Shards: A Novel

by Ismet Prcic

  It’s nighttime. I hear my mother cry, barely audible. It sounds like rhythmic squeaking. She cries into the pillow. It’s a private depression, she likes to joke. She does things like pull down her sleeves when she’s around me so I won't see the scars on her wrists. So I don’t get sad. So I don’t worry. Usually when I hear her, I jump up and go tell her that things are going to be okay. Usually I’m warm. Usually I know how to distract her, how to put things, how to smile.

  But now I’m exhausted.

  Now I just lie here and listen to her cry.

  I’m sitting on our park bench, Asja's and mine, drinking Fanta and vodka out of a Fanta bottle. I keep wondering what would happen if I bumped into her one of these days while I’m in town. There’s an old man on the bench a little way down the path and he keeps smiling at me and shaking his head. I keep smiling back politely.

  I haven’t seen Asja since the day I left. Some said she waited for me for a year, asking around if anybody knew when I was coming back. But then she married a distant cousin of mine, had a baby.

  “She stood you up, huh?” says the old man, suddenly standing next to my bench.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You’re lucky. It’s better that she leaves you now than later on when you’re sick and old like me.”

  He pats me on the shoulder and shuffles away. I can’t breathe.

  Excerpts from Ismet Prci’s Diary

  from October 1999

  Back in the USA, mati. Exit Ismet, enter Izzy. You have no idea how good it feels to be another.

  . . . taking a break from the fake memoir.

  (. . . the spitting bee-girl . . .)

  Despite the shame and the embarrassment of the bee fiasco, he said yes.

  Mustafa said yes because she was cute and petite and coquettish. Because she wore Doc Martins and ripped jeans and he kind of had a crush on her. Because he believed that they could end up being together for a long time.

  Bullshit. He said yes because at that age you never, ever say no to anybody who one day, potentially, might pop your cherry.

  When she winked at him and said, Let’s go, he said yes. She said, Yes, what? and he said, Yes, let’s go. They made out in the dewy grass in front of her building until ten minutes before the curfew when she had to physically push him off her. She gave him a handmade bracelet she always wore and asked him, Do you know what this is? He didn’t really, but he said yes and she killed him with a kiss. Then he hauled ass home.

  The very next night Mustafa made an almost fatal mistake by teasing her and calling her a little girl. She was fifteen then. They were in front of the Bosnian National Theater, the newest hot spot in their fun-filled besieged city. She slapped his face and stormed off just to come back a minute later and throw a bloody tampon at his head, right in front of everybody. He was more confused than a glob of human sperm in the third chamber of a frog’s heart.

  That same night, as he walked home alone, she jumped out of the bushes by the river’s embankment and kicked him in the groin. The gun looked huge in her little hands. She squatted over his convulsing body and aimed at his right eye. She kept spitting into the grass over his head. She squatted there for a long time, spitting, looking.

  There was no doubt in his mind that the brain behind those fierce eyes was going to send a motor stimulus to the muscles of her tiny hand, which were going to squeeze that trigger and send him to the land of wooden poles and toilet bowls for good. And he couldn’t think of a single thing, to say or otherwise. His life didn’t flash in front of his eyes. He didn’t think of loved ones. He didn’t think of hated ones, either. He just cupped his nuts—a laughable move when faced with the business end of a 9 mm Zastava.

  He would later come to believe that she saw something in his eyes that made her decide not to kill him. Perhaps it was the total absence of him from himself. Whatever it was she calmly removed the bracelet from his wrist, walked away, and never looked at him again.

  Things changed big-time for him after this incident. He stopped going out and spent most of his time with the basement dwellers, which is what everyone called those people who never accepted the war as normalcy and lived in fear underground.

  A year later somebody found the body of a guy named Goran, who he heard was her second boyfriend, in the middle of Banja Park. He had been shot and stabbed numerous times. The story was that he pressured her into having sex with him and then, during a quarrel, threatened to tell her dad, a devout Muslim, about it. Apparently she convinced her little brother to help her take care of the problem and they killed him together. Since her mother was a judge, she ended up in Kreka Psychiatric Hospital.

