Shards: A Novel

by Ismet Prcic

  When I look back I can see her sitting cross-legged behind her cigarette, glassy eyes fixed on the images overtaking her mind, violent head shakes when they got too graphic, waiting for me to come back from a rehearsal. I remember, at times, marveling at the ferocious results of her housework. It’s amazing how polished the furniture can get when polishing is not on the polisher’s mind. I also think I remember a peculiar tremor, clumsily disguised, behind her inquiries about the rehearsals, who this Asmir character was, and when she would get to meet him. Poor woman.

  We held rehearsals in the “Home of the Army.”

  For this statement to make sense you have to understand the nature of the Yugoslavian brand of Communism. Take architects, for example. Say a public building is to be made. In Communism it’s not the best architect who gets to make the building; it’s the guy (almost always a man) with seniority in the Party who happens to be an architect that gets to make the building. And to get seniority you have to kiss a lot of ass, sit on committees for stuff you know nothing about, endure years of boring speeches, write and deliver years of boring speeches, and get drunk nightly with the bigwigs to show that you’re involved in both the community and its social life. By then you’re 98 percent bureaucrat and 2 percent architect. This is the reason why the public buildings in the Balkans all look like filing cabinets and why, in turn, they are almost always called “homes” (Home of Health, Home of the Youth, Home of the Workers, Home of the Army): to evoke that warm feeling inside to compensate for their actual soullessness. It’s shit in your mouth, but officially it’s called ice cream.

  We held rehearsals in the Home of the Army.

  Home of the Army used to have an olive-colored cannon in front of it, next to a bed of well-groomed tulips and a perpetually bored guard at arms, sometimes with a rigid German shepherd at his heel and sometimes without. But at the beginning of war, the cannon was hauled to the front lines, the tulips were garroted by weeds, the dog disappeared, and only the guard remained, wearing his face like a gas mask.

  Inside this “home,” the air was gray, the chairs were on their last legs, the ashtrays were heaping, the ceilings pressed on your head, the corridors were long, the doors were massive and ocher, the young men were uniformed, and the shadows on their faces were sacred. The floor tiles looked soiled despite the kneeling, would-be soldiers with their toothbrushes and elbow grease. The walls were smoky. The art was small but dense. The frames were grand ornaments. Where there was no art, there were impeccable white squares from where the mandatory Marshal Tito portraits used to monitor the army that used to be everyone’s army until it became just the Serbian Army, better known as the enemy.

  Down the main corridor, third door down, just after the johns, was the auditorium of fixed, foldable wooden chairs, slightly slanting toward the raised proscenium and its musky velvet curtain. The stage was of wobbly parquet, bombarded for decades by politicians’ shoes, army bands, and touring folklore dancers. Centered on the cyclorama hung some kind of backdrop, leftover from the last regime, full of factory chimneys and soot-faced miners with rolled up sleeves and bulging biceps, the beams from their helmet lights cutting through the darkness.

  I was with “Torso Theater” then, a group of amateur actors doing cheap comedies for food led by a bald man everyone called Brada. We had just wrapped up our completely unrecognizable version of Molière’s Precious Maidens, in which I played the second henchman and got to wear a ninja mask and twirl around a pair of nunchakus to “Boom Shack-A-Lak,” which was popular at the time. That was the first time I ever got paid for doing something. I was fifteen. What I received as payment was a plastic bag with two kilos of low-quality, all-purpose flour, a can of vegetable fat, a couple of packets of powdered milk, and three or four cans of American corned beef. My heart was as big as a mosque.

  There were talks about new projects, but the plays Brada was looking at had too few characters and some of us would have ended up jobless and we didn’t like that. To appease us he announced that he was splitting Torso Theater into two groups, seniors—he and five or six of his personal friends, all grown men with factory jobs hoping to get some food packages on the side by clowning—and juniors, and that he had found a willing director to do a show with us juniors.

