Shards: A Novel

by Ismet Prcic

  “Welcome,” she said and went out.

  Beaming with joy that I had a home base for at least a month, I walked out into the corridor where Neda was still clutching the doorknob and tapping her shoe. She looked up at Mina, who asked her to come in for a coffee now that the business was settled.

  “We couldn’t really,” Neda said and leaned over the border of linoleum and carpet to give me a quick hug. “I’ll call you later,” she said to me. Vedad shook my and Mina’s hand and they were out of there in no time, disappearing down the stairs, dying to continue the earlier fight, to curse and vent in their little car, exaggerate, blow things out of proportion, feel righteous and angry, demand to be heard out, cut each other off, and fall asleep facing opposite walls. The front door closed behind them.

  I sat on the couch in the living room, stared into the muted TV, and endured a salvo of Mina’s questions and comments that left me naked and bruised. It wasn’t so much a conversation as it was an interrogation. Everything she uttered had a blunt inflection as though I were disagreeing and she needed to change my mind. I couldn’t help but spill the truth; I was afraid that she’d tie me up with a telephone cable and drive shards of glass under my nails to get it out of me. In the end she knew everything, even about Allison.

  “That’s not gonna last. You’re here, she’s there, and you’re going even farther away. Just suck it up and admit that it’s not gonna last.”

  You don’t know us, I thought, not really hurt but pitying her for being old and living alone in a three-bedroom apartment, not knowing what it’s like to love and have someone love you. Already a little used to her brash ways, I just gave her a smug smile and let her decipher it on her own.

  “Don’t be a bombastic fool,” she said and turned up the TV, on which a greenish helicopter passed a ridge of dry mountains and landed in the midst of scurrying soldiers and doctors, carrying gurneys, waiting to unload some injured comrades. The letters M, A, S, and H appeared in white with stars between them.

  “This is my favorite show,” she said curtly and actually rubbed her hands.

  She laughed at everything Alan Alda said as I politely and painfully sat there, tracing the swirls of design on the couch with my thumb and thinking of Allison.

  At some point someone walked out of one of the bedrooms and went into the bathroom. I saw her through the murky pebble glass on the door, a dark fraying shape gliding by, leaving short-lived, shadowy residue behind. Intrigued, I waited for the toilet flush but it never came. Instead, this shorthaired, salt-and-pepper woman, probably around forty years old, walked in slowly, hunched over as though we were sleeping and she didn’t want to wake us up. I stood up like my momma taught me.

  “Did I miss it?” she asked, her face drooping with disappointment. I noticed that her whole right arm was heavily bandaged and tied up, bulging indefinably, oddly, around the biceps.

  “Maybe half,” Mina said, not taking her eyes off the screen. “Ana, this is Ismet. Ismet this is Ana. He’s the new tenant.”

  She leaned over and extended her left hand to me. I shook it gracelessly and we exchanged our wide-eyed glad-to-meet-yous. Mina shushed us both and turned up the TV. Thus persuaded I sat down and watched the rest of the show with them. I didn’t know what was happening but a man with a hawkish face strutted around in a bonnet and a polka-dot dress, saluting his superiors, which was funny.

  In the blue-tinted darkness of my room, not being able to fall asleep as I kept remembering more and more about Allison, I stared at the broken red numbers of the alarm clock, wondering how a simple thing like 11:59 turning into 12:00 could make a person illegal.

  FROM ISMET PRCIĆ’S DIARY:

  September 11, 1995:

  I had that werewolf feeling again, all day today, like I wasn’t the only one in my body or my mind.

  I can’t sleep despite exhaustion. My heartbeat shakes the whole bed.

  My landlady’s name is Mina. Mina is SCARY.

  September 12, 1995:

  Bad day. Mina just had a conniption because I broke her stereo. She let me have it, her eyes lasers; I’m actually shivering. For a moment there I thought she was gonna kick me out but she just slammed the door to the living room and turned the TV on real loud. My door is closed but I can still hear every word. I need to calm down.

