Shards: A Novel (24 page)

In Bosnian this last sentence rhymed:
Meni je žao, al’ tako ti je grah pao,
sort of a fatalistic little rhyme illustrating one’s lack of power in the ways of the universe. The Claw smiled, but not with his eyes, and gathered around the map with the rest of the unit. The captain talked about the mission, where he thought their positions were, how many of them, where the minefields were, and what the best tactic was to retake the village on the plateau up the hill. He wasn’t briefing them. He was discussing. The Apaches stood around him like equals, although they were technically just privates. Sooty played pocket pool right smack in the middle of it and Mustafa just stood there stuck to the wall, his mind elsewhere, trying to cope, as the Claw’s last sentence kept playing in his head to a jolly but creepy little tune:

Meni je žao, al’ tako ti je grah pao!

Meni je žao, al’ tako ti je grah pao!

Meni je žao, al’ tako ti je grah pao!

Meni je žao, al’ tako ti je grah pao!

Meni je žao, al’ tako ti je grah pao!

15.

Mustafa spent the rest of the day and the night that followed in a state of catatonia, forgetting even to smoke. He walked around, sporadically communicating with the members of
his new unit, but it all felt both distant and familiar, like he was dreaming about something that had already happened, like he was watching himself do things on tape. When the feeling dissipated and the world sharpened up, it was dawn already and the turbulent sky was about to take a giant wet shit and the Apaches were about to advance up the hill with an enormous yellow bulldozer, and that meant Mustafa had to do it with them.

The army had no tanks, and this particular situation demanded a relatively unstoppable vehicle that could take a few hits and behind which the infantry could move forward and take cover. Somebody thought of a bulldozer. The Claw, who was to drive the monster, had raised its scoop or blade or whatever it’s called in front of the cabin as a shield. Sooty lay on its roof, where he had previously mounted a heavy machine gun. The rest started crowding up behind it, checking their weapons in silence.

For a second Mustafa thought it was all just a joke, an elaborate one to scare the rookie named Meat and make him shit his pants. He kept expecting everyone to start laughing and tell him it was all just an initiation joke, an Apache ritual every member had to go through. Instead, the old yellow behemoth awoke with a diesel roar, coughed up black smoke, and started around the barn and up the hill. Mustafa didn’t move. There was no power inside of him, as though someone had taken out his batteries. He would have just stayed there behind the barn if Steamboat hadn’t noticed him, run up, grabbed the back of his neck, and pushed him into the group. Mustafa stumbled forward, ricocheted between the Apaches until he slammed against the back of a slow-moving vehicle, and was told to stay there and keep up.

Sooty opened cover fire and so did the regular army from the trenches. The enemy woke up from their early-morning slumber and started to respond. The Claw stepped on the gas. Apaches cried their eerie battle cries. The bulldozer went over the first antipersonnel mines, which burst under its undercarriage, causing no damage. Bullets hit its metal bulk, sounding like a fast rhythm machine possessed by the ghost of a virtuoso jazz drummer. The skies opened up, pouring rain over all these silly creatures, and Mustafa just kept up behind the hulk, doing nothing but running and having not a single thought in his mind.

16.

He was not there.

His legs did run behind the bulldozer, and his hand did throw a grenade into the enemy trench, and his right index finger did squeeze off a few bursts to cover Ninja’s advance, and when everything got quiet, his eyes did see dead Chetniks with holes in them, and his lungs did push air up through his windpipe, and his voice box did shape itself to turn his breath into a battle cry to match the cries his ears did hear coming from his fellow soldiers all around. Fellow Apaches.

And up in the village his heart did sink when his pupils witnessed children’s heads atop picket fences, crosses carved into the heads of women with missing ring fingers, their bodies rotting in a pile by the community well. His stomach did turn at the sight of a hog burying its snout into a pond nearby, red with human blood and chalky with filth. His tears did flow, and his tongue did swear, and his brain did realize that the Claw was right, that what was standing there
in hell, seeing this, looking around in disbelief, crying, dying, wasn’t anything but meat.

