But Bajram’s hand did not return to the steering wheel but came to rest on my left thigh as though it had found a home, and my leg felt so warm it could have melted. I have two options, I thought. I could leave his hand where it was or I could take hold of it. I could decide to start loving him from that moment onward or I could wait for the same thing to happen later. Of these two options I chose the latter and laid my hand on top of his hand.
And for a few moments I was the happiest woman on earth.
Look at me, I wanted to shout out. I wanted to climb up the minarets and skyscrapers and tell everyone about us, about how our fingers intertwined and clenched one another so that we didn’t know whose fingers belonged to whom. His hand was soft, his grip was gentle and warm, and his face was beautiful and chiseled.
—
But he hit me, even though he walked so upright, though he had promised me a happy life.
—
A moment earlier Bajram had slid his hand from under mine and placed it on top of my hand. Then he took my hand, briefly closed his eyes, and laid it on his groin.
Startled, I pulled my hand away. I was shocked at his lecherous behavior and frightened for my life, as the car almost swerved into the oncoming traffic. He gripped my hand again and did the same thing. Again I pulled my hand away. When Bajram’s eyes opened a second time, I no longer recognized his face. His eyes were so wide open that I felt almost nauseous; his upper lip curled toward his nose and his eyebrows toward his hairline, then he looked at me at first angrily, then with disgust, and finally livid with rage. There’s no need for that, I wanted to say. To wait so long and take a shortcut at the last minute.
The back of Bajram’s head began to tremble as he clenched his teeth, and sharp spikes appeared at the edge of his jaw. For a third time he took a firm grip on my hand, yanked it between his legs, and began rubbing his groin. By now he was squeezing my hand tighter than before and pressed it down to show me that this is where it belonged now. Then he moved his hand and began fumbling between my legs beneath the layers of lace. I could hardly believe such a handsome man was capable of something so unpleasant.
“Don’t,” I said quietly.
Beneath my skirt Bajram’s hand found my petticoat. He clipped two fingers around the elastic like a pair of pliers, pulled it back, and eventually located my panties. He began rubbing me. Then, using his middle finger, he pulled my panties back and began rubbing with his forefinger.
“Don’t!” I shouted and grabbed his hand, clenched it as forcefully as I could, and looked at him furiously.
You’re hurting me.
He pulled his finger out and slapped me so hard that my head almost turned right round. Instead of his face, all I could see now were the painted, bare mountains. I could feel my pulse beating on my cheek, which now smelled of his fingers. After that he menacingly slid his fingers into his mouth and laughed.
8
The next day the cat sent me a text message. He told me he was homeless and needed somewhere to sleep. I was writing him a response asking him to come and live at my place when my phone beeped again.
I’m moving in. That’s all it said.
By all means. Be my guest! I answered.
I followed this immediately with another message explaining that I had another pet, a boa constrictor. You don’t mind, do you?
Not at all! the cat replied, and he moved his things in a week later.
Our shared life began promisingly enough, though until then I hadn’t lived with anything except the snake. We shared all our expenses, and gradually the cat got used to the presence of the snake, even dared to touch it, and I thought that perhaps our love could be just like in the cinema: strong, powerful love that needed no questions and wasted no time.
We walked through parks hand in hand, we read the morning paper together, we told each other the things you only tell your loved ones. The cat asked about my previous relationships, and I told him I had been with both men and women but that nothing had ever come of it, and now I was more than content to be with a cat.
I told my cat about my hopes and fears, and the cat told me about his dreams and family. It’s a perfectly normal story. I’m a perfectly normal cat from a normal home and everything about me is normal, normal friends, normal job, yada yada. Not worth worrying about. I never asked the cat why he was homeless, because I sensed that he didn’t want to talk about his financial situation or social position. He would tell me everything when he was ready.
We took baths together and I would read him extracts from my favorite novels. We went hiking and visited spa hotels; we tried our hand at bowling and mountaineering and squash. And every evening we returned to our shared home, both of us convinced that this time it was different, this was fate, these two beings had finally appeared in each other’s lives to make them more worth living.
The cat loved films. He could have watched them all day. He dragged me to the cinema several times a week and became irritated at me or other people in the theater if someone spoke too loudly. Once he climbed onto the back of his chair and shouted at a dark-skinned man sitting a few rows behind us.
“In Finland people sit quietly in the cinema! Now shut your mouth back there!” Then the cat dug his paw into his popcorn and began throwing it at the man, though we were only halfway through the advertisements.
The cat had a firm understanding of films and the history of cinema, actors and screenwriters, directors and galas. He spent time on the Internet reading about films and making lists: films he should absolutely see, films he wasn’t yet sure about, and finally films that didn’t interest him in the slightest.
He then learned the contents of his lists by heart in case anyone ever asked him about them. And this wasn’t just a hobby for the cat. After living together for a few weeks he told me he dreamed of changing profession. He no longer wanted to be a cat; he wanted to be a film director.
