But it wouldn’t be him at the statue but someone else, a crowd of people. They would have baseball bats and everything. They would grab me violently and force me into the trunk of their car. They would drive out to the middle of nowhere, throw me to the ground, stub out their cigarettes on my skin, spit on me, urinate and defecate on me, then they would grab their bats and shove them inside me, then into my mouth, and they would force me to say, Yes, what I do is wrong and disgusting and I deserve to die, please, do it now.
—
I watched him from my hotel window, watched the way he walked off down the pedestrian street running through Prishtina, past the small square, how he placed the temples of his sunglasses over his ears and returned to his other life, and I scratched first my shoulder, then my knee and my chin, for every bit of me itched, and I sat on the bed for a moment because it felt as though someone had drawn a cheese grater across my skin.
1999
SALVATION
NATO began airstrikes on Belgrade on March 24, 1999. In June that year the war came to an end and in July that year Bajram and a friend robbed a supermarket.
“It was perfect,” he said and flexed his hands.
Then he told me what had happened from beginning to end.
A friend of Bajram’s who lived in Helsinki had visited a number of supermarkets and asked one of the security guards in passing about his work, ostensibly because he was interested in getting into the profession himself.
At first the security guard described his work only superficially, but after a while he took Bajram’s friend to one side. When the friend continued talking about his terrible experiences as an imaginary security guard in Kosovo, the guard began talking to him like a brother. Here in Finland, he explained, the profession is plagued by a lack of resources. Bajram’s friend told him about security work in Kosovo. In Prishtina a group of men once robbed a convenience store. In a situation like that the security guard can only apprehend one of the thieves, if that.
If only that were the case here, the guard had said. He explained that he was responsible for a number of shops over a large area, and he was expected to look after them all at once. If there was a robbery in two shops at the same time he would only be able to deal with one of them. It’s the same story across the country, especially in smaller towns.
A week later Bajram and his friend bought themselves a couple of fifty-mark airsoft guns that looked and felt like real firearms. They cut holes for the eyes and mouth in their gray balaclavas as though they had taken inspiration from a cheap movie. The sight of them in front of the mirror with balaclavas pulled over their heads and fake guns in their pockets was more ridiculous than frightening. They truly had decided to do something so utterly absurd. I tried to tell them if they got caught they would go to prison. You won’t see your children for years. You’ll never get back to Kosovo. You’ll spend so much time in a tiny cell that you’ll pray for death.
Bajram and his friend looked at each other for a moment. I thought they might still consider backing out of the plan, but they closed the door behind them with a chuckle.
Bajram and his friend drove to another town. They left the car in the parking lot outside a cluster of high-rise buildings, separated from the rest of the town by a few miles of woodland. They walked through the forest for hours planning their escape route back to the car until they were sure of their plan. They watched to see when the security guard drove away from the back of the lot and waited for another fifteen minutes until they were sure the car had reached its next destination.
Then they charged inside the shop and told everyone to put his hands up. People lining up at the counter dropped their shopping to the floor and looked at them terrified, as terrified as Kosovans looking at Serb soldiers, as terrified as Serbs looking at American troops.
The assistant emptied the cash register and handed Bajram a bunch of banknotes. Just then Bajram noticed a customer peering between the shelves, holding a mobile phone to her ear.
Then Bajram and his friend ran back to the woods as fast as their legs could carry them. At some point Bajram thought he heard the wail of a siren, just like in the movies when the police officer investigating a murder or the police dog finds a clue and sets off in pursuit of the suspect.
They reached the car in less than half an hour and drove home without anybody noticing a thing. When Bajram returned home with his loot, he was trembling from top to toe, frightened and paranoid.
“I didn’t hear any sirens,” said his friend calmly. “Can we count out the money now? I’ve got to get home for the night.”
Bajram calmed down, let go of the curtains, which he had been holding open with his forefinger, and stopped staring out of the window.
Bajram was still convinced that police would swerve into the parking lot at any moment and take him away. He took a deep breath and told me to make some coffee.
There was a total of 24,200 marks in the cash register; 12,100 marks each. Bajram’s friend took his own share and left in the same car they had been using throughout. Once the car had gone the only evidence of guilt was the large pile of cash. Bajram hid the money in a briefcase kept in one of the higher kitchen cupboards, the same place he kept all our savings, university certificates, the children’s birth certificates, and an Albanian flag.
“Don’t worry, we’ll soon be on our way to Kosovo,” he said with a furtive look on his face.
And I looked at Bajram as he drank his coffee, his hands steady, and admired his ability to move so swiftly from one emotional state to the next.
The following week we were watching Police-TV, and when security-camera footage of the incident appeared on the screen Bajram jumped to his feet and turned up the volume.
Police are looking for the two Russian men in this footage. As yet there have not been any sightings of the suspects. Police urge the public to report any sightings or possible information to the telephone number at the bottom of the screen.
And then he laughed.
