And so the journey continues; we sit in the back seat, I take a tissue, wipe my sweaty brow, and try to read a book, while Miloš stares curiously out of the window at the swollen stomachs of the mountains and their colorful, undulating valleys.
As we approach our destination, Miloš has the nerve to slide his left hand between my legs, then he closes his eyes, breathes deeply, and rests his head against my shoulder, like it is just the two of us, and I push his hand away, wondering when the trip in this swelteringly hot bus with no toilet will end, whether it ever will. Doesn’t he understand that if someone had seen him touch me like that, it would be the end of us?
Finally we arrive at Ulcinj, a small, picturesque town populated mainly by Albanians that attracts tourists from across the Balkans and beyond and whose long beach, Plazhi i Madh, stretches for twelve kilometers. We stay at one of the largest beachfront hotels, and every day is like the day before: we wake up early, eat a hearty breakfast and cross the street, rent a parasol, place it in the sand and sunbathe for as long as there’s sun, and at some point in the day we buy ice cream from the vendors walking up and down the beach, most of whom are young boys, just kids, and we fetch afternoon coffee too. As evening draws in, we dress up smart and have dinner at a local restaurant, then return to the hotel room and curl up against each other though our skin still stings from the sun.
In Ulcinj’s old town there is a castle built by the ancient Illyrians and Greeks of antiquity. On the final day of the trip, we visit the hilltop castle, where some children claim in a fanciful voice that they can see all the way to Italy, though all my eyes can spot is water.
There’s no war here, I think at the top of the hill as I look out at the melancholy sea, the war is somewhere else, and when I look at Miloš in his white T-shirt, brown trunks, and dark blue sunglasses, I am not the same man I was in Kosovo; there is no room in my world for anything but these days spent here and him: how he subtly asks for the bill and pays it, how he slips packs of cigarettes into my pocket, how feverishly he looks at me when we awake to the morning light, so bright that it snatches away the tiredness we feel from our restless dreams, how he steps out of the water and looks around for a moment, almost in panic, because he can’t immediately place me among the crowds on the beach, how adorable he looks when he eventually finds me and can push his fears aside because I am exactly where he left me and haven’t disappeared.
“I don’t want to leave,” he says on our final evening, fetches us two cold beers, and walks out to the balcony in our hotel room, and leaning against the railings he gazes out at the traffic along the beachfront boulevard, the streams of people, and the sky washed in the city lights, looking like an old blackboard.
“Me neither,” I say, go to him, and put an arm around him.
“Are you happy?” he asks across the railing, somewhat out of the blue.
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know either. But I’m not sure I’ve ever met someone who is truly happy.”
“Right.”
“But I am happy, at least sometimes, I’ll admit that,” he says and turns to look at me.
“Me too. It’s something.”
“It is something,” he repeats with a curt smile and gives me a weary look.
“It’s quite a lot, actually,” I say.
Miloš’s eyes appear to gleam, and I stroke his lower back.
“Maybe happiness is knowing that happiness doesn’t exist,” he says eventually. “And sorrow is the wisdom to endure it,” he continues and turns to look out to sea. “I’ve been thinking about the last book you read…The way that every character was searching for happiness and all of them eventually found it,” he adds and touches his hair. “They actually…made me angry, though I told you I liked the book, and I’m sure I did like it a bit.”
“Really?”
“Yes…It was as if they thought that every moment they were unhappy was time wasted, as if happiness was their incontrovertible destiny, you know? That’s not how it goes, at least I don’t think so.”
“Yes,” I reply. “I don’t think so either.”
“Most people aren’t like that.”
“No, they’re not.”
“You see it every day. It’s easier to submit to tyranny than it is to fight against it. That requires so much more,” he says and exhales a long breath as though through a straw.
“I…I like you very much,” I stammer and remove my hand from under his T-shirt.
Again he turns to look at me, squints, and grips my hand.
“I like you too. A lot.”
This is the most perfect day of my life, I think, and the happiness we feel that evening, we both know it, the sensation as I kiss his neck, the person I am as I smell his hair, the gazes we cast upon each other, the taste of beer left on the balcony table, the way our lips touch right there in the flames of the fading evening, it will never end, even if there’s nothing left of it by morning.
5 NOVEMBER 2000
Those months that we knew each other they were the best of my life, untainted, because we didn’t have to explain anything to each other, anything at all, we were floating in space, bathing in the eternal morning like two sundials.
5
PRISTINA, 1995
On the bus to Pristina, Miloš tells me that once we get back I’ll see him even less than before.
For some reason, I begin to feel awkward being in his apartment when he is not there, though I know I can be there whenever I want. But I can’t concentrate at his place the same way I did before. I am easily distracted by sudden noises carrying in from the corridor, the rhythms of footsteps in the stairwell, the banging of doors opening and closing, the clink of keys turning in the lock; all I can do is wait for the door to open and for him to step inside.
* * *
—
A few days after our return, Ratko Mladić and his troops murder thousands of people in Srebrenica, randomly opening fire at unarmed civilians.
