by Ismet Prcic
The first thwack of the hatchet missed completely. The second was weak and it hit too close to the thick of the breast and didn’t do much. The third connected with the neck but failed to sever the head. The fourth one took the head off all right, but my grandmother lost her grip on the hen and it took off flying for four or five meters, landing in the grass right in front of me. It took a couple of steps and stretched its wings as if thrilled with itself that it got away. Its neck spurted blood that reddened its white plumage something awful, but that seemed not to be an issue. It fluffed its feathers, getting some specks of blood on my bare legs, then scratched the grass with its feet, leaned down, and, obeying a terrible instinct somewhere in its muscles, made as if to feed, as if to peck the ground with its beak that was meters away on a small dune of blood-sprinkled sawdust already stilled by death.
AGE THREE
The moment Marshal Tito died* I shat myself. These incidents were not connected.
It had to have been a weekday because I was at my grandparents’ in Gornja Tuzla. My parents mustn’t have gotten off work yet—they would come to visit every afternoon after work on workdays and would take me home to Tuzla on weekends and holidays—because I don’t remember them being there. I was sick as a dog from gorging myself on something or other and was lying in a fetal position on the L-shaped sofa.
It was cold. My grandfather sat in his armchair by the window and smoked his cigarettes. He sat on his right foot with his left knee drawn to his chest and stared intently at his ancient black-and-white TV with a pensive expression, mostly in his brow. I felt my stomach cramp and suddenly my drawers were filled with wetness and warmth. It took me a second to realize what had happened and when I did I immediately burst into tears. My grandma was in the adjoining kitchen behind these green curtains and when I called her my grandfather howled at me to shut up.
He had never raised his voice at me before. I fixed my bulging eyes on the TV to see what warranted this kind of explosion. On the screen was a gray town square somewhere with all the people standing frozen wherever they found themselves, dark against the asphalt, crying. The sound of wailing sirens came through the speakers. Then the weepy and grandiose voice of some TV announcer shouted things with emotion.
Scared and shitty I started to cry again and my grandfather called my grandmother to shut me up and turn up the television because Tito had just died. She stormed in and picked me up, automatically praying for the departed soul of the Communist leader in Arabic. Her hands were wet and cold from whatever she was doing in the kitchen and they smelled of apples. She patted my chest and whispered that we had to be quiet because it was an important day, and then she turned the volume knob to an almost unbearable level and carried me through the green curtains into the kitchen.
AGE FOUR
We lived on the eighth floor of an ugly, gray building on Brčanska Malta. All three rooms of our apartment faced south, which meant facing the newest, biggest twin skyscrapers in Tuzla. I was in the kitchen/dining room drawing an orange bulldozer unloading a mass of yellow sand into the back of a red truck. There was a construction site in between our building and one of the skyscrapers that I was using for inspiration.
Looking out the window I noticed a large gray coat swell with wind, disembark from a clothesline on a balcony on one of the skyscraper’s highest floors, and fall straight down to the ground. It must have been a very heavy coat—it fell that fast. But then passersby started to gather around it, dozens of them, crowding, walking urgently toward it, pointing, and clasping their hands over their mouths.
I told my mother about it. She came over and hugged me from behind and looked out too. The passersby ran and waved to the cars on the street. A white Cinquecento drove up over the curb onto the sidewalk, and over the sidewalk onto the grass, and sped all the way to the crowd, honking its horn.
Why are the people looking at the coat? I asked.
Mother put her hand over my eyes and asked me if I wanted lemonade. She closed the blinds and turned on the radio.
AGE SIX
I started first grade when I was six, which, because both of my parents worked—and it was my brother’s turn to stay with our grandparents— made me a latchkey kid at six. I both loved and hated this. I loved sleeping as long as possible, having the TV on all day, and “reading” all the books in my mother’s library—the medical ones with pictures of naked people were staples. But I hated being a child and alone, being vulnerable and scared. I hated being petrified when people rang the doorbell: door-to-door salesmen, beggars, Gypsies asking to fix your umbrellas, older kids collecting old newspapers and bottles, trying to earn some money through recycling. I never opened the door, just like I was told. I hated when they would hear me inside and ring the bell two or three times, just waiting there as I trembled in fright and tried to silently put on the chain. I hated having to walk to school by myself with my huge backpack while all the other kids walked in groups and fucked around. I hated the silence that filled the apartment when I was alone, the silence that made me leave the TV on even during the news and boring history shows and intermeZZOS. Those TV intermeZZOS were the worst. They would show a tape of a bird flying and play classical music for hours.
It happened out of the blue. I was watching The Little Rascals in the living room and eating a butter and honey sandwich when the phone rang. We had a red rotary phone that had a little light on it that flashed when the phone was ringing. I imagined this light to be a camera through which whoever was calling could look into the apartment and see me even though mother told me it was for deaf people to see that the phone is ringing. I was not supposed to be watching TV that day because I had a lot of homework to finish, nor was I supposed to eat in the living room, which was why I turned off the TV before I answered the phone and why I finished chewing my last bite, too.
Making a good-boy face to the flashing light, I picked up the handle and said hello.
