Shards: A Novel (21 page)

The parquet floor squeaked under my right foot and I lifted it off. I stood there on one foot, staring at the sticker. I stood and I stood there. I stood breathing deeply until the door to the kitchen opened behind me and I heard my mother freeze in the doorway.

“You’re home.”

I put my right foot down. The parquet squeaked imperceptibly.

“What are you doing?”

I faced her. Mother was up to her elbows in flour. Her graying hair was in a ponytail, her arms chalky white.

I went up to her and kissed her cheek, said hello. She looked at me sideways.

“What’s gotten into you?”

“What?”

“Listen, I think you guys will make it to Scotland.”

One of the parquetry squares had a dark node and I made it appear and disappear under my white sock. A tear worked itself out of my eye and dropped two centimeters north of the node. I pressed my big toe on it. When I lifted my foot, it was gone.

“I just don’t know what to do.” My voice was whiny, stupid.

Mother stepped in and half hugged me, keeping her floury forearms away from my useless T-shirt.

“Let’s talk about it.”

“Listen,” my father said from across the coffee table, “I talked to Branka today and she thinks you guys are going for sure.”

On the TV was a blonde woman opening and closing her mouth into a microphone and swaying idiotically. The sound was muted.

“She didn’t tell
us,
” I said.

“I know,” he said, condescendingly nodding his head. He couldn’t help himself wanting to be important, acting like he was. I hated that. “We would like to know what your plan is.”

I looked at my mother smoking in the armchair. She held my gaze but said nothing.

“What plan? If Lendo signs the passport I’ll go to Scotland with everyone else.”

“And then?”

“What do you mean ‘and then’?”

“He talked to Ramona’s father,” my mother said through her personal haze.

“Ramona will stay in London after your tour,” my father said.

This was no news to me. Ramona had an older sister in London and the whole troupe knew she was planning on staying in the UK. We also swore not to tell anyone about it.

“I hope you didn’t tell Branka that,” I said. The singer on TV finished swaying and bowed to us.

“I didn’t. Her father did.”

I looked at him.

“Yes, he talked to Branka and arranged everything. Branka’s gonna let her stay. That’s better than having to run.”

“Did he have to pay for this?”

“Don’t worry about that.”

“What does this have to do with me?”

“I could arrange the same thing for you.”

“If you want him to,” my mother added.

“To stay with Ramona in London?”

“To stay in Zagreb on the way back.”

“What for?”

“To get papers to go to America.”

Heat came out of nowhere and I thought I was spontaneously combusting. It spread from inside out, all over me, saturating my flesh.

“Your uncle Irfan phoned earlier today,” Father said. “He says you should come stay with him in California, go to college.”

I thought nothing.

“So what do you think? Ismet!”

I looked at Mother, her worried eyes. “What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know.”

A gray-haired man was strumming a silent guitar on the screen now and the back vocalists behind him clapped their hands in unison.

“I think I want to come back,” I said.

Father leaned back in his rocker and turned to the screen, his hand distractedly rubbing his face, rasping against his weak stubble. Mother took deep tokes of her cigarette. I could hear the smoke whir through the filter and into her lungs. When it came out it was silent like the TV, climbing slowly to the ceiling.

“I don’t know what’s smart,” my father said. “Who knows how long the war will last. It can go on for years or end tomorrow.”

“It will not end tomorrow,” Mother said with venom.

“Why don’t you want me to come back?”

“We do—” my father started.

“Because if you die on the front lines, I’ll kill myself.” It was Mother.

The room swung, the gray-haired man strummed his guitar, the three women behind him clapped, and the smoke billowed toward the ceiling. All things were in motion, not making a sound.

AUGUST 2

“When are you gonna call me tomorrow, goober?” Asja asked and I felt angry. It was 8 AM and we were on our favorite bench in the city park and I had just told her that there was a big chance Lendo had signed our papers—we were to find out later that morning.

