Shards: A Novel (13 page)

Excerpts from Ismet Prci
’s Diary
from August 1999

I saw him,
mati
. I saw Father holding some woman’s hand in front of a bank yesterday. Later he denied it. I can’t tell you this, though. I don’t think you can take it. I told Mehmed and he didn’t believe me.
He doesn’t look like a Don Juan to me,
was how he put it. I guess reality doesn’t matter if we ignore it.

I punched a kid in the face today,
mati
. Behind Albatros restaurant. Sixteen or seventeen years old. Good-looking. Smiling. I punched him and he just sat down. I ran away. It was so good to feel my heart pound like that. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

I can’t wait to get out of here,
mati
. I can’t wait to leave you again.

(. . . love, interrupted . . .)

JANUARY–MARCH 1995

Somewhere, somehow I convinced myself that a pink Levi’s jacket was a good decision. By then my hair was long and I had lost all that weight and was ready, really overdue, for everything. I buried my old self and hurled the new, unapologetically, into the city under siege, locking eyes, smiling coyly, positioning myself in front of a light source every time so the girls could see my insides. I cracked gross but witty jokes that disarmed even the holier-than-thous. I flaunted talent until they noticed it, then turned up the modesty. I did all that, my part, and waited for her to emerge out of the crowd and love me forever.

The way love happens in high school, a friend of a friend gets drunk in front of the theater one night, comes up to my buddy Omar and me and admits that Asja has a crush on me, and I do some research to find out who Asja is and almost shit my pants when I meet her eyes in the hall in front of the bathrooms, smitten. The next morning I spy her coming to school and arrange it so I pass her and strut my stuff, but right when I’m about to display a dashing smile, an insect, a bee of all things, flies right into my nostril. I start bucking in my pink jacket, and shrieking,
and slapping my face, and blowing my nose, and generally acting like a precious maiden in the presence of outlandish vermin.

Hers was the beauty of petite, fairy-tale shoes with buckles, black turtlenecks, and eyes that can take you in the way the skies can take in a bird jumping out of the nest for the first time—only they were brown eyes. Hers was the beauty of lips so lush they folded onto themselves in everyday speech; what happened to them in the act of kissing I could only imagine. Hers was the beauty of little hands, abashed, buried under arms, or shoved into pockets, or barely poking out of extralong sleeves. Hers was the beauty.

Mine was the agony of knowing that she liked me (or did she?) and not knowing what to do about it. God forbid I should just walk up to her and mumble a hello. For a month I took meticulous care of my appearance while I waited for things to be kicked into motion by the friend of a friend who naturally sobered up and kept acting like she hadn’t said anything to me. I bathed every other day, which was an astonishing feat when you consider the amount of work that goes into bathing in wartime: the shelled-to-shit waterworks, the shortages, the restrictions, the fact that even when our part of the town got water, there was not enough pressure to shoot it up to the fourth floor. You had to take buckets and canisters, tubs and basins, pitchers and plastic soda bottles, go to the basement and stand in a line of murky, pissed-off apartment dwellers for your turn to fill up your receptacles, then carry them to the apartment in three or four trips (guess what, no electricity), get wood from the balcony, start a fire, wait until the stove was hot enough, heat a huge pot of water on it, carry it to the bathtub, mix it with cold water until it was bearable, and finally pour it over sections of your body from a coffee mug.

I grew paranoid about having things stuck in my teeth, so I brushed them psychotically every time I happened to be around a
toothbrush. At school I dug at the seams of my clothing, trying to rip off a piece of thread long enough to wrap around two fingers so I could floss out a particularly stubborn chunk of lunch wedged in the crevice of my molars. I combed my hair like an excited schoolgirl (at least thirty strokes for each side) and let it hang down around my face in shiny, voluptuous whorls. I refused to wear my glasses to school so I wouldn’t appear nerdy, had to move to the front desk, and still I couldn’t see shit. I constantly sniffed at my pits. A part of me longed for the earlier times when I was fat and nothing mattered. A small part of me. That fat kid in me.

The friend of a friend had one of those bland Bosnian names you can never remember, like Jenny in California. She was an impish person, pointy in all directions, short and unremarkable-looking, like a female gull. I stalked her for weeks, walking behind her, sending telepathic vibes in ripples at the back of her head and her hippy hairdo. When that didn’t work I’d go in front and face her, making feverish eye contact.

Come on!
I thought at her.