The ensuing days are sheer insanity, the streets filled with a sense of perdition. People say the Serbs forced children to watch their parents and siblings bleed to death, that pregnant women had their stomach slashed open, letting their unborn children ooze out of them like sludge.
“Imagine,” I say to Miloš. “That someone can do something so terrible, so repulsive to another human being.”
“I know,” he says mournfully. “I’m sorry.”
The news knocks the wind out of my lungs; even loose sweaters feel like straitjackets, and eating, sleeping, washing, even changing clothes requires unreasonable amounts of effort. Talking about the war feels disrespectful, like the desecration of the dead; it’s as though you don’t have permission to talk about anything, neither the Serbs’ brutality nor their momentary defeats. I feel even more miserable at the news that the Croatian army has recaptured Krajina and finally driven the Serbs out of the city in a refugee convoy—only then to bomb it.
The destruction raging around us becomes a secret; talking about it gives it a face, while remaining silent gobbles up the rest of summer like a fistful of air.
* * *
—
As the new term is about to begin, Ajshe tells me she is expecting another child. She says it in passing, as if this were just another everyday event, as if she doesn’t care about my opinion in the least, and walks into the living room, possessively picks up the boy, and sits down on the couch to breastfeed him, something he has learned to enjoy more eagerly.
“How is that possible?” I ask and swear to myself that I need to stop sleeping with her.
“Arsim…,” she begins, the air between us like a dense spider’s web, and I walk up to her, wrench the boy from her arms, and place him in the crib, upon which he breaks out in earsplitting wails.
“How is it possible?” I continue, and I can feel the blood ris
ing to my head, my hands getting warmer, clenching into smoldering lumps of coal. “How can a woman who has just given birth be pregnant again? How?”
Ajshe looks at me as if sensing what is going to happen next, and I grab her by the hair and shove her across the room, hit and kick her. She sinks to the floor, clutching her stomach, wiping the edge of her mouth with her thumb, she looks up at me cheerlessly and says: “I’m sorry.”
That evening I go for a walk in a park some distance from our apartment. I even stop at a restaurant for dinner, and despite the expensive bill, my mood seems to lighten. People should always get out of the house when their heart starts racing fiercely, I think, and on the way home, I buy Ajshe a bunch of flowers, which she accepts with a smile, dips her nose in among them like a teabag in water.
“Thank you,” she says.
* * *
—
The following week Besnik and his family come to visit us; they have traveled for many hours and smell of sweat, and they have brought seven large suitcases that take up an inordinate amount of space, forcing us to watch our step as we move from one room to another.
When the children take their afternoon nap, we eat lunch and make the decision to leave tomorrow; we can’t stay here a day longer.
“It’s best for all of us,” says Ajshe.
“That’s right,” I say, mimicking her tone of voice and trying to sound as though we had planned all this together, as though she hadn’t done this behind my back.
Besnik holds his head in his hands and his wife stands awkwardly in the middle of the room, keeping far from the doors and windows, quivering with paranoia. She is afraid of the city, startled by the vast number of soldiers they saw on the journey. Ajshe grips her, asks her to calm down, to pull herself together for the children’s sake, and explains that when you see soldiers and machine guns and tanks every day, it feels much stranger when you suddenly don’t see them, and when Ajshe starts resolutely packing our belongings into suitcases, I nod in her direction, though she doesn’t see it because she has her back to me, at the way she packs only the essentials, the clothes in the best condition, the photo albums, the birth and school certificates, the childcare equipment.
As evening draws in, I say I need to take care of a few things and that I’ll be back early in the morning, and I run to him. I tell him about my wife, who is pregnant again, about the bus tickets to Bulgaria, our intention to move somewhere, anywhere else in Western Europe from there, and then apply for asylum, I tell him everything is paid and sorted out.
I kiss him and say I’m sorry, I’m sorry I can’t stay here any longer, I would stay if I could, you believe me, don’t you, I think it’s for the best, best for all of us, I have a wife and I have a child and another one on the way, I have a wife, and I want to tell him how much he means to me, how I wish our shared summer could continue forever, but instead I just cry and he takes me in his arms, looks at me, his eyes fixed on me like nails, his words wading through my body. “I know, I know, I’m sorry.”
* * *
—
When I wake up, he is gone, a five-word letter on the bed in his place, and the wardrobes are empty, the walls bare. For a while his scent hangs in the corners of the room like white ghosts, then they too process out the door, and I can’t stop thinking about how pained he looked when he bade me good night, and how quietly he sobbed.
I get up and look out the window, at the thick air, heavy with gunpowder, the people crossing the street, brittle as glass, and I look directly at the sun, its face scratched and bleeding, its rays beating the clouds from their course, and for a moment I think I am about to burst into tears, but instead I smile. It is morning, I tell myself, it’s a beautiful day, it’s time.
