My Cat Yugoslavia

by Pajtim Statovci

  I loved my children with all my heart, of course I did. But though loving them made me see the world in a wholly different way, I still didn’t love them as much as I loved myself. It’s impossible for us to love another person in the same way as we love ourselves. There is nothing more tragic than a mother who talks endlessly about her children in an attempt to demonstrate that it’s possible after all.

  If I’d had the choice, I would have chosen not to have children. It was painful and messy, and the workload only increased with each subsequent child. In fact, one thing that Bajram and I shared was a disappointment in the monotony of parenthood and family life.

  I was the wife of his dreams. I washed, clothed, fed, and looked after his children, scrubbed and polished his guests’ shoes when they visited the house. I made sure there was always water in the bucket in the toilet for flushing—this I checked every time one of his guests left the bathroom. Every evening I laid out his clothes for the next day, I ironed his socks and shirts and washed his underwear in almost boiling water, otherwise they smelled of his groin.

  I became pregnant without making a fuss and my bulging stomach only stopped me working in the final months of the pregnancy. I never gossiped with the other women and brought our children up to be quiet, the kind of children who didn’t make a song and dance about themselves. They only spoke when they were given permission.

  When cancer finally took Bajram’s mother, who had looked after the family finances and delegated the household chores for three decades, I assumed her role and workload without the slightest protestation. Throughout the village my reputation as a wife, a woman, and a mother was second to none—nobody else was able to get so much housework done, nobody else prepared pite pastry as thin as mine, and nobody else’s laundry smelled as fresh as mine. What’s more, nobody’s children obeyed their mother as dutifully as mine.

  In all those years Bajram never once said thank you, though he had plenty of opportunities to do so. He didn’t thank me that his favorite towel was always laundered and ready for him, didn’t thank me for the fact that he never once had to go to work without breakfast, neither that his shoes always looked polished and new nor for the fact that our children never woke him up at night, neither because I never mentioned his snoring nor for the fact that I never left him in a situation in which he might have needed me, because in his life I was always present. Nothing hurt me as much as his lack of thanks. It hurt more than all the work, the endless drudgery of beating the mats, washing the floors and walls, dusting the shelves, and preparing food.

  Did he have any idea how much time all this took? I often wondered. When it took me less than a minute to fall asleep next to him, did he understand that every part of my body ached? And when, despite my exhaustion, we made love, did he really think that nobody could possibly love her husband more than a woman waiting at home?

  Bajram worked long hours at the ministry of education, and when he came home he expected dinner to be served immediately, followed by two hours to relax. During that time nobody was allowed to speak to him. The children were shut in their rooms.

  Yet nothing pleased him, and he flew into a rage with increasing regularity. He often behaved violently for no apparent reason, slapped our daughters if they got in his way. He wanted the world to function according to his wishes. He lived out his days in his own mind and became frustrated when reality didn’t match the life he had imagined.

  —

  Bajram’s father died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage. He was a man who did lots of physical labor and who never complained of tiredness. One morning, as he was walking from the house out into the fields, he simply collapsed and fell onto his stomach. It was several hours until someone noticed him lying facedown in the overgrown reeds. Death plucked him like a caramel, said Bajram. Now I see that everything can end at any moment. What on earth is the point of all this?

  We held a dignified funeral for his father, and once it was over Bajram suggested we move to Prishtina. He would be closer to his work and the children could go to better schools. We wouldn’t need to look after all this. It would be easier for you too.

  Bajram felt almost naked. He was left looking after the farm by himself, and before the age of thirty had been saddled with the kind of responsibility that men his age rarely had to shoulder. He went to Prishtina to look for an apartment and quickly found something suitable: a flat on the sixth floor of an apartment building.

  City life came as a shock to all of us. From a young age I had wanted to live in the city, to visit jewelry and clothing boutiques, but the buildings were noisy and people thronged around us. It was impossible to concentrate on anything. There were shops on almost every corner, newspaper stands and tobacco kiosks, restaurants belching out the smell of boiling fat.

  Everything was expensive, food in particular. In the countryside ten dinars could last you for weeks, but here it was gone in only a few days. The city was brimming with temptations, gambling, and drugs. Thieves who emptied the bags and pockets of people walking along the street. You had to be on your guard all the time, and you couldn’t let the children out after dark because the roads were filled with black cars with tinted windows. Every day women and young children disappeared into those cars before being sold off for such brutal purposes that one could hardly believe the human mind could imagine such a thing.

  We knew that there had been unrest in the city between the Albanians and the Serbs, but we had no idea quite how serious the situation was until we moved to the city. Every day somebody died, somebody’s possessions were destroyed, houses, cars. Every day the front page of Rilindja was filled with gruesome headlines: someone was murdered on the way to work and someone else in the middle of the night, cars were driven into nearby lakes, and families entered long-lasting feuds with each other. Serbian children didn’t play with Albanian children, the Serbs didn’t eat in Albanian-owned restaurants, and the Albanians refused to sell tobacco to the Serbs. Tito’s death was the end, said Bajram. The Serbs will never give up. They want to see us on our knees, shining their shoes. One of the reasons Bajram wanted to move to the city was so that he could follow the unfolding chaos up close.

