My Cat Yugoslavia

by Pajtim Statovci

  I knew that the unrest in Kosovo was only going to get worse, so it was unlikely that we would be able to move back in the near future. I knew that in that time the children would become more like them and less like us. I knew that what always happens was bound to happen to us too: they would begin to despise people who were not like them. It was inevitable, that’s what always happens. After all, Bajram disliked everyone except other Albanians.

  Once the situation with the boy calmed down, I began to wonder how Bajram felt about the course of his life. Was it selfish of me not to ask him how things were going at work? Or how much money he had left when I asked for some? What did it feel like for a man to fail in his most important task? It had never occurred to me what it must feel like for a man who doesn’t have enough money to buy his children clothes or what it feels like to look at a dining table with nothing more than a pot of soup. What did it feel like to give his children slices of pite with nothing between them but pieces of onion and leek?

  —

  I noticed that it was hard for us to form any kind of relationship with our children, hard to fathom them. They didn’t like talking about their lives, and we didn’t go out of our way to ask them how they were getting on at school. We behaved like idiots; the children were allowed to come and go as they pleased. They had no boundaries.

  Our elder son began spending the night with his friends. Every now and then, almost as a formality, he asked us if it was all right for him to be away for a while. Of course it is, I said. And Bajram said the same thing. We allowed them to be raised by their teachers, we trusted the system lauded as the best in the world.

  Bajram rarely spoke with them. And when he did, he raved on about Islam and the situation in Kosovo. About wars and prophets, about the Battle of Kosovo at Kosovo Polje, the Ottoman Empire, Skanderbeg, and Enver Hoxha, about people who had already fled the situation in Kosovo but who now wanted to return and join the ranks of the Kosovo Liberation Army. They are heroes, said Bajram. Only God knows whether they will ever return to their families.

  Presumably Bajram expected them to understand that he too might become one of these men who leave their wife and children to fight for their freedom. But they never asked him anything. I imagined Bajram might disapprove and blame me for bringing them up badly, but, he said, the fact that they don’t feel they need us is a good sign. The best sign.

  —

  My younger son started school and learned to speak and write Finnish in a couple of weeks. According to the teacher at first he didn’t understand all Finnish words but he knew to ask about them—and he asked a lot.

  His teacher showed me pictures with three knives and four cars or six houses and five apples, which the pupils were supposed to draw on their own sheets of paper after seeing the picture only once. My son’s drawings were incredibly precise, the pictures had shadows and he remembered lots of details about them, things even his teacher hadn’t noticed.

  Apparently he always wanted to stay in school longer and resisted having to go home. In the afternoons he nervously stared at the clock ticking on the wall, packed up his things very slowly, and loitered around the school corridors for a long time.

  The teacher asked how things were at home.

  “Fine,” I said. “Everything is fine.”

  Given the silence that followed my answer, I imagined that would be the end of the conversation.

  I looked around for a moment, looked for something to focus on, an item to pick up, something to help me find the right words before finally looking at the teacher again. Then I asked the interpreter to tell him I understood and that I would tell the school immediately if we had any problems.

  I noticed that the teacher was clearly still waiting for some kind of answer. What could I have said? That it was difficult for me to adjust to being in Finland and that my husband found it hard to process events in Kosovo, that this situation was difficult for the whole family? How would this have helped? Even if I had explained that a war was about to break out in my homeland, I could sense it, sense it so viscerally that I felt faint and that sometimes I forgot to spit the toothpaste out when I was brushing my teeth. What could he have done?

  I held my son’s hand all the way home and didn’t want to let go of him, because I was thinking of everything he could one day become. A doctor, a lawyer, the CEO of a large company, a banker. Anything at all. How wonderful it would feel to be complimented, to be his mother at a time like that. My child would become something greater than me; he would know things I could never learn. Perhaps, I thought, this feeling was the very reason why people decide to become parents in the first place.

  I squeezed his hand more tightly because I could feel myself drowning into the gray of the endless pavement.

  —

  The following morning, I was sitting opposite Bajram at the kitchen table, though I normally let him eat undisturbed because the children and I generally ate after him. Bajram looked content as he sipped his coffee. I could tell from his expression how perfectly the coffee had been brewed, and the autumnal sunshine warming his wrist made a small, modest smile spread across his face. The boy hadn’t displayed any symptoms in a long time. Finally we could sleep and live in peace.

  Bajram’s life had taken a turn for the better, and that morning he looked so open and receptive that I began speaking to him. I told him of the meal I had planned for dinner, talked about our old set of china, our upcoming trip to Kosovo, and listed all the people whose houses we would visit. I told him what the teacher had told me at school the day before, spoke of how much the children enjoyed being at school, that they studied music, mathematics, literature, and world religions.

  “They could be on their way to something decent and worthwhile, something different from this,” I said and looked at the kitchen cupboards and stared out of the window as a harsh autumn wind blew across the yard.

  “What? What did you say about religions?” he interrupted me angrily and slammed his coffee cup on the table.

  “Yes, at school the children learn about all different religions,” I said warily and breathed out as calmly as I could.

