Shards: A Novel

by Ismet Prcic

  When I first got here she was great. The energy of my return popped her out of her routine and we talked and took walks and she told me more stories about her childhood and I wrote them down. Then she started to say the same things over and over again, wallowing as depressed people do, and it became harder and harder for me to be there for her. I’m not the sanest person in the world by a long shot. Who am I gonna help? I can fool myself and deliver convincing everything-will-be-all-rights, but only up to a point. Months into this, I feel drained, depressed.

  This morning I decided I would go visit my old stomping grounds to see if the sight of the theater or the high school building or the park would make it easier to write about puppy love, but Mother had an attack. She had warned me about these. Apparently, she’s fully conscious during them; she just cannot talk or see well or swallow. She was in bed talking to me and then suddenly stopped and her eyes got really big and she slowly put her cigarette in the ashtray and turned onto her side. I knelt by her and held my hand on her forehead. The veins on her temples swelled and her lower jaw started to shift to the right, disfiguring her mouth. Her tongue oozed out through it and her breathing became strenuous. I tipped her head down more to make it easier. She started to drool and I wiped at it with a handkerchief.

  It lasted ten minutes. After it was over her face muscles ached and she felt terrible and took a bunch of pills and went to sleep. I paced through the house for an hour, tried to read a story by Nabokov, fought with my father and brother in my mind, pounded their faces into pulp. I tried crying, but it never comes when you want it. I wanted to kill myself.

  Then I took a bunch of paper, went down to the store, bought a two-liter Pepsi Light and a fifth of rum, came here to the park, and drank it all. I went to see where Asja and I carved our names into a pine tree across the street from the Orthodox church, and it was still there. I sat at the base of it, tried to write about my youth, and ended up writing this instead.

  I turned out not to be insane after all.

  It was a Wednesday and I was hopping, blue-lipped, in the hallway in front of a classroom, breathing out clouds of steam, but with both of my jackets undone so everyone could see my trendy Beavis and Butt-Head T-shirt, which I’d borrowed from Omar. Earlier in the week a shell exploded off the side of the building right across the river and two pieces of shrapnel busted the window of the second-floor hallway. They covered the hole with plastic, but someone nicknamed Paša had sliced his name in it with a knife and the wind made curious sounds when it forced itself though the slits, a bit like silenced gunfire. There were two shrapnel holes on the wall, which somebody else had encircled with a black marker and made into a huge smiley face. I was appreciating its grotesqueness when I felt a light squeeze on my elbow and spun around.

  The friend of a friend looked pissed off and somehow different with eyeglasses on. Her face was curt and scrunched up, not even trying to conceal its disgust at having to speak to me.

  “Remember me? Jaca? Little Mario’s party?”

  Of course I remembered who she was, but there were no words in my head, let alone my throat. There was nothing remotely as organized as words anywhere in my body. My mouth dropped and there was a crack-and-hiss noise in my ears, as though from a soda can being opened. Then I couldn’t help but smile. The power of it was bigger than I. It was as if I had two fishhooks in the corners of my mouth that pulled my lips up and up and up, and no matter how much my ego screamed that I probably looked like an idiot, like an eager beaver, I had no willpower to choke this one down. She took a step back.

  “Well?” There was a pinch of alarm in her voice.

  Unable to talk yet, I overnodded.

  “A friend of mine wants to meet you,” she squeezed out. It was apparent what she herself thought of the idea.

  “Asja,” I said, finally managing a word. Her mouth screwed up in surprise. The alarm left her face and she reclaimed the distance between us.

  “You know about Asja?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You told me. Like a month ago? In front of the theater?”

  “You’re shittin’ me!” she said, punched my arm hard, and then busted out laughing. “Is that why you were acting like a psycho? I thought you were nuts.”

  “I thought I was nuts.”

  “Why didn’t you fucking come and tell me, you idiot?”

  “I thought I made it up in my head.”

