Shards: A Novel

by Ismet Prcic

  She refused to stay overnight in the weekend house anymore and made every excuse not to bring us, the children, at all. She and Dad would make quick trips up there to do some garden work, harvest the vegetables, clean the leaves out of the drainpipes and such, and would always return before nightfall. My father, the champion of taking the path of least resistance, humored her when she was around and made fun of her when she was not, saying stuff like: “Your mother and her conspiracy theories,” and “Your mother had a dream and now we can’t sleep in our own house.”

  One time when we did go with them Mother had just finished making ajvar and was in the process of transporting the still-warm jars into the shed when Marija and Ostojka’s mother walked by the fence on her way to retrieve a renegade yearling.

  “Oh neighbor, what are you making there?” called the woman.

  “Just a little bit of ajvar. We got tons of eggplants this year and the peppers weren’t bad either. So I figured I should make something out of them instead of freezing them whole and overstuffing my freezer.”

  “Make it, make it, who knows who’ll get to eat it,” the woman said and then jumped over the creek into the woods.

  Mother froze, a jar in each hand, swirling the sentence in her mind, trying to work out a nonthreatening interpretation. She stood there breathing, smelling the resin and the nearby outhouse, hearing the insects buzzing and screaming for someone to mate with them, feeling the breeze. And after a while, scrutinized by this most intense contemplation, all those stimuli began to make a new kind of sense. Her brain deciphered the code laid in the fabric of reality and she became aware that everything was saturated with terrible, mounting wrongness. She looked at our house and for a moment actually saw it roofless, stairless, and empty.

  She then walked to our dark blue Fiat, opened the trunk, and placed the jars of ajvar inside. She returned to the shed and did the same with another two jars, then another two, then another two, and she didn’t stop until the trunk was filled up with jars of ajvar, pickles, pickled peppers stuffed with shredded cabbage, pickled beets, pear jam, raspberry jam, bottles of rose petal syrup, bags of potatoes, bunches of carrots, boxes of dried valerian, whole pumpkins, everything. She told Mehmed and me to get in the car, then found my father fussing about the well and told him to drive us home. He did and that was the last time she ever saw our weekend house or the property.

  “To me it’s as good as torched,” she would say when Father would try to change her mind. From then on our weekends were spent around the TV, with my father taking naps and drinking and my mother staring into the void and chain-smoking.

  As for the TV, it constantly showed news footage of what had happened in the Croatian town of Vukovar, just a little north of Tuzla, its buildings turned into debris by artillery, its citizens fleeing up snow-covered roads with all their possessions on horse-drawn buggies or in bulky suitcases or mere pockets, its projectile-plowed streets now full of Serbian banners and music, and dancing neo-Chetniks, rocking left and right in the backs of their trucks, smiling at the camera as the truck tires, unseeingly, crunched through the flesh and bone of those who had too many holes in them to evacuate and were lying there, hugging the streets.

  At that time we still lived in the old apartment on Brčanska Malta, at the intersection of Titova and Skojevska, the latter of which led all the way to the Husinska Buna military base. I would wake up in the middle of the night to pee and find my mother in the darkness of the kitchen/dining room staring through the closed lace curtains with a pair of opera glasses eight stories down to the street on which convoys of military vehicles moved to and fro nightly. She would take a cigarette break and give me the number of the moment.

  “They just moved in forty cannons,” she’d whisper from the fuzzy darkness.

  “So what?” I’d say. “You should go to sleep.”

  “You go. I’m not tired.”

  Sometime in April, in the new apartment, just before my parents sent Mehmed and me away, my mother got to say her first I-told-you-sos.

