Shards: A Novel (17 page)

For a moment I see the two teenagers take a shaky step back and the animal in front of them jerk up, reclaim the distance, and then crouch down again. For the moment when it’s upright, it truly looks mastodonic. But I see it (remember it?) when it’s still a puppy in a litter of six. I remember it being picked up by a thin woman with dark circles around her eyes. She’s a poet and employed by Tuzla’s National Theater to do dramaturgical work. She can’t have children, and her husband agrees to get the puppy so their house on the hill won’t be so silent all the time. He’s a professor of music and a concert violinist (he has once played for Tito) and silence is not his cup of tea. He genuinely likes dogs, grew up with them. I see the puppy grow fast, see the woman sneak pieces of calf liver and chateaubriand to it, and see the man repeatedly throw a fat piece of rope with a knot at each end way down their property from the terrace and the dog fetch it every time. I see it take over his side of the bed and the man drag it by the collar over the polished parquetry with much difficulty to put it outside. Later, when the man is asleep I see the woman let it back in but keep the bedroom door closed. I see it jump over the fence one day, going after a cat, and get nicked a little by a blue Renault. I see the war come, and it’s getting harder and harder to find dog food, so the woman has to buy butcher scraps and offal and cook these pungent soups, crumble bread into them, and feed that to the rapidly diminishing dog. Dark circles return to her eyes. Shelling makes the dog whine and hide. It makes the woman despair and she hugs the whining animal in the basement and sleeps next to it on a cot. The man sleeps in a rocking chair. The first winter and it becomes obvious that the dog is suffering and that they cannot do anything about it. Their own clothes hang off of them like ponchos now and the man has to punch new holes in their belts. They try to give the dog away to a shelter but the employee laughs at them. They try to give it away to anybody

who will take it, even walk all the way to the UN base in Ši
ki Brod and try to give it away there. Nobody wants it. He says they have to let it go or put it to sleep. She says no, no, over and over. What else can we do? he asks. No, no, she says. With the last of his gasoline the man drives it to the edge of the town, feeds it a meal of cooked cow lungs and bread, throws a fat piece of rope as hard as he can toward the woods, and when the dog bolts after it, climbs into his car (without bothering to pick up the dog bowl), and drives away. He tilts his rearview mirror up and keeps his eyes on the white line in front of him. I don’t see the dog anymore, but I see the couple still. No, no, she screams at him when he comes back and melts through his arms and his fingers to the floor. No, no, she locks herself in the basement and refuses food. He breaks in after two days and the next-door neighbor drives them to the hospital. The hospital is full of crazed doctors and legless soldiers. They sedate her and send her home. The man cooks for her, spoons soup into his wife’s mouth every day. He changes her clothes, washes them by hand in the tub. She refuses to move or talk. The war keeps on. Their food stash is dwindling and so is their money. There are no concerts or plays in the town under siege, not the ones that people would pay for, and they have no income. What he’s getting from the music school, monthly packages of flour and oil, is not enough. He has to sell things from the house. They used to live well, so they have a lot of nice things that he goes to the market and sells for dirt cheap: a mink coat for a small bag of potatoes, an antique grandfather clock for a sack of cornmeal. He comes home one day and finds her dead, suicide maybe, but nobody has time to autopsy. Every morning he goes to her grave and picks up dead leaves or brushes away the snow or pulls up the spindling weeds. He gets thinner, starts playing violin publicly, making it cry for a cigarette here, a worthless coin there. He refuses to sell it. Going through his wife’s stuff, he finds
a can of German dog food that got overlooked, sleeps with it for a couple of days, and then, after selling the collected works of William Faulkner for two boxes of pasta, heats it up and mixes it with half a squishy, rancid onion and some ketchup from the bottom of a plastic bottle—he cuts the top of the bottle with a serrated knife pours hot water into it and makes sure to get every last smidgen of red out of it—adds it to the heaping plate of rigatoni, and devours it. And before I see him sell his violin to a bus driver, I am aware that the dog’s name is Archibald.

