by Asa Avdic
I sat down and stared apathetically at the screens, the gun before me, and was trying to figure out what to do next when the whole group abruptly popped up on one screen as they darted into the front hall. Although it wasn’t quite the whole group, I realized suddenly. The colonel was missing. There was no time to wonder why, because Henry headed straight for the stairs, apparently on his way up to his room. I made my way into the wall space, ran as quietly and quickly as I could up the padded stairs in the wall, and entered his room just after he did—but in the viewing area. The first thing he did was shuck out of his soaked clothes. He yanked and tore at them as if he couldn’t get them off fast enough. Garment after garment, until he was standing in the room naked. It was hard to comprehend that we had slept together less than twenty-four hours previously; his body looked both foreign and familiar in the gray daylight. I could see now that he had a number of scars on his body: a long one on his thigh and what looked like old gunshot wounds on his chest, dangerously close to his heart. I had felt the scars on his chest the day before, but I had been too engrossed in him to really pay attention to them. He walked into the bathroom. I heard the shower come on. I began to move so that I could follow him along the wall. I stood there indecisively for a moment, without opening the peephole. It felt peculiar to watch strangers through the wall, but that was nothing compared to how it felt to try to chase Henry into the bathroom without his knowledge. But it wasn’t only reluctance that was making me feel out of sorts. I wanted to see Henry in the shower, and I felt ashamed of it. I started searching for the hatch in the wall with my fingertips, but no matter how much I groped around in the dark I couldn’t find it. There was no peephole. At first I felt frustrated and almost a little angry, and then I was concerned. Had Henry been placed in a room where he couldn’t be observed in the bathroom on purpose? Was he aware of this? And what did all of this have to do with the gun? I tried to listen through the wall, but all I could hear was the sound of the shower, pounding with that irregular yet rhythmic sound that is created when jets of water break against a body moving slowly beneath them.
EVENTUALLY HE TURNED off the shower and came back out of the bathroom with a white towel around his waist. I had no view of the wardrobe from my lookout, yet I could hear him rooting around in it, presumably going after clothes. But then the sound changed, as if his movements grew more spasmodic. He took a step back, staring wild-eyed around the room. I couldn’t interpret this in any other way but that he had realized the gun was missing. He tossed all his clothing out of the wardrobe, then tore the sheets off the bed, took out his suitcase, threw it on top of his clothes, and rummaged through everything. The sight was almost comical. He even looked under the paperback novel on the nightstand out of sheer desperation. At last he appeared to give up. He sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, staring emptily at nothing. He sat that way for almost a minute, and then he seemed to come to some decision; he grabbed a pair of underwear from the pile of clothes, dressed hurriedly, and left the room. I followed him, inside the walls.
THE LAST TIME they took Nour in was after Grandpa got sick. This was a few years after he had moved back home. It had been a long process to get permission to emigrate, because Bosnia was no longer part of the Union, but at last they let him go. He had never been all that active in the party, and when it became clear that he was prepared to relinquish his pension, they probably realized that it would be more profitable to be rid of him. I don’t know whether Nour grieved over him then, because she didn’t say anything. It didn’t become a problem until he got sick. Nour wanted to travel to see him, but she wasn’t allowed. “You are needed here,” they said. “We can’t allow so much knowledge to leave the country,” they said. They were afraid she would defect. This was after I had moved out, so I didn’t see much of it, but I know she handed in application after application. “REQUEST TO CARE FOR DYING PARENT,” it read in angry red letters on one of the envelopes she sent in; I saw it lying in her hallway, ready to be mailed. Even then, I suspected that things weren’t going well for her when it came to an exit visa, and I knew there had already been a schism between her and the party, but I don’t think I understood how desperate she truly was.
One day I received a strange phone call from Nour. She asked me to pick her up at home and take her to the hospital. This was unlike her; she usually made it a matter of pride never to be sick. When I got to her building, the door was unlocked, and her apartment smelled close and musty. I called for her, but there was no response. The dishes in the kitchen sink looked like they had been there for many days. On the kitchen table was a tub with some dried-out butter on the bottom. I tiptoed up to her bedroom. Nour was in bed, sleeping. I hadn’t seen her asleep since I was a child. Her features were soft and peaceful; the wrinkle between her eyebrows was smooth. But otherwise she looked horrible. Her face was pale, bordering on olive green, and the skin of her arms looked several sizes too big. She must have been sick for a long time. The room smelled sweet with unwashed body, and on the floor next to the bed were glasses, cups, plates, and tons of empty packets of painkillers. I sat down on the edge of the bed and placed my hand on her arm. I didn’t know whether I should wake her up, but after a little while it seemed she sensed my presence in the room. She turned her head drowsily and looked at me.
“Anna?” She seemed surprised at first.
“How long have you been sick?”
Nour looked at me as if she didn’t quite understand what I was saying.
“How long have you been sick?” I asked again.
She cleared her throat a little. I handed her a glass of water, the one I thought looked freshest. She took it and raised her head to drink, then sank back down and looked at me.
“Anna, you have to help me get to the hospital. I need to be inspected.”