  Prior to that, my father’s blind optimism had turned into the worst kind of selfish naïveté; he saw the war with his eyes, but the message had yet to reach his brain, or at least the part of it in charge of self-preservation. He would come home from work and, while kicking off his shoes, peck my mother on the lips for my benefit. This performance of affection was transparent, insulting. It was supposed to make me feel better, like the family unit was intact, like the parents knew what they were doing, like there was no reason for alarm. He would walk into the bedroom to change, and Mother would follow, closing the door. I would sneak closer and listen to the hiss and the mumble of their muted conversations, which would always end abruptly with him emerging in his sweatpants, with a face like a red mask, white only around the lips, which were pressed together hard. He would take the kitchen route and materialize in the living room with a shot glass and a bottle of brandy in his hand. His chair would squeak when he dumped his weight into it. I would get shushed and the TV would pop on and blink at us all night with pain and violence and talk.

  Despite recognizing his stubborn denial of facts and beginning more and more to believe my mother, I did my share of blocking out the shit when I was with my friends. We avoided talking about politics and religion. Instead, all horny and in love, we walked the streets hoping to catch glimpses of our “girlfriends,” who were clueless that we even existed. We drank Cokes and coffees in crowded cafés, went to one another's houses, and played cheesy computer games and out-of-tune guitars. We lied to one another about sexual experiences, traded Italian comic books and German porn mags, told gross jokes, and bitched about school.

  The number of friends eroded with each wave of impending violence, though. Suddenly Boban had a sick grandpa in Pančevo and had to go visit him for a while. Sead’s family decided to move to Germany with his uncle, and we had a good-bye party in his weekend house before they sold it. Jaca left for Slovenia with her dad; Tarik flew to Turkey, and my friend Mile went to Banja Luka for his cousin’s wedding. Planes and helicopters flew over the town a lot.

  The next thing I knew my brother and I were quickly kissed and hugged, then hurried into the back of a white Opel Kadett belonging to our cousin Garo. The interior was solid with that new-car stench, and the pungent, coconut-scented air freshener hanging off the rearview mirror made me want to retch. With Garo driving and his sister Amela yammering nonstop from the shotgun side, Mehmed and I looked at the scenery, vaguely scared and perceptibly giddy because most of our friends were in school that morning and we were going on a trip to stay with some family of ours in Zagreb until this whole thing simmered down. For a week or two, my father said.

  Zagreb, 1992. The two-house complex on Ilica Street was already teeming with my father’s distant relatives, some of whom were natives and most of whom were refugees from other parts of Bosnia. It was like hanging out in a locked-down airport terminal with people sleeping among their luggage, sitting on lined chairs, eating bread and smoked sausages off their hanky-covered laps, with their toddlers running amok and slapping at everything with their sticky little fingers, leaving smudges of grease. Everything had the feel of old Russian movies and third-world misery. I was appalled.

  Mehmed and I moved in with Cousin Zvonko and his wife and daughter in the add-on attic apartment of the first house. Zvonko was a massive man, with a light brown comb-over and blue eyes behind rectangular specs, obese to the point of not being able to cut his own toenails. He breathed with a resonant wheeze that started on the third stair up, and by the time he reached the apartment he would cough and have to sit down for half an hour, drenched. His wife, Zana, was the exact opposite of him physically, to the point where you wouldn’t be able to fathom the image of the two of them in the act of coitus even if, by some twist of fate, you happened to witness it.

  The apartment was almost all one room except for Zvonko and Zana’s bedroom and the bathroom. It was broken up by beams and chimneys and smelled of sun
-bleached wood and dust. All the way in the corner, on the floor behind the TV cabinet, fenced off with low bookshelves featuring googly-eyed dolls and girlie trinkets, was our mattress. Before we got there this nook served as Zvonko’s daughter’s secret room, which was probably why she was a total shit to us and hated our guts the whole time. I didn’t like being called a refugee, so I spent the money Father gave me for essential foods on Ramones records, Coca-Cola, and sugary cacao powder, and the hosts were, let’s say, angry.

  “Do you know there’s a war going on?” they all kept asking. I cried and ran downstairs, slalomed my way through a gaggle of raggedy refugee toddlers and ended up in an office, the door of which I locked from the inside and whose phone I abused to call home. I told my dad we were ready to be picked up.

