The arrivals board showed that the flight from Istanbul was five minutes late, and Ismet took it as a personal insult. He had come to the airport in Butmir two hours early, in the navy blazer he had worn at his daughter's wedding, with a bouquet of white freesias wrapped in cellophane. He had ordered the freesias at a flower shop near Pofalići back on Tuesday, because Senija loves freesias, and in January they are hard to find. He had parked the car he washed that morning, although a fine rain had been falling from Igman all day, and now he stood in front of the glass doors, on the left side, where you could see best.
For four months Senija had been in St. Louis, with their daughter Melika, who had given birth to twins in September and who, as Senija said on the phone, was as lost without her as a child at a fair. Ismet stayed alone in the apartment in Velešići. He learned to turn on the dishwasher, he learned that you hold the phone upright for a video call, and he learned that in an empty apartment you eat lunch with the television on. He crossed off the days in red pencil on the calendar from the pharmacy. He told his sister not to come today. The first evening was theirs.
All her life Senija had been afraid of flying. The first time they flew, twelve years ago, to Melika's graduation, she held his hand from runway to runway, and he pretended he was not afraid. From then on it was his job: at takeoff and landing her hand was in his, and he felt her nails dig into his palm when the plane dropped through a cloud. This time she had flown alone, for the first time, both there and back. On the phone she told him she had not been afraid. He did not believe her.
The plane landed at six twelve. The board said Landed, and Ismet straightened the cellophane on the freesias. The first to come out were businessmen with small suitcases, then a diaspora family with carts full of bags, then students. People around him hugged, cried, took pictures. Twenty minutes passed, then forty. The baggage belt stopped. Senija did not come out.
At the information desk the clerk told him there had been a medical emergency on the flight and that all passengers would come out once the procedure was over. Ismet asked what kind of emergency. She said she was not allowed to say. He asked if it was a woman of sixty, in a beige coat. Next to him a man was saying into his phone that there was an ambulance on the runway. Ismet called Senija's number three times. The phone was switched off. The clerk looked at him the way you look at a man you are not allowed to tell anything, and Ismet sat down on a plastic chair with the freesias in his lap and for the first time in his life thought that he might be left alone.
She came out after an hour and a half, with a suitcase dragging on one wheel. She was pale and calm, with a scarf he did not know, blue, American. Behind her came two police officers and a woman in an airline uniform, who squeezed her shoulder and went back inside. When he hugged her, she hugged him too, firmly but briefly, and he felt that she held her hands as if they were cold. "What happened?" he asked. "I thought it was you." "Nothing happened to me," she said. "A passenger was taken ill. I will tell you at home." She took the freesias, smelled them and said they were lovely. She said it the way you thank a neighbor.
In the car he did the talking. He talked about the rain, about the new traffic light in Stup, about how he had taught himself to bake bread in the machine and how his first loaf came out like a brick. He asked about the twins, about Melika, about their son-in-law, and she answered accurately and briefly, as if at an exam, and watched through the window the trams that went down Zmaja od Bosne lit up and empty. Once she touched his knee, when he stopped at a red light, and he was so happy about it that he forgot to go when it turned green.
In the apartment everything was as she had left it, only cleaner. Her shopping list from September was still on the fridge; he had not let anyone take it down. Ismet had cooked Bosnian pot stew, because she always cooked it when he came back from a job in the field, and he had set the table with the white tablecloth that only comes out for Bajram. Senija sat down, looked at the tablecloth and said he should not have. She ate half a plate. Then she put down her spoon and said she had to tell him now, because she would not be able to sleep until she did.
The man's name was Ibrahim. He was seventy-nine and had spent thirty of those years in Chicago, where he worked in a bakery until his legs gave out. He was going home for the first time, to Sanski Most, to see his brother's grave and the house where he was born. In Istanbul he sat down beside her, in seat 14B, and told her right away that he was afraid of flying and did not know how to fasten his seat belt. For thirty years he had put off this flight, every year for a different reason. She fastened it for him. They talked about the Sana, about the karamanka pear tree that grew behind his house, and about how bread in America cannot be eaten the second day. He showed her a picture of his wife, who had died six years ago. Senija showed him the twins.
Over Croatia he was taken ill. He said something was squeezing him, as if someone had set a stone on his chest. The flight attendants brought oxygen, the captain asked whether there was a doctor among the passengers, but there was no doctor, only a nurse from Zenica, who knelt in the aisle and counted. Ibrahim reached for Senija's hand. She held his hand for twenty minutes, while they descended, while the plane banked over Igman and while he stopped breathing. When the wheels touched the runway, he was no longer breathing. She did not let go of him until the paramedics came. Then she gave a statement to the airport police and called his niece in Sanski Most, whose number was written on a slip of paper in his passport.
Ismet listened and felt something growing in him that he was ashamed of. He felt sorry for the man, of course. But he was also thinking that at six twelve, while he was straightening the cellophane on the freesias, his wife had been holding another man's hand, at landing, when that hand had always been his. That the last thing that man saw in this world was her face. That he had waited four months for that moment, the first look through the glass doors, and she had given it to someone she had known for two hours. "You did not have to stay," he said. "I did," said Senija. "Nobody else knew his name."
Ismet took a freesia out of the vase and broke its stem between his fingers. "Did he say anything to you?" he asked. "At the end." Senija nodded. "What?" She looked at him for a long time across the white tablecloth, and in that look he saw something he had not seen in thirty-eight years: a place he could not enter. "That was his," she said. "I cannot give it to you."
That night she fell asleep at once, turned toward the wall, with her hand under the pillow. Ismet lay awake and looked at that hand. It was the same hand he had held at their wedding, in the maternity ward, at his mother's funeral. Once he reached out and touched her wrist, lightly, so as not to wake her, as if checking whether it was warm. He knew it was foolish. He knew he would be ashamed if anyone knew what he was thinking. He got up, went to the kitchen and sat by the freesias until morning, listening to the first tram pass down below on the main road.
The funeral was the next day, in Sanski Most. Ibrahim's niece Zilha called at eight and said she would be glad if Senija came, because she had been with her uncle when none of them could be. Ismet drove for three hours, through Ključ, through a fog that would not lift. Senija was silent and kept her hands in her lap. Past Ključ they stopped at a gas station and he bought her coffee in a paper cup. She drank it all and said thank you. When they reached Ibrahim's house, where people were gathering, he parked by the fence and said he would wait in the car, because of the heater. Through the windshield he watched his wife walk up to people she had never seen and an older woman in black take her by both hands and not let go. The engine was running. The freesias had stayed at home, on the table, in water that no one had changed.