At times I torment myself on purpose and decide to fill the landscape with the fog gathering above the sea; it looks as though it’s fighting itself, and the rain pours down and all around us suddenly a storm rages unbridled, and that’s when you hold yourself close to me because you are scared too, scared that the house we built together might break apart, that the squall will wrench it all away.
But then, just as the feverish sky is spluttering, I push the rain clouds aside and cut the wind with scissors, and there you are in front of me, so alive, so utterly alive right there in front of me that I can smell your dry mouth and your wet hair, and the relief in your eyes right then, that’s the best part, the moment when your tension eases into an embrace, a kiss that never ends.
* * *
—
I’m trying not to wrap myself in despair here because it won’t help anyone or anything, no amount of misery will make us real again. It’s wrong, and that’s why I’d rather live a lie than live cowed by the truth.
Some days I’m perfectly content—I’m in a good mood, lively and creative—and I try to imagine new things about us, that you have published a book about our unlikely story, with all our words just as they were meant to be, you appear and tell me all about it with a childish glee, and I have just come home from the hospital and I tell you that I already knew, I knew this about you, I knew this day would come, how talented you are, and as I lavish you with hugs I can say quietly to myself that you are mine, mine, mine forever, you are mine and nobody will take you from me.
Or I imagine you reading a book on the couch, as concentrated as always, and you don’t even hear when I say something mundane, how many eggs would you like or how about I change the sheets today, you don’t hear me and I find it charming, you and your books.
Or then I might imagine you arriving at the house without my noticing, feeling only when you grip me from behind and your breath covers the skin of my neck in goose bumps, then I turn and there you are, firm as a stone column and so unimaginably beautiful, like a summer flood in the heart of winter, a pristine lake in the middle of a desert, something so dazzling and curious that it’s impossible to put into words, then with all that you have, you say what you once read to me from that book of yours, that you love me so much and that you’re so happy that it’s painful, do you remember how crumbled the love in that book was, “I love you so much it hurts” and “I’m so happy that I can’t breathe,” it went something like that, I’ll always remember it because there was something so mournful and comforting about it, to love someone so much that you can’t breathe
can something like that really exist
But then I feel it too, like a chain saw in my stomach, a fresh bullet wound in my calf, the frost on my chest set alight.
“so much it hurts so happy that I can’t even breathe”—right?
2
PRISTINA, 1995
We spend more time together than we do apart. I go to him late in the evening. He leaves a piece of cardboard between the door and jamb. We always exit the apartment at different times: once we’ve made sure, one ear against the door, that there’s nobody in the corridor.
Though I learn more about him all the time, his daily routines punctuated with too little sleep, his scant diet, his unwavering concentration, his tendency to answer everything in the affirmative, on some subjects he is more taciturn: he rarely talks about his family or childhood, so I don’t ask him much and don’t tell him much about myself either.
Our time together is mostly silent, and the curtains are always closed. We never go anywhere, not even for a walk, we don’t harbor thoughts of any kind of life outside this apartment because such a life simply doesn’t exist. We spend the days lying on his bed. I want him over and over and he wants me, and afterward he usually places his ear against my heart, and we lounge there for hours, our arms and legs entwined.
I have never felt as good or as safe as when I am with him. I have never opened any door with as much anticipation as when I do his, never waited to see anyone as eagerly as I wait for him, and even a short time apart feels agonizing and frightening; if he disappeared on his way to the store or if he wasn’t at home one evening, it would be unbearable, the idea that this might come to an end, that I might lose him after such a short time together.
At times, I feel guilty and dirty about what we do, and I get nervous and don’t want to see anyone, even him. I allow myself to consider that I don’t really know anything about this person, he might gossip about me, take a clandestine photograph of us and make copies for everyone, or while I’m asleep he might thrust a dagger into my eye and watch me bleed to death. He could do anything, I think, but then he gets up from the table and lies down on the bed simply to give me a kiss, and in doing so he banishes all my doubts, all my questions, all my grounds for worry.
He spends his time studying diligently because he wants to become a heart surgeon one day, to actually cut people’s hearts open for a living. His apartment is full of books, folders and piles of papers, lecture notes in small, barely legible handwriting with Post-it notes on top, codes and graphs, formulas and numbers that look like yet another language he speaks.
One of his textbooks, the most important one, is so massive that when it’s opened it covers the entire desk. The pages are the thickest and heaviest I have ever seen, filled with pictures of cells and organs in minute detail. He stares at the book’s images so close up that it sometimes looks as though he is licking them, often spending hours on a single spread. He is constantly feeling his body and comparing himself to the images; he prods his ribs and throat, runs his slender fingers along his spine, presses a hand against his groin, touches his knees, his shoulders and joints, strokes his face, temple, and neck, and sometimes he asks me to lie on the floor on my back and breathe deeply so he can explore my chest with his chilly, metallic fingers at the exact point where he would make an incision in a coronary bypass operation.
