Shards: A Novel (26 page)

(. . . allison . . .)

Our venue, Venue 25, was on Albany Street, this old gray building with all of the plumbing on the outside of it, black pipes dividing the facade into random straight-sided geometrical shapes. Off the pipes hung vivid banners advertising the festival, the individual plays. The wallpaper around the threshold was a collage of posters and newspaper clippings. Coming inside, the air smelt vaguely of basements and old glue. There was a downstairs and an upstairs, a narrow stairway leading from one to the other. A stout, pimply lass in an oversize festival T-shirt ushered us up toward the cafeteria. Her name tag read
LUCY
. She sawed the air with her arms and rolled her
r
’s the way Bosnians do it and it felt a little bit like home. With that bosom, with that smile, I just wanted to hug her.

“We’ve go’ a surpraize for ya,” she said.

The doorway into the cafeteria was narrow and we had to go in one by one, maneuvering our luggage so we didn’t get stuck. I walked in behind Omar, and there was Asmir in black jeans and a black blazer he had bought on the black market in Tuzla. He was standing on a chair, grinning, his arms spread out like seagull wings, his patented stance. The younger members of the troupe ran to him, screaming. He climbed down and hugged them and
ruffled their hair, and there was something eerily staged about it, like documentary footage of Communist dictators meeting schoolkids on national holidays.

“How did you get here before us?” I asked as we hugged.

“What do seagulls do?”

“Fly?”

“There you go.”

“Where’s Bokal?” Boro asked, and I felt so stupid that a ten-year-old could see through to the essence of things before I. Asmir’s smile faltered and his eyebrows went up in unison with his shoulders.

“He took a bus to Split the morning after you left. I told him to come with me, but he said that something in his dream told him to take the bus to Split. I trust he’s on the way, unless . . . you know.”

Asmir and Branka agreed on the lodging. Asmir suggested that the eighteen-and-over crowd stay in one of the provided houses and that the little ones stay with Branka in the other. He was right and you could see that Branka hated that he was. She made a spectacle of shuffling through some papers, then dropped the bomb that tomorrow morning “we” were all supposed to meet with a drama club from a local high school and rehearse a student-written play to be performed during the last week of the festival. Asmir laughed, argued that we were here not to perform other people’s plays but our own, that he didn’t know anything about it, that he wouldn’t do it. Branka said that it had been a condition of all of us getting visas. Asmir asked why he hadn’t known about it then, and said that he wouldn’t do it. She said that “we” could do it without him, that, in fact, she didn’t care what he did at all. Who’s gonna direct it, you? he said, and laughed. It’ll be a joint endeavor, she said. It’ll be a piece of shit, he said. What do you care? she said. What do I care what
my
troupe is performing? Are you out of your mind? he said. We’ll leave it up to them, then, make it voluntary, she said. Asmir then turned to us and announced that we were not required to show up for this meeting
or
do the play with the Scottish kids. Branka said we should do it because we promised we would.
You
promised for us without asking any of us, he said. I did what I needed to do to get us up here, she said. So did I, he said.

Lucy volunteered to take Branka and the young ones to their lodgings and Boro made a fuss. He said he didn’t want to lodge with his mother and the kids, and Branka, being an enlightened, modern kind of mother, soon gave up and put him in the care of his brother, Omar, and allowed him to stay with the older crowd.

Asmir led us “old birds” and the musicians away.

“Down this way,” he said.

The night fell on Edinburgh like a blanket over a birdcage and a haze crept into the air and made the lights crisp at the source but blurry on the periphery. The chill put bumps on your skin. Ghosts swirled around streetlights and tangled in your hair. Buildings breathed heavily. The streets groaned underfoot. You could feel how old everything was despite the neon, the cars, and the techno music bumping from basement bars.

There were crowds everywhere, walking and laughing, making me dizzy. We passed a group of tourists and I was sure I saw Asja. I thought I recognized her cheek across the street but it wasn’t her. The experience made me anxious, panicky. I forced myself to look down at my feet, gave myself the silly task of trying to step on every patch of dirty, ancient bubble gum on the sidewalk. After a while the monotony of it calmed me down. When I looked up I saw I was way behind the group.

