Shards: A Novel

by Ismet Prcic

  For a moment I actually felt heroic. I turned around and saw Asja trying to comprehend what had just occurred, her hand still breaking my fingers, when a mortar shrieked over us and rocked somewhere nearby, sending everything running, everything except us.

  We had no legs to run, no lungs to breathe. We just dropped to the ground and lay there holding hands as one, two, three sirens started to shrill at different pitches and filled the vast skies above us with their morbid symphony.

  No other shells fell. We looked for them against the gray and white sky but the gravel became uncomfortable and we scooted closer to the river into the dewy grass. When I tried to let go of her hand she crumpled her fingers in mine.

  “Don’t you dare,” she whispered.

  “I won’t.”

  She was silent for a while. I felt so close to her, never closer.

  “I heard,” she said, still whispering.

  “Heard what?”

  “You guys are going to Scotland.”

  Asmir had met this British woman aid worker and brought her to see some of our shows. She loved them and asked if we wanted her to put out a good word for us in the UK, that she knew some theater people. Asmir said yes but then completely forgot about it. Then, a couple of weeks ago, we got this invitation from Edinburgh to participate in some kind of festival. It was supposed to be in August, but there was no way the authorities would let us go. Bokal was in the army, Asmir was evading them although he was twenty-five, and Omar and I had both just gotten drafted. They didn’t let anyone out, let alone potential soldiers.

  “Nobody is going anywhere. We just got invited, that’s all.”

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  “It was nothing. We got a letter. When is the last time you heard of anybody getting a passport? It’s impossible.”

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  I sat up and tried to let go of her hand but she wouldn’t let me.

  “Don’t you let go.”

  I leaned away a little but she pulled me on top of her and into a feverish kiss. It was insane and outlandish, as though my consciousness went into every cell of my body and I was there in the curve of my lips, at the tip of my tongue, on my dewy back, where her hands were coldly pressing, and down there where my erection was pressing at her. It was wonderful.

  It wasn’t until the sun poked through the clouds and some children rode by on ancient BMX bikes and made fun of us that we got up and decided we might as well go along with my plan for the day. We crossed the Shoe People bridge and saw the smoke from behind the Shoe People building. Shoe People is this horrid cartoon for small kids—all colors and no heart. Right before the war started, this monstrosity of a building had burgeoned in the middle of the town, and some genius had painted it in a combination of pastel yellow, pastel blue, hot pink, and brown, which is why Tuzlaks started calling it the Shoe People building.

  The earlier shell had hit the parking lot in front of it, lifted this VW bug, flipped it, and brought it down atop a little Citroën. By the time we got close, you couldn’t see what colors they were, as they were burned extracrispy and still burning. The bug looked a little bit like a turtle on its back. Some pissed-off storeowners were sweeping their broken windows off the pavement. There were shrapnel holes everywhere. We overheard that two women were killed, but we walked past the jail and up to Banja Park to make out.

  Sitting on our favorite bench overlooking the town we could have been photographed for one of those cheesy love calendars that eleven-year-old girls across the world keep on their walls, all breathtaking nature and saccharine love. At one point something ran through the bushes behind us and we startled, but it was some old man in too small of a suit jacket, crazy we guessed.

  “I thought it was Archibald,” she said and I couldn’t stop laughing. “Where in the world did you get Archibald?”

  All I could do was point to my head. She punched my arm and kissed me.

  “You goober, don’t you ever leave me.”

  APRIL

  Asmir, Bokal, and I decided to go out after rehearsal. The Galerija was a toilet of a café, two low-ceilinged rooms crammed with bulky wicker chairs and smelling of rotten drywall.

  The guy behind the bar ignored us. Bokal had to go down to him and order our long coffees as Asmir and I settled into our chattering chairs.

  “Do the waiters here have to go to a school to learn to look this disaffected?” I said.

  “The less he comes this way the better,” Asmir replied.