There was silence on the other end but not a dead one. It was the silence of an empty room or a room that someone was keeping quiet in to give the appearance of an empty room. It was the kind of silence that sound people in the movie business have to mic and record because they can’t have the absence of sound, because it sounds dead, unnatural, and because they need more nuanced silences to make their movies sound alive. The silence I was hearing on the other end of that line was definitely an alive silence.
I repeated my hello at a higher pitch as my heart climbed into my throat. This time I heard something, a noise as though someone were sniffling or trying to subdue a whimper. I swallowed. I thought, hopefully, that it was a bad connection, that the whimperer simply couldn’t hear my voice. And just as I was about to go into a third, louder hello, a woman’s voice said something that I will never forget. She said:
Little boy, Dr. Stefan Tadi ; is your daddy. Do you hear? Your daddy is not your daddy. Dr. Stefan Tadi ; is your daddy.
I hung up, hard. It hurt my knuckles. I heard my heart in the silence of the apartment. I didn’t understand what she meant, but I knew it was bad what she said, really bad.
The phone rang again and I covered the light with my hand.
It rang again.
And again.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Shaking, actually hearing my teeth chatter, I waited it out, and when it was over I dialed my mom at work. The operator told me to hold. I held. My finger was bleeding a little. I held until my mom answered and then I couldn’t hold it in anymore.
AGE SEVEN
I was lying in my bed with my right arm stretched uncomfortably over the cold plastic of the night table to hold my baby brother’s hand as we listened. She was screaming at him again. She was breaking things.
He was saying, Don’t do it; why would you want to do that?
She was saying, Enough. Enough. Enough. I can’t take lies anymore.
There was noise: the banging and sliding of kitchen drawers, the ji
ngling of utensils, the clanging of cutlery. There were hurried footsteps down the hall, and then the door to our room opened and Father barged in. My brother cried first. He cried, What are you doing? I followed closely. I cried, Don’t fight, please. We were up on our feet already and Father ushered us out.
He was saying, I don’t know what’s wrong with her and maybe you can help her.
We came into the hallway awkwardly in our pajamas. The linoleum by the front door was cold on my bare feet. The light on the electricity meter on the wall was glowing red. It meant the nightly cheap rate had already commenced.
Mother came out of the kitchen with a knife, and when she saw us she hid it behind her back.
We cried. We wailed. Father was behind us with the front door behind him.
Let me go, she was saying to him.
Calm down, Henrijeta, he was saying to her. Be reasonable.
Step away or I’ll—she started and stopped herself. She thought about it. Her eyes darted around. Then she finished: I’ll do something ugly.
I remember thinking that it was a weird thing to say. In English you can get away with it, but in Bosnian it sounds weird. It sounds awkward. Nobody says a thing like that. It sounds cheesy. She was not saying what she wanted to say. I remember thinking: What does she mean?
Why? he was asking. We have an apartment, we have good jobs, we have two children. What’s so bad?
You are, she said. I am. This is a fiasco.
She took a step back into the kitchen and looked at Mehmed and me. Never forget this, she said, we’re all living a lie.
AGE EIGHT
My dream was to become that sinewy ice-cream vendor from Kosovo who owned that tiny shop by the autobus station in front of my building. At my age I couldn’t imagine a better job in the world, sitting in a matchbox of a room between the bank and the station on Titova Street, selling cheaply made refreshments to a wide range of citizens, from badly dressed businessmen with damp underarms to tough-handed peasants on their way to and from the nearby Little Market. My mouth would water at the mere idea of being in proximity to that giant ice-cream machine, buzzing with the sweet inner workings of its metal womb, a touch away from those three levers and the mad swirls of chocolate and vanilla behind them. Mmm, ice cream.
My mother allowed me one piece of bread a meal, a heartbreaking decision for her that probably saved me from childhood obesity, considering my appetite back then. I was never permitted an allowance either. Every time someone would slip me a coin at a family gathering my mother would bring out my kitty bank and make me put it in there. Tough love and all, though, at the time, I just thought she was mean. She took my weight gain seriously, unlike the rest of my extended family, who joked about it and piled macaroni on my plate whenever my mother was out of the room. They called me poguzija—an endearing, domestic way of branding someone a fat-ass.
Stop eating, my paternal grandma would say, or your ass will climb on the back of your neck.
My mother encouraged me to go out and play, made me. I would do so begrudgingly, and instead of running after a soccer ball or climbing a tree I would stake out the ice-cream vendor in our building. The sight of people buying ice cream, pulling their tongues around and over it, savoring its frosty succulence, never failed to give me a boner of a sweet tooth. Soon enough my eyes would fire up with ravenous gleam, and I would abandon my stakeout position to circle the shop like a shark around a scuba man in an underwater cage—a trancelike state.
Then one day I was awakened from my daze by the vendor. I don’t know how long I had loitered in front of the shop, scaring away the customers with my tongue dragging on the smoldering pavement and my eyes feverish with that outlandish, insatiable need. It was as if the world suddenly came into stark focus and I saw him poke his head out of the door and motion me over, his mustache twitching up and down like Chaplin’s. My legs took me there, closer to him, though my mind bellowed for them to stop, to quit, to turn away and run.
