“Ajshe,” I say sluggishly.
“Quiet!” she shouts in a voice that no longer sounds like her own. “I’ll focus their attention on other things while you’re gone, I’ll ask for extra shifts, we’ll be fine, send me the address of the prison and I’ll come and visit, it’s only thirteen months, Arsim. Thirteen months.”
“I don’t want you to visit, Ajshe.”
“Why not? I’ve heard the conditions in prisons here are very comfortable, you can even study or write, if you want.”
“Yes.”
“You’d like that. You can think of it as a sort of holiday. That’s what you’ve been waiting for, right?”
“That’s not the reason.”
“Then what is it? My sister? Besnik? They’ll understand. Or are you thinking about other people? Don’t worry about other people, I’ll tell them all the same story, nobody will know where you are, and if someone does find out, then I’ll turn my back on them before they get a chance to do so to me, I’ll tell them, get out of my sight, you are nothing to my family.”
“I don’t want…you, this, anymore. I don’t love you, Ajshe. Don’t you see?” I whisper, and once I’ve said it out loud I feel an enormous sense of relief, like lying down in a cool bed after an exhausting day.
For a moment she is quiet at the other end of the phone, and during that silence I imagine the words I have spoken sinking to the bottom of her stomach, wandering along her veins, and settling in her heart and mind. She must have been expecting to hear this for a long time, and now that I’ve said it, placed the words between us, they can never be taken back again.
“Of course you love me,” she replies curtly. “Because if you didn’t love me and the children in some way, you wouldn’t be calling me now. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes,” I say. “I suppose so.”
“Because sometimes love means being with someone, anyone, just so you’re not alone. Nobody deserves the cruelty of loneliness. So I will wait for you, Arsim. Please know that you will be in my thoughts every single second. Call me when you can. Give me the address where I can write to you, visit you, whatever you want.”
This woman never gives up, I think, and I can only hold back the sense of revulsion I feel as she asks: “Is that clear?”
After the call I am led into a police cell to await the following morning, when I will be transported to prison. The cell is gray and windowless, a room battered with bright yellow light, its brick walls full of scrawls of which I don’t understand much. It is the lowliest place I have ever been. In one corner of the room is a small metal sink and toilet bowl, and in the other a thin foam mattress the same color as the light; it is full of holes and smells of old urine. I sit down on it, my knees pulled against my mouth, I feel so horribly cold.
The first hours are the worst. I crack, shout, cry, hit and kick the walls, the sink, the toilet, the mattress, and myself, for nothing and yet for everything. In all my life I have never felt this small, this devastated; the cell is so dismal that I miss my mother, whom I haven’t thought about in ages, and I miss my father too, though I’ve thought about him even less. And I miss Ajshe too, her serenity; she would survive a night like this far better than me, she would be able to remain calm and say exactly the right words to keep herself from losing her mind.
Then the lights are switched off and I hear a lock turn, the fading echo of footsteps. It makes me remember the war years, the days and nights that Ajshe and I spent in front of the television or radio. Those moments that disquiet stole from us, those moments when we were watching the news, one story more desperate than the last, the taste of iron in our mouths, and whenever someone died, whenever a bomb exploded, a house burned down, a building, a village, whenever a gun went off, the silence between us was god stepping into the room. And then we prayed to him, to the god in our house far from home, the god we barely believed in anymore, we asked him, please, save the two of us, let that body be someone else’s sister, someone else’s father, brother, cousin.
And when he finally replied to our prayers and saved us, and someone else’s sister was violently raped, someone else’s brother was murdered, unfamiliar villages were razed to the ground, we felt relieved, lighter somehow, if only for a moment, and Ajshe asked, do you think we are bad people, you and I, for hoping and thinking and feeling things like this?
I couldn’t answer her, because I didn’t know what was acceptable or natural to feel during a war. But I guess it’s one thing to hope these things don’t happen to you and another to wish them on other people.