  Spent the day meandering around the apartment because she forgot to leave me a key. Ana wasn’t there either. Didn’t eat anything, just a Scottish Mars bar I had in my bag. Mina made it clear that her food is off-limits.

  In an attempt to snap myself out of the funk, I decided to play one of the tapes Allison sent with me. The EJECT button opened the stereo’s tape deck, the tape went in, the PLAY button played it. Offspring. I jumped up and down around the living room, played some air guitar, got into it. But when I went to turn the tape, the EJECT button didn’t open the deck. I tried every imaginable button fruitlessly. In the end I figured it must be one of those decks that opens when you pull it. I pulled it and it gave. A tiny rectangle of black plastic flew up, clinked against the side of the TV, and fell noiselessly onto the carpet. I knew I was fucked.

  September 14, 1995:

  Yesterday, Neda took me to some humanitarian organization to apply to immigrate to America. She was in a bad mood, rushing through everything as though trying to shake me off. I kept imagining myself as green slime sticking to her coat. She introduced me to the workers there and disappeared. I’m getting a feeling that I won’t hear from her again.

  The agency people were nice enough, helping me with the forms and feeding me peanuts. I gave them all the papers to complete my file. They said that from this point on it’s a waiting game. An INS officer comes every month to conduct interviews and it all depends on him or her. They said the last one was there just two days ago and that I’d have to wait about a month or more for an interview.

  At the main post office I talked to Allison for the first time and we cried. I spelled out Mina’s address for her, although I had already sent her one of my letters. Then I called Uncle Irfan in America to give him Mina’s phone number so he could call me. He said, “Good luck; we are waiting for you.” I bought some food and hurried back to my blue room. Finished Hesse’s Rosshalde and picked up Peter Camenzind.

  Mina came home from work in better humor. She kept going on and on about her stereo, how it was her father’s, how he left it to her with the apartment when he died, how much these little things mean to her, but she said it with less malice and more sadness. I apologized for the nth time.

  After M*A*S*H we pooled our food and all had dinner together. Ana said that I could hang out in her room when she’s not around and watch TV. The deal with her arm is that she has cancer. She thought she had got it beat but it came back and started swelling in her arm. She’s in Zagreb for therapy. I’m a little spooked. I don’t know what to say to her.

  Today: alone in the apartment all day. The TV programs here are dreadful, just like in Bosnia: badly made puppets opening their mouths to generic children’s songs, all of it amateurishly unsynchronized; history show upon history show showing black-and-white soldiers advancing amid explosions, carriers sinking with little planes orbiting them like electrons, Stukas clouding the skies, shitting out cylindrical turds of death and destruction; a fatso with a cigar, a cripple, and a man with an enormous mustache sitting around on a stage somewhere, laughing. In between they show nauseatingly dubbed, racist Bugs Bunny cartoons from the forties and fifties with black people nothing more than giant lips on tiny heads tap-dancing in the background, or domestic music videos of bad rap (Say “yo” for Croatia / say “no” for the war) and even worse pop rock (starfucker, star-starfucker / starfucker, star-starfucker / starfucker, starfucker / starfucker, starfucker, staa-ar).

  I left the TV on mute and just read. Finished Peter Camenzind and started Gertrud. I like Hesse. I like that in books the world is solid and the characters’ lives move from chapter 1 to chapter 2 and so on until the end. I like that.

 
Mina just can’t let it go.

  September 15, 1995:

  I’ve moved from the blue room into Mina’s bedroom. Mina moved into the living room where her TV is. Ana stayed put. My new room is big and cold and nothing like the blue room. I feel smaller, exposed, caught. Every time a car passes, its headlights press the pattern of the lace curtains over the wall above me like a net. I feel like the furniture is monitoring me. I can’t sleep in here.

  Then I realized what date it is. Today, this very morning, I was supposed to report at the garrison in Tuzla and become a soldier. The dreaded fifteenth of September. Tomorrow, two MPs will show up at my parents’ door, looking for me. They will not find me. Not me, brother. Not me.

