Shards: A Novel

by Ismet Prcic

Lucy volunteered to take Branka and the young ones to their lodgings and Boro made a fuss. He said he didn’t want to lodge with his mother and the kids, and Branka, being an enlightened, modern kind of mother, soon gave up and put him in the care of his brother, Omar, and allowed him to stay with the older crowd.

  Asmir led us “old birds” and the musicians away.

  “Down this way,” he said.

  The night fell on Edinburgh like a blanket over a birdcage and a haze crept into the air and made the lights crisp at the source but blurry on the periphery. The chill put bumps on your skin. Ghosts swirled around streetlights and tangled in your hair. Buildings breathed heavily. The streets groaned underfoot. You could feel how old everything was despite the neon, the cars, and the techno music bumping from basement bars.

  There were crowds everywhere, walking and laughing, making me dizzy. We passed a group of tourists and I was sure I saw Asja. I thought I recognized her cheek across the street but it wasn’t her. The experience made me anxious, panicky. I forced myself to look down at my feet, gave myself the silly task of trying to step on every patch of dirty, ancient bubble gum on the sidewalk. After a while the monotony of it calmed me down. When I looked up I saw I was way behind the group.

  I yelled for Asmir to wait, and they all stopped by some street performers until I caught up to them. There was a guy with a red mustache in a leotard juggling chainsaws. I leaned on the

  BOOM!

  “Incoming!” screamed Omar.

  Suddenly I was under a parked bus, hands over head, my mind flashing to the discharge of the shell that scared Archibald, counting to three because three is the number of seconds it takes a shell to arrive.

  One:

  My mind flashing to a severed foot on the pavement, to popcorn in the

  Two:

  street, to blood drops on my Reeboks, a car atop another car like turtles, smoldering

  Three:

  heat, mind bracing for the whistle or the BOOM, heart like a pager set to vibrate.

  Three:

  Waiting for it to come.

  Three:

  Bracing for the BOOM.

  But nothing came. Just another distant explosion. Then another. These shells are defective. Then the crackle of a series of smaller, tinnier explosions, but not like Kalashnikov fire, more musical, cascading in pitch. What kind of guns are these? Singing guns?

  I opened my eyes and realized I was face-to-face with a perfectly round bubble-gum stain on the curb in front of me. Oh, we’re in Edinburgh. I looked up. Red mustache was twirling small chainsaws in the air like nothing ever happened. Some of his audience were looking at me, though, looking at Ramona curled up on the sidewalk, at Omar and Boro crouching next to a building. The audience’s thoughts were legible on their faces: Were we insane, or were they witnessing impromptu street performance art?

  Then I saw Asmir and our musicians laughing at us.

  “What is it, peasants? Never seen fireworks?”

  I climbed from under the bus. A hugging couple avoided me in a wide semicircle. I dusted off and looked for my bag.

  No, I had never before that day seen fireworks. Neither had Ramona, nor Omar, nor Boro. Asmir and the musicians were older. They remembered with fully formed adult bodies and minds life before the war. Before chaos, they’d known order, before senselessness, sense. They were really out of Bosnia because leaving chaos to them felt like returning to normalcy. But, if you were forged in the chaos, then there was no return. There was no escape. To you chaos was normalcy. And normalcy was proving to be an unnatural, brittle state.

  Asmir came over and hugged me.

  “Don’t shit yourself,” he teased but the hug felt good, genuine. I avoided his eyes because mine were bursting. I turned uphill toward the explosions over Edinburgh Castle, blurting festive fire into downcast skies.

  We didn’t sleep all night, despite fatigue. We just dropped our bags at the house and then ran around the town in the mizzle, filling our eyes with the fresh and the unfamiliar. Asmir led and we followed him into every store, every pub, just to see what they looked like from the inside. We jumped over tall fences into fancy forbidden parks and kicked the trees to get each other wetter. We drank a mug of beer apiece in this loud place called the Basement where all the employees wore fluorescent T-shirts that said IT’S COOL TO BE DOWN. We buzzed. We vibrated. We were high.