  The situation grew tenser with every passing day. Party Chairman Milošević diverted more and more government funds to building projects in Belgrade, millions and millions of dinars.

  Everyone began to miss Tito because if Tito had still been in power the Serbs’ demands would never have passed through parliament. The people of Yugoslavia had feared this moment for years, the moment when the man who had risen from a modest peasant family to lead us all finally died. Who would lead Yugoslavia once Tito was no longer around?

  Only a few years after Tito’s death, Prishtina became a dangerous place to live. Milošević gave speeches in which he promised to look after all Serbs in the province who lived—without any good reason—in fear of their position in society. Nobody shall beat you again, said Milošević. We followed the rise in nationalist fervor his speeches caused in a state of shock. Nobody had beaten the Serbs. Nobody had so much as touched them.

  All of a sudden tanks and soldiers were filling the streets. When Albanians started being systematically removed from their jobs, from positions in hospitals and the police, and when it became impossible to study in Albanian, the situation turned desperate. There was no room in the city to breathe. The caretaker in our apartment building didn’t bother to clean the floors with Albanian residents. The bosses at Bajram’s office were sacked and Serbs were appointed in their place, and eventually Bajram too lost his job. Local authorities gave Serb-owned businesses tax cuts while general taxation for Albanians was increased. Albanians had to study in basements and private apartments, in secret, and teachers caught teaching Albanians were routinely attacked, gas grenades were thrown into civilian apartments, and innocent people were beaten up in the streets.

  The air became thick and damp, heavy with the smell of burning, because it was breathed in turn by the desperate and the insan
e. I worried that I would wake up to find our apartment building on fire or that my children and I would be kidnapped and taken away, that we’d never see one another again. How was it even possible to experience hatred to such a degree that you altogether lost your sense of right and wrong?

  When war broke out in Bosnia and we heard about the brutalities to which the Bosnians were subjected—they were driven out of their homes, their houses were bombed, pregnant women were tortured and raped and taken to concentration camps—I wondered what was happening to this planet. At what point had humans turned into beasts that mauled one another, that held their neighbors’ heads beneath the water? People had died inside, the veins leading to their hearts were a mesh of mold, and their souls were black and sticky with filth. Do people who commit such acts deserve to live?

  When I heard the streets rumble beneath the tanks, I wondered what it would feel like if my life were to end in the same way as that of so many Bosnians. I would look on as buildings were destroyed, the Biblioteka Popullore dhe Universitare e Kosovës and the Xhamia e Llapit would collapse like sand castles, and the city would no longer be a city but sand soiled and tormented with gunpowder, people would die in fires and explosions, and among the dead might be my own friends and relatives. And me too.

  I couldn’t help thinking these things, though they made me tremble with fear. I sweated with terror, had to change my clothes several times a day, and didn’t dare go outside. I might wake up in the middle of the night and frantically check that my children were all still alive, place a finger beneath their noses and reassure myself that they were still breathing.

  As I looked at the Serb soldiers’ machine guns I realized that that soldier could end the life of any passerby in a matter of seconds, that tank could bring an entire building crumbling to the ground if the soldier sitting inside the tank decided to do so.

  Death was the very clothes we wore, and the whole city was wrapped in sheets doused in ash. It belched dust and mortar, showering a ghostly fog all around, and it was so close that our entire lives assumed a new form. Life was no longer a unique journey; it was a short slit, a pinprick on a fingertip, a bottle to the head in a dark alleyway, and there was nothing unique about it.

  —

  One June day in 1993, when we arrived home from my parents’ house, we realized that our apartment had been ransacked. The door had been rammed in. My jewelry had been taken, the furniture broken, and the appliances smashed to pieces. A large stone had been thrown through the television screen and the cable cut with a pair of shears. The windows were in smithereens. The oven wouldn’t work because the flue had been knocked out of place. There was no warm water in the bathroom because the boiler had been knocked from the wall and had broken in two. The photographs had all been taken—they’d taken our photographs too, for no other reason than to cause added distress, all our wedding photos, photos of our children.

  There was nothing left, not even a bed to sleep in. Bajram stood for a moment looking at the devastation, the shards of glass and the torn clothes, at what little was left of our world. We have to leave, he said. If we don’t leave, we’ll die.

  Eventually we learned that our insurance would not cover any of the damage caused in the break-in. According to the Serbian eyewitnesses our front door had been wide open and a group of Albanian youths had taken advantage of the situation, and this was a good enough explanation for the Serbian police. Bajram paced agitatedly round the apartment, breathing heavily. He looked withdrawn, as though he couldn’t get a firm grip on the decision he’d just made, and rubbed his overgrown hair.

  He drove me and the children to my parents’ house, fetched our suitcases the very next day, threw them into the hallway, and said he would go back to the apartment in Prishtina to see if there was anything we could salvage. He had a few thousand dinars in cash, which would help us to a fresh start.

  We had heard countless stories of Albanians who had moved to Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, the Netherlands, but Bajram wanted to go somewhere far away, somewhere where there wasn’t a single Serb. On a map he had bought he circled three countries: Australia and the United States because they were far away, but Finland he circled because he liked the name of the country and because he’d heard people talk of how affluent the Nordic countries were.

