The cat then asked where my parents were now. Instead of answering I was silent for a moment, picked up my gin and cranberry, and drank.
“My parents are dead,” I said eventually, placed my drink back on the table, and stroked my chin. “When they were alive they still mattered, they had a meaning, a life, and a job. But now they’re gone and nobody will ever need them again.”
The cat’s eyes popped wide open. And he looked at me, and for a long time he didn’t say a word.
“Well,” he said eventually and squinted his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he slipped into the conversation. “It must have been tough,” he continued and paused.
“But!” he shouted, his voice ominous. The cat’s eyes bulged even more than before and his cheeks filled with air. He paused again, jumped from the sofa onto the floor, hop, then quickly leaped up again, hop.
“I’m bored,” he said all of a sudden.
Pff, the cat exclaimed, an extension of his show of protest, then scoffed a meh to underscore how little he was interested or could be bothered to listen any longer. He pulled a pink straw between his narrow lips, stroked his long cat’s whiskers, and with sunken cheeks he sucked on his tall drink, though he seemed bored by the taste.
“Do you want to come to my place?”
The cat pushed the straw away with his tongue. His little cat’s eyes brightened, his groomed paws tensed, and his coat fluffed up, so thick and bushy that he looked unbearably overweight.
“So, you finally asked me!” he shouted excitedly, pulled off his glasses, put them in their case, and ran his tongue along his lower lip, making his whole body seem to crackle like baking paper.
“Keep good hold of me,” he said. “Because without my glasses I can hardly see in front, only to the sides, and only bright pastel colors.”
Spring 1980
THE MOIST EARTH
It was Friday, the first official day of my wedding, a day I was supposed to use to grieve and say my farewells. I was leaving my family and our village behind. Instead of grieving, however, I felt restless all morning, couldn’t bring myself to concentrate on anything. I glanced furtively around and was certain that I’d forgotten something terribly important.
I stood at the front door and looked at the pretty flower beds in our yard. Rain was battering the leaves of the plants, whipping them. Droplets of water ran between the rocks, splashing from one stone to the next like crickets. The earth succumbed to the water, turning in front of our eyes into an inviting garden bed purring for yet more water. I sat on the edge of the terrace and pressed my bare feet into the soil. I had always loved the rain, its smell. It made everything seem fresh, extinguished the piles of burning rubbish at the edge of the field, and washed the dust back into the ground.
I pressed both hands into the soil and rubbed my feet. I imagined them covered in soft sand, moist from the sea. I closed my eyes, and the earth yielded to my imagination: now I was sitting somewhere else, I was on a beach where it never rained, where the sea foamed and splashed around my feet. The cold rain whipped my skin like a sigh, as though it had delayed its arrival so long that people had already given up all hope.
And then, a cool droplet on my hot skin.
I’d heard that a certain time after death there is nothing left of the body but the bones. In contrast to what I had imagined, the body was responsible for its own process of decomposition: the bacteria in the gut grow into long worms and begin eating the very creature that had once given them life. For the human body, the process is uncomplicated: all it can do is carry on living until one of its parts stops working.
I had often thought about my own death, but never as much as on that morning sitting on the terrace outside our house. How it would happen, how comfortless it would be. How brutal and quick, unrecognizable, a small flash somewhere, a hiss. My body would bear no sign of life, no evidence whatsoever.
Soon I heard the sound of determined footsteps clomping inside the house.
“What are you doing out here?” asked my father.
He was standing in the doorway, his expression unhappy, grave, and distrustful. He was wearing his dark-brown pajama trousers and a white sleeveless shirt.
“I was fetching tomatoes from the garden for breakfast and tripped,” I said and smiled at his stony face as politely as I could.
“You can’t make breakfast today, girl,” he said as if to put an end to the matter.
I was about to say that it didn’t matter, that I wanted to do something to keep my mind off what was about to take place the day after tomorrow. I wasn’t expecting him to place his hands on my shoulders and to speak to me the way an adult speaks to one who needed support, to his equal.
“I know you’re frightened about getting married,” he began and turned for a moment to stare out at the road leading away behind me. “It’s only natural because everything feels new. Fear is the most natural of all human emotions. It’s the same the world over,” he continued and paused, though not long enough to allow me to speak. “Just you remember, Bajram is frightened too. I am sure you’re going to be very happy with him. Do you hear? I’m sure of it.”
He held his hand into the rain and closed raindrops into his fist, letting the water trickle gray to the ground. “The earth has treated us well, don’t you think? Our generous partisan leader has been righteous to his people.”
His eyes gleamed. He took me by the hand and pulled me closer, pressed his lips against my forehead, and sheltered me between his chest and arms. His bristly chest hairs scratched my cheek and his faint heartbeat, calm yet full of pomp, drummed in my ears like the strophes of Aleksandër Stavre Drenova’s Himni i Flamurit.
