Shards: A Novel (3 page)

(. . . suicide attempt
number one. . .)

Mustafa never wanted to be born.

His mother, she wanted him out and he didn’t want to go. So he finagled the umbilical cord around his neck and big toe, hoping to choke himself to death. But the space was wanting and he was already ten pounds with a head like half a loaf of bread and he didn’t really know what he was doing. He kicked and wiggled, more out of frustration than anything else.

She misdiagnosed his tantrums for eagerness to emerge. His father took her to the hospital, but the doctors and nurses were celebrating the eighth of March, International Women’s Day. They were all tipsy and loud, greasy around their mouths from all the syndicate food. They made his mother wait until the next day. Although this was working out to his advantage (more time to really do himself in), he could still detect the errors of their ways, and had he been able to talk he would have characterized the Yugoslav Health System as cruelly negligent.

He kicked and kicked and blacked out and that’s when they used his sudden motionlessness to pull him into life. There was much rejoicing, everywhere but in his head.

(. . . some early sorrows . . .)

EARLIEST MEMORY

Hot summer day. My grandmother brought a hatchet from the shed and hung it on the branch of a thin cherry tree in the backyard, smiling. I sat on a sheepskin rug in the shade of a rosebush watching a hen trying to flee, flapping its white wings, one of its yellow talons tied by rope to a stake driven into the middle of the lawn. It would get a meter or so into the air and then, anchored, flap back down. For a second it would stand there balancing on one foot, blinking, cocking its head sideways, and then it would try again.

When grandmother approached, it went crazy, flying around in a whirlpool of airborne feathers. The sound of the wings was deep and muffled like glove-handed applause. Grandmother sniggered as she stepped on the rope closer and closer to the hen, gradually reducing its fly zone. Finally she caught it, untied the rope, and with the wide-eyed hen under her left arm, took the hatchet off the cherry branch, and walked behind the shed.

I got up and waddled after her, but she heard me and yelled at me not to look. I stood around the shed’s corner for some time not moving, then peeked out anyway. I saw her kneel down on the
bird, trying to subdue its wings, trying to get a good grip on it so she could place its head on a low stump in the clearing full of sawdust and wood chips. Her back was to me, so she couldn’t see me.

The first
thwack
of the hatchet missed completely. The second was weak and it hit too close to the thick of the breast and didn’t do much. The third connected with the neck but failed to sever the head. The fourth one took the head off all right, but my grandmother lost her grip on the hen and it took off flying for four or five meters, landing in the grass right in front of me. It took a couple of steps and stretched its wings as if thrilled with itself that it got away. Its neck spurted blood that reddened its white plumage something awful, but that seemed not to be an issue. It fluffed its feathers, getting some specks of blood on my bare legs, then scratched the grass with its feet, leaned down, and, obeying a terrible instinct somewhere in its muscles, made as if to feed, as if to peck the ground with its beak that was meters away on a small dune of blood-sprinkled sawdust already stilled by death.

AGE THREE

The moment Marshal Tito died
*
I shat myself. These incidents were not connected.

It had to have been a weekday because I was at my grandparents’ in Gornja Tuzla. My parents mustn’t have gotten off work yet—they would come to visit every afternoon after work on workdays and would take me home to Tuzla on weekends and holidays—because I don’t remember them being there. I was sick as a dog from gorging myself on something or other and was lying in a fetal position on the L-shaped sofa.

It was cold. My grandfather sat in his armchair by the window and smoked his cigarettes. He sat on his right foot with his left knee drawn to his chest and stared intently at his ancient black-and-white TV with a pensive expression, mostly in his brow. I felt my stomach cramp and suddenly my drawers were filled with wetness and warmth. It took me a second to realize what had happened and when I did I immediately burst into tears. My grandma was in the adjoining kitchen behind these green curtains and when I called her my grandfather howled at me to shut up.

He had never raised his voice at me before. I fixed my bulging eyes on the TV to see what warranted this kind of explosion. On the screen was a gray town square somewhere with all the people standing frozen wherever they found themselves, dark against the asphalt, crying. The sound of wailing sirens came through the speakers. Then the weepy and grandiose voice of some TV announcer shouted things with emotion.

Scared and shitty I started to cry again and my grandfather called my grandmother to shut me up and turn up the television because Tito had just died. She stormed in and picked me up, automatically praying for the departed soul of the Communist leader in Arabic. Her hands were wet and cold from whatever she was doing in the kitchen and they smelled of apples. She patted my chest and whispered that we had to be quiet because it was an important day, and then she turned the volume knob to an almost unbearable level and carried me through the green curtains into the kitchen.

AGE FOUR

We lived on the eighth floor of an ugly, gray building on Brčanska Malta. All three rooms of our apartment faced south, which meant facing the newest, biggest twin skyscrapers in Tuzla. I was in the
kitchen/dining room drawing an orange bulldozer unloading a mass of yellow sand into the back of a red truck. There was a construction site in between our building and one of the skyscrapers that I was using for inspiration.

Looking out the window I noticed a large gray coat swell with wind, disembark from a clothesline on a balcony on one of the skyscraper’s highest floors, and fall straight down to the ground. It must have been a very heavy coat—it fell that fast. But then passersby started to gather around it, dozens of them, crowding, walking urgently toward it, pointing, and clasping their hands over their mouths.

I told my mother about it. She came over and hugged me from behind and looked out too. The passersby ran and waved to the cars on the street. A white Cinquecento drove up over the curb onto the sidewalk, and over the sidewalk onto the grass, and sped all the way to the crowd, honking its horn.

