by Ismet Prcic
is surrounded by a serpent
Bosnian sevdalinka song
LATE MARCH
I turned eighteen in 1995 and was supposed to be a man already but didn’t like being one yet.
Sure I had an Adam’s apple and a penis in a cloud of pubes and could break big chunks of coal with an ax, gather the pieces into huge, heavy sacks, load three of those bastards onto a wheelbarrow at a time, haul them across the war-quieted city, then carry them, one by one, over my shoulder up sixty-eight stairs to our fourth-floor balcony. Sure, I could bang a nail in straight with two or three hits and could put away however much booze you set in front of me and still have the tenacity and audacity to yammer about David Hume. Sure, I could hold my own at man talk, too, sitting around with the boys and talking about weapons and pussy, even though I had yet to see either one up close and personal. Sure, I could do those things, but only because I’d been an actor since I was six, because I knew how to play parts and keep the illusion going, how to get into different characters. I knew that people always believed you if your performance was good, and I was good. I didn’t mind acting in real life as long as I could go into my head after the performance and, up there, resume being a kid.
I had developed many roles to pacify the people around me. At home I acted like a dick, an angry teenager to whom the world was owed, which of course warranted whining, and door slamming, and locking myself in various rooms, and playing my music at earsplitting decibel levels, and tormenting my brother. At school I acted cool, flaunted my sense of humor and my trendy long hair, was popular, everyone’s best friend. In rehearsals I was quiet and hardworking, a tenacious artist with balls of steel, a man who lived for his art. With my best friend, Omar, and the rest of the town’s punks I was a mysterious and tormented creature, dark and willing to do any drug first, a monster in a mosh pit.
With my girlfriend I had tried my best at first to act like a man but had a tough time giving a good performance. It was easier fooling multitudes than a single person. On the highly intimate stage of a one-on-one relationship, broad strokes that were a hit at bigger venues didn’t hold water. I was a theater actor having trouble transitioning to silver-screen close-ups, and it showed. I kept messing up, but fortunately Asja found my attempts at being a man for her amusing and she stayed with me nonetheless. Over time I realized that she liked me best when I inadvertently slipped into my kid self, and the longer we were together the more comfortable I was being that in front of her. Thus our relationship was innocent but deep, our trysts in Banja Park filled with kisses and caresses, with love so dreamy it could make you comatose, so syrupy it could make you puke.
But a month earlier I had been drafted into the army, and it was everything you would expect: intimidation, humiliation, obedience. Some camouflaged asshole actually rubbed his hands together and told me he couldn’t wait to get my mane under his clippers and my ass into the trenches. During my psych evaluation I played tough but lied and told them that I was good at math, hoping to be trained as an artillery man so as to put the greatest distance between me and the enemy when they sent me into the eye of the war, but the prematurely gray colonel said that we didn’t have much artillery and what we had was already being handled by people who knew how to handle it and how about a bright future in the meat grinder, instead: infantry? It was a rhetorical question. He said to report at the base on September 15 to serve my term, and he stamped my file red. FIT, it said. I acted nonchalant. Acted.
I started feeling like I had an expiration date, like my life would end on September 15, 1995, and I had to milk joy out of every moment I had left. I focused on spending as much time as I could with Asja or by myself, in my own head. I stopped sniffing paint thinner with Omar because I wanted “to be there for my life.” At one point I freaked out that I would die without knowing all the stuff there was to know, so I stayed up at night with flashlights or candles, reading through my mother’s library of classics. I crammed myself full of Pushkin and Pasternak, of Dostoyevsky. Every four or five days when our ward would get three hours of electricity in the middle of the night, I would play Bergman and Tarkovsky films I borrowed from Asmir, while my mother baked loaf after loaf of bread in our electric stove. I did sentimental things like go through my old diaries and cry over who I’d been.
