Shards: A Novel (9 page)

Four days later, despite well-meant protests from Pepa and his family, our parents made up their minds and we were on a bus heading back to Bosnia. Before we left Mother threw away armfuls of clothes and packed our bags full of cans of oil, bags of flour, tins of meat and fish, packages of coffee and sugar, yeast and dried milk. Again I had to leave my books behind.

“We’re going to be fine,” Mother said when we sat in our seats and she saw me crying.

But she hung a plastic bag containing her cigarettes and a bottle of cognac on the side of her window. It was a little weird but I didn’t say anything.

Somewhere around Karlovac, still in Croatia, the bus broke down and we lost half a day waiting in the sun by an abandoned gas station for a new part to be delivered from Zagreb. I searched my mother’s eyes to see what she was thinking, but she was smoking and I couldn’t really see inside her head.

Later we all took a pill and slept. Or at least Mehmed and I did. We were on a ferry for a little while. It was dark. Then we were on a bus again, going slowly, stopping, showing papers, starting again, sleeping.

I awoke at dawn and when I did Mother immediately took my hand, her face stern with fear, and squeezed. People mumbled from the semidarkness like at a funeral. The air smelled of puke and rancid mayo and motor oil and old sweat. A child was crying
in the back and a mother was telling her to shut up and act her age. My father was up on his feet, leaning into the aisle, copying what other men were doing, trying to figure out what was going on, looking busy.

We had stopped on an incline and we couldn’t move. The drivers debated something, deliberately keeping their voices down and their faces stony until one of them finally descended from the front to the middle of the bus and, looking down, told us that the engine was too weak to climb such a steep incline and that we should all get off, unload all our luggage from the belly of the bus, and try to push it up the hill.

Later on, while the men were pulling out the pudgy bags from the swollen bus—their faces so determined to be useful, to be strong, making the fear in them that much more visible and pungent—I saw my mother walk to the edge of the crude road and saw her shoulders go limp.

I realized then just how high up the mountain we really were and how wet green everything below must have looked from where she was standing, and I didn’t have to hear the distant tinkling of bells to know that the sheep were there as well. I went to her and saw it all in awe.

“This is what I saw in my vision,” she said, but I knew that already.

Home.

We walked around the apartment, in and out of rooms, looked in every corner, opened drawers and cabinets, dragged our fingers across the walls, slipped our hands under pillows and in between cushions, picked up glasses and trinkets and set them back down. Later, we lit a candle and sat around the table listening to Grandma
talk, looking in disbelief around our dining room, which the shivering candle was making unreal.

The grown-ups talked.

Mother said that the cognac was in case some Chetnik stopped the bus at gunpoint and climbed aboard and tried to get near us, her children: that it was to be drunk straight out of the bottle to kill the paralyzing fear, so she could then jump at the fucker’s neck and tear his throat out with her bare teeth.

Father said that he saw our property in Kovačevo Selo and that every thing was gone, looted—the barbed wire, the raspberry plants, the stairway, the roof, the windows, all the furniture, my comic books—and that the only things he found were a broken spatula in the grass and a framed poster of
American Ninja
’s Michael Dudikoff from the attic room way up in the pear tree.

Grandma said that she had fed the parakeet rice and that it died in its cage.

Excerpts from Ismet Prci
’s Diary
from February 1999

I love you,
mati,
but when I come to visit you I won’t stay.

Melissa’s moving to San Diego with her two best friends, those girls that hate me. You know when on nature shows those ice cliffs in Antarctica break off and crash into the ocean? Well that’s me now.

You’ll see me this summer. I don’t know how to feel about it. One thing I do know, though. I
will not
stay. No matter what you do, no matter how many times you try to kill yourself, I will not stay. Izzy has to follow Melissa to San Diego. That’s all there is to be said about that.

Pills and alcohol don’t work as well as before,
mati
. I take a sedative before I go to sleep, and I wake up half an hour later, covered in sweat. I get hammered on vodka and pass out and the same thing happens. How do you stave off the thought swarms, the brain chatter?

Dementophobia, it’s called. Dr. Cyrus told me. Fear of going insane.
Last thing you need,
he said.

* * *

This is how it happens: I think I hear a murmur. In my head? From downstairs? I mute the TV, listen. It’s still there. I go on the balcony, and through birdsong and car noise, I still hear it. A man whispering urgently, as if through a beard. I go back in, unmute the TV, turn it way loud. The murmur is still there. I chug vodka straight out of the bottle. It’s still there. It’s still there. And when I begin to panic I see things: you, Father, Mehmed, soldiers, and I’m transported into a random memory, a random occurrence of a life that might or might not be mine.