17
I met him on an airplane, and his name was Sami. I put my hand luggage under the seat in front of me and swung down into my own seat. When I noticed that I couldn’t fit my legs properly I began to calm my growing sense of panic by checking for the emergency exits, how many steps it would take to get there, and what kind of expressions were on the cabin crew’s faces.
I was afraid of airplanes, afraid that the engines might suddenly stall and the metal receptacle weighing hundreds of thousands of tons would start gently gliding toward the earth. The air would be soft as guitar music, and the airplane would slowly turn in the sky like a whale, and nobody would hear it. There would be unprecedented panic inside the plane, some people would die of the sheer shock, and the plane would reach the ground as nothing more than a capsule, its wings having come loose during the descent, and it would explode like an atom bomb, sending red-hot metallic debris flying across the crash site, fragments of plane carrying pieces of burnt flesh and small hands, a sole survivor would scream only to be drowned out and engulfed by the roaring flames.
I took the laminated safety instructions from the pocket on the back of the seat in front of me and started fanning myself. Sami had already installed himself in the seat next to me and was reading the Times. I didn’t pay any attention to him; I could barely see his face behind the newspaper, only a small section of a gleaming bald patch on his head.
I fastened my seat belt as the captain switched on the little light. Then the plane jolted into life, eventually achieved the necessary speed, and rose into the air. Sami was still reading his paper and I was gripping the armrests, because in my stomach it felt as though the plane were falling until we arrived above the clouds and the world opened out beneath us like a soft bed. The clouds under the airplane looked like downy feathers. When the seat-belt light went out I stood up, pulled out a book, and started to read.
At one point he folded his newspaper and turned to look at me. Though I was engrossed in my book, I could sen
se him watching my every move over the newspaper folded in his lap. He wasn’t even trying to be subtle.
It was only when he pushed his paper to one side that I saw he was wearing a suit and that his legs were crossed. One of his feet had transgressed the invisible boundary between us and jutted into my side of the space. Between his black shoe and trouser leg was a strip of tanned skin and, to my surprise, a red sock. I burst into laughter. By turns chuckling and serious I stared at his foot and the red sock he was wearing.
He twirled his shiny shoe in front of my eyes.
“I was out of black socks,” he began in English. “So I had to wear these,” he continued in a pronounced Finnish accent.
It was only now that I plucked up the courage to look him in the eye. The small bald patch above his forehead gradually grew into a head of cropped hair, his trim body swelled with imposing muscles, and his modest, handsome face remained somehow distant. His wide, greenish, curious eyes were stunning. He glanced at his smartphone, whose language was set to Finnish, and put it back in his pocket.
“That’s very funny,” I continued in English. “I must say, they look pretty good on you.”
At that, he too began to laugh, and when I asked whether he happened to speak Finnish his eyes brightened all the more.
“Yes, I do!” he replied almost too eagerly and adjusted his position in the chair: took his red-socked foot out of my space, lifted himself on the armrests, and placed his right thumb beneath his chin. His left leg remained casually resting on his thigh.
When I saw he was preparing to ask me a question, I began praying to myself. Please don’t ask me about my homeland, my name, or my mother tongue. Ask me what I want to do or about things I’ve done, my dreams and fears. Ask me about those things and I’ll tell you.
“How old are you?”
I looked at him, the blood vessel in the middle of his forehead, his full lips and small, wrinkly ears, his head, round like a bowling ball. He was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.
I told him my age and he smiled.
“Interesting,” he said and pulled up his red sock. “What are you reading?”
2000–2004
YEARS AND CIGARETTES
When the war ended, the little sympathy we had received from people here ended as abruptly as if it had been shoved from the roof of the building. Right, you got what you wanted. When are you going home? While the war was still raging our presence was somehow justifiable because we were refugees.
Bags of garbage started to appear outside our apartment door, the slightest sound after evening curfew had our downstairs neighbors running up the stairs and shouting in the echoing stairwell: If you don’t know how to behave, go back where you fucking came from! In the supermarket young men started imitating the way we spoke and placed their hands beneath their armpits like monkeys. Uu uu uu uuuu, fucking monkeys, shut your fucking mouth.
We were cut off from two different countries that nonetheless had come to resemble each other more and more, and we no longer belonged in either one. We were vagrants, travelers pushed to the margins of society, people without a homeland, an identity, or a nationality.
Back in Kosovo, people wondered why we could no longer eat white bread and why we wanted to spread our sliced—not torn—pieces of bread with margarine, why we couldn’t bear the stench of burning rubbish, and why the hot summer days made us feel like we were suffocating. They didn’t understand why we wanted to wash our laundry and dishes in machines and not by hand, why we bought bread from the store when you could bake it yourself. When we picked up a fork, they reminded us that pite was supposed to be eaten by hand. This isn’t a restaurant, you know. Do you think you’re better than us?
In Finland we were outcasts. We had no work, no long-term plans, no idea how long we would be allowed to stay. At one point we stopped talking about the subject altogether. We all knew we couldn’t carry on living the way we had before.