Her brow was mountainous. A light breeze picked up portions of her hair and let them go, picked them up and let them go.

“Did you hear what I just said?” I asked.

“My dad’ll be home all day but he usually goes to work on our car around ten o’clock,” she said.

“Look at me,” I said, but she wouldn’t.

Instead, she put a kiss on my lips, unexpectedly, and sensing it was going to be a brief, devastating one, I leaned into it more and felt my pursed lips fight for purchase against hers, trying to protract the mellifluent contact, and then it was all over. She stood up, told me to call her tomorrow morning, and walked away forever. I watched her devolve from the flesh-to-flesh contact, to a specter down the street, her peach-colored backpack bobbing slightly, noiselessly, her hand flying up for a wave, then—foliage.

* * *

I was waiting for the County Office of Personal Documents to open. I guess I looked like a down-in-the-mouth late-blooming virgin with heartache, because the first thing Asmir said when he walked up with Bokal was:

“Why are you sad; you haven’t even given it to her? By the time I was eighteen I had more pussy than salad.”

He ruffled my hair like I was his fucking nephew or something and I punched his hand away.

“Get the fuck off me!”

“Whoa,” he cried out, trying to shake off the pain as though it were a crab clamped to his finger.

It took me all that time to notice that Asmir had on new clothes. He sported a pair of Levi’s—fake and probably made in Turkey, but crisp and jet-black and nice-looking. On top he had a striped polo shirt and in his hand was a plastic bag with more stuff. Both of them had on brand-new Converse All Stars, also fake.

“How did you get the gear?”

“Oh, our troupe was sponsored by an undisclosed German humanitarian organization today,” Asmir said.

“Well, some members of it anyway,” added Bokal and the two of them cackled like children.

“You got a sponsorship for the troupe and you went shopping for clothes?”

“Do you know what I had to do to secure this sponsorship?”

“What?”

“Six, no, five and a half times I had to sexually please a forty-seven-year old aid worker with pussy flaps the size of elephant’s ears. I think I deserve a pair of sneakers out of it.”

“Not a word about this to Branka, though,” Bokal said.

“Or her sons.”

To the left of the County Office was a rectangular hole that used to contain a pane of bulletproof glass but now was boarded up with a sheet of plywood. We heard some scraping coming from the inside, and the top of the sheet tipped back. Four fingers wedged themselves between the plaster and the wood on each side and the whole sheet disappeared inward, revealing the disgruntled face of a county employee, a youngish fellow with dark hair and a week’s worth of stubble.

“Are you open?” Bokal asked.

“What do you think?”

As I was closest, I went to him first and gave him my ID card.

“Here to pick up my passport and the license to travel out of the country.”

He snatched the ID out of my hands and disappeared inside. When he came back he held the navy blue document and a sheet of paper.

“Ten marks,” he said.

I took the note out of my pocket, straightened it out, and handed it to him. He folded the piece of paper twice, stacked the ID card on top of it, put the whole thing inside the passport, and gave it to me.

Asmir stepped up next. I opened up the passport and stared at my picture. It was a little crooked, but the signature to the right of it looked official.

“Wow,” I said. “I can’t believe we really are going.”

“I can’t believe they are charging us,” Bokal said. “You have ten marks to lend me?”

“Sorry, man. My old man talked to Branka and she said bring ten marks.”

“Didn’t I tell you we’re going to Scotland?” Asmir said, holding up his passport, then spread his arms and mimed flying like a bird.

“Fuck,” Bokal said. He walked up to the window and put his ID in front of the man, who just looked at it without picking it up.

“It costs ten marks to pick up the passport.”

“I’ll go get it; I just want to see if they approved mine.”

Grimacing, the man took the ID and once more vanished into the back. Bokal turned to us.

“To tell you the truth, I don’t have ten marks at home, either.”

“Fuck, Bokal, why didn’t you tell me? We just spent a hundred and fifty on the black market.”

“I didn’t know they were gonna charge us.”