  Last night he had mooched forty marks off a Dutch humanitarian worker he was fucking and lifted a bottle of Johnnie Walker from her pantry when she went to the bathroom to clean herself up. He wanted to do something that would end their arrangement, because he was getting sick of her. He said she gave good blow jobs. In the dark. That was his joke. She was fifteen years older than him, or more, and he said he could only do her in the dark. Asmir was a bit of a bastard when it came to women.

  Bokal came back smoking a cigarette we knew he didn’t have when we came in.

  “Where did you get that?” Asmir asked him.

  “Look who you’re asking.”

  Bokal called himself the king of lying, scrounging, borrowing, and freeloading and was proud of it. Once I witnessed him leech a mark from a Gypsy beggar kid, honest to God. We were sitting in some other café and this little kid came over to beg from us and Bokal told him that he was in trouble, that he had ordered a coffee he didn’t have money for, and that the owner of the café would kick his ass when he found out. The little guy felt bad for him, took a wad of small bills out of his sock, and gave him a mark to pay for the coffee.

  The waiter/barman, with a gap in his teeth you could push a beer cap through, brought over three long coffees and put the receipt under the ashtray. I couldn’t stand the taste of coffee and so put in three packets of sugar.

  “What do you think, Asmir, God doesn’t see you fornicating with all these foreigners?” Bokal asked out of nowhere. “They come over here from who knows where to help Bosnians and you treat them like shit.”

  “Hey, I’m Bosnian. They’re helping me. Get off.”

  Asmir laughed through his nose at his own joke and we did the same. There was something disarmingly childish about him that you just couldn’t hate no matter what he said or did. He had a knack for downplaying his faults, a particular kind of charisma that made you let him get away with murder as though it were mischief.

  “Pass me your cups and keep pretending like you’re talking,” Asmir said.

  Bokal and I carried on a mock conversation while Asmir, hidden by the tablecloth, poured some Johnnie Walker from his shoulder bag into all our coffee cups.

  “Let’s drink to us making it to Edinburgh,” Asmir said, and I saw all the good humor go out of Bokal. His face went sour. We clinked our cups and drank the stuff. It was terrible but it burned in a good way. Bokal leaned back and the wicker under him woke up and groaned under his bulk. He glanced at the remains of the cigarette in the ashtray.

  “Fuckin’ walls,” he said.

  “What’s up Bokal, you don’t wanna go to Edinburgh?” I asked him, trying a jovial tone. He looked at me like you lucky kid, and I remembered that he was in the army, that even if the rest of us, by some Miracle, got our passports, he probably wouldn’t.

  “Look at that painting,” he said, nodding to the wall next to me. It was kind of a caricature of downtown Tuzla, with its signature buildings all being squeezed at the bottom by a huge white snake.

  “What does it mean?”

  “It’s from that song, right?” I prided myself on being a badass punk rocker, and admitting that I knew all about sevdalinke would betray my bad rep. I took a huge gulp from my cup to reinforce my badassedness.

  “Do you know what the snake represents?”

  “The wall?”

  “Wrong.”

  “What are you talking about?” Asmir butted in. “There used to be an actual wall around the whole downtown. There
are still pieces of it left up on Banja Park, that old armory up there.”

  “Yes, but do you think that somebody would write a song about a fucking wall? No. The snake is the invading army of Omar Paša Latas, who was dispatched from Istanbul to quash a rebellion in these parts. When he was done he surrounded the whole town with his troops and just hung out there for a while to show off the might of the Ottoman army and make sure nobody else had any funny ideas.”

  This was startling coming from Bokal, who was known to us more for his street smarts.

  “So what’s your point?” I asked.

  “My point is that us thinking that we can escape the serpent’s grip is just a very funny idea.”

  He downed his cup and slid it in front of Asmir.

  “Branka said it’s possible,” Asmir said and, keeping an eye on the waiter, poured him another Johnnie, this time unmixed. I quickly finished my drink, too, and presented Asmir with my own empty cup.

  “Possible, my shlong. If they let anyone go it’ll be all the young’uns in the troupe. Me, you, him, whoever can carry a gun, we’re just dreaming.”

