The parcel came back on a Tuesday. Over my address, over the German letters I had carefully copied for seven years, a yellow sticker had been pasted: Empfänger unbekannt. Recipient unknown. That much German I knew. Inside, everything was as I had packed it: dried meat wrapped in newspaper, a jar of ajvar, two pairs of wool socks, and a chocolate bar for the boys in the container, so they would not envy Smail. I put the parcel on the kitchen table and looked at it for a long time, as if it would tell me itself where it had been.
For seven years Smail had gone to Germany for the season. From March to December, on construction sites around Munich, as he said, and he slept in a container with three young men from Kalesija. Every evening at nine he called on video. The light was always bad, a gray wall behind him, and he was always tired. He said it was cold in the container, that the boss was stingy, that they had cut the hourly rate again. In December he would come home, thinner, with presents from Lidl, and sleep until noon for three weeks, and by the middle of January he would already be looking at the calendar the way you look at a clock. He sent six hundred euros a month. With that I paid the electricity, Adis's books in Sarajevo, and whatever my salary as a cook at a kindergarten did not cover. It never occurred to me to ask why after seven years everything was always the same.
That evening I told him about the parcel. He was not even surprised. He said the containers had been moved to another site and that from now on I should send things to a post office box, and he dictated the number. Quickly, as if he knew it by heart. When we had finished, I went into the bedroom and took out of the wardrobe the box from the perfume he had sent me for our twentieth wedding anniversary. I keep all the boxes, Adis laughs at me for it. On the back, under the postmark, was the sender's address: Pasing, a street with a long name, house number fourteen. No container has a house number.
At work I took four days off and said I was going to my sister's in Sanski Most. I bought a ticket for the night bus at an agency by the old bus station, paid for it out of the money for the winter preserves, and told no one anything. In my bag I put what had come back, the dried meat and the ajvar, and the blue sweater I had spent all winter knitting for him, because he had lost the old one, also blue, on some construction site three years before. The bus was full of women my age going to their children and grandchildren. One of them carried a tray of baklava on her knees from Bihać to Salzburg and did not put it down even when she fell asleep.
Munich met me gray and clean, with trams that wait for no one. Twice I got on the wrong train, and twice a kind man put me back on the platform, pointing his finger at my phone. In Pasing I found the street at nine in the morning. House number fourteen was yellow, two stories high, with a garden where pear trees grew and two garden chairs stood. A white van was parked in front of the garage. On the van's door, in big blue letters, it said Mešić Bau GmbH, and under that a Munich phone number. I stood on the sidewalk for a long time reading my own surname on someone else's vehicle.
I rang the bell. A woman of about fifty opened the door, her hair dyed blond, in an apron, and said something in German. Then she took a better look at me, looked at my bag, and her face spread into a smile. "Why, you're Nevresa!" she said in our language, with a Prijedor accent. "The sister! You look just like your picture!" She told me at once which one: Smail had shown her a photo from Adis's graduation night, in which I stand between the two of them in a green dress. I said nothing. She was already hugging me and pulling me inside, saying that her name was Duška and that Smail always said his sister was afraid of traveling and would never come.
She made coffee, the way I make it too, and put in the sugar before she asked me. The living room was bright, with a big window facing the pear trees. By the window stood an armchair, and on the back of the armchair hung a blue sweater. My sweater. The first one, the one he had lost on the construction site. I recognized it by the sleeve, which I had gotten slightly wrong back then, so it was shorter than the other. Duška noticed me looking. "That's his armchair," she said. "He sits there in the evenings and watches the news from Bosnia. And he won't let that sweater be washed. He says his late mother knitted it for him." Smail's mother, may she rest in peace, never in her life picked up a knitting needle. I tried to teach her, and she gave up at the first stitch.
She talked for a long time and gladly, the way you talk to someone your dear one has been describing to you for years. They had been together six years. They had started the firm four years ago, and now they had eight workers and more work than they could handle. Smail was a good man, she said, he just worked too much and worried too much. Every month he sent six hundred euros to his sister in Bihać, his widowed sister, so her son could go to university. "I tell him, send more, we have it," she said. "And he says there's no need, that his sister is modest." Then she lowered her voice. "How did your husband die? Smail doesn't like to talk about it." "Suddenly," I said. She showed me pictures on her phone. Lake Garda. A Christmas market. Smail in a white shirt, with my watch on his wrist, the one I bought him for our twentieth anniversary.
Smail was at a construction site in Augsburg and was not due back until evening. Duška was already reaching for her phone to call him. I took her by the hand. "Don't," I said. "I want to surprise him. I have to go back tonight, on the bus, but I'll come again, for New Year's. Don't tell him I was here. Let it be a surprise." Duška laughed, delighted, like a little girl who has been trusted with a secret, and swore she would not breathe a word. I left her the dried meat and the ajvar. I said they were for her. I did not mind. To this day I do not know why I did not tell her the truth. Maybe because she, too, put in the sugar before she asked.
On the bus back I did not sleep. The blue sweater, the new one, lay in my lap from Munich to the border. At Izačić the customs officer asked if I had anything to declare, and I laughed, for the first time since Tuesday, so that the woman with the baklava, who was coming back empty-handed, looked at me with concern. I got home at noon. I bathed, made coffee, put in the sugar, and sat down at the kitchen table, in the same place where the parcel had stood.
At nine the video call rang. The light was bad, a gray wall behind him, and he was tired. He said it was cold in the container, that the boss had been stingy again, and that he was afraid they would cut the hourly rate. He asked if I had sent the parcel to the new number. I looked at that gray wall and only then saw what I had not seen for seven years: the corner of a tool shelf and the edge of a white van. A garage. Seven years of a garage.
"You're cold?" I asked. "Freezing," he said. "Then put on that blue sweater," I said. "You left it on the back of the armchair, by the window that looks out on the pear trees." Nothing moved on the screen. Not him, not the wall, not the edge of the van. Only his lips parted slightly, like a man searching for a word in a language he thought he knew. I hung up before he found it.