It’s hard not to think about these things because hopelessness runs through everything here; it’s that skinny man over there wearing a suit and sitting on the street corner, maybe in front of his store, the old woman crossing the street with a loaf of wheat bread under her arm, the hungry children and grandchildren with whom she will soon share it, all those boys begging and selling cigarettes outside restaurants, the dirty hands stretched across tables, the wives who disappear into the goldsmith’s store to pawn their jewelry.
As the days pass, I begin to think it’s increasingly unlikely that I will find him and all the more likely that one day I simply won’t get out of bed again. That would be it. The end of a life, at peace with the words spoken and those left unsaid.
* * *
—
There is an item on the news one evening. Foreign journalists have visited a local mental hospital and written pieces published in acclaimed English-language newspapers. The stories allege that people who weren’t even sick were being locked up there, and once the war ended even Serbs as punishment for what they did to the Albanians during the war. The journalists say they are calling on international human-rights organizations to take a stand on the matter, as conditions in the hospital are appalling.
Half asleep, I watch the video footage of shaved-headed patients. In the background, an agitated voice explains that starving and emaciated individuals roam the hospital complex as though in a stupor, constantly shouting, begging the few visitors for money, cigarettes, clothes—apparently the advice is not to touch the patients because they have lice, fungal infections, and diseases. There are hardly any decent sanitary facilities, just a few buckets here and there along the corridor; the stench is overwhelming.
The patients masturbate in front of one another, rape one another, and give birth to children who can neither walk nor speak. On television they show a little girl sprawled on a bed; she looks like a drunken spider. They say the patients are constantly being given long-expired medicines, they have no stimuli, nothing to do, they mainly eat qull, a porridge made from corn flour, and bread and sleep in turns on the floors lined with excreta because there simply aren’t enough beds to go around.
I suppose I should be angry or sad at what I see, I should feel reprehension and disgust, but I don’t, and instead I find myself thinking it’s a good thing that the Serbs among the patients and prisoners or whatever you decide to call them finally got what they deserved, that now they are finally paying for what they did to this nation, for making our situation what it is today. They haven’t been locked up for nothing, I think, and I’m sure many people here think the same, and that’s why nothing is done about it. The only thing I wonder about is how any doctor or nurse can work in a place like that and supervise these sick people at such close range.
But then. Then the television screen shows me his face, it is his face, for a few seconds I truly see his face. It is miraculous, like a dream—as though a majestic two-headed eagle had flown into a crowded ballroom and exploded into a shower of money.
He staggers, hunched beneath a sash window, from which just enough light falls on him that I can make out his unfocused gaze, his expression soured with tedium, a flash of his narrow shoulders, his slender arms and bony legs, his brittle hands clasped around his knees.
As the image changes I drop to my knees in front of the television, instinctively clasp its electric edges as though that might bring the image back, might show him again. I’m gasping so hard I can no longer hear the announcer’s voice and cannot get up from the floor, though the news bulletin has already moved on to talking about something else.
I fall flat on the floor. I lie there so long that I can feel my cheek assuming the relief pattern of the carpet. At some point, I grip the edge of the bed and my legs begin to obey me again, my arms too, and once I have dragged myself into bed, once I have placed my head on the pillow, I feel strangely rested.
Then I get up. I organize my clothes in the wardrobe, set my alarm clock, change the sheets, straighten the curtains, take a short walk, wash up the plate and fork left from dinner, and return indoors with a glass of water. After drinking it, I notice that the room smells good.
I switch off the lights and sit on the bed, my legs crossed. Placed on the table, the water glass looks like a piece of coral.
I don’t sleep at all that night because I know precisely what I must do next, where to go, what to say.
Perhaps he exists after all. God.
4 DECEMBER 2001
have you ever held a gun felt its weight in the palm of your hand, how heavy and hot it is when it’s fired
have you ever told a patient you’ll be fine knowing they won’t be fine, pumped them full of sedatives in vain watched from the sidelines as they die
have you ever dreamed of the devil—how he rises from the shore and walks toward you and lies down next to you beneath the same parasol—a dream so real that in the morning you thought he was breathing against your face and didn’t dare open your eyes
have you ever said I love you though you didn’t mean it
have you ever been in war have you ever kil
Have you
I have
13
PRISTINA, 2004
I leave on Sunday. I buy myself a camera, a recorder, and a leather briefcase, I put on the only suit I own and rent an SUV; it’s all very expensive.
As I drive out of the city, I realize I’ve spent my entire life waiting. Some people are like that. They wait, walk from one room to the next and wait, they cry and wait, sit in armchairs and wait, they wait to get married, they wait to become a parent, wait for their children to graduate and enter a profession, they wait for food to be ready, for the weekend to come, to get more money for their work.
