My Cat Yugoslavia

by Pajtim Statovci

  Spring 1980

  THE WEDDING NIGHT

  The moment that only a week ago had seemed unreal and mindless was now upon us: Bajram and I were lying together for the first time.

  Only a moment earlier he and I had been eating together, after which Bajram’s sisters and aunts, who had prepared our meal, stood outside the bedroom and sang to us. If your bride is pretty, come out and give us some sweets, they sang, and as he sat on the bed Bajram opened the box of chocolates, stood up, and went to the door.

  Once the women had finished their song and gone from behind the door, it was time. Bajram said he had to visit the bathroom.

  The door opened. Bajram appeared in the darkened room carrying a small porcelain bowl containing raw white beans. Bajram then threw them into the air with a surprisingly subtle flick of the wrist so that, despite the force of the movement, the beans only rose a short way into the air. They flew in different directions and scattered around the room, on the bed, over the floor, and behind the furniture. They bumped against one another, hit the dresser and the walls like marbles.

  I was to gather them up and put them back in the porcelain bowl Bajram was holding out. The groom was supposed to watch his wife, to follow this performance, to examine and size up the shapes and curves of his new beloved’s figure. This was his way of getting to know his wife’s body.

  I got up from the bed and allowed the silken nightdress I’d put on to slip from my back to the floor. I held out my hand and Bajram gave me the porcelain bowl. Only now did I notice the letters B and E beautifully engraved into its side. I knelt on the floor and began gathering the beans and placing them one at a time into the bowl.

  I placed the bowl in my left hand and peered under the bed and behind the dressers in such a way that my buttocks moved farther away from each other, my thighs formed folds as they pressed against the floor, and the hardened soles of my feet were facing upward toward Bajram’s pensive stare.

  I’d imagined I wouldn’t be able to kneel down properly for shyness and shame, that I wouldn’t be able to collect the beans with ease, but I could after all because this event had arrived as naturally as one harvest follows another.

  Once the bowl was full and I had stood up again, my eyes were caught by the figure of Bajram, who now stood undressed at the other side of the bed and whose proudly engorged penis looked frighteningly large. His arms were muscular and the contours of his body were well defined, his shoulders broad; everything about him was symmetrical. He had a handsome washboard stomach and a back that curved into buttocks so round that they appeared almost separated from his body. The lower part of his back and his coccyx was covered in a thin layer of hair that seemed ready to thicken and conquer a larger area for itself at any moment.

  I yearned to touch him, to rest my head on his chest, to caress his chest hair, to listen to the beat of his heart.

  There was still one bean beneath the bed. I balanced on my right knee and reached toward it. When it fell into the bowl, the final bean of all, all I could hear was the sound of Bajram’s heavy, lustful breathing. I turned to look at him. Bajram had begun to pleasure himself; with his left hand he was stroking his chest, while his right hand was frantically moving between his legs. He jumped onto the bed, grabbed my hand, and pulled me with him.

  And I remember exactly what happened next. Every detail. The way Bajram forced his way inside me, rupturing my hymen. I remember the unpleasant, stuffy smell of his groin, the pain coursing through the bottom of my stomach, pain that felt as though someone had slit me open with a knife. I remember screaming with pain, Bajram’s hand in front of my mouth, his shushing, the stink of his breath: tobacco, garlic, tobacco, leek, tobacco, and aged beef.

  I remember how he pressed his body down on top of me, the small berries of spittle that trickled from the corner of his mouth, the sweaty hair clinging to his forehead. But perhaps most vividly of all I remember his face, frozen in an expression of the utmost pleasure: the inability of his eyes to focus, his lips slightly open, the panting moving in and out of his mouth, the quiver of his muscles from the exhausting back-and-forth motion of his hips.

  Once Bajram had finished he looked casual and carefree as he wiped his groin on the corner of the duvet. He sprang up from the bed, muttered a word or two to himself as though nothing had happened, as if he had stood up from the bed like that a hundred times, and disappeared.

  I remained sitting on the bed, pondering the extraordinary disappointment that had just befallen me, a few minutes of unpleasant smells, strange positions, and unexpected, uncomfortable surprises. I was at once calm and in an utter panic. I had nothing left to wait for. This is what it would be like always, I thought. Every time.

  Then I looked beneath the blankets. When I saw there was only a little blood on the sheet I took the razor blade from beneath my armpit. Following my mother’s instructions, I’d kept the blade in my bra and slipped it under my arm before undressing. Using the blade I made a little cut in my armpit, scraped up some blood and smeared it over myself and the sheets, careful not to leave smudged fingerprints. I licked my fingers clean, stashed the blade beneath the mattress, and pressed my arm against my side.

  When Bajram came back inside he sat down on the bed without saying a word, pulled away the blankets, and looked between my legs. He gave a satisfied smile and slipped the duvet between his legs. There was something so self-assured, so easygoing about his behavior that I knew he would always do this, always come to bed in precisely the same way.

  Then he opened the drawer in the bedside table and took out a packet of red Wests, pulled out a cigarette, carefully placed it between his lips, lit it, and filled the room with smoke.

