The bag had been packed since Thursday, and it sat under the bed, behind the box of winter boots, where her father never looked. Every evening Sumejra touched it with her foot, just to make sure it was still there. Inside were two pairs of jeans, the black dress she had bought for her grandfather's funeral and never worn again, a passport issued in March, and a blue folder holding a contract in English. The contract said that Sumejra Mehanović, thirty-one, had been hired to work in the laundry aboard the ship "Stella del Sud," boarding at the port of Split, on Saturday, at eight in the morning.
From the kitchen window she could see the chimneys of the steelworks and, when the air was clear, the forest on Smetovi. When she was little, there had been a meadow behind the houses where the children from the whole street played until their mothers called them in from the balconies. Now that spot held a car wash and a building with glass balconies. Of those children, two were in Germany, one in Sweden, and Sejo from the end of the street lay in the cemetery above the town. Her mother was gone. Six years had passed since she died, and Sumejra still washed the curtains in May, because that was how her mother had done it.
Her father, Osman, had retired from the steelworks after thirty-two years, and since then two things had stayed with him for good: a sore back and a bad day. While her mother was alive, he had shouted at Mehdin, because Mehdin was a boy and, in his view, should have known better. He did not shout at Sumejra, because she was a little girl. Then Mehdin left for Stuttgart, her mother died, and Sumejra was the only one left in the house who could be shouted at. He did not hit her. He hit the table with his fist, and that was enough. Every Saturday she handed him her pay from the market, and he gave some back for groceries, counting the bills twice and saying she would scatter everything the way her mother had.
At the Lipa market, on the embankment along the Bosna, she had worked the register for eight years. The manager, Mrs. Smilja, liked to scold her in front of customers whenever the till was two marks off. Sumejra often thought about what it would be like over there, where nobody would know her. She would be a married woman, as Mirhad said, and she would live in an apartment overlooking a river so wide you could not see the other bank. She would have a kitchen where nobody counted bills.
Mirhad had come into the market in December for cigarettes and batteries and stayed at the register longer than he needed to. He was tanned in the middle of winter, with a cook's hands, crisscrossed with small knife scars. He read the name off her tag and repeated it twice, as if he were learning it by heart. For nine years he had worked in the kitchens of cruise ships, and he came home only between contracts. He told her about the Panama Canal, about the port of Valparaíso where the houses are painted like candy, about a storm off the Azores when four hundred plates were broken in a single night. He said this was his last contract: a friend in Buenos Aires was opening a restaurant and was waiting for him to come be the head chef. She would work one season on the ship, and then they would stay there, together.
Her father found out in January, from a neighbor woman. He sat down at the table, was silent for a long time, and then said, "I know sailors. Every one of them has a girl in every port, and you he would leave in the farthest one." He forbade her to see him. From then on they met at Mirhad's aunt's place in Tetovo, or in the car outside the market. Sumejra knew all along that her father was not entirely wrong when he talked about sailors. She just did not believe he was talking about Mirhad.
Still, her father had not always been like this. When she was fourteen and in bed with pneumonia, he sat beside her for two nights, cooked her an unsalted vegetable soup, and told her about a man from the rolling mill who claimed he could talk to the machines. Once, on an outing to Smetovi, while her mother was still alive, he put on her mother's sunglasses and her headscarf and imitated the woman who read the news on television, until her mother started crying with laughter. Sumejra remembered this on Friday evening, while her father slept in his armchair in front of the television, his glasses resting on his stomach. For the first time it occurred to her that he would need her more than she needed him.
She wrote him a note on a sheet from a notepad and put it under the coffee tin, where he would find it first thing in the morning. She wrote that she was fine and that she would get in touch. Then, from the house next door, through an open window, a sevdalinka her mother had loved began to play. Sumejra stopped in the middle of the kitchen. The same song had been playing the night her mother was dying, at somebody's wedding two streets down, and her father had gone out in his slippers to ask them to stop. In those last days her mother kept repeating one sentence: "Turn off the stove, Sumejra." The stove was off. Sumejra promised her she would look after the house and her father, and her mother nodded and again asked her to turn off the stove. Now, standing in the kitchen, Sumejra felt a sudden fear, as if someone had opened a door a crack behind her: the fear that she would live the same life, all the way to a last sentence that made no sense. She pulled the bag out from under the bed and left, and she put on her jacket only once she was in the street.
Mirhad was waiting for her at the bus station, with two coffees from the machine and a bag of burek. The night bus to Split left at five past ten. They went through Travnik, Bugojno and Kupres, where snow still lay in the fields along the road, even though it was April. Mirhad fell asleep on her shoulder before Bugojno. Sumejra did not sleep. She watched the phone in her lap. Her father did not call. She knew he was asleep and would not call, and yet every half hour she lit up the screen, and its silence weighed on her more than any call could have.
They reached Split at six. The port smelled of diesel and sea, gulls were quarreling around the containers, and the ferry to Supetar was already sounding its horn. The "Stella del Sud" stood at the end of the pier, white and as tall as a twelve-story building. In front of the fence the crew was gathering: Filipinos with big suitcases, a young man from Kakanj whom Mirhad knew and hugged like a brother. Mirhad talked fast, as he always did when he was happy, explaining to her where the cabin was and which shift was best.
The gate was an ordinary one: a wire fence, a barrier, a metal turnstile, and a guard with a tablet on which he looked up names. On the asphalt in front of the turnstile a yellow line had been painted. Mirhad handed over his passport, the guard looked at it and nodded, and Mirhad went through. He turned around on the other side and reached his hand through the wire, smiling. Sumejra stopped at the yellow line and could not cross it. She thought of her father, who would wake up at seven and look for coffee, of the tin, of Mrs. Smilja, who at eight would be looking at the clock. She thought of the stove. She felt sick to her stomach, as if the sea were already under her feet. She prayed to God, without words, to tell her what to do.
"Sumejra!" Mirhad called to her over the fence. "Come on, what are you waiting for?" A line had built up behind her. The ship's horn sounded, deep and long, and the gulls rose off the pier. Sumejra stepped aside and gripped the wire with both hands, so tightly that the knots of the fence cut into her palms. Mirhad came back to the turnstile, but the guard signaled with his hand that he could not go back out: whoever was through was through. "Sumejra, please. Come." She looked at him and wanted to tell him something, one true sentence, and she did not have it. She took one hand off the wire and put it back.
An officer in a white shirt called Mirhad by his last name. He walked backward a few steps, not taking his eyes off her, then turned and went toward the ship with the others, growing smaller among the containers. Sumejra stood by the fence until the line had broken up. The guard came out of his booth and asked her whether she was all right and whether she was waiting for the ferry to Supetar. "No," she said. "I'm waiting for a bus."
The bus to Zenica left at noon. Somewhere past Livno her phone vibrated. Mirhad had sent a photo of the sea from the deck, blue to the edge of the screen, and written underneath: "There is a plane from Lisbon. I'm waiting for you." Sumejra did not answer. She did not delete the message either.
She got home after dark. Her father was sitting in front of the television, in the same armchair. "Where have you been all day?" he asked, without turning around. "At the sea," she said. Her father laughed, then coughed. "At the sea. And did you buy bread?" She had. She had bought it in Split, at the bakery near the station, and carried it in her lap the whole way. The note was still under the coffee tin, folded the way she had left it: her father had spent the whole day waiting for someone to make him coffee. She took it out and put it in her pocket. Then she went to her room and pushed the bag under the bed with her foot, behind the box of winter boots. She did not unpack it.