Shards: A Novel (11 page)

It was Salko.

Mustafa’s grandfather’s face wilted. He backed out of the building in silence. He wandered over to his booth and sat motionless until his family’s savior walked by with a wheelbarrow full of parts. He watched him get smaller and smaller, dark against the snow.

He sat there a while, staring first at the chips of paint flaking off the radiator like dandruff, then at an abandoned, dusty spiderweb between the desk and the wall, and finally at the seam of his son’s busted hiking boot on his left foot, still a little wet from the snow. He was looking for what was right.

When he found it he wrote it down under the
OUT
rubric of his notebook, took off his heavy jacket, folded it into a bundle, and shot himself through it. Since what he wrote didn’t make any sense to anyone (it was not a classic suicide note), the police considered his death to be a murder. Their thinking implied that suicides don’t shoot themselves in the abdomen to die in prolonged agony.

“By the code,” the note read.

* * *

Going through elementary school Mustafa heard all about the code. It was usually shoved down his throat by his mother to illustrate how good he had it.

Once, he’d lied to her about his grades; when she found out the truth at a parent-teacher conference, she sat him down in the kitchen and told him about an ancestor who happened to be at a market where another farmer had a gigantic pumpkin on display. The farmer claimed that his was the biggest one that year, and when Mustafa’s forefather said he had a bigger one in his shed, the farmer accused him of lying. So he went home, loaded his pumpkin onto a coach, took it back to the market, and had it measured in front of witnesses. When it was discovered that his pumpkin was indeed larger than the farmer’s, he stabbed the man to death for calling him a liar.

The moral of the story ricocheted off of Mustafa’s ill humor, but he said he was sorry and that it would never happen again. She sent him to his room to study, and he sneaked one of his ninja novels inside his history book. Ninjas were his favorite because they were well-trained assassins who could use any means to eliminate their enemies and had no code. They were not bound by Bushido like samurai. They didn’t have to fight fair.

Excerpts from Ismet Prci
’s Diary
from July 1999

I don’t recognize my hometown,
mati
. I’m standing right in front of my graffiti-covered high school and I miss Moorpark College. And Moorpark backward is Kraproom.

I look at Father. Who the fuck is this guy?

I look at Mehmed and he has an Adam’s apple now, his voice like from the bottom of a barrel. A grown-up, full of rage. That’s the only part of him I understand. He blames me for everything, I know.

I look at your face,
mati,
your tired, angry, pious, broken, miserable, warm, beautiful face, and I’m dying for Melissa.

You’re still fighting with him, still claiming he’s having an affair. He still keeps telling everyone you’re insane, and you keep trying to kill yourself instead of him. You should cut his throat when he’s sleeping. Mehmed is on his side. You should cut his throat, too. I have no choice but to be on your side,
mati
. Please, cut my throat.

* * *

I wish I were Izzy,
mati
. I wish I were mad and hungry in his room, where it’s possible to suffer in peace.

Greetings from sweltering Tuzla, Izzy.

(. . . the cult of asmir . . .)

In 1993, Mother suspected Asmir of being a pederast, out to take advantage of me under the pretense of being my director and mentor, out to make me “do things” by brainwashing me into submission. There was nothing in reality to support that kind of thinking, but she was the kind of person who needed no proof. She believed herself to be fine-tuned for detecting hazards to her children, mistaking common prejudices for mother’s intuition. Mere suspicion was proof enough that something was wrong. Hers was where-there’s-smoke-there’s-fire reasoning—smoke being the fact that I was doing physical theater, that I hung out with the director even after the rehearsals were over, went to cafés with him, read books he wanted me to read, swore by him no matter what. Granted, there was something cultish about our theater group, about Asmir’s status as an artistic leader, about our blind trust and willingness to take extreme chances in the name of art, but nothing like what was ripping her mind asunder.

