War is filthy and unhygienic, and nobody talks about how much dirt it causes, about the amount of equipment to be maintained, clothes to be washed and mended, wounds to be disinfected, sheets, tent fabric, surgical implements, hospital machines, disposable packaging, bandages, syringes, drip tubes, and the like—endless sacks, trucks, dumps full of rubbish, and nobody ever washes, many times I almost fainted from the smell of the soldiers’ feet as I took off their boots, it was repulsive, and as I pulled off their clothes the most revolting smell rose from their groins, a fug so pungent it stopped you in your tracks, the stench of urine and excrement mixed with the rusty smell of dried blood, the singe of gunpowder and the stink of ancient sweat—a filthy man is so entirely repellent.
But once we had all retreated from around him as though from a contagious dish, it was strange to note how this Albanian boy suddenly stopped shouting, just like that, as though he no longer felt any pain though we hadn’t yet had a chance to sedate him, as though he didn’t want us to touch him, so profoundly did the war’s spirit reside in every cell of his body, and then his eyelids closed, his legs went limp and his one arm too, short sputters sucked the last remnants of his strength, and he looked very peaceful as he died—like a slowly turning whale in its mansion in the sea.
3
PRISTINA, 1995
I don’t want to go to work. I know I should be grateful to have a job in the first place, when most people I know do not, but my shifts drag on endlessly because I’m thinking about him all the time, and I realize I can barely envisage any kind of life in which he does not play a part, and I notice the same about him too—in the way he kisses me at every opportunity, in how passionately he grips my waist, my ass and neck, how hard he tries to please me by getting out of bed quietly in the mornings, by leaving garlic out of the food he cooks, washing my laundry, skipping class so he can spend more time with me.
I practically live at his apartment. Sometimes we study together, he at the table and me lying on the bed making plot summaries of the books I’ve read, writing reports and analyses. At times it feels pointless and frustrating because I have no idea whether the degree I’m supposed to get will have any value due to the university’s ban on Albanian students. A university exists exclusively for Albanians, also called the University of Pristina, and its operations are partially funded by Albanians who have moved abroad, but still there isn’t even enough money to cover the bare minimum. Science students don’t have access to the facilities and laboratories that they need. What kind of doctors or technicians will they become? Some say that those responsible for the funds provided by the Albanian diaspora are involved in embezzling the money, while others say there is simply less money than is needed.
In the evenings I read him extracts from my favorite books and my assignments. It becomes a habit of ours; he sits on the bed with his back against the wall or rests his head on my chest, sometimes he chuckles at the absurdity of the events, grunts something about the characters’ stupidity, and when tragedy swells, he will even comment out loud, something like oh my god or that’s just terrible or it’s so unfair sometimes. He enjoys stories with an element of the supernatural, events that don’t adhere to the laws of the real world, characters and creatures that defy logical explanation.
Sometimes we listen to the radio. A goldsmith’s store was burgled, a kiosk owner was fined because he was unable to sell Serbian soldiers a particular brand of cigarettes, Albanian teachers secretly going about their jobs have been arrested again, and the Serbs have cut off the electricity supply to Albanian-populated areas. We can only keep the radio on for a short time because it never tells us any good news. We don’t know which news stories to believe, what has actually happened and what people only say has happened. We are hidden from view like a set of keys in a pocket, and we follow the rapidly emptying city from behind closed curtains.
We hear that at one of the numerous protests a student was hit over the head with a shovel, and when sometime later someone claims he died in the hospital from his injuries, I say what else, what else will they come up with to kick us, what, then Miloš opens the curtains and props the window ajar, letting the lights and sounds of the outside world flood in, almost violently, and says he is sorry, as though he feels guilty because the shovel was in a Serbian hand, but it’s not your fault, I tell him.
“Still,” he responds. “You know.”
* * *
—
I go home sporadically. Ajshe is always there and the apartment looks uninhabited; she has hidden our things in cupboards, washed the floors and walls and rugs, and dusted all the surfaces, but still the air inside feels like standing beneath a cloak of lead. When I arrive, she is usually knitting quietly on the living-room couch or ironing on the floor, but when I step farther inside the apartment she always stands up, and I can’t help but look at her unbearably swelling stomach, her belly button protruding like a bulging eye.
I try to be quick about my business and to say as little as possible, though she never asks where I’ve spent the last few nights, weeks, asking instead about my studies and work while I hurriedly pack clothes into a plastic bag, or she might try to start a conversation about the price of food, the unemployment in the Albanian community, the Serbs’ megalomaniacal behavior, or how the sound of violent shouting carries into the apartment at night, how more and more people have moved abroad.
“People are afraid,” she says and places her right hand on her stomach. “At a time like this it’s best not to make a fuss, it’s best to stay home and only go outside if it’s absolutely necessary. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes,” I reply. “Yes, as an Albanian that’s probably best, you’re absolutely right.”
