Shards: A Novel (35 page)

The wife-beater man has made it to the head of the table now, and he leans in and speaks directly to someone sitting there whose face you cannot see because there’s an enormous blond hairdo in your line of vision, like a clown’s Afro. You don’t see him until he stands up, wobbly on his feet, this
perfervid patriarch dressed in Chetnik war paraphernalia,
šajka
č
a, kokarda,
greasy gray beard down to his bellybutton, a pistol grip protruding from his pants.

“Where is this soldier man?” he yells, looking around while his son tries to keep him standing. He speaks in a patchy Serbian dialect with a rural Bosnian lilt, only a Bosnian Serb, a wannabe. You’re six feet from the back door when his hammered eyes finally find your own. The man smiles and waves you over.

Running right now would not be a good thing. A calm voice from within tells you to do what you’re told. You raise your bottle to the man and take a royal swig to buy yourself some time, then saunter over. Some of the people around the table pat your back. Those that can’t reach you raise their glasses in your honor, then go back to their conversations.

“Make some room for the war hero,” snarls the patriarch at the clown-fro lady, who has a face full of deviled egg.

“I’m done anyway,” she blurts, spraying egg bits out of her mouth as she stands. The wife-beater man and his pops shepherd you into her seat. Up close you can see that the old man has an elaborate tattoo on his shriveling forearm, a black shield with a red and blue border. In its center floats a two-headed eagle with two yellow swords held crossed beneath a human skull. Cyrillic letters are inked above and below it:
FOR KING AND FATHERLAND. FREEDOM OR DEATH.

In 1993, your unit crawled through a sticky minefield to take out a machine-gun nest as prep work for the early-morning offensive. The Claw, the leader of the unit and a truly insane individual, crept into the nest without his boots on and stabbed the last Chetnik in the back. He came out
with a souvenir, a banner with an identical skull-and-swords design. A pirate flag, he called it.

The patriarch claps your back and squeezes your arm, telling you how his dad was a Chetnik in the Second World War under the direct command of General Dragoljub “Draža” Mihailovi
and so were both of his brothers, and how he, the youngest, was too young to fight back then and how his father liked him the least because of that, and sent him to “Čemerika” without a dinar to carve a place for himself in the world. As he talks you start thinking of a different way to get out of here. Plum brandy.

“We should have a toast for staying alive despite everything,” you say, and swig your beer again.

“Wait for us,” the son says, looking around for his beverage.

“You’re gonna toast with beer?” You turn to the old man. “We need something stronger for this, right?”

“He’s right,” the father says. “Miloš, go get the
rakija
.”

An effete, shuddering fan trained on the back of the old man’s head putters to a stop. He swears, leans down to the grass, and fumbles with its cord until, resuscitated, it starts to twirl again, halfheartedly.

“Connection,” the old man explains.

You clink your beer against his and you both drink. He starts to talk again.

“See, both of my brothers were savagely killed. Dragiša, God save his soul, was caught and executed by the partisans in 1942 or 1943, we are not sure exactly when. His body was never found. Zdravko, God save his soul, was axed to death by the Zeleni Kadar in northeastern Bosnia. Fucking Turks. They chopped him up into pieces like a birch log. He came back to us in four burlap sacks.”

He slams his fist on the table like he’s in a bad play. Deviled eggs jiggle on his plate. His eyes well up. You hold his gaze while tightening your lips and shake your head in your best approximation of commiseration.

“After that my father hated me, said that if I’d been with my brothers to watch their backs they wouldn’t be dead now. But I was only twelve years old.”

Miloš comes back with a plastic Fanta bottle full of yellowy liquid and a tray of clashing shot glasses. As he passes by her a woman in black stands up from the table.

“What do you want that for?” she booms at him. She has a mouthful of gleaming golden teeth.

“To drink.”

“You want to kill your father?”

“He told me to get it for a toast.”

“It’s the middle of the day and he’s drunk already. You’ll give him a heart attack in this heat.”

“Raki thins the blood, Mother,” he says, and puts a shot glass in front of his father and another in front of you. He fills them all the way to the lip and then pours himself one as well.

“To survival, despite the enemy’s best efforts at achieving otherwise,” you say, and raise your glass. Miloš and his father follow.

“Whiny Turkish cunts!”

“Fuck their mothers on their shitty prayer rugs!”

