by Ismet Prcic
I ran on.
And on.
And there was a spring in my step and elation on my face despite the downpour, despite the equally wet socks now, despite what Asmir had done, what my father hadn’t, despite who all were left behind in hell, despite uncertainty about the future, the pull of the past, the disjointedness of the present. Despite fear. Despite love.
I ran on across the street with a shoe in each hand. A double-decker straight from a British postcard decelerated and came to a stop. I got on board and handed the driver a bunch of crumpled notes. I climbed the stairs to the top deck, which was empty, went all the way to the back, and threw myself face-first on the floor.
The bus started to move. I lay there for a while, then flipped onto my back. I dropped the shoes over my head. My chest was heaving. My face was smiling. My right hand clutched the left front pocket of my jacket, felt the document inside. My left hand reached into my inside right pocket and squeezed the money pouch. With that I lost consciousness.
I awakened to the sound of foliage scraping the roof of the bus, and as soon as I realized where I was, my heart was a-thump.
WhatareyoudoingWhatareyoudoingWhatareyoudoingWhatareyoudoingWhatareyou
I raised my head, looked down the aisle, and immediately felt a swoon coming. I closed my eyes and leaned into the side of the seat to my right, folded my legs under me, and managed to push myself up and into it.
doingWhatareyoudoingWhat
Slowly, my personal darkness retreated ahead of reality and I was able to look around. Slivers of Edinburgh, made opaque by rain, turned in the frame of the window, one after the other. I couldn’t recognize anything. It was the price of freedom.
areyoudoingWhatareyoudoing
I hallucinated I was someone else, someone older to whom the inside of this bus wasn’t foreign, someone who knew where they were, where they were going, and how many stops it would take to get them there. It felt both good and unnerving, good because it had a calming effect on the body, unnerving because inside it I knew I wasn’t really me. I panicked and fumbled to get out my passport. I opened it and looked at my photograph. Who was this pale kid? Why was his T-shirt neckband so stretched?
I read the name. Ismet Prci. I read the name, then looked at the picture, looked at the picture, then read the name until I recognized them both, the features of my face and the slopes and curls of my signature. I held the passport in both hands, closed it and put it back in the pocket, checked three times that the button was secure, pressed my palm on top of it, and felt my heart beat through it.
Whatareyoudoing
My feet were cold. Their once-white socks were now brown and translucent. I peeled them off and dropped them. They looked like two slush-and-shit snowballs melting on the bus floor. The skin of my feet was alien and wrinkled. I looked for my shoes. The back of the right one yawned at me, but they were relatively dry and I put them on my bare feet.
I saw some buildings. I saw some cars, their windshield wipers standing up and lying down. I had no idea what I was doing.
Outside a bigger bus station I got off. The wind blowing there made me aware of every bone in my body.
The inside of the station was warmer, but I couldn’t stop shivering. I meandered, looking for a nook, for some cubicle of privacy, to hide in, collect myself, and think about what to do. I found refuge in a stall of a public toilet.
I sat on the closed lid with my head in my hands while men around me pissed and shat, farted and groaned, washed and didn’t wash their hands. I checked my passport again, counted all my money (both German and British), then pulled out my address book and read the names and phone numbers of all my friends and family in Tuzla who couldn’t help me. I read my parents’ number, and even though I knew it by heart, it looked unfamiliar because I knew it wasn’t mine anymore. My uncle’s number in America seemed too long and obscure, like a line of computer code. Asja’s number was sad, like an unread love note found thirty years later.
Part of me wondered if I should just go back to the venue, find the rest of the troupe, and go home. This is not for you. You can’t do this alone.
Part of me was euphoric, alive, thinking of nothing but Allison. At the museum she’d said that she didn’t want me to go back to Bosnia, and I told her not to worry and informed her of my plans. She’d said that if the America thing fell through I could always come and stay with her. At the time I thought it simply romantic and rather unlikely, but now it was the only thing I could think about. Over and over I read her addresses and phone numbers (one at her dad’s, the other at her mom’s) and tried to commit them to memory.
I bought a triangular cheese-and-tomato sandwich wrapped in plastic, my first meal of the day, and devoured it in four bites. It tasted so good. I went and bought another one for later.
Having gathered a bit of courage and warmth, I called Allison’s dad from a pay phone, but he said she was at her mum’s. I called her mum and, with my heartbeat thumping in the booth, asked if Allison was home.
“Who’s this?”
“Ismet. From Bosnia. We met at the play.”
“Of course, how lovely. Allison is still at squl, I’m afraid.”
“I’m sorry?”
“She’s still at squl.”
“Oh, school,” I said through a sudden knot in my throat.
“I don’ expect her back until sex or seven.”
“Oh,” was all I could manage as tears fell hotly from my eyes.
“Ismet, are you o’right? What’s the matter?”
“I’m okay,” I said in a voice an octave deeper.
“Are you sure, luv?”
“I’ll call later.”
“O’ right then. I’ll tell Allison you phoned.”
“Thank you. Bye bye.”
“Cheerio.”
