Shards: A Novel

by Ismet Prcic

  “It’s the way it is,” Brada said—ignoring the uncoiled, sobbing Asmir—his lizard eyes scanning a piece of paper in his hands. “Tomorrow you’ll go perform in Lukavac, then two more here on Friday and Saturday. Then we’ll see where we’re standing.”

  “You have . . . no clue . . . ,” Asmir blurted in between spasms.

  “It’s the way it is,” Brada repeated and smiled. Smiled. He actually smiled. “I think we’re almost finished here.”

  Silence filled the green room like gas. Asmir’s tear ducts were empty, spent. Only the motions of crying persisted. We sat inside our rigid bodies, containing our screaming minds with the conditioned limpness of will, an instinct, really, when you’re young and dealing with long coats reminiscent of the Communism you grew up in. The patch of carpet in front of me was memorized. It lasted forever.

  “Can I say something?” Bokal asked, rupturing everything. It was a rhetorical question.

  “You’re not even part of this group,” said one of them, a short middle-aged guy with a mustache. Bokal didn’t look at him.

  “You people are dicks,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You are dicks! The man is crying here. What’s wrong with you?”

  “You have no voice here,” Brada said, his smile wiped out finally. “I’ll have to ask you to leave!”

  “You’re gonna ask me to leave? Do it, by God! Let me hear you ask me to leave!”

  Brada was perplexed for only a moment, and he would have come up with something cruel any second had Bokal not stood up in his bubbling fur-lined jacket and taken a step forward. Brada aborted the comeback in his throat.

  “Well?”

  “Calm down,” Brada said, suddenly a peacemaker. “We’re all on edge here. I was just stating the facts.”

  “No, you were treating people like shit. And I’m not gonna ask you to leave. I’m gonna tell you to get the fuck out of this room before I spill you like a bag of rice.”

  The Torso Theater seniors, all of them grown men, tucked their tails and drew back toward the door like in a movie. Brada looked at Asmir:

  “Is he making your decisions for you now?”

  “Yes he is,” Asmir said.

  “Fuck off! They don’t need you!” Bokal said and took another step forward.

  “You’ll never work in this town again!” Brada said and followed his buddies out.

  “Fuck the town in which the likes of you have that power!”

  That was it.

  That night, on the way back home, I tore my Torso Theater membership card into four pieces and threw them into a gaping garbage container. The moon was frozen to the night, stuck in its vast blackness, witnessing. Like a perfect bullet hole in the tinted window of a Black Maria.

  Mother waited up for me, playing solitaire on the kitchen table next to an empty ashtray, her forefinger lightly touching the partition of her lips. By this point in the war our funds were scarce, and cigarettes were expensive. Her hands would shake, constantly flying up to her face to handle the phantom cigarette, and finding nothing, would flutter around sheepishly like a pair of confused sparrows, only to end up on a deck of cards or on her lap, twitch there in agony for a while and then try again. She said that this character was the best thing I’d ever done artistically—so much so that my transformation terrified her and that the play blew her away, that she forgot about smoking. Coming from her—with her tough-love, no-bullshit approach to everything my brother and I did—the comment made my chest expand with joy and suffering. In my bed, I wept with it.

  The next day, during my quasi-continental breakfast of barely baked bread (sporadic electricity), plum jam, vegetable fat, and chamomile tea, there was a telephone call. I was expecting it. Asmir had bounced back with a fuck-the-Torso-Theater attitude, with new ideas swarming in his mind, new confidence and vigor, new drive, his gums flapping nonstop: “New group, new approach, new rehearsal place, new everything.” It was like I was getting a double dose of Asmir and it was intense and exciting and terrible. He asked me if I wanted to be a part of it all and I said yes . . .

  . . . because he cried the night before when the vultures were tearing apart his baby. Because he was a five-year-old and I wanted to play.

  From then on the theater became a playground rather than an office, a lab rather than a classroom, a religion rather than a hobby, a cult rather than a troupe. It became everything.

