Shards: A Novel

by Ismet Prcic

  “Make some room for the war hero,” snarls the patriarch at the clown-fro lady, who has a face full of deviled egg.

  “I’m done anyway,” she blurts, spraying egg bits out of her mouth as she stands. The wife-beater man and his pops shepherd you into her seat. Up close you can see that the old man has an elaborate tattoo on his shriveling forearm, a black shield with a red and blue border. In its center floats a two-headed eagle with two yellow swords held crossed beneath a human skull. Cyrillic letters are inked above and below it: FOR KING AND FATHERLAND. FREEDOM OR DEATH.

  In 1993, your unit crawled through a sticky minefield to take out a machine-gun nest as prep work for the early-morning offensive. The Claw, the leader of the unit and a truly insane individual, crept into the nest without his boots on and stabbed the last Chetnik in the back. He came out with a souvenir, a banner with an identical skull-and-swords design. A pirate flag, he called it.

  The patriarch claps your back and squeezes your arm, telling you how his dad was a Chetnik in the Second World War under the direct command of General Dragoljub “Draža” Mihailovi and so were both of his brothers, and how he, the youngest, was too young to fight back then and how his father liked him the least because of that, and sent him to “Čemerika” without a dinar to carve a place for himself in the world. As he talks you start thinking of a different way to get out of here. Plum brandy.

  “We should have a toast for staying alive despite everything,” you say, and swig your beer again.

  “Wait for us,” the son says, looking around for his beverage.

  “You’re gonna toast with beer?” You turn to the old man. “We need something stronger for this, right?”

  “He’s right,” the father says. “Miloš, go get the rakija.”

  An effete, shuddering fan trained on the back of the old man’s head putters to a stop. He swears, leans down to the grass, and fumbles with its cord until, resuscitated, it starts to twirl again, halfheartedly.

  “Connection,” the old man explains.

  You clink your beer against his and you both drink. He starts to talk again.

  “See, both of my brothers were savagely killed. Dragiša, God save his soul, was caught and executed by the partisans in 1942 or 1943, we are not sure exactly when. His body was never found. Zdravko, God save his soul, was axed to death by the Zeleni Kadar in northeastern Bosnia. Fucking Turks. They chopped him up into pieces like a birch log. He came back to us in four burlap sacks.”

  He slams his fist on the table like he’s in a bad play. Deviled eggs jiggle on his plate. His eyes well up. You hold his gaze while tightening your lips and shake your head in your best approximation of commiseration.

  “After that my father hated me, said that if I’d been with my brothers to watch their backs they wouldn’t be dead now. But I was only twelve years old.”

  Miloš comes back with a plastic Fanta bottle full of yellowy liquid and a tray of clashing shot glasses. As he passes by her a woman in black stands up from the table.

  “What do you want that for?” she booms at him. She has a mouthful of gleaming golden teeth.

  “To drink.”

  “You want to kill your father?”

  “He told me to get it for a toast.”

  “It’s the middle of the day and he’s drunk already. You’ll give him a heart attack in this heat.”

  “Raki thins the blood, Mother,” he says, and puts a shot glass in front of his father and another in front of you. He fills them all the way to the lip and then pours himself one as well.

  “To survival, despite the enemy’s best efforts at achieving otherwise,” you say, and raise your glass. Miloš and his father follow.

  “Whiny Turkish cunts!”

  “Fuck their mothers on their shitty prayer rugs!”

  You hold up yours until everyone at the table who wants to join in has a beverage in their hand, then slam it to the back of your throat, feeling like someone napalmed your stomach ulcer. It takes a conscious effort to suppress your urge to vomit. It’s not the brandy making you sick.

  Your mother’s body flashes in your mind’s eye, a skeletal figure too brittle and head-shy to hug after her stint at the camp. You shake your head to get it off your mind. In her stead emerge fallen trench-mates, their faces rigid and pale like papier-mâché masks. And before the floodgates are open all the way you slap yourself, hard.

  More toasts are shouted from all around the table: toasts to dead relatives, to dead relatives’ saints, to the personal saints of the host’s family members (his name is Jovan Cvetkovi, you hear), to slogans like Serbia-to-Tokyo, to President Miloševi, etc. Every time a shot goes down Jovan’s gullet he tries to stand up, pull out his weapon, and fire into the air, but Miloš and some younger cousins step in and dissuade him. They remind him that he’s in the Valley, in America. In response Jovan drops back into his chair and moans. You’re livid, but the sight of that Zastava sticking out of the old man’s pants keeps you from doing anything stupid.

