The imam hadn’t come dressed in religious attire, as I had imagined. He was wearing a dark-gray bespoke suit. He had two handsome thick golden rings on his fingers and a matching, suitably thick golden pendant round his neck and a steel watch on his wrist. The top two buttons of his shirt were open. White chest hairs spilled from beneath his shirt, his heavy pendant pressing them down against his sweaty skin. The imam shook Bajram’s hand firmly, only gave me a cursory look in the eyes, and asked Bajram in Finnish where the child was.
Bajram showed the imam into the apartment and the imam followed him after taking off his snakeskin shoes and leaving them in the hall. His socks, the same color as his suit, were damp at the toes.
Bajram and the imam stepped into the children’s room. The boy was lying on his bed staring fixedly at the lampshade above, as though the light didn’t dazzle him at all. The boy had developed a penchant for light and he’d started asking us to leave the lights on at night too. There were dried tears on his cheeks. Bajram took a handkerchief from his pocket and gently wiped the boy’s cheeks, then gave him a soft pat on the forehead.
The imam sat down next to him on the bed and said he was ready to begin. The boy blinked for the first time since we had entered the room. He turned and looked anxiously first at the strange man then at me.
“Everything is fine,” I said and walked to the other side of the bed to stroke him.
“This man has come to make you better,” said Bajram.
The imam looked around him cautiously.
“What’s the matter?” he then asked the boy.
The question made the boy move. He turned his back on the imam and said he was frightened. I tried to calm him and continued to stroke his thick hair, which had stuck to his forehead.
“I will only be here a moment,” the imam added and stroked the boy’s head as though he had just learned from me the proper way to calm a child.
He told Bajram that the room had to be absolutely dark throughout the procedure because the evil spirits will not appear if it is light. And there must be nobody in the room but him and the boy.
“Very well,” said Bajram.
“Why?”
The question leaped out of my mouth as though someone had squeezed it out, as though it had been wrapped in a small bag filled with air and popped free.
The imam looked first at me, then turned to look at Bajram and said that when the evil spirit leaves the body it will immediately try to find another body, and without that it will die.
“I will grab it as soon as it appears…” He paused for a moment. “And I will destroy it. I am immune to it.”
Bajram smiled contentedly. Thank you, he said. And he said it with that same carefree note in his voice that was always there when something that had been plaguing him for a long time was nearing a resolution.
I didn’t trust the imam and the imam didn’t trust me. I didn’t want to leave the boy in the room with him, but Bajram dragged me outside, leaving the boy alone in the darkened room with that strange man who could do anything to him. The imam looked at Bajram with an air of self-righteousness, winked, and closed the door.
The boy hollered for many minutes. At times it sounded as though he was being hit, at others as though he was beside himself with fear. Our other children asked what was going on, when he was going to be cured. He’ll be fine in just a minute, said Bajram. It shouldn’t take very long now.
We had gathered next to one another on the sofa. Bajram sat on the armrest and I sat next to him, and beside me our four other children sat in a row from oldest to youngest. I couldn’t remember us ever sitting like this before. There were no pictures of us sitting next to one another or doing things together, and I realized this was because we never did anything that anyone might want to photograph. Slowly I began to sense something powerful, something rising up from my stomach, and it felt good. Just sitting with them. We were together now, sitting here on the sofa. We all wanted one and the same thing, and we all sensed it from one another.
No matter how much I wanted to stay sitting there, to bathe in the notion of better times, I opened my mouth. I don’t believe in this. I don’t believe this will cure him. I don’t want to lie to you.
And at that moment Bajram looked at me the way he always looks at me when I am not quiet when I am supposed to be. Bajram had reserved a look specifically for this occasion, and he used it now: lips tightening, mouth slightly open, both his upper and lower teeth coming into view like a beaver, his mustache rising up to his nose, tightening the skin across his face. He turned to look at me, and at that I knew what would happen once the imam had left.
After a few minutes the imam opened the door, walked briskly into the hall, and crouched down to fetch his snakeskin shoes. The boy got up from the bed, terrified, and switched on the lights. On the way back to his bed he stepped quickly across the floor as though he was only able to touch certain spots.
He lay on the bed panting with relief, pulled the duvet over himself, and lay there staring at the lights on the ceiling just as he had before the imam had arrived. Bajram asked the imam what had happened in the room.
“Everything is fine. When he wakes up in the morning, he will be normal again,” the imam declared, opened the front door, and made to leave.
“Really?”
The sorrow of Bajram’s question embraced the walls like thick velvet curtains.
“Yes. The evil spirits have gone,” said the imam. “They have been destroyed,” he explained, lifted his hand toward the ceiling, and said there was no need to worry. God is great and God is good.
Bajram reached out to the imam, gripped his hand, and pulled him toward himself as if to embrace him.
The imam left our home showered with thanks after only half an hour’s visit. He slipped the wad of banknotes Bajram had given him into his left jacket pocket, the one nearest his own heart. He shrugged on his coat, slipped on his shoes, and said, God’s blessing. He has given us everything we need. All questions and all answers, he shall give.
