by Ismet Prcic
* * *
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.
I was going through a massive ninja phase at that time and so was everyone around me. They didn’t have a choice, really, given how obsessed I was. I rented every B movie that had the word ninja in the title. In them, masked stuntmen jumped fifteen feet backward onto tree branches and roofs, had two-minute sword fights in midair, and disappeared and reappeared in small explosions of smoke. These grotesquely formulaic stories, all of them shot on the same location or two, starring someone named Richard Harrison in a purple or a magenta ninja suit, were being made in order to cash in on the Ninja Turtle mania that was sweeping across the world at the time. I organized the younger kids from our neighborhood into a ninja school of sorts, made them call me “sensei,” gave them secret names, and made them secret ID cards written in a secret alphabet that they had to memorize and then destroy. I cut out step-by-step martial arts demonstrations from Black Belt magazine and had them go through the motions ad nauseam. I doodled gruesome ninja battles in my school notebooks. Even my mother, bless her heart, knew the Japanese names of all the wooden replicas of traditional weapons I kept receiving through mail order.
“Ismet, you left your kusarigama on the balcony. If I trip over it one more time I’m throwing it out!”
The seed of this obsession was planted much earlier, when I came upon Uncle Medo’s stash of trashy, pornographic novels about the only blue-eyed American ever allowed to master the art and magic of ninjutsu, who was taking out the world’s major players of organized crime and, in the process, fucking their trophy wives, their teary-eyed girlfriends, their redheaded secretaries, their favorite prostitutes, their nymphomaniac daughters, their beach-bunny sisters, their lusty S and M mothers, their accidental passersby—pretty much anything that moved. If a woman was introduced in the novel, you knew she would get fucked at some point. I was such a late bloomer that the ninja action passages excited me as much as these ridiculous sexual excursions.
So after an early lunch of homegrown-squash pie, I stole the dull old butcher knife from the kitchen drawer, and my brother, Adi, and I went into the woods to play. We sat on lichen-garnished stumps and pretended we were meditating, slapping at the bugs on our necks, knees, knuckles with the intent to commit insecticide. We threw the knife, trying to get it to stick into the trees but mostly twanging it off the sides of the trunks and then hunting for it in the ferns. We imagined convoluted plots in which we were a ninja team on a quest to save a kidnapped victim or steal back a priceless artifact or assassinate an evil drug lord and his band of mercenaries. The better these plots became the more we were aware that we were just playing, that it was all just make-believe, and that we wanted something more, a touch of real danger.
Throughout that whole summer Mehmed and I had spent a lot of time clearing out a particular part of the woods with Marija and Ostojka, attempting to make it into our own park/botanical garden. We wanted ponds with goldfish, fountains, and waterfalls. We wanted bridges, benches, and trash cans. We wanted tree houses and rope swings. All of those things were in the works in our heads, but in reality it was just a cleared-out portion of the forest where we had swept away the carpet of leaves, shaped the shaggy bushes to appear round and pleasing, and hung a vibrantly colored wooden sign declaring it our park.
When my ninja team came upon it that day, I had an idea of how to spice up the game. I told Mehmed and Adi that Marija and Ostojka had never met Adi before, that they had no idea he was even there, and that we could use that to set a cool little plot in motion. First we composed a generic ultimatum on a page from my journal, and each one of us penned every third letter in order to disguise our handwriting. It went something like “If you don’t pay us [insert trivial amount of money here] we will destroy your precious park.” Next, Mehmed and I went to lure Marija and Ostojka to the park to play, leaving behind Adi along with the knife, a smoke bomb we made out of a cut-up Ping-Pong ball wrapped in aluminum foil, a
nd detailed instructions on what to do when we brought the girls to the park. He went along with it because he got to do all the action stuff himself.
We found Marija tending to the pigs. She looked like she had spindled into the beginnings of adolescence a little too early and a little too fast, resulting in a mouthful of teeth that were a little too big for her skull, and a tall, hipless frame with limbs that were a little too long. She wore her hair in two flaccid braids, and they swung as she toppled a bucket of meal over the fence of a pigsty to the sheer ecstasy of its inhabitants, who screamed, bumped each other, and chewed with their mouths open. We invited her down to the park casually, covering up our giddiness, and she said yes. She said we should do some more work on the bushes, perhaps expand the whole park a bit, and fetched Ostojka, who looked like the daughter of a different mother with her moody, brown eyes, so unlike Marija’s bland, blue ones, her bronze complexion, so unlike her sister’s freckled paleness.