When I look back I can see her sitting cross-legged behind her cigarette, glassy eyes fixed on the images overtaking her mind, violent head shakes when they got too graphic, waiting for me to come back from a rehearsal. I remember, at times, marveling at the
ferocious results of her housework. It’s amazing how polished the furniture can get when polishing is not on the polisher’s mind. I also think I remember a peculiar tremor, clumsily disguised, behind her inquiries about the rehearsals, who this Asmir character was, and when she would get to meet him. Poor woman.

We held rehearsals in the “Home of the Army.”

For this statement to make sense you have to understand the nature of the Yugoslavian brand of Communism. Take architects, for example. Say a public building is to be made. In Communism it’s not the best architect who gets to make the building; it’s the guy (almost always a man) with seniority in the Party who happens to be an architect that gets to make the building. And to get seniority you have to kiss a lot of ass, sit on committees for stuff you know nothing about, endure years of boring speeches, write and deliver years of boring speeches, and get drunk nightly with the bigwigs to show that you’re involved in both the community and its social life. By then you’re 98 percent bureaucrat and 2 percent architect. This is the reason why the public buildings in the Balkans all look like filing cabinets and why, in turn, they are almost always called “homes” (Home of Health, Home of the Youth, Home of the Workers, Home of the Army): to evoke that warm feeling inside to compensate for their actual soullessness. It’s shit in your mouth, but officially it’s called ice cream.

We held rehearsals in the Home of the Army.

Home of the Army used to have an olive-colored cannon in front of it, next to a bed of well-groomed tulips and a perpetually bored guard at arms, sometimes with a rigid German shepherd at his heel and sometimes without. But at the beginning of war, the cannon was hauled to the front lines, the tulips were garroted by
weeds, the dog disappeared, and only the guard remained, wearing his face like a gas mask.

Inside this “home,” the air was gray, the chairs were on their last legs, the ashtrays were heaping, the ceilings pressed on your head, the corridors were long, the doors were massive and ocher, the young men were uniformed, and the shadows on their faces were sacred. The floor tiles looked soiled despite the kneeling, would-be soldiers with their toothbrushes and elbow grease. The walls were smoky. The art was small but dense. The frames were grand ornaments. Where there was no art, there were impeccable white squares from where the mandatory Marshal Tito portraits used to monitor the army that used to be everyone’s army until it became just the Serbian Army, better known as the enemy.

Down the main corridor, third door down, just after the johns, was the auditorium of fixed, foldable wooden chairs, slightly slanting toward the raised proscenium and its musky velvet curtain. The stage was of wobbly parquet, bombarded for decades by politicians’ shoes, army bands, and touring folklore dancers. Centered on the cyclorama hung some kind of backdrop, leftover from the last regime, full of factory chimneys and soot-faced miners with rolled up sleeves and bulging biceps, the beams from their helmet lights cutting through the darkness.

I was with “Torso Theater” then, a group of amateur actors doing cheap comedies for food led by a bald man everyone called Brada. We had just wrapped up our completely unrecognizable version of Molière’s
Precious Maidens,
in which I played the second henchman and got to wear a ninja mask and twirl around a pair of nunchakus to “Boom Shack-A-Lak,” which was popular at the time. That was the first time I ever got paid for doing something. I was fifteen. What I received as payment was a plastic bag with two kilos of low-quality, all-purpose flour, a can of vegetable fat, a couple of packets
of powdered milk, and three or four cans of American corned beef. My heart was as big as a mosque.

There were talks about new projects, but the plays Brada was looking at had too few characters and some of us would have ended up jobless and we didn’t like that. To appease us he announced that he was splitting Torso Theater into two groups, seniors—he and five or six of his personal friends, all grown men with factory jobs hoping to get some food packages on the side by clowning—and juniors, and that he had found a willing director to do a show with us juniors.

