It was then that I began to pity Bajram for the very first time. His melancholy and annoyance affected us too, the walls seemed to sneeze at his despair, and the constant sweat on his brow was the result of a deep-set rage. Many times I thought of going to him, stroking his hair, and comforting him by saying everything would be all right because things had a habit of working out.
But is it appropriate to comfort someone whose homeland is riven with war and whose entire family is in danger? Can people in the same situation really comfort each other? It was as though my mouth were bricked up. I couldn’t say anything to Bajram without my words sounding silly.
Instead I concentrated on keeping our apartment clean. I washed the windows three times a week, changed our sheets every evening, carried brushes and detergents back from the supermarket and vacuumed every single day.
—
For the next few years Bajram was glued to the television. Nothing was allowed to interrupt him during the news.
I often left him at the kitchen table swirling the spoon in his coffee cup, only to return hours later to see that he hadn’t touched his coffee. It’s impossible to enjoy anything, he sighed repeatedly. It was then that he mentioned he’d started thinking about death. After each battle claiming the lives of scores of people, he said he tried to imagine how those people had died.
When war finally broke out, the television was our only source of information. Phone lines were down and we couldn’t contact anyone. We hoped we might catch a glimpse of our relatives on the news, that we’d recognize members of our families when the television showed footage from a protest march.
Bajram heard from an old friend who had fled to Greece that his sister had been killed. The Serbs had burned the village where she had lived to the ground. Bajram grieved for his sister and her children. They were dead for a month until, suddenly, he received word that they were alive after all. And he could hardly believe it. When his sister telephoned him to say she had fled to the woods and managed to survive, he slowly slid from the sofa and onto the floor, all the while rubbing his chest, and asked me to call an ambulance. That evening Bajram had a heart attack.
Those were the quickest years of my life. I forgot them almost instantly, I couldn’t keep up. On the news we saw images of burning buildings and dead civilians, women and children. Nobody should have to see images like that, images in which bodies were no longer bodies because parts of them were missing and the skin was no longer skin colored but a mass of bright red and dark red, images in which the roads were no longer roads but mass graves. How was it possible for people to get into a situation like this? Massacres, bloodbaths, explosions, voting fraud, collateral damage, fires. Listening to news like this was an everyday occurrence.
At times it seemed as though what we saw on television couldn’t really be happening. It was a mirage, an unreal reflection of unreal events. But it was all truly happening, the lives of every single one of those people had ended, and I felt like a coward for refusing to die in the conflict. We will all die one day, I thought, and there will be nothing left of us. Wouldn’t it be nobler to die back home rather than to run away? To die in battle rather than of old age?
When the news reported the events in Račak on January 15, 1999, we began to question the existence of God. What had that woman, gunned down, ever done to the Serbs? What had that child done, what had those desperate men done, men who realized their village was surrounded by Serb troops? And when those men saw the soldiers shooting randomly at innocent people, where was God then? Where was he? When men who had been captured were suddenly told, Run away, and when those men ran away up the hill only to be cut down halfway there, where was he? And when after this skirmish they showed video footage of an orphaned little boy weeping, what did God do with that child?
God did nothing with that child because there was no God. There was war, and war was a row of tornadoes tearing up the ground one after the other, and war was a set of tidal waves swallowing up buildings, villages, towns, a tsunami of water kneading them into a paste before finally spitting them out.
15
I ran faster than I’d ever run before, past Mehmet’s shop, past the red-roofed houses with their whitewashed walls, past the unpaved roads, past the whole village.
I arrived at the boulder, and despite the clammy heat its surface was cool, forbidding, and bare, and I felt as though no amount of oxygen would satisfy my need to breathe. I rubbed my chest, felt the rocking as it swelled and relaxed, and wiped beads of sweat from my forehead. I breathed heavily, closed my eyes and opened them again, and my dizzy head seemed to sway in the heavy flow of air around me.
I leaned both hands against my knees and my ginger-and-white cat was nowhere to be seen, though only a moment ago its long body had been dangling round my neck. There was no snake either. No sand viper and no cat. I straightened my legs and stood upright and looked around for my cat and my snake, because I wasn’t supposed to misplace them but they were nowhere in sight.
—
My cat and my snake.
I lost them.
16
I spent another week in Prishtina. The hotel window looked out onto the main street through the city. People arrived in this city the same way as they arrived in all cities: their chest and head full of dreams that could come true at any moment. One day you could be sitting in a café or walking along the street, in the right place at the right time, then a bell rings and nothing is quite the same again. An unfamiliar person walks toward me and realizes that I have the looks of a model, the intelligence of a doctor of psychology, good motor and language skills, the largest shoulder muscles in the world or the smoothest hands, something that nobody has ever noticed about me before.
And this unfamiliar person, I thought as I stood smoking a cigarette out of the hotel window, will love me as unconditionally as a dog loves its master, and he will buy me a plane ticket into a world of enormous sets and spotlights, amid crowds of people, but I will deliberately keep him at arm’s length because I want to remain a mystery to him. I will enjoy how intoxicated he is with my uniqueness, and I will wake up every morning in a bed with expensive sheets and look out of the window, and for a moment I will doubt it all—can all this really be for me? Then I will realize that of course it is for me. Finally. For me.