  Mother did come a week later but not to pick us up. She was in one of the last buses that crossed the bridge into Croatia before it went, first up into the air and then down to the bottom of the Sava. Father stayed behind to keep his job, take care of the apartment, and feed the parakeet. Mother showed up in jeans with a bunch of bags and moved into the attic, as well.

  With that commenced our official exodus.

  In mid-May we saw our old apartment building on Brčanska Malta on TV. In the middle of the intersection that my mother spent nights monitoring with her tiny binoculars, an olive green ammunitions truck sat ablaze, its tires melting, its cargo crackling like a fireworks display, spraying projectiles indiscriminately. Behind it, stretching up Skojevska Street, were more trucks, some burning, some shot to shit, some stalled, some untouched but driverless. There were holes in the buildings. There were no soldiers except for the ones lying around, dead.

  A gray ashworm of about half my mother’s cigarette died, unsmoked, against the filter and fell silently onto the carpet. I scooped it up into an ad from a magazine and threw it in the trash. Comingback I saw her bring the filter to her lips, realize it was just a filter, and then look around the floor for a singed spot or a small fire, mildly amused that she could find none.

  Father called right before dinner, said he was okay, said that the Yugoslav National Army, mirroring what they had done in Sarajevo, attempted to evacuate the base and move all its artillery to the hills around town, where they would be in a perfect position to systematically shell it, and that the local group calling itself the Patriotic League ambushed them and seized . . . He got disconnected midsentence and didn’t call again. My mother served the dinner to everyone except herself and sat smoking by the open window, assuring us all that she just wasn’t hungry. I forgot and made the cardinal mistake of audibly slurping up a couple of spoonfuls of my hot hot soup and Zvonko lost it. He turned purple, smacked his napkin against the table, and gave me another lecture on how to eat with my mouth closed like a civilized human being. During the rest of the dinner nobody said anything.

  I read late into the night, something inappropriate for my age, something about rich couples lounging in Jacuzzis filled with champagne, rubbing cocaine on their gums and the tips of their pink penises and rubbery, swollen clitorises, and fucking, fucking, fucking all night long. When I finally turned off the lamp I noticed an orange dot of fire across the attic room in the darkness above where my mother’s mattress was, silently turning brighter for a moment or two and then dimming down again.

  Whispers:

  “Mom?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You still up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you okay?”

  Silence. Then:

  “Yeah.”

  I didn’t know what else to ask, so I let the silence win. It gloated there in the dark, humming. I closed my eyes and pressed my cheek against the cool side of the pillow.

  “What are we gonna do?” she whispered, and my eyes shot open. Her voice was so quiet and out of nowhere that it sounded like thoughts in my own head. “I can’t . . . I just . . . I can’t stand it here. I’ll break down. The way they’re treating . . .”

  She stopped herself. The orange dot did its lighthouse imitation.

  “We have to be thankful to them for letting us stay here.”

  “What did you say?” I asked, though I heard it well enough.

  “Nothing. Go to sleep.”

  The last straw came the very next day in the form of a field mouse.

  For more than a month while we were in Zagreb, Mother felt so bad about burdening Zvonko’s family that she took it upon herself to work like a maniac and earn our keep. She provided and made all the food, paying for it with our meager and rapidly dwindling savings. She scrubbed every square inch of tile, polished every wooden surface, every chimney brick and window. She vacuumed all the rugs and did all the laundry. She did all the dishes and then she did some more. She had become, pretty much, a live-in maid, this voiceless creature in yellow rubber gloves, kneeling on the floor and scouring, stopping only to stare and smoke. The problem of course was that Zvonko and Zana, and even their daughter, got used to food just appearing on their plates and dirty clothes vanishing off their floors only to reappear washed, ironed, and folded in their drawers the next day. They started to complain if their socks weren’t folded the way they wanted, or if there was no beer in the fridge, or if the vacuum cleaner was fucking up the TV reception. On top of all that, they were my father’s cousins and, like his immediate family, thought my mom of inferior birth.

