by Ismet Prcic
She was there when my doctor came into the room looking more like a butcher than a doctor, with oily skin a-sheen, an unshaven neck, and a mustache as solid as a chocolate log. He told us that I was a very lucky boy, that if I hadn’t gotten to the hospital when I did I would have died, that the inflammation of the appendix was at such a late stage that it was full of pus and ready to burst. He then produced a jar of yellowish liquid with what looked like a fat piece of decomposing red licorice, twisted and curled.
The biggest one I have ever seen, he said. That’s including the grown-ups.
Let me get one thing across: I never, not for a single second during my performance, felt any pain. None. So what happened? Here are some possibilities. Perhaps the doctor found a perfectly normal appendix and realized I was lying and decided to play a little joke on me. Or perhaps I got so far into the role of a boy who’s having an appendix attack that I psychosomatically caused my appendix to inflame. Or maybe God found a twisted way to tell me I needed an operation when my body refused to warn me the usual way.
So what happened?
A realization: There is no one solution. Everything’s up for interpretation. It’s all about what the author meant by this or that.
My mom made me go to school after missing only six days. I took the final exam. Got a C.
* * *
* Yugoslav “benevolent” Communist dictator Josip Broz Tito died in Ljubljana’s Clinical Center on May 4, 1980, three days before his eighty-eighth birthday.
(. . . germs . . .)
Mustafa was crawling around the apartment pretending to be a scuba diver, like one he saw on Survival. He had on a pair of welding goggles and a red thermos bottle taped to the back of his shirt as a makeshift oxygen tank. In his hand he brandished a straightedge, his harpoon gun, which he fired at things around the apartment, emitting slow, guttural sounds of underwater battles with sea monsters.
Chasing a particularly nasty and elusive hammerhead, Mustafa rolled into the hall when he heard them talking about germs in the living room. His mother had a guest and he was told not to disturb them. His mother’s friend from work, the doctor who talked weird, was over for a cup of coffee. He had given Mustafa a chocolate earlier, which Mustafa had devoured in three, enormous mouthfuls. He could see him now sitting on the sofa, holding his eyeglasses by their rims and sucking on one of the plastic tips meaningfully.
“Children of physicians often suffer from verminophobia,” the doctor said.
“Is that what it’s called?” his mother asked. From where he was lying, Mustafa could see only her bare foot lightly bouncing under the coffee table. It bounced sporadically against the doctor’s shin until the doctor moved it closer so the foot rested against him and the bouncing stopped altogether.
“Verminophobia is an unwarranted fear of germs, yes.”
Mustafa didn’t believe in germs. The smallest thing he ever saw was a grain of sand on a napkin, and he didn’t see anything on it resembling the multilimbed creatures whose photographs his mother pointed out in one of her books. He thought if they existed, they existed somewhere else, in the dirt or in the muddy water, in pond scum, but not here in the apartment. Otherwise he would have seen one by now, especially crawling around on his belly.
The pressure cooker hissed like a train and his mother jumped and ran to the kitchen, apologizing all the way. The doctor pulled out a kerchief from his pocket and started to clean the lenses on his glasses when he noticed Mustafa lying there in the hall. He smiled and motioned him over.
“Gentlemen do not eavesdrop on other people’s conversations,” the doctor said.
“I’m not a gentleman, I’m a scuba diver.” Mustafa stood up.
The man laughed.
“That is quite humorous, Mr. Scuba Diver,” he said and put his glasses back on. Mustafa, on the other hand, took off his goggles because they were beginning to fog up, inverted them, and let them rest against his forehead, still attached to his skull by their elastic band. He squinted at the doctor:
“Can I ask you a question?”
“May I ask you a question.”
“May I ask you a question?”
“Always, son.”
“Is it possible to die from germanophobia?”
“Do you mean verminophobia?”
“When people are scared of germs.” Mustafa said germs with skepticism and disdain.
“I’ll tell you a story if you promise not to tell your mother that I’ve told you it.”
“I promise.”
“A certain physician from Tuzla would wear surgical gloves at the dinner table. If he dropped a pen on the floor in his own house, he would put on gloves, pick it up, dispose of it, remove the gloves, wash his hands, and open a new package of pens. Once, in the winter, his car wouldn’t start, so he had to take public transportation to work. The bus was full and he had to stand. The driver pressed the gas pedal a little too eagerly, the vehicle jerked forward and the physician from Tuzla lost his balance, fell headfirst into the edge of a seat, cracked his skull badly, and later died in the hospital from head trauma. He refused to hold on to the rail for fear of it being contaminated by who knows what kind of germs. That physician . . . that was my brother.”
“Is that a yes, then?”
Excerpts from Ismet Prci’s Diary
from October/November 1998
The other day I was in the cafeteria at school and out of nowhere I thought there was shelling. They were shelling Moorpark College. I dove for nothing.
How is it that some shell that exploded long ago in Tuzla can reassemble itself, fly backward into the mouth of the mortar that shot it, get shot again, and reach me here at the Moorpark College cafeteria? How is it that I can exist in both the past and the present simultaneously, be both body and soul simultaneously, live both reality and fantasy simultaneously? How is it that the smallest units of light can be both waves and particles simultaneously, depending on how you look at them? Where’s the logic? Where’s the sound mind? How am I to interpret?
Mati, you’d kill me, but I drink. You have no idea how I drink!
I have a gun, mati, a lady pistol made of chrome and steel. I stole it from someone’s bedroom, from underneath their leopard-patterned pillow covered with dandruff, at a Halloween party last year. I was Pinhead from the Ramones song. I keep the gun hidden in my book-shelf, right behind the complete Mayakovsky, wrapped up in a rag. Eric doesn’t know. There are bullets in it, six of them, but only the first one matters, right? I’m sorry I’m so much like you in this respect.
In what way am I like my father? Sense of humor? Ability to turn off the outside world? In what way, mati?
I love a girl. Melissa. Her hair oozes like honey. It’s orange in the sun. She loves me, mati. She’s American. She goes to church. She wears a cross right where her freckles disappear into her cleavage. She volunteers. She takes forty minutes to scramble eggs over really low heat, but when they’re done they explode in your mouth like fireworks, bursts of fatty yolk and coarse salt and cracked pepper and sharp melted cheddar and something called thyme. She’s sharp. She drives like a lunatic. She’s capable of both warmth and coldness, and just hanging around her to see what it will be that day is worth it.
I don’t miss home, mati. I’m there all the time. In the past. In fiction.
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 h
ave 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 Stojkovis 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 abo
ut 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.
