Shards: A Novel (7 page)

“How could you do that?” Grandma yelled at us that night as the three of us stood lined up in the middle of the room with our hands on our throbbing asses and tears on our cheeks.

“These are very dangerous times to play those kinds of games,” said my uncle. “Don’t you know that?”

But we didn’t. Not really. We knew the politicians were fighting on TV a lot, that there was a lot of talk about what religion everyone was, about tensions between different nationalities, their constitutional rights—all foreign words to Adi and me, who were on the verge of crossing the border from the world of ninjas, marbles, and comic books into the world of new, curly hairs, cracked voices, and minds crammed with pussy, let alone Mehmed, who was only eleven.

“There’ll be a war,” my mother said, her lit cigarette as though forgotten in front of her face. Everyone looked over as though she had said that Venusians were about to land. But there were flickers of real fear in everyone’s eyes.

“God forbid,” yelped Grandma, shaking her head as her calloused fingers tapped against the plastic balls of her
tespih
and she continued to count off
zikr
prayers.

“I don’t think it will come to that,” said my uncle, though his words rang hollow.

Mother kept silent.

Father sent us upstairs. In bed I tried to imagine war and saw images from the Communist propaganda films in which the good guys, the partisans, machine-gunned Nazi dicks on their motorcycles with sidecars. I saw Rambo. I saw Arnold. As I understood it, war was good and exciting if you were a good guy and just the opposite if you were bad. But was I good or bad? Wasn’t it my idea to deliver the ultimatum?

Quickly I thought,
She couldn’t have meant war
. I rationalized that by
war
she probably meant something like a feud between the neighbors, the kind that Dad wanted to avoid by swallowing his pride and giving up his scythe. She was messed up from her concussion, I told myself. But I couldn’t fall sleep.

Soon enough even my father would realize that people
were
stupid enough to fling a hefty piece of wet Balkan shit right into the blades
of a turning fan and expect not to get soiled. The war would come just as prophesied, and for years a part of me would believe that by coming up with that bit of mischief, I had somehow caused it all, and I would feel guilty for all the dead and the dead-to-be, and sitting in the basement with my town groaning from destruction above my head, I would wish for a time machine and another go at that day.

By the next fall, scarred by the experience and about to start high school, I grudgingly put my ninja phase behind me. Solemnly, like an aging warrior with failing eyesight and unsteady hands, I retired my trusty mail-order swords to the cobwebs behind the ironing board and hung my nunchakus on the coat hook. I felt like something was ending, my childhood, perhaps, or the good ol’ times or pick your cliché, and something else, something forever foreign and foreboding, was coming to a boil in the country, in my city.

It crawled out of manholes and hissed out of pipes. It fell down with bloating rains. It blew in with stormy weather. It settled on souls, minds, concrete. We trudged upon it on the asphalt and in the grass. We kicked it around on dead leaves and trash. We breathed it in with dust and gulped it down with food. We washed it out of our hair and shed it with dead skin. It Freudian-slipped into our words and belly danced in our dreams. It was everywhere, yet we couldn’t recognize it, couldn’t see it for what it was. The best we could do was smell its ozone breath and sense its dead calm before the storm, attribute it to the changing seasons and blame it on the fall, then winter, then spring. All of us were fooled by it, by the war, except, of course, my mother.

The night Adi, Mehmed, and I pulled off our little stunt in Kovačevo Selo my mother dreamed of Chetniks, although she’d never seen one in her life. Her subconscious conjured them from
grainy black-and-white photographs in books about World War II, pictures showing long black beards, black caps and uniforms, big knives, and X-shaped sashes of bullets across the men’s chests. She told us that she saw herself running before them, carrying small, faceless children, presumably my brother and me. She saw headless bodies tumbling down an embankment into a muddy, swollen river, haystacks ablaze, buildings splotched with holes, and storm-pregnant clouds so close to the ground they obscured the tops of heads.

She refused to stay overnight in the weekend house anymore and made every excuse not to bring us, the children, at all. She and Dad would make quick trips up there to do some garden work, harvest the vegetables, clean the leaves out of the drainpipes and such, and would always return before nightfall. My father, the champion of taking the path of least resistance, humored her when she was around and made fun of her when she was not, saying stuff like: “Your mother and her conspiracy theories,” and “Your mother had a dream and now we can’t sleep in our own house.”