  “You’re an idiot. Let’s go before the bell rings.” She took my sleeve and pulled me along. It suddenly dawned on me what was about to happen. My feet got heavy going down the stairs.

  “Right now?”

  “Yeah, right now. When would you do it?”

  “I’m scared.”

  “You’re an idiot,” she said, and without having time to sniff at my pits, or cup my hand in front of my face to check if my breath stank, or tongue my teeth for something in them, I was pulled toward and introduced to Asja, a petite person with straight brown hair, wide eyes, and an even wider smile. Her tiny hand popped out of her sleeve for a quick handshake and popped back in like a turtle’s head.

  “Asja. Nice to meet you.”

  I blurted out my name. Jaca stepped aside and a bunch of nosey teens crowded around her, smiling, glancing over. I waved to Asja to follow me and I think she asked why, but came nevertheless. We walked down the hallway, away from her schoolfellows, in a giddy silence, our feelings in almost visible little explosions in the air around us.

  “You wanna go out tonight?” I heard my voice say. It sounded like a small-caliber bullet bouncing back and forth inside my skull.

  “I can’t.”

  I felt myself waning, drying up. Good thing I had that voice that kept on talking, this other me, while I suffered.

  “How about tomorrow?”

  She made a hurt face. “I can’t.”

  “Why not?” my voice asked, lightheartedly.

  “My parents don’t let me go out on school days.”

  My suffering shifted into a lower gear. Dumbly, I asked the obvious question:

  “How about Friday then?”

  “Okay,” she said, and I stopped suffering.

  The Bridge with the Statues was where she said it would be. I knew where it was, too, but when I left the apartment I literally followed the river, in a fit of insane compulsion, just in case. I found myself on the bridge forty-five minutes before the rendezvous, walking back and forth in beastly, agonizing strides and counting my steps.

  The bridge was an oppressive, parallelogram-shaped coffin of solid cement and steel, spanning the emaciated, shivering river at an angle. Its stone guardians, these identical quadruplets, stood forever on the corners, facing away from one another, slumped under the weight of light they were designed to deliver. Massive lamps pressed down upon their shoulders like globes, like crude, cement disco balls, and they endured it like Atlas. With one leg, knotted with muscles, erected back against the base, and the other one, barely bent, set forward for balance, they were obeying their meaningless destiny, holding up the dead lights, extinguished for a long time by shrapnel or detonations or lack of electricity. One of the brothers even had his elbow taken out by a metal shard, exposing his wire skeleton, but he was still withstanding his job, his expression unchanged, his eyes forever blind to the absurdity of stone or flesh here in the world.

  But then again, the way things looked might have been, just as easily, a result of my proclivity for self-torture, presently lapsing into pensiveness, which in turn was bordering on lunacy. The distance between the two brothers on the same side of the river was twelve steps, between the two brothers on the same side of the bridge thirty, between the first set of brothers on the opposite corners of the bridge twenty-six, and thirty-four between the other. I kept measuring and remeasuring the distances between things to take the edge off waiting, to kill the paralyzing thought that maybe she would never show. But as soon as I was aware I was doing it, it became futile and I st
arted doubting that I was even in the right place and searched my memory for another bridge with statues. After much obsessing it became obvious that there wasn’t any, and I looked at each stone brother for reassurance.

  The river hummed the freezing blues from within its embankment walls, and the buildings hunched like peasants in a summer hail, dreading the unseasonable showers of propelled destruction that had become oh so frequent as of late. Utterly unhampered by it I stared in the direction from where she was supposed to come and tried to recognize which one of the moving dots in the distance would morph into her figure. Every one of the little smudges of color made me heady as I watched them grow like cells; slowly, one cell of blue would become two cells of blue, then four, then eight, and after a while the blue would become a Windbreaker with bubbly little arms, still headless in the snow, and then the head would bud out with a little black atop the blue, and the little legs would connect the blue blob to the ground and this child’s drawing would walk toward me, evolving into an impressionistic painting, then into a realistic one, then become a scene from an Eastern European film with blatant social realism that made me want to shoot myself.