One day in late March, after tossing all night, staring at my brother sleeping with his mouth open, and suffering millions of thoughts having orgies in my skull, I came up with a plan that involved and depended on Asja. Life was short; we had so little time. I got up at first light, forced down some cornbread and beef fat, washed it down with cold chamomile tea from the night before, and left the apartment before anyone else got up. Not that I cared if I woke them: I had clanged around the kitchen like it was the middle of the day and slammed the doors with gusto. I didn’t bring my backpack with schoolbooks but hid it behind my bed.
Outside, Tuzla was stolid and chilly and you had to push your way through the wet haze. There was barely anyone around, just silent shadow people slipping into murky vestibules, stirring up nothing, making no mark upon the world. The parking lots were full of dead cars, juiceless for years, their sides peppered with corroded shrapnel holes. Their windows, if they were there at all, were fogged up and blind. There was no wind, and the greening trees were quiet like everything else. It felt good to be alone in this way.
I crossed the street by Hotel Tuzla, in front of which a blond man with a red face was drinking his coffee and reading a newspaper like he was in Paris or something. Foreigners were like that. They didn’t feel part of the surroundings, because this was not their war and somehow this made them feel immune to its hazards. They’d jog, whereas Bosnians would run, as though Chetnik shrapnel could tell American flesh from Bosnian. Granted, the mortars were eerily quiet for a couple of months, but before that, the mornings were their prime time, as Chetniks tried to discourage the populace from going to work or tried to kill them en route.
The Jala was swollen from snowmelt, its clayey waters barely a meter below the lips of the tall concrete embankments, rushing away from here. It hummed with odd power, and instead of proceeding alongside to my high school, I walked onto the bridge, somehow drawn to it. Approaching the guardrail I felt that power in my gut, in the immediate weakening of my muscles, as if the river were somehow robbing me of my life force, dispersing me. I made sure my hands were tight around the rail before looking down. One moment there was a chair leg in the current below, bobbing in and out of the brown and brandishing all its gnarly woodwork in detail; the very next, it was a black stick way down the stream, then nothing at all. Gone.
I imagined it getting away from here, from this city under siege, all the way to the Sprea, which would smuggle it through the enemy-occupied territory east toward the Drina. The Drina would then hook it north between Bosnia and Serbia, hiding it in the blood of the people from both jagged borders, and give it off to the Sava. The Sava, as big as it is, would have no problem getting it to the Danube, and the Danube, that behemoth, would provide a safe passage for it through the middle of Belgrade and then take it away from this godforsaken peninsula all the way to the Black Sea. But once in its inky waters, what would the chair leg do, beautifully carved as it was but broken off, without the rest of the chair? Without anyone to sit in it? Without anyone to climb upon it to screw in a lightbulb? Would it wash up on a beach somewhere and become driftwood, end up in a glorious bonfire as young people celebrated their youth beside it and jumped over it drunkenly? Would some tortured Bulgarian soul scoop it up at the docks of Varna, fashion it into a small sculpture of a mother holding a child and make it immortal? Or would a common villain pick it up and bash his victim’s skull in with it on the backstreets of Istanbul?
Looking straight down at all that turbulent water rushing away from me, it felt like I was on the back of a boat that was taking me away, away from September 15, but then a UN jeep screamed across the bridge behind me, its engine roaring, its driver sporting a red pair of
sunglasses even though the sun was hidden, and I bucked with fear and ran to the shore, and when I realized I wasn’t really being run down, I snatched a stone from the ground and hurled it after him. It ricocheted off the asphalt three or four times and came to rest in the bushes in front of the hotel. I saw his brake lights turn red as he slowed to take the corner and then disappeared around the hotel toward my neighborhood. The man with the red face glanced at this occurrence and then returned to his newspaper. Everything but the river returned to silence. I put down my middle fingers and made my way to the high school building.
Asja was an early riser and I knew that she would be one of the first students to show up at school. She did anything to be away from her parents, who were strict, old-fashioned, and overprotective, suffocating, really. We could hang out only on Friday and Saturday nights and during our brief encounters at school. Lately I started walking her home, too, and that was an extra hour of hand-holding and kissing before I had to disengage from her (by the entrance to the soccer stadium close to her building) and let her get smaller and, with a little wave, disappear behind the newspaper kiosk every time.
