Shards: A Novel

by Ismet Prcic

  “Don’t break your heart over her,” he said. “You don’t know what she’s like.”

  “I’m fine,” I said leaning over the rail. I wondered what it would feel like to be airborne above this street.

  “Real seagulls fly alone.”

  He spun me around and hugged me. His general aura was redolent of beer.

  “Tomorrow, after our play, Bokal and I will evaporate.”

  “You mean the day after tomorrow?”

  He let go of me so I could see his shaking head.

  “Tomorrow.”

  There was genuine sorrow in his eyes.

  “What about our last performance?” I managed.

  “Ismet, it’s not the show that must go on, but life.” I could see he was very proud of that one.

  We both leaned on the railing, looking out. My eyes stung. I looked at my white breath against the gray building across the street and thought about mankind, about how hot we had to be on the inside to survive in such cold environs.

  “Where do you think you’ll go?”

  He didn’t say anything. I looked at his profile against the city lights and the city darknesses. His shoulders were hunched. He looked smaller and toothless. He looked like a child, or a father who had lost one.

  “Let’s go inside,” he said.

  We found Bokal, and Asmir immediately turned from vulnerable to voluble. We had another round of tall ones and watched a frail fifteen-year-old Scottish girl puke amber into a potted plant. Allison’s father had had enough. There was a gong. He gonged it and we started to look for our coats.

  As the last of us were leaving in a group, Allison put on a jacket and said she’d walk with us part of the way, to say proper good-byes.

  “Don’t do it,” Asmir whispered in my ear. “You have no idea what these Western girls are like.”

  “We like each other.”

  “They like dick, that’s what they like. You’ll see. I’ll prove it to you.”

  He and Bokal lagged behind as the rest of us took over the street like an invading army. The cold oxygen had awakened us. Scottish high school girls hung off the musicians’ arms, cackling. Allison became her flirty self again and tried to tickle me, ruffled my hair, tried to push me off the sidewalk with her hip.

  And just as my heart grew big again to accommodate my regained feelings toward her, Asmir came out of the blue, swooped in like a fat seagull to prove his point, took a confused Allison by the arm, and they walked ahead of everybody, like lovers. My heart shriveled up on itself like a raisin. All the love in there escaped in a cloud of steam, exchanging electrons with the misty air, merging with it, and giving it importance. Some other Scottish girl (too many hair clips) slipped her hand between my elbow and me, snuggled in closer, and kept saying words in English while I tried to breathe so I wouldn’t die.

  I don’t know how long I walked, but out of nowhere I saw Allison standing on the sidewalk ahead, disoriented, her body rigid. I saw Asmir cross the street and vanish around the first corner. The hair-clip girl on my arm kept talking until we came alongside Allison, frozen to her spot, and I found myself slowing down as though she had some kind of gravitational pull only on me. I came to a stop and wiggled my arm up and out of the other girl’s grip, saying sorry, my face all gushy.

  “Please hug me,” Allison whispered and we locked in an embrace. Our pupils overtook our irises, opening holes in our eyes so big the world just got sucked right through them and into us. We stood still, clutching each other.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  After what she said I could have killed Asmir.

  Later we walked, hand in hand, up the hill from St. Stephen’s Church all the way to Princes Street, trying not to step on any lines or cracks in the sidewalk—a game. On the hill in front of us Edinburgh Castle stood well lit and unobtainable, like paradise. Black taxies passed us, somberly gliding up and down, like hearses. The creatures of the night gorged themselves on fish and chips out of oily paper wrappers. Tourists acted like they owned the place, yelling in exotic languages and laughing hysterically for no apparent reason. There were posters everywhere that read: “Amazing, tour de force performance . . .” and “You’re stupid if you don’t see this one . . .” Some just showed a picture of Salvador Dalí, his mustache like dollar signs.

  A group of teenagers passed us on the other side of the street. There was some kind of commotion and someone yelled something with a thick Scottish accent. Allison dropped my hand like a slug and said:

  “Shite!”

  “What?”