  Once he realized how many forms and applications he would have to complete in order to move to Australia or the USA and how expensive it would be he settled on the final option and got his hands on a pile of books about the Nordic countries.

  “It says here they have good schools and well-paid jobs. We’ll only be there a short time,” Bajram declared and slammed the book shut.

  “Very well,” I said. “We’ll go there now and come back here eventually.”

  “It will be best for all of us,” he said and paused for a moment.

  Then he said thank you.

  1993

  ABOVE THE BALKAN SKY

  Bajram had never before been in an airplane. He put five pieces of chewing gum in his mouth, took me by the hand, and gripped hard as the jet engines right by his ears began to suck air through their blades to lift up the weight of the plane and its passengers. His hand was sweaty and felt unpleasant.

  It was my first time in an airplane too, but I had to be a wife to him and a mother to my children, who were every bit as afraid as we were and whose ears hurt. The plane was a long, narrow tube, and nobody could get out of it. When the plane achieved the necessary speed and began rising into the air, higher and higher, Bajram pressed his hands over his ears. He was afraid that the floor might disappear from beneath him and he would plummet to his death, that the very fall itself would seem to last an eternity because it must take hours to fall from such a height.

  Bajram leaned across me to look out of the window. His eyes widened all the more and his grip on my hand became almost unbearable. Eventually he closed his eyes and began to pray. If humans were meant to fly like this, we would all have wings, he said.

  A month earlier we had traveled by bus to Sofia in Bulgaria, where we had been forced to wait several weeks. The city felt sweltering and massive, the volume of people seemed endless, they disappeared into brightly colored buildings like ants. We stayed at a cheap hotel and with the children in tow we didn’t venture farther than the hotel’s front courtyard and the shop round the corner because we spent every day waiting for Bajram to sort out our affairs.

  When Bajram tried to book flights to Helsinki, at first the staff at the tourist office refused to sell them to him. When Bajram told them we were going to Finland to visit relatives, they didn’t believe him and asked him to give the names and addresses of the relatives. Neither did they believe him when he said he had secured a job in Finland, nor when he told them he was a diplomat, and they took a particularly dim view of matters when he tried to bribe them. They knew we were Albanians. The city was full of us, and everyone wanted to fly somewhere out of Sofia.

  Once we were almost out of money, I asked Bajram to be honest. Tell them the truth. Please. Tell them you have an exhausted wife and five exhausted children, and tell them you’re worried we won’t survive this. Tell them you are a human being just like them, a father and a husband, and that you care about your family just as they do for their own.

  The following day Bajram ran back to the hotel. When he stepped into our hotel room he was panting heavily and stealing paranoid glances over his shoulder. Then he closed the door and pulled seven plane tickets from his jacket pocket, placed them in my hands, and kissed me on the forehead.

  “You’re a genius,” he said and stroked my hair with a smile, and once he’d gone again I sat down and smiled more broadly than I had ever smiled before, and I didn’t know whether I was smiling because we would soon be on our way or because Bajram had called me a genius.

  —

  All the people around us looked wealthy and important and they all spoke a different language. I didn’t dare get out of my seat, not even to go to the bathroo
m. Bajram, on the other hand, didn’t hear or see a thing until halfway through the flight when the plane began to shudder violently and sway like a rickety boat. It felt as if we were on a train that had come off its tracks. From the overhead speakers we heard speech that we couldn’t understand, and yellow lights switched on in the contraptions above our heads. Bajram was certain we were going to die, though nobody else seemed at all nervous. Bajram opened his eyes, gave me a look of sheer terror, and placed his other hand on my thigh.

  In the seat in front our eldest daughter stood up. She looked first at her father then at me. Bajram had buried his face in his hands. What’s happening, she asked, her voice trembling.

  “I don’t know. Sit down,” I said.

  And she obeyed me. She sat down next to her brother and took him by the hand. Ten minutes later the shuddering stopped. The yellow lights were switched off and the other passengers continued to look exactly the same, continued to leaf through their newspapers and sip the drinks the stewardesses had served them.

  “Don’t speak to them like that,” Bajram snapped. His eyes had opened and his fingers clenched round the armrests.

  —

  When we arrived we were driven to a reception center, a building that looked like a hospital for forgotten patients. I can remember almost nothing about that trip, though one would think it impossible to forget even a moment of such a journey, of the surprise at how different everything looked, the lights, the houses, how differently people walked along the pavement, the way they dressed, the smell of the air. And what a shock it was to discover that all the buildings were low, not high-rise, and looked cheap. That there was so much water and forest.

  Before long we were on the fourth floor of a large building, sitting in a deserted corridor with gray walls. We were waiting for Bajram. His voice could be heard from the room opposite. The reception center official was speaking English, but Bajram spoke only a few words of that language. I had expected we would wait until the interpreter arrived, at least that’s what we had understood from the official who had driven us here, but Bajram gesticulated impatiently and raised his voice to the blond-haired woman who seemed to be repeating the same couple of words to Bajram over and over.