Twenty-Three Envelopes

The box was a shoebox, size forty-three, and it stood behind rolls of old sketches, where Ranko keeps the things he does not throw away and does not look at either. Iskra was looking for New Year ornaments. Nađa was shouting from downstairs that a tree without ornaments looked as if it had been stolen from the forest, and Ranko had promised that this time the stand would stay upright. Iskra lifted the lid because she thought the box held the string lights. Inside were envelopes, held together with a canning jar rubber band, with a German address written in blue ink. The handwriting was hers.

She sat down on the floor among the boxes and counted them. Twenty-three. On each one a stamp from Banja Luka, a post office mark, a date. Not one had been opened. Some were stiff from damp, and on one the ink had run so that Munich looked like a stain. She remembered every one. She had written them at the kitchen table in a rented room in Starčevica, on Sunday evenings, with the window facing a chestnut tree, and taken them to the post office on Monday mornings before class.

She had been twenty-four then and studying German. In the afternoons she looked after six-year-old Nađa, the daughter of the architect Ranko Vidović, whose wife had been ill for two years and rarely left her room upstairs. Ranko came home late, sat with Iskra in the kitchen and told her about the buildings he would never build. He laughed beautifully and listened even more beautifully. One evening in February, in the hallway, while she was putting on her coat, he kissed her. A week later he took his wife and Nađa to Munich for treatment, and at the door he told her to write to him. "Letters, not messages," he said. "Letters can be kept."

She wrote to him every Sunday. About the Vrbas, which overflowed its banks that spring. About Nađa's drawings she had forgotten to take down from the fridge. About herself, more than she had ever told anyone. No answer came. In the fourth month she wrote that she would not write anymore, and then she wrote three more letters. In June she heard from a neighbor that Ranko's wife had died in Munich. She wrote him a condolence letter, short and careful, and that was the last. Afterward she spent two years at a call center, speaking German with people from Graz who complained about their internet, and she stopped turning around for every gray coat on Gospodska Street.

Then her aunt Danka died in Vienna, after forty years of cleaning other people's apartments in Ottakring, and left Iskra her own, a small one on the fourth floor with no elevator. Iskra sold it. In Banja Luka such things are known before you know them yourself. Three months later Ranko rang her doorbell, thinner, holding Nađa by the hand. He said he had not been able to write, that grief had shut him up completely, but that he had thought of her every day. They married that autumn. Her aunt's money paid off the debt on Ranko's firm and covered a new roof for the house on the bank of the Vrbas. Only once, on their first anniversary, in a restaurant above the Vrbas, did she ask him, half joking, what he had thought while reading her letters. Ranko put down his fork, looked at her the way only he could, and said he knew some of them by heart. Then he changed the subject, and she was grateful to him, because she thought it still hurt him.

Nine years had passed since then. Nađa is seventeen, she calls her Iskra, not mom, but when things are hard she comes to her, not to her father. When Nađa got pneumonia in eighth grade, Iskra slept for three nights on a chair at the hospital in Paprikovac, while Ranko brought flowers and jokes, and everyone on the ward said what a wonderful father he was. Everyone loves Ranko. Waiters bring him coffee before he orders it, neighbors invite him over for rakija, clients forgive him his deadlines. Iskra pays the bills. Envelopes from the bank, from the tax office and from the doctor lie for a week on the chest of drawers in the hall until she opens them. For years she laughed about it. She told her friends she was married to a man who was afraid of paper.

Now, sitting on the attic floor, she understood that he had not been afraid only of paper. He had not lost the letters. He did not know them by heart. He had kept them for more than ten years, behind the sketches, in a shoebox, and had never opened a single one. She tried to imagine why. Maybe he had never loved her. Maybe he had loved her and was afraid of what he would read in them. Maybe he had come to her door when he heard about her aunt's apartment. Maybe all three at once. She knew she would never find out, because if she asked him, he would give her a beautiful answer, and she would believe half of it.

She opened the first envelope. The paper smelled of a cellar. The girl who had filled it wrote fast, with a lot of commas, about the chestnut tree outside the window and how Nađa had learned to whistle. At the bottom was a sentence Iskra had forgotten she had ever written: that he did not have to answer her, that she loved him and that this was hers, not his, and that no one could take it from her, not even he. Iskra looked at that sentence for a long time. She did not remember ever being so wise. She had only been stubborn, she thought.

She thought about leaving. She had her own salary at the school, she could rent an apartment in Borik, Nađa was almost grown. She imagined telling him, in the kitchen, with the box on the table. She could see his face: he would go pale, his eyes would fill, he would say something well put together, about grief and shame, and he would lay his hand on hers. She knew exactly how long it would take before she laughed along with him. She also knew that after that she would never again open a single envelope in that house, not from the bank, not from the doctor, and that everything would be left lying on the chest of drawers.

"Iskra!" Ranko was standing at the foot of the ladder. "Are you still alive up there? Nađa says it's the stand's fault, and I say it's the tree's." His voice was light, as always. Iskra put the letter back in its envelope and the envelope in the pocket of her sweater. She bound the others with the rubber band, the way they had been, put the lid back on and pushed the box behind the sketches, in the same place, so that there was no mark in the dust. Then she picked up the box of ornaments and went down.

In the living room the tree was leaning toward the window like a drunken guest. Ranko was lying under it tightening the screws on the stand, and Nađa was holding the top and telling him he did not know what he was doing. They both looked at Iskra as if she were the referee. She set the ornaments down on the couch, knelt beside Ranko, took the wrench from his hand and told Nađa to let go of the top. The tree straightened. Ranko said that was exactly what he had been trying to do all along, and he kissed her hand, as if she had helped him win. Nađa laughed. Iskra got up and began taking the glass balls out of their paper, one by one, and hanging them where it showed least that the branches were thin.

That night, when everyone was asleep, she sat in the kitchen and read that sentence once more. Then she folded the letter in two and put it in her own drawer, under her passport, where Ranko never looks. She did not touch the box in the attic again. In the morning an envelope from the electric company lay on the chest of drawers in the hall, with Ranko's name on it, unopened. Iskra opened it, as always, and paid the bill before breakfast.