This continued for weeks, months, years after the war had ended. Regret caught in the throat, rose up to the mouth like potent bile, its taste wouldn’t go away, and guilt took hold of the eyes, making everything its slave, and god wouldn’t leave our house either but wandered from room to room in the air that flowed through the apartment, he hid behind our belongings concealed in cupboards, lurked between the sheets and inside a newly acquired dishwasher, left his role as answerer of prayers and turned into questions we asked ourselves every day in front of the mirror but never dared ask each other.
During that time, how could Ajshe concentrate on what our children were saying, on cooking dinner, cleaning, constantly washing laundry and scrubbing the bathroom? How did she have the energy to open her mouth, get dressed, and take a shower? How did she have the strength to answer their endless questions?
On one occasion Ajshe heard that her cousin had given birth in the middle of the woods, where she and her family had fled. “She lost a lot of blood,” Ajshe said. “But she’ll be fine, the Serbs will never find them in the woods, they’ll never get their hands on that child.”
At times I was envious of her and felt a sense of inferiority at being unable to act in the way she did. I often wondered whether she behaved like this out of sheer lack of emotion or because it was easier to feign indifference, to wake up in the morning, go about her chores, and go to bed lying to herself that what was happening in our homeland wasn’t really true, that it was happening somewhere far beyond these walls, to the people we no longer were. Perhaps she was so tired of violence that she’d become immune to it, that witnessing and experiencing it no longer felt like anything at all.
When I start to feel tired I lie down, wait for the right words, and invite god to my side, because it’s at moments like this that god is supposed to come. But after I have said the few phrases I know to him, he doesn’t come to me after all and I am alone, but it doesn’t make me too sorrowful. Maybe I’ve forgotten how you’re supposed to pray. Or made the mistake of longing for something I have always lived without.
But I still have a lot to wait for, thirteen months to do whatever I want, thirteen months completely to myself. The more I think about it, the more right it feels, the better and brighter the future appears. This is how this was supposed to go, I reason with myself, and the shock of being sent to prison and the thought of my future deportation begin to recede, like an old man making way for his son.
I have more than a year to plan my life, and after that I will return to Pristina, and then I will find him, this is my final thought, I will spend this night here and tomorrow I will sleep somewhere else, and the day after tomorrow I will be closer to him, to the life I want, and before that I can write and write and write, about my mother and father’s life, which was a celebration, or so I’ve been told, about my children and Ajshe too, about that summer and the following autumn when we first came here, the vast amounts of paperwork we had to fill out, about Kosovo and Serbia and the war, Yugoslavia, Tito, about televisions and radios that we only dared switch on in dark, hushed rooms.
* * *
—
That night I dream about snakes: We are still living in Kosovo, Ajshe is pregnant and sick with cancer, and I drive her to the house of an old woman who has accidentally discovered a cure. The woman had been pickling cabbage when,
without her noticing, a small snake wriggled into the preserving jar and suffocated inside it. For weeks it leached its poison into the vinegar water. Preserved cabbage and its brine, rasoj, was a great delicacy for the woman’s gravely ill husband, and the woman wanted to please him by serving it with every meal. To everyone’s astonishment, the man’s condition improved significantly over the next months, until he was free of cancer. A miracle, declared the doctor who had been treating him. Then one morning, as she was scooping the last remains of the cabbage onto her plate, the woman noticed the decayed baby viper dangling from her fork.
But as Ajshe and I arrive, the forest around the old couple’s house begins to burn, someone, or something, has set it aflame, and we have very little time to find the woman. But then she runs out into the yard shouting in panic upon hearing the howl of a fire-breathing kulshedra, she shrieks that we are all going to die, it has torn the sky open and will kill us all, and Ajshe and I hurry back inside the car and drive off, and it moves achingly slowly, almost at a crawl, and screaming people run onto the road, burning alive, and I am forced to drive over them, and the fire is on our heels, licking our toes and singeing our hair, hunting us down, then Ajshe goes into labor and she is in so much pain that she sounds like a flock of cawing crows, and then it pushes its way out, not a baby but a snake, fully grown, flayed and furiously hissing, and Ajshe faints, and I wake up just before it lunges at me from Ajshe’s footwell and sinks its fangs into my neck.
