Despite their young age, the children know this much about their father: my father isn’t the same as other fathers because my father can’t do the things other fathers do, and I don’t really need him for anything. And knowing this bothers me surprisingly little.
Then there are other days when I think horrific thoughts—and at those moments I have to pull over to the side of the road or go to the park, sit down and take deep breaths, because I’ve come so, so close to doing a U-turn and crashing into the side of a truck, throwing myself off the railings at the mall, or jumping in front of a bus or metro, and once I’ve calmed down and realize that what stopped me wasn’t the knowledge that I’d be leaving behind a wife and children but the fear that I might actually survive, my heart starts to turn.
The war ended long ago, but the end of it doesn’t really mean anything. Ajshe says that the real war starts with the cessation of hostilities and the signing of a peace treaty, because this is when you can see the earliest consequences of war, the havoc into which war has driven a country.
It’s aptly put, because we Albanians are washed across the world like a handful of sand scattered into the sea, we have disappeared into the landscape like a wooden altar screen against a wooden altar. Our country is forever tainted, it has been violated with malicious words, demarcated in the maps of the world with a dashed black line.
It’s easy to despise this life and everything about it because none of it is mine.
13 NOVEMBER 2000
is it wrong to get an erection while your father rapes you
is it wrong to get an erection while your brother rapes you
is it wrong to push a killer off the roof, to throw a sick cat into boiling water
can you have an abortion if the child is disabled can you commit suicide if you have a wife and children can you even if you don’t
can you steal from the poor if you are poorer still
is it wrong to want to be alone with your father or brother though you know they will rape you
is it wrong to wish for it at night—to wish for your father or brother to rape you
or both of them
again
and again
what if your father rapes your sister
what if you feel envious that your father rapes your sister instead of you
can you kill your sister then
out of envy
can you steal food if you are hungry
and clothes if you are cold
what about medicine for the sick
can you walk right into the pharmacy with a gun then
my sister took her own life
she was thirteen
she hanged herself from a tree at night I found her in the morning
I was on my way to let the cows out of the barn
and my sister was dangling from a branch like a salmon on a hook,
in her white nightgown
my father had raped her
my brother had raped her
I screamed for my life though my sister looked unharmed, unconquered
I’ll never forget that sight
my father, my mother, my brother came running, they were crying
can you feel envy toward the dead I wondered and looked at my sister’s groin
the grass beneath her feet it was black
I got an erection when my father slept with me the next day
he called me by my sister’s name, that slut
I’ll kill my father, I swore to myself, next time
I’ll kill my father
it is right it is perfect, I said
my father raped me many times after that
and it felt good, I didn’t want it to stop
it was so wrong it was sick I suppose
I am repulsive, later on I said
sorry
to the heavens
One morning I woke up early, before daybreak, like a cat. I packed a pair of pants and a few shirts in a plastic bag, a bar of soap, a notepad and a pen, my father’s savings from behind the upper cupboard in the kitchen
then I gathered a large pile of old newspapers on the couch in the living room and another beneath the kitchen table and a third in front of the wardrobe in the hallway and I poured gasoline over them and over the carpets and the curtains and the furniture, everything was as calm as a slow waltz in a beautiful dream, and I let the animals out of their cages and stables and then I set everything ablaze, the whole ground floor one room at a time, and my footsteps were like velvet, droplets of water in the ocean currents, and my father and my brother and my mother were asleep upstairs and I glided away from the house, as if I was flying, and above the roar of the fire I heard my father shouting something and my mother screaming and then the gas cylinders in the kitchen exploded, severing the sounds surging from the house’s openings, and the animals broke into a ferocious stampede, they were carefree now, and eventually without looking behind me I walked to the top of a nearby hill and sat down and said to myself good, good, good; I am good, I’m good, I am good, then I continued on my way to the station where I got on the next bus, it took me to Belgrade, the white city, straight to my new life, and after sitting down in my seat I wrote those words, vertically and horizontally, so that I would never forget, so that I would always remember—I am good I am good I am free
On the way I imagined them burning alive. At first it didn’t feel like anything at all, and then it felt good.
15 NOVEMBER 2000
I wrote terrible things the other day; I’m still trembling though I’ve been doing lots of strength and stretching exercises. Those things didn’t really happen, but I imagined them, and more besides, they would have all deserved it. Maybe I was just ashamed to admit that I left the way I did, pathetically, secretly, in the middle of the night while the rest of the house was asleep on their dirty sheets…
but it’s just as true all the same, they are just as dead to me still
I should apologize to you I’ve lied and keep lying
about so many things
sometimes it’s as if the evil you see becomes the evil you do
7
2003
After writing to each other online for a couple of weeks, he suggests we meet for the first time in real life. We have been messaging in a chat room almost every evening for a few weeks, talking about our favorite foods, our favorite books, movies, music, TV shows, school, hobbies, and I can’t remember the last time I felt this energetic coming back from work than during this time.