  Bajram hit the table with his fist so hard that coffee spilled from the cup. He stood up and walked over to me. I didn’t dare look at him because I could feel his expression without looking. It was red-hot, like a ceramic burner turned on full.

  “Why have you sent our children to a Sunday school?” he asked and hauled me to my feet.

  “I haven’t done that,” I tried to assure him. “In schools here they teach children about all religions.”

  I tried with all my might to calm him down, to escape the ensuing conversation. “It’s part of their basic education, part of their curriculum,” I said and tried to slip free from his hand.

  Bajram looked at me for a moment with that same expression on his face, that bloodthirsty expression, the kind of expression you see only on the face of one who is about to exact the final, ultimate revenge. He held my shoulders with both hands, moved his right arm round my neck, and began to squeeze.

  —

  The very next day Bajram marched into the children’s school and forbade the teachers to teach them about religion. According to Bajram, the teachers had stammered in response, trying to lie to him, and said that this was an optional course about life philosophy in which the students were encouraged to think about the world and its various phenomena, including religion. At first Bajram had scoffed at them, dug his fingers into his forehead, and shaken his head as though he had a headache. Then he asked them why he hadn’t been told about this. It’s as if you’re trying to steal my children from me, he said.

  When he came home he told me how he had shown them what’s what. I couldn’t understand how he seriously imagined he would be able to change their ideas of life by talking to them about Islam. On some level I admired his determination and resolve. He blindly believed in his own world and trusted that his own faith would save him from all imaginable sins for which he feared d
ivine retribution. It wasn’t a bad way to live your life.

  —

  The following month Bajram lost his job. He was genuinely shocked at this—despite the fact that he knew his employers had found out that he had been deviating from the prescribed syllabus. He had been talking to the students about Islam and told them their life philosophy classes were a pack of lies.

  He had been given two options: he could either resign or he would be fired. Upon realizing the difference between the two and the implications they might have, he took the former option. After this he seemed depressed for a long time because he truly loved his job and had wanted to do it full-time, not just in the afternoons and evenings.

  His employment record arrived in the post. Bajram looked at it for a while and slipped it into his desk drawer. He took it out again, read it for a moment, then put it back in the drawer. He did this so often that one day, when he had gone out for a walk, I took out the sheet of paper and read it for myself.

  Employment terminated at the employee’s behest due to disagreement over interpretation of the school’s aims and values regarding equality.

  That’s what it said.

  14

  Everything looked smaller from high up on the mountainside. The trees had no shadows, the fields looked like mirrors that drowned the roads in their reflected brightness. The houses were nothing but short strokes of a paintbrush, lacking clear contours.

  All at once my cat started hissing. It had walked to the edge of the boulder, its teeth bared, and began to hiss at something moving around in the long grass below us. The cat was leaning forward—it looked almost as though it might topple off the edge of the boulder. Its fur had become bristled and restless, and its sharp shoulders stood unnaturally high and its mouth opened and now looked extraordinarily large compared to the rest of its body.

  Down in the grass I could just make out a series of clear, black curved patterns that formed a long line, metallic, greasy-looking patterns that for some reason had perturbed the cat greatly. At one end of the line, the patterns merged into a slightly raised head with a pair of black eyes and a mouth stretched and ready to attack, a set of sharp fangs exposed.

  The snake was plump and must have been about a yard long. It was clearly a sand viper, Vipera ammodytes, the most poisonous viper in Europe. Its silvery gray body was covered with narrow black diamonds the shape of licorice caramels. The middle of its body was many times thicker than the head and its jaws were gaping wide. Judging by the bump in its stomach it must have eaten something very recently, gobbled a bird or a vertebrate, a lizard or a rodent.

  I lifted my cat away from the edge of the boulder, though the sight beneath us was captivating. The snake retreated and wrapped itself into an even tighter coil. From above it looked like a spinning top whirling very slowly on the spot, its black scales gleaming like a sweaty forehead.

  The cat and I backed off to the other edge of the boulder, but the viper sensed us nonetheless, and we could hear its hissing all the while.

  I still had Mehmet’s plastic bag, and I had all the knowledge about snakes I needed. I knew that snakes can’t hear but that instead they form their understanding of the world using their senses of smell and touch. They don’t need ears and that’s why they don’t have any. They feel vibrations in the earth instantly, but because there was a boulder between us that must have weighed tens of thousands of tons, stamping on the ground wasn’t going to help.

  The cat prowled round the boulder and wouldn’t sit still. It wanted to walk to the other side of the boulder where it could climb down, jump to the ground, and run away, but it didn’t dare. Perhaps it thought the snake would be waiting for it down there, would attack it, sink its teeth into the cat’s neck, and eventually paralyze its central nervous system. After that the viper would slither round and eat it, and the cat would melt in the snake’s stomach for weeks. It was hard to imagine a fate worse for the cat than being swallowed by a snake.

  To attract the snake I put a piece of dried meat in the plastic bag and went back to the snake’s side of the boulder. The cat came and stood beside me and started hissing again, even though I’d told it to wait at the other side of the boulder and keep still.