  And even though Mustafa was drafted and made to go and fight, and had seen people blown to bits, cadavers rotting in the trenches, children’s heads atop wooden sticks, crosses carved into abdomens and foreheads; and even though he had a lot of close calls like that time the shrapnel went through the van and through the folds of his shirt around the midsection when he was bending to tie his boot, still the closest he had ever been to death was the moment before she reclaimed her bracelet. In all those other instances his life did flash before his eyes and he did think about loved ones and about those he didn’t like.

  (. . . mustafa nali;

  goes to war . . .)

  His dreams were boring, like life. They were saturated with a few humans he had never really met, doing everyday things inside a home he had never really been in, but that he got to know quite well over time. Their routines were forever alien while he was in them and forever familiar when he woke up. The details were mind-bogglingly boring. He dreamed of watching TV and remembered what he watched in the mornings.

  Most times Mustafa suffered these virtual nonadventures the way one would suffer through a tedious, artsy-fartsy film when there was nothing else on. The only difference was that he was in there, conscious of not belonging, like an understudy who hadn’t even read the play. Conscious in a dream. Once in a while the B quality of it all would make him lose it and he would drop his character and scream something dramatic like “Who are you people?” or “Where am I?” or “You don’t exist!” He threw punches at his costars, and his fists would go through the fabric of the dream, shattering it, bringing forth rude awakenings of unsolicited sensations of fear for no reason.

  So when he awoke at seventeen, shaking and flustered, with a pair of glasses on, in a corridor that smelled of disease and harsh cleaning products, among some thirty nervous males of his age, clutching seemingly identical paper files in their hands, looking like they were awaiting execution, it didn’t take him long to decide that he had to compensate for the dullness of his dreams and make his life noteworthy. The glasses had to come off. There was nothing wrong with his eyes. He squinted a sinister smile as his new attitude kicked in with a wave of shivers up his spine, sending invisible ripples of energy up and down the corridor, affecting everything.

  “Are they gonna take our blood, do you know?” a broad-shouldered giant next to him squeaked and boomed, his voice going in and out like the spin cycle of a busted washer. The incongruity between his pubertal looks of oily, gangly awkwardness, radiating almost observable puffs of sharp fear, and his imposing size, topped with a full beard, made Mustafa cringe.

  “Oh yeah,” he answered.

  The paper file made a tiny crumpling noise as the giant hands that held it started to visibly vibrate. Then they caught themselves and, with feverish, insectile tenacity, smoothed out the file and laid it across the giant lap. Once free of the important papers and no longer responsible for their safety, they shakily drove the giant elbows into the giant knees and opened upward to receive a giant petrified head.

  Mustafa found it astonishing, this guy’s horror. The kid was obviously from the country, his body in bloom, made gigantic by field work and caloric homemade food, the opposite end of the spectrum from Mustafa’s own pale, tubercular body. He’d probably never received a shot in his life, and his dread of all things hospital relat
ed was theatrically apparent. It was probably his first time in a town, a place he would never go to unless he had to have an emergency operation or, in this case, get drafted to fight the war.

  “Make sure you keep breathing when they do it,” Mustafa said to him. Something inside made him say it, some kind of envy. He couldn’t stand so much fear inside a body that strong and that much better than his.

  “Why?” the giant said, looking up, his eyes popping out.

  “You don’t wanna have a heart attack. They have a syringe this fat right up in your vein here. If you stop breathing for a second”—he made a dramatic pause, held it, held it, then dropped the bomb—“you die.”

  The giant’s lips quivered in agony. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like he had an alien entity roaming under his skin there. “Oh, mother,” he said and buried his head back in his hands. Mustafa smiled, both keyed up and sickened by his work. The rest of the recruits snickered, trying to hold in their laughter.

