by Ismet Prcic
When, after some time, he came out, hunched over, slow and watchful as though he were walking through a marked minefield, and came over to our bench to retrieve his coat, he wore his face like a disguise. We all looked at him trying to read into his expression, his mannerisms, and his overall vibe, but he avoided our gazes by stubbornly staring at the floor. He mumbled a quick good luck and exited into the street, still in his shirt and pullover. There, he put on his coat, buttoned it up, took out a pair of blue woolen gloves, probed his way into them, raised his collar all the way to his ears, looked to the right, looked to the left, and walked out into the slush.
“You think they let him in?” someone asked no one in particular.
“No way,” offered someone else.
From where I was sitting I saw him stop a little way down the sidewalk and stare at the sky and the twirling descent of snow for more than a minute, his legs apart, his arms opening as if to receive a blessing or a punishment. I couldn’t tell if he was thanking the heavens for a miraculous break or cursing them for their cold and egregious injustice. Eventually he started walking again and became indistinguishable in the current of people. The pigeon was oblivious and just kept on blinking against the wind.
“Prchich,” mispronounced the woman with the clipboard and I rose and followed her through the white doorway, scratching off the stares from the back of my head. As soon as the door swung shut, she asked me to please keep my emotions in check when I went out no matter the outcome of my particular case, just to be considerate of the other applicants’ feelings. I asked her if she could tell me if the man before me was accepted or denied and she said she couldn’t disclose that kind of information. I entered the processing office with a smile, realizing I didn’t have to act for the time being.
Father was relieved when I told him the news from the carved-to-shit booth in the main post office. He didn’t understand why I was still mad at him for not arranging the deal with Branka like he had promised and why I wanted him to give the receiver to Mother. Mother said happy words when I told her. The happier her words the harsher was the unspoken feeling of doom and regret escaping from her voice. Her baby was moving across the globe and the knot in her throat suddenly snapped when this dawned on her, and she started sobbing, apologized for it, said not to mind, that she was just overly emotional, and quickly wrapped up the conversation.
Allison shrieked my ear off, then said happy words that sounded genuine but distant, and the automated voice said we had only another minute and we spent it saying I love you in all the languages we knew: Ich liebe dich, volim te, mahal kita, te amo . . .
Outside, the street was a-clink with Hare Krishna. The procession of about twenty people, mostly in orange and white, stopped at the entrance to some kind of a superstore and danced and chanted to the accompaniment of a percussion squad. Passersby lingered to check out the festivities. It felt like everyone was suddenly celebrating my personal good news. The machinal of reality that I had observed earlier in the day was thus gloriously interrupted and I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. I danced and sang and even followed the group when they started marching again. One of the leading percussionists, an American, complimented my huge grin, saying I should do commercials.
By the time I got back to the apartment they had already picked up broken Ana from the sidewalk, gathered all the scattered pieces of her, shoved them in a bag with the rest of her, and taken her away in an ambulance without sirens. They had already come with a cistern and melted away the bloody slush and washed away all the mess. They had already dispersed the gawking crowds and silenced the futile rumors. They’d done all that before I got there and entered the lobby.
I checked the mail and found an envelope with Ana’s sister’s name on it without any address or postal code and, puzzled, climbed six stories’ worth of staircase to Mina’s door, in front of which a bald police officer was talking to the teary woman from the apartment next door and writing things down in a little notebook.
Still, both eyes and mouth agape, I had no idea what kind of note I was carrying in my hand.
. . . a story is not compulsory, just a life, that’s the mistake I
made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself,
whereas life alone is enough.
Samuel Beckett
NOTEBOOK TWO:
SHARDS*
* * *
* Left behind by Ismet Prci at ____ Dwight Street, San Diego, CA 92104, his last actual residence.
(. . . porcus omnivorus . . .)
You know you’re dreaming, because you’ve seen this sneaker moving like this before. The movement you’re seeing is not voluntary. There’s an outside force. Something else is moving the foot and with it the sneaker. A hog.