He sent me a smiley face, that’s how it all started when he saw my pictures on my profile—standard images of men’s torsos that I’d found online but that might as well have been pictures of my own body. Unlike mine, his profile features a real photograph of himself, so young and so beautiful, I think the first time I see his picture, which he has taken lying in bed, perhaps after waking up on a lazy weekend morning. In the photograph he has a pillow on his chest, almost hiding behind it, and he is smiling coyly at the camera.
I became increasingly attracted to him, and the feeling grew all the more as he told me about himself, how well he’d done on his exams, the strategy and role-playing games that occupy him late into the night, about the walls of his room, which he has plastered with posters of pop and rock bands, about his mother, who works as an architect, and his elder brother, who studies information technology at the university. His father lives at another address, and it’s just as well, he says, I hate him. There’s something alluring about him, something almost delectable, innocent, trusting, and sensitive.
“Can you send me a face pic?” he asks the day before we meet.
“You know I can’t,” I reply. “I can’t take the risk—I’m married and have children. But people have told me I’m quite handsome, and I
’m a nice, down-to-earth guy with a sense of humor. Trust me.”
“I’m nervous,” he writes.
“I know, me too,” I reply. “Me too.”
“What if you don’t like me face-to-face?” The question pops up on the screen, and when I don’t respond immediately he sends another message, this one with only three dots.
“Don’t be silly. You’re a fine young man,” I write. “Really pretty. I’m sure I’ll like you.”
“I’m actually really ugly,” he writes. “You’ll run a mile when you see me. I bet you will.”
“No, no,” I reply. “You’re funny. So, see you tomorrow?”
The following day he arrives at the gas station we agreed upon, ahead of time, just like me. He has cycled five kilometers, far enough away from his house and people he might bump into, and all he knows is the make and color of my car—a dark gray Opel—and that I’ll be standing next to it in the parking lot wearing a pair of sunglasses.
I see him at a distance, the woeful way he pedals his bike, without a helmet, his sturdy, bone-white fingers gripping the handlebars, and when he sees me, he wipes the sweat from his brow with a nonchalant flick of his right hand, rides in front of the gas-station door, locks his bike to the stand, and begins walking toward me, confidently, his expression set, his chest chubby.
He is wearing a pair of worn-out denim shorts, his pale legs, covered in bruises, jutting from beneath them, as though unconnected to the rest of his body, and a brown long-sleeved T-shirt, which he is constantly pulling down, and on his feet a pair of red sneakers that look dirty and too small for him.
The closer he comes, the more pained my smile, the heavier the weight that has appeared above my stomach. He is much chunkier than in the photographs he sent me; his chest sags and his hips are like those of a grown woman, and his bangs hang down across his cheeks, as if to hide his pocked skin. He told me he regularly works out, goes running and swimming, but it doesn’t look like it; instead he looks slightly ill, a rather sickly version of a middle-aged man, though he is seventeen.
I begin to regret ever agreeing to meet him.
“How’s it going?” I ask once he’s standing in front of me. I remove my sunglasses and try not to let my disappointment show. “Shall we go?” I suggest as he mumbles something in reply, and beneath the roar of a passing motorbike all I can make out is that he isn’t asking me the same question.
“Yes,” he says, flicks his bangs again, and walks to the other side of the car as though we are in a hurry, opens the door, and hops into the passenger seat.
* * *
—
We head for McDonald’s, about ten kilometers away, just as we’ve agreed. I decide that once we’re done, I’ll take him back to the gas station, he will fetch his bike and cycle home, and I will no longer respond to his messages, and we will never see each other again.
“So, what do you think of me?” he asks all of a sudden, looking at me out of the corner of his eye.
His slightly raised shoulder only emphasizes his bad posture, and he has crossed his arms over his belly. I don’t reply but keep driving along the blurred road narrowing ahead.
“I knew it,” he says after a pause and demonstratively turns his head away. “You don’t want me,” he adds, staring out of the window at the landscape opening up in vivid autumnal splendor, the brazen evening sunshine, and the trees, their branches resplendent, almost boastful.
“No, no,” I say. “You look good, really good.” The words just come out of my mouth; I take off my sunglasses and then, though I can hear my mind resisting, I place my right hand on his left thigh and squeeze a little. “You are beautiful,” I add instinctively and smile.
“Really?” he says, his voice childish; his eyes turn first to my hand then my eyes, and again he swipes at his bangs.
“Yes.”
Just as I am about to take my hand away, he places his own upon it; tacky with sweat, his warm, pudgy fingers spread across the back of my hand like leeches.
“You’re really handsome,” he simpers. “Like, really handsome, much handsomer than I was expecting,” he repeats, then adds a “wow,” and my body is unable to obey my brain, which implores me to turn back, to stop touching him.
