“What have you seen?” it asked.
“The light.”
And it is said that there they remain to this day, just the two of them, curtsied statuesque in front of each other, in a cave on the side of the mountain where night never retreats.
I stumble over the words, my voice trembles, and I have to read slowly, pausing in all the wrong places, because I constantly want to change my mode of expression, to focus and correct myself, to make sure he understands all the meanings beyond the text.
But once I get going, I notice that he’s listening intently, his eyes closed, and it feels as though my story is coming to life beneath his eyelids.
When I finish, he is quiet for so long that I wonder whether he has drifted off to sleep, and in the course of that silence I think of my father, who in my childhood told me a variation of the same story of which there is only a bare bone left in my story, I think of what an inordinate amount of time Miloš and I spend lying still, and I think of the times to come, what if the Kosovo Liberation Army starts forcibly conscripting people to their ranks or if the Serbs turn up to arrest me claiming I stuffed a customer’s change in my pocket? What would happen then?
I listen to the wind pinching at the window frames and the quieting breathing beside me.
“Well?”
“I love it,” Miloš says eventually and opens his watery eyes. “My goodness, I love it so much,” he adds in front of the sweating window. “How I love it,” he repeats, as though he thinks I don’t believe him, though I trust that he means what he says. “Would you read it to me again, Arsim?” he then asks. “You could submit it for publication in an international magazine.”
I read the story again, and after that I read it again, and each time he interprets it differently, always approaching it from another angle. He says he has heard about “it” somewhere before, in a context in which “it” is used as a warning, a rebuke, a nightmare.
“It’s a snake, isn’t it?” he asks.
“I suppose it is.”
“A snake.”
“Yes.”
“But it has wings and it can talk?”
“Yes.”
“Is it blind too?” he asks.
“Well, I don’t know,” I say.
“What do you think they do there?”
“Where?”
“In the cave. Are they still there?”
“I don’t know,” I reply, amused. “It’s just a story I came up with.”
“Yes, but still. What do they do there?”
“They live together, I suppose.”
After I say this, he closes his eyes.
“Forever?”
“Yes.”
“Imagine,” he says. “A snake with a woman for a wife.” He smiles and kisses me on the cheek. “A home that two women share,” he adds, his eyes still closed.
For some reason, he starts to get on my nerves. I return my story to the desk and wish him good night on my way back to bed, and I am about to fall asleep when suddenly he starts talking, animated, as though everything he says comes into his head on the spur of the moment. He tells me he heard a similar story years ago, a story where a snake is in fact the daughter of god in disguise and not a real snake at all and where god and the devil barter using their children: a blind girl and a viper.
“Oh?” I ask.
“Yesss!” he replies and removes his hand from my chest.
“Surely not?”
I notice I find it hard to conceal my annoyance. How dare someone say something like that out loud, I think, mention god and the devil in a room like this, after everything we have done.
“Don’t you talk like that,” I say crudely.
“What do you mean?”
“About religion.”
“Oh?”
“You can’t possibly know what’s on the other side.”
“No, I can’t,” he says in self-defense. “Besides, I’m not particularly relig—”
“Then don’t talk about things you know nothing about.”
“Sorry,” he says, startled, and places his hand above my heart. “I didn’t mean to offend you, I really did like your story, I just wanted to tell you what I’ve heard,” he continues calmly, and I feel like asking whether he understands that there are some things it’s just not appropriate to talk about, that anything can and should happen in books, that a writer has the right to create an entire country at will, to rewrite history, and as he falls asleep next to me, for the first time I feel uneasy being near him.
* * *
—
Ajshe gives birth later that month. The child arrives early and I am not with her when it happens, though I promised I would support her through the final stages of the pregnancy and take her to a midwife we know to give birth. But after going into labor, Ajshe gets the bus to a hospital where most of the staff are Serbs. We’ve heard rumors that they sterilize Albanian women during childbirth.
After seeing the note Ajshe left for me on the table, I head to the hospital. Ajshe looks tired but happy, not at all frightened, and the child, a boy who, though swollen looking and two and a half kilos in weight, still looks impossibly small, is sleeping in her arms, swaddled in a blanket. The delivery went well, and the staff seem decent.
When Ajshe asks if I’d like to hold the child, I say yes and take him in my arms. I know that holding your newborn baby is supposed to feel unforgettable, momentous, and it does, undeniably so, but perhaps for different reasons than for those who told me about it.
A few days later I fetch Ajshe from the hospital. Once back home, she places the baby in a crib, erected in the middle of the living room, that her sister has given us.
“I’m happy,” she says and looks at the child, beaming. “He is so beautiful. Isn’t he beautiful, Arsim?”
“The baby is beautiful,” I say. “It will change our lives.”
Then I tell her I have decided to name the boy Driton, and Ajshe smiles at me all the more.
“Driton,” she says. “Light.”
