To Ajshe, however, I say the exact opposite: don’t come here, it’s terrible, I don’t want you to see me in a place like this, I don’t want you to have memories from here, and so she never visits me. She assures me that the children believe the lies she has told them about me. On the phone she sounds relatively relaxed, repeating the same words of comfort, though I sense she knows that my expressions of concern aren’t genuine, that in the words we send each other along the phone lines there is the same distance that has always existed between us, large enough to fit an ocean. I call her during the initial months after my sentencing, then the calls dry up altogether.
The inmates here don’t seem to consider their time in prison humiliating; that’s perhaps the greatest surprise to me, as in Kosovo being sent to jail brings profound shame upon the entire family, and the only way to fully shake off that shame is to make a public display of shutting the felon out of the family. The offender’s parents generally end up denying their child, he becomes nothing but air, and you cannot talk with him, because you cannot talk with thin air. Instead, people say, unfortunately he got mixed up with the wrong crowd and ended up in prison, and it’s the right place for a scoundrel like that, he will never be forgiven for his deeds, he will have to answer to Allah, the doors of whose kingdom will be eternally shut to him, that is his punishment and it’s a good thing too, let the cur burn in hell through all eternity and think about whether it was really worth it.
In Kosovo, prisons are places where the living wish they were dead. Yet prisoners, once they are released, are unable to return to a normal life and often wish only to go back inside. Though the cells are tiny and cramped, though there’s little food and the shower, toilet, and kitchen facilities are dilapidated, and though the guards and the stronger prisoners will eat the weaker ones alive, prison is still a sort of home, because there is no place for a former convict in the outside world where everybody knows your name, your unforgivable deed.
Back there, someone being sent to prison is better off taking their own life. Why suffer in prison first, live in fear of others and among all that havoc only to end up condemned for all eternity? If you kill yourself before going to prison, there is still a chance of forgiveness, maybe god will not consider your crime as reprehensible as the living do, maybe god will see farther, understand why someone was selling drugs or weapons, why they robbed and raped, maybe in someone who commits suicide god can see bravery and self-respect, maybe he will reassess the offender’s sentence and in the best scenario release them of their sins.
Here, when the cells are locked for the night the inmates chat out of the windows, share their news and comment on TV shows as though they were part of a reality into which they will return after serving their time. The bars across the windows are far enough apart to fit a packet of cigarettes, the prison’s currency, which the prisoners use as stakes when playing chess or table tennis. The inmates use shoes to smuggle items to different floors: the laces are tied together and the shoe is lowered or hoisted from one floor to another.
An elderly man lives in the cell next to me. He and I sometimes talk in the evenings, though I mostly keep myself to myself because I’m not in the mood for conversation. He tells me he has been convicted for fraud.
“Always tell people you were convicted of fraud, it’s a running joke in this place,” he says, and when I tell him I was convicted of fraud too, he laughs.
“False accounting, right?”
“False accounting.”
If you are friendly and respectful toward the other inmates, you are left in peace. You have to be invisible in a way that’s natural, that fits your character. If you look as though you’re not thinking about anything, you try to blend in with the wallpaper and move around the common areas without looking at other people, you’ll get off lightly. I stop smoking too, because I don’t want to carry anything around that someone else might want from me. I’ve been thinking this might be a good principle for everyone: don’t own or look like you own anything that someone else might covet. I don’t try to get to know the others, I don’t have opinions on anything, and I don’t take part in the group therapy sessions, anger-management courses, or the traditional barbecue parties. I even pretend to speak their language worse than I really do.
I try to write in the evenings, but it’s hard without having anything to read. I don’t understand this language well enough to get anything out of reading their books, so I bring up the matter when I visit the prison warden to talk about how my time here is going. It turns out he is himself an avid reader, and when I tell him I used to study literature in Pristina we end up discussing the books we have read and how he always dreamed of studying literature too and writing a book but ended up studying public administration instead.
“That’s life,” he surmises. “We rarely get to do what we really want.”
“That’s true,” I reply.
“Give me a list of the books you’d like to read, and I’ll see what I can do,” he says after I complain that the only books in English in the prison library are thrillers and romances.
“Really?” I ask, astonished.
“Absolutely,” he replies.
I excitedly write down a list of literary classics. If I give him the impression that I only read books that have changed the world, books from which we can learn something important and educate ourselves, perhaps he will think of me more favorably, perhaps he’ll see me as more than just a criminal.
Less than a week later all the books I asked for arrive. The Tin Drum, The Magic Mountain, and Death in Venice, The Stranger, Giovanni’s Room, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, Crime and Punishment and The Hours.
Though these novels are all somewhat similar, most of them tales of men or boys whose lives are upturned in the most incredible and tragic ways, they bring me a great deal of joy.
