Shards: A Novel (8 page)

A gray ashworm of about half my mother’s cigarette died, unsmoked, against the filter and fell silently onto the carpet. I scooped it up into an ad from a magazine and threw it in the trash. Coming
back I saw her bring the filter to her lips, realize it was just a filter, and then look around the floor for a singed spot or a small fire, mildly amused that she could find none.

Father called right before dinner, said he was okay, said that the Yugoslav National Army, mirroring what they had done in Sarajevo, attempted to evacuate the base and move all its artillery to the hills around town, where they would be in a perfect position to systematically shell it, and that the local group calling itself the Patriotic League ambushed them and seized . . . He got disconnected midsentence and didn’t call again. My mother served the dinner to everyone except herself and sat smoking by the open window, assuring us all that she just wasn’t hungry. I forgot and made the cardinal mistake of audibly slurping up a couple of spoonfuls of my hot hot soup and Zvonko lost it. He turned purple, smacked his napkin against the table, and gave me another lecture on how to eat with my mouth closed like a civilized human being. During the rest of the dinner nobody said anything.

I read late into the night, something inappropriate for my age, something about rich couples lounging in Jacuzzis filled with champagne, rubbing cocaine on their gums and the tips of their pink penises and rubbery, swollen clitorises, and fucking, fucking, fucking all night long. When I finally turned off the lamp I noticed an orange dot of fire across the attic room in the darkness above where my mother’s mattress was, silently turning brighter for a moment or two and then dimming down again.

Whispers:

“Mom?”

“Yeah?”

“You still up?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you okay?”

Silence. Then:

“Yeah.”

I didn’t know what else to ask, so I let the silence win. It gloated there in the dark, humming. I closed my eyes and pressed my cheek against the cool side of the pillow.

“What are we gonna do?” she whispered, and my eyes shot open. Her voice was so quiet and out of nowhere that it sounded like thoughts in my own head. “I can’t . . . I just . . . I can’t stand it here. I’ll break down. The way they’re treating . . .”

She stopped herself. The orange dot did its lighthouse imitation.

“We have to be thankful to them for letting us stay here.”

“What did you say?” I asked, though I heard it well enough.

“Nothing. Go to sleep.”

The last straw came the very next day in the form of a field mouse.

For more than a month while we were in Zagreb, Mother felt so bad about burdening Zvonko’s family that she took it upon herself to work like a maniac and earn our keep. She provided and made all the food, paying for it with our meager and rapidly dwindling savings. She scrubbed every square inch of tile, polished every wooden surface, every chimney brick and window. She vacuumed all the rugs and did all the laundry. She did all the dishes and then she did some more. She had become, pretty much, a live-in maid, this voiceless creature in yellow rubber gloves, kneeling on the floor and scouring, stopping only to stare and smoke. The problem of course was that Zvonko and Zana, and even their daughter, got used to food just appearing on their plates and dirty clothes vanishing off their floors only to reappear washed, ironed, and folded in their drawers the next day. They started to complain if their socks weren’t folded the way they wanted, or if there was
no beer in the fridge, or if the vacuum cleaner was fucking up the TV reception. On top of all that, they were my father’s cousins and, like his immediate family, thought my mom of inferior birth.

Our last day in Zagreb, Zvonko was watching TV, Zana was in their bedroom with a migraine, and Mother was looking for a pot when a little mouse ran out from the pantry and stopped, shivering, in the corner of two cabinets. Being grossed out by a thing like that, Mother asked Zvonko if he could take care of it. Annoyed, he called for Zana to do it, who in turn called him an idiot and told him that her head was about to split open and what the hell was he thinking. Puffing and swearing, he wrestled his ass out of an armchair, which perked up and grew like dough, thundered into the kitchen, and stomped on the little creature with his heel. Blood spurted on the cabinets, over the tile. He picked up the minuscule remains, threw them in the trash, and walked back to his armchair, leaving bloody heel prints on the tile, on the hardwood floor, and on the carpet. Mother suppressed a gag and asked him if he could please take out the garbage, and he said that it was not Friday yet and turned the TV on really loud.

That was it.