—
When I awoke to a new morning, I turned to look at the boy, who had been sleeping between us for several months. Bajram had already gotten up and gone to the shower. From the bathroom came the sound of splashing as drops of water fell onto the hard tiled floor.
“Good morning.”
I reached across the boy and pulled him closer to me.
“Be quiet,” he said and placed his hand over his eyes to close them.
Then he clenched his eyes shut and muttered something to himself. His eyelashes twitched and his cheeks quivered, his breathing was fast and frozen, as though his mouth were stuffed full of ice.
13
When I stepped out of the bathroom the next morning the cat had woken up. It was meowing contentedly, its stomach still full from the meal the previous night.
I asked it whether it would like to go on a trip with me. For a moment the cat looked at me in bewilderment, then hopped from the bed onto the floor and rubbed itself against my trouser leg. Yes, it would go anywhere with me.
I closed the hotel door behind me and wrapped the cat once again beneath my shirt so that nobody would see it. With the cat in my arms I jumped into a taxi waiting outside the hotel. I chose an orange Volkswagen to please my orange-and-white cat.
When I released the cat from beneath my shirt, I could see immediately how much it liked my choice because as soon as the car started up it raised its front paws to the window and craned its neck to watch the landscape opening up behind the window, a landscape that in only a few minutes turned from a restless urban jungle to a cluster of peaceful mountains. Soon they too disappeared behind us and the hot asphalt sank beneath the tires like black lava.
—
The village was on one of the mountainsides. The sandy road leading up there first wound its way up along one side of the mountain and went down along the steep opposite side.
“Stop,” I said to the driver as we approached the village shop.
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“What, here? Is it one of those houses?”
The driver pointed at a group of redbrick houses farther off, a neat row of pear trees standing in front of them. On the other side of the street Mehmet was still running the shop that had been there for as long as I could remember.
“I’ll get out here,” I said, paid him, and stepped out of the car.
I looked at the village as though I weren’t really there at all, as though everything around me was nothing but a dream, a mirage blown in on the wind. I sighed and breathed in the heavy, dusty air—I couldn’t bring myself to believe that I had come here, that I was standing on this sand after all these years, how familiar the sound of the earth was as I placed my foot on its surface. It was a soft sound, the same sound as waves and leaves caressing the earth. The mind always tends to forget these things, I thought, but the body never forgets.
I stood there with my cat outside the village shop and looked at the sandy road winding its way between the mountains and far beyond them. Several hundred feet away the road split in two; from the main road emerged a narrower, dusty track leading to a cluster of a few unassuming houses.
I walked into the shop to buy breakfast for me and my cat. I took a packet of cookies from the shelf, some water, juice, chewing gum, and for the cat a few pieces of dried beef. I placed my shopping on the counter, and the idle hands of the man behind it made me look up at him. I recognized that face instantly, his broad smile, his bad teeth. Nothing had changed.
“Is it really you?” asked Mehmet.
The wrinkles in his face deepened as his smile widened.
“Yes, it’s me,” I mumbled and glanced at him furtively.
“O Zot i madhë, how are you, boy?” Mehmet asked in disbelief. “I haven’t seen you in years.”
Mehmet wiped his face with a trembling hand. He rubbed his damp eyes and didn’t know where to put his hands. His voice quavered as he tried to say several words at once.
I responded briefly and hoped he would stop asking me things.
He wanted to know how my mother and my siblings were doing. And I told him the truth, for I had nothing to hide. When I told him there was no point asking me that sort of question, as I hadn’t seen my mother for some time and we weren’t really on speaking terms, he cleared his throat and wiped his brow.
“But…well, then,” he said from behind the counter as though he had to force himself to ask the next question. His stern expression had seemed to paralyze his face.
“Is that a cat you’ve got wrapped beneath your shirt?” he asked and pointed at the cat, his finger crooked, as though he wanted to keep his distance from it.
“Yes it is, but you can’t touch it,” I said and quickly packed my groceries into a white plastic bag, hoping that Mehmet might take the hint and stop trying to make conversation.
“Are you going to visit your grandfather and your cousins?”
“I don’t know.”
“You should. They will surely be thrilled to see you, especially your grandfather. He speaks about you often. He thinks about you a lot.”
As I left the shop Mehmet shook his head as though he had seen a ghost. I could see from his lips that he was muttering that familiar mantra whereby we invoke God twice, O Zot, o Zot, and shake our heads, so full of emotion. This is an answer to anything for which we cannot find words or for which words do not exist.
I walked toward the houses until my heart began to beat so hard that my entire chest seemed to move in time with it. My neck and hands felt clammy, and my throat clenched shut and tingled as though it had been filled with sand.
Almost without my noticing, my hands had slipped beneath my shirt and my fingers were gripping the cat by the neck. When I let go of it, the cat let out a pained meow. I took hold of the cat with both hands and lifted it above my head so that the sun lit up its ginger stripes, and it looked at me, almost smiling, and its tail and legs dangled like socks on a washing line, and I asked it for forgiveness—Please forgive me, I said—and lowered it once again to kiss it right in the middle of its tiny head.