Why are the people looking at the coat?
I asked.

Mother put her hand over my eyes and asked me if I wanted lemonade. She closed the blinds and turned on the radio.

AGE SIX

I started first grade when I was six, which, because both of my parents worked—and it was my brother’s turn to stay with our grandparents— made me a latchkey kid at six. I both loved and hated this. I loved sleeping as long as possible, having the TV on all day, and “reading” all the books in my mother’s library—the medical ones with pictures of naked people were staples. But I hated being a child and alone, being vulnerable and scared. I hated being petrified when people rang the doorbell: door-to-door salesmen, beggars, Gypsies asking to fix your umbrellas, older kids collecting old newspapers
and bottles, trying to earn some money through recycling. I never opened the door, just like I was told. I hated when they would hear me inside and ring the bell two or three times, just waiting there as I trembled in fright and tried to silently put on the chain. I hated having to walk to school by myself with my huge backpack while all the other kids walked in groups and fucked around. I hated the silence that filled the apartment when I was alone, the silence that made me leave the TV on even during the news and boring history shows and interme
ZZOS
. Those TV interme
ZZOS
were the worst. They would show a tape of a bird flying and play classical music for hours.

It happened out of the blue. I was watching
The Little Rascals
in the living room and eating a butter and honey sandwich when the phone rang. We had a red rotary phone that had a little light on it that flashed when the phone was ringing. I imagined this light to be a camera through which whoever was calling could look into the apartment and see me even though mother told me it was for deaf people to see that the phone is ringing. I was not supposed to be watching TV that day because I had a lot of homework to finish, nor was I supposed to eat in the living room, which was why I turned off the TV before I answered the phone and why I finished chewing my last bite, too.

Making a good-boy face to the flashing light, I picked up the handle and said hello.

There was silence on the other end but not a dead one. It was the silence of an empty room or a room that someone was keeping quiet in to give the appearance of an empty room. It was the kind of silence that sound people in the movie business have to mic and record because they can’t have the absence of sound, because it sounds dead, unnatural, and because they need more nuanced silences to make their movies sound alive. The silence I was hearing on the other end of that line was definitely an
alive
silence.

I repeated my hello at a higher pitch as my heart climbed into my throat. This time I heard something, a noise as though someone were sniffling or trying to subdue a whimper. I swallowed. I thought, hopefully, that it was a bad connection, that the whimperer simply couldn’t hear my voice. And just as I was about to go into a third, louder hello, a woman’s voice said something that I will never forget. She said:

Little boy, Dr. Stefan Tadi
;
is your daddy. Do you hear? Your daddy is not your daddy. Dr. Stefan Tadi
;
is your daddy.

I hung up, hard. It hurt my knuckles. I heard my heart in the silence of the apartment. I didn’t understand what she meant, but I knew it was bad what she said, really bad.

The phone rang again and I covered the light with my hand.

It rang again.

And again.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Shaking, actually hearing my teeth chatter, I waited it out, and when it was over I dialed my mom at work. The operator told me to hold. I held. My finger was bleeding a little. I held until my mom answered and then I couldn’t hold it in anymore.

AGE SEVEN

I was lying in my bed with my right arm stretched uncomfortably over the cold plastic of the night table to hold my baby brother’s hand as we listened. She was screaming at him again. She was breaking things.

He was saying,
Don’t do it; why would you want to do that?

She was saying,
Enough. Enough. Enough. I can’t take lies anymore.

There was noise: the banging and sliding of kitchen drawers, the jingling of utensils, the clanging of cutlery. There were hurried footsteps down the hall, and then the door to our room opened and Father barged in. My brother cried first. He cried,
What are you doing?
I followed closely. I cried,
Don’t fight, please
. We were up on our feet already and Father ushered us out.

He was saying,
I don’t know what’s wrong with her
and
maybe you can help her
.

We came into the hallway awkwardly in our pajamas. The linoleum by the front door was cold on my bare feet. The light on the electricity meter on the wall was glowing red. It meant the nightly cheap rate had already commenced.

Mother came out of the kitchen with a knife, and when she saw us she hid it behind her back.

We cried. We wailed. Father was behind us with the front door behind him.

Let me go,
she was saying to him.

Calm down, Henrijeta,
he was saying to her.
Be reasonable.

Step away or I’ll
—she started and stopped herself. She thought about it. Her eyes darted around. Then she finished:
I’ll do something ugly
.

I remember thinking that it was a weird thing to say. In English you can get away with it, but in Bosnian it sounds weird. It sounds awkward. Nobody says a thing like that. It sounds cheesy. She was not saying what she wanted to say. I remember thinking: What does she mean?

Why?
he was asking.
We have an apartment, we have good jobs, we have two children. What’s so bad?

You are,
she said.
I am. This is a fiasco.

She took a step back into the kitchen and looked at Mehmed and me.
Never forget this,
she said,
we’re all living a lie.

AGE EIGHT

My dream was to become that sinewy ice-cream vendor from Kosovo who owned that tiny shop by the autobus station in front of my building. At my age I couldn’t imagine a better job in the world, sitting in a matchbox of a room between the bank and the station on Titova Street, selling cheaply made refreshments to a wide range of citizens, from badly dressed businessmen with damp underarms to tough-handed peasants on their way to and from the nearby Little Market. My mouth would water at the mere idea of being in proximity to that giant ice-cream machine, buzzing with the sweet inner workings of its metal womb, a touch away from those three levers and the mad swirls of chocolate and vanilla behind them. Mmm, ice cream.