But he doesn’t move to open the door and again asks me if I think he is ugly. I do think he’s ugly, and I feel like asking him why he sent misleading pictures of himself and assured me he was different from how he is in real life, and as he presses me for an answer a third time I become so enraged that I reach across, open his door, and start pushing him out of the car.
“Go home,” I shout, and he is so startled by my outburst that he clambers out of the car, shuts the door, and scuttles off toward his bike.
And there he remains. As I pull away, I glance in his direction and see his hunched back, his arms wrapped round his stomach, his tearstained cheeks drooping beneath his closed eyes.
In the days that follow he sends me dozens of text messages:
I’m sorry I lied to you.
I knew I wouldn’t be good enough as myself.
That’s why I sent those pictures.
I’m sorry you don’t think I’m attractive.
I can’t help it.
I’m sorry I’m so fat.
I was wearing bad clothes.
I’ve got nicer ones.
Much nicer ones.
I’ll do whatever you want.
Please answer.
I’m sorry. Can you just answer?
You’re so handsome.
I promise I’ll lose weight.
Can I see you?
I want you to be my boyfriend.
Can you say something?
Are you even getting these messages?
We can do what we did in the car again, every day.
If you want.
No pressure.
Every day, loads of times.
As often as you want.
OK?
OK?
Can we meet today?
Or tomorrow?
As often as you want.
Many times a day.
I liked it.
You don’t have to do anything in return.
Because I love you.
Do you get it?
I love you.
Answer me!
Can you just answer me?
* * *
—
A week later the police turn up at my workplace. At first they are shown to my supervisor, who then leads them to my workstation. As I see them approaching, it feels as though the entire factory falls silent, the cutting machines turn cold, and my colleagues move more stiffly, as if making space for what happens next.
Upon seeing the police, the natural instinct for someone like me is to run away, but if you can’t do that, the mind starts fleeing instead, traversing moments chiseled with despair and remorse, unrepented deeds and sins that corrode the mind, and at times those moments are so broken and full of misery, so far in the past, that the mind forgets to return, and I find myself unable to hear what it is the officers are asking me.
This is the most humiliating thing that has ever happened to me, is the first thought once my mind is finally able to form them again, but as the police lead me out of the building, across the factory floor, and through countless doors and corridors, the shame quickly fades: this life, I tell myself and close my eyes as if I no longer needed them, this life ends now.
29 NOVEMBER 2000
Belgrade is a beautiful city, drenched in disinfectant.
When I arrived I had so much money, and because I had so much money I thought I owned everything, the restaurants, the cafés, and shops because I could eat and drink and buy whatever I wanted, and there was so much money that paper money seemed to multiply into more paper money and coins, so that eventually I didn’t need to count it anymore.
Until there came a point when I didn’t have any money, suddenly I was homeless, I was about to freeze, to be robbed of what little I still had.
How stupid we can be when we have plenty, how blind we are to luxury. I don’t know of anything more aggravating than the belly flop that follows when you realize you’re prepared to do anything, say anything at all to retrieve just a fraction of what was once so abundant.
It was then that I had to start talking to god, though I’d never believed in him: god give me a reason to be here AND help me I beg you AND I know I’ve never spoken your name in the way I’m speaking it now
surely that means something too—
and god knew what I left unsaid: that if he didn’t hear me at my most desperate he would never hear from me again
isn’t it bizarre that even people of no faith still invoke god
in a moment of need—
And so god gave me a reason: god gave me him. God brought him to me, sat him down on a Belgrade park bench on the greenest day of summer, and made him say hello to me as I walked past. You there, god’s creation called out, and I turned only to be impressed by his heroic body, alongside which my own body looked like a trampled leaf next to a majestic oak tree, and he had rugged, chiseled arms too, his face pointed forward like the hood of a truck.
sit down—that’s what he said to me,
sit down
I walked right up to him, because that’s what you do when a man like that beckons you over, and once I was close I first wanted to immortalize him, to scratch him into a tree, his wide nose and large, drooping ears, his sharp chin and bulging eyes, his thick, silken black hair like the bristles of a brush, his shovel hands and canoe feet in black, stretched leather shoes, and quivering I asked him, who are you, did god send you, did you come here at god’s command, and the man remained silent and gave me an enigmatic smile, and when I finally sat down next to him, adrift from myself, my eyes swollen, I asked him again: is it you, can it really be you, so you finally decided to come—
and the man simply smiled, placed a forefinger beneath my chin, and said
“hey, kiddo”
8
2003
I am interrogated several times. Different officers ask me the same questions, and I do my best to always respond in the same way. Yes, we wrote to each other online and we decided to meet in person, we had a bite to eat at a hamburger restaurant and after that we drove somewhere discreet and he gave me oral sex in the car, yes, I admit that’s what happened but I didn’t force him to do anything, it can’t be a crime if he wanted it to happen, he suggested it to me himself as I was driving him back to the gas station where he’d left his bike.
