need to warn me.
I received my diploma in the middle of December. Resi came to the graduation in the only dress she owned, a green one, and clapped louder than all the parents in the hall. That evening, in Mrs. Gruber's kitchen, she told me she had spoken with her boss and could get six months of unpaid leave. In Maglaj, she said, there were surely parks that needed someone who knew two names for every plant. She looked at me across the table and waited. I said we would work it out once I got there, that first I had to see my father. She said "dobro," all right. She said it in Bosnian, without a foreign accent, and I had to turn toward the window.
The train to Zagreb left at ten to nine from the third platform of the South Station. It was Monday, the eighteenth of December, and a fine rain was falling that had not turned into snow only because it lacked the strength. Resi carried my second suitcase and a flowerpot wrapped in newspaper. In the pot was a rosemary, a little bush as tall as a palm. She said it was for my mother, that rosemary puts up with frost and with people who forget to water it, and that my mother could keep it in the window until she came and planted it properly.
That was when I told her. I had no sentences ready, though I had been preparing them for weeks. I said my mother was old, my father was ill, that in Maglaj everyone knew everything about everyone and that there she would be a foreigner for the rest of her life, and I the man who had brought home a foreigner. I told her not to come. Not in six months, not later. I said I was sorry, and that was the worst sentence of all, because it was accurate and meant nothing. Resi stood under the big clock on the platform, the pot in her hands, and did not cry. She asked only one thing: "What does Švabica mean?" I told her.
She nodded, the way she nodded when someone in front of her called a tree by the wrong name. She set the pot down on the bench beside me and took the newspaper off the rosemary so it would not suffocate on the train. "Give it to your mother anyway," she said. "The plant is not to blame." Then she turned and walked down the platform toward the exit, neither fast nor slow, in a green jacket that grew darker and darker in the rain. Not once did she look back. I got on the train with the rosemary in my arms, and all the way to Zagreb I held it on my knees, as if it might run away.
My mother put the rosemary in the kitchen window and never asked me where it came from. My father lived eleven more years. From January on I worked at the health center, took the blood pressure of people who had known me since birth, and listened to them call me "doctor" and then add my childhood name. A year later I married Selvira, a teacher from the next street over. Selvira is the best woman I could have found, and I was not even looking for her. I love her. That is true and it is not the whole truth, and Selvira is wise enough never to ask for the rest.
The rosemary is alive. Every autumn I bring it into the house before the first frost, and every April I carry it out onto the terrace, and I do it myself, although Selvira says she has hands too. As a child Esma asked why we did not plant that bush in the garden. I told her it could not stand our winters. I did not tell her that I had written to Vienna only once, three months after I came back, to Mrs. Gruber's address. The letter came back unopened, and on the envelope, under the German postmark, in Resi's small handwriting, stood one word I had taught her myself: hvala, thank you.
Last night, after the photograph, Esma sent one more message. She asked whether there was anyone in Vienna she ought to visit, so she would not be alone on Sundays. I held the phone in my hand for a long time. From the kitchen Selvira asked whether I wanted coffee. I wrote to my daughter that there was no one, that Vienna was hers now, and that she should watch out for the tram tracks, because nobody honks there. Then I got up, filled a glass with water and went into the living room, to the window, where since October the rosemary has been waiting for spring.