I see myself get my right hand out of Asja’s and give her the left one instead and step in between her and the dog. I hear myself

“Archibald!” I yelled to the dog, and his ears suddenly perked up and his tail went down between his legs. He closed his cavernous jaws with a whiny yelp, jumped sideways toward the river, realized he couldn’t go that way, made a tight half circle around himself, took off like he was spring-loaded over the fence that separated the path and somebody’s war garden, and vanished.

For a moment I actually felt heroic. I turned around and saw Asja trying to comprehend what had just occurred, her hand still breaking my fingers, when a mortar shrieked over us and rocked somewhere nearby, sending everything running, everything except us.

We had no legs to run, no lungs to breathe. We just dropped to the ground and lay there holding hands as one, two, three sirens started to shrill at different pitches and filled the vast skies above us with their morbid symphony.

No other shells fell. We looked for them against the gray and white sky but the gravel became uncomfortable and we scooted closer to the river into the dewy grass. When I tried to let go of her hand she crumpled her fingers in mine.

“Don’t you dare,” she whispered.

“I won’t.”

She was silent for a while. I felt so close to her, never closer.

“I heard,” she said, still whispering.

“Heard what?”

“You guys are going to Scotland.”

Asmir had met this British woman aid worker and brought her to see some of our shows. She loved them and asked if we wanted her to put out a good word for us in the UK, that she knew some theater people. Asmir said yes but then completely forgot about it. Then, a couple of weeks ago, we got this invitation from Edinburgh to participate in some kind of festival. It was supposed to be in August, but there was no way the authorities would let us go. Bokal was in the army, Asmir was evading them although he was twenty-five, and Omar and I had both just gotten drafted. They didn’t let anyone out, let alone potential soldiers.

“Nobody is going anywhere. We just got invited, that’s all.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“It was nothing. We got a letter. When is the last time you heard of anybody getting a passport? It’s impossible.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

I sat up and tried to let go of her hand but she wouldn’t let me.

“Don’t you let go.”

I leaned away a little but she pulled me on top of her and into a feverish kiss. It was insane and outlandish, as though my consciousness went into every cell of my body and I was there in the curve of my lips, at the tip of my tongue, on my dewy back, where her hands were coldly pressing, and down there where my erection was pressing at her. It was wonderful.

It wasn’t until the sun poked through the clouds and some children rode by on ancient BMX bikes and made fun of us that we got up and decided we might as well go along with my plan for the day. We crossed the Shoe People bridge and saw the smoke from behind
the Shoe People building.
Shoe People
is this horrid cartoon for small kids—all colors and no heart. Right before the war started, this monstrosity of a building had burgeoned in the middle of the town, and some genius had painted it in a combination of pastel yellow, pastel blue, hot pink, and brown, which is why Tuzlaks started calling it the Shoe People building.

The earlier shell had hit the parking lot in front of it, lifted this VW bug, flipped it, and brought it down atop a little Citroën. By the time we got close, you couldn’t see what colors they were, as they were burned extracrispy and still burning. The bug looked a little bit like a turtle on its back. Some pissed-off storeowners were sweeping their broken windows off the pavement. There were shrapnel holes everywhere. We overheard that two women were killed, but we walked past the jail and up to Banja Park to make out.

Sitting on our favorite bench overlooking the town we could have been photographed for one of those cheesy love calendars that eleven-year-old girls across the world keep on their walls, all breathtaking nature and saccharine love. At one point something ran through the bushes behind us and we startled, but it was some old man in too small of a suit jacket, crazy we guessed.

“I thought it was Archibald,” she said and I couldn’t stop laughing. “Where in the world did you get Archibald?”

All I could do was point to my head. She punched my arm and kissed me.

“You goober, don’t you ever leave me.”