After lockdown, I push earplugs deep into my ears and read. Every so often the warden asks what I think about the books, and I tell him I’m enjoying them immensely. I dare not answer honestly and tell him what I really think, how I am envious of those writers, both of their ability to imagine such stories and worlds and their skill at being able to translate those thoughts into written form, into flowing, beautiful, aromatic text, into words wrapping other words inside them, endlessly.
In their words, a writer can live on in the most honorable way. As I read the books that have been brought in especially for me, I can’t help but wonder at the time I’ve wasted these past years, at how little I have read considering how much I enjoy reading.
I try to write something every day, but my sentences feel soulless and the texts I put together don’t bring to life someone who could be real, someone with whom a reader might identify, and don’t at all conjure up the world I am trying to depict. I try to develop a couple of stories—a soldier in the KLA disguises himself as a Serb; a young boy seeks revenge after witnessing the murder of his parents and plans to take matters into his own hands; a greedy weapons dealer ends up shooting himself—but none of the characters I create speaks to me deeply enough to make me want to tell their story, and what I manage to get down on paper doesn’t match the imagination in which I dip my pen.
Instead, I write about myself and my own life as I would a diary. I start with my childhood, my first memories of a time when my greatest worry was being late for school or a meeting with a friend, a time when you take pleasure in life in a way it’s impossible to experience as an adult—I write about that incredible ability to let go, to become excited about something and wait impatiently for tomorrow, and the moment when you realize that skill has gone forever.
I write about my youth, when even the smallest adversity felt like the end of the world, a bad grade in geometry class like a slap in the face. I write about the disappointment when, as an adult, you suddenly ask yourself, was this it? How was this life—the world’s cruelest lie—so different from the st
ories that attempt to imitate it, that encourage us to stick it out from one tragedy to the next. For most people, the world is a forest raging with fire; there is more destruction than reconstruction, and although there are more people than ever, somehow there’s less life now than before.
Writing isn’t particularly liberating, but it helps me kill time and tolerate the loneliness. My notebook doesn’t get close to full, though I write in a broad hand that takes up space, about my life, its successes, its losses. My accomplishment, a notebook crumpled around the edges in which entire lives intersect with one another for a few dozen pages, is a pathetic sight.
I once read somewhere that there’s a downside to a dream come true, because once it becomes real, the dreamer has given the dream away. It made me pensive, even slightly saddened, because I started to think that people should be afraid of their dreams, especially of them coming true. If the value of dreams is in the dreaming itself, what is a dream worth once it’s realized? What value is there in a book, if when it’s published it is nothing but a dream that the author has given away?
* * *
—
Amid all of this, I think a lot about Miloš. That feeling when I looked him in the eyes, that curious combination of distance and proximity, the uncertainty about whether he was looking back at me or at something behind me. I wonder what kind of life he is living right now, whether he is working somewhere as a doctor, a surgeon, like he always wanted, or maybe he is running a private clinic, he has his own house, a yard, and a garden only a short walk from the water’s edge, everything he always talked about. I think of the way he had of picking up a plate, his pincer-like fingers, that summer and that final night to which I have returned every day since, that I have relived in my mind over and over and over.
I try to imagine the moment I meet him again, we bump into each other by accident in front of his workplace or in the street; I wonder what that moment might be like, the moment when he sees me and I see him again after all these years, do we kiss there and then, in the entrance to the hospital or amid the traffic, would we dare, at the same kind of junction where I first saw him, or do we just hug each other and go somewhere for a quiet coffee, to a restaurant for dinner, and only after that do we go to my place or to his apartment, we take hold of each other as though no time had passed at all, we don’t necessarily even talk to each other, we don’t let go, and everything between us is taken for granted, written out: he and I in a house that is ours, a place where no one disturbs us, and there is a wide, princely bed where we spend every night together, rooms where, over time, our belongings migrate, spreading out like a metropolis.
6 DECEMBER 2000
I arrived in Pristina one June afternoon years ago. Everything will start in Kosovo, I told myself, here I will be a doctor, I said there at the heart of the trampled city, crushed at the legs.
A doctor.
A surgeon.
A heart surgeon.
The locals were wild and beside themselves…the soldiers and their guns and equipment were like drizzle—kill or die, it seemed as if everyone was saying to one another, as though every Serb and every Albanian had sensed what was about to happen, as though even I had known it, known that one day
we kill or we die
* * *
—
I walked from the bus station to the address the man had given me, slowly, as though through a nocturnal jungle, I knocked at the door, told the Albanian man who opened up my name and showed him the papers I’d been given. I had never even met an Albanian, at least I’d never knowingly spoken to one, I’d only heard about them, mostly hellish stories, and I was so petrified with fear that I was prepared for anything.