10 SEPTEMBER 2000
They wake us up at six in the morning. After washing in a bathroom riddled with mildew and brushing our teeth with a toothbrush the size of a pinkie, we stand in line in a corridor leading to the canteen, we are handed the medicines we have been prescribed from a small hatch, and the nurses make sure we take them, then we are forced to sit down at tables bolted to the floor; the benches attached to the table legs look like human shoulders. One at a time we fetch white plastic trays and white disposable cutlery, cups, and plates—everything here is white.
Each day we are given food that tastes the same, ready and rationed on the plate, wheat bread and thick corn porridge, bland soup and sour milk; it’s revolting, devoid of nutrition, stodgy, and barely good enough for dogs. And we have to finish everything, otherwise the nurses think you’re being insubordinate, they note down our every meal, every movement; every expression of dissatisfaction pushes further into the future the day you might walk out of the door through which they forcibly brought us, as though smuggling us underground. To them we are not even patients, we are numbers.
My ward is the one people want to be in, if they have to be here at all, because this is where they bring the “healthiest patients,” so I’ve heard. In here we have doctors, lawyers, bosses, and military commanders all together, apparently. Sometimes knowing this makes me think that things aren’t as bad as I’d thought and that there’s still hope of getting out.
We are allowed to write to our friends and families, who are even permitted to visit us, we exercise outside for an hour at a time, and at least to some extent we enjoy the respect of the staff because we have access to a small TV room with board games and a modest bookshelf; we can even request particular books and magazines, though none of our requests have yet been met.
&
nbsp; I think you would like that bookshelf.
Oftentimes I can’t help thinking about the others; I’ve heard there are children here who have spent most of their lives in cots, that a roomful of people are washed at once using a hose, they are herded into the bathroom where they are sprayed with cold water, and they are mistreated all day long, locked in their rooms for days at a time, taking turns to lie on the few mattresses provided.
Can you imagine? Not even rats deserve to live this way. What kind of person can do that or enable it by their silence?
* * *
—
I am becoming a horrible sight here. I don’t look like myself at all. I try to avoid mirrors and reflections because what looks back at me is a…beast. Growing old is so grotesque, and anyone who thinks otherwise never properly lived their youth.
You’d probably say what nonsense is this, you are beautiful, extraordinarily beautiful just the way you are, and I’d say don’t say that, I am terribly terribly ugly, and gaunt too, well, I am unpleasant in any case, I don’t look anything like what I did the last time we saw each other, because we do nothing here but follow the passing of time.
* * *
—
Loneliness peels you out of your skin, cuts out your tongue, and abandons you in a stale, locked room to slowly evaporate.
4
PRISTINA, 1995
The days become more difficult, the baby cries incessantly and struggles to suckle properly. I don’t know how you are supposed to lift him from the crib or the floor, how strongly I should grip him by the arms or legs when I’m changing his clothes. The baby is hopelessly small, and its guinea pig body covered in downy hairs makes it look sickly, like a different species of human.
The longer we live with the child, the more space it seems to take up, and the more strongly I feel that there’s something impudent and disdainful about its way of being; it wails night and day and never seems to sleep. And the scant time it spends asleep isn’t at all fruitful or relaxing but filled with the perpetual worry that it’ll soon wake up and everything will start again, this grinding reality that we call parenthood. When I was waiting for it to be born, I wasn’t prepared in the slightest for how much more arduous and frightening—and not at all easier, as I had imagined—everything would be once it had come into the world.
Ajshe looks after the boy most of the time, washes him, holds him while she is cooking, kissing him as though enthralled with every sound and movement he makes. She is confident and assures me that the boy only has colic; apparently her sister’s children had it too.
“You do believe me, Arsim, don’t you? This is only a phase,” she says, the boy sitting on her arm, looking in his eyes as though she could see the child’s bright, brave future on their surface.
What Ajshe tells me about the boy is immaterial to me, and I begin to loathe the sound of him. I try to avoid the child, and I believe he must sense my reluctance as he starts crying every time I have to pick him up. What if I never learn to love this child the way Ajshe does, I wonder when I am alone with him. Mostly I just dangle a toy in front of him, anything that makes a louder noise than he does.
I begin to think there’s something obscene about parenthood, especially if a child is born like this one. Out of habit.
I confess to Ajshe that from the day he was born I’ve wished we never had him because the boy couldn’t be further removed from his name. Ajshe says she is sorry I feel this way, it will pass, she continues, and dutifully looks after the boy by herself as best she can, stays up with him all night, changes his diapers, clothes, and sheets, and eventually she stops asking for my help altogether.
* * *
—
The Serbian troops move around sporadically, like a forest fire, ruthlessly occupying entire areas at a time, sowing terror as they go. Life has turned cruel, and people have become used to it, a dead human body is no longer a dead human body but an image of a dead human body. Raped women, murdered men, and abused children are no longer raped women, murdered men, and abused children but merely stories of such atrocities, and the invasions and skirmishes seem to grow increasingly inhumane the more people become inured to the bloodshed.
