by Ismet Prcic
“Does that mean that we’re not refugees anymore?” asked my brother and everyone’s heart broke a little. Mother put down her bag and hugged us.
Ðakovo is to Zagreb what low shrubbery is to a redwood forest.
The tallest things around were several grain silos and a full-size, redbrick cathedral, the proud symbol of the township. From the steeple, they told me, you could see fields of corn and wheat as far as your eyes could reach.
Cousin Pepa, a jolly gray man, showed us the house where we were to stay. It belonged to his Serbian neighbor, who had left for Belgrade the night before the war and asked Pepa to take care of his plants. The place was dark, unfinished, an architectural vomitus. Humidity had turned the layers of dust into invisible syrup that coated everything. Fingertips stuck to it like to wet envelope glue and you had to peel them off surfaces with a slight force. The second floor had a big room with a TV, an adjoining dining room, and a kitchen, and mother told Pepa that we loved it and thanked him. We left our stuff on the floor and crossed the street to Pepa’s backyard gazebo, where we were to have a party.
Mehmed and I met some new cousins and neighborhood boys, sneaked into someone’s strawberries, squatted there, and spoiled our dinners. Mother had a few glasses of Riesling and we saw her laugh a couple of times.
A month later Mehmed and I knew all the kids in the neighborhood. We spent our days throwing rocks into this large pond the color of white coffee that the local kids told horror stories about. They said that there were a couple of entire houses under the water and that someone named Vedran Tomaševi had drowned there—after taking on a dare to bring something from the very bottom, he had dived right down into a chimney, got stuck, and died. They took us to a German bunker from the Second World War and told stories of gang rapes and bludgeonings, Nazi ghosts and overdoses, and they pointed to beer bottles, syringes, and used prophylactics as pieces of evidence. We believed. We had our doubts. We spun our own wild tales.
At the house Mother would turn into a bitch when the news was on and would apologize, kiss our foreheads, and give us snacks when it was over. I imagined what Father was doing in the apartment all by himself. I envied him in a way.
Mother took on the house and cleaned, scrubbed, scoured, polished, washed, sponged up and down, and threw basins of dirty, dark water into the overgrown yard. She revealed dormant colors of wooden furniture and cooked thrifty but scrumptious meals that Mehmed and I pushed around our plates. She sobbed when she thought we weren’t around and sang when she thought we were. She held her fist against her stomach and belched her quiet belches, doubled over by her numerous ulcers. She cut off all her hair in front of the mirror and adopted the look of a mental patient, complete with the eyes of glass, long wall stares, and overly eager song.
Father called sporadically, telling tales of empty stores, deadly shellings, and basement-dwelling dynamics. He said he had to let our parakeet loose because he ran out of birdseed. He said that the hamster was still around.
I read and watched TV and read. I sneaked downstairs and rummaged through the stuff of our unknowing hosts, stealing books, trinkets, tapes they left behind. I jerked off to their magazines, family albums, medical books. I caught flies on their windowpanes and threw them into giant spiderwebs, watching them try to free themselves. Giddily, I observed the spiders tie them up with their butcher’s twine and store them off to the side for later. Mostly, though, I read books.
A day came when Mother decided that she didn’t have anything to lose and she was going to go out and try to feel like a normal person again, despite everything. She made us breakfast of bread and honey and tea and then put on her best outfit, reddened her lips and blackened her lashes, tied a scarf over her jagged do, and walked into the town. She checked out some shops, ran her fingers over fabrics, asked if they had this blouse in a more neutral color or a better size. She bought a fashion magazine, stopped at the corner café, ordered a cappuccino, and asked the waiter if they had any Bosnian music, anything from across the Sava. He found some bad pop and she sat there in the shade, flipping the colorful pages, her mind in a knot.
In time, she switched to beer, hoping it would loosen her up, which it did, and when she came back to the house the skin around her eyes was mucky with mascara, and she told both of us what had happened, how, while sitting there, she had this amazing vision of standing on top of a mountain, on the edge of a crude road, facing an abyss of crispy pastures and tumultuous foliage in the early, green morning air. She described to us a flock of shivering sheep draped with a gauze of patchy, disappearing fog. She said it was an omen. A good one.
