Shards: A Novel

by Ismet Prcic

  I was the first one up there in my tighty-whities, screaming giddily, staring one moment at the blue sky, the next at my white feet slapping the hard surface of the white cement, until the whiteness ended abruptly in a horizontal line and I found myself airborne above the blue, beneath the blue, in the blue and going up, up, up. I swear to God I would have been the first human to really fly had I not remembered, going up into the blue like that, that all my money was rolled up in a tobacco pouch hanging next to a pouch of another kind in my underwear.

  CRIMES AGAINST SUPER MARIO

  On the way north to Zagreb—another night was already upon us —Omar and I decided that, in theory, Super Mario wouldn’t be opposed to sharing some booze with us. In practice, though, Omar made sure that both he and his seatmate were asleep. He asked them questions and threw little wads of newspaper at their faces. When they seemed to be dead to the world I lay on the floor, reached under my seat, and retrieved Super Mario’s bag. In it were three two-liter plastic bottles of brandy (one almost empty and the other two full), an eroded loaf of bread, two cans of humanitarian corned beef, and a handful of bruised tomatoes in a sack.

  At first we were going to just take huge gulps and put the booze back, but when I saw that one of the full bottles was identical to one of the bottles of water my mother prepared for me before I left, I just switched them out making sure to put the water on the bottom of his bag so he wouldn’t find out for a while. I returned the whole thing between the man’s feet where I found it and Omar and I got ourselves drunk, cracked some ridiculous jokes, and were the only ones laughing. Periodically, I took my English dictionary out of the backpack and checked on the status of my money. The notes kept being almost dry.

  JOINT ENDEAVORS

  We spent that night at the Zagreb University dorms and in the morning, some of us hungover and groggy, went to the British embassy on Vlaška Street to apply for visas. Branka and the president were snippy with each other, each acting like they were in charge. The president was bombastic about it, talked loudly, flailed his arms, walked with his chest out. He had one of those large peasant bodies on which any kind of suit and tie just looks wrong. His big belly, a shameful thing on a man coming out of a siege, made the front of his shirt come out of his pants and he constantly tried to tuck it in as he marched in between us, telling us how to complete the forms that the embassy personnel had already told us how to fill out. Branka was sneakier, using Ramona’s knowledge of English to go behind his back and talk directly to the Brits instead of to the interpreters. After a while it became apparent that Branka was winning this round, because the president’s people kept having to come to us for help with English, which made the president seethe.

  “I’m the reason everyone is even going to Scotland,” he said to Super Mario, but loudly, so Branka could hear. She made a show of ignoring him but not without scoffing a little first. For a second I thought he would charge at her.

  “None of you would have taken a single step out of Bosnia if it weren’t for me, and you need to remember that!” he yelled, pointing his finger indiscriminately.

  “You’re behaving outrageously,” Branka said, smiling. “This is a joint endeavor. There’s no need for yelling.”

  “Joint endeavor, my dick. You’re here courtesy of me. You’re traveling under the wing of the National Theater and I’m the president of it, goddamn it, and I demand to know what these Brits are talking about.”

  “It might look like that on paper, sir, but I have to remind you that the reason you are here is because it was the Youth Center theater that got invited to Scotland, not the National Theater. I’m the president of the Youth Center, so you are here because of me.”

  “I’m in charge!”

  “You’re a drunk!”

  “What did you say to me, you fuckin’ cow?”

  “You’re a bully and a child, sir. You should be ashamed of yourself.” The blonde secretary came to the rescue again and pulled the president away from everyone as he spewed profanities. Branka beamed satisfaction, victory.

  “Neither of them would even know where Edinburgh is if it weren’t for Asmir,” I told Boro, and he laughed. “It’s weird not having him around.”

  “I know.”

  In the embassy waiting room, we waited and waited and waited some more, then had our one-on-one interviews with the consuls, who asked us if we would seek political asylum in the UK, if we would seek employment or government aid in the UK, and if we intended to return to Bosnia after the festival was over. Like well-coached parrots we all said no, no, no, yes. We gave them our passports, then meandered around the city until 4 PM, when we came back and were told that our visas were approved.