  “That’s William.”

  I looked over. This tall, blond guy separated from his group of friends and ran across the street toward us. I saw myself getting bludgeoned, stabbed. I planted my feet and prayed.

  But he smiled at me and said, “Sorry to bother bu’ I’d like a word with Allison?” or something like that. In Bosnia I would already have been picking my spleen up off the sidewalk.

  “No problem,” I said all too eagerly.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to me and followed him a little way down.

  William’s posse stood around, eyeing me with hatred. I swallowed a lot and counted steps from a bus stop to the building, making it look like I wasn’t compulsive, like I was just pacing. My mind kept telling me to run away, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to leave without Allison; that gravitational pull again. She and William were standing in front of a jewelry store, two shadows arguing against bright light and burnished gold.

  “Hey, fucker,” someone called from behind me, and I almost buckled like a piece of lawn furniture. Then I realized that it had been said in Bosnian. I turned and saw Bokal coming my way, holding a painting under his arm.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Shitting myself.” I moved my chin slightly, as though pointing toward the jewelry store. He looked over there, recognized Allison and laughed.

  “Tonight’s the night, huh? All right, I’m gonna leave you to it.”

  He tried to walk by me but I grabbed his jacket.

  “Where are you going?” I said through my teeth. “That’s her boyfriend and those are his friends. He saw us holding hands.”

  Bokal glanced at them and scratched his beard, evaluating their potency if it came to a brawl.

  “They’re not gonna do shit,” he said.

  “You stick around anyway.”

  “Hey, check this out.” He held the painting up for me. “What do you think?”

  It was a nude in blues and yellows, part of a window and a full moon outside it.

  “I picked her up in a pub. Said I needed to paint her. She took me to a store, bought me a canvas and some paints, and then took me home. When I was done, I fucked her.”

  “And you didn’t give her the painting?”

  “It’s my painting. I painted it.”

  I glanced toward the jewelry store and saw Allison and William hug. It was a quickie, like spouses parting in the morning, before going to work.

  “I guess that makes sense,” I told Bokal.

  Allison walked over. She and Bokal exchanged some niceties; then Bokal left. Allison and I turned on one of the streets leading to Queen’s Park and I put my hand in my pocket, but she reached into it and took my hand again.

  For the second time someone yelled her name from behind us, William. For the second time that night she said shite. For the second time I counted steps as they argued, this time in front of a pawnshop with electric guitars on display. For the second time I couldn’t just leave without her, despite my ambiguous status, despite the fear, despite myself.

  They took longer this time, though, and when she finally came back she said:

  “William and I are history.”

  We walked by a pond and in between the wall-like hedges of some park, the mist meandering in their corners like spiderwebs in the wind. A playground was there, and a soccer field. She swung in the swing and I tried to go down the slide but only got my jeans wet.<
br />
  “Doesnae that streetlight look like a halo?”

  “What’s a halo?” I asked.

  “Ye know, the sign of the enlightenment, like.”

  “What’s enlightenment?”

  “Like God’s grace.”

  “Oh.”

  I was going to ask what grace was, but I had a vague idea of its meaning and I didn’t want her to think I was stupid.

  “In religious art, halos are those circles around Jesus’s heed.”

  I suddenly got an urge to run into the middle of the field. She jumped into my arms and we stood there for a long time, just hugging. I became aware of the hot skin on her neck, our cold ears touching.

  “Kiss me, I’m Scottish,” she said—a T-shirt we’d seen in town.

  We breathed each other in. She touched my butt and I got an erection. She checked the grass but it was too dewy to roll around in. We kissed and rubbed against each other and time slipped away and a white police cruiser glided by, almost noiselessly, across the grass, shining its reflector on us, then politely, Britishly, carried on. We kissed some more until a little fox came up to us from behind the hedges, regarded us with a pragmatic leer, then trotted away, shaking its head, its tongue out, mocking us.