  Bokal wanted to do a painting of the troupe, so Asmir made a hefty wooden frame on which the canvas was to be stretched and lugged it across town to the new rehearsal place. We moved from the Home of the Army to my old neck of the woods, the Home of the Youth. Instead of the stage and auditorium, now we had a large room stuffed with crap: generic, Communist-looking chairs, dismembered drum kits, a selection of snapped mic stands, a behemoth of a filing cabinet made of solid wood, and dirty-beige curtains you’d just love to set fire to. The reason that we even got this room was that nobody else wanted it. All its windows faced southeast, making it a very likely target for a mortar.

  The carpet was the color of decomposing cigarette filters with a fragrance to match. My God, everything happened on that carpet, from shit to divine intervention, from trivial drudgery to magic. Everything. It was on that carpet, in the moist, sweltering air and pungent dust, barefoot and aching from theater and life, that I was the happiest. My God, I forgot.

  We had one of those amazing rehearsals of Asmir’s play when everything was awesome and meaningful and you felt like a real artist. Afterward we went out to celebrate, lugging that huge wooden frame. We walked to Café Galerija but, as none of us had any money, ended up in the park, on a bench, leaning the frame on a nearby poplar. We watched people go by, scared people, miserable people, masks of suffering on stick figures. No one was fat. Everybody was aware. Even old people had a bounce in their step, knowing what war could bring at any point. It looked grotesque, unnatural. If it were on TV it would pain you to see it.

  It was like we were driven to put that frame in front of us. To make a difference on those people’s faces, you know. Something. We let it sit in our laps, held it erect, and ceased all movement. We became a painting, staring out through the frame into the real world. And soon the real people stopped to stare at us, the painting, forgetting for a moment about the war, the oppressive psychosis that permeated everything. People have to look at art no matter what.

  A bunch of children swarmed around us trying to catch a facial twitch and laughed giddily, waved their little hands in front of our eyes, and scratched their little heads when we wouldn’t blink. Adults mostly stared from a distance, wondering why anybody would do this. Two elderly men with their hands behind their backs looked at us with brutal disgust, shaking their heads like the end of the world was coming and we were somehow responsible. And it would all have been an exercise in craft, a spur-of-the-moment performance-art piece, something nobody would remember for long, had it not started shelling and had we not, in our madness, remained motionless in spite of it, among the mad-dashing citizens.

  (. . . anatomy of a flashback . . .)*

  In May of 1999, right around the time I was supposed to fly to Bosnia, I found myself in the parking lot of a Ralphs in Moorpark, California. Eric had dropped me off too early because he had to go to work, and I was killing time before my train to San Diego. Melissa had moved down there earlier that year, and my ability to bear things had been decreasing each day without her. I was living from weekend to weekend when I could go visit her or when she would come to me. I would breathe in with sadness on Sunday night and exhale with joy on Friday afternoon, both in her arms. While holding my breath, I fought off my brain by stuffing myself with words people wrote, beverages people distilled, and sleeping pills people manufactured.

  The flashback started earlier at the station with the sudden roar of a freight train going by. The sound pierced me. I fell to the ground. For a moment it was happening right there. I didn’t go back to Bosnia this time. The war had come
to me. An explosion rocked the walled-off neighborhood beyond the station’s parking lot. I felt an onrush of warm air in my face. Debris sprayed everywhere, clanging into parked cars. A palm tree toppled over onto a green Chrysler. A Mexican kid fell off his bike, smoke devouring the cul-de-sac behind him . . . then it was blue sky, and cars wavering in the heat, and the Mexican kid contentedly riding in a loop, and the train disappearing toward Simi Valley, and nothing was happening, absolutely nothing was going on.

  I started walking toward the Ralphs shopping plaza a little way down the street. I shook off unwanted thoughts and focused on my sneakers stepping ahead of me, carrying me forward. I enjoyed the flatness of the asphalt against the bottoms of my feet and imagined the inner workings of my ankle during the action of walking. All the pushes and pulls, pressures and releases. The mechanism. But the thoughts started to advance again (I heard them buzzing, then murmuring in my head) and in panic I tried to remember where I’d bought those sneakers, and when I remembered that, how much they’d cost, and when I remembered that, too, which one had I put on first this morning, which was an easy one since I’m a creature of habit, and fuck there was a child’s foot, lying sideways against the curb, a trickle of gentle blood behind it, smudgy torn-up sock with the Adidas logo caving inward where the child’s ankle used to be, its mechanism no longer intact, and my heart played a drum solo devoid of beat, just endless rolls, from snare drum to timpani, from timpani back to snare drum, an occasional chilling cymbal, and a sinister, frantic bass drum so reminiscent of mortar fire.