  I awaited them, trembling, and despaired when I saw them become someone else, a man with a beard, someone’s grandmother, a lunatic. Their faces actually caused me physical pain because their features weren’t hers. I gulped down my pain and kept on walking and counting steps, picked another dot on the street’s horizon, observed its evolution into a stranger, then did it all over again.

  When, finally, she did turn from a blob into herself, right on time, by the way (the Catholic church across the street tolled and tolled), and with my insides a-quiver with the sheer insanity of their inner life, something changed and a miraculous calm came over me. It was like something, a male something, incapacitated my inner critic, slapped me a good one across the mouth to snap me out of the funk, took me by the collar and straightened my posture, whispered a word of male encouragement into my ear and sent me onto the battlefield with a pat on the ass.

  Thus improved, I waited as she came over with the pitter-patter of a toddler, wearing a black winter jacket—that billowed around her like her own personal cloud—growing more elaborate and beautiful with each small step.

  “Hi,” she said, smiling hugely, eyes squinted against the wind and a sole section of hair, ripped out from her ponytail, glued with the wind’s force against and across her face, splitting it into two uneven halves. She cocked her head sideways to remedy this, but her effort was fruitless. Asja reached way up into the sky to free her right hand from an oversize sleeve, brought it to her forehead, and gently brushed the renegade section away.

  I reciprocated the greeting and reached for her hand, my palm facing outward and my thumb down as though aiming, gangster-style. It was the boldest gesture I had ever attempted at the beginning of a first date and it worked; she took it with a smirk and we started walking.

  “Did you wait long?” she asked.

  “Two-to-three minutes.”

  The first step or two were mechanical because we were both manifestly overwhelmed. Her hand felt cold and she immediately curled it into a fist and placed it into mine, as if into a padded envelope. I smiled. She was making herself comfortable. Five steps later she briefly uncurled it and tickled the inside of my palm with the tips of her nails, looking at me for reaction. Stupidly gleeful I did it back to her. We smiled, thus acquiring our first ritual.

  “Wanna chewing gum?” I asked, fingering a pack of it in my right pocket. It was a rare commodity in those days, but my father had received an aid package from his ex–business partner in Slovenia and that’s where I got it.

  “No,” she answered, dropping her smile, her body stiffening as though hit with something, something disgusting. She looked at her feet, then away from me.

  “Okay.”

  I produced the pack, freed one of the individual foil-wrapped pieces of gum for myself and removed it with my teeth. She saw me do it and her smile returned.

  “Oh—that chewing gum. I do want that.”

  I looked at her, bewildered. Controlling her laughter, she took the gum from between my lips, unwrapped it, and popped it in her mouth. Her cheeks awoke with redness.

  Then I realized what I had asked her and a terrible “Ohh” escaped before I had a chance to swallow it. What I had asked was on a par with: “You wanna suck face?” “Chewing gum” was a crude local colloquialism for “French kissing.” The crudest one possible.

  “You didn’t think—”

  But we were already bursting with healthy laughter, as if we had always known each other. Less than fifteen seconds into our first date and we already had a little story to tell.

  Moments die as they pass and as they do their cadavers are dunked into specimen jars full of formaldehyde where they float with eyes shut and little fingers perfectly curved, as if they are alive, holding on to something—a pickled fetus I saw in my high school biology class. They become memories, nothing but perished moments marinated in brain chemicals to preserve the fact that they came into being once and were alive just as these present moments are alive, moments that I’m wasting by writing these words, leaning on the wall of my parents’ living room on a terribly hot day in September 1999.

  Mother said she doesn’t want to talk today, that she’s sick of talking about my father, about what he did, that talking is useless, and that she has said it all before. Fuck his mother, she said, then apologized to God in Arabic. Her lip was quivering. She said she wanted to pray and that I should close her bedroom door behind me and have some alone time, that she senses my fatigue, that I have writing to do. I know it’s all bullshit. I know she’s really down but I did close the door.

