“I live over here,” says the man and indicates the door to his own room, looking down at the sandals next to it. “And this room is for rent,” he continues, turns his head in the other direction, and sticks his forefinger and middle finger into his pocket to pull out a heavy key ring.
He opens the door, and the smell of wet wood surges out of the apartment. I step inside; the room is dark and damp, like the mouth of someone out of breath, the floor is covered in brown patterned carpet, and in front of the windows is a set of curtains in a matching shade of brown, in one corner stands a wobbly chest of drawers and in the other a chair brought in from the yard, in front of which is a small desk. In the middle of the room is an old wooden sofa bed, its mattress covered in stains and spatter.
“This’ll be a hundred euros a month,” he informs me from the corridor, and I turn and look at him standoffishly.
“I’ll pay seventy euros, you can have the first month up front and the next month’s rent on the final day of the previous month.”
“Eighty-five,” he says. “This is downtown.”
“Seventy. Otherwise I’ll walk right out of here.”
“Seventy euros,” the man repeats and closes his eyes, as though disappearing for a moment into calculations of everything he could do with that sum of money. It’s a lot round here. “Very well. Seventy it is,” he finally agrees.
I turn my back to take two notes out of my wallet, then turn around and hand them to him.
“Thank you,” he says and stuffs the notes into his back pocket, takes two keys from the key ring, and drops them in my hand.
I don’t stay to look around but go back to the café to pick up my belongings. The familiar waiter is sitting at a table in the empty café and appears happy to see me. He fetches my suitcases and I give him the money I promised. On the way back to the house, the suitcases no longer seem to weigh anything. I empty them, put my things in the chest of drawers and the closet, then wrap the mattress, the covers, and pillows in quality foreign sheets. They still smell of the detergent Ajshe always preferred, lavender and vanilla.
I sit down at the little desk and call Ajshe. I don’t feel nervous until the phone starts ringing; at the sound of the first ring I spit out the glob of phlegm that has suddenly formed in my throat, by the second ring my heart is beating frantically and my entire body starts to tremble, by the third I find it hard to hold the phone in place at my ear, and by the fourth ring I know she’s not going to answer, and then the call is connected to the answering machine where I leave a message, wondering whether these might be the last words I ever say to her.
“Hi. I’ve arrived safely and I’m doing fine.”
* * *
—
For the first few weeks I barely leave my room. I keep the curtains closed and lie on the bed. I sleep, wake up, sleep, drink some water, try to eat some cookies and potato chips, and occasionally I drag myself to the store to buy canned goulash, coffee beans, and fresh white bread that goes moldy before I manage to eat it all. When I realize I don’t have a coffee mill, I feel frustrated and throw the coffee beans in the trash, and for a moment everything feels pointless, wasted.
I start to stink. I start to deteriorate. I start hearing voices, words whispered in my ear in different languages, taps at the window, children shouting, scratching sounds beneath the bed. At times they sound like human voices, at others like animals, and all at once I’m sure there is a tall, skinny figure standing in the corner of the room looking at me, but then it turns out to be the wardrobe, the chair, or the clothes draped over its back. Sometimes I even talk to it, and I greet it first then ask it to leave, and it obeys me, slides beneath the carpet or seeps out through the gaps in the window frame.
Behxhet leaves early in the morning and returns at eight in the evening, quickly prepares himself some food, and locks himself in his room, watches television for a few hours until he falls asleep, then the cycle starts over again. I feel exhausted by his daily routine, at how similar each day is, the same meals, the same TV shows, the same clothes, every single day.
I cry in the mornings, I cry during the day, I cry in the evenings and at night, on my way to the park opposite, on the park bench and as I cross the street on the way home, I can’t make it stop. I visit the store, I cry there too, I buy a coffee mill, rummage in the trash for the coffee beans I threw away, and enjoy a cup of coffee, but the day after that I don’t get out of bed until the evening, and the next day, and the next.
It takes a while before I get used to the lack of things to do, the absence of human touch, before I understand where I am living, before I stop shouting through the nightmares or fumbling at the air when I wake up at the spot where I imagine Ajshe or my children to be.
One evening, Behxhet knocks on my door, and I realize it must be the last day of the month. When I open the door, he looks at me from head to toe, baffled.
“I’m a bus driver,” he begins and gives me a toothless smile. “The company is looking for someone to drive another route. You know how to drive a bus?”
“Yes,” I answer instinctively, though I’ve never driven a bus in my life, but I have to start doing something because before long my savings will run out.
“Good. Tomorrow morning, you come with me,” he informs me and lays a hand on my shoulder as though I were an old friend. “You’ll need to clean yourself up a bit first,” he says and turns to the door.
That evening I wash myself, cut my nails, brush my teeth, and shave; I even change the sheets, wash my laundry, and put my room in order. I’m nervous about the idea of driving a bus; I could bump into anyone, even my old acquaintances. Still, I can tolerate shame and embarrassment far better than idleness. Perhaps this is how I know I am different from these people.
