Shards: A Novel (22 page)

Then I was moving again, my sneakers swallowing meters of gray sidewalk, but something was off. Something was missing. I slowed down and turned around, and there I saw myself standing in front of the bank, unable to move, unable to catch up to me, as though there were an invisible barrier separating two possible futures that only a certain percentage of me could pass through. I wanted to stop and go back, but my own feet kept on moving.

At home Mother packed my bag, made sandwiches for the road, tightened the caps on bottles of water. Father gave me a thousand deutsche marks, and I put them in a tobacco pouch and hid them in my underwear. Mehmed kept touching me, patting my back, my forearm, his eyes different than usual, fearful with love. We all sat around in the low glow of a small neon tube and pretended nothing was changing. Father made the same ancient jokes, Mother smoked, shaking her head, Mehmed and I smiled. At nine we all walked out and through the town to the National Theater. There were a lot of people there, children and parents. They swarmed around the bus, loading it. Some families were louder than others, mothers wailing, fathers yelling last-minute instructions, jumping up and banging on the bus windows.

Once my bag was in the bowels of the bus, we, my family, quickly and quietly hugged and kissed and I climbed aboard. Quickly and quietly was the only way to say good-bye.

The back of the bus was all adult actors from the National Theater; the front of the bus was all us, Asmir’s troupe. But Asmir wasn’t there. And Bokal wasn’t there. Branka said she didn’t care. Asmir showed up a minute before the bus left and found me in my seat. He said he was staying behind to help Bokal sneak out illegally, that a friend can’t leave a friend behind.

He took my hand like my mother did and said that if somehow he didn’t make it to Edinburgh, he trusted me to lead the group in his stead. He said I was an artist, like himself. He then gave a short speech to the front half of the bus, said
see you in Edinburgh,
and stepped off onto the street. Doors hissed closed behind him. The bus crept ahead and a jolt went through the crowd of parents, whose hands flew up to wave and whose eyebrows went up together with their lips to cover up with smiles the fact that their hearts were descending into their stomachs.

Soon enough there was nothing but the hum of the engine and the war darkness outside the windows, and a creeping feeling that I had left something important behind.

Excerpts from Ismet Prci
’s Diary
from February 2000

I’m a lizard,
mati
. Eric got married in January and I had to move out of our place. I pay a hundred dollars now for a room in my theater teacher’s attic. There’s no place in it where I can stand up. I crawl around like a fucking lizard. I’m a lizard.

I hate going downstairs. My teacher’s kids hate me. I live on bread and peanut butter, which I keep in the room. I piss into a two-liter Mountain Dew bottle and pour it out the window when everyone’s asleep. I only get out to go to classes and buy booze. I shit and shower on campus.

On weekends I take a train to San Diego. To see Melissa. Her roommates still hate me. I met one of their mothers. When I told her where I was from she said,
Oh, I didn’t know there were any white people in Bosnia.
I wanted to take my gun and shoot her in the face.

Mustafa is back,
mati
. I can’t get him out of my head. I spend hours daydreaming his life as I wait for mine to make sense.

I’m waiting to hear from UCSD, whether they will take me. Everything depends on that. If they let me transfer in I’ll be with Melissa.

My gun tastes of ancient cutlery,
mati
, but its mouth smells of Bosnia.

(. . . the man called meat . . .)

1.

In wartime, when his country needed him the most—his shooting finger for defending, his body for a shield, his sanity and humanity as a sacrifice for future generations, his blood for fertilization of its soil—in those most pressing times, Mustafa’s special forces combat training lasted twelve days. He ran the obstacle course exactly twenty-four times, he threw fake hand grenades through a truck tire from various distances exactly six times, he practiced marksmanship with an air rifle so that bullets were not wasted, he got covered with blankets and beaten by his peers for talking in his sleep at least once. He did countless push-ups and sit-ups, chin-ups and squats, lunges and curls, mindless repetitions designed not to make him fit but to break him, so that when he was, the drill sergeant could instruct him in the ways of military hierarchy and make him an effective combatant, one who was too scared not to follow orders and who would fucking die when he was told to fucking die.

