Shards: A Novel (5 page)

Excerpts from Ismet Prci
’s Diary
from January 1999

More things I can’t tell you,
mati
:

I asked Melissa to marry me. Not now, obviously. Sometime in the future. Her friends hate me for it. They think she’s too young, that she’s supposed to go wild and crazy now, guzzle beer, experiment. That I’m too old and serious, that I drink too much, eat too much mayo.
If they only knew
.

I’m turning American,
mati
. I don’t go by Ismet any longer. Eric gave me a new name, a rock ’n’ roll name. Izzy. He has been schooling me in the ways of American culture, helping me assimilate. He’s a living encyclopedia and he knows what books I need to read, what TV shows I have to see, what albums I need to know by heart. The night I turned twenty-one, at midnight, we jumped the apartment complex wall, trudged through some abandoned compounds all the way down to Thousand Oaks Boulevard to a 7-Eleven there. I put a six-pack of Becks on the counter and the clerk didn’t even notice it was my birthday, didn’t say anything. He just swiped my driver’s license through a machine and told me the total. Eric and I went back home, lit some fat candles, and he played Tom Waits for me, made
me follow along with the lyrics on the record’s inner sleeve. It was then,
mati,
that love was born in Izzy for America, for its sadness and madness, for its naïveté and wisdom, for its vastness, its innumerable nooks where a person can disappear.

I look at Eric. He loves his girlfriend, his record collection, our giant couch. He hates his work, driving this vet around the Valley so that he can look at X-rays, but he bears it, makes it work. While waiting for his boss in clinic parking lots, he rocks out or writes or reads, smokes like a chimney (alternating between regulars and menthols), and warms up his lunch sandwich on the hood of the van. He loves his projects, making mixed CDs, putting together seemingly clashing artists into a unique and unified whole. He’s obsessed with Faulkner and has created a map of Faulkner’s imaginary county and a bunch of family trees of his characters, trying to look at all that fiction and make it as real as possible. He loves his TV and records almost everything on VHS tapes of which our storage room above the parking space is full. He loves his family and they talk on the phone every day; he swings by their place all the time. We hang out at night looking for boobs on cable and every time he goes out on the balcony to smoke or to the bathroom to take a whiz I yell, “BRIEF NUDITY!” and he scrambles into our living room to see.

I live this kind of life, this day-to-day, too, but you haunt me,
mati
. I have two minds about everything. Side A(merican) and side B(osnian). I wish I could find a way to drop off the face of the planet and leave my minds behind, get a new one. I dream of disappearing, cutting all ties, becoming a derelict, free to rave. I’d be calmer, happier. Or better, going back to Bosnia and telling no one, not even you. Just live there in the same city, grow a beard, and watch you go to the market from a café across the street through a pair of sunglasses, never letting you know who I am.

(. . . premonitions . . .)

The fall of 1990. My mother said:

“There’s going to be a war.”

On TV some suited fathead behind a podium yelled into a microphone and shook his sausage finger in the air. The crowd in front of him roared, sporting his framed photographs and holding lit candles. My mother repeated her sentence absentmindedly, staring into the corner of the coffee table on which meze was served. My father, chewing on smoked beef, laughed and said that it was all just talk, that people were not stupid.

He poured himself another slivovitz. The parakeet screeched in its cage and pecked at its cuttlebone. Mother just kept on staring.

To me and my brother, after my mother went to sleep, he said:

“Don’t listen to her, she’s paranoid. It’s from the concussion.”

A month before, she had walked into a low stop sign in front of our building on the way to the corner store and knocked herself out. She was in a coma for a day.

Every once in a while from then on she would act . . . weird: say weird things, stare off into space for hours, clean maniacally. Mehmed and I were scared for her. Father told us everything would be fine.

But nothing was fine.

The people
were
stupid.

There
was
a war.

Sometime in the eighties, seeing how most of his friends were doing it, my father was persuaded, after an all-out nag attack from his mother and sister, who themselves were not doing it, to take out an onerous bank loan and buy a piece of land on the outskirts of Tuzla on which to build a weekend house. He was notorious for his indecisiveness, waiting for the last moment, always making the wrong decision anyway and drunkenly lamenting his choices for years to come with I-should-haves, I-shouldn’t-haves, if-I’d-been-smart-I-would-haves, if-I-knew-then-what-I-know-nows, and so on and so forth. Bereft of imagination or creativity, he believed himself an adherent of a philosophy of sorts, which could be summarized by the counsel he gave me some years later, shortly before I was to flee Bosnia:

“Ismet,” he said, “if you don’t know what to do in life, just look around and see what other people are doing and then do the same thing.”