I deny guilt for what I am accused of, and at every opportunity I try to remind the authorities that the boy told me he was seventeen, not fourteen, that he looked much older, but none of this matters, they tell me I should have known, asked to see his ID. He is just a child and cannot be held responsible for his actions, they say, juveniles have no idea what they are doing, and from their reactions to my attempts to defend myself I learn not to argue with them, as I can feel I’m only making the situation worse by telling them that he sent me text messages after our meeting too, messages in which he said he loved me, wanted me to be his boyfriend.
I am assigned a lawyer, who seems reluctant to represent me. He is a man younger than me, in his late twenties and still inexperienced, I guess, because he looks at me in a way that is reserved only for certain kinds of people. People like me. People for whom it isn’t appropriate to feel anything. He has a transcript of the full correspondence between me and the boy, the situation isn’t looking good, I know that, and from our conversations I expect there is no doubt that I will be found guilty and that my lawyer will try to negotiate the most lenient sentence on my behalf, it might even be mitigated by the fact that I’m a first-time offender, and apparently my case would be viewed more favorably if I admitted guilt and showed remorse.
Throughout the weeks of investigation, I am angry and absentminded, I cannot control myself and can’t express my thoughts clearly, I refuse the interpreter they offer me,
as though someone else has taken my place and I am merely following this other person’s actions from the side. I lash out at my children and pull their hair for the smallest reasons, I hit Ajshe too because she infuriates me by constantly asking what I’m doing, about the upcoming weekend, the next week, and the following month, always double-checking our schedules, talking, talking incessantly. I park my car wherever I want, I don’t care, and in the evenings I often drive out to the same gas station where we first met, in the hope that I might see the boy again so that I could knock his teeth down his throat, punch his nose until it is broken and deformed, run him over, and drive away.
Sometimes I give in to my temptations and sign in to the chat room again, though I know I mustn’t and shouldn’t, that the authorities can trace every click of my computer. After scrolling through the list of nicknames online and noting that there’s no sign of the boy, I start chatting with the other users in disappointment. Some of them want to meet up and have sex in a car or somewhere in the forest, a cheap hotel, others just send me suggestive messages, and others ask me to exchange photographs and masturbate with them on the webcam, and sometimes I agree.
In the weeks before the trial, I keep coming back to a thought I first heard from my father a long time ago. He once said it’s good to experience misery and distress, because only misery and distress can prepare you for the day when misery and distress return, because it always happens, he said; they always come back.
* * *
—
“The world is rotten,” I say to Ajshe one morning.
“Yes, Arsim, it is,” she replies, lifts a box of eggs and a frying pan onto the kitchen counter, and sits down opposite me.
“I stole a doll from a store last week,” she says slowly, a hint of fear in her voice. “Drita was crying for one as though she was deranged and lay down on the floor in the middle of the toy department!” Ajshe exclaims. “You should have seen her, goodness it was embarrassing, she refused to let go of that damned doll. So I stole it, I stuffed it beneath a pile of clothes and went into the changing room pretending to try on some dresses and sweaters, and there I opened the packet, slipped the doll into my bag, left the rubbish beneath the pile of clothes in the booth, and walked out.”
Then Ajshe begins to cry.
“I’m sorry,” she says, blowing her nose into a scrap of tissue. “But it was terribly expensive. And she played with the doll for a few hours, then forgot all about it,” Ajshe continues, shaking her head and apologizing again. “I’ve been really nervous and on edge recently. Why might that be?” she asks.
I look helplessly in her eyes, which alternate between guilt, shame, and anger.
“What do you think? Should we move back to Kosovo?” she asks after a moment’s silence. “The children are still small,” she argues, and I am certain she has heard about my arrest from her sister.
“I really don’t know,” she continues the conversation with herself. “Did you hear they’ve started paying people to go back to their homeland? It’s not much apparently, but you’ll get by for a little while, possibly even long enough to get your life in order. We could rent a big apartment in Pristina, I could look for work there too. Besides, at this time of year the price of watermelon is ridiculously low, here they’re not nearly as sweet…”
I interrupt her and tell her I met up with a young woman I came across on the internet and that now I’m being accused of a crime, the sexual abuse of a minor. I tell her the girl said she was seventeen, I didn’t know she was fourteen, it’s a serious crime here, then I tell her about the gas station, the authorities, the interrogations and all the details, the upcoming trial, all this flows from my mouth like a shopping list, like an account of what I got up to that day, and when I finish Ajshe looks out of the window at the three apartment buildings opposite, identical copies of our own, the strip of brightening sky where the clouds have gathered in military formation, and the few trees standing in the yard like soldiers.
