Shards: A Novel

by Ismet Prcic

  That was the last shell that fell on my town.

  Body count: 71.

  Average age of the victims: 23.

  Wounded: around 124.

  Cousin Garo died in this shelling and so did a bunch of guys I hung out with at one point or another.

  My brother and I weren’t allowed to go to the funeral. The town was petrified of another deliberate attack on the mass gathering of civilians, so the time and place of the funeral weren’t announced on any media.

  They ended up being buried at dawn a few days later on a clearing in Banja Park. Both my parents were in attendance. Mom later told me that, as it was happening, swarms of birds took off from the forest, circled the area above the gathering, then flew off. She said she had never seen so many birds in one spot.

  When I went to that special graveyard for the first time to pay my respects to Garo, every grave sported a photograph of its occupant.

  I walked around the mounds of still-wet dirt, peering into unfamiliar eyes, recognizing a few faces here and there, looking for my cousin. His grave was perfect. It smelled like a plowed field. “1964–1995,” it read.

  I walked away from the place, then stopped and returned. There was a little bug of a thought that made me do it, made me feel like I’d missed something. I retraced my steps, looked at the photographs again, and when I saw it it killed me. Garo was my cousin, and seeing his grave didn’t affect me as this stranger’s did. The picture was murky, not the best likeness, but I recognized those eyes, that full beard, those broad shoulders, and something squeezed in my chest. I got a head rush. I had to sit down in the wet dirt.

  “Mustafa Nali,” read this grave, “1977–1995.”

  The man who shot Archibald.

  From then on I had trouble falling asleep. The dark of my room would seep off the ceiling and cover me with its morose particles. I would pull up my childhood covers, with their succession of sleep-walking Donald Ducks, over my head, but I couldn’t keep my eyes closed. The dark would find its way through the wetness of my eyes, through my pores and the roots of my hair all the way into my thoughts, and the shadows of my room would spring like screaming dogs or ominous storks, beaks dripping with dead, vile flesh.

  I dreamed of him. I agonized over my two memories of him, tried to remember them perfectly. I imagined his life before death. Who was he? What was he like? He never left my mind.

  I started to see him. I saw him everywhere. I saw him first from my balcony. He was standing in front of the arcade downstairs, watching kids play Double Dragon. Then I saw him at school, on the staircase. He was an extra in the movies I watched when there was electricity. He was a guest in my house, sitting on my parents’ bed, silently nodding approval. I found his toes in the residue of gunk in our bathtub.

  Why?

  He was just this guy, this stranger. A random fucking guy who begged to be in the special forces.

  But now he was Mustafa Nali. Now he was dead and pieced together like a puzzle in a shallow coffin, parts probably missing, swept into the gutters, and washed away by the cisterns of industrial water from the chemical plant. Maybe bits of his skull were gone, never to reunite with the rest of him. Or perhaps some of his fingertips still wiggled somewhere under the asphalt, never to rest in peace.

  I staked out the graveyard trying to meet somebody he knew. Nobody prayed at his grave.

  I asked around about him, about his family, his friends. Nobody knew them but people told me things anyway:

  “That kid’s name is Mustafa, Mue they called him. He used to work at the lodge renting hunting equipment. Ooh, is that kid messed up.”

  “He lost his father, too.”

  “I don’t know where he’s from, some place in the valley of the Drina, I bet, but people say all kinds of stuff about him, that he’s not all together. They say, and you can believe it or not, that he wasn’t right to begin with but that the war really pushed him over.” “He loved his father.”

  “Nali? Nalis are crazy! There are stories about a Nali who killed a man over a pumpkin. Stabbed him in the gut with a knife, and then went insane and starved himself to death in his attic.”

  “He killed his own father. Everyone knows that.”

  “He lost his whole family, the poor bastard.”

  “My neighbor lived next door to them, pure truth, this. Refugees. When the Chetniks came into their village, he saw his father hide in the septic tank. When they came to their house, they took away his mother and sister to rape them—who knows?—and cut off a bunch of his older brother’s fingers, his nose, his ears, gouged his eyes and sliced open his scrotum, and made him, Mustafa, chew on the stuff—eat it—horrible things. Then they said that if he wanted to live he had to cut his brother’s throat and that he did it. Can you imagine that? I can’t vouch for that last thing, but the other stuff is pure truth.”