But he was not there in the meat. No way.

17.

He snapped back into the meat only after the side of Steamboat’s head exploded with a high-caliber sniper slug, and the Claw yelled, “Ambush! Retreat!” and then called him by his real name, to help him carry Steamboat’s meat down to the trenches, since no man was ever to be left behind.

He called him Mustafa and that was who he was.

(. . . on the road
to edinburgh . . .)

PATHETICA

In the moonlight, from the moving bus, Tuzla seemed monochromatic and unoccupied. Dark windows gaped and gawked out of gray facades. Forsaken sedans with tarps thrown over them looked like full body bags. It all looked like stock footage from a late-night History Channel documentary about some sad thing that happened elsewhere a long time ago.

The interior of the bus was silent and ghostly, like a fever dream of being on a bus. Familiar faces were off just enough that you weren’t quite sure if you knew them or not, if the people to whom they belonged, your friends, were really sitting around you or if you were imagining them, badly, to make yourself feel better.

We drove past the soccer stadium and came upon Asja’s street. With my forehead pressed against the vibrating glass, I imagined I could see through two buildings and into her room, where her moon-washed body lay awake touching itself and thinking of me. A part of me then rebelled against this fantasy, cringed at the cheesiness, at my own
pathetica
.
Wake up, you’re leaving her, you asshole
. But quickly I imagined my heroic homecoming sometime from now: me walking up her street in daytime and in color, entering her building,
ringing her doorbell, her opening the door, and me catching her in my arms just before she faints from happiness.
You’re doing the right thing
. . . .
No, you’re a loser,
I said to myself,
a pussy.

We passed the alien skyline of Tuzla’s industrial zone, looped around the Ši
ki Brod loop, and hooked toward Kladanj. Five minutes out of town and we were farther from home than we had been since the war started.

CHECKPOINT

I dreamed of a man stomping on baby raccoons in a crate, and when I woke up the bus was stopped and a soldier of some variety was checking papers up front. Omar was next to me, listening to what sounded like drizzle in his Walkman. I nudged him.

“Checkpoint,” he said too loudly over the noise in his ears. The soldier glanced in our direction, then approached the next row of seats.

I heard the crinkling of a plastic bottle in the seat behind me, a quick slosh of liquid, and then the sound of someone twisting the cap back on. Omar and I were in the middle of the bus on the line of separation between Asmir’s troupe and the Bosnian National Theater troupe, twenty or so adult professionals occupying the back half of the bus. A faint smell of plum brandy drifted to me. Omar smelled it, too, pointed back and tipped an imaginary bottle to his mouth. We smiled.

The soldier neared. The rifle hanging from his shoulder was old but real. I reached for my passport but it wasn’t in my pocket. A surge went through me and I panicked and started to dig through my backpack. Omar tapped my shoulder and showed me that he had both his and mine.

“You scared the shit out of me,” I said.

He pulled off his headphones and the drizzle became the familiar three-chord progression of a Ramones song.

“We passed three checkpoints while you slept,” he said.

“Oh.”

It was our turn and Omar handed the soldier our passports. He glanced at the pictures, then stared into our faces. His eyes were like puncture holes in a mask.

“Where are we?” I heard myself cheerfully ask.

“In your mother’s cunt,” the soldier said and threw the passports into Omar’s lap.

STUPIDITY ON SHRAPNEL HIGHWAY

The bus was winding its way up a mountain road. Outside, the only visible thing was a jagged line of demarcation between the solid blackness of the dense conifers and the watery dark of the void above it, pockmarked somewhat with faint, throbbing stars. Omar was slumped in his seat as if shot, sleeping. Someone was snoring all the way in the back. I was thinking about my mother, pushing my head against the window, trying to get its vibration to shake my thoughts loose.

The road began to level out when the bus slowed down. A squeal of feedback came from all the speakers. The driver announced that for the next couple of kilometers he had to turn off the headlights. He said that we were coming upon a plateau that was clearly visible to the Chetniks and that among the bus drivers this stretch of the road was known as Shrapnel Highway.