I couldn’t call again. I stood in the booth with the phone in my right hand, with the number in my mind, with a left hand perfectly capable of pressing the buttons in the right order, with a mouth capable of strongly accented speech, with enough breath in my lungs to turn it into Good evening, is Allison home, but I couldn’t call again.
Instead I bought a bus ticket to South Queensferry, where Allison’s mother lived—or, rather, I saw myself buy it. I saw myself buy it and then it was in my hand, so I must have bought it.
I don’t know how long the ride took.
Queensferry.
Somehow I found the street, the apartment building. It’s not clear to me how. It took a long time. I remember the bite of the wind, the similarity of cobblestones to the ones in the center of Tuzla, the supernatural emptiness of the streets making me flash to curfews. I walked and walked, looking. I ate the second sandwich. I kept looking. I went into a pub. The statues on swivel stools cracked their necks trying to look me up and down, then turned back to their pints. I ordered milk. I told them where I was from, asked for directions. They heard me wrong. One of them said: “I didn’t know there was a war in Boston.”
After a while I found the apartment complex. I checked the numbers of the address three times. They were right. I went to the vestibule door and tried to go in, but it was one of those deals where you had to buzz someone to open the door for you. The apartment numbers on the intercom box were worn off. I couldn’t get myself to press any button. I didn’t know what time it was and I didn’t want to wake anybody up. I resolved to spend the night outside and try in the morning.
If you knew which one was the right button, would you press it?
The question just appeared in my mind as though someone had actually uttered it. Would I? I recalled not being able to place the call earlier, either. Why?
The light in the vestibule came on and a young man and a woman exited together. They paid me no attention and I caught the door before it latched itself. I went inside where it was warm and climbed the stairs and found Allison’s mother’s door. I stood in front of it, listening. Then I knocked.
The answer came to me then. It’s harder for someone
not to help you if you’re at their door than if you’re at their gate, or in another city calling them on their phone. The cold cunning of this thought surprised me.
Allison’s mother opened the door wearing a bathrobe over her pajamas.
“Ismet, luv!” she said as Allison popped her head from behind her.
“Ismet,” Allison squealed, “what’s the matter?”
Things sloshed in my head.
“I escaped,” I said and they took me in.
They drew a bath for me. They gave me some of Allison’s brother’s old clothes. They made me spaghetti for dinner and sat me down at the dining room table and asked me millions of questions. I told them everything: about why I had to run away, about my uncle in America, about my family, my town, my country, the war, my hobbies, my favorite books, my favorite movies, my favorite color. I told them I had never done anything like this before, that I had no idea what I was doing but that I had to.
“We’ll think of something tomorrow,” Allison’s mother said.
“Don’t worry.”
She looked like my mother in the old days, a blonde and a nonsmoking version of her, and I trusted her that things would turn out all right. She went to bed, and Allison and I held hands in Allison’s room and talked all night and I felt unreal again, like I was watching footage of myself.
Come morning, during cereal, Allison’s mother had it all figured out.
“Yer plane ticket to Zagreb is waiting for you at the Croatia Airlines office at Heathrow. Window seat. On the eleventh.”
Allison clapped hands, jumped up, and embraced her.
Inside me: kazoo music, confetti, fists pumping, childish voice screaming Yes!
The phone rang and Allison’s mother turned to answer.
“Excuse me?” I heard her mother say, then, “Come again?”
Allison’s mother motioned to me with the phone, eyes popping out of her skull.
“It might be for yee. It’s no’ in English.”
Mother?
She put the phone in my hand, this thing connected to the wall with a spirally wire, and I felt the weight of it and the weight of whoever was on the other end. My biceps strained to get it to my ear.
“Hello,” I said in Bosnian.
“What’s up, man. It’s Omar.”
“Omar?”
Where did he get this number?
“Listen man, we haven’t left yet.”
He paused and then continued as if I had asked him a question.
“Well, a bunch of people ran away from the group and Branka is trying to round them up. They just figured out where Ismet is.”
He paused again. I couldn’t even manage a grunt. He continued with his one-sided conversation.
“One of the girls in the troupe spilled to Branka that he fell for this one girl. Branka and immigration called the school and talked to her drama teacher, who released her addresses. They just went by the girl’s father’s house and didn’t find him there. So they are on their way to her mother’s right now.”
He was warning me. We had been friends for a long time and I knew him well, which is why I didn’t expect this degree of devotion, especially considering how close he was with his mother.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Yeah. They’re gonna pick him up and bring him back and then we’ll leave. They know the other guys are in London.”
“Thanks, man.”
“Okay then. So I’ll call you again when I get to London.”
The line clicked. I walked to the dining room wall and cradled the phone. I wiped my tears and turned around. Allison and her mother looked immobilized by my body language. I swallowed.
“They know where I am.”
Allison’s mother put her hands on my shoulders and said, “Nobody is taking you away. No’ if I can help it.” She called her lawyer friend and asked him what the best course of action would be, and he said that, because I was Muslim, she should take me to a mosque in Glasgow because there was a very strong and well-organized Muslim community there and they could advise me in legal matters better than he could over the phone. She called in sick, packed me a bag of her son’s clothing, and rushed us out of the flat.