8 NOVEMBER 2000
Do you remember our trip to Ulcinj? You looked so handsome at the beach and sitting opposite me at the restaurant and stepping out of the shower that for those four days my world came to a halt—do you remember that trip, the heat that sat at the dinner table with us, that tossed our salad, turning it sticky, and lingered until the next morning? How I wished the clock would stop, I wished for it so much that the sheer impossibility of it turned into an anger that raged through my life for years.
And I hated, hated everything, I hated the war, the sun and the moon, the light and the darkness, I hated the water and the air, children, I hated men, women, weapons, I hated banks, Serbs, Albanians, Bosnians, I hated the news, the radio and television and newspapers, I hated the streets and cars and every building—cafés, libraries, restaurants, schools, hospitals—I hated the earth and the mountains, hated the forest and the animals, I hated the colors of the world, hated medicine and philosophy, books and literature, I hated the sea, hated Europe, hated America, hated the heavens and religions, I hated Russia, China, and India with all their pollution, Africa, I hated politics and the police, hated god, hated the devil, hated sleep and dreams, hated waking up in the morning, dusty unwashed windows, dirty dishes, I hated the past, hated everything, everything you read to me, hated listening to your pathetic stories, the smell of your breath and your curved penis, hated the feel of it, the taste of it.
And I hated that night you said you had to go away, I hated myself too for getting up in the early hours and packing my things and slipping out of the apartment like an arsonist, letting you think I’d left, returned to Kuršumlija or somewhere else, and I hated the letter you found when you woke up, the five words I’d written down
“this is best for everyone”
did you really think that
And I hated how I walked around the city with my bags like a homeless man, and as morning broke I went to sit at the café where we first met, only a stone’s throw from where you were right then, and I cried in secret, hiding it from strangers, and I couldn’t come back though I almost did so, so many times—and I hated you when I imagined you looking out of the window, realizing I was gone, that I really was gone, I hated the way I thought of you breathing in that empty room, hated what I imagined you doing next, packing up your belongings at my apartment, a sour burning in your throat, and closing the door behind you leaving everything we once had locked behind it, every confession, all that deranged passion, and without exception everything I’d thought was eternal was drowned out in the sound of the slamming door and the steps echoing through the stairwell that no longer belonged to either of us.
Perhaps you were relieved that I left that night, I know that you were, isn’t that right, you were glad that I left you alone weren’t you, sure you were, because if I hadn’t been certain that you wanted me to leave, that you didn’t want to embrace another morning with me, I would never have left like that, I would have stayed and suggested, how about we go back to Ulcinj or Saranda or any other town!
I would have suggested, how about you tell that woman you’re not going with her, or how about you disappear without saying anything, you just never go back to her but leave with me instead—
you didn’t spend a moment looking for me, you didn’t look for me at all but you gave me up like an old wallet and disappeared just like that you disappeared and I was left alone in this world
that’s what I hated the most
that you didn’t give me the chance
to say: come with me don’t go stay here
but you cried like a little brat
I expected more of you than you expected of me, maybe that was our problem all along
—
and the majesty of that hatred, oh the majesty of that hatred!
how easily it allowed me to enlist for the army, just like
that
* * *
—
And I SAID: I’ll go to war, so be it, I’ll go anywhere at all,
life passes around like a coin
ANYWHERE AT ALL, to the house of god or into the flames I’m not afraid
of anything
II
The following day God slept with his daughter. As the result of their incestuous union, a deformed child was born, a blind little girl with a faint heart. “Don’t say a word about this to the Devil,” God told his daughter and went off to meet the Devil on a mountain pummeled by glaciers, a place where bloodhounds roamed in packs, letting out howls of hunger from their muzzles, etched with the scars of fangs, the steam of their breath rising up around the mountain in a veil of fog.
There the Devil resided, with his chimeras, inside the glacial mountain, and the subterranean tunnel that led to the Devil was full of poisonous lizards with spikes on their skin, ravens and crows that never slept but constantly flew on the spot, without permission to land, and along the walls were mummified insects, petrified clusters of gnats, crickets pressed against one another.
Once he arrived, God handed the little girl to the Devil, who grabbed her with the thumbs and forefingers of both hands, turned her upside down, and held the child closer the better to see her, to feel her feebly twitching heart against his copper chest—then they smiled at each other, the Devil with his flaming eyes and the girl with her flattened half face.
And so the Devil did as he had promised: he whistled to his snake, which, without delay, slithered its way along the fissures, forming an extension to the Devil’s left arm, then with his right he gripped God’s outstretched hand, and then, with the child in his arms, looked on as God departed, watched his lazy steps and slowly disappearing back.
“Fool,” the Devil said to himself and shook his head in disbelief. “To hand over the daughter of God. For a single snake.”
6
2003
I mourn him for years—his absence, like a dull thump across my chest. Sometimes it even feels like fear, and I’m frightened I’ll somehow forget him, and I start to doubt my mind and wonder if I dreamed us up after all. Could it really be, I sometimes ask myself, that he never really existed, that he was the sky I built, a god amid a burning forest?
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