I’ve been expecting you, said the Albanian; it turned out he was very friendly and immediately beckoned me into his home, which was beautiful and immense, almost a sibling of the house of the man I loved and had left in Belgrade, welcome, said the Albanian and asked me to sit down at a brass table, and I felt like an imposter, an orphan; after all, that’s what I was.
The man handed me a stack of papers, which I signed with my initials M.M., he gave me various documents from the University of Pristina, then he gave me an envelope and the keys to my future home, it’s very close, he told me, walking distance from the university, it’ll be easy to find your way to lectures.
Then the man took me to the apartment, you know where, the one on the second floor, opposite the bakery, the one that looked like the cell of a shriveled, forgotten saint. I’ve given you everything that was agreed, he said, remember to be careful round here, a Serb in an Albanian mosque, and when he left, the apartment shrank into a cage trapping a tiger cub away from its mother.
Nobody knows anything about me unless I tell them myself, I thought that first night, and I was about to lose my mind, this is an awful place and city, poor and diminutive, I thought the following night and shouted into my pillow, but the third night, and the fourth, and all the nights after that were easier, more gentle, and I dreamed a lot: in one dream there were tigers dotted across a town square, languidly taking in the sun as the people looked on; in another they prowled the streets, erratically smashing windows, pulling up bushes and plants in frustration and wildly breaking locks; in a third they fomented terror by frightening children for the sheer malicious joy of it.
I opened the envelope, which was full of money. With it was a note in which the man asked me to promise the things I had already promised him, is he still going on about these things, I wondered as I folded the note and slid it back into the envelope, because I have already moved far away from him, and he even farther from me; he didn’t know the conniving brute that would become of me here.
10
2004
I am told I will be released a few months early due to good behavior.
A week before the end of my sentence I meet the prison warden for the last time. He asks me how I would like to take care of the practicalities of my deportation. Does your wife know about this, will she be waiting for you? What about your children, do they know their father is coming home for a while? Do you have any suitcases to pack up your things? Did you know you can take two large suitcases with you and one piece of hand luggage? Do you have an apartment in Kosovo, somewhere to stay? What about work? Or money, then?
I feel bad having to say no to almost every question. I avoid eye contact with him, and the only thing I’d like to tell him is that I would rather go straight to the airport. I am ashamed, my clothes feel disgusting, damp and warm.
“This must be very difficult,” he says sympathetically.
“I’ll return the books,” I manage to say.
“You can take them with you if you want,” he says and clears his throat.
“No, I can’t take them,” I reply.
“Yes, you can, with my permission,” he tells me.
“I’m sorry, but they are very heavy and I don’t have enough room for them,” I reply. “But it’s a kind thought.”
“Very well.”
Then he informs me that my flight via Budapest to Pristina will depart the next day and that I will be driven home to pack before that.
“That’s how I have arranged things,” he says.
“Thank you.”
“So you might want to let your wife know,” he then says pointedly, as though he knows I haven’t told Ajshe anything.
“Yes.”
After this, the warden explains, I will be transported to the police station, where I will spend one night, after which two plainclothes police officers will escort me all the way to Pristina, they will fly with me and set me free only once we have landed. It seems a bit over-the-top, because there’s no way I could possibly escape while we’re ten kilometers in the air, and I almost feel like asking whether I could travel alone, without giving outsiders the chance to speculate as to why I am being escorted—it would only fri
ghten the other passengers, especially the children. In my mind I promise him I won’t try anything, that I will return to Pristina in a spirit of cooperation.
“Good,” I reply instead and take a deep breath.
My hands begin to sweat, and then, all of a sudden, I slump, powerless, a limpness spreading through my body like the taste of spicy food through my mouth, while I try to do everything I can to retain my posture. The warden hands me a tissue, which I use to hide my wet face and press against my eyes, and it’s as if there’s no end to the trickle of tears welling from them.
“Oh dear,” says the warden. “I’m sorry.”
“No,” I mumble from behind my fingers. “I am sorry. Thank you,” I continue and reveal my swollen, red, throbbing face.
“It’s all right,” says the warden. “I’m sure this must be difficult.”
“I…I could take the books after all.”
“Good,” he replies and stands up from behind his desk, then I stand up too, and he walks in front of me and offers me his hand, which I grip, pulling him closer, turning his handshake into a half embrace, which then turns into a kiss that I place on his right cheek.
He pushes me away slightly, stares at me in bewilderment for a moment, then lowers his eyes to my cheeks and lips, and at that his expression changes and becomes more serious, and after this he looks me in the eyes again, my eyes gleaming just as his do, and eventually he kisses me on the right cheek too.
* * *
—
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