  JUNE

  Branka’s office at the Home of the Youth smelled of bureaucratic dust and conservative perfume and oniony sweat. It wasn’t much of a dressing room. There was furniture everywhere: boxy desks, orphaned chairs, yellow, top-to-floor cabinets filled with tomes that made you feel bored and exhausted just looking at them. The girls’ stuff was strewn everywhere. Prop and costume boxes cluttered the floor and looked like their innards had exploded. It was our turn to get into costume now—the girls had dibs on the office first and had taken their sweet-ass time—and now we had only fifteen minutes before the show.

  It was kind of like a dress rehearsal marathon, all three of our plays in a row with fifteen minutes between each, starting at three o’clock. Branka was trying to make the Edinburgh thing happen and had invited all the bigwigs and all the military brass to watch it. In Bosnia, the bureaucratic machine in charge of issuing papers to the citizenry was vast in peacetime, but now it also included the military, who had the final say. No matter how you sliced it, any citizen leaving the country in wartime was a matter of national security, especially with the population numbers dropping precipitously on a daily basis and the end of the war nowhere in sight. Branka in her diligence nagged all levels of officials until she got the promise that General Lendo, the guy whose signature on your passport made it valid, announced that he would attend this afternoon.

  “What if I did the show like this?”

  The three of us guys turned and looked at Bokal, who was standing by the door in black socks, baby blue briefs, a laboriously ruffled white shirt, and with a crown upon his head. He played the King in the Dream About the Little Prince, the first play on our list tonight. We all laughed.

  “I’m not kidding. It’s fucking hot, man.”

  He wasn’t kidding. It was forty degrees Celsius all day and the air was hotter on the way in than on the way out of your lungs. Every place where one part of your body touched another was moist. Even eyelids stuck together when you blinked and it took some force to pry them open. You just wanted to be naked and spread-eagled and suspended in the air.

  “Don’t you say a word,” Asmir said, already drenched in sweat in his soiled winter coat and a beanie. He played the Drunk. Little Boro and I giggled. Our costumes were identical and pretty light compared to theirs.

  There was a light knock on the door and then Branka’s blonde head was in the room with us.

  “He’s here,” she said.

  “Mom!” Boro protested.

  “It doesn’t matter who’s here,” Asmir said. Branka beamed at him with hatred.

  They had this dynamic of disgust toward each other. Asmir thought her a heartless, talentless, self-promoting bureaucrat, and Branka thought him a selfish, pretentious, uneducated asshole; neither hid their feelings from each other or anyone else. They were both control freaks who needed each other and hated their predicament.

  “Yes it does, Asmir. We have to show him that we are serious about this if we want to get the papers.”

  “We,” Asmir said, indicating us and brazenly excluding Branka, “are serious about this. We always have been. We don’t have to do anyth
ing extra to show anything to anybody, especially not some career soldier who never read a book in his life.”

  Branka’s eyes turned into slits. I looked over at Boro and we both grimaced and rolled our eyes. Bokal on the other hand was very loyal to Asmir, and as soon as he saw the struggle ensue between them, he hurried to tip the scale to Asmir’s advantage. Nonchalantly, he took off his briefs. Asmir sniggered like a teenager.

  “Asmir, can I talk to you outside?” Branka asked.

  “There’s no time. I need to get ready. Can it wait?”

  Bokal made a show of leaning bare-assed into one of the prop boxes and rummaging through it.

  “It’s about what we talked about.”

  Asmir had told us earlier that Branka wanted him to cut some things out of the play to appease the brass, stuff that was making fun of the military. In Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince, the main character leaves his tiny planet to see the world of the grown-ups and finds out that it is absurd, that everyone is alone in their own fictional world, which they perpetuate ad infinitum. In his adaptation Asmir added a character of an archetypal soldier because it was relevant to our daily experience.

  The second and bigger problem that Branka had with this portion of the play was that there would be a real weapon on the stage. Ramona, the girl who played the role of the Soldier, brought her grandfather’s WWII Schmeiser from home for every rehearsal. The weapon was an antique and was obviously empty, but the military had ordered all citizens to turn in any and all weapons in 1992 when the war started because there was a serious shortage. If General Lendo saw it used in an artsy-fartsy play instead of being in the hands of one of his men on the front lines, he might not be as sympathetic to our cause. I agreed with Branka on this one. The gun was not crucial. It was not like we could have taken it to Scotland with us anyway. Asmir just wanted to exercise his ego, to piss Branka off.

