Shards: A Novel (18 page)

This was startling coming from Bokal, who was known to us more for his street smarts.

“So what’s your point?” I asked.

“My point is that us thinking that we can escape the serpent’s grip is just a very funny idea.”

He downed his cup and slid it in front of Asmir.

“Branka said it’s possible,” Asmir said and, keeping an eye on the waiter, poured him another Johnnie, this time unmixed. I quickly finished my drink, too, and presented Asmir with my own empty cup.

“Possible, my shlong. If they let anyone go it’ll be all the young’uns in the troupe. Me, you, him, whoever can carry a gun, we’re just dreaming.”

“If anyone can do it, Branka can. She’ll fight for Omar to go and he’s Ismet's age.”

Branka was the woman in charge of the Home of the Youth, where we rehearsed; she was an ass-kicker taker-care-of-things and Omar’s mother. Omar was part of the troupe, too, because he wrote and performed the music for one of the plays in our repertoire, a re-imagining of Saint-Exupéry’s
Little Prince
. I played the Little Prince. Omar’s little brother Boro played the Little Prince as a child.

“What is she gonna do, sign the passports instead of General Lendo?”

“Richard Bach says that when you wish something strongly enough, the universe shifts to make it happen.” It was like Asmir to pull infuriating New Age quotes out of his ass like this. Bokal stood up, tightened his fists, and shut his eyes.

“Here, I’m strongly wishing for my kidney back,” he said, opened his eyes and fists and pulled his polo shirt out of his jeans. He turned and revealed his operation scar to us. “Oops, tough titty. It’s still gone.”

He pulled himself together and walked down to the bar.

Outside, the day was dying and the thin, exhausted, fun-starved people were slowly starting to fill the garden seating area for the evening.

“That’s Bokal for you,” Asmir said, “no faith.” He grabbed my forearm to make me look at him. “We’re going to Edinburgh, you mark my words.”

And somehow a part of me knew we would. That was Asmir’s power. Despite his hypocrisy, you didn’t doubt that he believed.

“From your mouth to God’s ears,” I said.

“What are you going to do with Dunda?” he then asked. Dunda was what everyone called Asja. The question blindsided me. A sort of panic rang through my skull and rattled down my limbs. There I was wishing and praying to be away from this town, plotting to do so, believing I was out already, and not for one moment did she ever enter my thoughts.

“Nothing,” I heard myself say. “I’ll go to Edinburgh and I’ll come back.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Asmir said. “She’s your first. I know it feels strong, but she’s your first. You can’t throw away your life just because you think you know what love is at seventeen.”

“Eighteen.”

“Even worse.” He took a sip. “Nothing’s gonna come out of that.” Bokal lumbered over to us and brandished another cigarette he had scored.

“Ismet says he would come back if we made it to Edinburgh.”

“Come back here? Why?” Bokal looked flabbergasted.

“He loves his girlfriend.”

“Listen to me. If you get out of here and then come back, you better hide from me. If I see you on the street I will cripple you.”

“Why do you care?” I laughed, though I knew he was serious.

Bokal ignored me. He and Asmir talked about art and about the girls going in and out of the restrooms. I said not a word. A part of me wanted to run all the way to Batva, ring Asja’s doorbell, have a man-to-man with her father and win him over, marry her, go to war, liberate villages, and come home from the front lines every week to my love. The other part saw myself on a boat, alone, escaping September. I imagined myself in Scotland, what it would look like. I imagined green pastures and jolly red-bearded Scotts, long-haired yaks and ancient castles, wet cobblestones and mythic monsters hiding in lakes, things I read about.

At some point we heard two gunshots ring outside and all the people in the café leaped and charged into the night to the edge of the park where something exciting was taking place. Tipsy, we followed the dark crowd, and there was this mountain of a man out there, standing in the moonlight, a foot taller than anyone else, slinging what appeared to be an antique two-shell shotgun over his
shoulder and pointing to the ground where everyone was looking. Some smokers flicked on their lighters to better see whomever he had shot, and I saw that the big man had a top part of a ranger or security guard uniform on. For a moment I saw him squat out of sight and had to blindly follow Bokal, who cut through the crowd with ease. When the big man reemerged I saw his face and remembered him.

He was in my batch of draftees for the physical and psych evaluations, which made him my age, but unlike me, he looked like a soldier that day. With his shirt off he looked chiseled out of a boulder, had the full beard and body odor of a man. They wanted him for an MP but he kept begging to be in the special forces. They said no, but he kept ridiculing them, pushing their buttons, farting, and finally he pissed off one of the brass, who assigned him to the unit with an average life expectancy of about a week.

The crowd parted a little and what I saw lying there was lean and furry.

It was Archibald.

I kneeled next to him and touched his hind end. I felt like crying. His rib cage was devastated with a hole. There were bones protruding and they were white in the moonlight.

“Was it yours?” asked the mountain man.

“That’s Archibald,” I said and walked back toward the café. Asmir snickered, thinking I was messing with the guy. There was an omen here, and I was drunk and ready to go home.

MAY

On May 25, after rehearsal, I went over to Omar’s without calling ahead. It was in the late afternoon. I yelled his name from in front of his house and his head popped out of the second-story window.
I wanted to go out, but he felt like staying home, asked me in. I caved, as usual, and he sent his ten-year-old brother down to unlock the door. I teased Boro that he had a girlfriend and he told me to “screw off,” so I chased him up the stairs, a routine.

Omar was sitting by the window, smoking, trying to blow the smoke outside.

“Shut the door,” he said and sprayed jasmine-scented air freshener around in hisses.

I perched myself in the usual spot on the sofa, with my back against the stereo, and picked up a guitar that had seen better days some ten to fifteen years ago. It sounded like it was on hallucinogens.