APRIL

Asmir, Bokal, and I decided to go out after rehearsal. The Galerija was a toilet of a café, two low-ceilinged rooms crammed with bulky wicker chairs and smelling of rotten drywall.

The guy behind the bar ignored us. Bokal had to go down to him and order our long coffees as Asmir and I settled into our chattering chairs.

“Do the waiters here have to go to a school to learn to look this disaffected?” I said.

“The less he comes this way the better,” Asmir replied.

Last night he had mooched forty marks off a Dutch humanitarian worker he was fucking and lifted a bottle of Johnnie Walker from her pantry when she went to the bathroom to clean herself up. He wanted to do something that would end their arrangement, because he was getting sick of her. He said she gave good blow jobs. In the dark. That was his joke. She was fifteen years older than him, or more, and he said he could only do her in the dark. Asmir was a bit of a bastard when it came to women.

Bokal came back smoking a cigarette we knew he didn’t have when we came in.

“Where did you get that?” Asmir asked him.

“Look who you’re asking.”

Bokal called himself the king of lying, scrounging, borrowing, and freeloading and was proud of it. Once I witnessed him leech a mark from a Gypsy beggar kid, honest to God. We were sitting in some other café and this little kid came over to beg from us and Bokal told him that he was in trouble, that he had ordered a coffee he didn’t have money for, and that the owner of the café would kick his ass when he found out. The little guy felt bad for him, took a wad of small bills out of his sock, and gave him a mark to pay for the coffee.

The waiter/barman, with a gap in his teeth you could push a beer cap through, brought over three long coffees and put the receipt under the ashtray. I couldn’t stand the taste of coffee and so put in three packets of sugar.

“What do you think, Asmir, God doesn’t see you fornicating with all these foreigners?” Bokal asked out of nowhere. “They come over here from who knows where to help Bosnians and you treat them like shit.”

“Hey, I’m Bosnian. They’re helping
me
. Get off.”

Asmir laughed through his nose at his own joke and we did the same. There was something disarmingly childish about him that you just couldn’t hate no matter what he said or did. He had a knack for downplaying his faults, a particular kind of charisma that made you let him get away with murder as though it were mischief.

“Pass me your cups and keep pretending like you’re talking,” Asmir said.

Bokal and I carried on a mock conversation while Asmir, hidden by the tablecloth, poured some Johnnie Walker from his shoulder bag into all our coffee cups.

“Let’s drink to us making it to Edinburgh,” Asmir said, and I saw all the good humor go out of Bokal. His face went sour. We clinked our cups and drank the stuff. It was terrible but it burned in a good way. Bokal leaned back and the wicker under him woke up and groaned under his bulk. He glanced at the remains of the cigarette in the ashtray.

“Fuckin’ walls,” he said.

“What’s up Bokal, you don’t wanna go to Edinburgh?” I asked him, trying a jovial tone. He looked at me like
you lucky kid,
and I remembered that he was in the army, that even if the rest of us, by some Miracle, got our passports, he probably wouldn’t.

“Look at that painting,” he said, nodding to the wall next to me. It was kind of a caricature of downtown Tuzla, with its signature buildings all being squeezed at the bottom by a huge white snake.

“What does it mean?”

“It’s from that song, right?” I prided myself on being a badass punk rocker, and admitting that I knew all about
sevdalinke
would betray my bad rep. I took a huge gulp from my cup to reinforce my badassedness.

“Do you know what the snake represents?”

“The wall?”

“Wrong.”

“What are you talking about?” Asmir butted in. “There used to be an actual wall around the whole downtown. There are still pieces of it left up on Banja Park, that old armory up there.”

“Yes, but do you think that somebody would write a song about a fucking wall? No. The snake is the invading army of Omar Paša Latas, who was dispatched from Istanbul to quash a rebellion in these parts. When he was done he surrounded the whole town with his troops and just hung out there for a while to show off the might of the Ottoman army and make sure nobody else had any funny ideas.”