  Bosnia materialized around me and I hit the ground. Shut my eyes. Covered my head. Prayed. Hard.

  A bag lady brought me back.

  “Wake up!” she screamed. “I ain’t getting off at Solana Beach until I know for sure all my shit is off this motherfucker!”

  There was a flesh-colored hearing aid inserted in her ear like a piece of dough. I thought, Do deaf schizophrenics still hear voices?

  She rolled her shopping cart delicately, avoiding the potholes, aristocratic in her posture.

  “You’re too much in your head, cracker!”

  If you only knew, I thought.

  * * *

  * This piece was written on two napkins bearing the logo of a Café Leonardo in Tuzla and was found stuck in the diary that Ismet Prci ; was keeping in 1999 when he was visiting his mother.

  Excerpts from Ismet Prci’s Diary

  from August 1999

  I saw him, mati. I saw Father holding some woman’s hand in front of a bank yesterday. Later he denied it. I can’t tell you this, though. I don’t think you can take it. I told Mehmed and he didn’t believe me. He doesn’t look like a Don Juan to me, was how he put it. I guess reality doesn’t matter if we ignore it.

  I punched a kid in the face today, mati. Behind Albatros restaurant. Sixteen or seventeen years old. Good-looking. Smiling. I punched him and he just sat down. I ran away. It was so good to feel my heart pound like that. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

  I can’t wait to get out of here, mati. I can’t wait to leave you again.

  (. . . love, interrupted . . .)

  JANUARY–MARCH 1995

  Somewhere, somehow I convinced myself that a pink Levi’s jacket was a good decision. By then my hair was long and I had lost all that weight and was ready, really overdue, for everything. I buried my old self and hurled the new, unapologetically, into the city under siege, locking eyes, smiling coyly, positioning myself in front of a light source every time so the girls could see my insides. I cracked gross but witty jokes that disarmed even the holier-than-thous. I flaunted talent until they noticed it, then turned up the modesty. I did all that, my part, and waited for her to emerge out of the crowd and love me forever.

  The way love happens in high school, a friend of a friend gets drunk in front of the theater one night, comes up to my buddy Omar and me and admits that Asja has a crush on me, and I do some research to find out who Asja is and almost shit my pants when I meet her eyes in the hall in front of the bathrooms, smitten. The next morning I spy her coming to school and arrange it so I pass her and strut my stuff, but right when I’m about to display a dashing smile, an insect, a bee of all things, flies right into my nostril. I start bucking in my pink jacket, and shrieking, and slapping my face, and blowing my nose, and generally acting like a precious maiden in the presence of outlandish vermin.

  Hers was the beauty of petite, fairy-tale shoes with buckles, black turtlenecks, and eyes that can take you in the way the skies can take in a bird jumping out of the nest for the first time—only they were brown eyes. Hers was the beauty of lips so lush they folded onto themselves in everyday speech; what happened to them in the act of kissing I could only imagine. Hers was the beauty of little hands, abashed, buried under arms, or shoved into pockets, or barely poking out of extralong sleeves. Hers was the beauty.

  Mine was the agony of knowing that she liked me (or did she?) and not knowing what to do about it. God forbid I should just walk up to her and mumble a hello. For a month I took meticulous care of my appearance while I waited for things to be kicked into motion by the friend of a friend who naturally sobered up and kept acting like she hadn’t said anything to me. I bathed every other day, which was an astonishing feat when you consider the amount of work that goes into bathing in wartime: the shelled-to-shit waterworks, the shortages, the restrictions, the fact that even when our part of the town got water, there was not enough pressure to shoot it up to the fourth floor. You had to take buckets and canisters, tubs and basins, pitchers and plastic soda bottles, go to the basement and stand in a line of murky, pissed-off apartment dwellers for your turn to fill up your receptacles, then carry them to the apartment in three or four trips (guess what, no electricity), get wood from the balcony, start a fire, wait until the stove was hot enough, heat a huge pot of water on it, carry it to the bathtub, mix it with cold water until it was bearable, and finally pour it over sections of your body from a coffee mug.