After months and months of making up and then changing his mind about the location, he had settled for a verdant parcel in Kovačevo Selo, a predominantly Orthodox Christian village some fifteen kilometers outside our town. He acquired it from Drago Stojkovi
, a rich farmer who lived with his clan in a huddle of buildings on top of the hill overlooking all his land. To get to it you had to suffer through an off-roading experience. First there was a nerve-racking 40 kph roll across a shimmying bridge. If you attempted to cross at a slower speed, it would droop in the middle like a hammock and
emit agonizing groans. Then there was a sinuous, hilly, mud road that slalomed between scattered houses and sheds and made the cars wheeze going up and whoosh going down the hill.

Our parcel was the last in a row of five others, which all already contained pretentious attempts at the idyllic: picturesque cottages in various stages of construction, loud beds of flowers, absurd white statues of swans, lions, and armless Greeks. All of them were wrapped and rewrapped in barbed wire and guarded by overly passionate dogs and owners who yelled and brandished their double-barrel shotguns if you dared to pick up a plum that fell from their trees. Our little plot of land was a forty-by-eighty-meter rectangle choked with grasses and weeds battling for dominion. It was bordered by the woods on one side and a calamitous cloud of blackberry bushes—that looked like it was slowly rolling downhill from Drago’s house—on the other. In the middle there was a pear tree to end all pear trees, the oldest tree I’ve ever seen. It looked scarred and gnarly and even its leaves and fruit were wrinkled and acned with age spots.

The first thing my father did was put up barbed wire all around the property to match the neighbors’. Then he got stuck. Too many people were telling him too many things: what to build, what not to build, how to build it if he was building it. Some were advocating not building at all. In his small, gray, calculating head he didn’t know what to do, so he shut down. He stopped driving up there on the weekends, opting instead for televised sports of any kind and long afternoon naps.

Then it was up to my mother.

Over the years we got to know the Stojkovi
s pretty well. They helped us dig our well. We helped them scythe, rake, and stack up the dry grass for their cows. They would bring us slivovitz and fresh
cottage cheese. My dad would bring them gift packages of cleaning products from the factory. If we were around they invited us to their parties, weddings, and get-togethers. We invited them when we had people over to show them the progress on the house. By all accounts we were really good neighbors.

Mehmed and I befriended Marija and Ostojka, Drago’s two granddaughters, and spent large chunks of our summers playing in the woods with them. We gathered wild strawberries, observed adders hunting tadpoles in the gaunt creek, pretended we were stranded in the wilderness, climbed trees, fell out of them, those sorts of things. Ostojka and I played show-me-yours-and-I’ll-show-you-mine in a cow barn, although neither of us showed anything because we were too busy fighting about who should go first.

I’m not saying there were never any blemishes. There was that whole affair with my father’s scythe. He took it up to Drago, who said he was going to take it to a man in the village to have it sharpened. Weeks, then months, passed and Drago hadn’t brought back the tool, and my father, being that kind of a guy, hadn’t mentioned anything, either. Our property started to grow first a shadow, then a stubble, then a full-on scraggly Socialist beard. When my father finally— after my mother’s constant pestering that something might bite us from the grass—macheted his way out to the fence and walked up the hill to inquire about what had happened to his scythe, Drago denied that he was ever given it in the first place and started yelling as if offended by the whole thing. Father then minced the matter to calm him down and even went as far as asking to borrow Drago’s scythe for a day, which of course turned out to be his own. After my mother gave the property a once-over—she was the one doing the majority of the physical work because of my father’s supposed bad back and actual laziness—my father promptly returned his own scythe to Drago and had to borrow it intermittently from then on.

“Why did you do that?” Mother asked him afterward. “It’s our scythe.”

“It’s just a scythe. Fuck the scythe. Not worth starting a war over it.”

But you could see on his face that he was chagrined. His already thin lips disappeared completely and he looked away, not saying anything for a while. Only his crow’s feet got deeper as he squinted at his swarming thoughts. Mother smoked pointedly. Mehmed and I went to throw a makeshift ninja star made of tin into the pear tree.