  * * *

  I woke up late the next day, found no one in the house. It was ten minutes before the show already and none of the troupe members had bothered to wake me. I rushed into my jacket and caught a whiff of Allison on it and remembered what Asmir had done, that motherfucker. I was gonna kill him. I checked and there was still luggage in all the rooms and miscellaneous clothes, debris from a hasty breakfast all over the kitchen, bread crumbs and cornflakes and smears of orange marmalade. There was Asmir’s boom box in the living room. If he was still in Edinburgh, he was mine. I dashed out without locking the front door behind me.

  The day was soggy and I ran up the hill like a maniac, rage fueling my muscles. There were a lot of people out and I slalomed in between them, catching a shoulder here and there.

  As I turned onto Albany my right shoe started to clap against the sidewalk. Unwilling to slow down, I hopped on my left foot and kicked my right foot sideways to see what had happened. The cheap sole had unglued itself and my heel was a-flap.

  “Fuck!” I said and, off balance like that, crashed into a beefy man in front of me, bounced off his bulk, and bailed hard. In the nanosecond blur of being face-to-face, I recognized him.

  Mustafa! Could it be?

  “Sorry,” I said, trying to get up on all fours, but he just kept walking. By the time I was up and cupping the funny bone in my elbow, he was already around the corner.

  “Mustafa!” I called after him, but he didn’t come back.

  I hobbled into Venue 25 and went through the courtyard to the green room behind stage B, where I assumed the troupe was stalling the show until I got there. But as soon as I walked in I knew there wouldn’t be a show.

  The young troupe members, sitting on sofas in their costumes, looked at me with petrified faces. A gasp went through the room and caught Branka’s attention. She was standing with her back to me near the entrance to the stage with Ramona and two men I’d never seen before. When she spun around her face made me tremble. She ran to me.

  “Where were you?” she hissed and I thought she was going to hit me.

  “At the house,” I said and looked at Ramona. “Nobody bothered to wake me up.”

  Ramona turned away from me.

  “Where are Bokal and Asmir? Where are the musicians?”

  That’s when I realized that Asmir was long gone. They were all long gone.

  I wanted to bash his head in for groping Allison when he knew I liked her, for saying he did this to help me understand how the world works, for lying to my face. I remembered how vulnerable he’d looked the previous night on that balcony and it made me even madder. Something inside me came to a boil, and without being able to release the pressure of it in front of this anguished woman, it all came out of my eyes.

  “I don’t know where they are,” I choked out.

  “My dick! You’re as thick as thieves.”

  I wiped my eyes, my guts knotting.

  “I. Don’t. Know.”

  Her lips curled into a snarl. She grabbed my left sleeve and pointed me toward the sofas.

  “Nobody knows anything,” she said. “Go sit down. We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  My friends scooched over and made some room for me in the corner, next to Omar.

  “Fucking craziness,” he whispered, like it was all his fault.

  “What happened?” I whispered back.

  He looked toward his mother, who was now pacing from the stage entrance to where Ramona was talking to the two men, waiting for something, it seemed. One of them, a chinless blond, was writing something in a pocket notebook.

  “Boro and I woke up this morning and everybody was gone except for Ramona. We thought you were with that chick and didn’t even check in your room,” Omar said.

  “But they left their stuff behind.”

  “I think to give themselves more time.”

  “Fucking asshole.”

  “Who?”

  “Who do you think?”

  “My mother doesn’t give a shit about him or Bokal. They didn’t come on her bus. It’s the musicians she vouched for, that she’s responsible for bringing back.”

  Something in the way he phrased the sentence switched on the silent alarm inside of me.

  “What about me and Ramona?”

  “What about you and Ramona?”

  “Well, she’s letting us go, right?”

  “I know about Ramona. Her father made a deal or something.”

  The rage in me turned into panic. All alarms blared.

  “My father made a deal for me,” I said, almost crying again.

  “I don’t know, man. Not with Branka, or I would know.”

  My hands started to shake and I hid them under my knees, feigning cold.

  “Where were you gonna go? To your uncle in America?”

  I managed to nod.

  “Man, you better do something quick. Those guys over there are from immigration. Mother called them and told them that some people ran away from the troupe to seek asylum.”

