Shards: A Novel

by Ismet Prcic

  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!

  (. . . by the code . . .)

  Mustafa’s grandfather was born in a shed. The shed was right next to a puny, derelict house, where the rest of his family sat in miserable silence. They were awaiting this newest addition to the already swarming Nali household with dread. The room was pungent with smoke from a malfunctioning chimney, and all of their bellies crackled with need. The first milk from his mother’s breast was sparse. When she brought him into the house the family looked at him and saw not a son or a brother but an enemy.

  One of their two rooms was larger than the other; it served as a kitchen, a living room, a dining room, a children’s room, and, at night, a bedroom. His parents slept in the remaining room unless they had guests over, in which case they would give up their privacy and pile in with the children. There was a single outhouse in the backyard, a little way from the shed. Two other brothers camped in the shed unless it was wintertime, in which case they, too, would pile in with the children. One of the older brothers had recently married and found a small, derelict house of his own.

  Their father was a pious mason and a spare-time farmer who demanded quiet at all times. He ran his family according to the unwritten code of seniority he’d grown up on, the code of not speaking unless addressed, of politeness to the point of belly crawling, of always telling the truth even if it meant your death, of never smiling, because others might be miserable, of never crying, because others might be cheerful, of keeping your honor in the community by any means necessary, of saving your best food for guests even when you had to put a piece of glass over a handful of shredded cheese so that the smallest of your children would think they were eating it as they dabbed away at the glass with dry bread. The minutest transgressions would be answered with beatings.

  Their mother hardly spoke, would walk ten steps behind her husband and turn away to cry despite her veil.

  Unlike his siblings, Mustafa’s grandfather was good at school. But the spines of countless books were broken against the walls of their room by his father, who couldn’t stand anybody being engrossed in another world while he suffered in brutal reality. Often he tore the yellowy manuscripts from his son’s hands and fed them into the mouth of the furnace.

  Things were like this until the imam of the local mosque, the most respected elder they had, congratulated him on having such a clever son and said that it would be a shame if the boy didn’t go further in his studies. The ink of a scholar is more valuable than the blood of a martyr, he told the congregation. This would have had no bearing on Mustafa’s great-grandfather’s decision to mold his son into a bricklayer like himself had it not been uttered in the company of influential villagers after a Friday prayer. As it was, it became a social obligation. So with great reluctance and minimal allowance, Mustafa’s grandfather, at the age of eighteen, was sent to a medresa in Tuzla to become an imam.

  Another world war started and some bearded men of Orthodox Christian persuasion, exploiting the lawlessness of the time, ambushed the Muslims of Međaš at dawn one day. They raped and murdered the slow and scattered the quick. The houses were ravaged. Mustafa’s grandfather’s married brother, seeing ten men with tall black woolen caps and sashes of bullets across their chests advancing up the hill, split his wife’s head open with an ax. He couldn’t risk her being raped. When they broke down the door, he brought down the ax again, taking off the first pillager’s left ear, snapping his collarbone like a pencil and continuing downward through the heaving rib cage. The others shot him in the legs and took their sweet time carving crosses into his flesh. They disemboweled him, then burned him alive next to an ancient wooden ottoman, the only piece of furniture he owned.

  His parents and siblings were some of the quick ones. They returned to their property two days later to find it still smoldering in the morning rain, some crows jumping sideways through the damp ashes.

  Having no place to live, Mustafa’s grandfather married into a farming family from Gornja Tuzla and left his home behind. This would turn out to be a very fortunate decision. In 1945, just as he was finishing up his degree, the same bearded men from four years earlier realized that the Communists were winning the war. They shaved their beards, replaced their nationalistic emblems with red stars, and joined Tito’s partisans before pillaging Međaš once more, in somebody else’s name now but for pretty much the same reasons. The Nalis weren’t as quick this time around.

  After the war a new country was born, bloody all over and enveloped in a new ideological placenta. Its people, divided by faith before, were now forced to unite in godlessness. God was beaten, threatened, blackmailed, tricked, and lured out of the starving populace by the new regime. It was the worst time in the world to be an imam.