The bus crept ahead blindly in the moonlight. The guy behind me, a man in his fifties with a Super Mario mustache, sloshed another swallow of slivovitz. He cleared his throat and it sounded like somebody choking on vomit. After that, things grew quiet, eerie.
I looked across our row of seats, saw Omar, Boro, and Ramona all awake, overwrought, all awaiting the future.

Then Super Mario lit a cigarette.

A collective gasp rippled through the bus and abruptly died. Everyone stopped breathing.

“Put that shit out!” hissed the driver through the speakers.

Omar stood up, reached over his back support, and snatched the cigarette out of the man’s mouth. He took a quick toke from it and then squashed it into a built-in ashtray in front of him. We looked at each other for one, two, three, four seconds when something hit the side of the bus, a tinny crisp crack like a small rock hitting a windshield. One of the girls in front of us screamed. The driver swore and the engine roared like this was a jet and we were clear for takeoff. Velocity pushed my head into the back support.

The kids screamed and screamed and the bus careened insanely through the blackness of the world.

WRONGFULLY ACCUSED

In Kladanj we parked near a mosque whose minaret was missing its tip, an imitation of a snapped pencil. Nobody in the bus was hurt. The driver, his partner, Branka, and the president of the National Theater all went out with flashlights to check out the damage. Their beams found a single bullet hole high in the window above me.

My fear turned liquid in my stomach and I suddenly needed to piss it away. I went to the front and stuck my head out of the bus.

“I need to go to the toilet,” I said. The driver shined his beam on me.

“
Hajvanu,
you almost got us all killed,” he said flailing his arms, his flashlight unveiling random details in the night, a hole in a wire
fence of the house next to the mosque, an overturned traffic pylon leaning on a curb, a black galosh.

“You’re lucky they didn’t use mortars, you fucking idiot.”

I stepped into the street. The night was solid. A river gurgled somewhere. I walked past the four of them toward a shed flanked by some shrubbery.

“It was Super Mario who lit that cigarette,” I said.

The shrubbery turned out to be nettles. I pissed in the nettles.

THE PRESIDENT V. THE CONVOY

Creeping down a narrow, precarious dirt road chiseled into the side of a mountain, with the right side of the bus scraping the vegetation growing out of the toothed wall and the left side shaving the edge of an imponderable abyss, I realized I’d been here before. The only difference was that now I was going in the opposite direction. It was Tuzla’s only artery, the road my family took to sneak back into the city at the beginning of the war, the road where my mother had her déjà vu, where she hung that bottle of cognac within reach in case we got stopped by the wrong kind of soldiers, where all the passengers had to get out of the bus and help push it up the hill. Here it was three years later and the wear and tear from traffic had made the road even more dangerous, though this time around we at least had a better bus.

The headlights illuminated a clump of makeshift road signs somebody nailed into the trunk of a tree, one on top of the other. All of them were pointing in the direction we were going except one plank that said
TUZLA
. The others said
LONDON, PARIS, NEW YORK, NEW DELHI, TOKYO, ROME, MUNICH, ZURICH, SYDNEY
. It was a joke. This was the only way out of the siege.

The brakes squeaked. The engine rumbled. Branches chafed the glass from outside.

Turning a corner we came face-to-face with another pair of headlights and stopped. The driver got off the bus. He had to hug the side of it so he wouldn’t tumble down the mountain. He yelled things in Bosnian and somebody else yelled things in another language. When the two men stepped into the headlights, I saw that the other one was a UN soldier. There was a baby blue beret on his head. They talked and gesticulated and you could see that nothing was being communicated really.

The president of the National Theater, a tall, bombastic man with a shock of upstanding black hair, stood up and made his way to the front.

“I’m gonna goout and takecare of this,” he said, but then stumbled and fell to one knee, barely keeping his head from hitting one of the seats. “Fucking fuck!”

Like Super Mario, he was hammered.

“We need someone who speaks English,” Branka said, pretending to help him up.

“Are you saying I can’t say . . . I can’t talk English? To the gentleman in the blue hat.”