Her eyebrows would twitch in alarm and she would look down, grab at some friend’s elbow, and walk away in a swift stride, whispering, shaking her head, glancing backward like I ought to be institutionalized.

At night, I would sit crumpled in my bed, agonizing over whether I had hallucinated her drunken slip of the tongue that night or whether it had actually occurred. I played this moment over and over in my mind’s eye, me standing in front of the theater with Omar, freezing my ass off despite two jackets, her stumbling down the street, catching my eye, and turning to her friend, saying, “Is that him?” then walking up a couple of stairs, unzipping my top jacket, placing her boyish hand on my chest, saying, “Pink jacket, that’s him!” then leaning in with harsh spirits on her breath, whispering, “I have a friend that
really, really likes you; she’s a beautiful, beautiful girl,” and my heart growing, growing.

I just realized something. I was wearing two jackets because it was wintertime. January, I believe. February 28 was the first day Asja and I went out. How is it possible, then, that two mornings after I found out that she liked me a bee flew up my nose? Don’t bees hibernate in this part of the world? I think they do. But I do remember that happening—the bee incident, I mean. It did happen to me. I’m sure of it. I remember the humiliation. I remember the lesson learned. I remember the distinct knowledge of being put in my place by the universe for trying to appear better-looking than I actually was. It had to have happened some other time, then, in front of some other girl. But why did I bunch the two memories together? Why can’t I remember the other girl?

Someone, I think it was Omar, said to me once that memories are like tapes and that it’s important to keep as many as you can so you can play them later on and be able to recall who you were at the time. I always considered this to be bullshit. I still do. Memories are nothing like tapes. Tapes record reality. Minds record fiction. My mind was never one for remembering things right. Too much fantasy. Too much muggy past. Too many daydreams. Plus, the present reality, with all its tedious details, is just way too complicated; wherever you look there is something existing in itself: a file cabinet full of words, Mother smoking, an extension cord on the floor, a dirty sock, the shadow of my foot throbbing against the white sheets underneath me, and that’s just a sliver of a second from a corner of my eye. Who can keep track of it all when our eyes are open so wide and when seconds are so short and cheap and when we spend them so easily?

Mother is in shambles, broken. My father is away on business. At least that’s what he said. She thinks, knows, he has someone. My brother won’t come out of his room, thinks she’s nuts. The women in the neighborhood knit their gossip sweaters. Mother sees them nudge one another with elbows when she passes them on the way to the store. She stays in bed for days, eats nothing. Just smokes and prays. She’s skeletal, sallow, slime-eyed.

When I first got here she was great. The energy of my return popped her out of her routine and we talked and took walks and she told me more stories about her childhood and I wrote them down. Then she started to say the same things over and over again, wallowing as depressed people do, and it became harder and harder for me to be there for her. I’m not the sanest person in the world by a long shot. Who am I gonna help? I can fool myself and deliver convincing everything-will-be-all-rights, but only up to a point. Months into this, I feel drained, depressed.

This morning I decided I would go visit my old stomping grounds to see if the sight of the theater or the high school building or the park would make it easier to write about puppy love, but Mother had an attack. She had warned me about these. Apparently, she’s fully conscious during them; she just cannot talk or see well or swallow. She was in bed talking to me and then suddenly stopped and her eyes got really big and she slowly put her cigarette in the ashtray and turned onto her side. I knelt by her and held my hand on her forehead. The veins on her temples swelled and her lower jaw started to shift to the right, disfiguring her mouth. Her tongue oozed out through it and her breathing became strenuous. I tipped her head down more to make it easier. She started to drool and I wiped at it with a handkerchief.

It lasted ten minutes. After it was over her face muscles ached and she felt terrible and took a bunch of pills and went to sleep. I paced through the house for an hour, tried to read a story by Nabokov, fought with my father and brother in my mind, pounded their faces into pulp. I tried crying, but it never comes when you want it. I wanted to kill myself.

Then I took a bunch of paper, went down to the store, bought a two-liter Pepsi Light and a fifth of rum, came here to the park, and drank it all. I went to see where Asja and I carved our names into a pine tree across the street from the Orthodox church, and it was still there. I sat at the base of it, tried to write about my youth, and ended up writing this instead.

I turned out not to be insane after all.