  I called my parents from the post office and told them the good news. They were happy I was alive. Father asked if I still had the money. Mother told me not to have the window open when the bus was moving, that sweat and a draft in combination could lead to an inflamed nerve or even Bell’s palsy. Then I called Asja, but it was her crazy father who answered and I panicked and hung up. I stood there in the booth feeling ridiculous. What could he do to me now? I picked up the phone again, hovered over the dial buttons for a moment, then cradled it.

  Outside, Ramona was waiting for her turn, and I had an idea. I asked her if she would call and pretend to be Asja’s friend so we could circumvent the Nazi dad. She said yes and in seconds I was talking to Asja. Well, barely. I told her where I was, that I really got out. She sounded mad and curt. She couldn’t really talk. I told her I loved her. She said she had to go now.

  HOW BIG ARE THE PRESIDENT’S BALLS?— SPEAKING BOSNIAN IN FRANCE—THE ORIGINS OF SUPER MARIO’S MUSTACHE

  Sitting in the same seats for days and cutting diagonally across Europe on a bus made us feel just how boring freedom was. We drove the tedious highways, saw cities only from a distance, stopped at rest stops and gas stations, public restrooms and supermarkets. Having gone through what we brought with us, we gorged ourselves on prepackaged sandwiches and corn puffs and chocolate, drank sodas and juice boxes and mineral water, and smoked famous brands of cigarettes. Our stomachs were not used to all that, and we barfed into black plastic bags and diarrheaed everywhere.

  We went through a long tunnel through the Alps at one point.

  At another point the president made a huge scene in the middle of the night and demanded to be let off the bus. He screamed that he was sick of being treated like a child. He pressed the emergency button on the door and stood there in the draft, threatening to jump out into the night, his red tie flipping and beating him about the face. When the driver pulled into a gas station, the president got off, staggered drunkenly some two hundred meters down the road, and plopped on the curb with his head in his hands. The members of his company kept going over and trying to change his mind, and he kept yelling that he had to do this to show some people (Branka) who was in charge, to illustrate that nobody could go anywhere without him. Even his secretary couldn’t reach him this time. I fell asleep and woke up twice during the ordeal. In the end Branka told him we were going on without him.

  “You don’t have the balls for that!” he yelled and vomited on the pavement.

  Branka got on the bus and told the driver to go.

  “He’s a douche bag but we can’t just leave him,” the driver said.

  “Just you go. Let’s just see how big his balls are.”

  We rolled on by him but he kept on sitting there, flipping us off. The driver shifted into higher gears and we accelerated away. Around the first curve, where we couldn’t see him anymore, we stopped and waited. It wasn’t a minute before we saw him hauling ass on the shoulder, falling down, and getting up again. I thought I would laugh, but it was a sad thing to see. When he caught up and got on there was a huge raspberry on his forehead. A drop of blood trickled and got soaked up by his eyebrow. He walked to his seat in silence and nobody said a word to him for a long time after that.

  Somewhere around Paris a gendarme pulled us over because
of the broken side mirror and escorted us to a mechanic shop, where we had to wait two hours for a woman mechanic to find and install a new one. Nobody spoke a word of French. Omar, Ramona, and I separated from the group and walked into a small neighborhood. We drank Ramona’s brandy out of that jar of hers and sat on a patch of grass in the shade of a bakery and loudly described every French passerby in the most flowery negative terms we could come up with, amused that they didn’t understand a word we were saying. Sitting there like peasants, we felt like we had the right.

