“When the boy picked up the bag, something started thrashing around inside it. At first all I could hear was a frantic hissing, but a moment later a hole appeared in the bottom of the bag, and out of the hole slithered a snake.”
“A snake? Did you say he had a snake in the plastic bag?”
“Yes, it was a snake. A black-and-gray poisonous viper. There are plenty of them round here. I was rigid with fear and I didn’t dare move as he dropped the bag over the snake. His hands were sure and strong, as if he had known precisely how to take hold of the thing. The snake’s whole body was thrashing as the boy held it beneath the head. The cat on his shoulder hissed at first, climbed on the boy’s head, even tried to hit the snake, and paced restlessly along the boy’s shoulders until the snake had stopped writhing.”
Again he blew his nose and waited a moment, trying to find the right words.
“Then he held the snake behind him and threw it at me. The snake. My legs almost buckled beneath me, my knees were trembling, and a feeling of horror welled up in my stomach.”
He fell silent.
“Did you hear me, Emine?”
“Yes, I heard you.”
“He threw the snake at me. It came hurtling toward me, headfirst, and the cat leaped after it. The boy snatched the cat in midair and ran out of the room. The snake struck my right thigh. It tried to bite me but didn’t succeed. I was afraid, Emine. I’ve never been so afraid in my life.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“The snake started uncoiling itself and headed for the front door, and eventually it slithered into the garden and down into the field.”
—
The call was cut off, and when I saw he was trying to call me again I didn’t answer.
21
The following evening, he handed me a plastic bag and kissed me just the way he had before, as though six months hadn’t changed a thing. He slipped his hand under my shirt, his thick, curved fingers gripped my bare skin, his teeth nibbled my lower lip, and he stood in front of me smiling.
I turned his last kiss into an embrace. As he placed his open bag on the hallway floor I noticed he’d brought clothes and shoes with him, and I noticed they’d been thrown into his bag willy-nilly, that the shoes were dirty. I pulled him into the living room and put the plastic bag on the table. In addition to a DVD and a carton of juice there was a book in the bag.
He’d asked me to lend him a book that would tell him about my homeland. I told him there weren’t many stories written about my homeland and gave him György Dragomán’s The White King, told him to read it slowly and think about its story, but he hadn’t even opened it.
He knelt down and looked under the sofa.
“Where is it?” he asked.
I fiddled with the book on the table as if I hadn’t heard his question. I was annoyed that he hadn’t bothered to read the book, because I was convinced that when he realized the child narrator’s father had been abducted and taken to a labor camp and would never return to the story, which the protagonist spends waiting for his return, when he was forced to question whether the young Djata really loves his father or whether he simply loves the idea of his father’s absence, he would never be the same again. He would understand that endings in stories are never as interesting as the details of the beginning in which the fate of a ruined man drifting through life is revealed in the fact that he goes fishing every day though he doesn’t eat fish or that he takes his partner for dinner at an expensive restaurant though he doesn’t have any money.
After a moment I snap back to reality, turn to him, and tell him. “I took it back.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
I told him I’d realized I didn’t have the means to look after it, that I’d have to take it back. That he’d been right all along.
—
That evening we went to sleep as soon as the film ended. He thought the action thriller he’d picked was gripping; I said I agreed, though to me it was altogether uninteresting. We tumbled into bed and the evening quickly darkened as we lay there next to each other. He loves sleeping like that, I thought, otherwise he wouldn’t breathe so lightly and wouldn’t sniff my fresh sheets with such satisfaction.
“I’m happy,” he began and closed his eyes. “Are you happy?”
“Yes,” I replied and waited for him to place his hand on my shoulder and slide his fingers along my arm to show me quite how much he wanted to say what he’d just said, and how much he wanted me to respond the way I responded.
And that’s exactly what he did. I listened to his calm breathing until at some point he placed his hand beneath his pillow and turned to face the wall. I looked at how deep set his spine was between the extensor muscles on his back, and I thought about his words. When he said he was happy, did he really mean it or was he merely happy at his own imagination, at the illusion in which he loved me in a way he would never be able to love me in reality?
I tried to go to sleep, but as I lay thinking about his words I began thinking about my mother, thinking I should call her and meet her more often. And once I’d resolved to call her the very next day I began thinking about my father. About that afternoon when I told my father I’d been pushed around in town, called names and punched in the nose, my eyeballs pressed into their sockets and my clothes pulled so hard that my sleeve had ripped. Look, my sleeve is torn at the shoulder.
Why have you got such a crooked nose? they asked. Why is your hair so black, your eyebrows so thick? Why are you wearing worn-out shoes? Can’t you afford to buy new ones? You wear that same jacket every day—are you poor, are you a refugee? They shoved me between them, hit me, and laughed, one of them spat on my forehead, and the spittle trickled down my face and I didn’t dare wipe it away. Wipe it away and you’re dead, they said, wipe it and you’re dead, you fucking parasite refugee.