“What? Is it money the damn girl’s after?” Ajshe asks angrily. “Surely she knows we haven’t got much money?”
“I don’t know,” I reply.
“Then we can’t leave yet.” She sighs calmly, without looking at me, folds the tissue in her fist, calmly stands up, throws it in the garbage, and turns on the stove and slides the pan across the burner, breaking the silence that gradually fills with the growing crackle of eggs frying in the slowly warming pan.
* * *
—
The trial takes place in a court that resembles a school classroom, and there are only a fistful of people present as the case is heard behind closed doors. The judge sits in front of us, a pile of paperwork on his desk, behind him are a few framed photographs of lakeside scenery, and us, the accusers and the accused, both with their legal representatives; we are sitting in front of him on long benches as though we were in church. I’m not sure why I’m surprised to notice that, instead of the boy himself, it’s his parents who have come to the courtroom, looking angry and humiliated. I guess I had hoped to see the boy again, hoped that my seeing him or his seeing me would help bring all this madness to an end.
A woman wearing glasses and a black pantsuit is sitting with her arms folded, and beside her sits a man in a dark gray sweater and black jeans, blushing, almost as though he were trying to hide behind the woman. They don’t look like the boy’s parents at all, they don’t even look like parents, let alone a former married couple, but as though they have suddenly awoken to find they have a shared child. They don’t so much as glance at me throughout the hearing, though I constantly try to make eye contact with them.
The atmosphere is so tense that everything hurtles past me; it all happens as if by itself. I am strangely indifferent to the proceedings and almost can’t fully understand what the judge is saying, the heated summation by the prosecutor or my own lawyer’s defense plea, and it feels as though I am following a concert or the life of a complete stranger from inside my car; again I become inconspicuous, a framed photograph on the wall of a room filled with legal jargon.
The prosecutor, a relatively manly woman in her fifties who speaks in a strong, resonant voice, froths for a while, then the judge says something, and my lawyer gesticulates and grimaces as if he is ashamed and doesn’t want to be here, steadies himself against the edge of the table and nervously fidgets with the papers on the desk, he seems stupid and helpless and woefully underprepared for my case, then the judge says something else and soon it’s all over, the charges are read, the guilty party is sentenced, and justice is served.
How can they do this, I wonder, how can they compress so many people’s fates into a handful of convoluted sentences?
I burst out laughing. I can’t help it. I don’t know where it comes from, but that’s what happens. Everybody, the judge, the boy’s parents, the prosecutor, and my lawyer look at me with unbridled disdain, in the same way that I imagine I would look at them in a similar situation, and I do everything I can to try to suppress my emotions, but it just makes things worse so I allow the gale of laughter to erupt freely.
For some reason I think of ridiculous, irrelevant things, like the boy, now a victim of gross sexual abuse, tripping over his shoelaces and starting to cry about the ice cream now flattened beneath his stomach, then I imagine my daughter and how one day when we were in the park she called an old man walking past an idiot, it came out of nowhere, and how delicious a situation it was because she had never used that word before, and I think of my younger son, whom I once placed on the mechanical horse in the shopping mall, and I looked at his smile, at the boundless joy that shone from his eyes as he looked back at me, a man he didn’t even know, a man to whom his happiness should mean everything, and it pained me how little that boy knew about his father.
I have brought three children into this world, each of whom I have probably tainted forever, I think, and the thought snaps my laugh
ter’s neck asunder.
I made them, I brought them here.
I am going to prison, it hits me, you have been sentenced to thirteen months’ incarceration, they repeat this to me, and the court finds my crime and “case”—this is the word they use—so serious that once I have served my sentence I will be deported from the country, I hear them decree.
“Good.” The word escapes my mouth accompanied by a strange sneer, and when they inform me that I can appeal the decision in the higher court, I tell them I don’t want to, that I accept the ruling.
* * *
—
Only once I have relinquished my personal effects am I allowed to phone Ajshe, and when I have told her I am in police custody, about to go to prison, that I won’t be coming home for some while, at least thirteen months, that I can’t understand how this happened, I hear her swear—for the first time ever.
“Dreqi të hangt,” she says. “May the Devil eat you,” she repeats in a voice that is as sad as it is furious.
“I’m sorry,” I reply. “I don’t know what to say.”
She is breathing so heavily, so deeply, that I think she must be gathering the strength to say she never wants to see me again, that she wants to continue her life with the children, to move on without me, that this is the last time we will ever speak.
“I’ll tell the children you’ve gone on holiday,” she informs me after a short pause. “No. I’ll tell them you’ve gone to Kosovo to build us a house, Arsim, they are still small, don’t worry about it, they won’t remember this when they grow up, at their age thirteen months is nothing, you know how children’s minds work, time is different for them than for us. It passes painfully slowly, but a moment later they can’t remember a single thing about it.”
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