* * *
—
We arrive at the packed, noisy restaurant and stand in line at the counter; he wants a Big Mac meal with supersize fries, a drink, and a large chocolate milkshake. I only order a coffee for myself, because for some reason his order embarrasses me.
It feels as though the entire restaurant knows we are on a date, though I realize that to outsiders we might look like brothers. Once we have our food and drinks, we sit down at a two-seater table. He goes straight for the fries, dipping one end in ketchup and the other in mayonnaise.
“Why aren’t you eating anything?” he asks with his mouth full, and as I try to pick up one of the fries I’ve paid for, he bats my hand away.
“Get your own!” he snaps.
“I’m not really hungry,” I tell him and try, unsuccessfully, to muster a smile. “You eat.”
He greedily unwraps the burger and slurps his sugar-free soda and milkshake one after the other, his eyes wide, stuffs the fries into his mouth four, five at a time, and takes absurdly large bites out of his burger, which he seems to swallow almost without chewing.
“You realize that food is quite unhealthy?” I ask him across the table.
He stops eating and looks up at me, his expression pained.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you shouldn’t eat this kind of food very often,” I reply in a fatherly tone. “It’ll make you fat,” I add bluntly, knowing full well that he must have learned this at school.
He drops half of the burger onto the tray and pushes it away, stands up, wipes his hands on his shorts, and walks to the bathroom without saying a word.
He spends such a long time in there that I even consider slipping away, maybe he wishes I would disappear too, I wonder, but he’s so far away from his bike and even farther from home that it simply wouldn’t be right to run off and abandon him, I reason with myself. As I sit there waiting for him, I think how stupid this is and how stupid I am, how I don’t know anything about him though I thought I knew a lot, and I feel angry at his lies. What did he think they would achieve? He should already know that lying is never the answer, that the truth will always out.
He returns to the table, his eyes bloodshot.
“Take me back,” he says and blows his nose.
“Good,” I say, and he walks out of the restaurant.
As I return the tray to the collection point, I feel a great sense of relief. We set off in a mood of awkward silence. When we are halfway there, he starts nervously fidgeting in his seat, staring in turn out of the window and at me. I don’t look over at him but concentrate on driving us back to the familiar gas station, but when he puts a hand on my thigh, which at first I move away but which he instantly returns, this time to my groin, and when he starts caressing my testicles and asks if he can suck me off in the car, I drive past the familiar gas station and turn at the next junction onto a smaller road, from the smaller road onto a narrow dirt track leading to the edge of a disused sports field.
I don’t know where we are, and I switch off the engine but leave the radio on. After this, his fingers trembling, the boy undoes my belt and I raise my pelvis as he pulls down my pants.
“You’re really handsome,” he says nervously and pulls my underpants farther down. “Really handsome.”
I briefly catch his eye, and he looks so sad that I grab him round the back of the head and push his face into my groin. He barely knows what to do, his teeth are constantly scratching delicate areas, and he only takes the glans into his mouth, sucking it like he did his milkshake, without using his tongue and paying no attention to the shaft, which he treats mo
re like a door handle. In giving me oral sex, he sounds like a moose injured in a car accident. I ejaculate in his mouth quickly, without warning, and when I hear him swallowing, I guide his head away and fasten my pants.
“Thank you,” he says as I start the engine.
He wipes his mouth on his wrist, the car smells of chlorine, sweaty armpits, moist groin, flesh, and grease. Suddenly I find him amusing; he is revolting, I think, he eats at McDonald’s every day, eats everything he can get his hands on, at home he runs between his messy bedroom and the refrigerator and eats, eats, eats, and eats, stuffs himself full of fat and sugar, licks the plates, the pots and pans clean and slurps up every last drop of his soda, then burps. I can imagine him smuggling packets of cookies, ice-cream cones, bags of chips, boxes of chocolates under his clothes, munching on candy in the dark and hiding the wrappers at the bottom of the trash can.
Without delay, I drive back to the highway, and then he starts sniveling.
“What now?” I ask through a forced smile.
His whimpering erupts into a torrent of sobs, the air bursts out of him in a series of sharp splutters, and he buries his face in his hands, wipes his snotty hands on his shorts, letting the spittle run down his chin and dribble onto his chest.
“You think I’m ugly,” he stammers. “Don’t you?” he continues and looks up at me through weepy eyes.
I stare at the road ahead and put my foot on the gas, I want to get back as quickly as possible, to get rid of this unstable, hysterical person, while at the same time swearing to myself I’ll never again meet up with anyone under twenty.
“Everything’s fine,” I tell him.
Finally the familiar ramp comes into view, and behind that the tower of the gas station rises like a chimney from a house. As I pull up near his bike, he mercifully calms down a little, perhaps there’s a level of comfort in seeing his property again; he will be able to cycle home, where life will continue just as it had before he met me, and one day he will be able to erase this sorry episode from his mind altogether.
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