Shards: A Novel (40 page)

“Down! Down!” the Claw yells and we drop Steamboat’s body into the mud and get down. Three or four shells hit in
rapid succession, the closest one some twenty meters away. Up the hill, Ninja’s smoke grenade, thrown earlier to cover our retreat, is dying, spurting its last white breath.

“The tree!” the Claw yells through the rain, motioning to an oak halfway between the trenches.

We grab Steamboat’s shoulder straps and start our crawl and drag, crawl and drag. The progress is slow. Chetniks are blanket shelling everything, cavalier with their ammo. Two or three machine guns are blurting their repetitive syllables. Slugs fly over. Our noses in the mud, we blindly crawl backward.

I just keep going and going and the next time I find the courage to look around, the tree is right there, between us and them. I stop, my abdomen in a knot. The Claw stops, too. I can’t take large enough breaths to accommodate the sudden need for them with my face in the muddy grass. I flip and face the ferocious skies. Raindrops grow bigger and bigger and hit my lips, forehead, cheekbone. I pant like Archibald for a while and then push myself under the foliage, sick of being rained on and shot at.

Something forced itself into Mustafa’s mind’s eye with the ferocity of a flashback. He was transported to another place, a small round park completely surrounded by a street (it’s called a
roundabout,
he remembered,) in the middle of a city he somehow knew was Edinburgh. Everything was vivid. He knew what he was doing there, too; he was in the middle of a play, he knew his next line. Sure enough, there were his fellow actors, too. And even though he jumped right into his role, dropped down and did twenty push-ups, counting out loud in English and forcing his own face into the mud, a part of him was flabbergasted. Flash-forwards couldn’t feel like flashbacks,
could they? It simply wasn’t possible to remember a place one had never visited, recall a play one had never read.

He dropped down to his knees with his back to a mighty Scottish oak and said his next line:

“Please, God, give us technical pencils and salvation,” he crooned, his eyes closed, his face turned upward. “Bring back our mothers and let them splash in shallow cognac, O Mighty One. Give us spas for diving and walnut forests for pointy frolicking. Put fear in us so we don’t lose our moral balance. Fuck us into shards.”

All at once the other actors were leaving the park through a hole in a metal fence. Mustafa saw his director (Asmir’s his name) talking to a portly female cop and emphatically trying to explain something. Her small white police car was up on the curb, flashing its lights, the driver’s side door ajar. Passersby were converging on the scene in waves, gawking and sneaking snapshots.

He was alone in the park now, at the center of everything, and the cop came to the fence and pointed at him.

“You have not obtained the proper documentation to perform here, sir!” she said.

“Make our cunts wide so that we feel no pain of birth!” Mustafa screamed his next line.

“You have to discontinue!” the cop went. “This performance is over!”

Another police car pulled up and two male cops came out running. Mustafa turned away from them and approached the tree. He put his head to the ground and got up into the kneeling position again. He did it over and over again, unable to stop himself from performing. Every time he opened his eyes he saw that the crowd was growing in size. His fellow actors motioned for him to stop but he just kept on going down and up, down and up, again and again.

Somebody was taping him with a camcorder. There was a red dot in the crowd. Mustafa raised his head and screamed.

Then: magic. Out of the foliage above, a thick, dry branch broke off with a rich crack, shushed through the leaves, and thudded onto the ground in front of him.

I’m choking. It’s crushing my throat. I’m trying to push it off but can’t. My arms are boneless, fleshy. They bend when I push. I dig my nails into the bark, fighting for purchase. Twigs and bark fragments hit my face, eyes, fall into my mouth. Bullets are ripping up and down the tree. I cannot inhale. I cannot inhale.

Then I inhale and the air fills my throat, lungs, and mind with pain. I see stars. I exhale.

“Mustafa,” the Claw calls, breathing his rotten breath in my face as I inhale another gulp. But the pain . . . The pain is . . .

Mustafa spun around and around, wielding the fallen branch and laughing. He remembered how he had remembered who he was in the first place. It came down on him like a hammer when the Claw came to visit him in that loony bin, in that hospital room with that birdly man, his neighbor. He had instantly remembered how the Claw had left him in between the trenches all night but had come back before dawn, tied a rope around him, and dragged him down the hill to safety. And spinning around like that he also remembered the Claw’s strange demise later on. But what he still could not for the life of him remember was what it all meant.

The cops finally got the gate open and Mustafa, his face covered in mud, blood and spittle, calmly walked toward them and toward the red-eyed cameras.