Father telephoned out of nowhere after not being heard from in two weeks. He said he was at the bus station in Ðakovo and needed directions to the house. He had arrived there on one of the first buses to successfully sneak out of the siege of Tuzla. I flew recklessly across the street to Pepa’s house, screaming my brother’s name and jumping over things.
Father was sallow and thin. His clothes caved in on the places where protuberances should have been. There was film in his eyes like he was dead, or old, or just born, or drunk. He ate fast. He was unshaven. When he talked, he talked low. When Pepa would give him wine he talked louder and more often. He shook his head like he still couldn’t believe what he had seen, felt. But talking about war he still was optimistic, still claimed it would not last long, that people were not that stupid to drag it into the winter. At night he talked with Mother, and Mehmed and I lay under our covers, eyes wide open, holding hands, and trying to eavesdrop. We caught words like America and Zagreb, Mother’s crying, and Father’s consoling mumbles.
Four days later, despite well-meant protests from Pepa and his family, our parents made up their minds and we were on a bus heading back to Bosnia. Before we left Mother threw away armfuls of clothes and packed our bags full of cans of oil, bags of flour, tins of meat and fish, packages of coffee and sugar, yeast and dried milk. Again I had to leave my books behind.
“We’re going to be fine,” Mother said when we sat in our seats and she saw me crying.
But she hung a plastic bag containing her cigarettes and a bottle of cognac on the side of her window. It was a little weird but I didn’t say anything.
Somewhere around Karlovac, still in Croatia, the bus broke down and we lost half a day waiting in the sun by an abandoned gas station for a new part to be delivered from Zagreb. I searched my mother’s eyes to see what she was thinking, but she was smoking and I couldn’t really see inside her head.
Later we all took a pill and slept. Or at least Mehmed and I did. We were on a ferry for a little while. It was dark. Then we were on a bus again, going slowly, stopping, showing papers, starting again, sleeping.
I awoke at dawn and when I did Mother immediately took my hand, her face stern with fear, and squeezed. People mumbled from the semidarkness like at a funeral. The air smelled of puke and rancid mayo and motor oil and old sweat. A child was crying in the back and a mother was telling her to shut up and act her age. My father was up on his feet, leaning into the aisle, copying what other men were doing, trying to figure out what was going on, looking busy.
We had stopped on an incline and we couldn’t move. The drivers debated something, deliberately keeping their voices down and their faces stony until one of them finally descended from the front to the middle of the bus and, looking down, told us that the engine was too weak to climb such a steep incline and that we should all get off, unload all our luggage from the belly of the bus, and try to push it up the hill.
Later on, while the men were pulling out the pudgy bags from the swollen bus—their faces so determined to be useful, to be strong, making the fear in them that much more visible and pungent—I saw my mother walk to the edge of the crude road and saw her shoulders go limp.
I realized then just how high up the mountain we really were and how wet green everything below must have looked from where she was standing, and I didn’t have to hear the distant tinkling of bells to kn
ow that the sheep were there as well. I went to her and saw it all in awe.
“This is what I saw in my vision,” she said, but I knew that already.
Home.
We walked around the apartment, in and out of rooms, looked in every corner, opened drawers and cabinets, dragged our fingers across the walls, slipped our hands under pillows and in between cushions, picked up glasses and trinkets and set them back down. Later, we lit a candle and sat around the table listening to Grandma talk, looking in disbelief around our dining room, which the shivering candle was making unreal.
The grown-ups talked.
Mother said that the cognac was in case some Chetnik stopped the bus at gunpoint and climbed aboard and tried to get near us, her children: that it was to be drunk straight out of the bottle to kill the paralyzing fear, so she could then jump at the fucker’s neck and tear his throat out with her bare teeth.
Father said that he saw our property in Kovačevo Selo and that every thing was gone, looted—the barbed wire, the raspberry plants, the stairway, the roof, the windows, all the furniture, my comic books—and that the only things he found were a broken spatula in the grass and a framed poster of American Ninja’s Michael Dudikoff from the attic room way up in the pear tree.
