Shards: A Novel (14 page)

But then again, the way things looked might have been, just as easily, a result of my proclivity for self-torture, presently lapsing into pensiveness, which in turn was bordering on lunacy. The distance between the two brothers on the same side of the river was twelve steps, between the two brothers on the same side of the bridge thirty, between the first set of brothers on the opposite corners of the bridge twenty-six, and thirty-four between the other. I kept measuring and remeasuring the distances between things to take the edge off waiting, to kill the paralyzing thought that maybe she would never show. But as soon as I was aware I was doing it, it became futile and I started doubting that I was even in the right place and searched my memory for another bridge with statues. After much obsessing it became obvious that there wasn’t any, and I looked at each stone brother for reassurance.

The river hummed the freezing blues from within its embankment walls, and the buildings hunched like peasants in a summer hail, dreading the unseasonable showers of propelled destruction that had become oh so frequent as of late. Utterly unhampered by it I stared in the direction from where she was supposed to come and tried to recognize which one of the moving dots in the distance would morph into her figure. Every one of the little smudges of color made me heady as I watched them grow like cells; slowly, one cell of blue would become two cells of blue, then four, then eight, and after a while the blue would become a Windbreaker with bubbly little arms, still headless in the snow, and then the head would bud out with a little black atop the blue, and the little legs would connect the blue blob to the ground and this child’s drawing would walk toward me, evolving into an impressionistic painting, then into a realistic one, then become a scene from an Eastern European film with blatant social realism that made me want to shoot myself.

I awaited them, trembling, and despaired when I saw them become someone else, a man with a beard, someone’s grandmother, a lunatic. Their faces actually caused me physical pain because their features weren’t hers. I gulped down my pain and kept on walking and counting steps, picked another dot on the street’s horizon, observed its evolution into a stranger, then did it all over again.

When, finally, she did turn from a blob into herself, right on time, by the way (the Catholic church across the street tolled and tolled), and with my insides a-quiver with the sheer insanity of their inner life, something changed and a miraculous calm came over me. It was like something, a male something, incapacitated my inner critic, slapped me a good one across the mouth to snap me out of the funk, took me by the collar and straightened my posture,
whispered a word of male encouragement into my ear and sent me onto the battlefield with a pat on the ass.

Thus improved, I waited as she came over with the pitter-patter of a toddler, wearing a black winter jacket—that billowed around her like her own personal cloud—growing more elaborate and beautiful with each small step.

“Hi,” she said, smiling hugely, eyes squinted against the wind and a sole section of hair, ripped out from her ponytail, glued with the wind’s force against and across her face, splitting it into two uneven halves. She cocked her head sideways to remedy this, but her effort was fruitless. Asja reached way up into the sky to free her right hand from an oversize sleeve, brought it to her forehead, and gently brushed the renegade section away.

I reciprocated the greeting and reached for her hand, my palm facing outward and my thumb down as though aiming, gangster-style. It was the boldest gesture I had ever attempted at the beginning of a first date and it worked; she took it with a smirk and we started walking.

“Did you wait long?” she asked.

“Two-to-three minutes.”

The first step or two were mechanical because we were both manifestly overwhelmed. Her hand felt cold and she immediately curled it into a fist and placed it into mine, as if into a padded envelope. I smiled. She was making herself comfortable. Five steps later she briefly uncurled it and tickled the inside of my palm with the tips of her nails, looking at me for reaction. Stupidly gleeful I did it back to her. We smiled, thus acquiring our first ritual.

“Wanna chewing gum?” I asked, fingering a pack of it in my right pocket. It was a rare commodity in those days, but my father had received an aid package from his ex–business partner in Slovenia and that’s where I got it.

“No,” she answered, dropping her smile, her body stiffening as though hit with something, something disgusting. She looked at her feet, then away from me.

“Okay.”

I produced the pack, freed one of the individual foil-wrapped pieces of gum for myself and removed it with my teeth. She saw me do it and her smile returned.

“Oh—that chewing gum. I do want that.”

I looked at her, bewildered. Controlling her laughter, she took the gum from between my lips, unwrapped it, and popped it in her mouth. Her cheeks awoke with redness.

Then I realized what I had asked her and a terrible “Ohh” escaped before I had a chance to swallow it. What I had asked was on a par with: “You wanna suck face?” “Chewing gum” was a crude local colloquialism for “French kissing.” The crudest one possible.

“You didn’t think—”

But we were already bursting with healthy laughter, as if we had always known each other. Less than fifteen seconds into our first date and we already had a little story to tell.