(. . . the night you return
to bosnia . . .)

You wake up in the middle of the night. It’s one of those awakenings that messes with your head. The nightmare is still vivid enough to appear almost real, but the waking state is too hazy to offer any consolation of safety. Your shoulders tense up as if expecting a blow. There is no grounded reason for this yet somehow that doesn’t matter. The sense of awful urgency is overwhelming and you wait for reality to kick in. You wait for things to start making sense. Time drags its feet.

The air is hot. Your pajamas stick to you. Your eyes slowly adjust to the dark and your surroundings start to ring a bell: the Donald Duck sheets, your brother sleeping on the other sofa, the funky rug, the constant squeaking of the hamster wheel—you are back home. Back home?

You ransack your brain to discover nothing but leftovers of an already distant nightmare. You can’t recall your age. The baseless urgency you feel sitting on your chest borders on panic and you have no idea where it’s coming from. The hamster wheel stops squeaking and you tense up even more. The silence is pressing. You wait for something, anything.
What the fuck is going on?
you think.

BOOM!

You don’t even move. There is the sound of broken glass, then footsteps and the banging of doors in the apartment above. Your heart vibrates like a caught sparrow. You sit there, still waiting.

Your dad appears in the doorway in his tighty-whities. “Don’t be scared guys,” he says. “This is their usual night treatment.” You look at your brother, but he’s still half-asleep. You could fire a cannon right from underneath his blanket and he would hardly stir. Your dad helps him up. He keeps on talking but you can’t hear him. The source of your heartbeat seems to be in your inner ear, muffling everything else. In the noise you make out some words like
bomb shelter
and
hurry
. He goes out. You keep on sitting there. The siren starts wailing in the night. Loud.

Then you remember everything. Your body goes on automatic pilot and you put some clothes on in haste. All that time your mind keeps repeating
This is real. This is real. This is . . .
In his cage, Rambo the hamster runs in place like crazy. His wheel goes
squeakety-squeak
. You run out into the corridor after your brother. Your mom is shoving handfuls of plums into a plastic bag, her face pale. The sweatshirt she has on is inside out. The seams are littered with lint. She urges you toward the front door.

Outside the door, the stairway is dark but alive. Some neighbor with a flashlight descends from the floor above with a little girl in his arms. He has only one slipper on. The circles around his eyes make his face look like some kind of a mask. He looks like a scavenger bird.

“They haven’t shelled for quite a while, Mirsad,” your dad says to him sarcastically.

“Fuck ’em!” the man says.

BOOM!

Everybody rushes downstairs. You plunge into the current, staying behind your parents and your brother. You go down seventeen stairs, then turn. You do this four times again as more people join
the current on lower floors. You feel a boost of adrenaline make your head light. The last stairway is longer and it takes you into the bowels of the building.

Soon you are in a huge concrete room with two lines of bunk beds stretching the length of a soccer field. Metal pipes crisscross the ceiling. They are wrapped up with black duct tape. They still leak in places. The bun-shaped lighting fixtures beam unevenly from the walls. Their light is gray. It makes everything look greasy and damp. People go to the beds like skeletons climbing back into their grave slots in a mausoleum. You stand there speechless, your heart in your heels.

Your dad points to two bunk beds in the corner. He looks proud and focused, purposeful. He tells you not to be afraid. You sit down on the bottom mattress of the one on the right. Your mom ends up on the one on the left. She asks your brother if he wants a plum, rummaging through her bag. He declines. She squeezes a plum with her thumb and index finger and brings the two halves of the fruit closer to the light, inspecting for worms. You wonder how come she’s so calm. This is her first taste of the war, too. Looking down she notices her sweatshirt is inside out and bursts into tears, letting everything fall to the floor. Your dad gives her a pill. She takes it and lies down, sobs rocking her upper body. She looks straight into your eyes. She says, “You’re not a traitor.” You have no idea what she’s talking about. She smiles for an instant. You cannot hold the terrified gaze any longer, though, and you look away.

You notice a family of four arrive and settle on their two bunk beds across the way. They look average, nondescript, their movements mechanical. The son is kind of weird, though. His light hair is full of cowlicks and his shirt says
DON’T FUCK WITH CHUCK
in English. The dad pulls a flattened cardboard box from underneath one of the beds and reassembles it. You watch in astonishment as they all
produce a number of playing cards from their pockets and resume the hand that’s obviously afoot.
They’re taking it well,
you think to yourself and look at your own family. Your mom is motionless now, as though made of wax. Her eyes are glass. Your dad is making the rounds around the “neighborhood,” shooting the shit with the “neighbors.” Perhaps he’s

BOOM!