  Meanwhile the food’s been served, and now everyone’s plowing through it: soups, stuffed squash, stuffed peppers, savory pastry coils. There’s an accordion player, a fat person in a green felt hat with a crow’s feather stuck in the band and a mustache of the sort that vandals draw on posters. He plays and sings with varying degrees of success. Every once in a while he gets a clutch of people to get up and dance kolo. They wave you over every time, and eventually you tell them the shrapnel in your leg cuts off your circulation when you sit for too long and Jovan yells at them not to bother you. Really there’s no shrapnel, just nausea and cloying memories, confusion.

  At some point they unload the pig, head and all, placing it on the table so it faces you with one eye closed and the other agape and forlorn. They pull the spit out of its ass and put half a lemon in its mouth. They pour beer over it and laugh and smack their lips and ask for cutlery. They’re all really happy.

  You’re ripping apart. You see your mother climbing through an open window in Tuzla and your arms grab for her in the Valley. Your muscles remember how they had to hold on to her when she bucked and shrieked that day, trying to end it. Let me go, you hear her say, and the people around you dig into the pig. Your arms are rigid, holding on to nothing. Your stomach climbs into your chest. The sneaker moves in your mind, then doesn’t. You want to run away or cry or start swinging.

  In your heart you don’t know what you want.

  When some woman serves you a big, glistening piece of flesh, you throw up all over it, all over the plate, the side of the table, your lap. Somebody tilts your chair and you hit the grass, still vomiting.

  “Lightweight,” you hear Miloš say. You kneel there.

  The woman, the clown head, helps you up. She walks you through the back door and into the house, shielding your head with her hand when you pass below a chandelier, and puts you in front of the bathroom door. She knocks.

  “Hold your horses,” says a female voice from inside.

  She raises your head.

  “Are you all right?”

  You grunt.

  “Are you sure?”

  You nod.

  “Okay. Wait until she’s done and use the bathroom.”

  “Thank you,” you manage, covering your mouth for her benefit.

  “Don’t puke on my carpet now,” she says, smiling. Then she’s gone.

  You look around the hallway. Pictures everywhere, collages: Jovan in a Chetnik uniform, Jovan in a suit, younger Jovan with seventies lamb chops and a mustache, his wife in a floral-patterned dress, hugging a baby to her chest. A family portrait with a head count of more than a hundred. Miloš as a child on a donkey at a beach somewhere, Miloš on prom night with a blonde date, Miloš at the wheel of a red Camaro. A huge portrait of General “Draža” Mihailovi with his round little glasses and the puff around his eyes and a beard to match Jovan’s, only blacker. Next to it, framed in thin wood, is a photograph of a purplish medal. You get closer to see the caption. It reads:

>   General Dragoljub Mihailovi; distinguished himself in an outstanding manner as commander in chief of the Yugoslavian Armed Forces and later as minister of war by organizing and leading important resistance forces against the enemy, which occupied Yugoslavia from December 1941 to December 1944. Through the undaunted efforts of his troops, many United States airmen were rescued and returned safely to friendly control. General Mihailovi and his forces, although lacking adequate supplies and fighting under extreme hardship, contributed materially to the Allied cause and were materially instrumental in obtaining a final Allied Victory.

  —Legion of Merit award citation given by Harry S. Truman, President, The White House, March 29, 1948

  Underneath, in Cyrillic longhand, someone has written:

  The highest award the U.S. government can bestow upon a foreign national.

  Your whole life, since you were six years old, your teachers have told you that “Draža” Mihailovi was a bad man, a quisling, someone who fought with the Nazis against the Yugoslav Army and ordered the slaughter of thousands of Yugoslavs who were not of his faith. But here he is, an ordained American hero. You stagger away in rage. In fear.

  No one’s come out of the bathroom yet. You go farther down the corridor, into a bedroom, and find a phone. You dial your apartment and after two rings your roommate picks up.

  “Hello.”

  “Eric, I need a ride from you, dude. I’m in a pickle.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In the Valley.”

  “Still at that party?”

  “No, I’m in the house of a psycho and need to get the fuck outta here, pronto.”

  “Can it wait? I’m making ramen.”

  “You should be in the car right now, dude.”

  As you say “dude” there are four pistol shots in rapid succession: BANGBANGBANGBANG! You look around and notice an envelope on the bed stand addressed to some other Cvetkovi;. The mother.

  “Are those gunshots?”

  Ignoring the question, you read the address into the phone twice. You’re pleading now. “Come get me, man.”