  I couldn’t move, not even my eyes. They just stared ahead across the room and locked onto a blue sandbag next to the stage door, a doorstop. Every so often Branka’s blurry shape passed in front of it, pacing.

  The stage door swung open then and a conservatively clad woman entered. Branka told Ramona to tell her that they found me. Ramona translated, pointing in my direction, and the woman looked at me. She had large, photosensitive glasses and bangs and looked a little like Joey Ramone. I tried to move but my legs felt wooden, my feet bolted to the floor.

  Joey Ramone said something to the blond man and I heard the word passport. Omar heard it, too. I felt him lean slightly into me.

  “If you let go of your passport now you’re as good as in Bosnia,” he whispered without moving his mouth.

  “They recommend you take his passport if you want him to go back with the troupe,” Ramona said to Branka, and without a moment’s hesitation Branka started toward me.

  That’s it.

  My passport was in the front left pocket of my Levi’s jacket. My money was in a tobacco pouch in the right inside pocket. My name was Ismet. The sandbag was blue. Branka was coming. My hands were under my knees. My heart was beating in the tips of my fingers. My brain was churning. My legs were wooden. The room was silent. My throat was closed. Branka was coming. My armpits were damp. The room was silent. Branka was there. Her hand extended. Her mouth was moving. My throat was closed. My brain was churning. And I was flying. Flying above. My name was Ismet. My heart was not beating. I was looking down. At another Ismet. Whose heart was beating. Whose feet were not wooden. Whose throat was not closed. My passport was in the front left pocket of his Levi’s jacket. My money was in a tobacco pouch in the right inside pocket. He kn
ew this fact. Branka was there. Asking for my passport. With her moving mouth. My name was Ismet. He reached inside. Pulled out the money. His face screwed up. He dug deeper. Looking for the passport. In the wrong place. He stood up in panic. He looked around. Where is your passport? Branka was saying. I left it in the room, he was saying. We’ll go with you to get it, Branka was saying. The sandbag was blue. My name was Ismet. My passport was in the front left pocket of his Levi’s jacket and he didn’t give it up.

  We were on Dundas Street. I was walking downhill, flanked by two open umbrellas and their owners. The purple and white one belonged to Branka. The simple black one belonged to the man with no chin.

  My heel flapped as I walked and my shoe took on water. The rain was cold and my shoulders were hunched, no neck. Three times Branka offered to share her umbrella with me and three times I refused. “I like the rain,” I said. “My shoe broke,” I said in English. The man with no chin was stern.

  “I can’t believe you don’t have your passport on you,” Branka said.

  In front of the house. A flight of stairs down to the front door. I took it in one leap, removed my shoes, and left them there on the welcome mat. The two with umbrellas were still at street level.

  “If you want you can wait here,” I said. “I’ll go bring it.” But Branka started her descent, her face suspicious.

  The front door was unlocked and I ran in. I sprinted down the hallway and almost lost my balance because my right sock was soaked and it slid more dangerously on the polished hardwood. But there were walls for balancing and I made it to my room, scrambled in, and shut the door. I locked it from the inside.

  For a moment there was panic. I picked up my bag, put it down. I ran to the window, looked out, spun around, ran to the door. I grabbed at my hair, let it go. I heard footsteps. For a moment there was calm.

  A knock on the door.

  I put my Windbreaker on over my Levi’s jacket and climbed on the sill.

  “I’m gonna change!” I yelled. “I’m all wet!”

  I jumped into the courtyard in my socks.

  I muddied my hands and knees, got on my own two feet, ducked under some pillowcases now sopping on the clothesline, and ran to the door leading to the vestibule. I clutched the doorknob and pulled and pulled and there was panic again because it wouldn’t budge. I pulled and pulled and looked around, gauging the height of the walls, but then I pushed and the door clicked open and I ran the width of the building to the front, stuck out my head and saw that no one was at the front door, picked up my shoes from the welcome mat in one sweeping move, and ascended the stairs to the street.