The Younger Sister Carries the Bags

I was the one who carried the bags. In our family this is not said out loud, but everyone knows it: when something is breaking, someone has to carry the bags, and with us it was always the younger sister. That week in August I carried them from Ljubuški to Mostar and back every day, on a bus that stops at every café. In them were clean pajamas, my mother's burek, pomegranate juice, and newspapers, which my brother did not read but held on his lap so he would have somewhere to look when someone came in.

The fire started on the hill above Vitina, at noon, when the bora wind had been drying out the grass for three days. Hasan had been a volunteer firefighter since he was eighteen. That night, when the wind turned, he stayed last on the line so that people from two villages could get their livestock out, and the fire caught him on his arms and back. They brought him to Mostar before dawn. By morning every news site in Herzegovina had written about him, and by noon half of Ljubuški was standing in the hospital corridor: firefighters, the mayor, two television crews, and neighbors who would not otherwise have greeted Hasan at the market.

My mother and I got there first. His wife did not come. Dželila was from Vitina, from the Pintorović house, the youngest of six, and raised so that until her wedding she spoke only when someone asked her something. She had been with Hasan for nine years, they had three children, and in those nine years I had heard her laugh perhaps five times, and always behind a door. When she heard that cameras and half the town were standing in the corridor, she sat down on a chair in the kitchen and did not get up.

On the second day her brother came. Pintorović, whom everyone had called Beg since he was little, because that was how he walked and how he spent, sat down at our kitchen table, drank a coffee, and told Dželila that a woman from their house does not run in front of cameras through a men's hospital ward for all of Herzegovina to see. Let Hasan send for her, he said, when he was ready to receive his wife properly. Dželila nodded. I think it was a relief to her. Her brother had forbidden her the very thing she was afraid of anyway.

Hasan lay in a room with two other firefighters, his arms bandaged to the elbows. Every time the door opened he would lift his head, and then he would lower it. On the third day he asked me, without looking at me: "And her?" I said she was with the children, that the little one had a fever. That was the truth, the little one had had a fever for one afternoon. Hasan said "fine" and looked at the newspaper he could not turn the pages of.

That evening, when visiting hours were already over, Dželila came after all. Alone, on the last bus, with a plastic bag holding his pillow from home. I was leaving the room to get water and ran into her at the door of the ward. She was pale and her chin was trembling. To this day I do not know why I did what I did. Maybe because of the three days in which I had carried the bags while she sat in the kitchen. I told her Hasan was asleep, that he should not be woken, and that she should come tomorrow, with our mother, as was proper. I took the pillow out of her hand. She left without a word. Hasan was not asleep.

In the morning Hasan dictated a message to me, because he could not hold a phone. It was short. She should not wait for him, not at the hospital and not at home, she should go back to her brother since her brother mattered more to her, and the children would stay with him. I asked him if he was sure. He said he had watched the door for three days and he was sure. I put the pillow from home under his head and said only: "I brought you your pillow." I did not say who had brought it. I do not know why I did that either.

Ten days later the papers came from the lawyer, and the day after them came Beg, in a black SUV, with two cousins, to collect her things. He said the children would stay for now, until it was settled in court, and he said it looking at Hasan's picture on the wall, not at us. Dželila packed slowly. My mother cried in the kitchen, loudly, so it could be heard. When everything was in the SUV, Dželila asked her brother for five minutes and went to the children. The older boy was eight and pretended not to understand. The younger one understood and hid behind the wardrobe. The little girl was asleep in the wooden cradle that Hasan's grandfather had made for him.

Hasan came home from the hospital at the end of September. His hands had healed, red and tight, but they worked. He did not talk about Dželila. When someone in the café mentioned the Pintorović family, he would get up and pay. Once my mother tried to say that perhaps he ought to call, if only for the children's sake. Hasan answered that in this house nobody would beg anybody, and that he had learned that from her. My mother fell silent, because it was the truth.

Beg did not even wait for the papers to dry. In December he married his sister off to a judge from Mostar, a widower of fifty, with a big house and two grown children in Vienna. People said Dželila had said neither yes nor no, but had answered everything the same way: "As my brother says." She asked for only two things. That the wedding party from Vitina should not drive through Ljubuški but go by way of Grude, even if it was half an hour longer. And a long, thick veil, so she would see nothing on the left side of the road. She got the veil. Beg said the Pintorović family went around nobody and that the wedding party would take the main road.

The wedding party drove past our house on Saturday, around noon, with horns blaring and scarves tied to the mirrors. My mother told the children to stay in their room. The children did not stay. When they recognized Beg's SUV and the white car behind it, they ran out to the gate in their slippers, all three of them, the little one in her older brother's arms. They called to her. The white car stopped in the middle of the road, and the whole line stopped behind it, and someone in the last car honked angrily, then stopped.

Dželila got out in her white dress, with the veil lowered to her chin. She did not lift it. From her handbag she took out three small boxes, as if she had known, and I think she had. To the older boy she gave a watch, to the younger one the kind of phone he had been asking for all summer, and to the little girl a silver bracelet with her name on it. She whispered something in the older boy's ear. To this day he will not tell me what. I was standing at the window upstairs, next to my brother.

Hasan was holding the curtain with his red, tight hand. He saw everything: the veil, the boxes, the little girl reaching her arms toward the white dress. I could have said one sentence then. That she had come that evening. That the pillow under his head had been brought by her, alone, on the last bus. My mouth was already open. Hasan said, without turning around: "Let the children come inside." And my mother went out to the gate and brought them in.

Dželila got back into the car. The line started moving, and the horns sounded again, slowly, as if they too were ashamed. Hasan held the curtain until the last car had disappeared around the bend toward Mostar, and then he let it go. The cloth swayed and came to rest. I never told him. To this day I am the one who carries the bags.