Shards: A Novel

(. . . shards . . .)

(. . . shards . . .)

Ismet Prcic

Black Cat

New York

a paperback original imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 by Ismet Prcic

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 or
[email protected]
.

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

FIRST EDITION

ISBN: 9780802195067

Black Cat

a paperback original imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

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To Henrijeta.

To Melissa.

To Eric.

Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion

be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the

word to the action; with this special observance,

that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing

so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end,

both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere,

the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her feature,

scorn her own image, and the very age and body of

the time his form and pressure.

William Shakespeare

Who broke these mirrors

and tossed them

shard

by shard

among the branches?

. . .

L’Akdhar (the poet) must gather these mirrors

on his palm

and match the pieces together

any way he likes

and preserve

the memory of the branch.

Saadi Youssef,

translated from Arabic by Khaled Mattawa

(. . . an excerpt from
notebook one: the escape
by ismet prci
; . . .)

In wartime, when his country needed him the most—his shooting finger for defending, his body for a shield, his sanity and humanity as a sacrifice for future generations, his blood for fertilization of its soil—in these most pressing times, Mustafa’s special forces combat training lasted twelve days. He ran the obstacle course exactly twenty-four times, he threw fake hand grenades through a truck tire from various distances exactly six times, he practiced marksmanship with an air rifle so that bullets were not wasted, he got covered with blankets and beaten by his peers for talking in his sleep at least once. He did countless push-ups and sit-ups, chin-ups and squats, lunges and curls, mindless repetitions designed not to make him fit but to break him, so that when he was, the drill sergeant could instruct him in the ways of military hierarchy and make him an effective combatant, one who was too scared not to follow orders and who would fucking die when he was told to fucking die.

At some point he was introduced to the real weapons. “This is an Uzi, this is how it works, we don’t have any Uzis,
so forget what you just learned. This is an LAW, this is how it’s used, we only have a limited number of them and they are in the hands of people who already know how to use them, so you’ll never get in contact with them, so forget what you just learned.” And so forth.

The knife guy taught him where to stick the knife for what effect, and he stabbed hanging sacks of sand with people drawn on them. The mine guy showed him how to set up antipersonnel and antivehicle mines and pointed out all their deadly charms. The army doctor took a swig of plum brandy and told him that war was a giant piece of shit and that he, Mustafa, was a chunk of corn in that shit and then warned him not to come to his office again until he had a gut wound so big he could canoe right through it. That was, about, it.

In the end he got a Kalashnikov like everybody else, one clip of ammunition, one hand grenade, and one knife and was sent to the trenches with the regular army for a week, just to sample what war had to offer, to read the manual, as it were, before they decided what special unit he was fit to join.

NOTEBOOK ONE:

THE ESCAPE
*

*
Sent to Eric Carlson at ____ Los Feliz Dr., Thousand Oaks, CA 91362, by Ismet Prci
; at ____ Dwight Street, San Diego, CA 92104, postmarked August 27, 2000.

(. . . cheese . . .)

As the KLM flight finally touched American soil, the white-knuckled Bosnians in the back—people for whom just a few months ago airplanes were but thin lines of cloud, silently crisscrossing the skies above their godforsaken villages—erupted in spontaneous applause. I joined them, despite the queasy feeling in my stomach brought on by the cheese and fruit we’d received somewhere over England. The cheese had been yellow and maybe rancid, and throughout the flight I’d hurried up and down the aisles in search of an unoccupied lavatory, where—kneeling awkwardly in front of one tiny toilet or another—I’d find myself unable to hurl.

These people, my people, the refugees, they were fleetingly happy and stubbornly perplexed. They smiled but also furrowed their brows at the unfathomable patter coming from the speakers. The plane came to a stop at the gate at JFK, but the little belt buckle next to the crossed-out cigarette over our heads remained lit. We sat there. The man in front of me, a youngish fellow with a wife and a daughter and a mouth of cataclysmic teeth stuck his head over the seat and peered at me through glasses.