* * *

Mirsad, the buzzard man, he was taken away. Not just him but his whole bed. The mint green gap that Mustafa was now forced to face all day was a smile with a missing tooth. The bed to the left of it, the dead man’s deathbed, had another candidate in it, another slab of fed-up forehead, another pair of dry twig arms, another wheezing whine. The sky was invisible through the window from all the clouds. The rain was falling outside. And shells were falling. And the world was falling apart.

The nurses changed Mustafa’s piss bags (often) and shit bags (seldom), commenting on the amounts, colors, frequencies. They squirted salty mush through his barely open mouth and massaged the sides of his throat to ease the swallowing. They dragged lukewarm sponges over the surface of his rapidly diminishing body, giving extra care to all the hairy nooks and crannies.

The doctor changed his jaw and throat bandages, looked at the stitches from all angles, smiled sad smiles, and always touched his shoulder. The family members of Mustafa’s hospital roommates mostly ignored him, just as they mostly ignored their hapless old relatives. They moved around, working hard not to look into their eyes, and fussed about the blankets, curtains, and juice boxes. They gave quick pecks on the foreheads and short, crushing squeezes on the arms, mumbled feeble words of encouragement, and took their swift leaves.

His own family never came or came when he was out of it, but he never saw them while he was in there. He was having trouble even picturing them in his mind. All his memories of them seemed muddled and grainy. Only the woman who thought she was his mother came in every night after visiting hours were over, most likely sneaking away from the ward upstairs. She held his hand and patted his forehead. She sighed and cried, asked why he was so distant to
her, asked him if he remembered this or that, gave him news about his supposed relatives: that his uncle Fajko was mobilized into the army, that a shell had hit his father’s garage and totaled his car, that his brother was having a hard time acclimating to his new school, that he just wanted to sleep all the time. She even brought him a letter that he supposedly received from the army and started to read it aloud to him.

“We regret . . . to inform you,” she read, sniveling, “that your unit . . . was . . . decimated in the enemy counterattack—”

Her emotions had their way with her and she abruptly started to sob, folded the letter, stuffed it into a blue envelope, and left it on his bedside table.

“I can’t,” she whispered. “I can’t.”

What conviction,
he thought.

“They list most of your unit . . . they are all dead . . .”

As soon as the Claw walked in Mustafa remembered everything. He remembered the bulldozer, the ambush, and the rain. He remembered the tree and the chunk of the tree that fell on him. He remembered the stench of shit and the cold ring of his prayers in the night. He remembered his real mother, his real father, and his real brother. His family. He remembered everything.

He also remembered what the Claw did for him, how he called him by his name, how he came back for him because no man was ever to be left behind. He remembered that the Claw would die a week after the war was over, or rather he
knew
.
How strange,
he thought. He knew that his war buddy would be on the way to the command to receive the Golden Lily and that the asphalt would cave right under his feet and that he would fall into a deep hole caused by the town’s saltwater exploitation and break his neck.

“What’s up Mustafa, you pussy’s worst foe?” boomed the Claw now. “Is that you or did someone take a shit?”

Mustafa wanted to tell his fellow Apache both what he remembered and what he knew but the pain in his throat was bursting. All he could do was look, and when he did, for a while all his eyes could do was cry.

“You’re crying, you pussy,” the Claw said, only this time he looked away and choked something down before it was too big. He walked around and sat on the chair. He ran out of words. He swallowed audibly.

“Sooty says hi. He’s better now. They got him good, in the stomach and in the ass but he’s better. The bulldozer rolled over his foot and they cut off his heel. He’s gonna go to some place called Thousand Oaks in California to get a new one. They are letting him go.”

Mustafa strained to look into his eyes but the Claw was leaning forward in the chair, his elbows on his knees, his hands exploring each other, going through all the poses. His eyes darted sideways and every once in a while his facial tic took over them. He noticed the blue envelope on the bedside table and picked it up.

“Motherfuckers,” he said, scanning the contents. “I got one too: Your country thanks you for your valiant service in these times of war. We sent you on a fucked-up mission in a fucking bulldozer and you all got killed. Chetniks retook the village the next day so it was all for nothing. Thank you for your lives. In return we will list your names on this piece of paper and not even bother to find out your Apache nicknames, the fucking sacks of shit.”

He took a pen out of his pocket and started to scratch out the soldiers’ real names and write down their nicknames instead.

Almir Muteveli
became Steamboat.

Dragan Krsti
became Ninja.

Vedran Deli
became the Lump.

Damir Verlaševi
became Hammer.