The sneaker is a Reebok, white and baby blue, reasonably clean, its laces tied neatly. It bobs up and down several times, then comes to a gradual, bouncy stop for a few moments of pregnant immobility, then goes through a few sideways moves that make one of the lace loops sway like a noose, after which there’s another wicked stretch of time in which the sneaker is not moving because the hog is chewing. You can’t see the hog but you know it’s chewing, because you’ve seen the sneaker move and then not move like this before. You’ve seen it so many times it’s boring, like the back of your own hand, like your own dick. Bosnian Muslims don’t eat pigs but pigs have no problem eating Bosnian Muslims. Or anybody else. They have no problem eating dead meat. It’s all very boring. And before the close-up of the moving sneaker widens enough to show a whole human leg and the hog munching on its thigh, stopping to chew, then digging in again, making the lace loop sway, you come to on a sofa in someone’s house in the Valley.
Yesterday, after work, your coworkers said there was a party, that you should come. You took a ride with them because you didn’t want to drive, because Jason gave you speed and pot and you felt keyed up and groggy at the same time. They promised to drive you back to your car but here you are still in the Valley on a Saturday, sweating all over someone’s couch.
The sofa sags like clammy old tits. The ceiling has a cellulite problem and from a poster on the wall a white man and a black man are pointing their guns at you, about to blow you away. On the coffee table there’s an array of remote controls, some smut magazines, mounds of pistachio shells, and a soldier’s helmet half-full of peanut M&M’s. You swing your feet to the carpet and sit up. The air around you is yeasty with half-drunk, abandoned beers. You try to remember whose place this is but can’t picture any faces. It scares you, this inability. What if they don’t remember you, either? What if, after coming across you lying on their sofa, glistening, they decide to call the cops on you? You stand up, trying to make no noise.
On top of the paranoia you feel like shit. You feel like someone went through your intestinal tubing with a blowtorch. You’re buzzing with this unreachable, untreatable pain. You’re vibrating with it. You pick up a long-dead beer from underneath the table and pound it.
There’s a short, plosive sound somewhere, a door closing or a collision of two things, then a screech of metal against metal as a shower curtain is pulled open, and a gush of water against bathtub enamel. You set the bottle silently on the table and locate the front door. The next moment you’re outside, running across the grass, past parked SUVs and mailboxes and driveway hoops, everywhere underneath the scorching California sun that sits smack in the middle of the merciless blue void.
The Valley is a hellhole with palm trees, a perpetual quasi suburbia. You walk briskly for about fifteen minutes and wouldn’t be able to find your way back even if you wanted to. Neighborhood-watch signs make you queasy. You think you see curtains move in the windows. There’s a brawny bald fellow tinkering inside the gaping crocodile mouth of an El Camino in a driveway, and you dash across the street to avoid him.
You need a ride. You need a ride or a way to call for a ride, probably a phone. It’s a long way back to Thousand Oaks from here.
You check your pocke
ts and find a guitar pick, some bitten-off nails, a rolled-up Sav-on Pharmacy receipt, and no coins. Your wallet has your driver’s license, an ATM card, your Bosnian ID card, some business cards with chicken scratches on the backs of them, names and numbers, idiotic ideas, makeshift maps, book titles, band names, bullshit. There’s no money, which means you’ll have to find an ATM, get out a twenty, take it to a store somewhere to break it, then find a pay phone. You think if you just follow a major street you’ll eventually hit a minimall.
Mostly there aren’t any sidewalks. Walking is discouraged in the Valley. Motorists at red lights gawk at you or avoid your eyes and lock their doors.