“Examined,” I corrected her. “You need an examination. You’re sick.”
She shook her head, annoyed.
“No, no, they have to inspect me. I’m going to go on early disability retirement.”
She looked determined. Her usual little wrinkle between the eyebrows was back. I didn’t understand.
“Nour, you’re just sick; why would they put you on disability?”
“They have to,” she said, pressing her lips together like a stubborn child. “They have to now.”
Suddenly I understood. I shivered.
“No” was all I said.
“Yes,” she said, looking resolutely into my eyes.
We sat there for a long time, our eyes fixed on each other. I had heard of this before, how people would go to extremes to render themselves useless to the party in order to get an exit permit. But I thought those were only urban legends.
“Sit up so I can take a look,” I said.
“You don’t have to,” Nour replied. “They can do that at the hospital.”
“I want to. Please sit up.”
Reluctantly, and with great effort, Nour sat up in bed. I pulled up her nightgown. There was a stained compress taped to her lower back. A sour smell emanated from it. I cautiously loosened the tape, and she mewled a little as the sticky surfaces let go of her skin. Little gray outlines remained where the tape had been. The wound from which they had removed far too much spinal fluid was in the very center of her spine, between two vertebrae, and it was weeping pus.
“Stay there; I’m going to wash it.”
Nour didn’t protest, she just breathed heavily, so I went into the bathroom, wet some toilet paper with lukewarm water, rooted around the medicine cabinet until I found something that would work as a compress, and went back to the bedroom. She was just as I had left her. Nour’s black hair hung across her face; I couldn’t see her expression.
“I have trouble walking,” she said suddenly. “You have to hold me up.”
“How are you feeling otherwise? Does anything else hurt?”
“My head,” Nour said. “But that
’s to be expected.”
“Couldn’t you just have dropped an iron on your foot instead?” I said, stroking her hair gently. Nour shook her head.
“Don’t be stupid. Broken bones can heal. It has to be permanent.”
I washed her wound carefully. It looked horrible. I thought about asking who had done it, but I knew she wouldn’t tell me and that this was probably for the best. That person might get into trouble; I might too if I knew.
“You’re an idiot,” I said in a soft voice.
She was, of course. But still.
“He’s my father,” she said quietly. “I can’t let him die alone.”
I put on the fresh compress and stroked her back. Then I adjusted the pillows so that the softest one would land right under her spine.
“You can lie back down,” I said.
She sank back with a sigh. She looked at me, her expression stern.
“I would have done the same for you, I want you to know. And you would too, for me. It’s the only decent thing to do.”
“I know,” I said.
Then I didn’t say anything more; I just sat there on the edge of the bed for a while.
At the hospital, of course, there was a scene. The first doctor who examined her called in a second. Then the security police arrived. I was taken to another room, one without windows, where eventually a person in uniform, someone whose position was unclear, interrogated me for hours. Had I known what she was planning to do? Did I know who had performed the procedure? Did I know why she had done it? There was no point in refusing to answer this last question, because I knew based on their questions that they had figured it out, so I told it like it was: I believed it was connected to the fact that Grandpa was sick in Bosnia, and she wanted to be put on disability pension so she could travel there and take care of him. They bludgeoned me with the same questions and answers again and again, with few or no variations. Eventually I was standing outside the hospital, in the sleet, and I was allowed to go home, without having been allowed to see Nour again.
I later learned that they had moved her to the prison hospital, and that she stayed there for six weeks. They also told her (and this didn’t come out until much later either) that I had given her up. Six weeks later, when I called the prison, they suddenly informed me that she was back home again. And it was true. With her disability pension and on crutches. By that time Grandpa was already dead, and Nour would be a dissident forever after, a dissident who would need a crutch wherever she went. We never spoke of all this again, but I think about it often. The things you do for your own.
I SAW MANY mutilated people in Kyzyl Kum. Moms mutilated their sons to keep them at home; men shot themselves in the legs or feet to avoid battle. I saw so many dead bodies that it almost, but only almost, became ordinary. Some were strangers; others were painfully close to me; some were so maimed that I almost felt relieved that they wouldn’t have to live in such a condition, while others just looked like they were sleeping. Some were old; others were far too young. But it had never occurred to me that there might be times when it would be a welcome sight to have a dead body there in front of you, that being certain would actually be preferable to this scenario: having two people vanish on an island in the middle of nowhere, with no bodies to be found. At least, this was how I understood the situation as I listened to Franziska, Jon, Lotte, and Henry sit in the parlor and attempt to make head or tails of what had just happened. The colonel had vanished into the water when the boat overturned, and now it was too stormy to go out on the water and search for him. Not to mention that the boat was missing. We were truly isolated now. Jon didn’t seem satisfied with the answers he was getting from Henry.
“But what did he say while you were out there?”
“We were just talking about what might have happened to the pier, how it could have come unmoored.”
“And what conclusion did you come to?”
“Well, there was no way to tell until we got to it and examined it, but I suppose there was . . . a certain amount of suspicion that someone might have loosened it.”
“Why would someone have loosened it?”
Henry stopped staring at the invisible spot he seemed to have been studying up to that point and turned to look at Jon.