In the morning, we walk a short distance to an office where I meet my new boss. He shakes hands with both of us, sits me down in front of him, and begins explaining the route, from Vreshta to the city center, past the National Theatre, the university campus, the student housing blocks and Ulpiana, to the hospital and back again.
“Easy, it’s a nice, simple route,” says the boss. “Behxhet can tell you all the practical things you need to know, but there are two rules here: always be careful and always be on time,” he continues, then stands up from behind his desk to show us out of the office.
“Thank you,” I say and extend my hand, but he doesn’t appear to notice.
I start driving the following week; the old, stiflingly hot little German bus moves heavily but surely, forced to negotiate the bumpy roads, the steep hills, and the stress the thick gravel places on the suspension.
Traveling with me is a young conductor who collects twenty cents from everyone getting on the bus, though he lets people he knows on for free. He talks to me all day about trivial things, I reply merely by nodding or grunting, and I’m thankful he soon learns not to ask me anything. The traffic is aggressive and chaotic: people dodge in and out wherever they can and blow their horns for fun, male drivers shout at pedestrians from behind the steering wheel, wolf whistle at young women, greet their friends by sticking their heads out of the car window, a cigarette balanced between their chapped lips.
The days are drawn out, there are almost no breaks, and the wage is less than two hundred euros per month, plus the few coins that the conductor and I agree to put into our own pockets at the end of the shift. Still, the low wages don’t bother me, because sitting behind the wheel of the bus my body is no longer the host of inaction but subject to the cycle of life, and so I smile at the passengers as they step on board, and they thank me as they leave, I look in the side mirror, shift into first gear, put my foot on the gas, shift into second, then third, and make my way to the next stop, and the next and the next, and the one after that, and I find myself examining all the silhouettes that enter my field of vision, every person my eyes see.
And on
e day, after a few weeks of driving the bus, my attention is drawn across the street, it is him, those footsteps, that way of walking, the position of his arms, the neck, slender as a crane’s, the curvature at the back of his head, the hair on his neck, it’s him, I tell myself and brake suddenly, pull over to the side of the road, the conductor and passengers complain, and I dash out of the bus and set off running and catch up with him in front of the Xhamia e Çarshisë, a mosque with walls that resemble bean soup, and grip him by the delicate shoulders that suddenly don’t feel like his after all; the man turns, revealing his startled face, I’m sorry, I say, sorry, I mistook you for someone else, I’m terribly sorry, zotëri, I thought you were someone else, and at this the man’s expression becomes slightly less confused and he wishes me a nice afternoon, nods, and continues on his way.
I run back to the bus and start driving, and for a while I can’t seem to calm my breathing or worsening sweating, the bus judders along the road and I forget to stop in the right places, and at some point the conductor asks, who was that man, was it your brother or a friend, but I don’t answer him, and for the rest of the day I feel shaken, shivering as though a cloth dipped in freezing water were wrapped round my neck.
That evening I write Ajshe a letter. It feels more respectful than a text message or talking to her voicemail, and it’s harder to dismiss. I fold it, slip it into an envelope, and write out Ajshe’s name and address, lick a stamp, and as the shivering abates I realize that I must find him, the man I met on these pummeled streets almost ten years ago, he is here, I know it, alive.
Hi,
When I moved back here I thought I’d never be able to experience happiness again, but today I did—I think I can be happy here. Take care.
A.
15 DECEMBER 2000
You know how they say you have to love yourself before you can love someone else, feed yourself first and only then feed others, help yourself first to help others—
what kind of person has the nerve to say that, who has the gall to utter words like that
don’t the helpless, the hungry, and the loveless deserve love food and help
what if you’re unable to love yourself what happens then
* * *
—
everybody here says they want to help me—we want to help you we want to help you we want to help you we want to help make you feel better, that’s what they say every day
what a JOKE to get help now, to feel good in a place like this
they embarrass themselves they should travel back in time
they should have been there in the barn when I was eight years old and my father said
you are a man now
he handed me a knife
kill that crippled calf can’t you see it hobbling
kill it
slit its throat my father shouted
and when I picked up the knife, the calf’s mother, tethered to a pole, started struggling and thrashing and bellowing frantically, I looked straight at the cow’s miserable eyes and IT KNEW and I threw the knife to the ground and ran into the house I spent more time afraid than I did not afraid in that house
my father killed that calf, its mother looking on,
and he kept me hungry through the months that followed MEAT IS NO FOOD FOR COWARDS
he said
and punched me in the mouth
* * *
—
or they should have been there when my friends told me that stupid kids shouldn’t go to school, a boy shouldn’t behave like a girl, don’t come back tomorrow don’t ever come here again
they should have been there then
or when my brother said he was ashamed of me
or when I was homeless and slept in parks
or when I was at the front and didn’t know what pity was
where were they then?
