So I told the cashier at the supermarket that tonight I was going to make a meal for my significant other with eggplant and zucchini, and when I came home I threw the eggplants and zucchinis in the garbage can and wept. I fell into bed, exhausted, and when I woke up the next morning I looked out of the window and said out loud: Today.
Today is an immeasurably beautiful day.
2007–2008
A NEW LIFE
After leaving I spent several weeks in a women’s shelter. Then I got an apartment, a small one-bedroom flat near the center of town.
At first I found being by myself difficult. I needed to do the laundry only once a week, the dishes didn’t pile up, nobody else slept in my bed but me. I had never lived alone, though I’d wished I could on numerous occasions, and now I felt vulnerable, naked. I had nothing to do, nowhere I was expected to be at a specific time.
I had too much time to think about things. Could anyone have believed that one day I would be here? Without my children and without my husband. Wouldn’t it be better, I wondered, to be with somebody than to live like this? Would life with someone else, anyone else, be better than a life lived alone?
Had my children become too Finnish? I wondered. Had we? As they learned the names of plants and birds, learned to recite the capital cities of the world, learned about all those religions, did they ever think we should have done the same? That we should have done more, learned a trade, completed courses, and finished diplomas? Did they ever notice how envious Bajram and I were that they had the opportunity to do something decent with their lives, something worthwhile and respected? That they picked everything up so quickly?
I wondered why Bajram was so keen to sign all the forms they brought home, why he was always happy to tick all the boxes. How could he possibly have thought that his children would work, pay taxes, then return to him and help make his dreams come true instead of their own?
These thoughts plagued me for a long time. When I was walking home from the supermarket, I sometimes burst into tears in the middle of the street. When I was in the shower, I sometimes slumped to the floor. I held my stomach. Every inch of my body ached. And as, out of force of habit, I prepared far too much food and sat down at my little table, I looked in turn at the oven dish and at the empty chair opposite me until I stood up, put the dish back in the oven, and moved the chair out of sight.
The phone calls to my siblings and parents became more sporadic, and I began to fade from their minds. I sent my children text messages asking them to visit me, but they didn’t seem all that interested in coming. When my younger son visited me he didn’t ask anything about me, he asked only about his father though I was still here and his father was not.
20
He called me out of the blue and asked if he could come over. In his life six months wasn’t very long at all. It had gone so quickly that we barely noticed it. We can still do things together, see each other and go for dinner together.
“Hi,” I said at the door. “Good to see you.”
I greeted him and showed him into the flat.
“How are you doing?” he asked, took off his yellow sneakers in the hallway, and stepped into the living room to shake his legs, which were crammed into tight running shorts. His thigh muscles looked like enormous slabs of meat, somehow separate from the rest of his body.
I didn’t know what to say. Should I tell him the truth or should I answer his question in such a way that I could then turn it round and ask him the same thing?
“I’m doing fine,” I said and looked at him. “How about you?”
He had taken off his damp gray cap and propped his left leg on the sofa to stretch the back of his thighs. “Yes, all good,” he said.
“Are you hungry?” I asked because I knew how hungry he always was when he came home after exercising.
“Have you cooked?” he asked.
“No, but I was just going to make something for myself,” I said and instantly felt inadequate: I should have had something ready, I thought; making Bolognese sauce will take too long, he hates fast food, he never eats anything frozen, and processed food is something he simply cannot understand. He would push it to one side and demand something better.
“You don’t have to do that for me. I can have something small. A piece of fruit, maybe?” he said and sat on the floor.
I opened the fridge in desperation. If we’d still been together he wouldn’t have been this polite. He would have hurt me in the way that only a lover can.
“You can have an apple,” I said after noticing a single apple at the bottom of the fruit bowl on the kitchen table.
“That would be great,” he said, picked up the apple, thanked me and stepped over to the sink to rinse it, took a knife out of the top drawer, and began eating in that way he had of cutting off chunks and popping them into his mouth using the knife and his thumb.
He leaned against the wall behind him, pulled his leg up against the wall to stretch his thigh some more, and stood there munching his apple until he’d had enough of that position, put the apple and knife on the table and left them there, the way he always did, and peered beneath the sofa.
“That’s odd…,” he began hesitantly. “It must be behind the sofa. It would barely move if you didn’t lift it out every now and then. How come it doesn’t get bored?”
“It’s always there,” I said. “You know that. It’s very sensitive and well behaved.”
“I know, but why don’t you lift it into the terrarium you bought? It’ll dry out over there,” he said bluntly and picked up the apple and knife again.
“It doesn’t like the terrarium,” I said and began wondering what I could say or do so that he wouldn’t start the conversation about what he thought I should and shouldn’t do with the snake, where I should put it or where I should keep it, how it was living at too low a temperature.
“I’ve redecorated,” I stammered and walked toward the bedroom.