  Enter Asmir: this guy wearing red warm-up bottoms and a rag of a wife-beater, carrying books and binders. He started talking right there in the doorway. Suddenly there was energy in the auditorium, like things bursting. The almost-shaved head with chiseled cheekbones and angled eyebrows like the way people draw seagulls in the distance and the insatiable, childlike eyes—that was him.

  I would soon find out that food was not a reason to do theater.

  For the auditions he made us talk and move, sing and dance, and draw squares in his fat book of art. I talked and moved okay, sang a chantlike rock song disastrously, and danced like a Pithecanthropus. As for the squares, we were supposed to pick a painting we liked, divide it into three parts with pencil lines, and number the parts to tell a story of sorts. I picked a monochromatic print of a haloed baby Jesus in his mother’s arms and somebody’s sad, upraised fist in the sky.

  The callbacks were in a week, yet no one called me. One of the fellow troupe members, Jelena, told me at school that Asmir had left a message with her mother for her to come at 5 PM on Sunday. She was surprised I didn’t get the call. To tell you the truth I was surprised that she’d gotten it. Although she was pretty, her stage presence was meandering at best, and she played everything with reserve, not giving herself up. At first I thought Asmir had lost my number, but as Sunday rolled on I realized I hadn’t made the cut. And it hurt me. It hurt me so much that I got angry and told him off in my mind, told him that his fucking audition was retarded, that I didn’t wanna be in his stupid play anyway. But I did. Especially after I didn’t make the cut.

  Around 4:30, that lazy calm Sunday feeling washed over me like rage, ironed my brow, and corseted my thoughts. It happened while watching my hamster spin his wheel of misfortune, relentlessly. I realized that the best course of action was to go to the callbacks anyway and play dumb. I put on my Reeboks. My mother was a porcelain sculpture in the living room, entitled “Waiting.” She was smoking one of her five daily cigarettes. Her coulisse of smoke was unperturbed. I slipped out with a quick bye, not wanting to stand around and explain where I was going and how long I would stay there.

  “What are you doing here?” Asmir asked at 5 PM, the parquet squeaking riot from under his bare feet. Everyone else was mute, pretending to look away or look for phantom items at the bottoms of their backpacks. “Did I call you?”

  “Jelena said the next rehearsal was today. I didn’t realize . . .” I played dumb. He stopped to look at me, burrowing through me. I held his inspectorial gaze, letting my mouth open and close like a bass in the grass.

  “Well, you can stick around and watch,” he said and had everybody but me climb the stage. I had to smile. I had to smile as something scrambled up my esophagus and into my throat, yanking at the fraying tissues, sucking away my breath, destroying me.

  It so happened that the guy Asmir picked to play the father character in his play had a bit of a speech impediment that he had concealed masterfully during auditions, was too short in comparison with his supposed wife (played by Jelena), and didn’t know how to take criticism at all. The guy mouthed off one too many times and Asmir finally told him where to go. That was how I got my second chance.

  Asmir was unorthodox and pregnant with a vision. Nuts, really. A lot of people, including Jelena, couldn’t get over the nuts part and dropped out. He’d say stuff like:

  “Fuck musicals! Fuck the dead, cold, classic masters and their dead, cold, classic words. Fuck the chickenshit modern masters and their need to eat and have a roof over their heads and pay bills. We have to change theater! We should go berserk and improvise. Fuck entertainment! Leave it to the cinema. We should show the truth with all the mistakes of our perceptions. Fuck aesthetics! Pretty is a lie
. We shouldn’t cut, revise, rewrite. We should rave and ramble. The truth is chaotic and it makes no sense.”

  He’d say that democracy is not the way of the theater and if theater is to be worthy there is lots to be learned from dictatorships.

  He’d do stuff like halt the whole rehearsal for Jelena’s replacement to learn how to shriek. This girl was supposed to play a mute mother who at the crucial point in the play unloads a mind- shattering scream, but she just couldn’t get there. Asmir made her stand alone in the limelight, with everyone else watching her in silence, until the pressure mushroomed thickly and she shrieked a blinding ray of hate and frustration and it was the realest thing I ever heard. It broke me in half.