  Back on the bus somebody told us a story about Super Mario. Apparently he had had that mustache since he was sixteen years old and had vowed never to shave it. Then, sometime before the war, a famous guest director arrived from Zagreb to do a show at the National Theater and gave Super Mario a part in his production of one of García Lorca’s tragedies. At the first rehearsal he asked Super Mario to shave so he could get a visual idea of what he looked like without the mustache so he could make a decision about the look of the character. When Super Mario told him about his vow and how much his facial hair meant to him, the director pressed the matter even harder. What was the big deal? He was an actor, was he not? Did he want the part or what? After some soul-searching Super Mario chose to be a professional and capitulated. He showed up at the next rehearsal smooth as a baby’s bottom. The director took one look at him and told him he looked awful and then made him wear a fake mustache—a replica of the one he had just shaven—throughout the rest of the rehearsals.

  FRESH ON THE BOAT

  The night we crossed the Channel on a ferry it was freezing. Most passengers dozed off in their cars or clustered around the boat’s coffee shop, pacing to keep warm, sipping out of steaming Styrofoam cups. They all looked double-knit and miserable, watching and hating us young Bosnians because we ran up and down the stairs with a spring in our steps, screaming at one another, laughing with abandon. They envied our dynamism, the thrill of freedom that returned to our hearts and legs as we got closer and closer to Scotland. Mostly it was the fact that we didn’t have to be seated anymore that prevented the freedom from being boring again. On top of that there was the novelty of traveling by boat and the sea wind that stung the nose, infiltrated us, and burned our lungs with chill.

  Out on the upper deck the wind bore down on us, nabbed at our cigarettes, smoked them for us. It lifted us off our feet, made us hold onto that guardrail in earnest, made us squint and cry and feel the world in a different way, somehow more corporeally. I went to the back of the boat with Ramona and we stared down at the churning waters and at the lights of France diminishing in the distance. I remembered standing on the bridge by my high school looking at the swollen river below. I remembered kissing Asja and felt again like there was a small hole in my chest that was hissing and letting out my essence. My hand naively went up to plug it.

  “Do you miss her?” Ramona asked into the salty darkness.

  The wind screamed in my ear, messed with my clothes, pushed me around.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  She pushed me, then hugged me, sideways, with one arm. She handed me a jar and we drank. The slivovitz tasted strange at sea level; plums are grown in the hills.

  “How much booze do you have?” she asked.

  “Let’s just say I’ve been tapping into somebody’s supply.”

  Omar found us then and we ran around the ferry calling people names and laughing in their faces and found things to throw overboard, trash and pieces of rope and paint chips. The lights of Dover were getting bigger when Ramona went back to the bus to get another jacket. She returned laughing, told us to keep quiet, and then led us to where the driver was standing on the hood of a Peugeot and peeping into his own bus. Ramona went right up to him, and when he saw us he waved us over and showed us where to look in silence. When it was my turn on the hood, I saw the president mounting his secretary in their seat, the slab of his naked flank flashing in the dull light.

  SCOTLAND

  The last leg of the trip, northward through England, was the worst. I was exhausted but couldn’t sleep; I was wired but couldn’t stay fully conscious.

  We got lost in the maze of London highways and passed the same graffiti-covered wall three times until someone mentioned it to the driver. He then pulled up behind a road-assistance vehicle in a half circle of orange pylons, and the nice man in overalls told Ramona where we were supposed to make our turn. After a while the driver got used to driving on the other side of the road.

  The weather was cloudy, the hills were a-green, and the haystacks weren’t piled around a pole like in Bosnia but were in uniform yellow cylinders or cubes that looked like giant boxy toys thrown around the sides of the highways.

  In Scotland it was cloudier and greener, but despite our exhaustion and hangovers it made our hearts grow. We had made it.

  On the outskirts of Edinburgh I saw a fat seagull on a chimney of a house made of stone and thought of Asmir and Bokal.

  It was then that Super Mario decided to crack open another bottle of slivovitz to celebrate. He took a sip, and when he realized it was water in his mouth, he screamed “Robbery!” and accused his seatmate of stealing his booze, then Omar and me, and then everyone on the bus. The president yelled at him to quiet down, said that we would get to the bottom of this later, but in about ten minutes we were parked in front of the venue and people were taking pictures of us and shaking our hands and welcoming us to the festival and the crime that Omar and I had committed was altogether forgotten.