Moments die as they pass and as they do their cadavers are dunked into specimen jars full of formaldehyde where they float with eyes shut and little fingers perfectly curved, as if they are alive, holding on to something—a pickled fetus I saw in my high school biology class. They become memories, nothing but perished moments marinated in brain chemicals to preserve the fact that they came into being once and were alive just as these present moments are alive, moments that I’m wasting by writing these words, leaning on the wall of my parents’ living room on a terribly hot day in September 1999.

Mother said she doesn’t want to talk today, that she’s sick of talking about my father, about what he did, that talking is useless, and that she has said it all before.
Fuck his mother,
she said, then apologized to God in Arabic. Her lip was quivering. She said she wanted to pray and that I should close her bedroom door behind me and have some alone time, that she senses my fatigue, that I have writing to do. I know it’s all bullshit. I know she’s really down but I did close the door.

Am I an asshole? What kind of son am I?

Yesterday I bought a shitload of those little bottles of booze. I unzip my luggage as slowly as I can so she can’t hear me next door when I take out a couple of vodkas and a couple of brandies. I knock back one of each and shove the empties in my backpack. The other two I put in my pocket. Asja, Asja, Asja, I think.

Went to first base the night of the first date under a streetlight in Batva after botching the first attempt at it a few minutes earlier at the entrance to the Tušanj football stadium due to inexperience. Walked home in euphoria as though I had single-handedly liberated a country.

Mother sobs in the bedroom. I open the door and go to her.
He never stood up for me,
she says
. His own cousins would grab my knees under the table during family gatherings. I would tell him in the kitchen and he wouldn’t say a word. He would just stare into the void. Waiting for me to stop talking.
I take her hand and she squeezes it hard. She cries silently for a couple of seconds and then calms herself down.
Don’t worry,
she says
, it’s like this all the time. I have to get it out of my system. Go back to your work.
I come back and leave the door open, sit on the couch. All I see is her thin wrist when she closes the door. I reach into my pocket. I reach for the backpack where the empties go.

Went to second base—never, really. One time timidly brushed my hand on the outside of Asja’s right breast while making out on a bench in Banja Park. The other time playfully pushed her away and ended up with one of them in my hand. Let go of it immediately like Jackie Chan in one of his films.

I can hear her again, moving about. I get up and open the door and right then the midday prayer sounds from the nearby mosque. I see her praying: standing up, bending forward, standing up again, kneeling down, touching the
serdžada
with her forehead, and murmuring throughout all of it. I close the door. I reach into my pocket but the muezzin’s voice is loud and full of God and I don’t dare.

Went to third base—never. One time Asja straddled me next to a fountain and we were uncharacteristically spontaneous and so close to everything, but then an old man with a cane walked by and chastised me like I was a pedophile (Asja was very short), messing up my game. For the rest of the night had silent arguments with the geezer in my head and couldn’t be spontaneous anymore.

TV from the bedroom. Dialogue in English. Mother’s quiet. I feel a little better about myself. I drink the brandy.

Home run—not a chance. Utterly without any idea how to even talk about it, let alone do it, I put the ball in her court without telling her. Wanted love and romance first (had honorable, PG-rated intentions). Believed that sex would come later (after marriage, perhaps,) unless mentioned by her before then. She was too shy to mention it. I was too proper. We were chronically horny.

The TV gets louder. Songs. I remember how I
. . .

Walked from Stupine to Irac through a mythic blizzard and paced for two and a half hours from a curb to a building, counting steps, being molested by wind, freezing my ass off in my two jackets. She didn’t show. Later, said it was too cold.

I realize why the TV is so loud. I open the door and her face is buried in the pillow. I go to her and hold her hand, pat her back. Tears come to me. They come and as soon as they do, hers stop and she’s dabbing my cheek with her moist handkerchief.
I’m mostly mad at myself,
she says
. I know who he is; I know he has no spine . . . no heart, no balls . . . and I still stay here like a cow . . . Like a . . . Like . . .
She stares off for a moment, then lights a cigarette.
I think I stay because I knew you guys would grow up and move away and I don’t want to be old and alone.
She smiles at the irony, looks at me.
Go, honey,
she says
. I’m fine again.
I close the door and stand there looking at the couch, the armoire, Grandpa’s calligraphy on the wall, the radiator, the lace curtains, my stuff on the floor. I remember being so in love with Asja, so sick, so saturated, blissful, and I feel good that what I’m feeling now will one day become just pictures and words, too, nothing that can really break my heart again.

I drag my luggage right next to the couch so I don’t have to get up later. Brandy in my pocket. It’s medicine. Pen, too.

