Shards: A Novel

by Ismet Prcic

  But by 2 AM the following things had happened: He had had too much to drink, had broken two strings on the priceless guitar and had it torn out of his hands, some fragile fifteen-year-old girl had projectile-vomited into a fern plant and was later carried home in a blanket, and Allison’s boyfriend, William, had showed up unexpectedly and she was really happy and almost sucked his face off. Painfully, Mustafa watched William’s left hand squeeze her ass in slow motion over and over again.

  So he waited until Allison was out of the room to try and head-butt William. The next thing he knew he was outside with a bump on his head, walking arm in arm with somebody in the cold wet night.

  Her name was Leslie. She was a busty eighteen-year-old with curly rust-blonde hair kept away from her face with an armada of hair clips. Her eyes were too close together and she wore denim overalls. She looked like a girl one would meet at a county fair.

  “Fun-see a reed?” came out of her mouth and he thought she had sneezed. He couldn’t remember the phrase to say after someone sneezes, so he went for the literal translation of a Bosnian equivalent. “On health,” he said. At that point she thought he had sneezed and her facial features pulled into a grimace of utter confusion. He smiled like the drunken idiot that he was.

  “Fancy a ride?” she repeated more slowly and with a touch of annoyance. This time he figured she was offering to drive him home. “Yes. It surely beats walking drunk,” was what he said.

  Then they walked. He kept waiting for her to stop by a car somewhere but she just kept on walking. He figured she had just parked far away. But then she led him down some stairs and into the basement of an apartment building. She leaned him against a green wall and unlocked her front door. She didn’t even bother to answer his questions anymore, probably because he was asking them in Bosnian. She sat him on a queen-size bed and disappeared into the hall.

  Her room was a meticulous composition of straight lines and sharp corners that had him feeling like he was in the middle of an abstract painting. The fringeless carpet looked like a flattened sheet of aluminum foil, the desk was a hollow cube, and the lamp a pyramid. It took him a minute to realize there were no round shapes anywhere. Even the screw heads in the furniture were angular.

  On the wall was an eight-by-eight-foot metallic frame without a picture. He didn’t know if this was a statement or if she hadn’t had time to put one in just yet. No stuffed animals. No pillows. He imagined having to vomit into a cube-shaped toilet bowl and freaked himself out.

  When she returned she was naked and her face and nipples were painted in metallic makeup. Her pubic hair was trimmed into a perfect triangle. She walked over to the stereo and the sound of a vacuum cleaner came from the speakers mounted over the bed. After turning on the pyramid lamp, she killed the general lighting. He just sat there like a frozen drumstick. She said something in a robot voice and started to unbutton his jeans.

  He guessed they fucked, but his brain still remembers it as him being vacuumed. She did it to him mechanically, her on top and him on whiskey. The only thing he remembers doing before he passed out was imagining Allison’s bedroom and visualizing it with a heart-shaped bed and fuzzy red pillows, with round windows, and William-less.

  Excerpts from Ismet Prci’s Diary

  from July 2000

  San Diego. Beach, beach, beach. Beach bunnies and beach bums. Meat-market bars. Bush stickers on the backs of ginormous vehicles. Baseball caps, everywhere.

  I feel like a pig in Tehran.

  I’m afraid to write about Melissa. It seems that as soon as I write about someone I love, they are gone and forgotten. Like Asja. Like Allison. I guess I’m just that kind of guy who has to have someone to love even when he knows the love is doomed. Girls like stepping-stones. Is it love? a techno band would ask.

  Melissa’s hard to wake up for school or work, but when I finally succeed, after at least forty-five minutes of warnings and begging, she graces the living room with her presence (in her underwear), lasers through me with her eyes, and says, “You’re fired,” then turns to the cat, the ottoman, the love seat, Ben’s poster of Endless Summer, each time repeating the phrase, after which she stomps off into the shower. She kisses with abandon and to her love is sharing a guava and cheese pastry from a Cuban place down the street, and walking together while holding hands, bitching about the sun, and, if it happens to be raining, stopping whatever we’re doing—and I mean whatever we are doing—to go outside barefoot and walk in the wet grass, beaming at this magic falling from the sky.