I don’t remember what we talked about or did. I don’t even remember if it was still light outside. I just remember freezing in midsentence when I heard the muffled discharge of a faraway cannon—by this point everybody could distinguish between the sound of a cannon and that of a mortar. There hadn’t been any shelling since that morning in March.

Time imploded. My internal clock, trained to turn on as soon as a discharge was heard, started counting seconds before the projectile would reach the town, three seconds in all—everybody knew that, too. Three seconds to find cover, or run, or pray, or hold a thought, or remember. Three seconds.

One, one thousand.

Two, one thousand.

Three, one thousand.

Movies don’t do it justice—that’s all I’m going to say about the thought-collapsing, breath-stealing sound a spinning shell makes as it pierces the air on the way down toward the center of your town, in between three of the busiest cafés and a little bit to the right of the popcorn vendor in the midst of hundreds of citizens who are
pretending that everything is okay, that the war is winding down. But I didn’t know that yet.

Three seconds passed in silence, then BOOM! A close one. Sirens blared. We rushed to the living room because it overlooked the center, Branka already at the open window.

“Stay away from the windows,” she said.

“Come on, Mom,” Omar replied and looked outside.

“You guys wanna go to the basement?”

“It’s not like it’s our first time.”

We listened for more discharges. Everything was quiet.

“You smell like smoke,” Omar’s mother said to him and he grunted in feeble protest. We kept on looking out.

A car sped down Ju
ž
na Magistrala, a red Fiat Zastava 101, backfiring and leaving clouds of gray fumes behind it. Then came other cars. Then bicycles. Then people running. Everybody was hurrying toward the center.

I decided to walk home, as I knew the police would shorten the curfew tonight. I said my good-byes and left. The night was quiet and I took the path by the river. Walking past the gymnasium, I saw somebody graffitiing one of the walls and I hung out in the grass until I figured out what it said. It said:
HALLOWED BE THY NAME
, and judging by the face of a zombie cyborg by the name of Eddie next to it, I suspected it wasn’t a religious message.

When I got home my parents were beside themselves. Mother was angry, unable to utter a word. Father wanted to know where I was, why I didn’t call. I went past him into the kitchen and poured a glass of water.

“Open your mouth so I can tell you,” I told them. It doesn’t translate well into English but means something like
It’s none of your business
.

“What’s wrong with you? Don’t you know what happened?”

“Yeah. A shell fell downtown. Very exciting.”

He just stood there, so I went to my room where my pallid brother was watching TV.

I saw it all on TV: a severed child’s foot by the curb, survivors piling the wounded into the backs of cars and banging on the roofs when they couldn’t fit any more in, to signal the drivers to step on it, blood trickling into a manhole with popcorn sprinkled in it, dozens of humans on the cobbled ground, not many of them moving at all, and a decapitated body in a green sweatshirt sitting upright inside the Gate Café, a cigarette still burning in an ashtray in front of him.

That was the last shell that fell on my town.

Body count: 71.

Average age of the victims: 23.

Wounded: around 124.

Cousin Garo died in this shelling and so did a bunch of guys I hung out with at one point or another.

My brother and I weren’t allowed to go to the funeral. The town was petrified of another deliberate attack on the mass gathering of civilians, so the time and place of the funeral weren’t announced on any media.

They ended up being buried at dawn a few days later on a clearing in Banja Park. Both my parents were in attendance. Mom later told me that, as it was happening, swarms of birds took off from the forest, circled the area above the gathering, then flew off. She said she had never seen so many birds in one spot.

When I went to that special graveyard for the first time to pay my respects to Garo, every grave sported a photograph of its occupant.

I walked around the mounds of still-wet dirt, peering into unfamiliar eyes, recognizing a few faces here and there, looking for my cousin. His grave was perfect. It smelled like a plowed field. “1964–1995,” it read.

I walked away from the place, then stopped and returned. There was a little bug of a thought that made me do it, made me feel like I’d missed something. I retraced my steps, looked at the photographs again, and when I saw it it killed me. Garo was my cousin, and seeing his grave didn’t affect me as this stranger’s did. The picture was murky, not the best likeness, but I recognized those eyes, that full beard, those broad shoulders, and something squeezed in my chest. I got a head rush. I had to sit down in the wet dirt.

“Mustafa Nali
,” read this grave, “1977–1995.”

The man who shot Archibald.

From then on I had trouble falling asleep. The dark of my room would seep off the ceiling and cover me with its morose particles. I would pull up my childhood covers, with their succession of sleep-walking Donald Ducks, over my head, but I couldn’t keep my eyes closed. The dark would find its way through the wetness of my eyes, through my pores and the roots of my hair all the way into my thoughts, and the shadows of my room would spring like screaming dogs or ominous storks, beaks dripping with dead, vile flesh.

I dreamed of him. I agonized over my two memories of him, tried to remember them perfectly. I imagined his life before death. Who was he? What was he like? He never left my mind.

I started to see him. I saw him everywhere. I saw him first from my balcony. He was standing in front of the arcade downstairs, watching kids play Double Dragon. Then I saw him at school, on the staircase. He was an extra in the movies I watched when there
was electricity. He was a guest in my house, sitting on my parents’ bed, silently nodding approval. I found his toes in the residue of gunk in our bathtub.

Why?

He was just this guy, this stranger. A random fucking guy who begged to be in the special forces.

But now he was Mustafa Nali
. Now he was dead and pieced together like a puzzle in a shallow coffin, parts probably missing, swept into the gutters, and washed away by the cisterns of industrial water from the chemical plant. Maybe bits of his skull were gone, never to reunite with the rest of him. Or perhaps some of his fingertips still wiggled somewhere under the asphalt, never to rest in peace.