Enter Asmir: this guy wearing red warm-up bottoms and a rag of a wife-beater, carrying books and binders. He started talking right there in the doorway. Suddenly there was energy in the auditorium, like things bursting. The almost-shaved head with chiseled cheekbones and angled eyebrows like the way people draw seagulls in the distance and the insatiable, childlike eyes—that was him.

I would soon find out that food was not a reason to do theater.

For the auditions he made us talk and move, sing and dance, and draw squares in his fat book of art. I talked and moved okay, sang a chantlike rock song disastrously, and danced like a Pithecanthropus. As for the squares, we were supposed to pick a painting we liked, divide it into three parts with pencil lines, and number the parts to tell a story of sorts. I picked a monochromatic print of a haloed baby Jesus in his mother’s arms and somebody’s sad, upraised fist in the sky.

The callbacks were in a week, yet no one called me. One of the fellow troupe members, Jelena, told me at school that Asmir had left a message with her mother for her to come at 5
PM
on Sunday. She was surprised I didn’t get the call. To tell you the truth I was surprised that she’d gotten it. Although she was pretty, her stage
presence was meandering at best, and she played everything with reserve, not giving herself up. At first I thought Asmir had lost my number, but as Sunday rolled on I realized I hadn’t made the cut. And it hurt me. It hurt me so much that I got angry and told him off in my mind, told him that his fucking audition was retarded, that I didn’t wanna be in his stupid play anyway. But I did. Especially after I didn’t make the cut.

Around 4:30, that lazy calm Sunday feeling washed over me like rage, ironed my brow, and corseted my thoughts. It happened while watching my hamster spin his wheel of misfortune
,
relentlessly. I realized that the best course of action was to go to the callbacks anyway and play dumb. I put on my Reeboks. My mother was a porcelain sculpture in the living room, entitled “Waiting.” She was smoking one of her five daily cigarettes. Her coulisse of smoke was unperturbed. I slipped out with a quick bye, not wanting to stand around and explain where I was going and how long I would stay there.

“What are you doing here?” Asmir asked at 5
PM
, the parquet squeaking riot from under his bare feet. Everyone else was mute, pretending to look away or look for phantom items at the bottoms of their backpacks. “Did I call you?”

“Jelena said the next rehearsal was today. I didn’t realize . . .” I played dumb. He stopped to look at me, burrowing through me. I held his inspectorial gaze, letting my mouth open and close like a bass in the grass.

“Well, you can stick around and watch,” he said and had everybody but me climb the stage. I had to smile. I had to smile as something scrambled up my esophagus and into my throat, yanking at the fraying tissues, sucking away my breath, destroying me.

It so happened that the guy Asmir picked to play the father character in his play had a bit of a speech impediment that he had concealed
masterfully during auditions, was too short in comparison with his supposed wife (played by Jelena), and didn’t know how to take criticism at all. The guy mouthed off one too many times and Asmir finally told him where to go. That was how I got my second chance.

Asmir was unorthodox and pregnant with a vision. Nuts, really. A lot of people, including Jelena, couldn’t get over the nuts part and dropped out. He’d say stuff like:

“Fuck musicals! Fuck the dead, cold, classic masters and their dead, cold, classic words. Fuck the chickenshit modern masters and their need to eat and have a roof over their heads and pay bills. We have to change theater! We should go berserk and improvise. Fuck entertainment! Leave it to the cinema. We should show the truth with all the mistakes of our perceptions. Fuck aesthetics! Pretty is a lie. We shouldn’t cut, revise, rewrite. We should rave and ramble. The truth is chaotic and it makes no sense.”

He’d say that democracy is not the way of the theater and if theater is to be worthy there is lots to be learned from dictatorships.

He’d do stuff like halt the whole rehearsal for Jelena’s replacement to learn how to shriek. This girl was supposed to play a mute mother who at the crucial point in the play unloads a mind- shattering scream, but she just couldn’t get there. Asmir made her stand alone in the limelight, with everyone else watching her in silence, until the pressure mushroomed thickly and she shrieked a blinding ray of hate and frustration and it was the realest thing I ever heard. It broke me in half.

