Shards: A Novel (33 page)

He gave a sign to Junior, who pulled the paper out of his typewriter, crumpled it into a loose ball, and dropped it behind his desk and out of my sight, presumably into a trash bucket.

“I don’t know,” I whimpered. The cop tossed me the passport.

“I’ll let you go this time but if I see you again . . .”

“You won’t.”

On the way back the world was all hard concrete and harsh edges, nothing malleable about it. Everything was definitely matter. You
couldn’t leave a mark if you wanted to, let alone sink into the street.

I walked, pretending to be okay, just a normal, unafraid citizen of the world putting one foot in front of the other, until the bus station tower was out of my line of sight and I knew the cop couldn’t see me anymore. At that moment I started running and I ran all the way back to Mina’s building, stopping only to exchange a bunch of money, buy a shitload of canned food, and stock up on airmail envelopes. I was never leaving that apartment again unless to go to the INS interview or take a final ride to the airport on the way to sunny California, its iridescent pools, its fake-breasted women—dreams in a jar, labeled and barcoded and all.

FROM ISMET PRCIĆ:’S DIARY:

October 27, 1995:

No go.

America, college, kiss all that shit good-bye.

The INS officer was a fucking robot encased in a blob of doughy human flesh. His eyes were devoid of humor. His brain had the motherboard of a Commodore 64 and his thoughts were written in BASIC (
IF
1, 2
AND
4 /
GOTO
10, 10 being
NO ENTRANCE
). He was programmed not to see me as a person.

For him it all came down to a simple question: “Do you have a place to go back to?” I didn’t want to lie. I said yes. (IF “
YES
”
GOTO
10.) The interview was over.

I thought of just going back home but Mina told me not to. Neda told me there was another agency, the International Rescue Committee, through which I could attempt to immigrate
to the United States, so I went and dropped off all my papers there. They said to wait a month or so until the next INS officer showed up.

November 9, 1995:

Officially read every book in the place, including the complete works of Erich Fromm. Around 3
PM
thought I was having a heart attack but the palpitation subsided after about ten minutes. Ana said it was an anxiety attack and gave me half a pill of Valium. I tried reading the newspaper but it was atrocious. Kingdom for a book. Don’t know what to do with myself.

November 15, 1995:

Mina went to bed early. Ana busted out a bottle of red wine and offered me some, but for some reason I told her I didn’t drink. She ended up getting quite sauced and happy and we talked movies into the night. She asked me if I had seen
Pulp Fiction,
“the best film in the world,” and I said no. First she screeched and then she proceeded to tell me the whole convoluted plot of it, quoting huge chunks of dialogue by heart in English, reenacting gestures and grimaces and voices. After about three sentences I realized I had in fact seen the film before, just hadn’t caught the title, but by then it was too late. She went on and on and I couldn’t bring myself to disappoint her. Truth be told, I don’t think I would have sat through the whole thing had she not had cancer. Is that bad?

Around eleven her medication started its slow dance with the wine, and in half an hour’s time her eyes, little by little, turned into slits and she thanked me for my company and retired.

November 20, 1995:

Felt good and positive, like this America thing will happen after all. Made myself get out for the first time in a long-ass time and walked around Zagreb, had a cup of coffee on Ban Jelači
Square, went to the U.S. embassy to use their library, got out two books on avant-garde theater, and read some on the bench in the park, watching the leaves glide to the ground and dog owners chaperone their pets’ bowel movements.

Decided to go to a movie.
Braveheart.
Started crying from the opening image. Camera flying over the highlands and then those bagpipes kick in. Killed me. The Scottish accents made me giddy. The love story made me cry for Allison. All the freedom fighting pumped me up to the point of invincibility. Had a bunch of cops tried to deport me when I left the theater, I would have gone through them like Mel Gibson through a carload of wet cardboard cutouts—no contest. I walked back to the apartment like an invading general, chest out, eyes on fire, letting everyone know I wasn’t to be fucked with.

Now I can’t sleep.

November 25, 1995:

No call from IRC yet.

Ana is crying in her room. I can hear her all the way in here.

December 7, 1995:

IRC just called!
D-day tomorrow, noon
.

It rained or snowed all morning. My broken shoe was no match for the briny slush that stuck to the city streets like a dirt ganache. I had
my wet right foot parked against a lukewarm radiator that stretched the length of the wall right below the window in the waiting room of the IRC in Zagreb.

Outside, on the sill, an old pigeon suffered his life with sagelike fatalism, standing on his one and only leg, unaware of the tragic state of his plumage, and blinking his eye against the wind. Still farther outside, on the sidewalks, citizens in histrionic winter head wear hobbled under the weight of their ex-Communist coats, looked at their shoes to hide their helpless necks from the chill. Something swooshed up diagonally into the window frame, a page from a newspaper bullied by a particularly ardent gust, and the pigeon hopped once to the left, cocked his head back as if contemplating this uncouth agitprop theatrical occurrence, then settled back, unimpressed, into his one-legged meditation.

In the big waiting room people waited in lines they were told to wait in, holding papers they were told to bring, looking at watches and clocks, their faces scared and ready for anything. Employees smiled tirelessly and spoke in subdued, library voices. Every newcomer through the doors mechanically stomped their feet against the welcome mat to get the slush off and collapsed their umbrellas in the same déjà vu manner.