My father used to say there was no evil in the world in the form in which we imagine evil to exist. As he watched news of the unfolding conflict in Kosovo he said we should come up with another word for evil, and that name should be laziness.
Because nobody is born into this world evil, he argued. There is no genetic distortion that predisposes people to committing evil deeds or that can explain warfare, inequality, poverty, and famine. A man cannot harm another man without feeling guilt, and nobody can sell himself for money or take another life instead of his own. There is only laziness; it comes creeping through the shallow waters and fills people’s mouths and brains with shit. It has become a parasite whose hosts are without exception in the depths of despair, and so the cycle continues. That’s the problem with this world.
I thought of his words as I watched the people in the city, and I almost missed him, so precisely did we agree on the matter. Sometimes I felt as though nobody was able to speak about people and matters as incisively as he had.
—
I switched on my computer and Ardi sent me a message. Hey, sexy, it read as it clinked into my profile with the picture of my shirtless upper body aimed at getting as many clicks as possible, to be as desirable as possible.
Ardi took the bait, complimented my profile picture, and asked me where I was right now. Prishtina?
Prishtina, I responded and wriggled my way into Ardi’s profile. I looked at his profile pictures. In one of them Ardi was lying on a deck chair in the seaside resort of Sarandë in Albania. His dark leg hairs straggled like an unwieldy coat despite the glare of the sun, though the bright white light seemed almost to swallow up part of Ardi’s legs. He was leaning on his
elbow, he was doing everything he could to tense his stomach muscles for the camera and was clumsily holding his arms unnaturally far away from each other in an attempt to trick the viewer.
In another picture a trouserless Ardi was sitting on a chair. His backside was pressed against the chair’s surface, and beneath his legs was a glimpse of the jeans he’d pulled down only a moment ago and the white, triple-striped socks on his feet.
D’you want to hook up? he asked. Coffee? Meet at the café beneath the Grand Hotel. You know the place?
I know the place, I replied. See you there in half an hour.
—
Sitting at the terrace café outside the Grand Hotel Ardi looked as natural and carefree as a thirty-one-year-old Kosovan man can be. The tables were full of people, and the area was edged with rows of tall bushes with gateways leading out into the busy street while the Grand Hotel itself blocked the afternoon sun, casting a shadow across us like a cold blanket.
Ardi didn’t draw out his words by effeminately lengthening the vowels, didn’t pronounce his consonants lazily, didn’t wave his head as he spoke—all mannerisms he would have picked up in the West by watching others of his kind. Rather he looked and sounded like a man who could claim to be anything at all.
He was wearing a pair of tight, light-blue denim shorts that came down to the knee, flip-flops that bore the impression of the sole of his foot, and a thin blue stripy T-shirt that revealed the few beads of sweat that had exuded from his tanned skin.
Nobody batted an eyelid at us, wondered why two men were sitting together enjoying their fifty-cent macchiatos, why we were chatting like best friends and looking at each other the way a man looks at a woman he desires, the way a woman looks at a man she desires.
He chain-smoked cigarettes, seemed relaxed as he talked about cars, his work as a builder, and his dream of making it to the West. He wasn’t concerned with what I thought about his dreams, whether or not I found them credible or worthwhile.
He laid his hand along the backrest of the chair next to him and revealed a sweaty armpit to which the thin cotton fabric of his T-shirt had stuck. He talked away for a while, occasionally waved a hand to emphasize his words, told me more about himself, and interrupted himself all of a sudden.
“Tell me something about yourself,” he said.
“Like what?”
“What do you do?” asked Ardi. “People always have something to tell. What job do you do? Are you at university? Tell me your dreams.”
“Hard questions,” I said, finished the remains of my coffee, and stared at him. His easy social nature and genuine curiosity were mesmerizing. I couldn’t stop looking at him, but I had to say something. I started to laugh and assumed the same position. I slipped my arm along the backrest of the chair next to me, tensed my biceps so that it swelled to twice its size, and waited for his gaze, which would only move toward my biceps on one condition: Ardi would only look at it if he really wanted to. If not, it would be best to run. Fast.
But his eyes fixed on my biceps like a laser locating a target.
“Do you want to come upstairs?” I asked and stubbed out my final cigarette. “I need some more cigarettes too.”
“Yes,” Ardi replied instantly, though he still seemed hesitant. “Aren’t you afraid?”
“No,” I said. “What is there to be afraid of?”
“Well…” He thought, stood there tasting his words, wondering how to say them out loud, whether to say them at all. “It’s dangerous round here. Anything could happen.”
“I’m not worried,” I said and looked at Ardi, who suddenly seemed agitated.
“You’re brave,” he said and pulled himself together as we walked past the row of tables bubbling with conversation. “If only I could be like that,” he eventually said over his shoulder.
I laid my hand on his lower back, and when we’d walked side by side across the hotel foyer, past the reception desk, and reached the elevators, where there was nobody around, I pulled his clammy T-shirt up, pressed a finger against his skin, and with my other hand stroked his smooth, muscular wrist, and kissed him.