1 DECEMBER 2000
I met the man quite often, he was a doctor, a heart surgeon to be precise. He took me to restaurants and cafés and museums and gave me pocket money as he might his child, and before long he rented a studio apartment for me to use in downtown Belgrade.
The building was in a busy block, and there was a bakery opposite where the same people went in and out every day, the smell of fresh bread and the clink of the cash register carried right up to my apartment on the third floor.
I had a kitchenette and a mattress on the floor and some of the man’s old clothes, they smelled of onion, of the man the doctor hadn’t been for a long time. The room was dark and it was lonely there, though he visited me constantly, after work he would arrive with the weight of the day on his shoulders, dead with fatigue, the patients’ and relatives’ sorrow on his mind, and I thought there is nothing more noble than a concerned doctor and it was my job to push his weariness aside, to flush his worries down the drain, to be useful and good to him so that he would have the strength to get up again in the morning, to care, to heal, to revive, to operate.
Sometimes when his wife and children were out of town, he invited me to his home, a two-story detached house on the banks of the Danube. Sometimes I even spent the night there. It was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen, a fabled land.
I loved him, god how I loved him, he was perfect and bulky and hairy as a gorilla. I made love with him, caressed him, massaged him, I did whatever he asked of me because he never forced me to do anything, that was the best of all, I licked his armpits and groin all over, he liked that and he liked me and I liked the fact that he liked it, and of course I liked him too. He resembled my father.
What do you want to do with your life, he once asked me, and I couldn’t answer him, and I was ashamed that I hadn’t given a thought to life after him, it was stupid, of course, spectacularly so, because the war was already knocking on our doors, waiting in locked basements and dark alleys, shaking hands with men in suits.
I am leaving Serbia, I can’t bear watching this never-ending feud any longer, he informed me, and I collapsed because now I knew for sure that one day he would no longer be there, I’m going to Denmark, I’m going to start working at a hospital there, he told me, and I cried against his sturdy chest saying, please stay, please please don’t leave, don’t ever leave, and again he said, hey, kiddo, in that familiar way he had, tell me what you want to do with your life, I need to know because I’ll be leaving soon, and all that came out of my mouth was I want to be just like you, that’s right, exactly like you.
Is there anything else you’d like to do, he asked, running his rough fingers along my back. No, there’s nothing else, I assured him and cried some more, I wanted to sink my nails into his back, transform myself into his skin or one of his eyes, will you take me with you, I heard myself ask, and he said it would be impossible, you know that, you know why, yes, I said, yes I suppose I do.
Kiddo, he said again, kiddo, kiddo, the word steamed from his mouth, in that case I’ll make a few phone calls, okay, but you can’t tell anyone about me or about us, he said firmly, you can never tell anyone about me, about us, ever, and I said of course I wouldn’t tell anyone, not under any circumstances, never ever, that much I can promise you, we can never talk about this to anyone because nobody would understand, isn’t that right, and the next day, after making a few calls, he told me I would be starting medical studies in Pristina the following autumn, did you hear that, at the University of Pristina, there’s a little apartment there ready for you too.
At that I started laughing at him and I suppose there must have been a touch of mockery in my laughter because the idea was so ridiculous, you can’t become a doctor just like that, especially not someone like me, I told him and shook my head, then he gripped me and shouted, KIDDO, you can be whatever you want to be, there’s room in this world for all kinds of doctors, remember that, you can become anything at all, he held my head in place with his enormous hands, be hardworking and don’t give up, he said urgently, and that moment, he said, the moment that at first seems impossible, you know when you’re convinced there’s nothing to be done, you’ve experienced it, haven’t you, he asked and I dutifully nodded because I had experienced it many times, that’s the best moment, he said, the BEST, believe it, I’ve seen it in sick people and in healthy people, in myself and those close to me, faced with death a person is as close to the radiance of life as can be—remember this when you’re ready to give up, because then you really are at your best; a lack of options is in fact a multitude of possibilities.