I also knew that she liked to use the shortcut by the river to get to school instead of taking the long way down Južna Magistrala, so I planted myself halfway down the gravel path and found a plank to sit on and wait. The plank had a knurl in it and it kept digging into me, so I had to stand up every once in a while to rest my ass. When I saw her coming in her black sweater I hid in the shrub above the embankment, and when she passed by me I jumped out producing inarticulate sounds, trying to scare her, but she just turned around and punched me in the chest.
“You goober,” she said. “I saw your head from Shoe People’s bridge.”
“You’re saying I have a big head?”
“I’m saying you’re a goober.”
I braced for a long kiss (I needed it), but she just touched my lips with hers and then withdrew, took my hand, and started walking. Usually we didn’t stop sucking on each other’s faces until we ran out of breath, like barnacles. Clearly this was bad news, but I so didn’t want it to be that I ignored it and staked everything on my little plan.
“What classes do you have today?”
She squinted. There was coldness in it. “What are you up to now?”
“I was thinking maybe we could skip the whole day of school, go up to the park, make out.”
She grunted. Playfully, I poked her rib. She squirmed and hid her hands in her sleeves. I tried again but she slapped my hand away.
“Don’t!”
“What?” I went to embrace her from behind, but she wangled her way out of my arms.
“Stop it!” she said and started walking away. I walked behind her.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing, my dick.”
She threw up her arms. Her feet crunched down the wet gravel path. The river hummed. My feet crunched, too, but off beat to hers, so the noise of the three of us in the world was continuous and sounded like grinding.
“Why are you doing this?”
We kept on grinding.
“Talk to me, please.”
Grinding. And suddenly I couldn’t handle the percussive monotony anymore and stopped. It felt like the only thing to do, like the last thing I could do: stop. The river hummed and sounded like a river now. Without mine, Asja’s footsteps sounded like the footsteps of someone walking away.
She came to a bend in the path and halted as if paused by a remote control. My heart hopped. She couldn’t walk away. I thought she was gonna turn around and come back but she just stood there. It looked unnatural, her rigidity, her stillness. It went on for a long time, too, so long that I thought briefly that I was hallucinating, that she was already gone but that my brain, unable to deal with her departure, had taken a snapshot and buried me forever in this moment of heartbreak. Then her right hand moved back a little. She bent her whole arm at the elbow until her hand slowly traveled to the middle of her lower back and started to frantically rotate there.
What the hell?
Puzzled but recharged, I went to her. She took one excruciatingly slow step back toward me, her hand still doing somersaults and cartwheels against the black wool of her sweater, then halted again. I came up to her and kissed her neck from behind. She smelled of mothy clothes and soap. I took her possessed hand in my right and hugged her against me with my left when I felt her squeeze my fingers like she never had before. I thought it was out of obdurate love, but then I saw the dog.
Five meters in front of us, cocked and crouching, its jaw open and slobbering bile, was a huge Great Dane and my knees buckled under me. Its eyes were feral and livid. Its ribs glared through the mangy coat. It growled once and I felt my body ossify and my mind rush back in time, away from the two teenagers who were huddling petrified on the river path. Age six, my cousin Garo’s German shepherd clamps me on the thigh when I try to pet it. Some man yells and beats him with an open palm but it doesn’t let go. The man starts to use his fists. The thuds sound hollow and meaty at the same time. Age eleven and I’m riding my bike under the line of willows by the river and a little shit of a black terrier named Johnny takes after me, and in horror I grab the first branch I can reach and clamber like a fat monkey all the way into the treetop as my beloved green “Pony” rolls itself down the embankment and into the water.