When he eventually thanks me, says that he doesn’t know of anything more beautiful than the human body and that I can get up, I could almost laugh. Though I respect and even admire his determination, his patience and dedication, the thought of him as a doctor amuses me because he can barely carry his own books. What will happen, I wonder, when he has to deal with a body, someone who needs to be lifted onto a stretcher or a large man with a dislocated shoulder that needs to be jammed back into place? Has he thought about how he’ll cope when he has to carry out real heart surgery?
I find it extraordinary that he moved to Pristina without knowing anybody here, that of all universities he chose this one, that someone like him, a talented linguist, would really leave Serbia and move to a region riven with violence and where people have become nothing but curses to one another.
There’s a war coming, I often say, to him and my friends, and I hear other people saying the same, there’s a war coming, war is inevitable, just like in Bosnia and Croatia, possibly, probably even bloodier, it won’t take long before god finally turns his back on us, and then the devil will appear, he can destroy and demolish in peace, he’ll thrive on violence that nobody can remember a time living without, that’s the word on the street.
What could there possibly be in Kosovo that he couldn’t find in Serbia? Surely he knew that he would get a far better education elsewhere, that it would be safer at some other university, that he could apply to study anywhere he liked—abroad, Scandinavia, or central Europe—and get a degree that would open more doors than one from here?
* * *
—
One evening he makes us a vegetable omelette. I’ve just told him the next few weeks will be busy because of my work and studies, then he flips the omelette onto a plate and runs the red-hot frying pan under the tap, where it starts hissing angrily like a viper goaded with a stick.
“Come,” he says, and I get up from the bed and sit at the table.
“Aren’t you having any?”
“Maybe later,” he says, and I’ve learned that this means I can eat the whole omelette if I want.
He eats so rarely and so little—and almost always only fruit, mostly apples, which he has all around the apartment, in the fridge, on the tables, the windowsill, on piles of books and papers and between them, in plastic bags hanging from the door handles—that I wonder how he manages to stay alive, how he can have even that much musculature, and where he gets his energy.
He slips into bed and grabs an apple from the bedside table, bites a chunk out of it. I eat quickly because he looks lonely lying there, staring at the ceiling and devouring the apple down to the core.
Once I lie down next to him, he places his head in the crook of my arm and starts speaking, his eyes still fixed on the ceiling, and without the slightest reservation he tells me that he never particularly liked his family, his kin, his childhood home or town.
“I moved here because I wanted to get away from Serbia,” he tells me. “I’ve always known I’d leave one day. That might sound odd, especially to Albanians,” he continues, then pauses. “But, well, you know how it is.”
He runs his hand between my thighs.
“How what is?” I ask and give a brief, confused laugh, though I’m astonished that someone could speak about his own family this way. Only a Serb, I think, as they say. Only a Serb.
“This. You know?”
He starts caressing my testicles, and I wish he hadn’t said anything at all, about his family and certainly not about us, insinuating what we are to each other, because though we are here now, though we hear the words spoken between us and feel each other’s flesh, we will never be more than that. Then I roll on top of him, spread my spit into him, and we make love, rougher than usual; for the first time he asks me to slap his sides, his back, and buttocks while I’m inside him.
Afterward, as we lie close, as I listen to his heavy breathing, I think how unfair it is that there are two kinds of people in this world: people who don’t need to fear anything and people who ought to fear everything. That’s how fear works: it arrives all at once, and it is indivisible.
The following evening I learn that he has an older brother and a sister, who is the elder of his siblings. He tells me his brother is a pharmacist and that his sister worked as a nurse until she married, his father was a dentist until he died a few years ago, and his mother, who had died young, was a secretary in an accountant’s office. According to him, the only thing he and his family share is the desire for an education.
Miloš sits on the bed and I am on the floor; he massages my shoulders, against which his fingers now feel soft and supple.
“I think they envy me,” he says from behind me. “Because when I was young I wasn’t very interested in studying, let alone medicine, and now they don’t care about me because—” He interrupts himself as though he is about to reveal a secret, to say something he hasn’t fully thought through. “Well.
“You know,” he continues, letting out the air that has gathered inside him. “My hometown…it’s so small, you know, the villages, the distances between the villages, the people from one another, everything is so small…Envy makes people climb the walls, empty the house…,” he says and stops massaging me for a moment. “Have you ever felt that kind of envy?”
“I don’t think so,” I reply, and I think of asking whether he has heard the stories that people here tell about the envy of the Serbs, but just as I am about to, I hold my tongue. “I’m not a very envious person.”
“I had no option but to leave; I haven’t missed anything about my past. This is better for me, better for them, better for everybody. I can do whatever I want, whenever I want, with whomever I want. Anyway, that’s that. We never have to speak about this again,” he says and taps me on the shoulder. “All right?”