One time when we did go with them Mother had just finished making
ajvar
and was in the process of transporting the still-warm jars into the shed when Marija and Ostojka’s mother walked by the fence on her way to retrieve a renegade yearling.

“Oh neighbor, what are you making there?” called the woman.

“Just a little bit of
ajvar
. We got tons of eggplants this year and the peppers weren’t bad either. So I figured I should make something out of them instead of freezing them whole and overstuffing my freezer.”

“Make it, make it, who knows who’ll get to eat it,” the woman said and then jumped over the creek into the woods.

Mother froze, a jar in each hand, swirling the sentence in her mind, trying to work out a nonthreatening interpretation. She stood there breathing, smelling the resin and the nearby outhouse, hearing
the insects buzzing and screaming for someone to mate with them, feeling the breeze. And after a while, scrutinized by this most intense contemplation, all those stimuli began to make a new kind of sense. Her brain deciphered the code laid in the fabric of reality and she became aware that everything was saturated with terrible, mounting wrongness. She looked at our house and for a moment actually saw it roofless, stairless, and empty.

She then walked to our dark blue Fiat, opened the trunk, and placed the jars of
ajvar
inside. She returned to the shed and did the same with another two jars, then another two, then another two, and she didn’t stop until the trunk was filled up with jars of
ajvar
, pickles, pickled peppers stuffed with shredded cabbage, pickled beets, pear jam, raspberry jam, bottles of rose petal syrup, bags of potatoes, bunches of carrots, boxes of dried valerian, whole pumpkins, everything. She told Mehmed and me to get in the car, then found my father fussing about the well and told him to drive us home. He did and that was the last time she ever saw our weekend house or the property.

“To me it’s as good as torched,” she would say when Father would try to change her mind. From then on our weekends were spent around the TV, with my father taking naps and drinking and my mother staring into the void and chain-smoking.

As for the TV, it constantly showed news footage of what had happened in the Croatian town of Vukovar, just a little north of Tuzla, its buildings turned into debris by artillery, its citizens fleeing up snow-covered roads with all their possessions on horse-drawn buggies or in bulky suitcases or mere pockets, its projectile-plowed streets now full of Serbian banners and music, and dancing neo-Chetniks, rocking left and right in the backs of their trucks, smiling at the camera as the truck tires, unseeingly, crunched through
the flesh and bone of those who had too many holes in them to evacuate and were lying there, hugging the streets.

At that time we still lived in the old apartment on Brčanska Malta, at the intersection of Titova and Skojevska, the latter of which led all the way to the Husinska Buna military base. I would wake up in the middle of the night to pee and find my mother in the darkness of the kitchen/dining room staring through the closed lace curtains with a pair of opera glasses eight stories down to the street on which convoys of military vehicles moved to and fro nightly. She would take a cigarette break and give me the number of the moment.

“They just moved in forty cannons,” she’d whisper from the fuzzy darkness.

“So what?” I’d say. “You should go to sleep.”

“You go. I’m not tired.”

Sometime in April, in the new apartment, just before my parents sent Mehmed and me away, my mother got to say her first I-told-you-sos.

Prior to that, my father’s blind optimism had turned into the worst kind of selfish naïveté; he saw the war with his eyes, but the message had yet to reach his brain, or at least the part of it in charge of self-preservation. He would come home from work and, while kicking off his shoes, peck my mother on the lips for my benefit. This performance of affection was transparent, insulting. It was supposed to make me feel better, like the family unit was intact, like the parents knew what they were doing, like there was no reason for alarm. He would walk into the bedroom to change, and Mother would follow, closing the door. I would sneak closer and listen to the hiss and the mumble of their muted conversations, which would
always end abruptly with him emerging in his sweatpants, with a face like a red mask, white only around the lips, which were pressed together hard. He would take the kitchen route and materialize in the living room with a shot glass and a bottle of brandy in his hand. His chair would squeak when he dumped his weight into it. I would get shushed and the TV would pop on and blink at us all night with pain and violence and talk.