I showed him the new look in my bedroom: a black-rimmed mirror leaning against the wall, new black sheets, and curtains that didn’t let in the small amount of daylight coming from the windows that looked out onto the street.
“Nice,” he said, catching his breath.
“Thanks,” I said and watched him sit on the edge of the bed and start bobbing up and down as though he had too much energy.
I wanted to walk up to him, grab him from behind, wrap my arms around him, smell him. I had remained standing in the doorway, and it felt as though my shoulders were glued to the frame.
He stood up and turned to face me, raised his hand to the zipper on his jacket, and pulled it down.
“You know…I was lying when I said I’d cheated on you.”
“I know that,” he said and began stepping toward me.
“Right,” I managed to say before he was right in front of me and placing his hands on my hips.
“Right,” he repeated.
We looked at each other for a long time, he and I, without saying a word; I touched his naked chest and he rubbed my lower back and said it the same way he’d said it the first time: I love you. That’s what he said. I want to be with you. I’ve been thinking about things a lot, and I’m sorry I walked out and left you.
And he said he’d missed me, said how right it felt to hold my hand, how well he slept when he was with me, and how different life was without me. I raised a hand to his cheek but he pulled it down again. For a while I didn’t say a word to him, then I said yes, I love you too—and I let him lift me into the air, I swung my legs round his hips, let him throw me on the bed, and we sat there opposite each other, he looked at me and I looked at him and the light behind him, and his outline was as clear-cut as a sheet of folded paper and every bit as white.
And when he went home, he asked if he could come the following evening and spend the night. I’ll bring some things with me, said his text message.
Come on round, I replied, my hands trembling. I wiped my sweaty brow on my shirt and threw my phone
at the wall.
—
The day he returned darkened into a black, sudden night. The snake had slithered behind the sofa, its skin smelled rancid, in dim lighting its color turned from brown to black, and it moved slowly but surely across the floor like a pile of rolling pebbles. Only the dust that caught on its skin made a noise, the sound of silent whispers, of Blu Tack being peeled off the wall or the faint gasp escaping from the mouth of one out of breath, a wheezing that was at once silent and fast as a bullet.
Then the snake arrived, closer than ever before. It pulled its tail up next to its head and began hissing like fragile porcelain, and I could hear from its rough throat and tongue how dry its mouth was.
I lay on my bed, one hand on my brow and my head turned toward the snake. It was coiled up on the floor, its tail was quivering now, and its tongue flickered back and forth out of its mouth. I sat up on the bed and the snake leaned backward as though I should have warned it about my sudden movement. This was a familiar game of ours.
But it wouldn’t let me touch it. It resisted and bit my arm three times. Its powerful jaws tightened, bruising my skin, and its teeth sank beneath my skin. But its mouth still felt warm.
I finally got hold of it. Not caring about the bites I grabbed it with both hands. And at that very moment it started thrashing, its tail beat against the floor like a hammer and wrapped round my legs as though it were about to fall off the edge of a cliff.
I pressed it against the wall with my knee and elbows. There it was, trapped. It might be able to bite me again, maybe even try to escape, but it finally gave up and realized it couldn’t get away.
Eventually it relaxed. Its tongue disappeared into its mouth and its body went limp and straightened out. I let it go and it fell to the floor, piling on top of itself like a crumpled garment. Then I grabbed it again, sank my nails into its skin, lifted it onto the bed, and placed it next to me like a licorice-caramel-patterned pillow. Good night.
I’d never seen it behave like that before, and I’d never handled it like that before—I’d always relented. Now I made the decisions. In this situation resistance was futile.
Before we fell asleep the snake adjusted its position, and as it quickly wriggled past me the sheets rustled beneath it as though someone had run his nails across them. A moment later it was right in front of my face. It craned its head forward and looked at me the way a pet looks at its owner. Its faint breath puffed in my face, and its tongue flickered round its mouth like wet hands.
—
When I awoke, it was a gray morning outside.
The snake had wrapped itself round me three times: once round my upper thighs, a second time round my stomach, while the thickest and strongest part of its body formed a third coil round my chest and lungs.
I’d been giving it hints and feeding its hunter instinct, and now my being asleep had given the snake the opportunity to react to my breathing, the swelling and relaxing of my chest. There’s only one thing you need to know about boa constrictors: they react to motion by tightening their grip on their prey.
I tried to remain as calm as possible and held my breath as I looked at the snake’s head, which it held right next to my face.
I looked at the coils it had wrapped round me. I tried to slip a finger beneath them and forbid it from continuing, to punch it all over and scratch its skin, but this made it tighten all the more.
With the snake still around me I ran into the kitchen. Each step was heavier and shorter than the previous one. It was holding me so tightly that at one point I wasn’t sure I would make it. Then I gripped the fruit knife and stuck it into the snake’s head.
There was soon a long gash in the snake’s body, and it was now almost half the size it had been only a moment earlier. Blood was pouring out of it like a broken pipe. Its organs, guts, its elongated white lungs, its brown liver and pink kidneys spilled out in such a bloody mass that it was hard to imagine they had once all belonged inside its body.