“Are we there, or are we just getting gas?” he whispered to me in Bosnian, eyes bulging, half-fearful and half-embarrassed. Despite
his attempt at discretion, everyone heard him, and they turned to me, the only Bosnian on board with any English, for information.

“We’re here,” I mumbled, nodding.

Murmurs of approval spread from seat to seat. The man turned back around.

“I thought so,” I heard him say to his wife.

“Don’t pretend you knew,” she said.

“You always have to turn the harvest combine off before refueling, otherwise it’s a fire hazard,” he explained pointedly. “Same goes for planes. Machine’s a machine.”

“Yeah, yeah, you know everything.”

“Shut it, woman.”

It had begun with politicians fighting on television, talking about their nationalities, their constitutional rights, each claiming that his people were in danger.

“I thought we were all Yugoslavs,” I said to my mother, although at fifteen I knew better. You had to live under a rock not to see that the shit was about to hit the fan. I don’t know why I said it. Maybe the Communist message of Brotherhood and Unity had been so thoroughly drummed into my head that it surfaced robotically and overrode my actual experience. She told me to shut up and turned up the volume on the television.

Then reports had started coming in: sieges, civilian casualties, concentration camps, refugees. Croats and Muslims being slaughtered left and right by Serbian paramilitaries and by the Yugoslav People’s Army, who, as their actions made evident, seemed not to really belong to all of the peoples of Yugoslavia.

“Which ones are we?” I asked my mother, still playing dumb, hoping that my willful denial could erase the images on the screen,
erase my fear, make everything normal again. Again she told me to shut up and turned the volume even higher, until the downstairs neighbor started broom-handling our floor and my mother had to turn the TV down.

All at once your nationality became very important. There were reports of Serbian paramilitaries stopping all men trying to flee Bosnia, ordering them to drop their pants and underwear to prove they were Serb. Being circumcised meant your ass.

All the Bosnian cities and towns, if not overrun, were suddenly under siege. This went on for years. Civilians chopped down park trees, got buried in soccer fields, burned books and furniture, kept chickens on balconies, duct-taped their footwear, caught and ate pigeons, made makeshift stoves out of washing machines, grew mushrooms in basements, replaced broken windows with murky plastic, went nuts and jumped off buildings, drank rubbing alcohol diluted in chamomile tea until it was no longer flammable, rolled herbal tea cigarettes in toilet paper, suffered, hoped, waited, fucked. Authorities emptied the jails and mental institutions because they couldn’t provide for the inmates and patients. Thieves and murderers went back to their families. Lunatics walked around town doing funny things like comparing people to watermelons and sad things like freezing to death behind churches. Soldiers fought for all of them and for themselves. My father, a chemical engineer, got lucky and came up with a contraption that turned industrial fat into edible fat and got paid ten thousand German marks by a small business entrepreneur and war profiteer, which saved us. My mother ate just enough to survive, because she felt so guilty about not being able to quit smoking. She rationed her cigarettes as much as she could, walking around the apartment like a restless ghost, playing her solitaire, counting seconds before the next one. Sometimes, my brother and I stole a cigarette when the pack was close to full and
hid it somewhere in the apartment just to pull it out, unexpectedly, when she didn’t have any left, just to see her eyes light up for a moment. Later it would break our hearts to see her fingering the wool of the large tapestry in the corridor, looking for our stash, her forefinger touching her lips, her eyes on fire.

The airport corridors glowed majestically. The current of passengers moved us along. You could tell who was a refugee and who wasn’t—facial expressions, postures, surety of stride. The natives and the tourists walked briskly, trying to get it over with, catch their next flight, and be somewhere else. Their bodies were streamlined. The refugees, we walked like somnambulists, clutching our carry-ons, putting them between our bodies and the new world as if for protection. Hungry-eyed, we took in the wall posters advertising liquor and Disneyworld, the tiled floors, our stolid shoes, our knobby knees, our hands against these unfamiliar backgrounds. We drank it all in, giddily and guardedly at the same time.