  “If anyone can do it, Branka can. She’ll fight for Omar to go and he’s Ismet's age.”

  Branka was the woman in charge of the Home of the Youth, where we rehearsed; she was an ass-kicker taker-care-of-things and Omar’s mother. Omar was part of the troupe, too, because he wrote and performed the music for one of the plays in our repertoire, a re-imagining of Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince. I played the Little Prince. Omar’s little brother Boro played the Little Prince as a child.

  “What is she gonna do, sign the passports instead of General Lendo?”

  “Richard Bach says that when you wish something strongly enough, the universe shifts to make it happen.” It was like Asmir to pull infuriating New Age quotes out of his ass like this. Bokal stood up, tightened his fists, and shut his eyes.

  “Here, I’m strongly wishing for my kidney back,” he said, opened his eyes and fists and pulled his polo shirt out of his jeans. He turned and revealed his operation scar to us. “Oops, tough titty. It’s still gone.”

  He pulled himself together and walked down to the bar.

  Outside, the day was dying and the thin, exhausted, fun-starved people were slowly starting to fill the garden seating area for the evening.

  “That’s Bokal for you,” Asmir said, “no faith.” He grabbed my forearm to make me look at him. “We’re going to Edinburgh, you mark my words.”

  And somehow a part of me knew we would. That was Asmir’s power. Despite his hypocrisy, you didn’t doubt that he believed.

  “From your mouth to God’s ears,” I said.

  “What are you going to do with Dunda?” he then asked. Dunda was what everyone called Asja. The question blindsided me. A sort of panic rang through my skull and rattled down my limbs. There I was wishing and praying to be away from this town, plotting to do so, believing I was out already, and not for one moment did she ever enter my thoughts.

  “Nothing,” I heard myself say. “I’ll go to Edinburgh and I’ll come back.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Asmir said. “She’s your first. I know it feels strong, but she’s your first. You can’t throw away your life just because you think you know what love is at seventeen.”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Even worse.” He took a sip. “Nothing’s gonna come out of that.” Bokal lumbered over to us and brandished another cigarette he had scored.

  “Ismet says he would come back if we made it to Edinburgh.”

  “Come back here? Why?” Bokal looked flabbergasted.

  “He loves his girlfriend.”

  “Listen to me. If you get out of here and then come back, you better hide from me. If I see you on the street I will cripple you.”

  “Why do you care?” I laughed, though I knew he was serious.

  Bokal ignored me. He and Asmir talked about art and about the girls going in and out of the restrooms. I said not a word. A part of me wanted to run all the way to Batva, ring Asja’s doorbell, have a man-to-man with her father and win him over, marry her, go to war, liberate villages, and come home from the front lines every week to my love. The other part saw myself on a boat, alone, escaping September. I imagined myself in Scotland, what it would look like. I imagined green pastures and jolly red-bearded Scotts, long-haired yaks and ancient castles, wet cobblestones and mythic monsters hiding in lakes, things I read about.

  At some point we heard two gunshots ring outside and all the people in the café leaped and charged into the night to the edge of the park where something exciting was taking place. Tipsy, we followed the dark crowd, and there was this mountain of a man out there, standing in the moonlight, a foot taller than anyone else, slinging what appeared to be an antique two-shell shotgun over his shoulder and pointing to the ground where everyone was looking. Some smokers flicked on their lighters to better see whomever he had shot, and I saw that the big man had a top part of a ranger or security guard uniform on. For a moment I saw him squat out of sight and had to blindly follow Bokal, who cut through the crowd with ease. When the big man reemerged I saw his face and remembered him.

  He was in my batch of draftees for the physical and psych evaluations, which made him my age, but unlike me, he looked like a soldier that day. With his shirt off he looked chiseled out of a boulder, had the full beard and body odor of a man. They wanted him for an MP but he kept begging to be in the special forces. They said no, but he kept ridiculing them, pushing their buttons, farting, and finally he pissed off one of the brass, who assigned him to the unit with an average life expectancy of about a week.

  The crowd parted a little and what I saw lying there was lean and furry.