“All right,” I reply with a smile.
Before we turn in for the night, I go to the bathroom. On the way, I think about how cramped his apartment is, the lumpy bed covering a quarter of the floor; there isn’t much furniture yet still there’s too much, and the globe lamp hanging low from the ceiling is dusty and takes up space like a moon reeled into the room.
I look at myself in the battered old mirror and wash my hands, though they’re not dirty, and return to him, sit on the edge of the bed.
“Is everything all right?” he asks.
“Yes. My wife is pregnant,” I reply, unable to make out his expression in the dusk.
“That’s okay,” he says.
“My parents have passed away too,” I hear myself saying.
“Really?”
He places a hand on my thigh, starts twisting my hairs between his fingers.
“Yes.”
He sits up, runs his hand along my neck, whispers that he is sorry about my parents, and kisses my throat right where he knows I like it.
And when I tell him I really do want to write for a living, stories of my own for newspapers, articles and interviews, other kinds of texts too, vignettes, short stories, maybe even novels, and when he responds by saying, one day you will be a writer, I’m sure of it, I start to smile and think there’s nowhere I would rather be than by his side, here.
“Say it,” he insists, reaches over to open the curtains a little, letting a strip of bright light from the street shine in and illuminate his face, then sits down, his legs crossed, one foot on the bed, the other on the floor.
“Say it, then it will come true. That’s how I convinced myself for years. Every morning I stood in front of the mirror and repeated, I will be a doctor, I will be a doctor, I will be a doctor, I will be a doctor,” he proclaims, brushes the hair from his forehead, and takes me by the hand. “I said it so many times, tens, hundreds of times every day, because I didn’t believe I would become anything, and I was alone for so long that the mantra I repeated to myself every morning was the only thing that kept me alive.” Then he takes a breath and looks almost panicked now, “Dreams follow the lies we tell ourselves, I will be a doctor, I will be a doctor, I will be a doctor, I repeated over and over and I got so excited, I will be a doctor, and so my lie began to come alive, and the person left outside that lie, the person I thought I was, was left further and further in the past, I will be a doctor, I will be a doctor, once I arrived here and enrolled at the university, I will be a doctor. And now I will be a doctor, can you believe it, I really will become a doctor,” he booms. “One day you will become a writer and you will publish books. Say it.”
“One day I…will be a writer,” I say, and letting my dream out into the open in front of him feels so silly that it comes out in two parts.
“No,” he says sternly. “I will be a writer. Say it. Say it right now,” he demands, grips my hand, and gives it a reassuring squeeze.
“I will be a writer,” I say again, and this time it doesn’t feel at all silly or delusional; it feels like the future.
14 MAY 2000
The nurses say I can’t recover without talking. I don’t understand why I need to talk about the things I’ve seen, what I’ve done, and where I’ve been. Is it because killing is supposed to put an end to everything, corrupt everything, mark a person for life, because you can’t simply kill someone without feeling sorrow, without sinking into darkness?
No, that’s not how it goes, I’ve explained to them, because in war people die differently and kill differently than during peace, that’s why it’s difficult to care about the fallen, they become statistics, nothing else, but when I say that people look at me as though I had no compassion whatsoever, and it both amuses and angers me—if only they knew how quickly the mind can crack, how suddenly evil can take the place of good, and how easy killing is then, how simple and light, because you’ve managed to convince yourself that you have to kill, you have to do it now, there is no other option, you either kill someone or they will kill yo
u, it’s that simple, seamless, as immaculate as water.
Without shame I can admit that I don’t feel that much guilt, except in one case: a young boy, barely a teenager, who was brought to me, beside himself with fear, shrieking in pain, in blood-soaked civilian clothes and missing his left arm, and the first thing I did was press my hand against his chest and say I know you’re in pain but you’re safe now I’ll take care of you everything will work out—though I wanted to ask him, what are you doing here, how did a kid like you, so young, as dumb and fearless as a cow, why did you go off into battle, I was so livid I wanted to slap his stupid face and curse his wretched parents.
And he just looked at me, his eyes like molten glass, and gripped my arm with his remaining hand, and once I’d asked him his name and he’d finally managed to tell me, I raised my hand into the air, Albanian, I told everyone, this boy’s an Albanian, I shouted it out, then the nurses raised their hands into the air and the boy remained where he was, lying on his sickbed, can you imagine how wrong it felt to touch him once we realized he was just a petty little Albanian, a louse.
War is born of war and there is no war that will end a war, and the disgust the boy caused was war’s finger, a fist shoved down the throat, choose your side and remember that the enemy is not human, the enemy doesn’t have a face, a family, the enemy is nobody’s child, nobody’s parent, the enemy doesn’t have a sister or a brother, and the enemy doesn’t feel pity and neither should you.
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