  “I’m not changing a thing,” Asmir said simply. Branka’s chin trembled.

  “Do you understand what you’re doing?”

  “I’m doing my job and maintaining the play’s artistic integrity.”

  “You’re sabotaging everybody, including yourself. Not to mention possibly ruining all the work I put into making this happen.”

  “What work? And what did you make happen? We got invited to the Fringe. The troupe. Doing the play the way we do the play. Not you, not the Home of the Youth.”

  “You can only leave the country as an institution.”

  “We can be an institution.”

  “But you’re not. As far as the government is concerned you’re a bunch of individuals trying to leave the country in the time of war. You’re not an official company, you have no credentials, no business cards, no bank account, no permanent or mailing address, no telephone, no fax, and you don’t pay taxes on anything. To the state, you’re virtually nonexistent.”

  There was a knock on the door and Branka opened it without looking. Ramona stood there in a stylized black uniform with a cap that was reminiscent of Parisian gendarmes. The submachine gun hung horizontally across her midsection. At the sight of her, Bokal turned away from the door and scrambled into his royal breeches. Ramona tore her eyes from his ass.

  “I’m sorry but we’re starting,” she said.

  Branka turned to Ramona.

  “I really think it’s not smart showing that to the military.”

  Ramona looked up at Asmir.

  “The gun stays. The costume doesn’t work without it.” Asmir pushed past Branka, almost knocking her into the door frame. “Thanks to you, now we don’t have time for our meditation.”

  Somewhere, Omar played the first notes of his original score on the piano. I took Boro’s hand and we ran like mad through two corridors to the open doors of our rehearsal room, in front of which all the girls in their costumes gestured for us to hurry with almost synchronized arm movements.

  “What took you so long?” they whispered and straightened out Boro’s costume. On the third measure of the piano melody, right on cue, Boro turned on his flashlight and walked into the room.

  “Which one is him?” I asked the girls, scanning the clammy and uncomfortable faces of the audience members sitting along the wall with their arms crossed or balled up in their laps. Seven or eight of them were in uniforms. The girls pointed to a massive man with white hair and a bald spot, his black beret shoved through his shoulder strap, his camouflage shirt damp under the arms. I watched him. His brow was downcast but something in his eyes almost showed fear. He listened to Boro’s opening speech as though ashamed of something. You could see he’d rather be anywhere else but here where this long-haired child with big eyes was putting simple but crushing words into his skull. You could see he preferred the front lines, where the world was divided into us and them and you lived in your muscles instead of your head because matters were crystal clear and nothing was up for interpretation and there was no need to use the head at all apart from planning maneuvers, dreaming, and remembering.

  I could say that the reason he let us go to Scotland was that we knocked him on his ass, that our art, the truth of it, got to him, and that he realized we really deserved to show the world that there was beauty in Bosnia, and heart, and love, and that we weren’t just victims of madmen, experts at suffering, beggars crying for help, vegetating in our towns and waiting to be picked off while the world watched it on CNN. I could say that, but it wouldn’t be the truth.

  The truth was that he only stayed for the first play to make sure we weren’t a bunch of scammers, and in that sense I guess we did our job well. In fact, the only time during that hour and a half when we did something that actually reached him had nothing to do with our art. Quite the opposite. The only thing that reached him was a mistake, a momentary absence of art in one scene when Bokal broke character and let reality become part of the make-believe world.

  In the play, the character of the King rules a planet of which he’s the only inhabitant, and when the Little Prince shows up the King tries to convince him to stay so he can finally have a real subject. The Little Prince quickly figures out that the guy’s orders are meaningless and starts to leave. It was at that moment in the scene—right as I turned to the audience and was to deliver my “the grown-ups are certainly very odd” line that finished off each scene—when Bokal cleared his throat and boomed the following words:

  “All right. You can go. You can go if Lendo lets you go.”

  There was a gasp in the audience.

  Some people scoffed, tried to pass it off as coughing, and then quieted down. For a few moments I felt disembodied, surprised by where I was, who I was, what I wanted, why I was so sweaty. I looked through my long wet hair and saw the general’s clenched jaw, his adjutants looking at him, waiting to see what he would do. He held his mouth clenched for a second longer and then his face opened and he started to laugh. He laughed with abandon, like he was alone or with friends. The rest of the audience soon safely followed suit. I remembered, then delivered, my line and began walking to another planet as Omar played the melodious theme.