  . . . she is slipping away from me.

  (. . . zagreb diaries . . .)

  My first time on a plane (London–Zagreb) and all I had was this little black leather tobacco pouch hanging in my underpants like a second nut sack, containing all my money. It was digging into to the skin down there like a critter, like it was trying to merge with me and give me more balls. I appreciated the constant reminder that the money was still there—that at least I had that—but all the sweat was starting to give me a rash that I couldn’t quite go after the way I would have had I been alone.

  The pouch was old-fashioned, with a drawstring, and featured a gold drawing of a mosque, on account of which I was convinced that, any moment now, God would smite me with mechanical failure or pilot error, yet nothing happened. The jet engines kept on humming, and an exhausted, wrung-out businessman next to me, with his tie undone and hanging around his neck like a dead adder, unbuckled and walked drunkenly to the lavatory. I used the opportunity to rearrange the two sacks for minimum sweatage, scratched my balls viciously, and looked out the window.

  Down there, somewhere, I had left Allison and her mother in tears against the backdrop of craftily displayed cartons of cigarettes in a duty-free shop and walked through the metal detector without a peep. Allison and I hadn’t slept at all on the overnight bus ride from Edinburgh to London, but held hands and watched the almost full moon follow us, peeking through the window like a veteran chaperone, making sure we weren’t doing anything naughty while her mom was dozing in the seat behind us. Allison was a mess. She had broken out in zits from all the nervous tension around my departure, and her lips were chapped and sore, so our last kiss was painful and short and full of woe. I had never cried so hard. We promised to write every day and went through our assortment of private, teen, puppy-love jokes and rituals, and then I was gone.

  The businessman came back, zipping up, and noticed a postcard in my hand that Allison had signed with a row of x’s and a row of hearts. He gave me a spineless, despondent smile, an everything-must- go-today-because-I-owe-some-bad-people-some-money-and-they’ll- be-coming-after-my-kneecaps-with-a-lead-pipe kind of smile. With a face like that he couldn’t do any better.

  He said something in my mother tongue, something sexist and Balkanicly crude, and I screwed up my face like I didn’t understand, pretending to be an Englishman. I just couldn’t handle talking to a brother Slav all the way to Zagreb. I wanted to be left alone for the sake of both of us. He looked at the Guardian in my lap, smiled as if to say, Okay, I believe you, then uncapped a knobby bottle of Tanqueray and pushed it through the air in my direction. His hand was clammy, glistening. I declined politely but cuntishly, at which point he blurted out in his loud, creaky English:

  “To sveetharts!” and took a seemingly painful swig, shook his head once and put the bottle back into his briefcase. In there I also caught a glimpse of a package of crisps, an overcircumcised summer sausage, and a wedge of sagging Brie, its rind untouched. He gave me another shit-eating grin, simultaneously calling me a faggot in Bosnian and looking me in the eye, probing, searching for a glint that would break my character. But I looked at him as if through a monocle, the way the Duke of Edinburgh in the nineteenth century might have regarded an infectious ape that monkeyed out of its quarantine. I smiled sourly from those heights and turned my gaze over to the clouds and to heartbreak.

  From the air the city of Zagreb looked slimy, covered with a gauzy, egg-whitey layer of watered-dow
n clouds. The flaps on the wing started to sporadically deploy, their inner workings churning like intestines, slowing us down. The safety belt sign pinged on and the captain started his garbled prepare-for-landing patter. In his slumber the businessman’s face went from slack to a painful frown, which held until the announcement was over, at which point he relaxed it again.

  Something began to stampede back and forth in my stomach. It wasn’t the landing. Well, it was, a little bit, but mostly I sweated what would happen once I was down on the ground.

  “Passport,” said the young officer in English, noting the Guardian under my arm. He began to smile but when I failed to produce a maroon British travel document and instead flashed my blue Bosnian one, he aborted it and hid it behind a compulsory twitch of the lips. It fell like crumbs off his face.

  “Are you aware that Bosnian citizens now need a visa to enter Croatia?” he barked, his voice suddenly an octave lower. His pink, shaky, nail-biter hands fussed over the covers, overtouching them, turning the thing this way and that, flipping it open and closed as if he’d never seen a passport before.