Nobody inside or outside (not even the employees) knew that the INS officer had approved my application to immigrate to the United States. I was sitting sideways on the edge of a bench blending into a group of fellow applicants who crushed their hands, popped their knuckles, bit their cheeks, paced the room, and awaited the official results of the morning and afternoon interviews. I, too, tapped my cold foot nervously against the radiator and examined my nails over and over again, all of it out of solidarity. Like I said, I knew for a fact that I was in. I had shaken on it. The INS officer had said, “Welcome to America,” stood up from behind her desk, and
initiated a handshake. Unlike her fat automaton predecessor she had gentle, gray human eyes and a soft hand. Her final and most important question had been: “Why do you want to come to live in the United States?” I said I wanted to go to college, which was true. She scrutinized me for a long while, rubbing the edge of the desk with her index finger, saying nothing. Her tongue explored the cavity of her mouth as if it had never been there. A range of feelings and thoughts about those feelings walked to the proscenium of her face, posed for a moment, and then walked off the runway to be replaced by the next one. Next, she wrote something down in my file and said:

“Be good at school.”

The weird thing was that I had been really calm all morning. I suppose it had something to do with the pill Ana gave me the night before. I had trouble falling asleep and when I sneaked out to the bathroom I heard her in the kitchen. She was grunting, thinking she was the only one awake, yielding to her pain in private. As soon as she noticed me her left hand dropped off her bandaged arm and she smiled that big, toothy grin of hers, a little embarrassed and a little violated, like I had caught her touching herself. She wanted to know what I was doing, dressed, in the middle of the night. I told her and she gave me a pill to zonk me out, and zonk me out it did. I woke up at nine this morning, completely refreshed and calm as a cucumber.

A healthily plump woman came out of the door marked
IRC
and read a Bosnian last name off a list and searched for its bearer among us, crushing her clipboard against her bosom and smiling a generally reassuring yet undecipherable smile. Looking at her you couldn’t tell if you were the winner of a contest or next in front of the firing squad. A graying man on the other end of my bench shot up desperately, dropping his documents, his face made up in
hope and dread. His peasanty hands were knotty and thick and unacquainted with handling papers and it took him some time to pick them up off the carpet. Through the canvas of his face I could see exactly where his sockets were situated as his ogival cheekbones protruded, making twin pointy ledges. The woman waited for him and once he was next to her she led him calmly through a big white door. The rest of us succumbed to murmuring.

When, after some time, he came out, hunched over, slow and watchful as though he were walking through a marked minefield, and came over to our bench to retrieve his coat, he wore his face like a disguise. We all looked at him trying to read into his expression, his mannerisms, and his overall vibe, but he avoided our gazes by stubbornly staring at the floor. He mumbled a quick
good luck
and exited into the street, still in his shirt and pullover. There, he put on his coat, buttoned it up, took out a pair of blue woolen gloves, probed his way into them, raised his collar all the way to his ears, looked to the right, looked to the left, and walked out into the slush.

“You think they let him in?” someone asked no one in particular.

“No way,” offered someone else.

From where I was sitting I saw him stop a little way down the sidewalk and stare at the sky and the twirling descent of snow for more than a minute, his legs apart, his arms opening as if to receive a blessing or a punishment. I couldn’t tell if he was thanking the heavens for a miraculous break or cursing them for their cold and egregious injustice. Eventually he started walking again and became indistinguishable in the current of people. The pigeon was oblivious and just kept on blinking against the wind.

“Prchich,” mispronounced the woman with the clipboard and I rose and followed her through the white doorway, scratching off the stares from the back of my head. As soon as the door swung shut, she asked me to please keep my emotions in check when
I went out no matter the outcome of my particular case, just to be considerate of the other applicants’ feelings. I asked her if she could tell me if the man before me was accepted or denied and she said she couldn’t disclose that kind of information. I entered the processing office with a smile, realizing I didn’t have to act for the time being.

Father was relieved when I told him the news from the carved-to-shit booth in the main post office. He didn’t understand why I was still mad at him for not arranging the deal with Branka like he had promised and why I wanted him to give the receiver to Mother. Mother said happy words when I told her. The happier her words the harsher was the unspoken feeling of doom and regret escaping from her voice. Her baby was moving across the globe and the knot in her throat suddenly snapped when this dawned on her, and she started sobbing, apologized for it, said not to mind, that she was just overly emotional, and quickly wrapped up the conversation.

Allison shrieked my ear off, then said happy words that sounded genuine but distant, and the automated voice said we had only another minute and we spent it saying
I love you
in all the languages we knew:
Ich liebe dich, volim te, mahal kita, te amo
. . .

Outside, the street was a-clink with Hare Krishna. The procession of about twenty people, mostly in orange and white, stopped at the entrance to some kind of a superstore and danced and chanted to the accompaniment of a percussion squad. Passersby lingered to check out the festivities. It felt like everyone was suddenly celebrating my personal good news. The
machinal
of reality that I had observed earlier in the day was thus gloriously interrupted and I
couldn’t stop myself from smiling. I danced and sang and even followed the group when they started marching again. One of the leading percussionists, an American, complimented my huge grin, saying I should do commercials.

By the time I got back to the apartment they had already picked up broken Ana from the sidewalk, gathered all the scattered pieces of her, shoved them in a bag with the rest of her, and taken her away in an ambulance without sirens. They had already come with a cistern and melted away the bloody slush and washed away all the mess. They had already dispersed the gawking crowds and silenced the futile rumors. They’d done all that before I got there and entered the lobby.

I checked the mail and found an envelope with Ana’s sister’s name on it without any address or postal code and, puzzled, climbed six stories’ worth of staircase to Mina’s door, in front of which a bald police officer was talking to the teary woman from the apartment next door and writing things down in a little notebook.