At some point he was introduced to the real weapons. “This is an Uzi, this is how it works, we don’t have any Uzis
so just forget what you just learned. This is an LAW, this is how it’s used, we only have a limited number of them and they are in the hands of people who already know how to use them, so you’ll never get in contact with them, so just forget what you just learned.” And so forth.

The knife guy taught him where to stick the knife for what effect and he stabbed hanging sacks of sand with people drawn on them. The mine guy showed him how to set up antipersonnel and antivehicle mines and pointed out all their deadly charms. The army doctor took a swig of plum brandy and told him that war was a giant piece of shit and that he, Mustafa, was a chunk of corn in that shit and then warned him not to come to his office again until he had a gut wound so big he could canoe right through it. That was, about, it.

In the end he got a Kalashnikov like everybody else, one clip of ammunition, one hand grenade, and one knife and was sent to the trenches with the regular army for a week, just to sample what war had to offer, to read the manual, as it were, before they decided what special unit he was fit to join.

2.

The morning was shitty and opaque, pregnant with grayness and cold moisture. A slothful, hungover rain tapped them on the shoulders as they waited for the trucks to take them to the front line. Those who were issued caps now put them on. The others just hunched, made their necks smaller, and continued to suffer the water torture.

To Mustafa it all felt, a little bit, like the first day of school or a funeral. Everybody was dressed the same, standing around, stupidly, looking at everyone else, not knowing what was appropriate.
Faces were knotted with wretchedness, working too hard not to collapse, melting away from the skull bones.

Around them, the base was just waking up to the sounds of drill sergeants rampaging through the barracks. Steam was billowing out from the side of the kitchen. The guards at the gate were fucking around in their guardhouse, tossing a paper cup, laughing, as if nobody could see them through the glass. Some pigeons landed on the soccer field and strutted up and down and around, mocking military discipline.

Mustafa curled and uncurled his toes, already freezing in his oversize boots. Actually, his whole uniform was oversize and the camouflage patterns on the pants and the jacket didn’t match. He had asked for a medium and they had given him an extralarge. When he complained, they made him scour the kitchen storage room with his toothbrush. Now the side pockets of his pants, which were supposed to be at his thighs, were tickling the tops of the boots. Looking down he noticed the laces were untied again. The fucking things were rigid and slippery and no knot could survive for long. He bent down, his jacket ballooning in front of him as if he had a prop belly on, and laced up.

“Your ration,” somebody said behind him and Mustafa turned. This scarecrow of a soldier was handing him two packs of Ronhill, staring off somewhere with his eyes like wounds. There was something about him, a veneer of divorced guys in cheap motels on rainy afternoons, staring into swirls of wallpaper and throttled dreams.

“I don’t smoke.”

“Yes you do. You just don’t know it yet,” said the scarecrow, tossing the cigarettes on the pavement, sick of holding them in the air. He walked to an older soldier with a hood on.
Mustafa finished tying another provisional knot and picked up what was given to him.

“I swear to God, the only reason I’m fighting in this war are these shit sticks,” said the man with the hood on, grinning. He dug through his pack fanatically, holding it in front of his face like a hamster. Behind him, the gate opened for four dirty trucks and a van, causing a stir.

“Well, fuck it! Now they come.” He spat, putting the pack away, his fingers shaking, his eyes dying. He stood in line next to Mustafa, sighing and pouting like a toddler.

A thick man in a pristine uniform and with a fancy sidearm, the captain, stepped down from the back of the van and everybody saluted. He touched the rim of his cap casually, as if checking to see whether he had put it on at all this morning, and ordered one of the lower officers to read the list, to do his job. He lit a cigarette instead, leaned on the van, and smoked. In comparison to everybody else he looked like a soldier of some other, superior army.