I knew he was giving me that free ice cream to get rid of me, out of pity. To him I was a poor child salivating over something I couldn’t afford. And it was true; I couldn’t afford my ass climbing up my spine to sit on the back of my neck, the cruel teasing and pinches, girls snickering during recess. I knew I shouldn’t take anything from strangers, and, of course, there was also the question of dignity. But despite all that my hand rose, and a chocolate-vanilla ice cream exchanged hands, and it was on my tongue and down my throat so fast that I blushed. I stood there staring at this man from Kosovo with his knobby chair-leg arms, muttered guiltily my feeble thanks—more habitually than expressing my real gratitude, which was bittersweet at best—and walked away.
I never went by that place ever again on account of shame. If I had to go past it I walked in step with an adult passerby, keeping my gaze locked ahead of me and fighting off all sorts of discomfort.
That charity ice cream didn’t sit well and I ended up spewing under some stairs.
AGE TWELVE
In elementary school I was into math. I liked that there was only one solution per problem, that nothing was vague and that you didn’t have to interpret what the author meant by this or that. I had it all figured out for the first four years.
It was later, as the math got more abstract and elusive and you had to remember formulas and draw coordinate systems and such, that I developed animosity toward the subject. Suddenly there was more than one solution to a single problem and I started to lose my footing in reality as I knew it. I remember being obsessed with the notion that a straight line can go on forever and never touch another straight line that was parallel to it, that, seen from the side, a straight line is just a dot, which I thought could not be proven, since the line would go right through your eye and brain, rendering you blind and dead. Tragically, I said this out loud in class and my comrade-teacher thought I was trying to be funny and made me stand in the corner facing the wall for hours. My peers snickered at the size of my ass, and I visualized myself turning into a dust mote and wafting out through the crack under the door.
But mostly my change of heart came when she walked into my life, my comrade-teacher Radmila. She was a plump brunette in her forties, with pleasant features and nicely manicured nails but with some kind of growth on her cheek that allowed her to smile only with one side of her mouth, making the effort seem cold and halfhearted. She was capable of such astonishing mercilessness that I pissed myself twenty minutes into a class because she wouldn’t let me out, because that’s why we have breaks in between classes. I sat there in lukewarm dampness, inside an acrid cloud, thinking of comic book heroes.
I stopped doing my homework. I convinced myself I couldn’t get it. I faked being sick to cut class. I prayed not to be called on. I copied other students’ work.
By the third trimester I had accumulated a plethora of bad grades, got caught cheating on an exam (little pieces of paper with formulas glued to the underside of my fat ruler), and was sent to the principal’s office. The principal, whom we called Rooster because he had a piece of loose, leathery skin connecting the tip of his chin to the center of his collarbone, ripped me a new one and then gave me a second chance. If I did well on my final exam he was going to let my conduct unbecoming a student slide.
There was no way I could have prepared a school year’s worth of math in two and a half weeks. I told myself that I was trying. In reality, most of my energy was directed at conjuring up an elaborate scheme that would excuse me from taking the final. I fantasized about being hit by a car and lingering between life and death. I prayed for a communicable disease.
It just so happened that my mother had to go with her nurses’ club to a symposium on how to battle alcoholism somewhere in Macedonia right about the time I was to take my final exam. Knowing this ahead of time and realizing that I was going to be alone with my pushover of a father, I hatched my master plan.
See, a couple of years back my cousin Adi had an inflamed appendix that needed to be taken out. Due to the
operation and some complications, he didn’t have to take any final exams and still passed into the next year. My plan was to find out from him all the symptoms of an appendix attack and act them out for my father in hopes it would get me under the surgical knife. In the dictionary it said that the appendix is a slender, closed tube attached to the large intestine near the point at which it joins the small intestine. I had no problem sacrificing that.
Not only did my father buy into my performance but so did the doctors in the ER. I went out of my way not to blurt out the list of symptoms like an amateur. I just picked a few good ones and mentioned them offhandedly. There was no empty doubling over or cries of pain. I kept my cool.
It worked. By the time they got me into one of those surgery slip-ons and led me down the tiled floors of pacifying mint green and bleach, I did get cold feet but it was too late. The anesthesiologist started telling me a joke and zonked me out just before the punch line. When I tell this story I often exaggerate and say that my last thought as I was going under was Motherfucker! Like I said, an exaggeration.
I dreamed that my inflatable raft got ruptured on some craggy rocks just under the surface and that I was about to sink into the depths where some dark shapes were sliding around.
I came to in a corridor with terrible pain and a confusion of squeaky wheels and people talking and bleach and iodine. I was wheeled into a room, moved to a bed, and the boy next to me had some complications, so they left him open with a tube dripping yellow pus into a plastic container. He looked miserable. The girl on the other side of my bed was bald. She had lice, among other things.
I remember the ravenous sounds my stomach made when they brought in food for everyone but me and the pus boy. I remember his haircut—a little like Hitler’s—and the way the liquid glucose dripped down the tube and into my vein for lunch. My mom returned from Macedonia early and pulled some nurse strings to come and visit me beyond the visitation hours. She seemed to have bought my performance as well.