  Am I an asshole? What kind of son am I?

  Yesterday I bought a shitload of those little bottles of booze. I unzip my luggage as slowly as I can so she can’t hear me next door when I take out a couple of vodkas and a couple of brandies. I knock back one of each and shove the empties in my backpack. The other two I put in my pocket. Asja, Asja, Asja, I think.

  Went to first base the night of the first date under a streetlight in Batva after botching the first attempt at it a few minutes earlier at the entrance to the Tušanj football stadium due to inexperience. Walked home in euphoria as though I had single-handedly liberated a country.

  Mother sobs in the bedroom. I open the door and go to her. He never stood up for me, she says. His own cousins would grab my knees under the table during family gatherings. I would tell him in the kitchen and he wouldn’t say a word. He would just stare into the void. Waiting for me to stop talking. I take her hand and she squeezes it hard. She cries silently for a couple of seconds and then calms herself down. Don’t worry, she says, it’s like this all the time. I have to get it out of my system. Go back to your work. I come back and leave the door open, sit on the couch. All I see is her thin wrist when she closes the door. I reach into my pocket. I reach for the backpack where the empties go.

  Went to second base—never, really. One time timidly brushed my hand on the outside of Asja’s right breast while making out on a bench in Banja Park. The other time playfully pushed her away and ended up with one of them in my hand. Let go of it immediately like Jackie Chan in one of his films.

  I can hear her again, moving about. I get up and open the door and right then the midday prayer sounds from the nearby mosque. I see her praying: standing up, bending forward, standing up again, kneeling down, touching the serdžada with her forehead, and murmuring throughout all of it. I close the door. I reach into my pocket but the muezzin’s voice is loud and full of God and I don’t dare.

  Went to third base—never. One time Asja straddled me next to a fountain and we were uncharacteristically spontaneous and so close to everything, but then an old man with a cane walked by and chastised me like I was a pedophile (Asja was very short), messing up my game. For the rest of the night had silent arguments with the geezer in my head and couldn’t be spontaneous an
ymore.

  TV from the bedroom. Dialogue in English. Mother’s quiet. I feel a little better about myself. I drink the brandy.

  Home run—not a chance. Utterly without any idea how to even talk about it, let alone do it, I put the ball in her court without telling her. Wanted love and romance first (had honorable, PG-rated intentions). Believed that sex would come later (after marriage, perhaps,) unless mentioned by her before then. She was too shy to mention it. I was too proper. We were chronically horny.

  The TV gets louder. Songs. I remember how I . . .

  Walked from Stupine to Irac through a mythic blizzard and paced for two and a half hours from a curb to a building, counting steps, being molested by wind, freezing my ass off in my two jackets. She didn’t show. Later, said it was too cold.

  I realize why the TV is so loud. I open the door and her face is buried in the pillow. I go to her and hold her hand, pat her back. Tears come to me. They come and as soon as they do, hers stop and she’s dabbing my cheek with her moist handkerchief. I’m mostly mad at myself, she says. I know who he is; I know he has no spine . . . no heart, no balls . . . and I still stay here like a cow . . . Like a . . . Like . . . She stares off for a moment, then lights a cigarette. I think I stay because I knew you guys would grow up and move away and I don’t want to be old and alone. She smiles at the irony, looks at me. Go, honey, she says. I’m fine again. I close the door and stand there looking at the couch, the armoire, Grandpa’s calligraphy on the wall, the radiator, the lace curtains, my stuff on the floor. I remember being so in love with Asja, so sick, so saturated, blissful, and I feel good that what I’m feeling now will one day become just pictures and words, too, nothing that can really break my heart again.

  I drag my luggage right next to the couch so I don’t have to get up later. Brandy in my pocket. It’s medicine. Pen, too.