But what I thought was going to be a short, silent, incognito burp turned out to be a mouthful of cheesy vomit. I stopped, dropping my bag next to the wall, and choked the burning, foul liquid down. It made my eyes water. I kept swallowing, trying to coat the inside of my throat with saliva. Then I realized that no one was passing me. When I turned around, sour-faced and disgusted, I saw that all the Bosnians were queued up behind me, waiting, all eyes. They had been following me. Even the few who had been walking ahead had stopped where they found themselves, looking over their shoulders.

“You all right there, pal?” the harvest combine operator asked, carrying his blonde-angel daughter in his arms like a sack of grain. His wife, a loose white headscarf over her head, was lugging two bags behind her and scowling.

“Ž
garavica,
” I managed, and they all made sympathetic faces. Indigestion. I picked up my bag and started walking again, swallowing. There was poison oak in my mouth, my throat, the middle of my chest.

One part of me felt pride to have fifty people stopping when I stopped, going when I went. The other part was embarrassed by them, by their bucolic cluelessness, their needy, confused eyes. I fought the urge to run ahead and merge with the natives and the tourists, to ape their body movements, roll my eyes at the slowness of the line, pretend I cared about what time it was, and become one of them.

The corridors spewed us out into a huge room. A black woman in a uniform stood motioning with her hands, first to the right and then, just as eagerly, to the left. Her lipstick was bright red and you didn’t have to be close to notice that some of it was on her teeth.

“Citizens and resident aliens, line up to the right. Everyone else, please keep left,” she said, impatiently eyeing a Bosnian family of six, who, painfully baffled, planted their feet and gawked at her, holding up their manila refugee envelopes like signs at a rally and impeding the flow of traffic.

“Go left,” I yelled ahead in Bosnian, and the family hesitated, turning to me. When I nodded, they lowered their envelopes and lined up to the left, checking to see if I really would follow suit.

The right-hand line was moving fast. Immigration officers waved the Americans to their stations, opened their passports, shot some shit with them, stamped the stamp, closed the passports, and, smiling, welcomed them back. Pretty soon the right side of the room was completely empty—until another wave of Americans, from some other flight, crowded it again.

The left side was uniformly compact, with foreigners inching down a monotonous maze. At the front, stepping over the yellow line became an issue. Officers kept repeating their admonishments with disgust, and the refugees kept looking around the floor, wondering why the hell these Americans were yelling and pointing at the tiles, checking their pockets to see if they’d dropped anything important, shrugging their shoulders.

When it was my turn at the yellow line I stood as close to it as possible without going over, like I was about to shoot a free throw. My heart rocked my body; I could feel its beat behind my eyes, on the sides of my neck, at the tips of my fingers, in my toes. For a moment I forgot about the rawness of my throat, about the putrid weight in my stomach, the bad taste in my mouth. I stared ahead at the
PLEASE WAIT FOR THE NEXT AVAILABLE STATION
screen, praying silently, sending good vibes, and visualizing the perfect outcome.

The screen changed to a flashing number eleven. I swallowed and crossed the yellow line toward the station where a young Sikh gazed at me politely but without emotion. I approached with a smile, psychically projecting Koranic verses instead of uttering them, and handed him my everything.

“Welcome to the United States. Good luck.”

I wandered out of the immigration maze on a pair of legs that weren’t mine.

There was a man with a sign in his hand that read
BOSNIA
, a chicken of a man in gray woolen pants, an off-gray jacket, and long navy blue coat. He had one of those comprehensive foreheads that, over the years, creeps up to the top of an egg-shaped head and a pair of
eighties-style aviator eyeglasses, the top of which were tinted and flush with his eyebrows; the bottoms drooped to the middle of his cheeks. At the end of the corridor behind him was a uniformed cop—the last line of defense—whose forearms seemed rooted to his Batman utility belt. He was a huge redhead with the voice of a gargoyle and hands that could squeeze a confession out of a sculpture.