  First I was in a bomb shelter with Mustafa’s dark, stormy face screaming at me among the pipes, then I woke up in this strange bed and discovered that all my teeth were loose, and when I touched them they fell out of my mouth with awful ease, like rotten fruit off the branches, and then I really woke up in a strange bed.

  I lay there in a dense clump, staring over the blurry precipice of the pillow into the void of a room, afraid to move my tongue against my teeth lest I find a salty, metallic gap. On the ceiling was a light fixture that looked like a starfish. I shut my eyes and checked for my teeth. They were still there.

  It took me a while to remember who I was, until I saw my clothes deflated and laid out on the carpet in such a way that it looked like someone had gotten beamed up onto an alien ship in the middle of doing sit-ups. I shut my eyes again.

  I visualized my body already in California, wearing shorts and a yellow basketball jersey, driving a beat-up convertible gas hog with a Bosnian flag hanging on the rearview mirror, my biceps bigger, meatier, my long hair in a sun-bleached ponytail, my head bobbing to the radio and to the blasting Ramones. But then Mina’s phone rang in the hallway and erased all my ephemeral fantasies and my old life came back to me and I succumbed to it like a junky, like I needed it, like I couldn’t live without it.

  Beyond the door there were mumbles of a phone conversation, a couple of guttural sounds I recognized as groggy good-mornings between Mina and Ana on the way to and from the only bathroom, and then everything mercifully died down. I burrowed into the pillow like a fetus, trying to enjoy my blanket, stretching it tight across my back to get the sensation of being squeezed or spooned or something and stared into the photograph Allison had sent in her last letter.

  There was a single troubling sentence toward the end of her last letter. It read: “Just in case you’re wondering, William and I are history.” It made me crazy. I kept watching them make out in my mind, his hand hungrily going under her shirt, her gasping for air, almost cross-eyed with ecstasy. I tossed and turned, shut my eyes tightly and opened them again, shook my head, trying to shatter these images, when Mina knocked on the door, a highly irregular occurrence.

  “Hey, Hawkeye,” she ordered. “Wake up!”

  I jumped up like I was spring-loaded.

  Ever since I had given her some money (to finally shut her the hell up about the fucking stereo) and subsequently made her laugh a few times, she persisted in calling me Hawkeye, her most beloved character from M*A*S*H.

  “Just a sec,” I yelped, hustling my way out of pajama bottoms that clung to my ankles, tripping me. My voice was too creaky, too surprised, and I just knew she thought she had caught me abusing myself. I cringed at the image I imagined her imagining. When I came out, the dining room table was set for three and Mina came out of the kitchen and dropped a wooden coaster in the middle of the table.

  “Hurry up and brush your teeth,” she said. “I made breakfast for all of us.

  “It’s uljevak,” she added before returning to the kitchen.

  “What has gotten into her?” I whispered to Ana when she got out of the bathroom. She shrugged and giggled. I went to brush my teeth.

  My double looked me up and down with disgust, running his palm over his patchy stubble, then suddenly pulled down on his eyelid, exposing the beastly redness of the underbelly of his eyeball. His mouth open wide, he cocked his head sideways and leaned in as though for a kiss, only it felt more like he was about to bite down and tear off a chunk of my cheek. He stopped centimeters away from my own mouth, smiled and breathed toward me like a silver-screen villain exhaling smoke into our hero’s face while the latter is gagged and tied to a chair. His something-died-in-his-mouth fumes made the partition between us visible for a few extended moments and I felt a little safer. In the two-dimensional, fleeting cloud that hung between our faces, I drew him a fist with an extended middle finger, reached for my dying toothbrush, and watched him robustly brush his teeth.

  “Sit down,” ordered Mina from the kitchen as soon as she heard me closing the bathroom door. Ana was already sitting at the dining room table, fork in hand. I heard the scraping sound of Mina’s knife against the bottom of the pan as she cut the uljevak into squares. Ana sneaked a slice of cucumber out of the salad bowl and put it in her mouth with a face like she was getting away with something.