I yelled for Asmir to wait, and they all stopped by some street performers until I caught up to them. There was a guy with a red mustache in a leotard juggling chainsaws. I leaned on the

BOOM!

“Incoming!” screamed Omar.

Suddenly I was under a parked bus, hands over head, my mind flashing to the discharge of the shell that scared Archibald, counting to three because three is the number of seconds it takes a shell to arrive.

One:

My mind flashing to a severed foot on the pavement, to popcorn in the

Two:

street, to blood drops on my Reeboks, a car atop another car like turtles, smoldering

Three:

heat, mind bracing for the whistle or the
BOOM
, heart like a pager set to vibrate.

Three:

Waiting for it to come.

Three:

Bracing for the
BOOM
.

But nothing came. Just another distant explosion. Then another.
These shells are defective
. Then the crackle of a series of smaller, tinnier explosions, but not like Kalashnikov fire, more musical, cascading in pitch.
What kind of guns are these? Singing guns?

I opened my eyes and realized I was face-to-face with a perfectly round bubble-gum stain on the curb in front of me.
Oh, we’re in Edinburgh
. I looked up. Red mustache was twirling small chainsaws in the air like nothing ever happened. Some of his audience were looking at me, though, looking at Ramona curled up on the sidewalk,
at Omar and Boro crouching next to a building. The audience’s thoughts were legible on their faces: Were we insane, or were they witnessing impromptu street performance art?

Then I saw Asmir and our musicians laughing at us.

“What is it, peasants? Never seen fireworks?”

I climbed from under the bus. A hugging couple avoided me in a wide semicircle. I dusted off and looked for my bag.

No, I had never before that day seen fireworks. Neither had Ramona, nor Omar, nor Boro. Asmir and the musicians were older. They remembered with fully formed adult bodies and minds life before the war. Before chaos, they’d known order, before senselessness, sense. They were really out of Bosnia because leaving chaos to them felt like returning to normalcy. But, if you were forged in the chaos, then there
was
no return. There
was
no escape. To you chaos
was
normalcy. And normalcy was proving to be an unnatural, brittle state.

Asmir came over and hugged me.

“Don’t shit yourself,” he teased but the hug felt good, genuine. I avoided his eyes because mine were bursting. I turned uphill toward the explosions over Edinburgh Castle, blurting festive fire into downcast skies.

We didn’t sleep all night, despite fatigue. We just dropped our bags at the house and then ran around the town in the mizzle, filling our eyes with the fresh and the unfamiliar. Asmir led and we followed him into every store, every pub, just to see what they looked like from the inside. We jumped over tall fences into fancy forbidden parks and kicked the trees to get each other wetter. We drank a mug of beer apiece in this loud place called the Basement where all the employees wore fluorescent T-shirts that said
IT’S COOL TO BE DOWN
. We buzzed. We vibrated. We were high.

In the morning, through the thicket of a hangover headache, in a small, unfamiliar room that smelled of paint, I heard a doorbell ring.

A door opened somewhere in the house and a moment later someone shrieked—in pain? Horror? Joy? I had slept in my clothes, so I just jumped out of bed, ran and opened the door, and saw little Boro careening toward me down the hallway at full sprint.

“Bokal is here! Bokal is here!” he screamed as his feet fought for purchase on the hardwood. He braked in the fashion of somebody on a motorcycle, swinging his rear end to the front, was still just for a split second, and was already running back the other way before I even left my room.

Bokal looked like a shepherd in his fur-lined jacket, with his face unshaven and his hair oily and matted and sticking out indiscriminately. It was Lucy who had picked him up at the train station and called him a taxi, which dropped him off in front of the house. He stood in the living room with his bag on the floor but with his backpack still over his shoulder as he received hugs and pats on the arms. You could see he was happy and tired.

“Sit down,” said Ramona, ushering him toward an armchair. He took two steps, then changed his mind.

“If I never sit again it will be too soon,” he said.