Promise me that you’ll go to Pristina, he said, his hands still cupped round my head as if it were a chestnut.
say it, he insisted, and I said very well and cried some more and some more, I’m sorry
don’t apologize, but say after me, “I will be a doctor,” and so I said I will be a doctor
say after me, “I am hardworking,” and so I said that too, I am hardworking, I am hardworking
promise me you’ll never tell anyone about yourself or about us, about who I am or who you are, promise you’ll keep yourself to yourself and not cause trouble or prompt the wrong kinds of questions, that you won’t make a spectacle of yourself, you know this but I’ll say it anyway just to be sure, kiddo, don’t trust anybody, do your exams, promise me, promise, and I sobbed that I promise you all these things, very well, I will go to Pristina I will be a doctor I promise
I love you, the words echoed in the room, and it didn’t matter which of us said it because those words were true—
and then he released his grip on me and left, and I never saw him again, but he accompanied me everywhere, a divine presence, he was there in the documents he gave me, in the handwriting on my new school certificates, in the scent that never fades from his clothes
I thought I would never meet anyone like him again but
then I met you
9
2003–2004
The prison is massive and modern. It reminds me of a large, sleeping octopus; the buildings surrounded with electric fencing are like tentacles extending out from the watchtower. In my ten-square-meter cell there is a window that can be opened, and though there are concrete bars in front of it at least it means I can air the cell and bring in the smell of the rain and forests. I have a bed, a desk, a toilet cubicle with a sink and a small cupboard for hygiene products, and I learn that if I behave well, I might even get a te
levision. A television!
I am given a sack containing dark gray clothes, sweaters and T-shirts, pants, shoes, sandals, socks and underpants, sheets, a toothbrush—nothing excessive. They also give me a set of plastic cutlery and a lunchbox with a lid.
We fetch food from the kitchen and eat in our cells, not all together, as I had imagined. It’s best like this, I think as I eat my first meal, rice with chicken sauce, so that the inmates don’t spend too much time with one another, plotting things together. The next day we have potatoes and ground-beef sauce, on the third day soup with toasted bread, on the fourth pasta with sauce.
Wake-up is at six a.m., breakfast usually consists of porridge, sandwiches with sliced sausage and cheese, and coffee, and after that we start work at seven. I work in the laundry. It’s simple, easy work. We wash the prisoners’ clothes and sheets, then place the cleaned items in numbered bags that the prisoners collect at the end of the day. We have lunch at eleven, after which we return to work for a while.
At three p.m. we have two hours’ free time; we can go outside into the yard, play table tennis, football, or basketball, even go to the gym. Then it’s time for our evening meal, and after that the cell doors are locked at around eight p.m., to wait until the next morning when it will all start over again. The days are so similar that after a while you can barely tell them apart.
All this aside, the place isn’t so bad, and it’s hard to imagine that it’s a prison at all because the conditions are significantly more pleasant than the place where Ajshe and I spent months as refugees after our years in Pristina, and far nicer than the bleak reception center where we spent our first year in this country—here we can have hobbies, we can work, spend time together, and we have more than enough food.
The guards trust us, they take us at our word, and scuffles are rare because everybody seems content. I never hear anyone complaining about maltreatment, and only rarely does anyone express discontent out loud. Longing is mostly reserved for children and wives and parents waiting at home, and hardly ever for freedom, for going to amusement parks or the movies, going for walks in the woods or the park, visiting restaurants or driving around in the car, though many people probably miss these things too.
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