Everybody knows that war will soon be declared here too. Conversations are no longer about the possibility of war but about when it will happen. Some people, including several of our neighbors, think the war has already begun, entire towns in Kosovo have already been occupied, and tens upon tens of thousands of Albanians have fled abroad, to Germany, Italy, France, and all across Europe, some even as far as Australia and the United States. Others say that until war is officially declared, there is no war.
Miloš is constantly apologizing to me for things that have nothing at all to do with him, acts fueled by a rabid hunger for power and not by anything in him. He even commiserates with me when I tell him that some of my classmates have turned their backs on me because I have the gall to question out loud the quality of our courses; they say this makes me complicit in the subjugation of the Albanian people, apparently it means I accept what’s been happening to the university, they can’t believe that I could speak about my own people, my own blood, in such unpatriotic terms, and there is no point in arguing with them, trying to explain that my education and maintaining my language skills means a lot to me, because they are deaf with rage.
Miloš is busier all the time, and I see him more infrequently because he is always taking on extra shifts: he is working full-time at one restaurant and part-time at another, while at a third he does night and weekend shifts too.
“I have to save money,” he explains, and I understand him perfectly well, I would do the same in his position. “There’s just so much to read that it’s impossible to work long hours during the term.”
I am forced to ask my brother-in-law Besnik for a loan. It is the most shameful thing imaginable, but there are no other options because while Ajshe and I can tolerate hunger and even cold, our child doesn’t know what it means to go without, it only understands its own needs; in that regard children are uncompromising.
Besnik works at a factory and lives in a two-story house in the countryside, away from the maelstrom of Pristina, and when we visit them Ajshe’s sister asks her about the boy and how he is doing, the birth, asks what Ajshe was thinking giving birth in a hospital, risking handing such a beautiful boy over to the clutches of the Serbian nurses, and at some point that evening, once we have eaten, Besnik leads me out to the patio behind their house and suggests, for the umpteenth time, that I take a job at the factory.
Ajshe has told me that Besnik pities me because I don’t have any brothers, but I don’t understand why, because that’s the way it has always been. Can you really miss something you’ve never had?
“It wouldn’t be so bad, would it?” he says from beneath his thick eyebrows as we sit smoking, his black hair, heavy with gel, cascading across his neck. “You and Ajshe could live at our house, you can have one of the rooms upstairs,” he continues and places a hairy hand, marked by cuts, on my thigh.
“Or we could start thinking about moving abroad,” he says and squeezes my thigh. “What do you think?”
I politely refuse his suggestion, saying I greatly appreciate the gesture because we are not even close family, we don’t owe each other anything, I slip the money he gives me—a thousand German marks—into my pocket and give him my word that I’ll pay him back with interest.
“I promise you, my brother,” I say and move his hand away.
On the way back to Pristina, I start to feel sick sitting at the back of the bus, the baby is crying and wets itself, Ajshe changes its diaper in her lap, and as soon as she is finished the baby decides to empty its bowels, and it smells so repulsive that for a moment I wonder whether I should simply disappear with the money and never come back.
I don’t say a word to Miloš about my financial predicament
, though he guesses as much—from the amount I eat at his apartment, from the fact I’ve had to give up smoking and wear the same clothes for days at a time, from how bad I smell because I can’t be bothered to wash. He knows that my situation and my future prospects look hopeless, that the only thing keeping me here is him.
At the beginning of July, he surprises me by telling me he has bought us bus tickets to Ulcinj. He presses the tickets into my hand and says: “I’ve taken care of everything, I’ve saved up for this, this is my present to you, Arsim, these four days at the beach, I couldn’t get any more time off, we met three months ago and we still haven’t celebrated it at all. We deserve this.”
Then he smiles at me so beautifully that saying no doesn’t even cross my mind.
* * *
—
The following week we board a packed bus, and getting to our destination takes a long time because for most of the journey the roads are not paved, just thin dirt tracks, narrow and full of potholes, running along the mountainsides, and at every sharp turn it’s as though the driver is playing with our lives, barely braking, though there’s no way he can see if anyone is coming toward us.
At the Kosovo-Montenegro border, Serbian officials storm the vehicle, stare suspiciously at the passengers, handguns hanging from their belts; they open up people’s bags and suitcases, ask all the Albanians to empty their pockets and show their wallets, all this before telling me I won’t be allowed into Montenegro because I don’t have official permission to cross the border or written proof of the purpose of my journey, a document I’ve never heard of before. I am so nervous that my tongue feels paralyzed, but when Miloš hands both guards some money, his fingers trembling, and says something so quickly that I can’t make it out, they step off the bus and wave us through the checkpoint.
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