  Religious institutions were shut down or heavily monitored, and Mustafa’s grandfather found himself jobless. He lived with his wife and three quick children in a house that looked like a clammy cardboard box. They survived on the sporadic donations of secretly pious villagers and his wife’s awesome ingenuity. At one point he was offered a job as a secretary in an elementary school and accepted wholeheartedly. But when a colleague asked him to partake in some slivovitz to celebrate, he declined, citing his religion. He was fired on the spot for being an enemy of the party. From then on, every once in a while, in the middle of the night, beefy men would show
up at his door, take him away in his pajamas to a dark concrete cell where they would drip water on his head for hours, and then let him go in the morning without a word of explanation.

  But everyone gets a break at one time or another. Mustafa’s grandfather was hired in 1951 as a security guard at a new detergent factory in Tuzla by one of his neighbors, who worked there as a staff supervisor. This man never mentioned to his comrade-bosses that the skinny, ghostly man who was to be the guard was not a proud member of the Yugoslavian proletariat, nor that he was a God-fearing man. It was an act of courage that brought Mustafa’s grandfather to tears. The neighbor was named Salko, and that name was uttered in the Nali household only with deep reverence. It gained the status of a family savior.

  The job consisted of sitting in a booth in front of the building and writing down in a notebook the name and ID number of everyone coming in and out of the factory and the time at which they passed him. That was the day shift. At night, every half hour, he patrolled the premises with a handgun to make sure that nobody was stealing the detergent. He took his job seriously and performed his duties with methodical dedication despite their tedium.

  And better times came. The factory took off and mushroomed into a chemical industrial complex unmatched in all of Yugoslavia. As the air in the region became more polluted, the workers’ wages went up. In ten years’ time the county’s cancer rate had hit new heights, and Mustafa’s grandfather had accumulated enough money to build a house his father would gasp at if he saw it. He filled it up with books and children. When each one was born he swore to make himself unlike his father, to modernize his views and improve upon things for his children’s sake, but the old way, the code, was too ingrained in his fibers to be eradicated by sheer conscious effort. It was like trying to repel darkness by boarding up windows with planks.

  His offspring turned out to be an intelligent, honest, and well-behaved bunch, yet also meek and voiceless, subservient to anyone older even if he happened to be stupider than dirt. They all, without exception, had rage bubbling in their stomachs, unyieldingly tight lips, and eyes watery with heat.

  His wife, tired of waiting for him to bring electricity to their shed, which she used as a summer kitchen, did it herself without any training apart from remembering how the electricians put it in the house. And when her first son went to serve the mandatory year in the army, she taught herself to read and write, so she could send him letters. The letters were crookedly written and grammatically hilarious.

  In 1983 cartons of various cleaning products began vanishing from the factory’s warehouse. This went on for a few weeks, until it dawned on Mustafa’s grandfather that one of his coworkers, someone who knew how religiously he stuck to his half-hour patrolling routine, was probably at fault. Greatly disappointed that someone could be so vile, he forced himself to alter the order in which he checked the buildings and discovered, one night, a laborer by the name of Sead loading a fortune in furniture-polishing liquid into a raggedy white van. When he tried to stop him the young man knocked him down, called him an old fart, and then walked off and started the vehicle, snickering. As he pulled away Mustafa’s grandfather unholstered his handgun for the first time in his life. Running alongside the vehicle, he took short, concentrated aim and fired a single round through the van’s side window and into Sead’s neck. Death was next to instantaneous.

  There was a trial. Not guilty.

  When he came back to work, his coworkers regarded him with a mixture of respect and fear. Even the bigwigs, who had barely given him a glance as he wrote down their names in the morning, now smiled and said hello. Their handkerchiefs dabbed worriedly at their foreheads. He was congratulated on his industriousness and given a small plaque for protecting the Workers’ Property and for helping the Brotherhood and Unity of the nations of Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. Behind his back people laughed at his rigidity. Behind his back only.

  Privately, he stopped using utensils and became obsessed with death. He moved up to the attic and spent whole nights practicing religious calligraphy in Arabic under a single naked bulb. To fall asleep and not wake up screaming was an achievement; his eyes, over time, dropped into the shadowy craters of his skull, where they gleamed with red, magmatic intensity. His veins seemed to run not under his skin but on top of it. His teeth got loose and tipped to the right. His hair thinned. He started addressing persons not present and often failed to answer simple questions without going on and on about the destiny of mankind and about how many times a day one had to remember death in order to go to heaven.

  Another war in 1992. Ancient grudges that had lain dormant for some time awakened full-grown and rested, and new pillagers, while waiting for their beards to grow, cast away their red stars and pinned the hateful emblems of their fathers back on their coats and here they came again, with crunchy boots and swearwords.