Despite recognizing his stubborn denial of facts and beginning more and more to believe my mother, I did my share of blocking out the shit when I was with my friends. We avoided talking about politics and religion. Instead, all horny and in love, we walked the streets hoping to catch glimpses of our “girlfriends,” who were clueless that we even existed. We drank Cokes and coffees in crowded cafés, went to one another's houses, and played cheesy computer games and out-of-tune guitars. We lied to one another about sexual experiences, traded Italian comic books and German porn mags, told gross jokes, and bitched about school.

The number of friends eroded with each wave of impending violence, though. Suddenly Boban had a sick grandpa in Pančevo and had to go visit him for a while. Sead’s family decided to move to Germany with his uncle, and we had a good-bye party in his weekend house before they sold it. Jaca left for Slovenia with her dad; Tarik flew to Turkey, and my friend Mile went to Banja Luka for his cousin’s wedding. Planes and helicopters flew over the town a lot.

The next thing I knew my brother and I were quickly kissed and hugged, then hurried into the back of a white Opel Kadett belonging to our cousin Garo. The interior was solid with that new-car stench, and the pungent, coconut-scented air freshener hanging off the rearview mirror made me want to retch. With Garo driving and his sister Amela yammering nonstop from the shotgun side, Mehmed and I looked at the scenery, vaguely scared and perceptibly giddy
because most of our friends were in school that morning and we were going on a trip to stay with some family of ours in Zagreb
until this whole thing simmered down.
For a week or two, my father said.

Zagreb, 1992. The two-house complex on Ilica Street was already teeming with my father’s distant relatives, some of whom were natives and most of whom were refugees from other parts of Bosnia. It was like hanging out in a locked-down airport terminal with people sleeping among their luggage, sitting on lined chairs, eating bread and smoked sausages off their hanky-covered laps, with their toddlers running amok and slapping at everything with their sticky little fingers, leaving smudges of grease. Everything had the feel of old Russian movies and third-world misery. I was appalled.

Mehmed and I moved in with Cousin Zvonko and his wife and daughter in the add-on attic apartment of the first house. Zvonko was a massive man, with a light brown comb-over and blue eyes behind rectangular specs, obese to the point of not being able to cut his own toenails. He breathed with a resonant wheeze that started on the third stair up, and by the time he reached the apartment he would cough and have to sit down for half an hour, drenched. His wife, Zana, was the exact opposite of him physically, to the point where you wouldn’t be able to fathom the image of the two of them in the act of coitus even if, by some twist of fate, you happened to witness it.

The apartment was almost all one room except for Zvonko and Zana’s bedroom and the bathroom. It was broken up by beams and chimneys and smelled of sun-bleached wood and dust. All the way in the corner, on the floor behind the TV cabinet, fenced off with low bookshelves featuring googly-eyed dolls and girlie trinkets, was our mattress. Before we got there this nook served as Zvonko’s
daughter’s secret room, which was probably why she was a total shit to us and hated our guts the whole time. I didn’t like being called a refugee, so I spent the money Father gave me for essential foods on Ramones records, Coca-Cola, and sugary cacao powder, and the hosts were, let’s say, angry.

“Do you know there’s a war going on?” they all kept asking. I cried and ran downstairs, slalomed my way through a gaggle of raggedy refugee toddlers and ended up in an office, the door of which I locked from the inside and whose phone I abused to call home. I told my dad we were ready to be picked up.

Mother did come a week later but not to pick us up. She was in one of the last buses that crossed the bridge into Croatia before it went, first up into the air and then down to the bottom of the Sava. Father stayed behind to keep his job, take care of the apartment, and feed the parakeet. Mother showed up in jeans with a bunch of bags and moved into the attic, as well.

With that commenced our official exodus.

In mid-May we saw our old apartment building on Brčanska Malta on TV. In the middle of the intersection that my mother spent nights monitoring with her tiny binoculars, an olive green ammunitions truck sat ablaze, its tires melting, its cargo crackling like a fireworks display, spraying projectiles indiscriminately. Behind it, stretching up Skojevska Street, were more trucks, some burning, some shot to shit, some stalled, some untouched but driverless. There were holes in the buildings. There were no soldiers except for the ones lying around, dead.