Then there are those who don’t wait but who act, those who ask and shall then receive, those who do not know what waiting is, those who graduate from school, form couples, have children, and work endlessly and take what belongs to them.
I will not wait another moment, I repeat to myself, I put my foot on the gas and refuse to be afraid. I will take it, I tell myself out loud, I will take it, once and for all I will take back what was taken from me.
I pass countless houses that all look the same, many of them erected right at the side of the road. The ground floor of these two-, three-, and four-story houses is almost invariably a retail space, a show of the owner’s long-dead dreams, evidence of a father who never managed to get his business off the ground, a son who realized there’s no point having a shop in the middle of nowhere, took his family, and moved to the city. It was only after I left Kosovo that I started to question the Albanians’ constant urge to start family businesses, and while I was away I realized how little sense it makes, because you can’t open something in every house, and certainly not a business that will be profitable.
The windows and balconies face the road, because preferably you shouldn’t be able to see into the neighbors’ yard from your own house, and the girls and young women hanging out washing on the balconies make me feel sad, the way they stare at the passing cars as if hoping that one of them might stop outside their house and take them away. They all have the same expression that you can make out from a distance, the same supine body language, their face stiff, their gaze hollow like someone who is about to lose their mind in the melting ennui of passing time.
* * *
—
Though the hospital isn’t far from Pristina, the journey takes several hours because the roads are terrible. I park the car in front of the hospital’s rusty gates, step out, and with the camera dangling from my neck, I begin ostentatiously taking photographs of the damp and cracked building with small sash windows that resembles an army barracks. The brown lawn surrounding the decrepit walls makes the place look like a burned-out barn with an abandoned ship rising from inside.
I
take pictures of the grimacing profiles that appear in the cracked window frames, of the surrounding forest, filtering a ghostly haze that hangs above the courtyard, of the barbed-wire perimeter fence separating the worlds of the living and the dead like the stone walls around a cemetery, of the yard covered in cigarette butts, empty save for a few wooden benches swollen from the rain.
Then they arrive. The guards and staff run out from behind the building; at first they politely ask me to leave, and when I refuse they threaten me. I tell them that I am a reporter and that I’d like to discuss some financial matters with the director of the hospital. Fifteen minutes later I am waiting in an office that looks like a police interview room with metal tables and filing cabinets. On the wall is a framed poster of Kosovan separatist hero Adem Jashari.
To my surprise, the hospital’s director is a woman; she walks to the other side of the table, stony-faced. I have no doubt she has found herself in similar situations countless times before. She knows what she is doing, but she doesn’t know that I know what I’m doing too, she is unaware that in my imagination I’ve already met her, already talked to her.
“What do you want?” she asks, sits down, and leans against the back of her chair, its worn-out wheels squeaking against the gray tiled floor.
I tell her why I am here, my voice remains calm and even, serious but dignified and confident; I articulate the words as clearly as I can, I make concrete suggestions and present my demands. I am not here to bargain.
My name is Mehmet Rugova.
I work for a large daily newspaper as a correspondent covering Balkan politics.
I’ve been sent here to write an article.
You make healthy people sick here.
God is great.
God can see far.
One of your patients is a man who has no business being here.
His name is Miloš Micić.
The paper’s editorial board wants him out of here immediately.
He is involved in an important series of events about which we want to publish a story.
This is nonnegotiable. This man must be released forthwith.
Do you understand?
I implore you to cooperate.
In return, the paper is willing to make a donation to your hospital of five hundred euros.
* * *
—
The woman pulls a cigarette from her jacket pocket and presses it between her lips, and once she has taken a drag of smoke she glances at the ceiling, the floor, the walls, then stares at me until she stubs out her cigarette in an ashtray bearing the logo of a sports club. She stands up and leaves the room mumbling under her breath, and my legs feel as limp as boiled bell peppers, my hands as moist as freshly caught fish.
A moment later she returns to her spot behind the desk carrying a file.
“Who are you really?” she asks, taking a thick pile of papers from the file.
“I am a reporter,” I answer, undeterred, and at that the woman begins laying the papers across the table.
“This patient is in a very bad condition,” she says and takes a deep breath. “He’s been here for years.”
I exhale a bucketful of air.
“He hasn’t spoken for a long time; we believe he doesn’t truly remember the time before the hospital. Do you know who this man is, where he has come from?”
“No,” I reply and press my trembling hand into my jacket pocket to feel the envelope and, inside it, the money; it’s most of what I have left. “I don’t know anything about this man,” I continue in a hoarse, scratchy voice.
“And where are you planning to take him?”
“To Pristina,” I say and clear my throat so loudly that the woman flinches.
“Pristina?”
“Yes, Pristina. They’re expecting him there,” I say.