That same night after a couple of shots in him, my father, of course, regretted returning the tool. He said that he shouldn’t have done it, that my mother was right, that it was our scythe, and that he would get it from Drago the next weekend.

But the next weekend he again returned it
to
Drago. When he climbed back down the hill he was whistling. He walked by my mother and started locking up the shed, avoiding her blazing eyes.

“You said you wouldn’t give it back,” Mother hissed.

“What?”

“The scythe.”

“When did I say that?”

“Last week.”

“I don’t remember saying that. Are you sure?”

Mother’s hand flew to the scar in her hairline. She turned from him and walked to the barbed wire and stared into the woods until he had the car packed up. On the drive back to Tuzla he said “Fuck the scythe” again, but Mother said nothing. The Fiat’s belt squeaked. The air was hard to breathe. In the backseat Mehmed squeezed my hand. I took it away from him. Father whistled through his teeth.

* * *

In 1990 the weekend house was done. The final addition was a beautiful outside stairway to the large attic room, which was my favorite place to be. There I had my collection of comic books and magazines, my futon bed, my posters on the wall, a TV, and a secret stash of candy, everything a tubby fourteen-year-old boy needed to avoid boredom indoors. As for the outdoors, it was impossible to be bored there.

One particular morning, a Saturday near the beginning of autumn, while we were waiting for our mother’s side of the family to show up and spend the weekend with us—which meant that we would have another boy, cousin Adi, to get in trouble with— Mehmed and I were playing the stealth game. The goal of it was to sneak, with our ninja masks on, from the well on one end of the property, through the garden, behind the rows of raspberry plants, around the house, around the shed, to the car, which at this time of year was never parked under the pear tree because of the falling fruit, and to the gate on the other side, without being noticed by our parents. After we had both accomplished this wondrous feat several times, we decided to up the ante and try to retrieve something from inside the house, the candle in the shape of a cat from the top of the downstairs TV or a Pluto mug from the kitchen, without being seen. That proved to be next to impossible because Father was watching tennis and Mother was kneading dough. We were going to change the rules a little bit, but that’s when everyone showed up: Grandma, Uncle Medo, Aunt Suada, Adi, and his two sisters.

My father had the annoying habit, which I have regrettably inherited from him, of carrying on with a joke or a prank for much longer than necessary.

That day Father led our guests to our brand-new stairway and told them that he himself had designed it. That was hilarious to me because I knew he couldn’t pick a straight line out of a group of
curvy ones. I’ve always been puzzled as to how he got his engineering degree—probably paid somebody off. I knew for a fact that he could not even imagine a shape in his head without seeing it with his own eyes first, no matter how perfectly you described it to him. That’s why he never read books. That’s why Mother had to build a model of the weekend house and explain where every piece of furniture would go before my father would green-light any expenditure.

The guests didn’t know that Father was pulling their leg, and he kept at it, dropping names of fake schools of architecture and nonexistent designers whose work, supposedly, inspired him and coining design-related nomenclature full of crude puns, all with a straight face. My aunt and uncle intuited that something was not right but were too polite, too conditioned by provincial Communism and their own sense of blue-collar unworth to overtly question somebody who went to college. My grandma actually believed him and kept saying “really” and “Mašala” and “good, good.” They trusted and respected him because he was an engineer, because his family descended from the
begs
and
agas
of the proud Ottomans, because (as he told me and my brother on a million occasions) his grandfather owned half of Tuzla before the Communists took it all away.

They respected him for all the wrong reasons. Truth be told, my great-grandfather Abdulaziz-aga did own some forty houses in Tuzla, one of the first automobiles in Tuzla, and a lot of land on which Tuzla’s new neighborhoods stand today, but he didn’t own these things because he was noble or learned. He owned them because he was an unscrupulous businessman who clawed his way to the top by pushing and shoving and signing his dotted lines with a smudge of a fingerprint or a wobbly X.

There was meanness in what my father was doing, condescension. His joke was unsalted, cruel, tasteless. It just wasn’t funny anymore, not even to me. But he kept at it, and Grandma kept saying “really”
and “Mašala” and my aunt and uncle kept looking down at their bare feet, stoically enduring this treatment without a word.

Then my mother, up to her elbows in flour, came out and told them the truth, that Father was pulling their leg and that the design was hers. My father burst into his evil little laugh and told everyone to lighten up, that he was just kidding, and we all smiled through our teeth, even Grandma, but her face had a glassy, wide-eyed tint of hurt.