  The nearest door swung outward and banged against the wall. At the sound, murmurs dropped off a cliff and heads turned. The swinger was a meaty nurse with bejeweled fingers, rings she could never get off without Vaseline or oil.

  “Next five,” she barked and waited until Mustafa, the giant, and three more lads stood up to form a line. The giant’s knees were shaky. He crept ahead, hunched like he had a cannonball around his neck.

  “Hey, big man, hurry up! You look like you dropped a load in your pants.” She laughed a callous little laugh. There were a few obligatory chuckles around the corridor. Mustafa felt like she was stealing his spotlight as the entertainer of these guys.

  “Take your shirts—”

  Mustafa farted.

  “—off and—” Her instructions got eaten up by billows of laughter from a number of newly matured voice boxes, something that couldn’t be said for their owners. Her eyes searched the line for the perpetrator and met Mustafa’s cool leer. There he was, the knower of his audience, looking her in the eye, not budging. Laughter started to die.

  “How can you be so disgusting?” She tried to sound like a disappointed mother.

  “Inspiration.”

  Without ever dying completely, the laughter ignited with a vengeance, and since there was no point in trying to scream over it, she sternly pointed to the door, her eyebrows flying up. Mustafa gave the giant a gentle push in the back and the line of five stepped into a white room as if into the afterlife. The nurse followed and banged the door shut.

  “Documents on the table!”

  They obliged, some of them still trying to suppress residual chortles. Mustafa’s papers got buried under others, but she fished them out and put them on top of the pile, cocking her head to read his name.

  “You first, jester! Take off your shirt and sit up here!”

  Mustafa tried hard not to be affected by disrobing in public, and it showed. He lingered as though trying to find the bottom of his sweatshirt, and then hesitated slightly before he pulled it over his head, revealing a tight wife-beater—his brother’s. Her face exuded ridicule.

  “The undershirt, too.”

  There was no need for that. He looked at her, then at his exposed veins, unhampered by any clothing, then back at her. She held his gaze. He waited a second and then got rid of the wife-beater, uncovering his accordion rib cage. She looked at him and chuckled.

  “No comment,” she said and turned to prep the needle. Mustafa’s eyes wandered across the room, caught the giant’s smile, and instantly blazed with fury coming to a boil somewhere within. The giant, that pitiable hulk of dense meat cowering at just the thought of being pricked by a needle, was laughing at him, at his scrawniness, at his pathetic patch of pubiclike hair halfway between his nipples, at the absence of any discernable musculature, at his fucked-up posture. As the nurse drove a needle into Mustafa’s vein, concerned with gentleness not at all, he closed his eyes, uttered a short scream, collapsed backward off the stool, and started to twist and spasm, twitch and shake. She panicked for a second, then ran over to a cabinet, trying to remember what to do when someone has a seizure. From the corner came the thump of a giant body hitting the floor abundantly. The bigger they are . . . The nurse turned around, wide-eyed, with a syringe in her hand and found Mustafa back on the stool like nothing had happened.

  “Better give that to the big man over there.”

  Mustafa was on a roll. He farted again while blowing into the thingamajig that measures lung capacity—and received a standing ovation. He told the ear-checking nurse that he lived with constant voices telling him to burn down cinema “Center.”

  During the optometric exam he claimed to be seeing gnomes all over town, climbing trees, holding hands, riding Vespas. He got patted on the back and cheered by his audience. The nurses weren’t so amused. After what he had done to her, the first one kept following him and warning her colleagues.

  “Watch out for this one! He’s a real jester! Oh yeah! Funny stuff. It’s too bad he doesn’t know that jesters shouldn’t ridicule the king lest they end up headless.”

  Mustafa replied with another inspired toot.

  But in the basement they made them strip naked in front of the army committee behind prison tables. A gaggle of civilian girls crowded the high windows, looking down through the metal bars, giggling and covering their mouths. They flashed sheets of paper with numbers on them like figure-skating judges. Mustafa got a 4, a 5, two 6s, and a 7. He tried to swallow, but it all came back up, battery acid. It would have made him look down, except he couldn’t face his nudity.