  I pointed to the visa.

  It trembled there in his hands, stapled crookedly to a page in my passport, its edges sticking out, dog-eared and yellowy from finger grease. He looked at it, touched it, rubbed it with his thumb as if to check its authenticity, looked at it against the light. The only thing he didn’t do to it was lick it.

  “Is there a problem?” I asked in a language he could understand.

  “Wait right here,” he said and dialed a number.

  The problem, of course, was my Muslim name in the wake of recent clashes between Bosnian Muslims and the Croats in Middle Bosnia, despite the fact that there was a coalition of their respective infant republics standing against the common enemy to the east. Some villages got torched. There were reports and videotapes of children being tossed out of windows onto bayonets.

  Anchored with my elbows against the booth I stood there, leaning, fighting off the fear and the rapid light-headedness deflating my skull. My reflection in the glass was ashen. Only the eyes now looked alive. Everything around me, ashtrays, tiles, people—they all flickered and then came into focus, bursting with reality, with the essence of what they were. This must be the end, I thought, my eyes grabbing at every image as though I were about to go under. Why else would the tubercular grayness of the tile mean so much to me, unless it were a parting image of this world I was surely about to leave?

  But someone screamed behind me, a woman. Then something fell to the floor, and by the time I turned around I saw two men at each other’s throats. The woman next to them had one hand pressed against her breasts and the other rigidly fanning the dip where her neck met her breastplate. On top of that her burgundy face, presently shot full of blood, was outraged the way only an Englishwoman’s can be.

  The two men fought like four-eyed librarians, with their heads craned backward as far away from the fight as possible and both hands blindly flapping in front of them. All the blows were thrown from the elbow with the eyes shut, hitting each other’s shoulder or forearm or, mostly, nothing. When airport security finally stepped in and pulled them apart, the Englishwoman’s knight, a cotton top in a tweed jacket with an unlit pipe still protruding from his mouth, had the other man’s atrocious tie in his fist.

  Lo and behold, the other man was the businessman.

  “Let me go, motherfuckers, I’ll break all your legs!” he screamed in Bosnian, as they dragged him away, his comb-over sticking up thinly as though running away from his wild eyes.

  “Pervert!” screamed the cotton top in English and looked at the woman, who in the meantime had changed colors. Now without a drop of blood in her face, she was swooning and he shepherded her into a row of fixed blue chairs against the wall, struggling to communicate with an airport sec—

  “Mister!”

  A muffled voice from behind me. I turned toward the booth and saw it filled with a meaty shape, loosely humanoid, seemingly made of fodder of the kind that God probably used to sculpt and chisel humans from back in the day. He was fitted into a huge uniform that was still too tight on his bulk. Behind him, the young officer’s head looked like a grape in comparison. I froze at the sight.

  “Are you aware that your transit visa is expiring tonight at midnight?”

  He struggled to move down closer to the rectangular opening in the glass between us to hear me.

  If you don’t stay with me until the last possible moment I will hold it against ya, Allison had said. But this was cutting it close.

  “Yes,” I managed.

  “What is your plan then?”

  I had learned this part by heart.

  “I’m going straight from here to catch a bus for Tuzla.”

  “When does it leave?”

  “Four thirty.”

  “How are you getting there?”

  “I have family here. They’ll take me.”

  He looked at me with his dull, whale eyes. I tried a smile. Saliva started to accumulate in the back of my throat as he held my gaze, x-raying me. If I had swallowed right then he would have seen through my bullshit. But I didn’t and his gaze dropped down to my passport again.

  “Do you know that failure to leave Croatia tonight at midnight will result in your incarceration and deportation?”

  “Yes.”

  He licked his lower lip and gingerly, pedantically stamped my passport.

  This time around I didn’t want to have anything to do with Zvonko or Zana, the cousins my mother, Mehmed, and I stayed with at the beginning of the war, so instead I had Vedad and Neda pick me up in their little car. Its interior was stuffy, almost gooey from a recent fight that was put on hold for my benefit. It was obvious. There was a hateful residue of curses in the air, pushing at me from all sides like a liquid. In the backseat with my hands on my knees I immediately felt like an encumbrance, like dead weight. She snapped at him because he pulled out too suddenly and then made a point of cutting herself off and looking away, out the window. I caught his eye in the rearview mirror and Vedad grimaced something that was meant to be a smile. His role was unmistakable: a husband in the doghouse.