I got out of bed in the middle of the night, picked up Sami’s bag, and laid out his clothes. I sorted them out and wondered why, when I returned home that afternoon, I’d told my father I wanted to die. I do, I really do. I’d rather die than go back there ever again. As I fetched the iron I remembered how I’d regretted turning to him.
Now you listen here. First of all, you don’t know a thing about death, and second, I’ll tell you, he began. I’ll tell you what to do. Don’t ever tell them your name, and don’t say where you come from. He drew his hand along my face and I felt his meager fingers on my cheek. Don’t ever tell them who your parents are, who your siblings are, don’t get in people’s way, and don’t talk, and if they come and ask you something, you know what to do.
“I’ll lie.”
“That’s right. You lie. And if someone still gets in your face, you hit them harder than they hit you. Is that clear?”
—
Once I’d ironed and folded all his clothes I fetched the shoe brush from the hallway. I brushed the loose mud from his shoes and took them with me as I slipped outside, sprayed them with protective lacquer, and when I came back inside I polished them and watched them dry until I placed them on the shoe rack and went back to bed, lay next to him, and fell asleep in an instant.
2009
THE CAT
I finally managed to get a job in a grocery store. At first I was so nervous that I almost decided not to turn up at all. I hadn’t realized that working would be such a difficult and significant step. In the days leading up to my first shift I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to give people the right change, that they would come back to my register and accuse me of shortchanging them. I’d lose my job, they would call the police and add my name to a register so I’d never get another job.
On my first day at work I sweated like an obese man on a hot day. I had to go to the toilet so many times that I told people I wasn’t feeling very well. I ran ice-cold water from the tap, soaked my hands in the sink, and took a series of deep breaths.
I wanted people to like me but I didn’t know what kind of things to talk about with them in order
for that to happen. I didn’t know what the other employees talked about to one another, so I kept quiet and didn’t talk about myself to anyone. I simply did what my boss told me to do.
It took a few months before I learned the names of the products and where they were kept. Thankfully the shop is so small that only on a few occasions have I ended up in a situation where I don’t know how to answer the customer. Nowadays there’s a sense of routine about my job and I don’t need to think about it so much. Sometimes I find new favorite foods among the discounted items and I try out lots of Finnish recipes.
I like the fact that people have started coming to this country from around the world. Sometimes I find myself staring at them and feel like asking them where they come from. I wonder what circumstances they have left behind and what their lives are like now. But the Finns might not like that, they might roll their eyes and even swear at having to wait in line longer.
—
On Wednesday evenings I go to the sauna in our building. Such warmth amid such breathtaking cold always feels unreal, supernatural. It dives beneath the skin, and the boards are so hot they almost burn you.
On Saturdays I stroll round the town, walk through parks covered in glinting snow. I love that the winter is so cold here. The freezing temperatures make everything stop. The trees covered in snow stand still like statues, the snow hardens on the streets as thick as asphalt and tightens round the streetlamps like a hood.
I have become friends with one of my coworkers. She is in her fifties, a single woman with a lovely sense of humor who never had any children. She told me her husband had died of a heart attack. She lives with her three cats and two dogs. And when she asked me the same questions, I told her my husband had died too. After hearing her story, my own story no longer felt so dysfunctional. In this country, living by yourself isn’t at all out of the ordinary.
We held each other’s hand as we told our stories. She wiped the corner of her eye with a finger and I blew my nose, then she gave a deep sigh and looked up at the bright sky and the bare branches of the trees. Then we laughed, two women sitting on a park bench in the middle of winter.
In the spring she told me one of her cats had had kittens. Just normal, mongrel kittens. When she showed me a photograph of the three gray kittens and one black one sleeping next to one another in a basket, I asked her almost by accident what she was planning to do with them. Could I have the black one? I asked straightaway, and she smiled and said there was no one she would rather give it to.
—
The cat and I spend most evenings watching television or simply being close to each other. I scratch it, and it likes that. It has deep yellow eyes, and when it spends hours sitting on the windowsill and looking outside I feel strange, as though I don’t know it at all, but when I put food on its plate I know it will always eat and that it is grateful.
For the most part the cat and I enjoy watching talent shows. I always cry when someone gets up onstage and starts to sing, someone whose life has been full of sorrow. When they speak of the loves they have lost, I instinctively think of Bajram.
I think of my siblings more rarely these days. They are all in new houses, in new countries, living new lives. They call me on special occasions and we exchange a few words, for formality’s sake more than anything. But we never speak of how terrible our lives once were, and we never speak of the war.
I have started speaking to my children more often, even meeting up with them. Sometimes we go for long walks and visit cafés, and sometimes I go shopping with them. Our conversations are often stiff because I don’t always understand their work problems and I don’t know how much it is appropriate to ask them about things. I’m not sure whether I should perhaps ask for their forgiveness. But I don’t want them to feel they have to explain their business to me because they shouldn’t have to explain anything to me. We have started planning a trip to Kosovo because we would like to visit his grave.