“You’re just like me,” I said with a smile and placed a cup of coffee in front of him on the table where he sat examining his lists. “That’s what I do too. You’ve got to have your finger on the pulse, to be alert at all times. Someone could ask you a question at any moment; they might ask about that film there, and you’ll know the right answer straightaway.”
The cat gave a sour smirk. “This is in a slightly different league from you and your silly books,” he commented, “books that no sensible person can understand at all.”
“Don’t talk to me like that,” I snapped. “That’s disrespectful and I don’t like it.”
The cat threw his glasses on the table, gripped his coffee cup, and turned to look at me. He crossed his hind legs, sat upright, and placed a paw on the back of his chair as though someone had just erected a 1920s Parisian set around him.
“Look at it another way,” he said arrogantly. “What’s disrespectful is that I still haven’t met your siblings,” he continued through gritted teeth.
“They’re busy. I’ve told you a hundred times.”
“Always the same story,” he said, his voice now surly. “To be honest, the only disrespectful act in this entire conversation is going to be this one.” At that the cat held his front leg out straight—the one holding the coffee cup.
Then he dropped the cup. There was a clatter as the cup smashed, which startled the snake. It was sensitive to sounds and thuds, and the cat knew this.
“Clean it up!” he shouted wildly, a ferocious rage glinting in his eyes.
The snake began hissing and thrashing against the floor and the wall, and soon its small head peeped out from beneath the sofa, eventually followed by its whole body. There was coffee everywhere, all over the floor, on the rug, splashed up the walls and the chair legs. The cat sighed with ostentatious discontent and went back to examining his lists. By now the snake had slithered so close to the cat and the table that I picked it up with both hands and placed it round my shoulders, regardless of the cat.
“I knew it!” cried the cat.
“Come o
n. It could cut itself and die.”
“I wish it would die,” he snapped. “A disgusting creature like that deserves to die. I can’t for the life of me understand why you want it in the house.”
I took the snake into the bedroom, placed it on the windowsill, and returned to the kitchen, where the cat had sorted his lists into three separate piles. The lists were covered in bullet points and arrows, sums of money, annotations, the cat’s expectations, attitudes, and opinions. I took a small bag from the kitchen cupboard and began picking up the shards of the coffee cup.
“You know, I’ve been thinking,” I said as I took the shards to the garbage can.
“Well, well, do tell me what you’ve been thinking again,” said the cat.
“I’ve been thinking of changing profession,” I said, picked up a roll of paper towels and a cloth from the sink, and began mopping up the mess the cat had left. “Of quitting the university, and when vacancies come up in the spring I could apply to the same school as you,” I said to the floor. “We would always be together. I’ve been thinking I’d like to become a film director. I think I’d be rather good at it.”
For a while the cat was silent. I’d managed to dry the floor and fetch the vacuum cleaner before he started communicating again. He burst into laughter and laughed so much it sounded as though he could barely breathe properly.
“You? You, a person who knows nothing whatsoever about films?” he managed to say through the volleys of cackling.
I switched on the vacuum. As I vacuumed the floor I muttered to the cat that I could learn, I could know as much about films as he did.
—
Spring arrived, bright and sunny. Our first spring together when the sun was cool and light lasted long into the evenings. Snow dripped from the rooftops and disappeared down the drains, and the air was heavy with the scent of the moist earth. The trees gradually filled with light-green leaves that shone as if they were spun from pure silk.
To my surprise the cat didn’t want to come and see it all, the thawed lawns whose grass was still a heavy shade of green, the dusty asphalted streets completely dry though all around was still damp. Spring made the cat feel almost ill, all that light and sun, and he slept until long into the afternoon. And on the rare days that he agreed to venture out of the apartment he guarded his winter coat as if it were his most prized possession and refused to take off his thick gloves, scarves, and ankle boots. He huddled beneath his clothes and buried his head under a tight hood though the temperature rose to over seventy degrees.
I had lived under the belief that the cat simply hated the cold and that’s why he didn’t enjoy going outside during the winter, but it seemed he simply didn’t want anybody to see him. He didn’t like the way people had started talking about us. At first he led me to believe that he didn’t care about other people, but after a while he began to hear rumors, to read on people’s lips words that he took very personally, and no matter how much he tried to dismiss what he heard he began to see himself in other people’s words.
It’s such a burden, being different, he said, crushed and despondent. People just stare at me and you and wonder, they gawp at us—and wonder! First you try to become just like them, and when it doesn’t work out you try to come up with the silliest jokes to cover our difference in laughter, and when the jokes stop being funny, that’s when the lies start. And when that stops working, it’s time to pack your bags and run for the hills.
The cat had put on weight too. When he leaped up to the windowsill to watch people, he had to use his front paws to hoist himself up, leaving his hind legs flapping in the air like two ungainly appendages. Only then could he haul himself all the way up, gasp for breath, huh, pff, and swear to himself. He hadn’t become fat and happy but fat and bitter, and he began to find himself ugly. Don’t look at me. I’m a mess.