It was something in the way we descended the hill, running and wielding our rakes and shears like battle clubs or banners, that suddenly rang a thousand alarms in my head. I saw flashes of unspecified violence in the future, attacking movements of color and bared teeth, and a part of me was aware that it had something to do with the turmoil in the country. That part of me tried to decelerate, digging my heels deeper into the dirt, but my fat-assed momentum shot me across the creek and into the woods.
Marija and Ostojka looked so happy. They were telling us how they’d seen a wild boar last week and how fast it had run through the leaves. They asked me if Muslims were allowed to eat wild boar. I told them I wasn’t sure. I started to sweat. I thought of telling them what to expect but didn’t. I couldn’t.
We walked to the edge of the park when something flew from the thicket and fell some six paces in front of us. It spun hissing on the damp ground, billowing a cloud of acrid smoke that smelled of burning hair. Through the smoke things started to look slow and unreal. Ostojka screamed. Marija ducked behind a tree. Mehmed looked at me to see what I would do. I just stood there, watched.
Wearing my ninja mask, Adi threw his body parallel to the ground, executed an inept somersault, jumped up to his feet, and stabbed the ultimatum into a tree trunk with the kitchen knife. He then hopped and kicked the wooden sign that swung on its rope, but it got caught on a low branch and stayed up there in the foliage. Seconds later there was only the shushing of dry leaves as he hauled ass into the forest and the shrill screaming of the girls.
When I conjured this plan I expected Marija and Ostojka to buy into it the way kids buy into plays written for them. I never anticipated the hysteria that would take over their faces and minds, or those shrill and elaborate curses that no child can come up with on their own but have to overhear from adults to remember, curses against Adi’s mother (they’re always against a mother, aren’t they?) speckled with words I didn’t quite expect to be uttered there, words like fundamentalist, Turks, and terrorist. I never anticipated that Adi would have to dodge the flying shears or dive headfirst across a barbwire fence into someone’s cornfield. I never anticipated that Ostojka would stomp on the smoke bomb and that Marija would take the knife and the ultimatum out of the tree and that they would salamander up the hill, screaming for their dad and grandpa.
Amid all that panic the woods suddenly felt perilous and dark, and Mehmed and I felt compelled to run for our lives, too. It was like we’d awakened something big, something ancient. The forest came alive. The trees leaned in trying to scoop us up with their talons. Blackberry bushes shot out their sticky tentacles at our ankles, tripping us, tearing at our socks. The ground itself secreted a noxious sludge of putrid, dead leaves and animals, trying to bring us down, trap us, and slowly digest us over time, reducing us to petite skeletons with glass marbles and ninja masks in our decomposing pockets.
We reached our property white with fear and Grandma asked us where Adi was and we said we were in the middle of a hide-and-seek game. She said that the hot pot was not going to be ready for another hour or two and that if we wanted a snack we should ask our mother for a piece of bread with plum jam. Then Adi wandered in, all sweaty and scarlet-faced, out of breath, hair full of cobwebs, knees stained, acting like nothing was out of the ordinary. We said we were going upstairs to read—of all things—and nobody was fooled. My mother and aunt were halfway up the stairs to inquire what had happened when they noticed three generations of Stojkovis rushing down the hill, blackening the green.
* * *
To both my family and the Stojkovis it was quite obvious who did what. The Stojkovis knew that we were the only boys playing in those woods. That was clear to my family, too. What was peculiar, though, was that both families ignored the obvious and put on an act that was incomprehensible to me.
The Stojkovis came out yelling, cursing malicious extremist Muslim elements who were sent to burn our forests, threaten our children, set neighbor against neighbor, and destroy our whole country. They cursed their Turkish mothers, their dirty prayer rugs, and their whole lineage all the way back to Muhamed. They kept repeating that it was not us but some extremist Muslims on a mission to obliterate the Yugoslavian way of life. For some reason all the grown-ups in my family agreeably hung down their heads, denied being a part of anything, mumbled pacifying words, and endured this salvo of curses directed at some other Muslims, not us, although we were the only ones there, in the whole village.
I started to buy into the Stojkovis’ version of the events myself, happy that everyone seemed to think I had nothing to do with it, and I was amazed at how well organized this Islamist terrorist cell had to have been to even find out about our shitty little park in the woods around Kovačevo Selo and how important it must have been to them to send an operative to destroy it. But that only lasted about half an hour, until the neighbors dispersed and there was hell to pay.
“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 proph
esied, 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.