“To isolate us, of course. Now we can’t get out of here. It’s no longer possible to come in by boat, at least not until the wind dies down.”
“But . . .”
Henry went on, showing no mercy: “In which case, someone on this island really does mean to harm the rest of us. But there’s still no way for us to know for certain, just as we don’t know whether the pier detached itself or whether it was actually the colonel who murdered Anna, made Katja disappear, and then sabotaged the pier. Because now he’s gone too, and the boat is gone, and the communication radio in the basement doesn’t work . . .”
Jon interrupted him.
“And whose fault is it that the boat and the colonel are gone? Are you just going to stand here running your mouth when it’s your fault that . . .”
“If you have any suggestions about how we should solve this, I’m all ears,” Henry said stiffly.
No one said anything. The room seemed unusually still. Franziska was the one to break the silence. For the first time she sounded neither offended nor ingratiating, just exhausted.
“We’re all tired. And in shock, I assume. I am, at least. I suggest we attempt to eat something and get some rest, and after that we’ll try to compose ourselves and figure out what to do.”
This was a reasonable suggestion, and as she uttered it I realized I hadn’t eaten for many hours either. My legs felt thick and swollen, and I was weak and hungry. As the others got organized (Franziska and Jon decided to go to the kitchen to get out the food; Henry and Lotte stayed in the parlor to make a fire and set the table), I staggered down to my basement and over to the fridge. I made a monster of a sandwich, with everything on it, and then I ate the whole thing in thirty seconds, in the yellowish light of the lamp, my eyes half on the grainy screens. Franziska and Jon eventually joined Lotte and Henry back in the parlor.
The scene was almost cozy as they sat before the fire in their easy chairs, eating sandwiches and serving themselves tea from a beautiful samovar. Afterward, they lingered there. I assumed they all felt drained. Now and then I went up in the passageway and listened to see if anything interesting was being discussed, but they mostly didn’t speak. No one suggested that they go out and resume the search. Most of them seemed to have settled on waiting the whole thing out. Everyone but Franziska had selected a book from the large bookcase, and they seemed thoroughly absorbed in reading, while Franziska alternately sat on the sofa beside Jon and stared listlessly at the fire on the one hand and restlessly paced the room and stared out the window at the sea on the other, all while the sun set. At one point, Henry and Jon went down to the medical station to test the communication radio. By now the wind appeared to be blowing at a full gale, and it tore and clawed at the house until the windows rattled.
It was hardly past nine o’clock at night when Franziska and Jon said they were going to go to bed and left the room. Soon thereafter, Lotte and Henry also left the ground floor and went up to their respective rooms. When I checked in on them all a little while later, they appeared to have gone to bed. Jon was on the sofa in Franziska’s room; the others were in their own beds. I decided to get some sleep as well, so I crawled into the bunk and set my alarm to wake me a few hours later, with the goal of getting up and checking in on everyone. I barely had time to lay my head on the hard, flat pillow, pull the gray army blanket over myself, and muse that it was a damn shame that everything in the military had to be so uncomfortable before I faded away into sleep, down into a well of darkness.
I WAS BACK in Kyzyl Kum. Although it was dark around me, I knew where I was at once. The raw, cold night air, the odor of brown coal burning in a stove
, the sound of the wind beating against tents. Flap flap flap. It was nighttime. I was wearing my sleeping mittens and my hat since the stove was unreliable and you never knew if you would wake shivering with cold. But that wasn’t why I was awake. There was someone moving around in the hospital tent. Not the usual stirrings of people tossing and turning with cold or pain on their cots as they slept. This was a different sort of motion. I slowly turned over and tried to look out from between the thin curtains that separated my sleeping corner from the rest of the room and saw the contours of a body moving quickly, as if it wanted to rove about unseen. I cautiously groped under the right side of my mattress and found my revolver. Even in my dream, I knew it was potentially lethal to sleep with an old, unreliable weapon under the mattress. Any day now, the movements of my body might disengage the safety and I would accidentally shoot myself or someone else just by sleeping restlessly. But I kept it there anyway. It made me feel like I was in control, and when I got hold of it beneath the thin mattress I slid slowly, slowly out of bed and onto the floor. The shadow moved again, now in a completely different part of the room, which was full of thin curtains. I moved toward the shadow slowly, keeping low. The curtains seemed to multiply the more I moved. The shadow was sometimes here, sometimes there, like a ghost out of the corner of my eye. The room seemed to have become infinitely huge, and I felt panic rising in my chest as I tried to shove all the cloth aside, but it was everywhere, blocking my way forward and backward. I lost my sense of direction. Suddenly I sensed movement right behind me. I turned around. The curtain behind me was hanging up in the air, a few meters away. I could see a pair of large boots sticking out under it. They were perfectly still. I raised my weapon. Aimed. I slowly reached out to move the cloth aside. Then, suddenly, it was pulled away from the other side. Standing before me was the skinny body of a boy in a pair of gigantic boots. His clothes were thin and ragged, even though it was the middle of winter. Snowflakes whirled around him. His head was a big red apple. I fired my weapon and the apple exploded.