My daughters have Finnish husbands with whom they plan to have children. My elder son and eldest daughter have good jobs, and my youngest children are studying hard. I am so proud of them that I am always eager to answer if someone asks about their lives.
At some point everyone should experience what it feels like to run out of options. That’s what I think. Because in a situation like that you think you’re losing your mind. Only now I know it’s not the least bit dangerous. When I received the letter Bajram had sent me I sat at the kitchen table because I thought I might lose my mind at the very contents of that letter. But when I opened it and read the few lines he had written to me and the children, I slid the letter back into its envelope, turned it in my hands for a moment, and put it away in the cupboard, because he had addressed it to people who no longer existed.
22
I got out of bed and walked into the living room. Sami was looking out of the window at the weighty snowflakes falling to the ground. He said he’d been thinking about things all night, turned his head, and looked me in the eyes.
I wasn’t angry about my father’s death. I was relieved, relieved that he had finally found a way to turn to the only option still open to him. The only thing that made me angry was Sami’s tone when he had asked me, because my father hadn’t been a father to me, not the same way as his had been a father to him.
“I think it’s high time you told me,” he began and glanced at his clothes, neatly folded on the sofa.
When I didn’t answer immediately, he shot out a volley of questions, as if it would be easier for me to start from a single detail. What was he like? What did he look like? When was the last time you saw him? Tell me, please, say something, trust me.
I picked up the pile of clothes and said that my father had left this country long ago. As I walked into the bedroom, I told him it had taken months before I even heard he had left. I placed his clothes in the wardrobe, and once I returned to the living room I said it had taken even longer before I heard he had died.
I put a hand on my hip, shifted my weight from one leg to the other, and hoped that Sami had more clothes than I did. Then I pressed my hands to my face as I realized I had never told anyone about my father’s death; I had always said we weren’t on good terms or that he’d left us when I was young.
Sami gripped my shoulder and turned back to face the window, and the snowfall was lighter now, more drifting. He was silent, but his questions weren’t over; they were there in the way he moved his head, in the trajectory of his coffee cup as he drew it closer, in the grip with which he tried to hold me still, and they were in his mouth, in the delicate rhythm in which his lips tried to form words.
For a long time I hadn’t understood my father because he didn’t view life the same way as others. Whereas other people asked each other what they wished for in life, my father asked people what they wished for in death. He couldn’t understand why people didn’t spend time wondering about the way in which their lives would one day come to an end. It would happen to every one of us; it was the only thing that united us. How on earth can they bring themselves not to think about it, not to discuss it? he would ask, shake his head, and eventually burst into laughter.
Then he would start to list ways of dying: cancer, a car accident, suffocation, falling to the pavement, drowning, burning, being shot. Do me a favor, he said. Close your eyes and imagine what it would be like if you accidentally leaned against a circular saw and your arm was sliced off and you’d never be able to get it back again. Instead of fingers, there would be nothingness. Or what would it be like to fall from the deck of a ship into the freezing water? The motors would swallow you up in a millisecond no matter how strongly you tried to swim away.
I wasn’t sure whether he really wanted to die or whether all he wanted from death was what it would mean for his loved ones.
A heart attack, a plane crash, a stroke, tuberculosis, cirrhosis, being crushed, being starved, freezing to death. What would you choose? If you could?
Then he would start battering his
fists against his head, go into the bathroom, fill the bath, and lower himself into the tub, as though he imagined he could end his life through the force of sheer willpower, or he would tighten a belt around his neck, press a sharp knife against his throat, and threaten to cut himself. Once, he ran into the bedroom, fetched a pile of blankets from the cupboard, buried himself beneath them, and said, Sorry, Daddy’s very scared right now.
And I listened and watched, I listened to his stifled voice and I watched as the blankets shuddered to the rhythm of his flinches, I watched until he began to gasp for breath, and I went to him and stroked his damp back and said I was sorry, and when he vomited at the side of the bed I mopped everything up even before he stood, and as I stroked him, as I cleaned up the mess he had made, I felt nothing for him but disgust, his viscid sweat oozing between my fingers like egg white.
“That’s what my father did,” I said.
I stepped behind Sami to see him more closely, to watch his reaction. Then he turned to look at me, took my arm, and wrapped it around him.
“Thank you,” he said and slid his fingers between my own.
His hand was warm and strong and squeezed my hand, and I thought of the warmth that existed between our hands, the rustle that occurs as he pulls on an item of clothing I have washed for him, the soft hiss from his nostrils as he breathes against my forehead. Did my father ever experience anything like this?
—
All those years I’d hoped he would die, though I didn’t understand what death truly meant. And as I wished for his death, I didn’t realize that one day my wish would come true, nor did I realize that, when it finally happened, I would think of him so often: what clothes had he worn or what pieces of furniture had he acquired, who had cooked for him every day and what kind of crockery did he eat from, who tidied his apartment, did he have anyone to change the sheets or simply to check that he didn’t lose too much weight?
My Cat Yugoslavia Page 22