For a moment I see the two teenagers take a shaky step back and the animal in front of them jerk up, reclaim the distance, and then crouch down again. For the moment when it’s upright, it truly looks mastodonic. But I see it (remember it?) when it’s still a puppy in a litter of six. I remember it being picked up by a thin woman with dark circles around her eyes. She’s a poet and employed by Tuzla’s National Theater to do dramaturgical work. She can’t have children, and her husband agrees to get the puppy so their house on the hill won’t be so silent all the time. He’s a professor of music and a concert violinist (he has once played for Tito) and silence is not his cup of tea. He genuinely likes dogs, grew up with them. I see the puppy grow fast, see the woman sneak pieces of calf liver and chateaubriand to it, and see the man repeatedly throw a fat piece of rope with a knot at each end way down their property from the terrace and the dog fetch it every time. I see it take over his side of the bed and the man drag it by the collar over the polished parquetry with much difficulty to put it outside. Later, when the man is asleep I see the woman let it back in but keep the bedroom door closed. I see it jump over the fence one day, going after a cat, and get nicked a little by a blue Renault. I see the war come, and it’s getting harder and harder to find dog food, so the woman has to buy butcher scraps and offal and cook these pungent soups, crumble bread into them, and feed that to the rapidly diminishing dog. Dark circles return to her eyes. Shelling makes the dog whine and hide. It makes the woman despair and she hugs the whining animal in the basement and sleeps next to it on a cot. The man sleeps in a rocking chair. The first winter and it becomes obvious that the dog is suffering and that they cannot do anything about it. Their own clothes hang off of them like ponchos now and the man has to punch new holes in their belts. They try to give the dog away to a shelter but the employee laughs at them. They try to give it away to anybody
who will take it, even walk all the way to the UN base in Šiki Brod and try to give it away there. Nobody wants it. He says they have to let it go or put it to sleep. She says no, no, over and over. What else can we do? he asks. No, no, she says. With the last of his gasoline the man drives it to the edge of the town, feeds it a meal of cooked cow lungs and bread, throws a fat piece of rope as hard as he can toward the woods, and when the dog bolts after it, climbs into his car (without bothering to pick up the dog bowl), and drives away. He tilts his rearview mirror up and keeps his eyes on the white line in front of him. I don’t see the dog anymore, but I see the couple still. No, no, she screams at him when he comes back and melts through his arms and his fingers to the floor. No, no, she locks
herself in the basement and refuses food. He breaks in after two days and the next-door neighbor drives them to the hospital. The hospital is full of crazed doctors and legless soldiers. They sedate her and send her home. The man cooks for her, spoons soup into his wife’s mouth every day. He changes her clothes, washes them by hand in the tub. She refuses to move or talk. The war keeps on. Their food stash is dwindling and so is their money. There are no concerts or plays in the town under siege, not the ones that people would pay for, and they have no income. What he’s getting from the music school, monthly packages of flour and oil, is not enough. He has to sell things from the house. They used to live well, so they have a lot of nice things that he goes to the market and sells for dirt cheap: a mink coat for a small bag of potatoes, an antique grandfather clock for a sack of cornmeal. He comes home one day and finds her dead, suicide maybe, but nobody has time to autopsy. Every morning he goes to her grave and picks up dead leaves or brushes away the snow or pulls up the spindling weeds. He gets thinner, starts playing violin publicly, making it cry for a cigarette here, a worthless coin there. He refuses to sell it. Going through his wife’s stuff, he finds a can of German dog food that got overlooked, sleeps with it for a couple of days, and then, after selling the collected works of William Faulkner for two boxes of pasta, heats it up and mixes it with half a squishy, rancid onion and some ketchup from the bottom of a plastic bottle—he cuts the top of the bottle with a serrated knife pours hot water into it and makes sure to get every last smidgen of red out of it—adds it to the heaping plate of rigatoni, and devours it. And before I see him sell his violin to a bus driver, I am aware that the dog’s name is Archibald.
I see myself get my right hand out of Asja’s and give her the left one instead and step in between her and the dog. I hear myself
“Archibald!” I yelled to the dog, and his ears suddenly perked up and his tail went down between his legs. He closed his cavernous jaws with a whiny yelp, jumped sideways toward the river, realized he couldn’t go that way, made a tight half circle around himself, took off like he was spring-loaded over the fence that separated the path and somebody’s war garden, and vanished.