  In the morning, through the thicket of a hangover headache, in a small, unfamiliar room that smelled of paint, I heard a doorbell ring.

  A door opened somewhere in the house and a moment later someone shrieked—in pain? Horror? Joy? I had slept in my clothes, so I just jumped out of bed, ran and opened the door, and saw little Boro careening toward me down the hallway at full sprint.

  “Bokal is here! Bokal is here!” he screamed as his feet fought for purchase on the hardwood. He braked in the fashion of somebody on a motorcycle, swinging his rear end to the front, was still just for a split second, and was already running back the other way before I even left my room.

  Bokal looked like a shepherd in his fur-lined jacket, with his face unshaven and his hair oily and matted and sticking out indiscriminately. It was Lucy who had picked him up at the train station and called him a taxi, which dropped him off in front of the house. He stood in the living room with his bag on the floor but with his backpack still over his shoulder as he received hugs and pats on the arms. You could see he was happy and tired.

  “Sit down,” said Ramona, ushering him toward an armchair. He took two steps, then changed his mind.

  “If I never sit again it will be too soon,” he said.

  Ramona and I decided that we would go to the meeting with the Scottish kids. Asmir made fun of us but we told him that if his troupe was going to be represented in any form—and we knew Branka was going to make all the youngsters show up, because she had their passports and parent slips and pretty much owned their asses outside of Bosnia—we should at least have a couple of senior members present to protect the integrity of the group. He made fun of us again but we were steadfast. Halfway to the venue he caught up with us on foot, with Boro in tow. He went on and on about Branka putting the troupe in this situation and kept apologizing to Boro that he had to talk shit about his mother in his presence. There was no need for that. Boro understood. Boro was smarter than any of us.

  In the rehearsal room there were two cliques, with a language barrier between them. The Scottish kids had some kind of scripts in their hands; the Bosnians didn’t.

  Avoiding everybody’s eyes, we immediately took off our shoes and sat on the floor, a routine practice before any Asmir-led rehearsal. The younger members of our troupe responded to the familiarity of it and did what we did, which left the Scottish kids to look from face to face trying to figure out if they should follow suit. Their poor leader, a wide-eyed high school drama teacher, told them to go ahead.

  Soon enough there was a circle of barefoot kids sitting Indian-style on the parquet and still nobody knew what to do. Branka asked Ramona to help her talk to the Scottish teacher. Ramona got up and the two of them crossed the language barrier. Just as they did someone else left the circle and walked over to Boro and me, kneeled down, and said hello. There was nothing else I could do but look up and meet Allison.

  Allison had the hands of a grown woman, and something passed between us through the handshake. Allison’s skin was cold and smooth to the touch. Allison wore a watch. Allison’s trousers were black and I can’t recall her blouse. I couldn’t keep my gaze away from her eyes, a little brown and a little green and a little sad, despite the smile. A little troubled.

  “I’m sorre, bu’ could you say yer name again, please?” she asked.

  “Ismet.”

  “Izz-matt,” she said.

  Boro scoffed.

  “Ssss,” I said. “Izmet with the zed means, uh . . . shit of cow in my country.”

  All the Scots laughed.

  “Why would yer parents do that to ya?” she asked. />
  Two other Scots crawled over and introduced themselves, too, and I shook their hands but almost never broke eye contact with Allison. They snickered at our connection and oooooooohed a little bit and kept mentioning someone named William.

  Then Asmir took over everybody’s life for the next two hours. The poor Scottish drama teacher had no chance. Asmir just gathered all her scripts and tossed them on some chair in the corner. Then he took off his shirt and lay down in the center of the circle. He might as well have pulled out a gun; everyone was frozen, waiting.

  “Ve do relax number one,” he said, “number two ve do game of theater, THEN ve do theater.”

  Branka and the teacher simply backed into a corner each, sat down, and watched with their lips pressed tight. Asmir led us all through a meditation exercise. I was amazed by how seamlessly Allison and her friends merged with our troupe under Asmir’s leadership. At first they sniggered at his Tarzan English commands to close eyes and tink of inside of mother stomach and imagine energy of life come out of your eyes like balls, but soon got comfortable.