—
He wanted to make love for a long time, to start as the door closed behind us. He couldn’t get enough of it.
He panted beside me, touching his muscular stomach, until he stood up from the bed, wiped his lower back and groin on the end of the sheet, and swung into the bathroom and closed the door so carefully that its sound inevitably reminded me of Finnish bathrooms, their perpetual openness, the ostensible naturalness they had. Finns always left the door open when they went into the bathroom to do their business, rinsed their groin in the sink, and peed right into the center of the toilet bowl so that even the neighbors could hear the splashing.
Ardi suddenly opened the door.
“There’s fur all over the place,” he said, somewhat bewildered, in the doorway.
“I know,” I replied.
I thought of getting out of bed, coming up with an excuse. I thought of telling him to leave, but I couldn’t get a word out of my mouth.
“Why?” he asked, because for him no question was inappropriate or too embarrassing.
“Because I washed a cat in there,” I replied from the bed, pulled the duvet farther up my body, and waited for his reaction.
“A cat?”
“Yes.”
“You’re really weird,” he said and closed the bathroom door again.
He turned the shower on. From the bed I could hear his vertebrae cracking as he stepped over the edge of the bathtub. I started to get dressed.
“I have to go,” he said as he stepped out of the bathroom and almost stumbled on his flip-flops, which he’d left just in front of the door.
Ardi had wrapped a white towel round his waist and dried his hair so carelessly that droplets of water were still trickling down his stomach. His black leg hairs twined wet against one another; it looked as though someone had taken a felt-tip pen and scribbled across his shins.
“Well go then,” I said. “I’ve got to go too.”
“I’ve got to pick up the kids,” he said a moment later.
When I turned to look at him he was already dressed, he had picked up his sandals, dried his short hair, found his T-shirt and denim shorts. And now a golden ring had appeared on his right ring finger.
“You’re married,” I said, almost a question, and stood there gazing at his right hand, which was now fumbling with the zipper on his shorts.
“Of course I’m married,” he said dismissively. “I’m thirty-one. I’ve got two daughters,” he continued and adjusted his belt until it was tight enough.
He tugged at his T-shirt a few times to air his damp body, pulled it down slightly, and turned to look at me.
“Thanks,” he said.
I got up from the bed and went to him. On the way I looked at everything: the crusted corner of the sheets, the steam billowing from the bathroom, the open suitcase in the corner of the room, the clothes inside it neatly folded.
“Thank you,” I said, closed my eyes, and tried to kiss him, but my lips touched only his cheek.
Then I tried to hug him. Again I closed my eyes; I wanted to feel his soft cheek but I didn’t want to see him, his discomfort, the disgust he felt toward himself and toward me.
“Hey,” he stammered, startled, shoved me firmly backward, and assumed a threatening boxer’s pose: his hands clenched into fists, risen up to protect his chest, one leg farther back in case he might soon have to launch himself at me.
“Money,” he said.
“What?”
“Money. Have you got any?”
“Sure, I’ve got money,” I said and peered at my suitcase.
From the side pocket I dug out the small wallet where I had kept all the money I would need for this trip. I counted my money for a moment and wondered how much to give him, how much of the money I had saved up, how much of this I could give him.
“Are you rich?” he asked.
I w
anted to tell him I was made of money. Instead I closed the wallet, turned to face him, gripped his wrist, and closed the wallet into his hand.
He opened it instantly, pulled the bunch of notes into his fist, and started counting them in astonishment.
“Are you giving all this away?”
“Yes. Take it.”
“This is unreal. Thanks. Thank you,” he repeated, hugged me, and kissed me on the cheek.
The door closed, I threw myself on the bed and lay there. What if I had a child, I wondered, a five-year-old daughter waiting at home? She would be there waiting for me while I met up with strange men in hotels. What if my life was like this, I wondered, hotel rooms, dark alleyways, an online world where you always had to remember to delete your browsing history. Paranoia and suspicion, fear that someone might send me a message and that he might be perfect, a man with thick blond hair and a tall, sinewy body, and he might ask me to meet up at the beautiful peak of summer.
He would tell me about the life he dreamed of, a life he wanted to share with me, about his little house by the sea. There would be a garden at the back with trees and enough room for a couple of dogs, and the sun would always be shining—not a harsh sun but a carefree sun that doesn’t lick your body moist but that embraces it. We could escape to a place like this, you and me, and we’d live the rest of our lives like that, that’s what he’d tell me and say, I’m leaving now but I hope you meet me at Skanderbeg’s statue, I’ll be wearing a white shirt, blue jeans, and red shoes, tell me what you’ll be wearing so we can recognize each other and run away together.
And I would want what he promised me so fervently that I’d tell him what I would be wearing when we met at the foot of the statue, a black sleeveless shirt, white jeans, and blue shoes, see you there, of course I’ll see you there, I’m almost in love with you already, do you hear? In love with you.
And I would think of everything we could become together, the two of us, and how happy we would be.
My Cat Yugoslavia Page 18