  You hear some commotion out in the corridor, and turn around in time to catch a glimpse of Miloš and his mother hurrying down the hall, arguing about where to hide the pistol, fussing.

  You remember a cataclysmic night on the front line, when the snow was the color of bone in the close-to-full moonlight and the branches were spread above you like blood vessels on the anemic belly of the night sky and the bullets dove from nowhere, crashing into soft things and bouncing off hard things, and the enemy mortars smashed everything into powder. You remember the story the Claw told you that night, the one about how, some time ago, he was given orders to crawl up a hill and rendezvous with another squad of guys who were crawling up from the other side. He was supposed to wear a white band around his left arm to distinguish himself from the enemy, since otherwise their uniforms were virtually identical. He told you about how he reached the top and lizarded his way into a trench full of guys with white armbands on their left arms, squatting there, shooting the shit, until finally he realized that they were actually Chetniks, that by some strange twist of fate they’d decided on the same white armband to set themselves apart. You see the Claw keeping his cool, creeping backward, silently cocking his Kalashnikov, and killing them all from behind.

  The bathroom’s open now and you lock yourself in, determined to wait it out. The little room is decorated in belabored beige: beige tiles, beige shower curtain, red and beige towels, your own beige face in the mirror. You splash water on yourself, take some into your mouth, spit it out, take it in, and spit it out. Through the small, pebbled window you can see the accordion player typing an intricate Balkanesque melody on two keyboards simultaneously, acting like no shots were fired at all. You sit on the beige toilet lid, put your head into your beige hands, and stare at the tile grid on the floor, at a wastebasket, at the grid again. You think of death and Mother. You try to figure out what’s right.

  The wastebasket is small, wicker, and lined with plastic. You push at the base of it with the edge of your foot and the wads of tissue tumble and rearrange themselves, exposing a dull glint beneath. You reach in and retrieve Jovan’s gun.

  Your hand knows what to do with it; your index finger turns inward. The grip feels good. You sniff the barrel and it smells of youth, of Bosnia. You switch the safety off and stand up. You cock. In the mirror you look like the Claw, standing there against the beige. You lean closer. Your eyes are all pain.

  Police sirens start off low and grow higher until they shut up the accordion player and silence the clamoring Serbs. There are conversations you can’t really hear. Questions are asked. Things are blamed on the kids, fireworks. Apologies are given and warnings issued. You realize you’re standing there with a gun in your hand. Where is Eric? How long does it take to get here from Thousand Oaks in an Oldsmobile?

  You pace the bathroom. You hide the gun. You pick it up again. Hide it. Pick it up. You lift the tank lid, toss the gun in. You close the tank.

  Half an hour later a car horn sounds and you know it’s your ride. There’s a party going on in the backyard again. You focus on what you need to do, take a deep breath, and get out of the bathroom and down the hallway. There are kids sitting around the table in the kitchen, laughing. You make your way across the living room. The white front door is the only thing you see. You can feel it, this elation in your chest, this glee in the muscles of your face. Your lips curl. You reach for the doorknob and wrap your fist around it.

  “Soldier!” Jovan yells from behind you. “Where are you going?”

  He stumbles toward you, pushing himself off the walls, almost falls but doesn’t. He makes it to the back of the giant armchair and, with fifteen or so feet ahead of him without anything to balance himself on, stops there and leans on it with both hands.

  “Stay a while longer.”

  “I have to go, sir. I didn’t mean to stay this long. I have some things I have to do.”

  He grunts. “Eh, okay. Okay, but come over here before you go so I can thank you for what you’ve done for us.”

  He raises his arms, stumbles forward, and catches himself just before he hits the back of the chair with his face. The car horn sounds again. You can see the brown Delta 88 right in front of the house.

  “That’s my ride,” you tell him, and start to step out the door.

  “Tell me one thing.”

  You wait. You turn to him.

  “How many of them did you—,” he stops, dragging his left forefinger across his neck, “—with your own hand?”

  You look at him, this son of a bitch. His eyes smirk. You want to say, I’m Mustafa Nali, but you can’t. You want to forgive him. In your heart you want to hug him but you’re afraid you’d break his spine. You want to shake his hand but you’re afraid you’d pull his whole arm out of its socket. You want to kiss his cheek and spit upon it.

  “One night I infiltrated an enemy trench and killed six with one clip. They thought I was one of them. They were joking around. I just mowed them all down.”

  He smiles and nods his head.

  “Good for you,” he says.