—
When I was little, my father told me a story about the Balkan peoples, explaining that they were all distinguishable by their own specific characteristics. Bulgarians were good when it came to business negotiations but were bad judges of character; Serbs were crafty, devious to their heart and soul; Macedonians had a self-assurance verging on self-destructiveness and were easily conned; Bosnians lied through their teeth and had a finger in every pie; but an Albanian, you could trust an Albanian like a rock. Albanians helped those in need, while the other Balkan nations swooped after money and possessions like vultures.
My father continued by telling me the story of how a Bosnian, a Bulgarian, and a Serb put their wise heads together to trick a Macedonian living in the United States by selling him faulty car parts. Still, the devious Serb, the lying Bosnian, and the greedy Bulgarian couldn’t decide what to do with their ill-gotten gains and ended up destroying one another.
Money leads to envy, he said. Envy leads to lies, and lies lead to deviousness, which in turn leads to violence and death. When the unarmed encounter the armed, the outcome is clear, but when the armed encounter other armed people, nobody wins. A motley crew of Bosnians, Bulgarians, and Serbs is doomed to failure; it’s an impossible conundrum. And my father explained this in the only way he knew, leaving not a single stone unturned. His final word was a full stop, the end of the story, and for every question he had a perfectly absurd answer. But it was always the right answer.
The Macedonian of the story lost his money and was forced to return to Macedonia via Albania. In his simpleminded naïveté he had counted his money incorrectly, and in fact he had only enough to get him to Albania. But as soon as he stepped off the ferry across the Adriatic Sea at the notorious port of Durrës, he met people who helped him home, helped him back on his feet, and with their genuineness, their meekness and generosity of spirit even strengthened the Macedonian’s self-esteem. The story ended with the familiar aphorism: an Albanian’s word is his bond.
“It’s what’s always happened to us Albanians,” he said. “People always abuse us and our good-heartedness. In some ways we’re like the Macedonians, because we’re too good-natured, too strong and trusting,” he said. “That’s why it’s so easy to kick us.”
—
My father let go of me, took a few steps,
and stood on the spot. He sniffed the clean air, sniffed it as he might a freshly washed shirt, filled his lungs with it as though he’d been cooped up in a prison cell. I looked at him, the holes along the seams of his sleeveless shirt, the stretched collar and the thick white hairs jutting out from beneath it, hairs that I could still feel and smell on my cheek and beneath which his heart was beating in time with the second hand on the clock.
Spring 1980
THE WOMEN WHO
WISHED HER LUCK
The following afternoon there came a knock at the front door. My mother beckoned the guests inside, women from the village, extended family, and some of my girlfriends. They paraded through into the living room, where my mother kept them company while I waited in the kitchen. I was sitting in front of the woodstove. I’d opened one of the hatches and was watching the logs burning inside. First they turned black and began to crackle. After that they snapped in two, then into even smaller pieces, until all that was left of them were flying black strips.
“Emine, come here!” my mother shouted.
I pretended I hadn’t heard her.
“What are you up to?” Hana asked.
She was leaning nervously in the doorway because I hadn’t appeared in the living room after being called twice. I could hear my mother telling the women of the village that preparations for the wedding had clearly taken their toll on me. Only this morning she was so absentminded that she tripped in the yard, imagine, and came in covered in mud like a wet dog. I don’t know how such a clumsy girl ever caught the eye of a man like Bajram.
I thought of Bajram and our marriage, because there were men, and then there were some men we called Llapjan after the place where they lived. That’s where Bajram was from, a region renowned for its traditional ways, its violent men and unhappy women. I’d rather die than live with a man like that. I’d kill either myself or someone else, I thought, that’s what would happen. Killing someone would be easy; you could kill your husband without him knowing. I’d pick up a large knife and drive it through his chest in the middle of the night. I’d choke him to death, cut off his penis with a pair of shears, or slit his throat and run off into the woods. Either that or I’d slit my own throat if all else failed.
“Please just go away,” I said once I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Hana had no intention of giving up.
Hana stepped into the room, pulled up a wooden stool standing next to the door, sat to my right, and started staring at me. She looked exactly like my mother; reading her expression was impossible.
“What do you want?”
Hana took my hands and held them tight. I tried to pull my hands free but my struggles only made her tighten her grip. Then she hugged me, as quick as a flash, as though she didn’t want anyone to see her doing it. She wrapped her longs arms around me. Her whole body was trembling. After that she let go of my wrist, quickly looked behind, and pulled me toward her.
“You have to get up now,” she said, stood up, and tugged at her blouse to straighten it.
I continued to gaze at the burning logs. The surface of the wood looked almost moist.
Hana breathed gloomily and told me to pull myself together. Please, why are you making this so difficult? Get in there, now.
After a moment I stood up and forced myself into the living room. I took my first steps surrounded with encouraging smiles, and my sisters cheered me on as they might a sportsman. I held out my hand, thanked the guests, and forced myself to respond with a smile to their well-wishing.