Grandma said that she had fed the parakeet rice and that it died in its cage.
Excerpts from Ismet Prci’s Diary
from February 1999
I love you, mati, but when I come to visit you I won’t stay.
Melissa’s moving to San Diego with her two best friends, those girls that hate me. You know when on nature shows those ice cliffs in Antarctica break off and crash into the ocean? Well that’s me now.
You’ll see me this summer. I don’t know how to feel about it. One thing I do know, though. I will not stay. No matter what you do, no matter how many times you try to kill yourself, I will not stay. Izzy has to follow Melissa to San Diego. That’s all there is to be said about that.
Pills and alcohol don’t work as well as before, mati. I take a sedative before I go to sleep, and I wake up half an hour later, covered in sweat. I get hammered on vodka and pass out and the same thing happens. How do you stave off the thought swarms, the brain chatter?
Dementophobia, it’s called. Dr. Cyrus told me. Fear of going insane. Last thing you need, he said.
* * *
This is how it happens: I think I hear a murmur. In my head? From downstairs? I mute the TV, listen. It’s still there. I go on the balcony, and through birdsong and car noise, I still hear it. A man whispering urgently, as if through a beard. I go back in, unmute the TV, turn it way loud. The murmur is still there. I chug vodka straight out of the bottle. It’s still there. It’s still there. And when I begin to panic I see things: you, Father, Mehmed, soldiers, and I’m transported into a random memory, a random occurrence of a life that might or might not be mine.
(. . . the night you return
to bosnia . . .)
You wake up in the middle of the night. It’s one of those awakenings that messes with your head. The nightmare is still vivid enough to appear almost real, but the waking state is too hazy to offer any consolation of safety. Your shoulders tense up as if expecting a blow. There is no grounded reason for this yet somehow that doesn’t matter. The sense of awful urgency is overwhelming and you wait for reality to kick in. You wait for things to start making sense. Time drags its feet.
The air is hot. Your pajamas stick to you. Your eyes slowly adjust to the dark and your surroundings start to ring a bell: the Donald Duck sheets, your brother sleeping on the other sofa, the funky rug, the constant squeaking of the hamster wheel—you are back home. Back home?
You ransack your brain to discover nothing but leftovers of an already distant nightmare. You can’t recall your age. The baseless urgency you feel sitting on your chest borders on panic and you have no idea where it’s coming from. The hamster wheel stops squeaking and you tense up even more. The silence is pressing. You wait for something, anything. What the fuck is going on? you think.
BOOM!
You don’t even move. There is the sound of broken glass, then footsteps and the banging of doors in the apartment above. Your heart vibrates like a caught sparrow. You sit there, still waiting.
Your dad appears in the doorway in his tighty-whities. “Don’t be scared guys,” he says. “This is their usual night treatment.” You look at your brother, but he’s still half-asleep. You could fire a cannon right from underneath his blanket and he would hardly stir. Your dad helps him up. He keeps on talking but you can’t hear him. The source of your heartbeat seems to be in your inner ear, muffling everything else. In the noise you make out some words like bomb shelter and hurry. He goes out. You keep on sitting there. The siren starts wailing in the night. Loud.
Then you remember everything. Your body goes on automatic pilot and you put some clothes on in haste. All that time your mind keeps repeating This is real. This is real. This is . . . In his cage, Rambo the hamster runs in place like crazy. His wheel goes squeakety-squeak. You run out into the corridor after your brother. Your mom is shoving handfuls of plums into a plastic bag, her face pale. The sweatshirt she has on is inside out. The seams are littered with lint. She urges you toward the front door.
Outside the door, the stairway is dark but alive. Some neighbor with a flashlight descends from the floor above with a little girl in his arms. He has only one slipper on. The circles around his eyes make his face look like some kind of a mask. He looks like a scavenger bird.
“They haven’t shelled for quite a while, Mirsad,” your dad says to him sarcastically.