“What nation is abusing us now?” he boomed at the man with the sign watching me come down the corridor. But seeing me slow down, the man disregarded the question and came toward me.

“Bosnian?” he asked in Bosnian, and I, surprised, said yes in English. The combine operator and his wife attacked the man with a salvo of overlapping questions. As soon as they heard somebody speaking in a language they could understand, my fellow refugees turned their backs on me. I was instantly demoted from general of this ridiculous comedy to grunt, no one paying me any mind, some even pushing past me to get closer to this tiny man. I remembered how six months ago, on the way to Scotland, aboard a ferry from some French town to Dover, my friend Omar and I had separated from the rest of the theater troupe and walked around the boat, crudely insulting everyone we encountered in our native tongue, terrified and giddy that we might stumble upon the one passenger who, realizing he’d been told he was spawned by an ass-eyed, donkey-raping water buffalo, would kick our heads in.

“If you’re from Bosnia, let’s gather over here,” yelled the man with the sign. “I’m Enes, and I’m from the Bosnian consulate. Welcome to New York City. The majority of you are trying to catch a connecting flight, and I’m here to assist you in—”

The Bosnians went fucking crazy, speaking to him all at once, waving their tickets, their yellow immigrant envelopes, pushing to the front. Enes tried to calm them down, shaking his head, shouting that he wouldn’t help anyone if they didn’t queue up.

I felt a little sad witnessing this, so I pulled away. My flight wasn’t until the next day, so I knew I would have to stay in New York overnight. I meandered a little way from the group, trying to look native. My stomach cramped and again I felt like I could burp. Fooled once, I swallowed down some spit instead.

“The rats are a-coming,” said the redhead cop to a passing American who had noticed the commotion. I glared at him, right into his green blue eyes. He held my gaze.

“You speak English?” he boomed toward me, overpronouncing. There’s a word in Bosnian,
zaprška,
which is a culinary term for the finishing touch to a lot of Bosnian meals. It’s golden butter melted in a pan with red paprika, a violently orange sauce (the exact color of the cop’s hair) that is poured into stews and over stuffed peppers.

“
Zaprška,
” I said to him, smiling my best fresh-off-the-boat smile, “
jebem li ja tebi mater hrđavu, jesi’l čuo!
”

A couple of Bosnians heard me and scoffed and chuckled at the insult.

“I know you understand me,” yelled the cop, but I took my ticket out of my pocket, pushed myself in between two Bosnian women and waved to attract Enes’s gaze.

“
Hej care, kad je avion za
Los Anđeles?” I called.

I sat there people-watching, the shoulder strap of my bag wrapped around my ankle in case somebody tried to steal my wrinkled clothes and smoked beef and the slivovitz I was smuggling as a present to my uncle—stuff he couldn’t get his hands on in California. After telling me to wait, Enes had led the rest of the Bosnians away to catch their flights to cities like Nashville, Fargo, St. Louis. I sat there thinking I was cold. My jaw was jumpy. But the more I pressed my
arms against my body the more I became aware that it wasn’t the cold making my teeth chatter. I looked around. People: shapes, races, demeanors I’d never seen before. They were walking in groups or pairs, or were at ease with their aloneness, purposeful, while I sat there trying not to puke.

Other men with signs displaying the names of other sad countries rolled by with gaggles of confused immigrants, yelling in exotic languages, leaving behind one or two other petrified saps who, like me, tried to occupy as little space as possible. There was a gangly black man in a black suit sitting with four veiled women (resembling babushkas) in a range of sizes, pretending he knew what was up, but clearly scared. Only a young African woman in dark jeans and a white blouse, with closely cropped hair and shiny eyes, behaved with any sort of confidence. She took her seat, took a book and snack out of her carry-on, something noisy and, by the look of it, covered in salt, and proceeded to read and munch like she was on a park bench. I wanted to lay my head in her lap, to be touched and told that everything was fine.