And though I tried to convince him that he was still very handsome, he couldn’t stop calling himself names, let alone stop blaming me. He blamed me for making him fat, for his greasy coat and swollen stomach, his badly trimmed claws, which he could no longer reach to cut by himself. He thought I fed him too much. I’m a cat; I can’t help my basic instincts. I’ll eat whenever there’s food available and drink when there is something to drink.
For the rest of the spring the cat waited anxiously to hear whether he’d been accepted to the school where he had applied. He paced nervously round the apartment, as though that would make time go faster. I was waiting for the same news, though I’d had to keep my application a secret from the cat because he had no faith whatsoever that I would get in. You can’t just wake up one day and decide you want to be a doctor. These things take time to mature and develop.
Of course you can, I wanted to say to him. That’s exactly what you can do. You can open a book and read so much that you no longer have the strength to hold your head upright. The cat believed that time would make him intelligent and mature, that time itself, living from one day to the next, would give him experience that would in turn make him wise. That’s not how it works, I wanted to say, not at all. Instead I held my tongue and encouraged him through every stage of the application process. You can do it. You’re a clever cat. Who are they going to take if not you?
Our life began to turn to routine, and suddenly we knew each other so well that we had run out of questions to ask. The cat knew not to talk to me for half an hour after I walked in the door; he let me read in peace and kept the sound on the television turned down whenever I went to bed before him, while I knew to lay out the clothes he needed for the next morning, as the cat was terrible in the mornings, whereas I was excellent.
Then one perfectly normal June day, the cat came to the decision that he wasn’t cut out for such a life. It’s the same every day, he said. I have to leave you. I want to leave you. I don’t want to do this anymore. A cat, in a world like this, a relationship like this.
At that moment the old Kosovan proverb popped into my mind whereby too many good things can spoil a person. We can achieve good things and they can occur in a variety of ways. If someone has more possessions than he needs, if he is used to being treated too well or becomes too adept at something, he starts to believe that he deserves only the best. He refuses to associate with people other than those who are the same as he is. He becomes accustomed to good food and drink and wonders how it was once possible to drink sugary lemonade or smoke the cheapest tobacco. And all the while he thinks other people’s pity is nothing but envy.
Did you really think that you and I would be together forever, just the two of us? How could you believe something like that? Surely you realize that you are like that and I am like this, and that together we’re not like anything? People should be fined for such abject stupidity.
The cat wanted to move out straightaway, but when I said I thought he should reconsider, he stopped to think over his options. You can live here even if we’re not together. It’s not a problem for me, I said. At that he raised his head from the sofa, leaned it to one side, and smiled, and his eyelids were curved like in Japanese cartoons.
“Very well then,” he said. “But I won’t pay a penny in rent.”
“That’s fine,” I said.
Spring 1980
SECOND REVELATION
The car curved into the yard and the shadows cast by the freshly painted tall white concrete walls. At each entrance stood a small cypress bush surrounded with flowers in different colors, as though they had been fired toward the bushes at random.
Bajram’s family house stood right in the middle of the yard all by itself; there were no other houses in sight. This enormous house was just the way I had imagined it, and the yard was filled with women and children waiting for us in their best outfits. Many of the women were wearing a dimije, which looked like wedding dresses and were bought especially for weddings.
The car pulled up right in the middle of the neatly trimmed lawn. At the other end of the yard stood the massive, three-story building with the orange roof. This pl
ace was only about twenty miles from my house, and still I felt as though I had traveled to the other side of the world. The house had been painted white. On the upper floor was a balcony the length of the building, and the family’s land seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see.
I heard people standing outside the car giving melancholy sighs and talking to one another, though I couldn’t make out the words. Bajram slipped out of the car and walked round to the other side to open the door for me.
I gripped Bajram’s hand and slowly stepped out of the car, pulling the train of my dress after me, and as I stood up I felt as though I were the only person in the world. The guests gathered in front of us gave way to form an aisle through the yard, a route along which I would soon be brought to the house.
The women were singing and rattling tambourines while the men beat their tupan drums roped across their shoulders, and I held out both my elbows to the sides, the palms of my hands one on top of the other above my stomach and tried to concentrate on looking at the ground. Bajram gripped me by one shoulder and his sister approached us and took me by the other. Slowly they began guiding me toward the veranda.
Once we arrived at the front door it was time to anoint the upper part of the doorframe. Bajram’s sister was holding a small bowl containing some sugar water.
“When you reach the door, dip your hand in the water and rub it along the top of the doorframe,” my mother had instructed me.
In times gone by, it was a commonly held Kosovan belief that this would make the newly wed couple’s shared life sweet. I dipped my fingers in the sugar water and tapped them against the doorframe as the guests looked on. After this Bajram opened the door. Waiting for me inside was my new bedroom, the bedroom I would share with Bajram.
As I stepped into the hallway I noticed that the layout of the house was identical to our house, just like all Kosovan houses. The hall rug was placed precisely in the center of the corridor, the porcelain cockerels behind glass vitrines in the living room had never moved from their spot, there wasn’t so much as a scratch on the steel kitchen counter, and there wasn’t a single crumb on the floor to disturb the perfect symmetry of the kitchen tiles.
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