“Fuck ’em!” the man says.
BOOM!
Everybody rushes downstairs. You plunge into the current, staying behind your parents and your brother. You go down seventeen stairs, then turn. You do this four times again as more people join the current on lower floors. You feel a boost of adrenaline make your head light. The last stairway is longer and it takes you into the bowels of the building.
Soon you are in a huge concrete room with two lines of bunk beds stretching the length of a soccer field. Metal pipes crisscross the ceiling. They are wrapped up with black duct tape. They still leak in places. The bun-shaped lighting fixtures beam unevenly from the walls. Their light is gray. It makes everything look greasy and damp. People go to the beds like skeletons climbing back into their grave slots in a mausoleum. You stand there speechless, your heart in your heels.
Your dad points to two bunk beds in the corner. He looks proud and focused, purposeful. He tells you not to be afraid. You sit down on the bottom mattress of the one on the right. Your mom ends up on the one on the left. She asks your brother if he wants a plum, rummaging through her bag. He declines. She squeezes a plum with her thumb and index finger and brings the two halves of the fruit closer to the light, inspecting for worms. You wonder how come she’s so calm. This is her first taste of the war, too. Looking down she notices her sweatshirt is inside out and bursts into tears, letting everything fall to the floor. Your dad gives her a pill. She takes it and lies down, sobs rocking her upper body. She looks straight into your eyes. She says, “You’re not a traitor.” You have no idea what she’s talking about. She smiles for an instant. You cannot hold the terrified gaze any longer, though, and you look away.
You notice a family of four arrive and settle on their two bunk beds across the way. They look average, nondescript, their movements mechanical. The son is kind of weird, though. His light hair is full of cowlicks and his shirt says DON’T FUCK WITH CHUCK in English. The dad pulls a flattened cardboard box from underneath one of the beds and reassembles it. You watch in astonishment as they all produce a number of playing cards from their pockets and resume the hand that’s obviously afoot. They’re taking it well, you think to yourself and look at your own family. Your mom is motionless now, as though made of wax. Her eyes are glass. Your dad is making the rounds around the “neighborhood,” shooting the shit with the “neighbors.” Perhap
s he’s
BOOM!
Third one. It strikes you that it has probably been only three or four minutes since you awoke, five tops.
Your brother is asleep. Wow, you think.
BOOM!
Close one. They sound more sinister underground. You move to the foot of the bed and look. Some apartment dwellers curse. Others pray. Most of their faces are in midcringe. They look like people who don’t want to die. Only the family across the way stands out in their cheerfulness, playing gin rummy. You witness the dad win the round and smile. His wife calls him a lucky bastard. He tells her, “He who’s unlucky in cards is lucky in love.” She pushes him playfully. He produces a cigarette and licks it all over. It burns slower that way. He lights it, takes one long puff, and extinguishes it promptly on the wall. You realize that they are playing for puffs of smoke instead of money. On the wall behind them somebody has spray-painted a huge phallus in green. The family doesn’t seem t
BOOM!
You recall the twenty-four-hour bus ride you took from Croatia yesterday. You recall the checkpoints with guards in at least three different uniforms. And land mines alongside the street. You remember your dad saying that you don’t need any papers when you are coming in. It’s only if you want to leave Bosnia that they look for documentation. You recall the unshaven face of a young ma
BOOM!
You wonder if this is what war is all about for a fifteen-year-old: sitting in the nerve-racking safety of a bomb shelter, listening to mortar shells explode on the surface. You cannot imagine anything more terrifying. On TV wars are at least exciting, you recall. In reality, in the safe concrete mausoleum, you stare at the halved plum on the dusty floor. Nothing. Yet your heart still races as if you’re running a marathon.
Your mother is asleep now. The pill has kicked in. Your father is still talking to some people five or six beds down. While in Croatia you imagined being thrown across rooms by detonations. You imagined walls crumbling and dodging bullets, all that TV crap. At least you would know why your heart pumps so hard. The halved plum stares at you from the floor like a pair of moist eyes. You lie down and try to sleep.