  We did some warm-ups, some voice and trust exercises. We did that one where one person stands rigidly still with their arms crossed on their chest and has to let two others push them back and forth like a metronome. This blond boy in the Riddler T-shirt and I pushed Allison. Every time her shoulders fell into my hands she smiled. Her eyes were closed and I looked at her chest. I could feel the bra straps through her blouse on my thumbs and I never wanted to stop doing this.

  After the rehearsal Asmir went up to the drama teacher to explain his vision of our troupe’s involvement with her show:

  “Scot actors do text. Ve do dance. Yes? Ve vill pretend ve are the vor. Ve vill come and be very together like a bomb and then ve vill sing like a bomb and start from one end of stage to the other, dancing like bomb, and ven the bomb fall around you, people, ve vill become . . . geler, kako se kaže geler, jebem mu mater . . . vill become piece, small piece of bomb, all of us, and dance like different small piece of bomb, killing. Yes?”

  The drama teacher stood there, baffled.

  Allison winked at me twice during the warm-ups the next day. After the rehearsal she said her father was letting her have a party for all of us that night and that I had to come. She gave me directions and kissed my cheek. It felt like a sunburn on my skin. In my head, it felt like a gulp of brandy. She walked away, and when she finally disappeared from the doorway, I realized that everyone was watching me standing there stupidly.

  “Nice going, Ismet!” Bokal said and clapped me on the back.

  “No wasted time, huh?”

  “She has a boyfriend, ya know?” the Riddler kid told me, interpreting the clap.

  “I have the girlfriend,” I told him.

  “Right,” he said.

  All day the rest of the day, her friends (the “morality police,”

  Allison later called them,) kept reminding me that she had a boyfriend, although we hadn’t done anything but blush around each other and smile a lot. And hug that one time. And that peck on the cheek, which I didn’t reciprocate. Even Ramona and Asmir started bringing up Asja for no reason, trying to make me feel bad.

  I kept forcing myself to do the right thing and think about Asja. I would start to remember her, love her, and for a while I would succeed and feel righteous, but halfway into a daydream my mind would insert Allison’s face into my memories of Asja. It would be Allison holding my hand in Banja Park, Allison kissing me on “our” bench. I felt scared, deranged, not in charge of my mind. So instead of going to Allison’s party like everybody else, I spent the night writing a love letter to Asja, wallowing in self-pity, coming up with pretty words for how shitty I felt.

  The next day I woke up with a pounding headache—there was a bump on my head I couldn’t explain—and sore all over. Everybody regarded me with admonishment. Allison looked wary of me and I suffered through the rehearsal. She left right after, without a goodbye. I felt marbled with love and anger. So, come matinee time, I performed my ass off out of spite, taking over the performance, upstaging everyone, exorcising my frustrations. The show went well. My feet ached from stomping.

  The troupe dispersed and left me in the cafeteria and I was glad. I stood in line and got a croissant sandwich and a paper bowl of fruit, sat down, opened the sandwich, picked out the pork, pressed the halves back together, and bit into it. It tasted like it was made by robots, but I got it down with the steady munch of somebody who knew hunger well enough. Grapes tasted like grapes. Melon like melon.

  Then Allison showed up and sat at my table. She just sat there, looking at me for a while, and like that, I fell in love. Or realized that I had. She was wet from the rain and there were clusters of gossamer white foam on her hair where whatever product she was using came in contact with water. Rain slid from her scalp and down her cheeks. She wiped it off slowly, like a movie star. She was beautiful.

  I started to cry a little and she took my hand. She said that she saw the show and that I was great and that she was bringing her mother to see it tomorrow and that she wanted me to meet her afterward. She said that I was her friend, that there would be a repeat of the party, and that she hoped there would be no more incidents. What incidents? I thought, but said nothing. Just wanted her to keep touching my hand, keep talking to me. She asked me if I wanted to go to a museum with her. I hated museums, but I said yes. Once there, she did cartwheels when the guards weren’t watching and we giggled and the stern people in the paintings stirred not.