  It was Archibald.

  I kneeled next to him and touched his hind end. I felt like crying. His rib cage was devastated with a hole. There were bones protruding and they were white in the moonlight.

  “Was it yours?” asked the mountain man.

  “That’s Archibald,” I said and walked back toward the café. Asmir snickered, thinking I was messing with the guy. There was an omen here, and I was drunk and ready to go home.

  MAY

  On May 25, after rehearsal, I went over to Omar’s without calling ahead. It was in the late afternoon. I yelled his name from in front of his house and his head popped out of the second-story window. I wanted to go out, but he felt like staying home, asked me in. I caved, as usual, and he sent his ten-year-old brother down to unlock the door. I teased Boro that he had a girlfriend and he told me to “screw off,” so I chased him up the stairs, a routine.

  Omar was sitting by the window, smoking, trying to blow the smoke outside.

  “Shut the door,” he said and sprayed jasmine-scented air freshener around in hisses.

  I perched myself in the usual spot on the sofa, with my back against the stereo, and picked up a guitar that had seen better days some ten to fifteen years ago. It sounded like it was on hallucinogens.

  I don’t remember what we talked about or did. I don’t even remember if it was still light outside. I just remember freezing in midsentence when I heard the muffled discharge of a faraway cannon—by this point everybody could distinguish between the sound of a cannon and that of a mortar. There hadn’t been any shelling since that morning in March.

  Time imploded. My internal clock, trained to turn on as soon as a discharge was heard, started counting seconds before the projectile would reach the town, three seconds in all—everybody knew that, too. Three seconds to find cover, or run, or pray, or hold a thought, or remember. Three seconds.

  One, one thousand.

  Two, one thousand.

  Three, one thousand.

  Movies don’t do it justice—that’s all I’m going to say about the thought-collapsing, breath-stealing sound a spinning shell makes as it pierces the air on the way down toward the center of your town, in between three of the busiest cafés and a little bit to the right of the popcorn vendor in the midst of hundre
ds of citizens who are pretending that everything is okay, that the war is winding down. But I didn’t know that yet.

  Three seconds passed in silence, then BOOM! A close one. Sirens blared. We rushed to the living room because it overlooked the center, Branka already at the open window.

  “Stay away from the windows,” she said.

  “Come on, Mom,” Omar replied and looked outside.

  “You guys wanna go to the basement?”

  “It’s not like it’s our first time.”

  We listened for more discharges. Everything was quiet.

  “You smell like smoke,” Omar’s mother said to him and he grunted in feeble protest. We kept on looking out.

  A car sped down Južna Magistrala, a red Fiat Zastava 101, backfiring and leaving clouds of gray fumes behind it. Then came other cars. Then bicycles. Then people running. Everybody was hurrying toward the center.

  I decided to walk home, as I knew the police would shorten the curfew tonight. I said my good-byes and left. The night was quiet and I took the path by the river. Walking past the gymnasium, I saw somebody graffitiing one of the walls and I hung out in the grass until I figured out what it said. It said: HALLOWED BE THY NAME, and judging by the face of a zombie cyborg by the name of Eddie next to it, I suspected it wasn’t a religious message.

  When I got home my parents were beside themselves. Mother was angry, unable to utter a word. Father wanted to know where I was, why I didn’t call. I went past him into the kitchen and poured a glass of water.

  “Open your mouth so I can tell you,” I told them. It doesn’t translate well into English but means something like It’s none of your business.

  “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you know what happened?”

  “Yeah. A shell fell downtown. Very exciting.”

  He just stood there, so I went to my room where my pallid brother was watching TV.

  I saw it all on TV: a severed child’s foot by the curb, survivors piling the wounded into the backs of cars and banging on the roofs when they couldn’t fit any more in, to signal the drivers to step on it, blood trickling into a manhole with popcorn sprinkled in it, dozens of humans on the cobbled ground, not many of them moving at all, and a decapitated body in a green sweatshirt sitting upright inside the Gate Café, a cigarette still burning in an ashtray in front of him.