The Mistress with the Same Pajamas

I bought the pajamas at a quarter past seven, by the Rondo, in a small shop that was only just raising its shutter. Blue, with thin white stripes, cotton, size XL, thirty-nine marks. The saleswoman asked if they were a gift, and I said they were for the hospital, and without a word she put them in a plain bag. At home Mario had three pairs of pajamas, all washed out. I did not want the people on the trauma ward to see him in something that made him look like a man nobody cared for. Twenty-three years of marriage teach you small things like that.

The phone rang at ten past two in the morning. A police officer, very polite, said that my husband had gone off the road near Buna, that he was alive, that he was conscious and that they had taken him up to Bijeli Brijeg. A broken shin, two ribs, a cut above the eyebrow. The Škoda had ended up in the fence of a pomegranate orchard, and the orchard, the officer added, had come off worse than the car. On Wednesday Mario had told me he was driving wine to a hotel in Neum and would sleep there, because he did not like driving at night in the rain. After that I lay awake until morning, tracing in my head the road home from Neum, which really does go through Buna. I traced it again and again, as if someone were going to grade my homework.

Visiting hours on the trauma ward are from three to four. I arrived twenty minutes early, because I had asked a colleague at the pharmacy to cover for me, and I sat down on a plastic chair in the third floor corridor, next to a machine that gives you something like coffee for one mark. Outside it was raining that November Mostar rain that does not fall so much as hang in the air. Apart from me, only one other woman was sitting in the corridor, younger, maybe thirty-five, in a beige coat, with wet strands of hair stuck to her neck. She held a bag on her knees. Out of the bag peeked the sleeve of blue pajamas with thin white stripes.

At first I thought it was a coincidence, because Mostar does not have many shops and they all sell the same things. Then I remembered how every winter, when I bought him checked or plain pajamas, Mario would shake his head. "Only stripes, like my father," he used to say. "Everything else is for pensioners." He said it in front of my mother, in front of our daughter Petra and, as I now understood, in front of this woman. I looked at her bag, then at mine. She looked at mine. We even had the same receipt, folded in half and tucked between the buttons.

A nurse with a folder came out of the room at the end of the corridor and asked who was there for Krešić. I stood up. So did she, then she sat down, then stood up again, as if her legs did not know what they were allowed to do. The nurse looked at the two of us and at what we were holding. She said the patient could have one visitor, fifteen minutes, but he had just fallen asleep after his medication, so we should wait half an hour. Then she went back into the room faster than she had come out.

The woman's name was Monika. She told me that first, before I had asked anything, as if she were introducing herself at a counter. She also said she lived in Blagaj, above the spring, and that Mario had left her place at half past midnight because he supposedly had a meeting in Čitluk in the morning. When he did not text to say he had arrived, she called him ten times, and at two in the morning she called the hospital. She said all of this quietly, and at the end she added that she knew this was not easy for me. I answered that she did not know, but that it was all right, because I had not known anything either until three minutes ago.

Half an hour is a long time on a plastic chair. I bought us two coffees from the machine, because it seemed silly to buy one only for myself. Monika talked, and I listened the way I listen to people at the pharmacy counter who list the medicines they take, checking what goes with what. Mario had told her that we had slept in separate rooms for a long time. He had told her that I knew about her and had agreed to keep quiet until Petra finished her degree in Zagreb. He had also told her that Petra's apartment in Zagreb had eaten up his savings, which was why the two of them could not yet rent a place together in town. Petra lives in a student dorm and works in a bakery on Saturdays.

Then I told her my side, because that seemed fair. That we slept in the same bed, the window on my side, the radio on his. That in September he had told me the firm had cut their pay, so we had canceled our summer vacation in Gradac. That every other Thursday, while he was out on the road in Neum, I went alone to his mother's in Rodoč to wash her windows. Monika listened, holding a coffee she did not drink. When I mentioned the Thursdays, she set the cup down on the floor. She said that on Thursdays he had dinner at her place and always brought wine from the cellar in Čitluk, the kind he said was not for sale.

The nurse came back and said the patient was awake and one person could go in. Monika said I should be the one to go in, because I was the wife, and that she would leave the pajamas with the nurse and go. I told her to give me the bag. She looked at me for a few seconds, as if weighing everything a woman could do with thirty-nine marks' worth of pajamas, and then she handed it to me. I took both bags and went in.

Mario was lying by the window, with his leg in a cast and a bandage above his eyebrow. When he saw me, he smiled the smile he kept for customs officers and traffic police. He started right away: the hotel in Neum, the rain, he could not sleep so he set off early, he did not want to wake me. He spoke smoothly, as if he had been rehearsing the lines all morning. I did not interrupt him. I took out both pairs of pajamas, spread them side by side over the blanket and over the cast, and straightened their sleeves. They were identical down to the last button.

Mario fell silent in the middle of a sentence. He looked at the pajamas, then at the door, then at the pajamas again. Then he asked quietly, "Which ones are yours?" That stayed with me more than anything else. He did not ask how I knew, he did not ask where she was, he did not say he was sorry. He asked which ones were mine, as if the answer would tell him what to do next. I told him there was no difference. I folded one pair in four and put it back in the bag with the receipt, and I left the other on the blanket. I told him those were from Monika and that his things would be waiting for him at his mother's in Rodoč, in wine boxes, when they let him go home.

In the corridor Monika was still standing by the machine, with her hands in her pockets. She asked what he had said. I told her he had asked which ones were mine. She looked at me for a long time, and then she laughed, short and ugly, the way someone laughs at a funeral and is frightened by their own voice. She asked whether I needed a ride into town. I said I did. She drove a small red car that smelled of Mario's cologne, so without a word between us we both rolled down our windows even though it was raining.

She dropped me off at the Rondo, in front of that same shop. The saleswoman recognized me and asked whether the size had been wrong. I said the size had been fine. She gave me back my thirty-nine marks. I crossed the street, sat down in a café by the window and ordered a real coffee, the first that day that had not come from a machine, and I drank it slowly, until the rain over Hum began to lift.