I felt pleasantly paralyzed in the car on the way to Glasgow. Someone else was in charge. The heater was working. Droplets of rain traveled sideways across the side windows and couldn’t get me wet. Allison was pumping love through my hand. Up front, her mother was reassuring me that everything would be fine, that it was my destiny to make it to America, that I should not let the dream die.
Well, is it destiny or is it a dream?
We pulled up into the parking lot of a pretty big Islamic center and the posterior mosque. The building was made of brick and there was a squat pillar with a speaker on top of it, posing as a minaret. Allison’s mother went up to the information booth by herself, and Allison and I held each other feverishly in the backseat and kissed until we couldn’t breathe. It felt like the end of things with the rain drumming on the roof.
A man named Tariq, some kind of liaison for the center, received us in his small, simple office. He had one of those white flowing thobes and a Rasputin beard you could hide a cat in. He served us black tea with milk and listened to my predicament with genuine interest and understanding.
Apparently, the center’s legal representative had the day off and Tariq said that the best thing for me to do was to stay there until the next day. They had accommodations for refugees and asylum seekers in the back and he would provide food. Allison’s mother kept stressing safety and he assured us that I would be taken care of. Allison wanted to stay with me but he said that would not be possible.
Allison and her mother left, said they’d be back tomorrow. Tariq saw me cry and then asked me if Allison was Muslim. I told him no. He shook his head at me and put his hand on my shoulder, said:
“Perhaps it is good that they are gone, yes?”
He showed me around the complex. When it was time for noon prayer he took me to the mosque. During prayer I murmured suras that I knew, that my grandfather taught me. I didn’t know when to kneel and when to stand up, when to touch the serdžada with my forehead, so those aerobic parts of the prayer I copied from the man in front of me. Tariq then took me to his house and fed me some kind of spicy egg dish, which we ate with our fingers, dabbing pita into the mush. The Death of Yugoslavia was on BBC and I watched it die, again.
In the evening he drove me back to the center, showed me where I was to spend the night, a small room in the back of the mosque with gym mats stacked in one corner and a cabinet full of gray blankets.
“Tomorrow Dr. Habib will make everything all right, God willing,” he said.
Dr. Habib was a skinny Egyptian man in a well-fitting suit, and he did make everything all right. He looked over my papers and said that there were no legal grounds for Branka to make me go back to Bosnia if I didn’t want to go. He called immigration and informed them where I was, that I didn’t wish to return with the troupe, and they wished me a pleasant rest of my stay in Great Britain. While Allison and her mother were parking, Tariq asked me if I wanted to stay at the center instead and I said no. He smiled sadly and shook my hand. As I left his office I caught a glance of his expression in the glass on the door. The joy with which I was leaving appeared to cause him pain.
Excerpts from Ismet Prci’s Diary
from June 2000
On the surface, mati, everything is fine. I got accepted to UC San Diego. Melissa and I live together in sin. We found this little house in North Park, a neighborhood in San Diego. We’re sharing it with another couple. Ben and Jen are their names. Jen is Samoan. Ben has a cat and Melissa is a sucker for those. None of them has any idea what’s going on in my head, where my gun is.
My memoir is a sham. Who am I kidding?
I might come to Bosnia to see you again, mati. Maybe in a year. If I find the money. I’m looking into this one place that does medical testing, sleep deprivation studies, expe
rimental drugs and such. Maybe I’ll sell them a kidney. Or my brain. I don’t want it anymore.
I realized tonight that I may have lost my virginity in Scotland. And not with Allison. I remember it . . . I think I do. I had forgotten. Is that even possible?
Allison. Asja. It’s terrifying how these people come into your life, do what they do, and get the fuck out. Gone.
(. . . going through
the motions . . .)
It was the late summer of 1995 and Bosnia was still bleeding somewhere on the other end of Europe. Mustafa was getting drunk with Allison’s father at his party in the posh part of Edinburgh.
Allison’s father was a chatterbox and Mustafa pretended he understood more then 20 percent of the words that were coming his way. The Scotsman went on and on about the process of aging whiskey and Mustafa humored him, the whole time trying to strategically maneuver his host so he could steal glances at his daughter. He was in love with Allison. He had met her the first day in Scotland because she did promotions for the venue. She had a boyfriend and was way out of his league physically. He read once that some poets would allow themselves to fall deeply in love and then break up on purpose just to have inspiration for their tragic love poems. He was like that. For him there was nothing better then being young, skinny, and sad about girls.
At first the Bosnians and the Scots did not mix at all, but as alcohol blurred the cultural border, things got better. Mustafa played Green Day songs on his host’s Gibson and everybody sang along. Allison’s father kept saying that the new generations had no idea what music was and that three chords over and over again did not constitute a song. Allison said to disregard his comments and sat in front of him, bobbing her head. Some of her girlfriends followed. So it wasn’t exactly the blackest day of his year.