  I always called them my aunt and uncle, although they weren’t. Neda was some kind of a cousin on my father’s side but they were more like friends of the family. She was a droopy woman with eyes like Ping-Pong balls that threatened to pop out of their sockets when she got too surprised. She looked famished and old, and you’d think it was because of the war and its wear and tear, but no. She always looked like that. Her husband was short and portly with thinning hair and the smile of a leprechaun. He had on a spanking new uniform with the Croatian Army insignia.

  “I didn’t know you were with the army?” I said just to say something.

  “He’s not,” Neda said almost in anger then looked away again.

  That was the only thing she said for the rest of the ride.

  Outside, it was like any place in the world, streets and buildings, big fat heads of politicians smiling constipated smiles from tasteless campaign posters, people walking and carrying things, people stopping to pick gum off their soles, trams sparking, pigeons shitting off wires.

  Vedad talked to fill the silence, going over the plan of action once again, what to say to the INS officer, how to dress, how to avoid raids in this recent backlash against Bosnians, how to be thankful to my uncle in America for what he was doing for me. He talked about where I’d be staying and my landlady-to-be (a Bosnian-born spinster), what she’s like and how to make the money last. He tried to make it sound like fatherly advice but his voice was devoid of feeling and inflection; he was just going through the motions.

  Somewhere close to their apartment a traffic cop stopped us for something. I freaked out silently in the backseat but Vedad turned on a perfect Croatian dialect and started talking about the front lines and at the end of their conversation the cop just shook his hand and simply let us go without even a warning.

  I
t became clear, the purpose of Vedad’s uniform. After all, they were illegal, too.

  * * *

  It felt like being sold, like I was this Cuban cigar or illicit drug, and they had to finish the transaction quickly and get the fuck out. Neda just closed the apartment’s door and stood there on a patch of linoleum, not even thinking of taking off her shoes, holding the doorknob in her hand for a quick getaway. Vedad introduced me to this woman, buttoned up to her ears in conservative garb, standing harshly in the corridor like a bouncer, her face austere, almost disgusted, her nose pointing down to her chin and her chin commendably reciprocating. Her gaze penetrated my head and I felt it rampaging in there, turning over tables, ripping up sofa cushions, looking for evidence of my unworthiness of being her tenant.

  “Mina. Pleased to meet you,” she said, although she appeared to be everything but. “It’s best we take care of the business part immediately so everybody knows the rules.”

  I knew she was talking about money and I asked if I could use the bathroom really quick. I couldn’t very well just drop trou and dig my sweaty, musky money pouch out of my underwear in front of everybody.

  It was cold and white in there, as though I had stepped through a portal into, like, Narnia. A grid of sterile tiles took me in, leading my eyes around, giving me a modest tour: a small alien sink, a mirror speckled with toothpaste, a curvy tub like a giant bedpan in a corner, a pebble-glassed window overlooking a parking lot, a toilet bowl, a washing machine, and some shadows. I untied the pouch, took out the money, checked myself for a rash, and found nothing but a patch of ordinary, explicable redness. I put the pouch in the front pocket, the money in the back, washed my hands dutifully, inhaled, and stepped back into reality.

  “Step this way,” Mina said. “This is nobody’s business but our own.”

  She showed me into a tiny blue room with baby blue walls, pool-blue curtains, and two single beds, their comforters a messy composition. of blue and turquoise flowers, and closed the door. The wooden furniture was painted white, a dresser and a nightstand. She said her price and waited for my answer, as if I had any choice, as if I could say, Thanks, but I’ll try to find a better deal somewhere else in this foreign city where I’m practically illegal, undocumented, unwanted. I took a thin roll of German currency out of my back pocket and gave her what she asked. Her eyes lit up and for the first time I thought she was actually a person, someone with thoughts and inner life. But don’t get me wrong; the price was fair.