  —

  The following morning our white sheet with its large red stain was hung out on the washing line for all to see.

  The relatives who had been staying at the house looked at it, now convinced beyond doubt that the bride was indeed untouched. The sheet fluttered with the wind carried in across the undulating meadows. I looked at it through the kitchen window, relieved that the bleeding had stopped so quickly last night. By morning there was only a thin smudge of blood across my bicep and armpit.

  Just then a black cat ran across the yard. It leaped up onto the wall and walked along until it reached the corner. The cat sat down and looked regal and dignified, the mountains rising up behind it like a cape, the walls surrounding it as though they were a part of the cat’s armor in which the trees were embroidered decorations. The cat’s long black tail dangled in an arch like an adder; it sat on the spot, not moving, and stared at the house, which seemed to stare back at it.

  I wondered why the morning seemed so quiet and strange. When I had served the men of the family with coffee and handed them a slice of bread from the tray, they had put money on the tray and driven off to their own houses. Bajram’s mother hadn’t shown the slightest interest when I’d mentioned the events planned for the afternoon and evening and said how much I was looking forward to receiving my family.

  When Bajram and his father drove off somewhere, I asked his mother to tell me the truth. Is it true that we’re not having any guests today? A moment later Bajram’s mother showed me into the living room, told me to sit down, and switched on the television.

  The death yesterday of Josip Broz Tito marks the end of an era.

  “Bajram didn’t want to tell you,” she began and dabbed the corner of her eye with a handkerchief. “He was worried it would ruin your day if you heard. That’s why he wanted to fetch you yesterday in person.”

  When it transpired that I was the last person to hear the news, I realized that my wedding had come to an end. That day would not be a day during which the bride can receive guests at her new house, a day on which anyone can visit and see all the clothes and gifts that the groom had bought his bride and that were now laid out for all to see in the newly wedded couple’s bedroom. The ball gowns would not cover the bed and the walls, the floors would not be covered with different p
airs of shoes, gold would not be set out on the dressing table, pieces of jewelry would not be hung around the drawer handles, and rings would not be placed in a neat, pretty row so that the dressing-table mirror would make it look as though there were two of everything.

  And I went back into the kitchen, pressed a hand against my chest, clenched my fist, and when I noticed that the cat was no longer sitting on top of the wall, I ran my fingertips along the windowpane and wept.

  II

  When you touch me, I die

  I wonder if this could be love

  —LADY GAGA, “VENUS”

  10

  Our trip to Kosovo each summer took us almost two thousand miles by bus, because my father refused to use the plane or the train. They traveled so fast that they would come to pieces, he said, their metallic bodies would fatigue and eventually fall apart and passengers would be thrown from inside like giant hailstones.

  In Helsinki we took the ferry to Estonia, and from Tallinn we took a bus to Berlin. There we changed to the bus to Vienna, and in Vienna we changed to a bus bound for Prishtina.

  Of those journeys I remember the hours spent sitting in buses, the searing heat, and the skylines of the cities. How primitive Tallinn looked compared to Helsinki, for instance, how forbidding and colorless Warsaw rose from the banks of the Vistula, how the sheer abundance of consonants in Polish caused me anxiety, every word sounding harsh and violent. And when I told this to my father, he explained that the Polish language is like that because the Polish people are like that, harsh and violent. They support Russia and Serbia. Thank the Lord there’s only another two hundred miles of this godforsaken country.

  Once we had driven through Poland and passed the seemingly endless lines of trucks, we arrived in Germany, where the roads had four lanes and were all brand-new, they smelled of fresh asphalt, and you could drive along them so fast that sitting in a bus suddenly felt even more frightening than all those Polish consonants.

  I can recall how modestly the outskirts of Berlin began. The city didn’t draw attention to itself but warmed up slowly like a jogger’s muscles. And I remember the hurry in Berlin, how little time we had to change buses, it was the same every time, there was never any time to go to the toilet let alone stretch our legs, and how much my coccyx started to ache the minute the bus jolted off again.

  But it didn’t matter for soon we would arrive in Vienna, which was my favorite city of all. Its tall buildings were beautifully shaped: roofs with tapered turrets, curved buildings one after the other. They were built of shining glass, and the people standing at the foot of these buildings looked content and cheerful and beautiful and, above all, happy. The hours spent waiting at the bus terminus in Vienna were what I looked forward to the most, even though I was never given permission to explore the surrounding area by myself.

  I admired everything around me—the modern benches we sat on, the patterns on Viennese shopping bags, the habit people had of lightly blowing smoke from their lungs, as though it had never been there in the first place, cars with hoods that gleamed and glinted and with tires that looked as though they were turning backward though, of course, they were moving forward.

  I pressed my forehead against the bus taking us to Prishtina and dreamed that I would one day return to this city and really see it, go inside all those buildings that we never visited and that we left behind after ten minutes’ driving. After a while the mountains came into view, mountains that looked very different from those in the Balkans, greener and steeper and yet gentler with cozy little houses built into the hillsides. They were connected to roads and villages and posed no danger to anyone. They simply existed.