—
I waited in the kitchen, my face covered, and I was wearing the long dark-blue evening dress with silver sequins at the top that Bajram had bought me. On the Saturday of the wedding festivities, it was traditional to hold a kanagjegji, the women’s party during which the bride wept in front of her relatives, friends, and the women from the village. The bride was to cover her face with a red veil, curtsy in front of each guest in turn, hug her, and weep. The closer the friend or relative, the more noise the bride was to make. This was how the bride said good-bye to her friends and the other women in the family. After this, the bride spent the evening with the guests, the women painted one another’s nails, looked at the clothes the bridegroom’s family had bought, and, naturally, talked about the bridegroom, his family, and his wealth.
A large group of women had congregated in the living room while the children set up chairs for the men in the yard, where they sat smoking, talking about politics, farming, and the economy, and eating the snacks laid out for them: salted sticks, salted nuts, chocolate candy, coffee, tea, and llokum.
My mother had explained to me that if for some reason I couldn’t cry, then I had to pretend to cry. She was walking around the room dusting the windowsills, lifting ashtrays to wipe beneath them. You’ll just have to pretend. Lie so much that you can feel it throughout your body and soul, right down to your fingertips.
“Though I’m sure you will cry. It’s that kind of occasion,” she continued.
She placed the final ashtray back on the windowsill, folded the cloth in her hand, and threw it toward the cooker before starting her performance. She gripped the side of the stove and suddenly began writhing and moaning. Like this. You can mumble, wail, or whimper, so long as it’s broken, as if you’re really crying. Remember to breathe every now and then. If you tense your arms, your hands will start trembling, and there won’t be a soul left unconvinced.
Now there were dozens of women, young and old, sitting on the sofas, on the floor, wherever there was room, staring at me as though a creature from beyond the grave had stepped into the room. The murmur of the men’s conversation came bubbling in from outside. There was very little space to move on the floor. Everybody was staring at me, pricking her ears to hear the moment I started weeping.
I stepped forward, my back hunched. Hana stood behind me, holding my skirt and guiding me toward the guests because the veil was thick and I couldn’t see through it properly. A bead of sweat trickled down my forehead. My heartbeat boomed in my ears, on both sides of my throat, throughout my upper body. Then we began doing the rounds.
When I gripped the hands of the lonely widow living next door, who had always been so genuinely happy at other people’s joy, and hugged her, I thought it wouldn’t be long before I would no longer have to pretend. I’d be crying soon. It would happen at the very latest once I’d seen enough wet eyes, once I’d received enough encouraging embraces, or once I’d touched enough hands, once my friends started singing the wedding lament accompanied by the defi, the tambourine, and with the words:
Never again will you see your family.
Why do you leave us?
Why do you leave all this behind
And go to your husband?
From tomorrow you belong to another family.
But all I wanted was for these sad dirges to end; I wanted to pull my hands away and wipe them on the hem of my skirt, because my hands soon stank of the grime on the guests’ hands, of ingrained sweat and old grease. The smell pushed its way through my veil, and time went so swiftly that the weeping was almost over before I knew it.
Once we had finished the round of guests, I had to wait for Hana to give me permission to sit on a stool placed in the middle of the living room and reveal my face, my red swollen eyes that I had rubbed with a raw onion before we started.
When I revealed my face, a long sigh filled the room, as if performed by a choir.
6
The morning after we met, the cat was next to me when I woke up. The night before, when we’d arrived back at my place and gone to bed, I was sure that once I closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep, I’d never see him again. I imagined he would carefully pick up his clothes in the morning and skulk outside, close the door so quietly that it would barely make a sound. He wouldn’t want to wake me because he thought I might ask him for something he was unable to give.
I glanced at his delicate head, which was like a sculpture as it rested on my checkered pillow. His thi
ck whiskers extended into the room like sharpened pencils and his breath cascaded into the air with a gentle wheeze. The cat had placed his paws beneath his head. He had curled up beneath two blankets to keep warm because he hated the cold and even the slightest chill made him shiver. What’s more, he’d already commented on how terribly cold it was in my apartment; apparently it struck him the minute we stepped inside. He’d made a show of looking for a suitably warm spot. He thought it was extremely uncouth and downright despicable that something so obvious had been overlooked.
Then he woke up. He stretched his limbs and muscles, taking all the time in the world, yawned long and hard, and eventually stood up as if to show off his beautiful silhouette.
“Get up,” he said curtly. “Up, right now,” he continued when I didn’t obey him. “I want to wake up and eat and bathe and take a walk and do things!”
The cat’s smell had clung to my sheets, and I kept finding his fur for weeks. He had seen everything: my apartment, my secrets, the fact that my cupboards were full of all different kinds of detergent and that my walls, floors, windows, and tiles were all sparkling, not a speck of dust in sight. And now he was lying next to me telling me to get out of bed, humming a tune he’d heard on the radio and licking his coat as though to rid himself of a tick. When I didn’t get up at once, the cat never thought of waiting but leaped onto the windowsill, gripped the curtains, and pulled them demonstratively to one side. Serves you right! Ha ha!
My Cat Yugoslavia Page 7