  It took her an hour to do it. Later, I realized that watching her stand there for an hour was more interesting than any play. The rawness of it. The nude beach of emotions. The piecemeal swelling of truth within a human being, her inability to contain it any longer, and its orgasmic release, all inhibitions stripped away. Now this is theater, I thought.

  In Asmir’s kingdom rehearsals were sacred, every day for four hours, rain or shine, snipe or shell. They would start with the ritualistic removal of footwear, then go into a collective meditation with everyone on their backs, eyes closed, mouths partly opened, palms down. The cassette player usually played Vangelis. After this it was movement exercises, then voice stuff, then character stuff, then the play. Afterward it was out to town for a cup of coffee and to meet up with Asmir’s best friend, Bokal, and talk about everything.

  Bokal claimed to be a lot of things: an artist, a model, a sign maker, an actor. He claimed to be working on a book called The Way of the Ram that would one day top all the best-seller charts. He claimed he beat up Tuzla’s worst hoodlums and soccer hooligans. He claimed he lost a kidney due to a terrible inflammation he acquired in the wet trenches of the Bosnian front lines. He had a scar to prove it.

  It was like that for awhile: Asmir ruled and Bokal claimed. I kept my mouth shut and belonged for the first time.

  My character, Father Karamazov, demanded quite a transformation on my part. He demanded straight lines, no imagination, direct approach, body fetish, soldierly conduct, rigid discipline, and everything else that wasn’t me. He was all about the mindless repetition of a man who dug trenches through life’s manure, made a couple of wrong turns, ended up where he started, and from fear of being ridiculed convinced himself that his path was not only legitimate but the only one and kept walking it over and over again.

  In the play I had to march the square perimeter of the stage from the beginning until the crucial point where Karamazov has an epiphany, realizes he’s going in a circle (a square, actually), and, knowing he has to change something, starts to march in the opposite direction with as much conviction as before.

  Years of lugging oversize schoolbooks over one shoulder and hanging out with punks on curbs, gravestones, and staircases gave me the posture of a shirt thrown on a hat rack. So, in rehearsals, Asmir had me carry different things around in order to even out my shoulders—a potted plant, a cassette player, a wooden frame.

  I marched on and on. In a square. Every day. I learned to walk straight. I learned not to cut corners. I breathed in through my nose, tight-lipped. I stomped loudly. My voice carried far. I got into shape. Pretty soon Karamazov was marching for me, set in his ways, taut like a bass string, while in his mind’s eye the red carpet unfolded over the rotting cadavers of his enemies, and admirers crowded alongside, waving little flags, smiling and chanting, and he knew he was the only one.

  The morning of the premiere there was shelling. I woke up to the whistle and boom and wondered if the performance would be canceled. There were footsteps in the hallway and I closed my eyes. Didn’t feel like talking. Mother opened the door, counted her children, and then went back to her solitaire, the normal run of things. Sirens blared their warnings more than ten seconds too late. I opened my eyes and watched my brother sleep right through everything with his mouth hanging open.

  Later in the morning Asmir called. The show must go on. He said to meet him in front of the Bosnian National Theater and to bring a snack. I was the first one he called. Mother stole worried glances at my giddiness.

  * * *

  I was there right before the show started. That I remember. I stood in the wings in my costume, waiting for the houselights to go down. I could see my mother in the second row. The boots were squeezing my feet and the march hadn’t even begun yet. Air came in and out of me in small increments, spasms like I was freezing. The audience thundered indecipherably, ominously. There were spirits swirling around the old lighting fixtures, kicking up dust, swooshing down my spine, whispering obscenities, encouragements. I repeatedly made fists, clutched at an imaginary rope with all my might, then uncurled the fingers as though giving up. I bit my lower lip. I shook my head. The shit you do to try to kill the butterflies.