I started to feel ill. The heat was unbearable, and eventually we turned in another direction, the cat and I, and began walking up the mountainside.
Halfway up, thirty or so yards from the dirt track, was a large, tall boulder from which you could look out across the entire village, every house, every path leading into the village and leading out again. The boulder that my mother had always spoken about and that she had loved. Whenever we visited Kosovo, she climbed on this boulder almost every night and looked out at the world she had left thousands of miles behind. Nothing beats this landscape, she said. I love this. The red sun shone across her face, she held a hand up to her forehead, and she stood there proud as a deer and tall as the mountains behind her.
I turned from the path and walked toward the boulder, climbed on top of it, and sat down with my cat at its highest and most beautiful point. I placed the cat next to me and it relaxed, then I took the cookies and dried beef from the plastic bag and laid them out in front of us. As I watched the cat eating, I took a cigarette from my pocket, placed it between my lips, and lit it, and the smoke didn’t seem to disturb the cat in the slightest.
The smoke whirled round the mountain, the cat, and the boulder, the world felt smaller than a fingernail, and the whole village rose up before us like a ruptured blister oozing the scentless liquid of houses and cars and people.
1995
OPTIONS
If we had given him poison to drink or mixed strong sleeping pills into his food, buried him in the woods in the middle of the night and told the police and everyone else that he had run away or that he had been kidnapped, snatched right out of our backyard, it would all have been over. In Kosovo people disappeared all the time, young girls were abducted at the bazaar, small children stolen from their mother’s arms and driven away. The boy’s death was one option among many, a very good option too, because I was convinced he would be unable to live a life worth living, a life of any degree of human dignity. This would end his suffering and we would cease to be a part of that suffering.
Living with him was like being caught in fog; we sank into it, disappeared, we had sunk into a grave in the deepest recesses of the ocean, a place nobody had ever been before. The pressure of the water howled around us like frozen steel, and we could see neither the surface nor the bottom, for there was only black. That’s what he had become, that’s what his desperation had caused; it was like walking from one destination to another deaf, dumb, and blind.
Nobody seemed able to help him, least of all us, though the boy was our own flesh and blood. Should we have done more? I wondered. Was it a parent’s duty to do for her child what she deemed sensible, then wait and see what happened, or to do everything possible all of the time? Because there was plenty more we could have done. I could have spent more time with him, and so could Bajram. He could have been at home more often, bought the boy something, talked to him.
I don’t know why I began thinking we should take him to a better place. Just as suddenly I became fascinated by something as mundane and trivial as counting—how many times I swallowed in an hour, how many steps it took from one place to another. Was I desperate or insane for letting such thoughts take over my mind? Both perhaps? At one point I began watching the clock and timing myself to see how quickly I could clean the bathroom, iron Bajram’s shirts, or vacuum the apartment.
When I mentioned this to Bajram as I prepared dinner, he was silent for a moment and didn’t answer me. Then he picked up the flour-coated rolling pin in his right hand and threw his cigarette into the sink, as though he couldn’t hold it while hitting me on the back with the rolling pin.
“Have you gone mad? Oj budallaqe, you stupid, careless woman,” he said and hurled the rolling pin back onto the table.
The thump was followed by the sound of hurried footsteps. The boy appeared in the kitchen. We had had to take him out of preschool because the staff hadn’t even been able
to force-feed him. He had clenched his teeth together so hard that they cracked.
“Don’t touch her,” he said, his voice tight. “Or I’ll kill you.”
The boy sounded at once fearful and fearless. I took my hand away from my hip so that he would see I was fine, and I walked him back into his room, where Bajram then disciplined him. Who do you think you’re talking to? he said and thrashed him with a belt.
Bajram was right to hit me. Did I want what was best for the child and what was right in God’s eyes, or did I simply want the gloom to end? I couldn’t even bring myself to say the boy’s name or answer when Bajram came home from work and asked how the boy had behaved. He was on my mind all day; he filled every conversation. I deserved to be hit because no sane person would ever seriously think things like that, not even half seriously, not even in jest. And she certainly wouldn’t say such things out loud even if that’s what she was planning.
The day after the beating the boy got up after a long night’s sleep. He had slept very well without a single nightmare. When he walked into the kitchen the color had returned to his cheeks, and he sat down next to his father at the table and smiled. Good morning, he said and looked at his father, and he never again spoke to us about nightmares or snakes. Or indeed about his life.
Bajram said his recovery was a miracle, and that’s what I thought too. Nobody could recover from something like that overnight, not even a child. I began to wonder whether all this time he had been pulling the wool over our eyes and claiming to have nightmares in order to get our attention. Don’t be stupid, said Bajram. Children are children, first they think one thing then they think another.
Only once he had said that did I realize quite how carelessly Bajram thought about his future. He was certain that his children would look after him when he became old and the children grew up—this despite the fact that the children were still small when we moved to this “godforsaken country,” as Bajram called it.
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