Ramona and I decided that we would go to the meeting with the Scottish kids. Asmir made fun of us but we told him that if his troupe was going to be represented in any form—and we knew Branka was going to make all the youngsters show up, because she had their passports and parent slips and pretty much owned their asses outside of Bosnia—we should at least have a couple of senior
members present to protect the integrity of the group. He made fun of us again but we were steadfast. Halfway to the venue he caught up with us on foot, with Boro in tow. He went on and on about Branka putting the troupe in this situation and kept apologizing to Boro that he had to talk shit about his mother in his presence. There was no need for that. Boro understood. Boro was smarter than any of us.

In the rehearsal room there were two cliques, with a language barrier between them. The Scottish kids had some kind of scripts in their hands; the Bosnians didn’t.

Avoiding everybody’s eyes, we immediately took off our shoes and sat on the floor, a routine practice before any Asmir-led rehearsal. The younger members of our troupe responded to the familiarity of it and did what we did, which left the Scottish kids to look from face to face trying to figure out if they should follow suit. Their poor leader, a wide-eyed high school drama teacher, told them to go ahead.

Soon enough there was a circle of barefoot kids sitting Indian-style on the parquet and still nobody knew what to do. Branka asked Ramona to help her talk to the Scottish teacher. Ramona got up and the two of them crossed the language barrier. Just as they did someone else left the circle and walked over to Boro and me, kneeled down, and said hello. There was nothing else I could do but look up and meet Allison.

Allison had the hands of a grown woman, and something passed between us through the handshake. Allison’s skin was cold and smooth to the touch. Allison wore a watch. Allison’s trousers were black and I can’t recall her blouse. I couldn’t keep my gaze away from her eyes, a little brown and a little green and a little sad, despite the smile. A little troubled.

“I’m sorre, bu’ could you say yer name again, please?” she asked.

“Ismet.”

“Izz-matt,” she said.

Boro scoffed.

“Ssss,” I said. “Izmet with the zed means, uh . . . shit of cow in my country.”

All the Scots laughed.

“Why would yer parents do that to ya?” she asked.

Two other Scots crawled over and introduced themselves, too, and I shook their hands but almost never broke eye contact with Allison. They snickered at our connection and
oooooooohed
a little bit and kept mentioning someone named William.

Then Asmir took over everybody’s life for the next two hours. The poor Scottish drama teacher had no chance. Asmir just gathered all her scripts and tossed them on some chair in the corner. Then he took off his shirt and lay down in the center of the circle. He might as well have pulled out a gun; everyone was frozen, waiting.

“Ve do relax number one,” he said, “number two ve do game of theater, THEN ve do theater.”

Branka and the teacher simply backed into a corner each, sat down, and watched with their lips pressed tight. Asmir led us all through a meditation exercise. I was amazed by how seamlessly Allison and her friends merged with our troupe under Asmir’s leadership. At first they sniggered at his Tarzan English commands to
close eyes and tink of inside of mother stomach
and
imagine energy of life come out of your eyes like balls,
but soon got comfortable.

We did some warm-ups, some voice and trust exercises. We did that one where one person stands rigidly still with their arms crossed on their chest and has to let two others push them back and forth like a metronome. This blond boy in the Riddler T-shirt and I pushed Allison. Every time her shoulders fell into my hands
she smiled. Her eyes were closed and I looked at her chest. I could feel the bra straps through her blouse on my thumbs and I never wanted to stop doing this.

After the rehearsal Asmir went up to the drama teacher to explain his vision of our troupe’s involvement with her show:

“Scot actors do text. Ve do dance. Yes? Ve vill pretend ve are the vor. Ve vill come and be very together like a bomb and then ve vill sing like a bomb and start from one end of stage to the other, dancing like bomb, and ven the bomb fall around you, people, ve vill become . . .
geler, kako se ka
ž
e geler, jebem mu mater
. . . vill become piece, small piece of bomb, all of us, and dance like different small piece of bomb, killing. Yes?”

The drama teacher stood there, baffled.

Allison winked at me twice during the warm-ups the next day. After the rehearsal she said her father was letting her have a party for all of us that night and that I had to come. She gave me directions and kissed my cheek. It felt like a sunburn on my skin. In my head, it felt like a gulp of brandy. She walked away, and when she finally disappeared from the doorway, I realized that everyone was watching me standing there stupidly.