  Excerpts from Ismet Prci’s Diary

  from June 2003

  Melissa is gone, mati. Gone.

  We kept fighting. For months she kept . . . she said she found motel receipts and drugs in my dirty jeans while doing laundry. WHAT?

  She became so . . . cold, like she does, and I felt like I was gonna shoot her, so I stormed out of the place before I did. Drove all night. Camped in the woods. When I came back she was gone.

  She’s still gone. Ben and Jen (roommates) are gone, too, but they will be back in San Diego tomorrow. From outrigger racing in Hawaii. Melissa won’t be. She left for good. I’m alone with Ben’s cat, drinking.

  I called Dr. Cyrus at midnight. Like a broken record. Take a Xanax and write, he said. Write everything. He wants everything? Here’s everything:

  (. . . a full
minute of everything,

  for cyrus . . .)

  . . . home sweet home and on a love seat reclined groggy with alcohol and a five-day camping trip with ticks and bears and giant trees you sit in the low glow of a 40-watt bulb with a journal and the TV on and Johnny cat is psychotically chewing his fur off and the insides of his hind legs are even more bare than when you left and his eyes are huge and loveless and the aquarium sits half-full or half-empty the fish have been moved elsewhere since it started leaking and shorted out the answering machine and there’s a week’s worth of Los Angeles Times Orange County Editions still in their plastic auras unread and splotched with desert dreamscapes broken wire fences camouflage uniforms and mushroom clouds and everything is a mess and clustered against the cyclorama of colorful junk mail offering junk food and junk dreams for prices a junky could afford are white envelopes reminding you of approaching due dates and a lady longlegs pokes her appendages at the old wine stain under the strict surveillance of the cat too lazy to get off his fat ass and hunt his own food and a car drives into a desert sunset on-screen and the metallic letters spell out NISSAN and then the angry young white man comes back on his baby face wrinkled with tough at titude his whiny voice gets bleeped a lot and he swears by artistic expression and spits on censorship and laughs all the way to the bank and his song bounces in the background and your hand slips to the floor and investigates around until it finds the “Kai Elua Outrigger Canoe Club” mug half-full or half-empty of diet orange soda and Albertsons vodka out of a plastic bottle purchased with your Discover card since your bank account said $18.69 last time you checked some months ago and the liquid goes down with painful ease and your eyes get a bit watery from all the mess around so you press a button to change the things you can change at the moment and the angry young white man vanishes into a representation of a faraway land on-screen with tongue-breaking names for towns split sometimes with a dash and the south is scribbled on with red and black arrows pointing north and the drawings of tanks and planes are harmless and look like something from the Cartoon Network and a white-haired white-collared white dude with a foot and a half in the grave points a pointer with his sagging hand and explains in a loveless voice “what we are doing” using sports rhetoric like “we hit the target” and “our team is easily maneuverable” and “we have the best team in the world” and fairy-tale rhetoric of bad guys and good guys victims and bullies right and wrong and somewhere across the globe civilians are being “liberated” liberated of their lives personal property culture pursuit of happiness and you press the button again as your eyes water a little bit more and the cat licks his ass and more liquid goes down and you find a bump on your back and it better not be another tick that Lyme disease shit is nothing to laugh about and some other white-haired white-collared white dude talks to a handful of white-haired white-collared white dudes about his newest book on multicultural diversity and you mute the sucker silent and imagine him running a marathon in sweltering heat and drinking Gatorade that turns his sweat green and for a moment everything is silent—then the phone screams too loud and the cat sprints into the corridor and your mind flashes to Bosnia and to a mortar shell hitting your high school gym and its detonation tossing you over three meters of tiled floor into a pinup board and your head buzzing like a hysterical motherboard and you barely hearing the sirens you know are shrill and your thoughts are comatose with the overwhelming flashback forcing itself into your awareness reminding you that things might not be so peachy after all and your heart pumps hard but off beat and the way the air escapes out of you without your control over it foreshadows the impending panic attack that freezes you in your tracks and you should go and answer that phone before it rings again screams again but you cannot move and everything is suspended as if paused by a remote control so that the being watching you dreaming you inventing you on the spot can go and take a leak squeeze a zit out and marvel at its chiseled facial features while you wait for the crushing collapse of your inner system and the ascent of baseless fear paranoia will destroy ya but it doesn’t come a false alarm and you are relieved and sweaty and only if your heart would start again and then it does and you start for the phone which screams again but this time you’re ready and prepared and you put aside the remote control get off the love seat step over a bunch of crap and pick up the telephone.