It’s nighttime. I hear my mother cry, barely audible. It sounds like rhythmic squeaking. She cries into the pillow.
It’s a private depression
, she likes to joke. She does things like pull down her sleeves when she’s around me so I won't see the scars on her wrists. So I don’t get sad. So I don’t worry. Usually when I hear
her, I jump up and go tell her that things are going to be okay. Usually I’m warm. Usually I know how to distract her, how to put things, how to smile.

But now I’m exhausted.

Now I just lie here and listen to her cry.

I’m sitting on our park bench, Asja's and mine, drinking Fanta and vodka out of a Fanta bottle. I keep wondering what would happen if I bumped into her one of these days while I’m in town. There’s an old man on the bench a little way down the path and he keeps smiling at me and shaking his head. I keep smiling back politely.

I haven’t seen Asja since the day I left. Some said she waited for me for a year, asking around if anybody knew when I was coming back. But then she married a distant cousin of mine, had a baby.

“She stood you up, huh?” says the old man, suddenly standing next to my bench.

“I’m sorry?”

“You’re lucky. It’s better that she leaves you now than later on when you’re sick and old like me.”

He pats me on the shoulder and shuffles away. I can’t breathe.

Excerpts from Ismet Prci
’s Diary
from October 1999

Back in the USA,
mati
. Exit Ismet, enter Izzy. You have no idea how good it feels to be another.

. . . taking a break from the fake memoir.

(. . . the spitting bee-girl . . .)

Despite the shame and the embarrassment of the bee fiasco, he said yes.

Mustafa said yes because she was cute and petite and coquettish. Because she wore Doc Martins and ripped jeans and he kind of had a crush on her. Because he believed that they could end up being together for a long time.

Bullshit. He said yes because at that age you never, ever say no to anybody who one day, potentially, might pop your cherry.

When she winked at him and said,
Let’s go,
he said yes. She said,
Yes, what?
and he said,
Yes, let’s go.
They made out in the dewy grass in front of her building until ten minutes before the curfew when she had to physically push him off her. She gave him a handmade bracelet she always wore and asked him,
Do you know what this is?
He didn’t really, but he said yes and she killed him with a kiss. Then he hauled ass home.

The very next night Mustafa made an almost fatal mistake by teasing her and calling her a little girl. She was fifteen then. They were in front of the Bosnian National Theater, the newest hot spot in their fun-filled besieged city. She
slapped his face and stormed off just to come back a minute later and throw a bloody tampon at his head, right in front of everybody. He was more confused than a glob of human sperm in the third chamber of a frog’s heart.

That same night, as he walked home alone, she jumped out of the bushes by the river’s embankment and kicked him in the groin. The gun looked huge in her little hands. She squatted over his convulsing body and aimed at his right eye. She kept spitting into the grass over his head. She squatted there for a long time, spitting, looking.

There was no doubt in his mind that the brain behind those fierce eyes was going to send a motor stimulus to the muscles of her tiny hand, which were going to squeeze that trigger and send him to the land of wooden poles and toilet bowls for good. And he couldn’t think of a single thing, to say or otherwise. His life didn’t flash in front of his eyes. He didn’t think of loved ones. He didn’t think of hated ones, either. He just cupped his nuts—a laughable move when faced with the business end of a 9 mm Zastava.

He would later come to believe that she saw something in his eyes that made her decide not to kill him. Perhaps it was the total absence of him from himself. Whatever it was she calmly removed the bracelet from his wrist, walked away, and never looked at him again.

Things changed big-time for him after this incident. He stopped going out and spent most of his time with the basement dwellers, which is what everyone called those people who never accepted the war as normalcy and lived in fear underground.

A year later somebody found the body of a guy named Goran, who he heard was her second boyfriend, in the middle
of Banja Park. He had been shot and stabbed numerous times. The story was that he pressured her into having sex with him and then, during a quarrel, threatened to tell her dad, a devout Muslim, about it. Apparently she convinced her little brother to help her take care of the problem and they killed him together. Since her mother was a judge, she ended up in Kreka Psychiatric Hospital.

And even though Mustafa was drafted and made to go and fight, and had seen people blown to bits, cadavers rotting in the trenches, children’s heads atop wooden sticks, crosses carved into abdomens and foreheads; and even though he had a lot of close calls like that time the shrapnel went through the van and through the folds of his shirt around the midsection when he was bending to tie his boot, still the closest he had ever been to death was the moment before she reclaimed her bracelet. In all those other instances his life did flash before his eyes and he did think about loved ones and about those he didn’t like.