It took her an hour to do it. Later, I realized that watching her stand there for an hour was more interesting than any play. The rawness of it. The nude beach of emotions. The piecemeal swelling of truth within a human being, her inability to contain it any
longer, and its orgasmic release, all inhibitions stripped away. Now
this
is theater, I thought.

In Asmir’s kingdom rehearsals were sacred, every day for four hours, rain or shine, snipe or shell. They would start with the ritualistic removal of footwear, then go into a collective meditation with everyone on their backs, eyes closed, mouths partly opened, palms down. The cassette player usually played Vangelis. After this it was movement exercises, then voice stuff, then character stuff, then the play. Afterward it was out to town for a cup of coffee and to meet up with Asmir’s best friend, Bokal, and talk about everything.

Bokal claimed to be a lot of things: an artist, a model, a sign maker, an actor. He claimed to be working on a book called The Way of the Ram that would one day top all the best-seller charts. He claimed he beat up Tuzla’s worst hoodlums and soccer hooligans. He claimed he lost a kidney due to a terrible inflammation he acquired in the wet trenches of the Bosnian front lines. He had a scar to prove it.

It was like that for awhile: Asmir ruled and Bokal claimed. I kept my mouth shut and belonged for the first time.

My character, Father Karamazov, demanded quite a transformation on my part. He demanded straight lines, no imagination, direct approach, body fetish, soldierly conduct, rigid discipline, and everything else that wasn’t me. He was all about the mindless repetition of a man who dug trenches through life’s manure, made a couple of wrong turns, ended up where he started, and from fear of being ridiculed convinced himself that his path was not only legitimate but the only one and kept walking it over and over again.

In the play I had to march the square perimeter of the stage from the beginning until the crucial point where Karamazov has
an epiphany, realizes he’s going in a circle (a square, actually), and, knowing he has to change something, starts to march in the opposite direction with as much conviction as before.

Years of lugging oversize schoolbooks over one shoulder and hanging out with punks on curbs, gravestones, and staircases gave me the posture of a shirt thrown on a hat rack. So, in rehearsals, Asmir had me carry different things around in order to even out my shoulders—a potted plant, a cassette player, a wooden frame.

I marched on and on. In a square. Every day. I learned to walk straight. I learned not to cut corners. I breathed in through my nose, tight-lipped. I stomped loudly. My voice carried far. I got into shape. Pretty soon Karamazov was marching for me, set in his ways, taut like a bass string, while in his mind’s eye the red carpet unfolded over the rotting cadavers of his enemies, and admirers crowded alongside, waving little flags, smiling and chanting, and he knew he was the only one.

The morning of the premiere there was shelling. I woke up to the whistle and boom and wondered if the performance would be canceled. There were footsteps in the hallway and I closed my eyes. Didn’t feel like talking. Mother opened the door, counted her children, and then went back to her solitaire, the normal run of things. Sirens blared their warnings more than ten seconds too late. I opened my eyes and watched my brother sleep right through everything with his mouth hanging open.

Later in the morning Asmir called. The show must go on. He said to meet him in front of the Bosnian National Theater and to bring a snack. I was the first one he called. Mother stole worried glances at my giddiness.

* * *

I was there right before the show started. That I remember. I stood in the wings in my costume, waiting for the houselights to go down. I could see my mother in the second row. The boots were squeezing my feet and the march hadn’t even begun yet. Air came in and out of me in small increments, spasms like I was freezing. The audience thundered indecipherably, ominously. There were spirits swirling around the old lighting fixtures, kicking up dust, swooshing down my spine, whispering obscenities, encouragements. I repeatedly made fists, clutched at an imaginary rope with all my might, then uncurled the fingers as though giving up. I bit my lower lip. I shook my head. The shit you do to try to kill the butterflies.