  The doorbell rang.

  I looked at Ana in terror. Police! something screamed in my head.

  I wondered if I could survive a jump out of the window, six stories down from here.

  “Well, will someone go and get that?” Mina yelled from the kitchen entrance, holding a blackened pan with two mismatched mittens. “My hands are busy!”

  The smell of kajmak melting over the golden squares of baked dough pounded my head with images of my childhood’s summer mornings: sheepskins covering the patch of sun in the backyard, bees humming in yellow blossoms, trees hissing with gusts of wind, Grandpa sitting on his foot, folded over his stomach ulcer, his knee under his chin, smoking. The saltiness of Grandma’s creamy salad dressing, infused pink with bleeding tomatoes. Blue heavens above it all, as though open for business, and the time dripping or flying capriciously . . .

  I opened the front door and was hypnotized by the sight of two men in civilian clothes. I stared at them as though they were a pair of naked, toothless Bedouin.

  “Günter?” said one of them. I shook my head no.

  “Günter?” tried the other one.

  “There’s no Günter here,” I managed.

  The men looked at each other, apparently devastated.

  “Nein?” said the first one.

  “Nein?” repeated his friend.

  “No,” I said, pointing behind me, “Nein Günter.”

  They craned their necks trying to see beyond me, then slowly backed away, gesturing that they understood and that they were sorry. I closed the door, locked it.

  “Who was that?” Ana asked.

  “Some Germans . . . I think.”

  “Who was that?” Mina yelled from the kitchen.

  “Some Germans,” Ana yelled back.

  We ended up having the most marvelous conversation about food, about differences and similarities between Croatian and Bosnian cuisine, about Osijek, where Ana was from, and Tuzla, where Mina and I were from. Mina brought out some old photographs and talked about every single one of them. I watched in wonder at her newly apparent tenderness and heartbreaking pride as she pointed out various members of her extended family, illuminating their black-and-white images with stories of eccentricities, hard work, and triumph. It was as if her furrowed brow and blunt ways, this mask and shield, suddenly became transparent and revealed an extraordinarily good, truth-loving, down-to-earth person. I could have hugged her right then.

  Later on in the afternoon, although frightened and unsure, I decided to go out. Part of me felt like a caged animal and all of a sudden I couldn’t tolerate it any longer. Usually I gave my letters home to Mina, who had this reliable channel to get them into Bosnia via UN convoys, but this time I figured I would take my letter to the bus station myself and stretch my legs.

  Parts of Croatia and most of Bosnia were occupied territories and there was no conventional postal service of any kind between them. If you wanted anything to go back home y
ou had to give it to a trustworthy someone who was going there by bus or bribe the daredevil drivers and hope they were honest enough to deliver it. Trips that in more peaceful times took three to four hours tops now took whole days, because the buses had to go around all the troubled zones and pass through innumerable checkpoints where any military or paramilitary formation could pull you off the bus on a whim and put a bullet in your sad, hapless head.

  I was sealing a letter to my mother, thinking about where it would really end up, when Ana came out of the bathroom, hugging her bundled arm like a baby, her face lopsided from pain. She walked by me like I was an abhorrent lamp and locked herself in her room, where she started to moan, a miserable lioness in a zoo. There was something both fuming and desperate about her moaning. “Fuck this arm,” I heard her say. “Fuck this arm.” Mina closed the door to the living room, which meant don’t come in. A man and a woman started to yell at each other in some language from her television. “Fuck this arm,” cried Ana.

  It was as if the magical breakfast we shared earlier had never occurred.

  I went out. It was not my custom to tempt fate and venture outside unless I really had to. I didn’t feel like I belonged out there. My month-and-a-half-long quasi incarceration had shrunk my universe and made the outside world seem immaterial. I hallucinated stepping outside the building and sinking ankle-deep into a doughy street and having to keep moving lest I get devoured whole.