  The next day we were told to gather proper papers and get photographed.

  Luckily and disturbingly, nobody even noticed that Ramona’s Schmeiser was the real thing.

  LATE JULY

  Right after I had given up looking for anybody who knew Mustafa, a piece of information landed in my lap—his family’s supposed address somewhere in Mejdan. I went to Omar’s to get him to go with me, because Mejdan was a tough neighborhood, but he had found a bottle of paint thinner in his basement and he wanted to huff it.

  “I can’t go by myself, man.”

  “I know what can give you some courage,” he said, dangling a plastic bag with a soaked rag in it in front of my face.

  I saw myself: I’m crying and kissing Asja on a bridge and she turns and walks away and I try to go after her but as I run around the corner it’s nighttime in a foreign city and the tumultuous skies are pouring water on me and wet I dart under the bridg
e and slip in the grass and fall down the embankment into the river which is frozen and I think I’m a fat child until I look down and see my camouflage pants and the cold shaft of the Kalashnikov in my hands and the walls of the roofless house I’m in are eroding with projectiles until they disappear altogether revealing a gut-dropping view of a thin distant bridge stretching from a palmy shore across the ocean into the red of the setting sun.

  When the high subsided some I marched up the hill to Mejdan and found the address as though in a daze. Once there I didn’t know what to do. It was hot and my mouth was dry and everything looked meaningful, so I sat on a makeshift bench across the dirt road from the property, looking at the little house, the yard.

  This is where he lived.

  In place of flower beds, every available piece of the yard except for the path to the front door was planted with vegetables in no discernable order. It was like a blind man had done it. There were heads of cabbage strewn among the flattened scallions, tufts of carrot hair popping out of the lettuce, bean vines overtaking the fence and squeezing the tomato plants. Three stalks of corn leaned against one another like drunken buddies. A sunflower was propped on its toes, looking for the master.

  Somewhere behind me a radio murmured about no-fly zones, cease-fire agreements, and what Richard Holbrooke had said at the press conference about the Srebrenica massacre. And like that it is a week earlier and my mother wakes me up and tells me to get dressed. What are we doing? I ask, but she just says, Come with me. We go outside and she’s carrying this ocher plastic bag. What’s in that? I ask. Food, she says. Look, she says. I look and see a UN truck pass down Južna Magistrala and, for a second, cannot fathom what’s in it. We walk closer as we watch. It disappears but another one appears—it’s a convoy—and I look closer and still can’t see. I see movement. Things are moving on these trucks. Here and there. We get closer, closer. Up close and we see the people, all women, so packed in the back of the open trucks that they look like solid, uniform blocks of human meat. The ones on the outside are pressed against the railing, immobile, their backs crooked, their arms jammed against their neighbors’, faces made of misery, eyes made of empty. We can hear wailing. Here and there. But mostly they don’t wail. They are so compressed that there isn’t enough air for breathing and wailing. Just breathing. Barely. What is this? I ask. Refugees from Srebrenica, my mother says. We walk and walk, alongside. Even when the whole convoy passes us and the street is empty, we walk. We walk where they are going. To the sports arena, where I saw my share of basketball games and handball tournaments, boxing matches and humanitarian concerts. Now I can’t see the parquet floors beneath the thousands of wailing women moving around like insects or sitting on yoga mats and blankets, their faces in their hands. We climb from the nosebleed section down to the court, and the place is deafening: wailing, sobbing, sniffing, screaming, shrieking, crackling of plastic bottles of water, calling of the names of the living, calling of the names of the dead, calling of the names of God, yelping, whining, sighing, banging of fists against the floor, singing of sad songs, singing of happy songs, cursing of mothers, swearing to Gods, blowing of noses, shuffling of clothes, crying of children, crooning of lullabies, and the sounds of my heart booming in my skull. Mother kneels on a blanket. The woman she’s trying to help is red. Veins bulge out of her forehead and neck. I can’t watch. I turn around. I smell shit. An old invalid flops on a mat. Only arms flop. Paraplegic. Incontinent. She calls a guy’s name. No one comes. I look up. The ceiling of lighting fixtures, the arena’s baskets on elaborate blue, metal arms folded against it. Nobody’s gonna score here for a long time.