It was a Wednesday and I was hopping, blue-lipped, in the hallway in front of a classroom, breathing out clouds of steam, but with both of my jackets undone so everyone could see my trendy Beavis and Butt-Head T-shirt, which I’d borrowed from Omar. Earlier in the week a shell exploded off the side of the building right across the river and two pieces of shrapnel busted the window of the second-floor hallway. They covered the hole with plastic, but someone nicknamed Paša had sliced his name in it with a knife and the wind made curious sounds when it forced itself though the slits, a bit like silenced gunfire. There were two shrapnel holes on the wall, which somebody else had encircled with a black marker and made into a huge smiley face. I was appreciating its grotesqueness when I felt a light squeeze on my elbow and spun around.

The friend of a friend looked pissed off and somehow different with eyeglasses on. Her face was curt and scrunched up, not even trying to conceal its disgust at having to speak to me.

“Remember me? Jaca? Little Mario’s party?”

Of course I remembered who she was, but there were no words in my head, let alone my throat. There was nothing remotely as
organized as words anywhere in my body. My mouth dropped and there was a crack-and-hiss noise in my ears, as though from a soda can being opened. Then I couldn’t help but smile. The power of it was bigger than I. It was as if I had two fishhooks in the corners of my mouth that pulled my lips up and up and up, and no matter how much my ego screamed that I probably looked like an idiot, like an eager beaver, I had no willpower to choke this one down. She took a step back.

“Well?” There was a pinch of alarm in her voice.

Unable to talk yet, I overnodded.

“A friend of mine wants to meet you,” she squeezed out. It was apparent what she herself thought of the idea.

“Asja,” I said, finally managing a word. Her mouth screwed up in surprise. The alarm left her face and she reclaimed the distance between us.

“You know about Asja?”

“Yeah.”

“How do you know?”

“You told me. Like a month ago? In front of the theater?”

“You’re shittin’ me!” she said, punched my arm hard, and then busted out laughing. “Is that why you were acting like a psycho? I thought you were nuts.”

“
I
thought I was nuts.”

“Why didn’t you fucking come and tell me, you idiot?”

“I thought I made it up in my head.”

“You’re an idiot. Let’s go before the bell rings.” She took my sleeve and pulled me along. It suddenly dawned on me what was about to happen. My feet got heavy going down the stairs.

“Right now?”

“Yeah, right now. When would you do it?”

“I’m scared.”

“You’re an idiot,” she said, and without having time to sniff at my pits, or cup my hand in front of my face to check if my breath stank, or tongue my teeth for something in them, I was pulled toward and introduced to Asja, a petite person with straight brown hair, wide eyes, and an even wider smile. Her tiny hand popped out of her sleeve for a quick handshake and popped back in like a turtle’s head.

“Asja. Nice to meet you.”

I blurted out my name. Jaca stepped aside and a bunch of nosey teens crowded around her, smiling, glancing over. I waved to Asja to follow me and I think she asked why, but came nevertheless. We walked down the hallway, away from her schoolfellows, in a giddy silence, our feelings in almost visible little explosions in the air around us.

“You wanna go out tonight?” I heard my voice say. It sounded like a small-caliber bullet bouncing back and forth inside my skull.

“I can’t.”

I felt myself waning, drying up. Good thing I had that voice that kept on talking, this other me, while I suffered.

“How about tomorrow?”

She made a hurt face. “I can’t.”

“Why not?” my voice asked, lightheartedly.

“My parents don’t let me go out on school days.”

My suffering shifted into a lower gear. Dumbly, I asked the obvious question:

“How about Friday then?”

“Okay,” she said, and I stopped suffering.

The Bridge with the Statues was where she said it would be. I knew where it was, too, but when I left the apartment I literally followed the river, in a fit of insane compulsion, just in case. I found myself
on the bridge forty-five minutes before the rendezvous, walking back and forth in beastly, agonizing strides and counting my steps.

The bridge was an oppressive, parallelogram-shaped coffin of solid cement and steel, spanning the emaciated, shivering river at an angle. Its stone guardians, these identical quadruplets, stood forever on the corners, facing away from one another, slumped under the weight of light they were designed to deliver. Massive lamps pressed down upon their shoulders like globes, like crude, cement disco balls, and they endured it like Atlas. With one leg, knotted with muscles, erected back against the base, and the other one, barely bent, set forward for balance, they were obeying their meaningless destiny, holding up the dead lights, extinguished for a long time by shrapnel or detonations or lack of electricity. One of the brothers even had his elbow taken out by a metal shard, exposing his wire skeleton, but he was still withstanding his job, his expression unchanged, his eyes forever blind to the absurdity of stone or flesh here in the world.