You hold up yours until everyone at the table who wants to join in has a beverage in their hand, then slam it to the back of your throat, feeling like someone napalmed your stomach ulcer. It takes a conscious effort to suppress your urge to vomit. It’s not the brandy making you sick.

Your mother’s body flashes in your mind’s eye, a skeletal figure too brittle and head-shy to hug after her stint at the camp. You shake your head to get it off your mind. In her stead emerge fallen trench-mates, their faces rigid and pale like papier-mâché masks. And before the floodgates are open all the way you slap yourself, hard.

More toasts are shouted from all around the table: toasts to dead relatives, to dead relatives’ saints, to the personal saints of the host’s family members (his name is Jovan Cvetkovi
, you hear), to slogans like Serbia-to-Tokyo, to President Miloševi
, etc. Every time a shot goes down Jovan’s gullet he tries to stand up, pull out his weapon, and fire into the air, but Miloš and some younger cousins step in and dissuade him. They remind him that he’s in the Valley, in America. In response Jovan drops back into his chair and moans. You’re livid, but the sight of that Zastava sticking out of the old man’s pants keeps you from doing anything stupid.

Meanwhile the food’s been served, and now everyone’s plowing through it: soups, stuffed squash, stuffed peppers, savory pastry coils. There’s an accordion player, a fat person in a green felt hat with a crow’s feather stuck in the band and a mustache of the sort that vandals draw on posters. He plays and sings with varying degrees of success. Every once in a while he gets a clutch of people to get up and dance kolo. They wave you over every time, and eventually you tell them the shrapnel in your leg cuts off your circulation when you sit for too long and Jovan yells at them not to bother you. Really there’s no shrapnel, just nausea and cloying memories, confusion.

At some point they unload the pig, head and all, placing it on the table so it faces you with one eye closed and the other
agape and forlorn. They pull the spit out of its ass and put half a lemon in its mouth. They pour beer over it and laugh and smack their lips and ask for cutlery. They’re all really happy.

You’re ripping apart. You see your mother climbing through an open window in Tuzla and your arms grab for her in the Valley. Your muscles remember how they had to hold on to her when she bucked and shrieked that day, trying to end it.
Let me go,
you hear her say, and the people around you dig into the pig. Your arms are rigid, holding on to nothing. Your stomach climbs into your chest. The sneaker moves in your mind, then doesn’t. You want to run away or cry or start swinging.

In your heart you don’t know what you want.

When some woman serves you a big, glistening piece of flesh, you throw up all over it, all over the plate, the side of the table, your lap. Somebody tilts your chair and you hit the grass, still vomiting.

“Lightweight,” you hear Miloš say. You kneel there.

The woman, the clown head, helps you up. She walks you through the back door and into the house, shielding your head with her hand when you pass below a chandelier, and puts you in front of the bathroom door. She knocks.

“Hold your horses,” says a female voice from inside.

She raises your head.

“Are you all right?”

You grunt.

“Are you sure?”

You nod.

“Okay. Wait until she’s done and use the bathroom.”

“Thank you,” you manage, covering your mouth for her benefit.

“Don’t puke on my carpet now,” she says, smiling. Then she’s gone.

You look around the hallway. Pictures everywhere, collages: Jovan in a Chetnik uniform, Jovan in a suit, younger Jovan with seventies lamb chops and a mustache, his wife in a floral-patterned dress, hugging a baby to her chest. A family portrait with a head count of more than a hundred. Miloš as a child on a donkey at a beach somewhere, Miloš on prom night with a blonde date, Miloš at the wheel of a red Camaro. A huge portrait of General “Draža” Mihailovi
with his round little glasses and the puff around his eyes and a beard to match Jovan’s, only blacker. Next to it, framed in thin wood, is a photograph of a purplish medal. You get closer to see the caption. It reads:

General Dragoljub Mihailovi
; distinguished himself in an outstanding manner as commander in chief of the Yugoslavian Armed Forces and later as minister of war by organizing and leading important resistance forces against the enemy, which occupied Yugoslavia from December 1941 to December 1944. Through the undaunted efforts of his troops, many United States airmen were rescued and returned safely to friendly control. General Mihailovi
and his forces, although lacking adequate supplies and fighting under extreme hardship, contributed materially to the Allied cause and were materially instrumental in obtaining a final Allied Victory.