I sat amid the gore and cut the snake open more and more, because I started to fear it might miraculously put itself back together and cure itself, that the gashes in its side would somehow heal and it would come back to life in the time it took me to stuff it into a black garbage bag, that it would stand up on end like a sturdy coat stand. That it would be immortal and say, Don’t tell anyone about this. I’ll kill you if you tell anyone about this.
2008
A PHONE CALL
“Hello, Emine,” came the voice at the end of the phone. I would recognize that voice in the middle of a crowd, anywhere at all. Lowered by tobacco and old age, the voice was deep and coarse. There was no mistaking my father’s voice.
He was one of the hundreds of thousands whose life had fallen apart after the war. Only one of his three sons had remained with him, brought his wife into the family, and finished building the house. The rest of us had fled, promising to come back one day, but none of us had done so. The war had changed everything. It laughed at things that had once been sacred and didn’t care about people’s faces.
“How are you?” I asked, though I knew he never called me unless he wanted something, to ask about any planned trips to Kosovo or to speak to Bajram. We treated each other like distant relatives who have nothing in common but the blood flowing through their veins.
“I want to apologize, and I want you to apologize. I want us to bury the past.”
He paused for a moment, and in that time I began weeping silently.
“I’m sorry—for everything,” I said, and the air that had built up in my mouth burst out in a single gasp and I didn’t know whether I was crying with joy or because I’d finally said something I had wanted to say for so very long.
“I’m sorry too. If only this had turned out somehow…,” he began and started to gasp for breath, “…differently.” For a moment all I could hear was rushing at the other end, the sound of my father wiping his beard.
“Your son Bekim,” he began and blew his nose.
Again he paused and took a deep breath.
“He was here,” he spluttered. “Did you know that? Did you know he came to visit?” he repeated insistently when I was unable to pull myself together to answer him.
“I didn’t know that,” I said. “I didn’t know he had visited you.”
“I have to tell you what happened.”
“Why did he visit?”
“That’s why I’m calling you. I don’t know why he was here. I thought you might be able to tell me that.”
“I can’t tell you that.”
Then my father told me how my son had turned up at Mehmet’s shop and how he had climbed up the boulder.
“Straight off Lula saw a ginger-and-white cat sitting happily next to him. The boy was stroking it. Imagine, he was stroking a cat. After a while he left the boulder and came back to the village. When he arrived, I saw him out of the window. You can recognize a person in so many different ways, Emine, from the way he holds his head, the way he wipes sweat from his brow, the way he gestures with his hands—even though it’s someone you haven’t seen for a very, very long time.”
He took a breath.
“And the closer he came, the more clearly I saw it.”
“Saw what?”
For a moment he was silent.
“The cat. He had a cat with him.”
Again he was silent.
“A cat? You already told me he was stroking a cat on the boulder.”
“Yes, he had a cat on his shoulder, a ginger-and-white cat dangling round his neck. Have you ever heard anything like it?”
I furrowed my brow.
“He turned up at the gate, knocked on the door, and waited outside. Your niece Arta opened the gate and asked him inside. Of course, Arta didn’t recognize him. She wanted to play with the cat and tried to pick it up, but your son didn’t pay her the slightest attention.”
My father took a breath.
“He walked across the yard and stopped outside the front door. I held
out my hand, but he wouldn’t look at me. Instead he stared at the ground, gripped the plastic bag in his hand tighter, and spun it round. Then he stepped inside. Lula asked if he would like some coffee or tea or something to eat, but he didn’t answer. He just peered round the room.”
Again he took a breath.
“The boy sat down on the living-room sofa and fixed his eyes on me the minute I sat down opposite him. He placed the plastic bag next to him on the sofa.”
“You’re not lying to me, are you?” I asked.
“I swear this is God’s honest truth.”
He answered me agitatedly, almost offended. I knew that when he swore something, he was telling me the truth from start to finish.
“I asked how he was but he wouldn’t answer. I decided to give him a friendly smile and say something to break the awkward atmosphere. I mentioned how much he had grown.”
He explained that the boy had asked about Bajram, told him he’d heard that his father had died recently.
There was a moment of silence at the other end of the phone. Then he said he had told the boy about his father’s funeral and his grave.
“When I asked whether he’d like to visit Bajram’s grave, the boy suddenly stood up. The cat was still sitting proudly on his shoulder as though it were glued into place. No, he said. The hairs on my neck stood on end as though I’d had an electric shock. I didn’t know what else I could say to him. The whole situation was unreal.”
I said I was sorry.
“Then the boy said, I was outside just now and caught this. At that he held the plastic bag in the air. I could see something curved inside it, but the bag was so thick that I couldn’t quite make out what it was.”
I made a sound to encourage him to continue.
My Cat Yugoslavia Page 21