12
PRISTINA, 2004
I visit the university. I tell the elderly gentleman sitting behind the desk that I am a former student, that my education was interrupted because of the war, and that now I would like to complete my studies, starting this autumn if at all possible. He looks me sternly in the eye and asks whether I have any documentation to prove that I studied there before the war, and when I hand him my old proof of registration and incomplete transcript, the man puts the papers to one side, giving them only a cursory glance, and starts twiddling his thumbs, then slowly scratches his temple.
“Well…this will mean a lot of work…You’ll have to pay another registration fee, have the credits you’ve already done approved one by one, which you’ll have to agree with each professor individually, and so on,” he says haughtily.
“I understand,” I say, take two bills from my wallet, and place them on the desk in the knowledge that, in addition to the registration fee, there will be enough for him too.
The man slides the bills to his side of the desk and promises to get the paperwork done by next week.
When I fetch the papers, I ask the man about a medical student who studied at the same time, Miloš Micić. Upon hearing the name, the man seems clearly uneasy, grips the edge of the desk, and for a moment remains silent, so I add that this is important, I must find this former student. He shakes his head and scoffs that there are no records of any Serbs.
“I’m sure you know that the university was split into many parts during the war and in the aftermath, and the medical faculty was transferred to Serbia,” he says. “All the Serbs, students, teachers, and other university staff, they all left town. The faculty no longer exists, at least not as it was.”
“I know.”
“So, he studied medicine?” the man asks, his expression taut, his mouth clipped into a thin line, and his eyes crumpled like two raisins. “Why would he have stayed here?”
“Exactly.”
“Exactly,” he repeats and wipes a chubby palm across his face. “This man could be anywhere, surely you realize that, he could be in Serbia or Montenegro or Bosnia or Croatia or Slovenia, anywhere at all, America, Australia even,” he explains.
“Djalosh,” he says, again wiping his brow. “Young man,” he repeats, this time more emphatically. “Just let it go.”
During the weeks that follow I visit the city hall, the hospital and health centers, I visit the libraries, the government agencies and ministries, even cafés and restaurants, and everyone I meet—doctors, nurses, officials, waiters, restaurateurs—gives me the same answers. Nobody knows a man by that name. They probably think I have an ulterior motive for trying to find him, to take revenge on him, to exact retribution.
After a while I feel deflated. My days are vapid, their guts and innards lie steaming on the floor of my room as though freshly pulled from a pig, and I can barely drag myself to work. I don’t have the energy for anything else, not even for greeting the passengers, I don’t care where they are going, whether they pay or not, I don’t care about the sounds around me, and before long my environment stops offering them to me altogether.
On the way home one evening, I see a secondhand television on sale for next to nothing outside an electronics store, and when the owner assures me it still works and says I can pay half up front and the other half once I’ve tried it, we shake hands on the deal.
I start following a Turkish drama series telling the story of two feuding families and watch the news, which features the same issues day after day: the rebuilding of the country; the funds received from Europe or America, which will be used to revive the national economy and eradicate unemployment; the struggle for independence; the fight for justice. On the one hand, people want to settle old scores, but at the same time they want to forget the war, to move away from here as quickly as possible, to arrive in the West but still to see their country thriving with investments, with money others have given, work others have done.
Every news story drags behind it a train stained with blood, because everything is always framed through the prism of war: the buildings blasted to the ground will be rebuilt, the bombed roads will be mended, and people will once again find their long-abandoned houses. The Serbs will get what they deserve, they will pay for what they’ve done.
You can’t trust the politicians; they line their pockets with our tax money, appoint their relatives to highly paid government positions, everybody knows it’s going on, everybody talks about it, but people vote for the same men at the next election too because they believe that money will have made these men replete already, which means they are more likely to build the schools they promised, open the factories they boasted about, that’s what people say to one another, surely these scumbags have already stolen more than enough. Maybe on some level the people who vote for these men know that money would make them just like that too.
The most amusing thing is that after such discussions, people give thanks to god that the war is now over. I can’t understand how or why people who constantly cheat one another, people battered by inaction and poverty have fallen for the belief that there’s still hope, that there’s still a point in talking about tomorrow though life already happened yesterday, that one day everything will turn out for the best and things will fall into place because god is great, that’s what they say, god is great, god is good.
I sleep, wake up, eat, drive, eat, sleep, and drive again, and I find it hard to imagine the value of the life I am living. Is there any sense driving a bus all day long for a wage that barely leaves me enough for food? Any sense eating out of a can every evening, living in a moldy house, worrying about freezing when winter comes and the fact that nobody would miss me if I died—where is the sense in that? In being alone, living alone? A joyless life with someone else is always better than a joyless life spent alone.
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