“Well, bye then,” she has a habit of saying once I’ve put my shoes on and started getting ready to leave, and every time as I open the door: “I know you’re busy, but…”
“I know, I know, I know,” I interrupt her. “See you soon,” I say and hand her a little money, and when she sees it she says she can survive on less but takes it all the same and stuffs it in her bra.
That’s what life is like between us now. She wants to talk, to be together, to wait together for the birth of this child, and all I can say is, I know, I know, everything in its own time, you don’t have to worry, everything will work out, I assure her and open the door, and just before it closes I cast her a cold glance. If only she could hear my thoughts, my solemn wish that she didn’t exist.
* * *
—
I finish the final courses of the semester with excellent grades, but I’m not proud of myself because all my classmates get the same results, as the teachers don’t want anyone to drop out. I also learn that the restaurant can’t offer me any extra shifts during the summer—apparently due to “changed circumstances.” Though my financial situation is bad, the matter doesn’t really bother me because I decide to use this extra free time for reading and writing in earnest.
As June arrives, Miloš and I don’t see each other as often as before; his days are long and he gives me a spare set of keys to his apartment. He returns home in the early hours, tired and smelling of cooking fat and unable to stay awake for long. We don’t even have time to properly catch up either, but I know that before long, whether it’s at two or five a.m., he will always come back to me.
Besides the fact that the continual work has both a mental and physical impact on him, he always dutifully gets up early in the morning and contentedly lies down next to me at night, drained from his day but still grateful. Perhaps he is able to work so endlessly because the moment he wakes up he assumes a particular mode of being, the dignified manner in which he speaks to himself and with which others should speak of him. I will be a doctor, I will be a doctor, I will be a doctor—sometimes I wish I could talk about myself with such confidence too.
But the more I read and write, the worse a writer I become in my o
wn eyes, and the dumber a reader too, and many of the stories that are supposed to change a reader’s view of the world feel impenetrable to me, my concentration span seems nonexistent. I feel anxious at the sight of thick novels and their sprawling galleries of characters, at the way I can spend hours with a book, turning its pages and looking at the words but not really reading, because I don’t really see them and I don’t notice or pay attention to which sentences, which events are interrupted as I turn the page. The allure of reading is gone.
There are days when I am filled with certainty that the story I am sketching, the kind of story he might like too, will one day be finished, and I imagine the moment when I can read it to him and even the day my published book arrives in the mail and I can finally hold it, flick through its pages, run my fingers along the cover bearing my name, and give copies to people. How wonderful a feeling that must be for a writer, I imagine, to see all those years of work, all that time spent doubting, challenging, disciplining, and punishing yourself, an entire universe in a form at once small yet vast, modest yet grand, as proof of something so significant that all that suffering finally feels worth it.
At times like that I truly believe that reality follows the lies we tell ourselves. If a surgeon doesn’t assure himself he can operate on a brain tumor, will he be able to drill into someone’s skull? If a young couple expecting a baby don’t convince themselves that they are capable of bringing up their firstborn, what kind of future will await them and their child?
But other days I spend frustrated, incapable of moving forward—I feel silly and childish and despise myself, because everything I write lacks sense, and what only a short while ago I thought was lofty and immense is in fact pitifully small, and as I correct my mistakes I notice myself making even more mistakes; I realize I am terrible with words and nobody will ever publish anything I write.
There’s nothing great about writing per se; on the contrary, it’s painful and agonizing, forcing yourself to say things that others have already said far better and more eloquently. I didn’t know that something I thought I loved unreservedly could feel so wrong and unpleasant. The endless need for comparison and an uncontrollable, paralyzing shame come to afflict literature once you transition from reader to storyteller—one would be better off without it.
That’s how it is, really, I tell myself and wash my hands, and after returning to bed, fatigued and distant, I begin listing facts about myself: I am an Albanian in a world run by Serbs; my parents have died and everything they left to me I have sold; I am married, a husband and soon-to-be father; I study in order to enter a profession that I probably can’t achieve, and I regret not studying something more sensible, law or economics, it would have made everything so much easier. I regret getting married, I regret getting Ajshe pregnant, and I regret not leaving Pristina years ago when a friend of mine suggested it.
Because no matter what you say to yourself or no matter how steadfast your self-belief, even if you are blessed with an army of will and the courage to be as unscrupulous as a politician during an election, even if you manage to convince yourself that you have it all, isn’t the most probable outcome that you still won’t get what you want? Why should I be the exception? If everybody got what they wanted, would there even be a word to describe desire?
* * *
—
Over the following weeks I manage to write only a few pages, though I work on something every day, from morning till night, trying to formulate ideas for different articles and stories.
“That’s really good for just a few weeks,” says Miloš when on one of his rare free evenings I tell him I have finally completed a story, that I wrote it first in Albanian then translated it into English. “I’m really proud of you,” he continues. “Will you read it to me?”