You’ve seen pigs eat dead villagers: big, pink, fleshy hogs feeding on gray, wet, dead people. You’ve seen other things, too: chopped-off heads near makeshift goalposts, human-ear necklaces, dickless, toothless, breastless, scrotumless, noseless, eyeless, fingerless, armless, headless, legless, pissed-on, shat-on, came-on, carved-up, stabbed-through, burned-up, bludgeoned, fucked-with bodies of men and women you knew. You’ve seen all this and yet the images that come back to you now, night after night, nap after nap, are from the TV footage you saw toward the beginning of the war: a close-up of a sneaker, moving, then stopping, then moving again until a slow pan reveals the hog.
Memory is bullshit.
Stop it.
You make yourself look around. Corner of Somewhere and Someplace. The crosswalk signal is red. Cars are zooming by: an Asian lady in white, a fat redhead smoking a cigarette, a man with a thin mustache, a hippie stereotype in a tie-dyed VW van, a police cruiser. You can’t stand standing there.
There’s a song in your head, something accordiony from back home. You think about firing bullets into unsuspecting bodies, rib cages ripping open, heads caving, oozing stuff. The music in your head gets louder and you realize that it’s not exclusively in your head.
A man wearing black slacks and a wife-beater stumbles out of a beige house and opens a tall door to the backyard, where apparently someone is playing a song you know on an accordion. He’s yelling into his cell phone and it takes a surreal moment for you to realize that he’s speaking Bosnian.
“. . . park it on the grass, then, I guess—fuck it!” he says, then waves to someone behind you.
You turn around and find a burgundy minivan there, its driver with one hand on the wheel and the other holding a cell phone to his ear, waiting for you to get out of the way. As soon as you hop aside he has the minivan slanted up the gentle slope of the lawn, its fender kissing a rosebush. You look up and down the street. There isn’t a parking spot in sight for miles. It’s another party. With Bosnians this time.
Out of the van comes a gaggle of boys and girls, all of them screeching in English. The wife-beater man makes them all high-five him before he lets them squeeze by and fuck off into the backyard.
“Domaine,” says the driver, locking the van with one of those key remotes. Be-beep! Both men raise their arms like they haven’t seen each other for years, step into a hearty hug, then smack kisses on each other’s cheeks, three apiece.
“Come on in, come in!”
“Did you start without me?”
“Shit yeah, we started last night.”
“I heard, I heard!”
The driver walks toward the door, then realizes that the man in the wife-beater hasn’t moved.
“Are you coming?”
“Yeah, I just want to smoke a cigarette in peace. Go get yourself a beer.”
“Hurry up.”
You watch all this like it’s a play; it isn’t until the man in the wife-beater gives you a look that you realize you’re just standing there, staring at him lighting up. He’s thick and meaty, older than you, with thinning black hair held up and against his skull with what must be bucketfuls of gel, all of it painstakingly combed to give the whole head a ribbed texture, like in Mafia pictures.
“You want one?” he says to you in English.
You don’t usually like talking to Bosnians in America. You feel like they stand in the way of your complete assimilation. You don’t like the doubling of words in your head, things coming out in Bonglish. But then you remember you still need to make a phone call.
“All right, give me one,” you say to the man in Bosnian, watching his eyes pop open, bloodshot and blue, almost teary.
“Are you here for the thing?” he asks, lighting your cigarette, a menthol, nodding back toward the house. You get a whiff of his breath and for a second you’re back with your dad and his slivovitz-drinking friends, yelling at the soccer game on TV, clapping yourself on the forehead when they just miss it by an inch, watching them swear and say stuff like “My aunt Devleta would put that in” or “Fuck his mother, he’s got two left legs.”
“No, man—I was just walking by and heard the music.”
“Where are you from?”
“Tuzla. You?”
“The whole of Tuzla a single goat did milk, and then keeps on bragging that it feeds on cheese.” It’s an old song about your town, and he’s smiling like he’s proud he remembers it after all these years. “I’ve been there a million times. My ex-girlfriend studied there. Jasna Babi. You knew her?”
“I don’t think.”
“Kind of shortish, blonde hair?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Tits up to here?”