Third one. It strikes you that it has probably been only three or four minutes since you awoke, five tops.

Your brother is asleep.
Wow,
you think.

BOOM!

Close one. They sound more sinister underground. You move to the foot of the bed and look. Some apartment dwellers curse. Others pray. Most of their faces are in midcringe. They look like people who don’t want to die. Only the family across the way stands out in their cheerfulness, playing gin rummy. You witness the dad win the round and smile. His wife calls him a lucky bastard. He tells her, “He who’s unlucky in cards is lucky in love.” She pushes him playfully. He produces a cigarette and licks it all over. It burns slower that way. He lights it, takes one long puff, and extinguishes it promptly on the wall. You realize that they are playing for puffs of smoke instead of money. On the wall behind them somebody has spray-painted a huge phallus in green. The family doesn’t seem t

BOOM!

You recall the twenty-four-hour bus ride you took from Croatia yesterday. You recall the checkpoints with guards in at least three different uniforms. And land mines alongside the street. You remember your dad saying that you don’t need any papers when you are coming in. It’s only if you want to leave Bosnia that they look for documentation. You recall the unshaven face of a young ma

BOOM!

You wonder if this is what war is all about for a fifteen-year-old: sitting in the nerve-racking safety of a bomb shelter, listening to mortar shells explode on the surface. You cannot imagine anything more terrifying. On TV wars are at least exciting, you recall. In reality, in the safe concrete mausoleum, you stare at the halved plum on the dusty floor. Nothing. Yet your heart still races as if you’re running a marathon.

Your mother is asleep now. The pill has kicked in. Your father is still talking to some people five or six beds down. While in Croatia you imagined being thrown across rooms by detonations. You imagined walls crumbling and dodging bullets, all that TV crap. At least you would know why your heart pumps so hard. The halved plum stares at you from the floor like a pair of moist eyes. You lie down and try to sleep.

BOOM!

BOOM!

BOOM!

You sit back up. You stare at the family playing gin rummy. The mom has shitty cards. The
DON’T FUCK WITH CHUCK
kid is dozing off. His sister looks at his cards when he does. Somewhere a baby wakes up and does what babies do best, very loudly. After a while you pray for another explosion just to shatter the monotony of the screeching.

BOOM!

Thank you,
you say to yourself. The dad wins another round and you ogle him as he inhales the smoke and puts out the ever-shrinking cigarette yet again, so happy.

A movement across the room catches your attention. A woman. She’s sitting on a wooden plank and rocking back and forth as if in some kind of a trance. She’s wearing a skirt but is not concerned that she’s flashing everybody. You can’t help but stare at the whiteness
of her underpants. Her makeup is running down her face in streams. The baby is still crying. You stare at the panties. Your mind wants to sleep but can’t.

BOOM!

Your mind plays tricks on you. You visualize the woman getting up and pointing at you. The running mascara makes her face look like an inkblot test. She looks like one of the guys from Kiss. In your mind she screams,
TRAITOR!
Everybody looks at you then. Everybody condemns. They all know you haven’t been there since the beginning. Some of them are mourning relatives.

You shut your eyes tight. You shake your head to cast off the pressing thoughts.
TRAITOR!
the woman screams again. This time you don’t know if you’re imagining it or if it’s real. You jump up. People look at you. The woman keeps on rocking and wiping her nose from time to time. Seconds pass and people go back to minding their own business. You don’t know if they looked at you because you jumped up or if the woman really screamed.

It’s not possible,
you think. You deduce that there’s no way that you just imagined her voice. It sounded way too real. It’s not possib

BOOM!

le. . . . Le? . . . Not possible. . . . What? . . . You forget what you were thinking about. You are not sure. The baby keeps on crying. You feel like you just woke up but you know it’s not true. Somebody touches your shoulder. You turn. It’s your dad. He asks you a question. You say, “Yeah.”

BOOM!

You try to recall the question. “What was the question?” you whisper to yourself. You can’t remember. You lean on the wall behind you. Suddenly the prospect of spending your days in this room makes you feel like

BOOM!

You can’t remember anything. You push your body against the wall. . . .

BOOM!

. . . the wall is rough . . .

BOOM!

. . . nothing . . .

BOOMS!