The man coughed to get Bokal’s attention.

“Your passport is here, but your license to travel was denied on account of your being a member of the military.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that you can take this passport and wipe your ass with it, is what it means.”

“What’s the point of giving somebody a travel document and forbidding them to leave the country?”

“What’s the point of trying to make sense of the bureaucratic lapses of an infant state in the fourth year of a devastating war?”

“So what am I gonna do now?”

“You can go home and bring me ten marks and I’ll give you a worthless document. Or you can go home, take those ten marks, buy a bottle of moonshine, and drink it until the colors of the world melt off.”

“I can’t drink,” Bokal said, changing tack. “I lost a kidney in the trenches.”

The man sighed.

“Listen, if the passport is void anyway, why can’t you give it to me for free?”

“Because it cost the county ten marks to print it.”

“But if I don’t pick it up you’re gonna lose the money anyway.”

“What can I say?”

“You don’t have to say anything. Just close your eyes and hand me the passport and you’ll never see me again.”

The man shook his head and placed Bokal’s ID on the sill but kept the passport. Bokal scooped it up and turned to us. For the first time ever I saw Bokal scared. He bit the nail off his thumb and spit it into the grass.

“You’ll have to sneak out illegally. The passport will work outside of Bosnia.”

“You think?”

“What do you think, that some embassy worker is going to call Lendo on the phone and ask him if one Be
o Bokal got permission to leave the country?”

“You’re right.”

“I know I’m right. Let’s go to my place and get the money.”

“I don’t want to go all the way to Ši Selo.”

“What do you want from me, Bokal? You want me to go and get it for you?”

“Hold on a sec,” Bokal said and went up to the window again.

“Hey, it’s me again.”

“What’s up?”

“You don’t happen to need a pair of red Converse All Stars?”

“No, I don’t.”

Bokal folded his right leg and took off the sneaker without having to bend down. He presented it to the man like an expert shoe salesman.

“I just bought them at the market for twenty marks and am willing to part with them for my passport.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Come on. These are good sneakers. And trendy.”

“They’re too big for me.”

“They are not big. Just wear two or three pairs of socks. Winter is coming. They’ll be perfect and warm.”

The man started to laugh.

“What’s funny?”

“You are. You’re relentless.”

“I need that passport.”

He laughed again, shaking his head.

“All right. Put ’em up here.”

Bokal took off the other sneaker and reunited it with her friend. The man gave him the passport and Bokal casually stuffed it in his back pocket.

Minutes later Asmir and I watched Bokal shuffle down the street in his black dress socks. Asmir stayed behind to wait for the rest of the troupe to show up and help out the younger ones. He reminded me that the bus was leaving at ten p.m. from the front of the National Theater building. I went home to pack.

Walking homeward I felt that I was there, putting one foot in front of the other and advancing through the familiar locality the last time in this direction for who knew how long. I felt the hardness of the sidewalk, on my heel, then on my toes, on my heel, then on my toes, and I saw my feet come down upon it, left one then right one then left one, swallowing distance, and what I felt and what I saw matched perfectly. That was how it was at first, anyway, because as soon as I started thinking, as soon as I said to myself
It’s happening, you’re leaving tonight
, things started to shift and not make sense. It felt like there was a charge in my chest and in my brain, and looking down I saw my feet move in their Reeboks, but all I could feel was the crushing weight of Asja’s
goober,
of Mother’s
I’ll kill myself,
of Father’s
I don’t know what’s smart,
of Bokal’s black socks and Asmir’s outstretched wings. And suddenly I walked into something. There wasn’t anything in front of me that I could see—the tree-lined October Revolution Street looked the same as always—but I walked into something. I could feel the impact. For a second I felt dead and empty and couldn’t help but stop moving. When I looked I saw myself from the back, walking away, carrying on. I stood there, close to the sandbagged entrance to the main bank and saw myself walking away with a purpose. It sure looked like me. It sure looked like I knew what I was getting myself into.