“I don’t think so, man.”
“Man, she fucked like a pike.”
He takes a drag, a sad toke of nicotine fumes and nostalgia, looking glassily away. You try to emulate him.
“She got blown up by our own shell,” he says, and smokes. You don’t know what to tell him, so you just ape his mannerisms. You read in How to Make Friends that it puts strangers at ease.
“I told her a million times to fuckin’ get out,” he continues, but then stops himself. Something like anger blows across his face. His eyes change. “Oh, fuck her. Her fuckin’ choice.” He smokes some more and then says, in English, “There’s plenty of pussy in the sea,” and laughs, smacking you on the back so hard it uproots you. His cigarette is almost to the filter now, and you still have to ask about the phone.
“Listen—” you start.
“When did you get here? To the States.”
“Uh . . . end of ninety-five.”
“How’d you get out?”
“Got wounded in battle. They let me go.”
“Wait a minute, you were a soldier?”
He’s suddenly very close to you, looking into your eyes like a lover or a nemesis. You nod, leaning backward. You swear to God he starts to cry a little, embraces you like he did the driver earlier, and kisses you on both cheeks.
“You have to come in and party,” he manages through his genuinely shrinking throat, then hugs you some more. Clamping your neck, he maneuvers you toward his house. “I won’t take no for an answer. Not even in theory.”
“I should—”
“My pops would love to meet you,” he says, ushering you past a line of color-coded garbage bins. “He still can’t forgive himself for not going back to fight when you guys needed it the most.”
Most of the backyard, you see, is taken over by a long, white tent. Underneath it forty or fifty people are packed around a long table, fanning themselves with paper plates, gulping down beers, yelling, laughing, standing up to make announcements. Little kids run in and out of the house with sticks in their hands, marshmallows stuck on their tips. Their mothers run after them, screaming for them not to run. They scream in Bosnian and the kids answer in whiny English, complaining that so-and-so’s mother is letting so-and-so do what he likes, look. In the yard’s far corner there’s a kidney-shaped hole in the grass, the beginnings of a pool, in which a hairy man with a T-shirt tied around his head is using the shallow end to spit-roast a pig. Something is a little off.
“Here,” says the wife-beater man, handing you a Beck’s. “Let’s find you a spot at the table.”
As you follow him you figure it out. Next to the tent t
here’s a three-colored flag with a yellow symbol in the middle, an Orthodox Christian cross and a Cyrillic S in each of its quadrants, four S’s you’ve seen before. They stand for Samo sloga Srbina spašava, your enemy’s creed from the war you fought in and survived: Only Unity Saves a Serb.
You look for the easiest way to get the fuck out of there. Through the house, maybe? Or across the pool, onto that bench, and over the wall into someone else’s yard? Definitely not the way you came. Too many bodies to go through. You’re mad at yourself. You should have realized something earlier: three kisses for the Holy Trinity, not to mention the pig in the pool. Shit. You sidestep timidly toward the house.
The wife-beater man has made it to the head of the table now, and he leans in and speaks directly to someone sitting there whose face you cannot see because there’s an enormous blond hairdo in your line of vision, like a clown’s Afro. You don’t see him until he stands up, wobbly on his feet, this perfervid patriarch dressed in Chetnik war paraphernalia, šajkača, kokarda, greasy gray beard down to his bellybutton, a pistol grip protruding from his pants.
“Where is this soldier man?” he yells, looking around while his son tries to keep him standing. He speaks in a patchy Serbian dialect with a rural Bosnian lilt, only a Bosnian Serb, a wannabe. You’re six feet from the back door when his hammered eyes finally find your own. The man smiles and waves you over.
Running right now would not be a good thing. A calm voice from within tells you to do what you’re told. You raise your bottle to the man and take a royal swig to buy yourself some time, then saunter over. Some of the people around the table pat your back. Those that can’t reach you raise their glasses in your honor, then go back to their conversations.