My Cat Yugoslavia

by Pajtim Statovci

  Finnish sounded like a colorless, inexpressive language. The words seemed to crack like brittle, unhealthy bones.

  —

  We remained at the reception center. We had imagined we would be given our own apartment with our own kitchen and bathroom. Along one of the walls in our room were three bunk beds, all painted red, and along the other wall a row of wardrobes for our clothes. The beds were metallic and badly made and they gave a shrill creak every time you moved. The creaking beds all but drove me and Bajram to distraction, and eventually we took all the mattresses and placed them on the cold floor simply in order to get some sleep.

  Bajram had told me that people in Finland lived in enormous detached houses with swimming pools, laminate floors, and large kitchens. He said that all the houses were at least 150 feet apart and that in Finland people respect one another’s privacy by placing their houses far apart, unlike in Kosovo, where houses are built in a row, each higher than the next. Imagine, grua, it’s a completely different world.

  One morning I lifted my bare feet from the cold concrete floor and placed them on the armchair, looked out of the window, and wondered at how brazenly he had lied to us.

  I was furious. I could think of nothing else for many nights, many weeks, many months, and every time I saw him, every time I spoke to him or smelled him, every time he lit a cigarette, when he snored or ground his teeth, every time I hated him more and hated myself more. I wanted to kill him.

  The Finnish houses he had talked about were nowhere to be seen, the swimming pools, the remodeled attics, the bright rooms. Everything we had had before, everything we had owned, had been swapped for these plastic floors and old beds.

  There were eight families on our floor, eight apartments and one kitchen. The bathrooms had elevated toilet bowls with dubious-looking stains running down the sides. The greatest shock of all was that Finnish people didn’t wash themselves after doing their business but settled for a piece of toilet paper. Paper! That’s why there were no jugs or bottles of water in the bathrooms. It was the most repulsive thing I’d ever seen. How could they walk after doing their business?

  In the room opposite was a family of eight from Somalia. They made a racket night and day and their language was strange. When I saw my children playing with their dark-skinned children it felt as though something was wrong, something had been turned upside down. We had become just like them; we befriended them because we too were oppressed and disliked. We were as rejected as the Gypsies, another group of people who had come from far away and wound up in this country, a place where the people were so white they might as well have been made of snow. I considered us white too, but in their eyes we weren’t white in the same way.

  I spent most of my time sitting in our room and thinking. It felt as though the Finns looked at us like animals in a cage. I was ashamed even to go out for a walk because I knew people would spot me simply by the way I carried myself. I was ashamed of taking public transport, of sitting in the park, of looking people in the eye and going into shops other than the supermarket.

  And when in one shop I bought five discounted loaves of French bread and five cans of chopped tomatoes without separating my purchases with the divider, I could have died of shame when the cashier began angrily speaking Finnish to me, lifted the divider into the air, and showed me how to put it on the conveyor belt after my own shopping because now she had almost charged me for the next customer’s shopping too. I didn’t understand a word. I handed her a banknote, left without waiting for my change, and never went back to that shop again.

  I admired how organized everything was. Imagine, in Finnish supermarkets you could separate your shopping with a divider; they even had their own groove to keep them in a neat row. There were no dividers in Kosovo. I imagined that, when I got back home, my story would start with the dividers.

  But when I got back to our room and saw how the staff at the reception center greeted me, how pityingly they smiled at me, I wanted to punch them in the face. And when they spoke to us like children and said you shouldn’t eat with your fingers, I wanted to clobber them round the back of the head with the frying pan.

  We might eat with our fingers, I thought, but you won’t find our men sleeping on park benches and bus shelters in the morning. The Finns drank so much alcohol that they couldn’t remember what they had done or where they had been, and when I heard that some people lost everything—their family, their health and work—all because of alcohol, at first I shook my head then doubled over laughing because I’d never heard of something so thoroughly nonsensical.

  I’ve never seen people like this, said Bajram. They stand around like trees, statues, staring at us. He gave a mocking laugh. Let them stare. He seemed unable to comprehend it when I tried to explain that they were probably staring at us because they didn’t want us here in their country.

  Look around you, woman, he said and gesticulated wildly. They have more than enough. Why on earth wouldn’t they want us here? What could they need that they don’t already have?

  1994

  THE TOWN

  After living in the reception center for almost a year, we settled in a small Finnish town that went to sleep at eight o’clock in the evening at the very latest. All the other immigrants were placed in the same district.

  The immigrants spent time only with one another and didn’t care that you were supposed to be quiet in the apartment buildings after 10 p.m., that you were supposed to use the sauna only when it was your turn, that you weren’t allowed to leave clothes in the drying room overnight, or that you couldn’t just pick any empty parking space outside the building. Such rules seemed incredibly petty, and once they noticed how much breaking them irritated the Finns, they simply laughed.