“I’m saying you’ll fall off this cliff,” she said.

“I’m in charge here!” His thumb thumped against his barrel chest.

As this was going on, Ramona slipped past him and went out. She interpreted for the driver and soon they were both back aboard. The president was leaning over Branka’s seat and boasting about his engineering degree.

“What is this?” the driver asked. The president flipped around.

“I demand to know whatsgoingon.”

“Go and sit down, man. We have to go back.”

“
I
decide wherewego. And
I
say we go straight through those fuckingBrits. Make
them
turnaround.”

“First of all, that is a humanitarian convoy and there is no way
they
can back up on this road. We have to. Second of all, if you don’t go and sit down in your seat I will kick you off this bus.”

The driver was two feet shorter than the drunken man and fifteen years older, but I had no doubt he was capable of walking the walk.

“D’you know who you’re talking to?” the president asked, pointing at the driver’s face. But before he could continue, a drained blonde, his secretary, materialized next to him, hugged his neck, and took him away. He swore and mumbled his outrage.

Branka chortled deliciously.

The driver put the bus in reverse and it labored up the hill like a shit bug. I gripped the arm on the side of my seat and prayed. Omar had his eyes closed and his music on, but I was pretty sure he was praying, too. Some four to five hundred meters back we found a wide spot in the road to tuck the bus in. We parked close to the wall and watched trucks and armored vehicles go by for a long time. They were so close to us we could see inside their cabins, into their lives.

The penultimate truck clipped our side mirror with its own. Ours gave way at the base but the glass itself didn’t break. The whole thing dangled on some wires.

The president laughed hysterically from the back.

BOSNIA, HERZEGOVINA, CROATIA

Out of the night, we rolled down into the limestone crags of Herzegovina. As soon as it cleared the horizon, the sun broke out whitely over everything and everyone started to sweat. Outside, the rivers turned fluorescently emerald. Tall, smooth trees hunched down and grew smaller and gnarly. Limestone houses became indistinguishable from the surroundings, and the sky descended upon the world in a serious way.

From a distance half of the city of Mostar looked as if a berserk giant had stomped it into rubble. It shut us all up. Tuzla looked untouched in comparison. I saw half of a skyscraper standing upright and the other, broken-off half upside down next to it. If you saw it in a movie you’d find it unconvincing, cartoonish.

There were more and more checkpoints and we had to wait longer and longer to pass through. At the border crossing, the Croatian soldiers gave us dirty looks, made us take all our stuff out of our bags and onto the asphalt, made us stand in the sun for hours, and then sit in the bus with the windows closed. But we all had valid transit visas stapled to our passports and they had to let us through.

When they did, you could feel the change of pressure, as though the air in Bosnia were really a liquid. We went across an invisible line and I felt giddiness and élan in my legs, felt like I could have dunked. The younger of our troupe members broke into a song, the staple song of elementary school field trips, urging the driver to overtake everyone in front of him. What was it we were feeling? Freedom?

THE BEACH INVASION

The first sighting of the Adriatic was cheered like a victory. There were enthusiasts even in the back of the bus, hooting and singing along with the children. One of these professionals yelled, “Cheers!” and the driver threatened to stop and made an official announcement about no drinking on his bus.

We snaked across the arid hills, in between crumbling rocks, through sun-bleached conifer groves and orchards until the hills parted and we fell upon the blue. We stopped in the first town, at the first beach next to a long dock that cut a block of white into the blue, and when the doors opened we ran out screaming—the younger half of the bus, anyway. The air smelled of pines and seaweed and
fish guts, and we ran through the pine needles of a small park and crunched onto the pebble beach, leaned on twisted trunks of olive trees long enough to get rid of our sneakers and shoes, then hobbled like geriatrics over the hot pebbles, causing quite a ruckus among the natives there. They all perked up their heads from their beach towels and gathered their children and stared at these screaming lunatics who ran past them, shedding clothes, exposing cheese-white bellies and backs, and clambering like large insects onto the cement dock.