  The factory was shut down and its workers sent to the front. Some of them, too old, were allowed to perform their regular duties for almost no compensation, just to preserve the feeling of everyday lives going on uninterrupted. Thus, Mustafa’s grandfather patrolled the empty facilities, checked building after building for nonexistent crooks, and locked and unlocked the rusting fences like it was 1989.

  In the winter of 1994, the year of the worst shortages, Mustafa’s grandfather spotted a figure in the packaging department dismantling one of the conveyor belts for sellable parts at three in the morning. He sneaked up behind the figure, took out his gun, and yelled for the man to freeze and turn around.

  It was Salko.

  Mustafa’s grandfather’s face wilted. He backed out of the building in silence. He wandered over to his booth and sat motionless until his family’s savior walked by with a wheelbarrow full of parts. He watched him get smaller and smaller, dark against the snow.

  He sat there a while, staring first at the chips of paint flaking off the radiator like dandruff, then at an abandoned, dusty spiderweb between the desk and the wall, and finally at the seam of his son’s busted hiking boot on his left foot, still a little wet from the snow. He was looking for what was right.

  When he found it he wrote it down under the OUT rubric of his notebook, took off his heavy jacket, folded it into a bundle, and shot himself through it. Since what he wrote didn’t make any sense to anyone (it was not a classic suicide note), the police considered his death to be a murder. Their thinking implied that suicides don’t shoot themselves in the abdomen to die in prolonged agony.

  “By the code,” the note read.

  * * *

  Going through elementary school Mustafa heard all about the code. It was usually shoved down his throat by his mother to illustrate how good he had it.

  Once, he’d lied to her about his grades; when she found out the truth at a parent-teacher conference, she sat him down in the kitchen and told him about an ancestor who happened to be at a market where another farmer had a gigantic pumpkin on display. The farmer claimed that his was the biggest one that year, and when Mustafa’s forefather said he had a bigger one in his shed, the farmer accused him of lying. So he went home, loaded his pumpkin onto a coach, took it back to the market, and had it measured in front of witnesses. When it was discovered that his pumpkin was indeed larger than the farmer’s, he stabbed the man to death for calling him a liar.

  The moral of the story ricocheted off of Mustafa’s ill humor, but he said he was sorry and that it would never happen again. She sent him to his room to study, and he sneaked one of his ninja novels inside his history book. Ninjas were his favorite because they were well-trained assassins who could use any means to eliminate their enemies and had no code. They were not bound by Bushido like samurai. They didn’t have to fight fair.

  Excerpts from Ismet Prci’s Diary

  from July 1999

  I don’t recognize my hometown, mati. I’m standing right in front of my graffiti-covered high school and I miss Moorpark College. And Moorpark backward is Kraproom.

  I look at Father. W
ho the fuck is this guy?

  I look at Mehmed and he has an Adam’s apple now, his voice like from the bottom of a barrel. A grown-up, full of rage. That’s the only part of him I understand. He blames me for everything, I know.

  I look at your face, mati, your tired, angry, pious, broken, miserable, warm, beautiful face, and I’m dying for Melissa.

  You’re still fighting with him, still claiming he’s having an affair. He still keeps telling everyone you’re insane, and you keep trying to kill yourself instead of him. You should cut his throat when he’s sleeping. Mehmed is on his side. You should cut his throat, too. I have no choice but to be on your side, mati. Please, cut my throat.

  * * *

  I wish I were Izzy, mati. I wish I were mad and hungry in his room, where it’s possible to suffer in peace.

  Greetings from sweltering Tuzla, Izzy.

  (. . . the cult of asmir . . .)

  In 1993, Mother suspected Asmir of being a pederast, out to take advantage of me under the pretense of being my director and mentor, out to make me “do things” by brainwashing me into submission. There was nothing in reality to support that kind of thinking, but she was the kind of person who needed no proof. She believed herself to be fine-tuned for detecting hazards to her children, mistaking common prejudices for mother’s intuition. Mere suspicion was proof enough that something was wrong. Hers was where-there’s-smoke-there’s-fire reasoning—smoke being the fact that I was doing physical theater, that I hung out with the director even after the rehearsals were over, went to cafés with him, read books he wanted me to read, swore by him no matter what. Granted, there was something cultish about our theater group, about Asmir’s status as an artistic leader, about our blind trust and willingness to take extreme chances in the name of art, but nothing like what was ripping her mind asunder.