  An army nurse counted their balls and wrote things in their files. She smiled facing the giant’s package. You could paddle yourself to safety with that thing. He stood there, still scared shitless, with a shiner on his cheekbone, and cried.

  “Pull ’em up, ladies!” she ordered, discarding the latex gloves with which she had touched all of them. “Move along.”

  Behind the tables, uniforms were unbuttoned, eyes were bloodshot, hair was prematurely gray, mouths curved downward, and a ballpoint pen was tapped against the edge of the table in a steady rhythm. A hand was extended to receive Mustafa’s file, and eyes were made to read the printed letters and numbers. No longer naked, Mustafa felt again the twinge of his new attitude. It was like madness in the back of his mind, devoid of survival instinct. A cheap-laugh whore he was.

  “Where do you go to school?”

  “The gymnasium.”

  “Are you good at math?”

  “Oh, I’m brilliant.”

  Salt-and-pepper eyebrows were raised at the blatant sarcasm of Mustafa’s answer. His face was sternly inspected. A pause was given.

  “What branch of the military forces do you think you’re most suitable for?”

  “I’d have to say the navy, since I’m a . . . a brilliant swimmer.”

  And although Bosnia and Herzegovina does have something like a two-inch-wide access to the Adriatic Sea, the Bosnian Navy was obviously a joke. All voices died in the basement room. The ballpoint pen ceased its percussive assault on the table. Behind it, lips tightened and eyes squinted in anger. His file was stamped like someone squashing a roach.

  “I think you’ll enjoy the special forces, funny man. For a short while at least. Next!”

  He’s lying on his back and staring into the night sky, looking for the face of God. He’s murmuring ancient Arabic phrases that carry no meaning for him, since he learned them phonetically when he was a kid. He has shit himself. He has pissed himself. He’s cold.

  The sky is getting carved with projectiles. Explosions. Gunfire.

  He’s praying the only way he knows how and hugging his empty rifle.

  He’s halfway between the trenches.

  Excerpts from Ismet Prci’s Diary

  from November 1999

  I went insane, mati. Again. And I thought I was okay. It’s Melissa’s coldness that does it every time. We were at her parents’ house in Thousand Oaks (they weren’t there, thank God) and we we
re fighting about something inane. She wanted me to wear my good sweatshirt for the dinner with them that night, one without holes and without the half-naked cowgirl on the front, and I went on a sanctimonious diatribe about how I wanted her parents to know the real me, and what the fuck is wrong with a hole under the arm if the person at the table is courteous and loving, and shouldn’t we stop judging books by their covers, and she. turned. cold.

  I’d seen it before, this transformation, but I didn’t expect it then. It was reserved for severe fights. Obviously, this wasn’t about the sweatshirt. She sideswiped me with a glance that made me freeze, that made me feel unwanted. I turned on the waterworks, but she sustained the same level of coldness. I begged her to say something warm. She thumbed through a cooking magazine instead. My pain turned into rage.

  On the floor at the end of the hallway there was an empty laundry basket and a gallon bottle of laundry detergent, seemingly empty. I punted the first as hard as I could and watched it clatter down the hallway with hilarity. That didn’t satisfy me, so I punted the bottle, as well, which turned out to be full. I heard my big toe snap, but heated by adrenalin, I barely noticed it. I put on my sneakers, slammed the front door, and walked away.

  When I hobbled back home two days later, Eric barely recognized me. He was sore I hadn’t called, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t call, because I had no idea where I’d been.

  Back in therapy, on Melissa’s request. Or should I say ultimatum? Dr. Cyrus insists I have to keep going with the “memoir,” that my trip to Bosnia put a snag in my recovery. He insists I arrange things in chronological order, write the name of a month, and go into what happened that month. Simple as that.

  We’ll see.

  (. . . scaling the serpent . . .)

  Donju Tuzlu, Donju Tuzlu

  opasala guja

  Lower Tuzla, Lower Tuzla