The Pine Behind the House in Visoko

I was the one who showed my mother how to block a number. It was in January, over a video call, she in a hospital corridor in Munich, I in our kitchen in Visoko, with the phone propped against the sugar bowl. I thought it was because of the people from the bank who kept calling Omer about the loan for the apartment. "Three dots, top right," I kept telling her, "then block. No, Mother, top right." It took her ten minutes. When she managed it, she thanked me as if I had helped her carry the bags home from the market.

By then Omer had been working in Germany as an electrician for over a year. He had gone to earn money for an apartment, because he wanted to live with Merima on their own, not in the room above our mother's kitchen. Merima came from a house across the river, below Visočica hill, from a family that people in the old town said had no luck. Her father had lost their house at cards, and later his health, and her mother cleaned other people's apartments. Our mother never forgot it. "I have nothing against the girl," she would say. "I have something against the house." Omer would laugh and walk across the bridge. Merima wrote to him every evening, and on Sundays they saw each other on camera, she with the Bosna behind her, he with a bare wall.

In January he fell from scaffolding on a building site outside Munich and broke both forearms. For the first time in her life our mother got on a plane. She stayed with him for five weeks, first in the hospital, then in his rented room, fed him with a spoon and held the phone to his ear, because his fingers did not come out of the casts. She read his messages to him. She was the one who answered them. I learned all of this only in June, in someone else's garden, and back then all I knew was that my brother was getting better and that Mother called from Germany every day and complained about the bread.

Merima wrote every evening. Mother read and deleted. In the third week she wrote to her from Omer's phone that he had met someone and that she should stop writing to him, and then she blocked the number, just the way I had taught her. To Omer she said at first that Merima was not getting in touch. A week later she told him she had heard from a neighbor that Merima was marrying some policeman from Zenica. Omer asked her to call Merima. Mother dialed some number, held the phone to his ear, and he listened to it ringing into nothing.

He came back in April, thin, his arms as narrow and white as a boy's. He sat on the balcony and watched the Bosna, and he asked no one about Merima. I thought she had left him for someone else and I was angry with her, so I did not ask either. In May Mother began to mention Melida, the daughter of her friend from the leather bag shop, a teacher at a kindergarten in Sarajevo. She is calm, Mother would say, from a good family, she commutes every day and is never late. Omer listened, looked at the river and finally said: "It's all the same to me, Mother. Arrange it however you like." The engagement was set for the last Saturday in June.

At Melida's family home the garden was full of relatives. Baklava and ružice stood on the tables, the women sat in the shade under the walnut tree, and the men stood by the grill. Omer wore a suit he had bought in Munich and stood up straight, as if posing for a passport photo. Melida was prettier than I had expected, and shyer, and when he put the ring on her finger she looked at the ground. Mother wept with happiness. Afterward Melida photographed the ring on her hand and, laughing, sent the picture to someone. A little later her phone rang in her hand. She went behind the house to answer it. She came back pale.

She called me into the kitchen, where there was nothing but dishes and silence. "Was your brother ever with someone called Merima?" she asked. "Merima from Visoko, from below Visočica?" I said he was. Melida sat down on a chair. Merima, she said, was her colleague from the kindergarten, the one she had coffee with every morning before the children arrived. Since spring she had been living in Sarajevo, because she could not bear to look at the bridge he used to cross. All winter Merima had cried over a young man in Germany who had written to her that he had met someone else and then blocked her, and she had never said what his name was. Now she had seen the photo from the engagement. "She isn't married," said Melida. "She never has been. She wants to talk to him."

Melida went out into the garden and held out her phone to Omer, in front of everyone. I watched him listen. He said almost nothing. Once he said: "I didn't write that." Then again: "My arms were in casts." Then he lowered the phone and looked at Mother, across the table, across the baklava and the ružice, and Mother did not look away. "I wrote it," she said, loudly, so that everyone would hear. "For your own good. Nothing good ever came out of that house." Omer turned to me. "Did you know?" I told him the only thing that was true. That I was the one who had shown her how to block a number.

Melida took off the ring and set it down on the tray, between two ružice. "Go," she told Omer quietly. "I will explain to my family." Nobody stopped him. Omer went out to the street, and I followed him, because I did not want him to drive alone. We drove to Sarajevo in silence, along the Bosna, past Ilijaš and Semizovac, all the way to the apartment blocks of Alipašino Polje, where Merima rented an apartment with two other girls. It was almost midnight. She came down in slippers and a tracksuit, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, and stopped under the streetlight without coming any closer to him.

I stayed in the car, but the window was down and I heard enough. Merima did not cry. She said that for a week she had not believed that message. That she had written to him on every app there is, that she had called from a friend's phone and our mother had answered and said that Omer did not want to talk. Only then had she stopped. "In one week you believed I had gotten married," she said. "I waited six months for you to come across the bridge, to my mother's, and ask. You didn't come. You came with a ring for someone else." Omer said he would put everything right. Merima shook her head.

"Your mother wrote in your place once," she said. "And you let her get you engaged as well. I am not going to spend my whole life checking who is writing to me." She said that in September she was leaving for Graz, for a kindergarten she had signed a contract with back in March, when she thought there was nothing left to wait for in Visoko. She turned and went into the building. Omer stood under the streetlight until the light on the third floor went out. We got home at two. Mother was sitting in the dark kitchen, and none of us switched on the light.

Merima left in September. Omer never married. He works as an electrician in Visoko, fixes other people's wiring and seldom speaks, and with Mother he talks only about bills. That autumn he planted a young pine behind the house, without explaining why to anyone. Last year Melida showed me a photo from Merima's balcony in Graz: a red rose in a plastic pot, and behind it a foreign river. I did not tell Omer. Every morning Mother waters the pine, though pines do not need water, and Omer watches her from the balcony and says nothing to her.