A corporal with misaligned, yellow teeth shouted the last names into the morning, and corresponding soldiers climbed into the trucks. When he was done Mustafa was still standing at attention.

“What’s the problem, Private?” asked the captain, walking up to him, letting the smoke come out of his nose like an angry dragon.

“I did not hear my name called, sir.”

“Did you listen for it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Bring me that list!” He motioned to the corporal like he was going to kick his ass. “And you give me your ID.”

Mustafa handed him his military card. The captain started
scanning the clipboard and in no time found a match. He flogged him with a stare, then chucked the document right into Mustafa’s face.

“Get your ass on that truck! I didn’t hear my name called, sir! Next time open your fucking ears!”

Mustafa ran to the closest truck but found it full.

“And don’t you think I’ll forget about this! I’m like a fucking elephant!”

There was no room on any of the trucks. Mustafa turned around in confusion.

“What is it now?”

“There’s no room, sir.”

“Well, I guess you’ll have to ride with me.”

3.

The back of the van had no side windows, just the little one up front that looked into the back of the driver’s rotund head, and two on the back doors. It was hot in there and dark and humid and noisy. The captain slept, sprawled over two seats like Caesar, his heaving belly testing the limits of his shirt’s buttons. The corporal sat like a robot, suffering through his life with conditioned mindlessness and fatalism that was intolerable. There was barely anything behind his gaze, anything alive anyway. Mustafa held his shit together in the midst of this.

The radio was garbled, its voices extraterrestrial, aloof, ill. The tires made out with the asphalt, making that constant slurping sound. Raindrops banged covetously on the thin metal roof. The captain woke himself up, looked around, licked his seemingly salty lips, and then closed his eyes again. It was then that Mustafa noticed that his boot was untied
again. It was only the left one this time. At first he was going to let it be, since he didn’t have to walk for a while and he was fed up with tying them all the time, but the little insects of compulsion gnawed at his thoughts, reminding him that untied laces were in an unnatural state, that the universe ached because of it, that he had to do something about that.

As he bowed down, all he realized was that it got lighter in the van, and that there was a tug on the front of his jacket and shirt, a lover’s tug when she feels horny and wants you closer to her. His fingertips reached the laces as the sound arrived, a sound so big it changed the density of things, and the air became solid like Plexiglas, trapping him, freezing him. It was like God decided to show Itself, and the fabric of reality wasn’t made to bear it, so it gave way, accommodating. Only Mustafa’s thoughts, the little monkeys of free will, still darted all over the place, and he remembered having crippling abdominal pain when he was a kid and how he was scared to tell anyone because he thought he would die if he did, and how his mother would sing to him his favorite lullaby, the one about Grandpa’s house, and how that one time when his dad took him to a soccer match, he couldn’t see anything because everybody would stand up in anticipation whenever a team had a chance to score, and the terrible paralysis he fell victim to when a girl asked him out in a dark passageway through a building that smelled of human waste and burning matches, and just how much he hated this kid Vlado, and his thin, freaky, witchy fingers . . .

4.

No, Mustafa didn’t die.

5.

It was a 120 mm mortar shell, discharged at random in the direction of the town in order to keep the populace up-to-date and in fear. It hit by the side of the road just as the van was passing. The denser the surface a shell hits the bigger the devastation, since the shell gets to explode aboveground, giving its shrapnel wider range. It so happened that the rain had been falling for days, turning soil to muck. It missed the cement kilometer marker by a foot, submerged itself in the mud, and did its thing. Most pieces of it were channeled upward, giving the nearby treetop a frontal lobotomy, but a few found their way to the van. One ripped apart the front right tire, one smashed the passenger side window, wedging itself in the lining of the cabin roof above the driver’s head, one took out the muffler for good, and one made a pencil-size slit in the side of the van, went through Mustafa’s jacket, ripped up the front of his shirt without touching him, went through the jacket again, and exited through a hole the size of a coin.