The situation got worse with every day that passed. We didn’t dare speak our mother tongue in public and we couldn’t use the laundry room in the apartment building because someone always rubbed out our apartment number in the reservation book and wrote, Fuck off! Wogs can wash their clothes SOMEWHERE ELSE. Our children came back from school covered in bruises, other kids spat at them, laughed at them because they didn’t have skates and skis on winter sports days, because they didn’t have gym shoes or tracksuits, because we had nothing to give to the school raffle. Bajram and I never showed up at the children’s school because they didn’t want to be seen with us.
It felt as though we’d gone back in time ten years, and once again we started feeling ashamed of our nationality. Bajram told people he was from Bulgaria or Russia—anywhere that didn’t have the same associations as Kosovo, because those associations were always negative. There was unrest in Kosovo, the people were disenfranchised and didn’t know how to behave. I felt that their newspapers were slandering our homeland.
We were stuck between the truth and the lies. We no longer knew what was real. Our children started speaking Finnish to us in public, though they knew if they did that at home Bajram would punish them.
Bajram started to have brutal, violent dreams in which he was being hunted, beaten, and tortured. He told me and the children about them. Last night I had a dream where I was shackled to the table, I was in a hospital somewhere, and they were giving me electric shocks. The night before that I woke up twice. The second time I woke up for real but the first time I woke up in a room that had no walls and was full of water. I almost choked. His dreams sometimes continued into the mornings, long after he had woken up.
He thought of the phone calls he had received during the war. He said he spent every waking minute thinking about the calls and all the people who had died in Kosovo, he was torturing himself. Sure, I understood him—how could we not think about those people?
—
Bajram started handling stolen goods and selling them on to Finnish traders. It’s their own fault, he said. The Finnish people formed a single unit that had become his sworn enemy. They want us to behave just like them, but at the same time they make doing so impossible.
It was true because Bajram hadn’t been offered work in years. He had undertaken unpaid assistantships in schools, shops, and museums, but once the stint was over they always showed him the door. Some employers even told him to his face that they didn’t want to employ an immigrant. We don’t want any problems round here. Why should we take you on when there are unemployed Finns who speak Finnish looking for work? Bajram was furious. How well do they expect us to speak this damn language?
He eventually came to the conclusion that the Finns owed him a sum of money they would never be able to pay. The Finns had changed him, taken his honor, and he would never be the same man again.
Bajram and his friend started driving to the Russian border, which had become a notorious place for doing business for Finns and foreigners alike who wanted to make a little extra cash.
Bajram’s job was to transport goods—computers, mobile phones, clothes, and electrical appliances—from Helsinki to the Russian border. For this he received a small fee, cash in hand, and a small share of the cargo.
He told us the strangest stories of how goods were smuggled across the border, how stupid and gullible the Finnish border guards were, and how easily they gave up in the face of the language barrier. And I laughed, first at Bajram then with him as he played out his stories with his hands, his right hand playing himself and his left hand playing the Finns, and his right hand was so swift, cunning, and self-assured that his left couldn’t keep up.
That’s what they’re like, he said. Quitters. The situation makes them so greedy, grua, you wouldn’t credit how low and greedy a man can become when he truly believes himself to be honest.
I had hope that Bajram would give it up, but when he started buying me and the children expensive gifts and we started celebrating birthdays and he stopped putting money into our savings I
realized he was hooked.
But the more money Bajram acquired, the unhappier he became.
18
Three weeks after our first meeting I invited him back to my apartment. That night he fell in love with me and I with him.
He loved my snake. He played with it and suggested suitable names for it. Autumn, he suggested; if you look closely, it’s covered in autumnal colors. Or Smack, because its tongue makes a smacking sound.
To him the snake wasn’t a strange pet at all; it was unique, individual. He bravely took it in his arms, stroked it, and cooed at it. I think you like this. There’s a good boy.
He thought its skin was hard, though on the inside it was soft and gentle; he loved the way it wrapped itself round his neck like a giant necklace, the way it tightened round his neck without choking him. It knows, he said. It can sense me. He believed that the snake enjoyed human warmth and proximity, though it pretended to reject everything except living by itself.
—
I had made a pot of coffee and handed him a cup. Our first shared coffee at my apartment was perfect and the coffee so heavenly that his first sip was interrupted by an endearing desire to tell me how good it was.
“I’m glad you like it,” I said and sat down next to him, content, and laid my head against his soft shoulder.
Outside the window it was a late summer’s day, rays of light filtering into the room through the half-opened venetian blinds as it would through the wall of a barn. After leaning against each other for a while, about halfway through his cup of coffee, he said it. I think I love you. I don’t know if I should say it so soon, but I’ll say it anyway. Sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything.
He waited for a moment, and at the base of my ear I sensed that he swallowed just before kissing my hair, and at that I felt my heartbeat pulsing in my jugular. Now that these words had been spoken, spoken to me for the first time, there was no taking them back.
My Cat Yugoslavia Page 19