  The houselights went down and then right back up again and it was all over. There was applause like rain upon a sunroof and boos like birds fighting birds, and I didn’t bow but had to find a quiet spot, for the world was suddenly too much for me, standing there drenched and gasping, existing in it. I didn’t know that time could be so dense, so true, and that a sliver of it could envelop you like that, overpower you. Then was as dense as now is fleeting. I was aware of then as I wish I were aware of now right now instead of writing about then; it’s pathetic.

  A few days later we watched the recording. On the videotape this . . . person marched around the stage, his feet crunching down on the floor like he had a beef with Mother Earth. He knew all the lines. His smile was maniacal, something I hadn’t seen before, couldn’t even imagine before. Later I tried to smile like that on my own and failed. My face muscles simply wouldn’t stretch and flex in those ways. He had my ponytail. And my wide thumbs. And I knew in my head, intellectually, that it was me; I had blisters on my feet to prove it, too, but . . .

  It couldn’t have been. It was someone reminiscent of me, for sure. But I don’t remember any of it, as if I was put on hold for the duration of the play, as if the archetype that is Father Karamazov rented my body to rave and rage and show me how it’s done. The tape rolled and he marched. Asmir kept analyzing, praising, finding faults in others, patting himself on the back.

  “This is amazing,” he said. “You guys have to be aware of what we accomplished with this play.”

  I just sat there rubbing my thumb into my wrist, feeling the heat, proving to myself that I was there doing that.

  Something happened right after the show, an incident. Brada and the other Torso Theater seniors summoned us all to the green room, walking silently among us like health inspectors around a questionable establishment, with long coats and everything. Shit was a-brew, I could just see it. They sat us down but remained standing themselves, Intimidation 101. They murmured to one another while keeping us in silence, waiting for Asmir, who was still out there talking to people.

  “What’s happening?” someone asked them. The answer was hissed. Apparently a bunch of people walked out because they didn’t know what to make of the play. Didn’t understand it. Booed it. Asked for their money back. Add to that the fact that another bunch never showed due to the morning shelling and that we were rather cavalier with our comp tickets, giving them to a considerable bunch of friends and family. Money that was expected to be made was not made. They were furious.

  “You’ll have to perform this another ten times just to break even,” Brada said with malice.

  There was silence after that. Brada and his buddies stood by the door, hands crossed at the crotch. They looked like Communist politicians paying last respects to a dead comrade. We, the partly costumed performers, still between the two worlds, still beautifully empty between reality and art, tried to occupy as little space as possible and waited for something concrete to establish itself. Silence played tricks and seconds stretched into hours, but it was already wearing off when Asmir came in with Bokal right behind him.


  “This is just for the company members,” Brada said, attempting to dismiss Bokal, who lumbered by him as though he weren’t even there.

  “What’s it to you?” Bokal asked without inflection and to no one in particular. He gave me a high five and sat down next to me.

  “Well, that was the worst performance of the worst play in the history of the universe,” Brada said to Asmir.

  I looked at the carpet.

  “I trusted you to put up a show that people would want to come and see, not a show that makes people threaten to break the glass and strangle me in the booth if I don’t give them their money back.”

  I went over the patterns on the carpet, memorizing the angles of designs, the subtle shifts in coloring, the locations of stains, anything just not to be there in full. Asmir sounded quiet and confused.

  “Who are we trying to appease here, the judicious or the groundlings? ‘The censure of the which one must in your allowance o’erweigh a whole theatre of others.’”

  “What are you talking about? I’m not gonna debate you. We’re taking the Torso Theater logo off the poster and you are going to perform this shit until it pays itself off. Then you can do whatever you want with whomever you want.”

  “When you don’t have quality you have to compensate with quantity,” said another one of the seniors.

  What happened next branded me.

  What happened was that Asmir unreeled. The self-taught know-it-all with confidence and know-how up the wazoo, the king of his theatrical kingdom, this man peeled off and what was left in his stead was a child, an angry, hurt child. And I loved him for it, for this nakedness and innocence and passion. He went from age twenty-five to five in an instant, bawling at the injustice and ignorance, at the malice of people who knew only profit and wouldn’t know art if Dalí signed their limp, melting dicks.