When he saw the holes for what they were, Mustafa couldn’t think anymore. Heady elation was in the air, as if he were frozen in the middle of a sneeze. He touched the hot skin of his abdomen and began to laugh.

6.

“And this is your first day?”

“Yes, sir,” Mustafa said with a smile that was strained, a little too wide. His hands did a drumroll in the air, culminating in the noiseless crescendo of an imaginary cymbal. He put his hands on his knees for a split second, and then flung
them up again, somewhere above him, like he was trying to catch something.

“I don’t know if you’re lucky or doomed,” said the captain, mixing up a deck of playing cards with naked women on them, trying to hypnotize him, calm him down with his voice and the slow, repetitive shuffling. They were sitting at a wooden table under a ribbed, plastic roof in someone’s front yard, waiting for the driver and the corporal to change the tire. Mustafa’s knees jumped up and down with adrenaline. His face got pulled this way and that, unconsciously. Every once in a while he chuckled like a lunatic.

“Do I look like a doomed man?” asked Mustafa in a voice that pushed the limits of a private-officer relationship. The captain let it slide, though obviously miffed.

“You’re in shock,” the captain said. “We’ll play poker and get your mind focused.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” Mustafa said. He laughed, uncontrollably opening and closing his fists.

“Put a gun in those hands and you’re a liability.”

Mustafa tried to stop fidgeting and found it impossible. He chuckled, looking at his hands, sprightly entities with minds of their own.

“I’ll deal first,” the captain said in a deliberate monotone.

“What are we playing for? You can’t play poker just for shits and giggles.” It was apparent that Mustafa couldn’t help talking that way. There was so much energy just being wasted off him. The captain swallowed.

“We can play for smokes.”

“Yeah! I don’t even smoke, man, but you won’t either by the time I’m done with you! You won’t have any cigarettes.”

He laughed a little too hysterically and a little too long. The
captain did his best to hold in his annoyance, but what came out still sounded harsh.

“Pay attention here!”

He slammed his palm on the wooden surface, attracting Mustafa’s gaze to it, and dealt.

7.

An hour later the tire was replaced, they were on the road again, and the captain had lost all his cigarettes and his deck of cards. There was nothing to be done about the muffler, and sitting in the back of the van was like being inside a jackhammer. The captain’s forehead was ridged with irritation as Mustafa kept looking at him and shrugging as though apologizing for his good luck. The captain turned his head away and reached for a nonexistent pack in his pocket.

“I need a smoke, Private,” he said.

“Too bad you lost them all,” Mustafa replied, dismissing the captain’s outstretched hand, which presently started to tremble.

“What did you say?”

“I said too bad you lost.”

The captain’s eyes shrank, squeezed down by his overactive brow, suggesting waves of pain issuing from somewhere within his skull. For a long moment he was speechless. His military demeanor left him and he suddenly looked like a salesman or a high school teacher. Mustafa was cool and detached, acting like his superior.

“But you don’t even smoke,” was what he said, “and look at my hands.”

Mustafa rolled up his sleeve and showed him his arm.

“Look. I got all goose-bumpy from how much I care,” he said and watched the dumbfounded captain soundlessly open and close his mouth.

8.

When the racket of the van with the busted muffler got replaced by the far more dangerous clamor of the front line and thunder, when the giddy energy became plain horror as the shock caught up with him, when he marched in a line into a cluster of faceless houses with their eyes gouged out and their brains spilled, the debris of their caved-in skulls all over the grass, Mustafa knew that he really did smoke but just didn’t know it yet. The rain fell in self-perpetuating ropes that looked like you could climb them all the way up to God’s leaky basement; the soldiers’ faces drooped, as well as their mismatched uniforms. The captain had his power back, barking over the explosions, not flinching as the wandering bullets zinged into drainpipes and thudded into brick. He designated which house was the preliminary command post and started calling the names of the first shift of soldiers to replace the ones in the trenches. Mustafa expected his name to be found on that list, after every thing that had happened, but it turned out he was wrong.