His request makes me feel ill, but I quickly cave because this is what I’ve been waiting for. What else is writing, I wonder, if not agreeing to everything, hurting yourself, tolerating your own imperfection, walking naked through a crowded square?
And so I begin:
The Girl and It
For almost a year it hasn’t felt sunlight on its skin, only the cold walls of its cave, which it scratches and gnaws incessantly, nervous and restless, its claws and teeth ground and blunt; it cannot distinguish night from day, sleep from wake, its wings from the pitch darkness, or its calloused body from the stones and boulders with which from force of habit it exchanges pleasantries.
They tell its story in grim tales that frighten little children. Finish your dinner, it loves leftovers, they say, it will think you are its friend, and while you are asleep it will steal in like a breeze through the window or rise up like steam through the floorboards, so slowly that you won’t even notice, it will climb into your bed and quietly lie down next to you, then it will press its forked tongue in through your nostrils, your mouth, and your ears and out through your eyes, and with that you will die and won’t live to see the following morning. Don’t talk back to your parents, don’t be selfish, vain, lazy, greedy, envious, don’t lie, because it will appear and eat you alive, swallow you like a marshmallow.
It lives in the judgments that the enraged hand down to one another, the words used to describe the stubborn and the agitated, the resentful and bitter, and it lurks on the paths we tread alone, where the rivers meet and the current is at its most treacherous, in abandoned houses, uninhabited forests and dales, on lonely mountains whose tall, icy summits pierce the clouds like balloons.
For one day a year it is allowed out of its cave, always in the springtime, at sunrise, when the trees stand straight and the fields have begun to grow new hide. On that day it has a set of borrowed wings, and it is called a kulshedra, but on all other days it has a different name. It is said that while it is free it destroys everything it sees, that it strikes the woods ablaze, emptying the towns, razing everything the people have created in the preceding year. After this, it begins looking for somewhere suitable to nap; it visits the sea, the land, and the heavens, and after finding an agreeable place it sometimes forgets where it has come from, where it resided only a day earlier, how many people it has just killed, the guilty and the guiltless, and even sings in a voice hoarse with allure.
One year, as it rocked carefree on a branch, it felt a pebble strike its side. It boomed like thunder and disappeared from sight in the blink of an eye.
“Who is there?” came a bright voice from the mouth of a girl wrapped in a bearskin standing at the foot of the tree.
In a flash, it darted down from the sky and grabbed the girl, wrapped itself around her body, and held her face close to its own, ran its tongue across her eye sockets, which were as empty as the pockets of the dead.
“Do you know what I am, you silly little girl?” it asked.
“No,” the girl replied and began to giggle. “I am blind.”
“That tickled me, by the way,” she said and continued chuckling. “You are very strong,” she said as it tightened its grip. “I wish I was too.”
“Aren’t you afraid of me?” it asked.
“Afraid?”
“Yes.”
“Of course I’m not afraid of you,” the girl replied, playfully tapped its hide, unable to appreciate its immensity, and laughed again. “And it’s not very polite to call me silly when we don’t yet know each other. I might be blind, but I’m very clever.”
“Really?”
“Yesss!”
All it could do was join her chuckling; it lowered the girl to the ground, and when it was about to leave, the girl reached out her left hand and grabbed it by the end of the tail.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“Away,” it replied, wriggled free of the girl’s grip, and twisted into an attacking position, its hide covered in gleaming scales and crinkles, its mouth like a loaded weapon, ready to bite the girl’s arm off as punishment f
or her impudence.
“Very well,” she said. “But don’t go just yet. Do you want to play with me first?”
“Play?”
“Yesss!”
After giving this a moment’s thought, it agreed to the girl’s suggestion, and the two of them chased each other across the fields and meadows, taking turns hiding in the thickets and the boughs of trees, and as evening fell they were both exhausted and had told each other everything—the girl about her family, who had thrown her out of their home, because what could they do with a blind child, and it had told her about the cave where it had lived its life and all the different names it had been given.
The girl’s name was Drita, which meant light, and it thought the name was amusing because the girl had never seen the light.
Before saying goodbye, they agreed to meet again in a year’s time, and from that moment on they met every year, always in the bloom of spring, in the same forest where they first encountered each other, on the same path where the girl almost lost her arm.
Over the years, it taught the girl to hunt, to stake out prey, and to throw a spear. It bit off one of the girl’s breasts too, the better for her to shoot a bow and arrow, and proudly followed her development into an adult, a woman every bit as strong as a man.
One spring, it plucked up the courage to ask, timid and bashful, if Drita would become its wife, if she could imagine them living together, spending time together every day of the year.
Drita began to weep, and for a moment she was unable to answer, so overcome she was with emotion.
“And does it matter that I was once…a girl, too?” it asked.
“No,” Drita answered, catching her breath and raising her hands to its cheeks. “It doesn’t matter at all,” she continued and pressed her lips against its mouth, which was as rough as bark. “I will be your wife, of course I will. I have seen it now.”
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