  The other immigrants in the area soon began working at one of the local factories, but Bajram would not accept a job like that. He didn’t believe it worthy of him because he had a university degree and had held respected positions in the past. Nobody here with a university education would take on a job like that, he said. Never.

  Bajram learned Finnish better than I did, better than all the other immigrants, and found Finnish friends whom he regaled with stories about his world and his culture and whom he even invited to our house.

  He showed me and the children off to these middle-aged men as he would any possessions, and the men sat at our table smiling and peering around. My son, he is good boy. And my daughter, she make good food, Bajram boasted.

  I prepared food for them, peppers stuffed with ground meat and mazë, I baked fresh bread for them and offered them tea, and they ate and patted their bellies in a manner that even I understood. But Bajram wasn’t yet full. He picked up his empty plate and held it toward me without saying a word. I had just put food in my mouth and my fingers were covered in the mazë into which I had dipped pieces of bread. Bajram saw this.

  I took his plate in a panic, tried to swallow my mouthful and surreptitiously wipe my fingers on the table and beneath his plate, but there was too much of it and my fingers were still slippery with grease.

  I placed two stuffed peppers on Bajram’s plate, though the dish with the peppers was closer to him than to me, and put it in front of him. I tried to continue eating, though I could see immediately that he wasn’t moving. I wished he would let the matter pass. When I looked up, he was puffing like a bison. He raised his index finger and tapped his nail against the surface of his plate. Please don’t do this, I begged him silently.

  His unflinching stare felt so crushing that eventually I got up, took a fresh dishcloth out of the drawer, leaned across the table, and wiped the almost imperceptible smear of mazë off the side of his plate. After this he began to eat again.

  The men sitting round the table gave me a look of pity. I glanced at Bajram, who was concentrating on stuffing his mouth with mazë, to make sure that I could look up at them the way I wanted to look at Bajram. All four of them looked down, picked up their cutlery, and began spooning the creamy mazë like s
oup.

  Bajram spent all his evenings and weekends with these men. They visited famous places, drove across Finland, and watched sporting and musical events. Bajram missed the children’s birthdays, their first day at school, the moment they learned to ride a bike. I had imagined he would start taking an interest in things like this, especially now that he had nothing better to do, now that his children needed him more than ever before, but once Bajram got to know other Albanian immigrants in Finland, with whom he could finally speak Albanian again, we saw even less of him.

  Every time he went off somewhere, he left money on the kitchen table. I quickly learned how to gauge from the amount of money when he would be back. He had worked out that one hundred marks per week was plenty. It was always a relief when Bajram went away. I took the money from the table and began budgeting for the following days, and from every sum I counted I put a small amount aside.

  Our eldest children started going to school. When it turned out that children in Finland are entitled to preschool education even before they start school, I was so happy that I could hardly believe it was true. I was afraid they might send the children back home and say there was no good reason why my children should be at preschool.

  Because Finnish women had jobs, they didn’t have time to stay at home with their children, and so they let other people take care of them. When I heard that children as young as eighteen can move away from home, I was shocked. What kind of person is an eighteen-year-old? What does an eighteen-year-old know about life? Nothing whatsoever.

  Every day I sent my children to school and preschool slightly early and collected them late in the afternoon. All my spare time I spent sleeping. I couldn’t get enough of it. It was as though I was addicted to killing time: the time until my husband would come home again and leave again.

  11

  When I arrived in Prishtina for the first time in eight years, everything had changed from the images in which the city had remained in my mind. Dust floated down from the sky like slow rain and rose up through the drains like fog and mixed with the gasoline and sweat hanging in the air.

  A long line of taxis was waiting outside the terminal for all the Kosovans who had moved abroad and who flew back to their homeland for the summer.

  The taxi driver was holding a cigarette smoked right down to the filter in his thick, brown, weather-beaten fingers, and his expression didn’t so much as flicker when I responded to his attempt at conversation by telling him to drive forward. He looked around himself, regularly wiping his sweaty brow with his yellowed shirtsleeve.

  I turned and looked out of the window at the view in which the advertisements, shops, and cafés of the airport quickly changed into an attractive panorama of trees and mountains that looked like a row of hats. An unrelenting heat parched the terrain like a fluttering sheet.

  The closer to the city center we drove, the more crammed the streets became with orange, yellow, green, red, and blue billboards, each of them shouting to be noticed. The streets were crowded, the heat was unyielding, and the smell of sweat clawed at me everywhere, and all around there were orange-bricked houses, most of them only half finished, nothing but black holes where there should have been doors and windows. There was rubbish everywhere, between the houses and at the side of the pavement. Through the doors of the shops spilled the wares that people were desperately trying to sell inside—fruit, appliances, and toys—as the traffic tried to negotiate its way around them.

  I arrived at my hotel room and put my suitcases on the bed. The Grand Hotel was situated near Bill Klinton Boulevard at the northern end of a street named after Xhorxh Bush and just south of the Skanderbeg statue. The central pedestrian street was full of people, clothing shops, cafés with music blaring inside where people had to speak all the louder to make themselves heard.