“Who is expecting him?” she asks, raising another cigarette to her lips.
“That I don’t know,” I reply, upon which she takes an indifferent drag on the cigarette, leaves it dangling at the corner of her mouth, and starts leafing through the papers again.
“We can’t let him out just like that,” she says through the smoke. “Surely you understand how frightening the outside world can be to someone like him. He won’t be able to cope. He needs round-the-clock care.
“Who will look after him there?” she continues, raises her eyes to look at me. “Who will make sure he eats and suchlike?”
“I can assure you he will be taken good care of. This man is a Serb, he is a doctor, I know that, and I know there are people who will look after him.”
“I know perfectly well who he is,” she snaps. “I’ve seen him every day, spoken to him. You can’t simply turn up here making these kinds of demands. This is a hospital, these people cannot survive on their own. Do you understand that? These people need help,” she says, now agitated.
For a moment she falls silent, and the extended quiet makes me so nervous that I can’t think of anything to do but continue the conversation, though I know it would be best to stop talking because she wouldn’t have gone to fetch a folder full of documents if she wasn’t planning on showing them to me or giving them away.
“Zojë,” I begin. “I do understand. But, to be frank, I think anywhere would be better for him, for anyone, anywhere but here,” I say calmly.
“Is that what you think? Is it really? What do you think it’s like working here? Do you think this is easy, do you think anybody actually wants to come here to treat them? To feed them, hand out their medicine? Would you do it? Would you? Well?” she shouts and slams her hand on the table. “The vast majority of these people have been abandoned, their relatives don’t pay a penny for their treatment here, many don’t even know of their existence. So you’ve watched a few items on the news, poor child, you’ve read a couple of newspaper columns, and now you think you know what it’s like in here. Don’t make me laugh.”
I feel sorry for her and I try to apologize, to assure her that I really do understand, but I’m too late, she gets in first and continues her tirade.
“It’s easy to come here for a few hours and pass judgment once you’ve heard how they shout and cry, once you’ve seen what bad condition they are in, then say this is the worst place in the world. But it is me who keeps them alive. Me. With what little I have. Me alone, I am their mother and their father. All the others, the nurses, the cleaners, the doctors, they come here for a while, but they always leave, before long they always leave. Nobody else can bear this place or the patients.”
“I’m sorry,” I interject. “I don’t know why I said what I said. You’re absolutely right, I don’t know anything about this place.”
“No, you don’t.”
I can see her sorrow, see that it is my sorrow too, that her sorrow is in fact the sorrow of this entire country, I see how it travels with her everywhere she goes, it is there when she takes the house keys from her pocket, when she prepares a meal for her family, when she shakes the rugs, wipes the crumbs from the kitchen counters, and vacuums under the bed.
“Here, this is a donation to the hospital,” I say and take the envelope from my jacket pocket, place it on the table, and press down with my forefinger.
“And these,” I begin and with my left hand take out my wallet, open it up with my fingers, and pull out six fifty-euro bills. “I would like to give these to you,” I continue, raise my finger from the envelope, and slide the bills inside.
“No, no, no.”
“I insist. Please, take them. I want to give these to you, by way of thanks for all the work you’ve done.”
“Well, thank you,” the woman says, momentarily closes her eyes, and swallows. “Thank you,” she repeats, opens her eyes, takes a deep breath, and replaces the papers in the folder, which she tucks under her arm.
She rolls her chair out from behind t
he desk and hands me the folder with both hands.
“This man was brought here in a very bad state,” she explains and glances down at the envelope, which I have placed on top of the folder. “He was beaten up in Mitrovica, he had spent a long time in the hospital before coming here, he almost died from his injuries; because he is a Serb he was barely even examined properly.”
I do my best to pretend that what she says doesn’t have the slightest effect on me, that the words coming out of her mouth aren’t human words about another human being.
“He eats very badly, always has. But he understands speech, some days better than others,” she says and holds a lengthy pause during which I tense my arms, tense my face, my legs, my stomach muscles, my shoulders and back, my entire body feels like it is on fire. “And he is very timid, that’s what he is, sensitive. And he likes…,” she continues slowly. “He likes writing.”
She grips my upper arm, strokes it, her toughened fingertips feel like tires driving across my skin, even through my suit.
“At first he wrote quite a bit, in a little notebook we gave him, but nothing for the last few years. I don’t normally read the texts the patients write, but I read his. I’ve read them many times over.”
Again she pauses.
“You’re not really a reporter,” she states.
“What are you talking about?” I ask, and at this my stomach starts to ache and my lungs begin to tighten so much that the folder and envelope almost fall from my hands.
“You don’t have to pretend,” she says, leans over and begins stroking my thigh as if it were a piece of her own itching skin.
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