  Our last day in Zagreb, Zvonko was watching TV, Zana was in their bedroom with a migraine, and Mother was looking for a pot when a little mouse ran out from the pantry and stopped, shivering, in the corner of two cabinets. Being grossed out by a thing like that, Mother asked Zvonko if he could take care of it. Annoyed, he called for Zana to do it, who in turn called him an idiot and told him that her head was about to split open and what the hell was he thinking. Puffing and swearing, he wrestled his ass out of an armchair, which perked up and grew like dough, thundered into the kitchen, and stomped on the little creature with his heel. Blood spurted on the cabinets, over the tile. He picked up the minuscule remains, threw them in the trash, and walked back to his armchair, leaving bloody heel prints on the tile, on the hardwood floor, and on the carpet. Mother suppressed a gag and asked him if he could please take out the garbage, and he said that it was not Friday yet and turned the TV on really loud.

  That was it.

  Mother first smoked a cigarette, looking out the window, her back hunched, her elbows on the sill, and then took the garbage out herself. It took her a long time. When she came back she went straight for our stuff and started packing. Zvonko was outraged. My brother cried. I sat there with a book in my lap, dreading the fact that I, judging by the gleam in her eye, probably wouldn’t get to finish it. Even Zana walked out of the bedroom in her nighty, her face like a storm on the horizon, hissing her deeply wounded whys.

  “Thank you for all the help,” Mother said, “but we’ve been here over a month now and it’s time for us to leave. We don’t want to be a burden anymore.”

  “Where are you gonna go?” asked Zvonko, as if calling a bluff. There was nowhere to go.

  “To the Red Crescent with the rest of the refugees,” she said and gave me a crazy look, signaling. I swallowed, put the book on the coffee table, rose, and picked up one of the big bags.

  “Think of your children,” boomed Zvonko from the top of the stairs as we made our way to the front door.

  We sat on our bags in front of the Zagreb mosque, in the parking lot, in the sun.

  The heat made the black asphalt look like crusted-over lava, throbbing and emitting visible waves of the red hell that seemed to boil beneath it. Cars wavered in this radiation, their contours melting, collapsing. Shirtless Bosnian men sat on curbs or squatted in the patches of grass, staring vaguely in the direction of the closed doors of the Red Crescent, their skin baked from field work, their spines, pelvises, ribs evident through it in detail. Their head-scarfed wives, sisters, mothers sat clustered on towels and blankets, fanning one another miserably with newspapers, ca
lling their ill-groomed children to come back.

  Mother smoked and rummaged through our bags, zipping open all the compartments and slipping her hand inside them, looking for something or satisfying a compulsive need to touch everything she owned. She offered us sandwiches and consolations and every half hour or so walked over to a phone booth on the corner. Through the glass we saw her go through the same motions of putting a card into the phone, pressing buttons and listening, listening, listening for a while, then hanging up, pulling out the card, putting it in her purse, stepping outside, and lighting a cigarette, every time.

  Then at some point Cousin Seka showed up in a van with this blond man in a faded Hawaiian shirt. Zvonko had called her and told her what happened, where we were going. Both Seka and the man worked for the Red Crescent, driving food and medicine over treacherous terrains in monthly humanitarian convoys to besieged Bosnians. Mother told us to watch the bags and they walked off a little way and Mehmed and I watched them talk, trying to discern what they were saying from their gestures and body language. When they finally started walking back there was a different aura around my mother.

  “Let’s go, guys,” she said, picking up a bag.

  “Go where?” asked my brother. I lifted our biggest bag, but the blond man patted my head and took it out of my hands.

  “Your cousin Pepa’s in Ðakovo,” Seka said. She had a man smoker’s voice and cool little eyes. I had never heard of any cousin Pepa.

  “But we’re not staying in their house,” Mother corrected her. “We’re gonna have a place of our own.”