  “Are you crazy? Get back!”

  The snake was in an aggressive mood, and out of sheer thoughtlessness the cat and I had disturbed it. It must have been sleeping in the shade of the boulder and our picnic had woken it from its siesta. But you couldn’t blame the cat for being curious. It wasn’t the cat’s fault.

  I dangled the plastic bag in my hands for a moment. I watched the snake, watched its narrow mouth open even wider than before, watched its teeth grow larger and more grotesque, watched its entire body start to tremble, its scaly skin begin to moisten as its hissing became grating.

  And then I dropped the bag.

  It fell through the air as slowly as a feather. When it was about three feet from the ground, the snake leaped up toward it, its fangs bared, writhed in the air, and eventually fell back to the ground with a thump like a stone dropped on the grass. I jumped backward and gasped with relief, for the snake was far longer and heavier than the cat and I had initially guessed.

  We could hear the snake wrestling with the bag. When, a moment later, we looked over the edge of the boulder, we saw the viper writhing inside the bag as though it were about to suffocate. It was wriggling and thrashing, twisting and turning, the plastic was confusing its sense of touch and smell. Its hissing was filtered through the bag and sounded almost catlike, and before long it was so exhausted that its movements became more stiff, more tired.

  I picked up the cat and we looked at the snake together—how slowly it was moving, like an elderly man about to faint, how it was constantly gasping for breath with the desperation of someone buried alive.

  After struggling inside the plastic bag a moment longer, the viper finally gave in. It no longer had the energy to move. Once it had gone without oxygen for a while, it fainted. Its muscles went limp and shrank slowly like a burst bicycle tire.

  The snake’s frantic writhing had pulled the bag tight and constricting around it, so that both ends of the snake were inside the bag and only a small section of its black-and-gray side was visible from one end of the bag.

  The cat and I slowly made our way down from the boulder. I snapped a thick branch from a nearby tree and walked round the boulder to where the snake was. I stepped over the piles of twigs and through the long grass, deliberately making noise, stamping on the ground and snapping twigs to test the snake’s senses.

  The hissing had stopped some time ago, and now the snake was lying inside the bag, motionless. The cat sniffed the snake as though the smell was not to its liking. I began to poke the viper with the branch, and when it didn’t even react to forceful prodding I crouched down to its level and put my fingers on its skin. Its tight-fitted scales were hard and rough like a wire fence.

  I then picked up the snake with my bare hands. I pushed its heavy, limp body inside the plastic bag and twisted the top of the bag so that it became almost like a balloon from which the snake had no way out.

  —

  After that I began striding back down the mountainside—a ginger-and-white cat on my shoulder and a black-and-gray viper wrapped in a plastic bag dangling from my right hand.

  1996–1999

  MY YUGOSLAVIA

  It was clear that there was no way we would be able to save enough money to take the family to Kosovo the following summer. When he realized this, Bajram was utterly crushed. He sat on the sofa with the money he had saved and counted it out again and again. He said it would be too late to go to Kosovo the summer after next. By then there might not be anything left.

  He placed the money back on the table, defeated. His steps were slow. He lay down on the sofa and turned to face the backrest. And right then, for the first time ever, I saw Bajram weep.

  At first he started to whimper, quietly, as though he was trying to unblock his sinuses. Then he started to
howl like a dog that had been kicked.

  It wasn’t long thereafter that I saw him weep again.

  Bajram and I were watching a news item in which it was reported that the KLA had admitted to murdering Serbian policemen. The KLA had given a statement claiming the attacks were retribution for the Serbs’ dominance, the oppression of the Kosovan Albanians, and the new direction of social policy, which the Albanians could not accept under any circumstances. Language and education policy must be changed and returned to the way they had been in the past: Kosovo should be allowed to take care of its own affairs.

  The camera swerved and showed a man fighting with the KLA. He proudly slung a rifle across his shoulder, pulled up his chin, clenched his teeth, and fixed his face in an expression that was merciless and unyielding. I found the man on the screen frightening, though I respected him and the values that he was prepared to defend to the death.

  “That’s a brave man,” said Bajram, his voice heavy with emotion, almost a whisper, and hid his face behind his hands, now clasped into a single large fist.

  Tito had ruled Yugoslavia for almost thirty years. During his time in office we blossomed. We were independent in all but name. We had our own university, our own radio and television station, though we Kosovan Albanians weren’t considered a people in our own right. But Tito liked us, and for that we received wealth from the rest of Yugoslavia, because Tito knew that we needed it the most. He managed to keep the worst of the conflicts and differences of opinion within Yugoslavia at bay by favoring both the poor and the wealthy, both Muslims and Christians. In that way he gained respect from everyone.

  But then those who already had plenty decided that was unfair. The rich should be allowed to keep all their wealth for themselves. And once Tito was gone, nobody else was able to argue the case against these people convincingly.

  Bajram knew that full-out war was round the corner. Worse still, he knew he wouldn’t be able to get back to Kosovo before it started or while it was going on.