  A week later, a few hours before Allison’s second party, I came back to the house and found Ramona, Asmir, Bokal, and the musicians congregated around the fireplace. A green bottle of something was circulating from hand to hand.

  “There he is,” Asmir said as I was taking off my shoes, “Bosnian Casanova.”

  Bokal came over with a grin, grabbed my hand, and sniffed my fingers.

  “Still ruled by conscience, I see. What kind of Bosnian are you? You’ll ruin all our reputations.”

  The musicians laughed. I saw Ramona’s brow bunch up and tugged my hand away.

  Bokal said, “You have two more days. It’s like the Olympics, man. You’re not scoring just for yourself but for your country, too.”

  More laughter.

  “Yeah, yeah, you guys are hilarious,” Ramona said and then backed me up into a corner away from the rest of them. She whispered something and I had to bend down to her to hear. There was booze on her breath. “Tell me you didn’t do anything.”

  “I didn’t do anything.” It was the truth.

  “Can the soap opera wait?” spat Asmir. “I didn’t send Branka’s boys on an errand for nothing. We gotta plan this right, and they’re probably on their way back already. So, this is what’s going on: We have two more days before we’re supposed to go back and matinee performances on both days.”

  “And the play with the Scottish kids at five, Asmir,” added Ramona.

  “Fuck the Scottish kids.”

  “Well, Ismet is letting us down in that department,” Bokal said.

  “Come on!” Asmir practically screamed. “Do you want to stay here or go back to war?”

  The laughter died. Somebody handed someone a bottle. Liquid sloshed. Someone else took a nip.

  “We’re in a foreign fucking country, and if we don’t do this right, if they find some of us before the bus crosses the border, that’s it. I know that Ismet and Ramona have arrangements with Branka, but the rest of us don’t. This is my life, man.”

  “All right, what are we doing?”

  “Tonight at the party, make sure to spread some rumors about where you’re going. I want each of those kids to have a different story about where each of us is headed. Tell them I have a cousin in Glasgow, or Ireland. Or a friend. I don’t care what you tell them, just make it sound hush-hush, like it’s special information just for them.”

  The musicians nodded in approval, looking surprised that they hadn’t thought of this first. I gla
nced at Ramona and her face was flat.

  “But wait a second,” she said. “Are we going to finish all our performances, or are you guys bailing on the shit we’re doing with the Scots?”

  Asmir looked at her almost in confusion, and I saw his mind jump from thought to unknowable thought.

  “Well?”

  “Tomorrow, we’re doing both,” he said. “The last day, I’m gone right after our matinee. I don’t know about you.”

  “Me, too,” Bokal chimed in. “We need a head start to get away from Branka.”

  Right then, the front door opened and Omar and Boro walked in with plastic bags of beer. A gust of wind whooshed in with them and it felt like the room imploded a little. Everyone looked otherworldly and stiff. Nobody said anything. Ramona grabbed the green bottle out of the drummer’s hands, stomped across the living room to the bathroom, and slammed the door.

  The party went into the night. Minors drank tall cans of lager, spilling all over the place. Asmir, Bokal, and the musicians cornered them individually and told them where in the UK their fictitious relatives lived. Allison played the piano in a blue T-shirt and her father kept maneuvering people off his expensive Chinese carpet. The young troupe members were sad because our Scottish excursion was coming to an end, and so were their Scottish counterparts. Everyone took pictures of everyone else, crying, exchanging addresses.

  I wanted to spend some time with Allison alone, but suddenly it felt like she was embarrassed that I was there, scared almost. She wasn’t the same Allison from earlier in the week, the one doing cartwheels among statues, goofing off, using every chance to be touching me. Maybe it was because her dad was there and she was trying to be someone he would approve of. Maybe she thought about it and realized she really loved her boyfriend and dreaded getting close to me. Maybe she was only toying with me behind his back, the bitch. After all, where was he tonight? In the end I figured I shouldn’t have been hoping for anything in the first place. Bad karma. In the end I blamed myself.

  At some point Asmir took me out on the balcony and closed the door. The night was cold but without rain. The street below us was empty.