  I walked around aimlessly, my hands in my pockets, and eventually decided to sit down at a café where people were sitting outside talking about literature, education, and equality. I’d expected to see people licking their wounds and shutting themselves away in their homes, but I soon came to understand quite how much those who had moved away from Kosovo, the shqiptarët e diasporës, had fallen behind. People’s attitudes and values seemed to have remained unchanged from the time when they left the country, and they were preserved in tight-knit communities in overcrowded European apartment buildings in disreputable parts of town, places where the homeland was only present through radio and television.

  A handsome waiter brought me a fifty-cent macchiato, and I sat quietly listening to the people around me. Right then I realized that I could no longer speak properly; my Albanian was clumsy, slow, and unsure. I didn’t recognize all the words they were using because the language had changed. Still, all the smells and tastes, the soft aroma of the macchiato, the thick, wooden tobacco smoke, and the smell from the stalls selling roasted corn on the cob were all familiar.

  I was worried that somebody might come and start chatting to me, because then I would be caught out. I knew how shameful it was to be an Albanian who had forgotten his mother tongue. I turned the coffee cup in my fingers, stirred the two-colored foam with a red plastic stick until it was a single-colored mixture, and ordered all manner of different coffees that I only tasted, desserts that I didn’t touch.

  I felt guilty for being so tired and for thinking about the wrong things, for the fact that returning to this city after all these years didn’t feel any more special than this. It should have felt as though I had come home, that I had come back here to die. I should have been making plans, should have written out a list, Muzeu i Kosovës, Muzeu Etnologjik, Varrezat e Dëshmorëve, and Galeria e Arteve, and visited photography exhibitions with photographs of mass graves, visited cemeteries, talked to people who had survived and told their story for future generations.

  Perhaps I should have thought of all those dead people, those who had killed others or who had themselves died. Tiredness was nothing compared to spending months in a wintry forest, your fingers and toes freezing and eventually falling off. Nothing compared to children being born already dead and buried in a pile of snow.

  —

  The first time I heard the cat’s plaintive meowing was on the way from the café back to the hotel. It was coming from a car wash near the hotel. Needless to say, I had to step inside and ask where the sound was coming from. After recovering from the shock of a complete stranger starting up a conversation by asking about a cat, the owner explained that a cat had turned up behind the building a few days earlier and wouldn’t stop meowing.

  Wiping his hands on his dirty sleeveless shirt and stained blue jeans, the man asked me over the rush of the pressure washer why I wanted to know. After all, it was only a cat, vetëm një macë. I was so agitated that I didn’t hear his question but asked what kind of cat it was. The man told me he had never gone behind the building to see what kind of cat it was because it was only a cat.

  Shut up, you fat idiot, I felt like shouting at him, but before I could do so I snuck behind the building, as slippery as a herring, as agile as a squirrel. It was an old house, traditional and built in three stories. The owners of the car wash lived above the garage, situated on one of the busiest streets in Prishtina.

  As I arrived in the backyard I saw a wooden ladder propped against the wall and, a meter from the house, another tall wall separating this plot from the next. The wall seemed to stand there so lazily that it looked as though it might come crashing down on the house at any moment.

  The backyard was a mess of plastic bottles, old food, and scraps of paper. And standing on all the litter was a small orange-and-white cat digging for something to eat.

  The cat had slender paws and a frail-looking body. Its orange coat was dappled with irregular white spots, and the cat looked extremely unwell, as though it had taken a mud bath and then gone through the dryer.

  When I took a step toward the cat, it stopped digging for food and turned to give me an accusatory look in the eyes, as though my step had
put its life in danger.

  As I took another step, the cat got itself ready to retreat. Its backside rose up tall and its paws tensed, its yellow claws protruded.

  Then I began calling to it. I crouched down to its level and held out my hand, clenched in a fist. At first the cat looked at it, curious, then a moment later took its first step toward my fist, toward this strange person smiling and speaking to it, a thing the cat had probably never seen before.

  It took almost an hour for the cat to start trusting me. Every now and then it took a cautious step toward me only to leap suddenly back onto the pile of rubbish upon hearing a single uneven breath.

  I let the cat watch me and smell me in peace and quiet, and only once it touched me did I finally touch it. I stroked its small head and tail, its back and tummy, and eventually it climbed into my arms.

  I decided to take it back to my hotel room. It didn’t have a home, I thought. What a shame that nobody wanted to take the cat in, and such a beautiful cat too. Under no circumstances could it be left at the mercy of a man for whom this adorable creature was just a cat.

  With the cat in my arms I walked back to the front of the building and turned furtively to see if anyone was watching me. I almost collided with the car wash owner’s enormous stomach as he shouted at me, asking what I was doing with a stray cat.

  “Macë e rrugës!” he kept repeating, shaking his head and laughing. “O budallë!”