  Excerpts from Ismet Prci’s Diary

  from April 2000

  I miss her, mati. I miss her so damn much. Can’t wait to hear from UCSD. They have to take me. They have to.

  I hang out with Eric when she’s in San Diego, watch Twin Peaks with him. He’s married and our old home looks different now. Stuff that we had is in storage somewhere. They have new stuff, new blue couches, new entertainment center, new, healthier cereal. I can’t wait to have that with Melissa.

  I keep finding things in my pockets, things I don’t remember getting. I shouldn’t be drinking this much, that’s for damn sure. I go to parties in the Valley and wake up in people’s homes, look at the photographs on the walls, and freak out because I don’t recognize any faces. I sneak out and run like hell. In my attic I go through the clothes I wore the night before and find pills, notes written by strangers, keys that open no door I know.

  Mustafa is becoming a problem for me.

  (. . . allison . . .)

  Our venue, Venue 25, was on Albany Street, this old gray building with all of the plumbing on the outside of it, black pipes dividing the facade into random straight-sided geometrical shapes. Off the pipes hung vivid banners advertising the festival, the individual plays. The wallpaper around the threshold was a collage of posters and newspaper clippings. Coming inside, the air smelt vaguely of basements and old glue. There was a downstairs and an upstairs, a narrow stairway leading from one to the other. A stout, pimply lass in an oversize festival T-shirt ushered us up toward the cafeteria. Her name tag read LUCY. She sawed the air with her arms and rolled her r’s the way Bosnians do it and it felt a little bit like home. With that bosom, with that smile, I just wanted to hug her.

  “We’ve go’ a surpraize for ya,” she said.

  The doorway into the cafeteria was narrow and we had to go in one by one, maneuvering our luggage so we didn’t get stuck. I walked in behind Omar, and there was Asmir in black jeans and a black blazer he had bought on the black market in Tuzla. He was standing on a chair, grinning, his arms spread out like seagull wings, his patented stance. The younger members of the troupe ran to him, screaming. He climbed down and hugged them and ruffled their hair, and there was something eerily staged about it, like documentary footage of Communist dictators meeting schoolkids on national holidays.

  “How did you get here before us?” I asked as we hugged.

  “What do seagulls do?”

  “Fly?”

  “There you go.”


  “Where’s Bokal?” Boro asked, and I felt so stupid that a ten-year-old could see through to the essence of things before I. Asmir’s smile faltered and his eyebrows went up in unison with his shoulders.

  “He took a bus to Split the morning after you left. I told him to come with me, but he said that something in his dream told him to take the bus to Split. I trust he’s on the way, unless . . . you know.”

  Asmir and Branka agreed on the lodging. Asmir suggested that the eighteen-and-over crowd stay in one of the provided houses and that the little ones stay with Branka in the other. He was right and you could see that Branka hated that he was. She made a spectacle of shuffling through some papers, then dropped the bomb that tomorrow morning “we” were all supposed to meet with a drama club from a local high school and rehearse a student-written play to be performed during the last week of the festival. Asmir laughed, argued that we were here not to perform other people’s plays but our own, that he didn’t know anything about it, that he wouldn’t do it. Branka said that it had been a condition of all of us getting visas. Asmir asked why he hadn’t known about it then, and said that he wouldn’t do it. She said that “we” could do it without him, that, in fact, she didn’t care what he did at all. Who’s gonna direct it, you? he said, and laughed. It’ll be a joint endeavor, she said. It’ll be a piece of shit, he said. What do you care? she said. What do I care what my troupe is performing? Are you out of your mind? he said. We’ll leave it up to them, then, make it voluntary, she said. Asmir then turned to us and announced that we were not required to show up for this meeting or do the play with the Scottish kids. Branka said we should do it because we promised we would. You promised for us without asking any of us, he said. I did what I needed to do to get us up here, she said. So did I, he said.