  I grew paranoid about having things stuck in my teeth, so I brushed them psychotically every time I happened to be around a toothbrush. At school I dug at the seams of my clothing, trying to rip off a piece of thread long enough to wrap around two fingers so I could floss out a particularly stubborn chunk of lunch wedged in the crevice of my molars. I combed my hair like an excited schoolgirl (at least thirty strokes for each side) and let it hang down around my face in shiny, voluptuous whorls. I refused to wear my glasses to school so I wouldn’t appear nerdy, had to move to the front desk, and still I couldn’t see shit. I constantly sniffed at my pits. A part of me longed for the earlier times when I was fat and nothing mattered. A small part of me. That fat kid in me.

  The friend of a friend had one of those bland Bosnian names you can never remember, like Jenny in California. She was an impish person, pointy in all directions, short and unremarkable-looking, like a female gull. I stalked her for weeks, walking behind her, sending telepathic vibes in ripples at the back of her head and her hippy hairdo. When that didn’t work I’d go in front and face her, making feverish eye contact.

  Come on! I thought at her.

  Her eyebrows would twitch in alarm and she would look down, grab at some friend’s elbow, and walk away in a swift stride, whispering, shaking her head, glancing backward like I ought to be institutionalized.

  At night, I would sit crumpled in my bed, agonizing over whether I had hallucinated her drunken slip of the tongue that night or whether it had actually occurred. I played this moment over and over in my mind’s eye, me standing in front of the theater with Omar, freezing my ass off despite two jackets, her stumbling down the street, catching my eye, and turning to her friend, saying, “Is that him?” then walking up a couple of stairs, unzipping my top jacket, placing her boyish hand on my chest, saying, “Pink jacket, that’s him!” then leaning in with harsh spirits on her breath, whispering, “I have a friend that really, really likes you; she’s a beautiful, beautiful girl,” and my heart growin
g, growing.

  I just realized something. I was wearing two jackets because it was wintertime. January, I believe. February 28 was the first day Asja and I went out. How is it possible, then, that two mornings after I found out that she liked me a bee flew up my nose? Don’t bees hibernate in this part of the world? I think they do. But I do remember that happening—the bee incident, I mean. It did happen to me. I’m sure of it. I remember the humiliation. I remember the lesson learned. I remember the distinct knowledge of being put in my place by the universe for trying to appear better-looking than I actually was. It had to have happened some other time, then, in front of some other girl. But why did I bunch the two memories together? Why can’t I remember the other girl?

  Someone, I think it was Omar, said to me once that memories are like tapes and that it’s important to keep as many as you can so you can play them later on and be able to recall who you were at the time. I always considered this to be bullshit. I still do. Memories are nothing like tapes. Tapes record reality. Minds record fiction. My mind was never one for remembering things right. Too much fantasy. Too much muggy past. Too many daydreams. Plus, the present reality, with all its tedious details, is just way too complicated; wherever you look there is something existing in itself: a file cabinet full of words, Mother smoking, an extension cord on the floor, a dirty sock, the shadow of my foot throbbing against the white sheets underneath me, and that’s just a sliver of a second from a corner of my eye. Who can keep track of it all when our eyes are open so wide and when seconds are so short and cheap and when we spend them so easily?

  Mother is in shambles, broken. My father is away on business. At least that’s what he said. She thinks, knows, he has someone. My brother won’t come out of his room, thinks she’s nuts. The women in the neighborhood knit their gossip sweaters. Mother sees them nudge one another with elbows when she passes them on the way to the store. She stays in bed for days, eats nothing. Just smokes and prays. She’s skeletal, sallow, slime-eyed.