  All I remember of the final leg of our journey was the heat and the feeling of nausea. The buses were older and made more noise, there wasn’t always a toilet on board, they rattled along the bumpy roads stretching across the Balkans, and the seats were upholstered with old, stale-smelling velour.

  When we arrived in Slovenia my father told us that many people had died here. And when we reached Croatia he said the same thing: many people had died here. And when we arrived in Bosnia my father told us that here is where the most people of all had died. And as we drove through Serbia my father said that many people had died here—and a good thing it is too. People had died all around us, in Macedonia too, he said, in Albania, Bulgaria, and Greece.

  So many people had died on this peninsula that it seemed as though my father wished to honor each and every one of them by using the word death as many times as possible.

  —

  When we finally arrived at our destination my parents smiled. It was different from the smile that my siblings and I smiled, for our smile was one of relief, a smile that after three days we no longer had to sit on a bus. But theirs was the smile of someone who hasn’t smiled for a long time.

  We stayed at my mother’s parents’ house in the countryside near Prishtina, and throughout our stay we did virtually nothing. We woke up in the mornings, ate breakfast, then dinner, and eventually went to sleep. I remember that time seemed to pass very slowly, that our father spent very little time with us, and that every day ended with my mother arguing with her parents.

  “You promised to come back,” they said.

  And my mother said simply that it wasn’t possible. She said it almost in passing because my mother didn’t argue with them at the same speed as they argued with her. She answered their questions calmly and slowly, and they presented increasingly provocative questions. And eventually they said to my mother that she had turned her back on her own country. The argument always ended when my siblings and I were summoned into the room and asked point-blank where we would rather live, here or in Finland, asked which was a better country, and we looked at one another and answered one after the other that we would rather live in Finland, though we didn’t say why.

  “See?” said my grandfather. “That’s precisely what I mean.”

  —

  Once I woke up in the middle of the night, and I was on my way to the bathroom when I bumped into my grandfather in the corridor. He went into the toilet first and I waited my turn behind the door. When I was finished, I saw that he hadn’t gone back to his room but had sat down in the living room and left the door open. I had barely glimpsed his figure from the corner of my eye when he called me by my name and startled me.

  “Bekim. Come here,” he whispered.

  And I did as I was told, sat on his knee, and asked him what he wanted. He gave a deep sigh and began to speak. He said he was worried about us, worried about what kind of people we would become. I couldn’t say anything to him because the room was pitch-dark, and he asked whether I’d noticed that I had started to forget words in my mother tongue, asked why I didn’t like the same games as my cousins, because he wanted to know, and he asked why I was so quiet, why I spent all day with the farm animals, why I didn’t answer when I was asked if I liked the food or whether I had slept well, why I would rather spend the evenings reading a book than watching television with the family.

  “And I’m worried,” he said. “Worried that one day you won’t be an Albanian at all but something else altogether. And then you’ll go to hell.”

  He pulled me closer, tight against his chest, and wrapped his arms around me. I could smell the old sweat beneath his armpits, the scent of garlic on his breath; his rough fingers clasped round my wrists. Then he said my mother had suggested that, if I wanted to, I could stay with them.

  “You could help with the animals and go to school in Albania,” he said and clenched my wrist tighter still.

  I tried to wriggle free of his grasp, but he clenched all the harder.

  “Think about it,” he whispered eventually and let me slide down his thigh.

  I lay awake all night, and when I heard that my mother had woken up I went to her and asked why she had suggested such a thing. I didn’t want to live here, she knew that perfectly well.

  My mother creased her brow, she scoffed and looked away for a
moment, then turned and stared past my grandfather and across the room with a look in her eyes that I was unable to read.

  1980–1993

  THE ALCHEMY OF A NATION

  I duly obeyed Bajram and his parents and never made a fuss, though the majority of the household chores and work in the fields fell on my shoulders. For a long while I was unsure of my status in Bajram’s house, a feeling that only worsened when I didn’t become pregnant at once. His father made only a few comments, but his mother more than compensated. Shouldn’t we do something with her, she whispered to Bajram, making sure I heard. Take her to the doctors, maybe? I’m worried. I want nothing else in this life than to see you have a son.

  Bajram had three older sisters who had all been married off to neighboring villages and who visited the house several times a month. There was nobody else in the house, only us and his parents.

  At last we had our first child, who was a boy. Bajram and his parents couldn’t have been happier, and they spent all their free time with the boy and were continually buying him new clothes from the bazaar.

  As I looked after the child, I gradually realized that I was different from the other mothers. The other women in the village talked about their children all the time: how old they were when they started to walk, when they stopped breast-feeding, what kind of children’s clothes you could pick up at the bazaar. Listening to the other women, I’d realized that having a child changes us. There is nothing we care for as much as our child and our child’s well-being. Any extra resources would be used on the child, while we ourselves could survive on bread if necessary.

  Once I got over the enormous sense of hollowness that the birth of my first child brought about, the other four came in quick succession. We had two girls one after the other, and Bajram became increasingly impatient until we had another boy and then a third daughter. Bajram was thrilled—two sons, both of whom looked exactly like him.