Mother first smoked a cigarette, looking out the window, her back hunched, her elbows on the sill, and then took the garbage out herself. It took her a long time. When she came back she went straight for our stuff and started packing. Zvonko was outraged. My brother cried. I sat there with a book in my lap, dreading the fact that I, judging by the gleam in her eye, probably wouldn’t get to finish it. Even Zana walked out of the bedroom in her nighty, her face like a storm on the horizon, hissing her deeply wounded whys.

“Thank you for all the help,” Mother said, “but we’ve been here over a month now and it’s time for us to leave. We don’t want to be a burden anymore.”

“Where are you gonna go?” asked Zvonko, as if calling a bluff. There was nowhere to go.

“To the Red Crescent with the rest of the refugees,” she said and gave me a crazy look, signaling. I swallowed, put the book on the coffee table, rose, and picked up one of the big bags.

“Think of your children,” boomed Zvonko from the top of the stairs as we made our way to the front door.

We sat on our bags in front of the Zagreb mosque, in the parking lot, in the sun.

The heat made the black asphalt look like crusted-over lava, throbbing and emitting visible waves of the red hell that seemed to boil beneath it. Cars wavered in this radiation, their contours melting, collapsing. Shirtless Bosnian men sat on curbs or squatted in the patches of grass, staring vaguely in the direction of the closed doors of the Red Crescent, their skin baked from field work, their spines, pelvises, ribs evident through it in detail. Their head-scarfed wives, sisters, mothers sat clustered on towels and blankets, fanning one another miserably with newspapers, calling their ill-groomed children to come back.

Mother smoked and rummaged through our bags, zipping open all the compartments and slipping her hand inside them, looking for something or satisfying a compulsive need to touch everything she owned. She offered us sandwiches and consolations and every half hour or so walked over to a phone booth on the corner. Through the glass we saw her go through the same motions of putting a card into the phone, pressing buttons and listening, listening, listening for a while, then hanging up, pulling out the card, putting it in her purse, stepping outside, and lighting a cigarette, every time.

Then at some point Cousin Seka showed up in a van with this blond man in a faded Hawaiian shirt. Zvonko had called her and told her what happened, where we were going. Both Seka and the man worked for the Red Crescent, driving food and medicine over treacherous terrains in monthly humanitarian convoys to besieged Bosnians. Mother told us to watch the bags and they walked off a little way and Mehmed and I watched them talk, trying to discern what they were saying from their gestures and body language. When they finally started walking back there was a different aura around my mother.

“Let’s go, guys,” she said, picking up a bag.

“Go where?” asked my brother. I lifted our biggest bag, but the blond man patted my head and took it out of my hands.

“Your cousin Pepa’s in Ðakovo,” Seka said. She had a man smoker’s voice and cool little eyes. I had never heard of any cousin Pepa.

“But we’re not staying in their house,” Mother corrected her. “We’re gonna have a place of our own.”

“Does that mean that we’re not refugees anymore?” asked my brother and everyone’s heart broke a little. Mother put down her bag and hugged us.

Ðakovo is to Zagreb what low shrubbery is to a redwood forest.

The tallest things around were several grain silos and a full-size, redbrick cathedral, the proud symbol of the township. From the steeple, they told me, you could see fields of corn and wheat as far as your eyes could reach.

Cousin Pepa, a jolly gray man, showed us the house where we were to stay. It belonged to his Serbian neighbor, who had left for Belgrade
the night before the war and asked Pepa to take care of his plants. The place was dark, unfinished, an architectural vomitus. Humidity had turned the layers of dust into invisible syrup that coated everything. Fingertips stuck to it like to wet envelope glue and you had to peel them off surfaces with a slight force. The second floor had a big room with a TV, an adjoining dining room, and a kitchen, and mother told Pepa that we loved it and thanked him. We left our stuff on the floor and crossed the street to Pepa’s backyard gazebo, where we were to have a party.

Mehmed and I met some new cousins and neighborhood boys, sneaked into someone’s strawberries, squatted there, and spoiled our dinners. Mother had a few glasses of Riesling and we saw her laugh a couple of times.

A month later Mehmed and I knew all the kids in the neighborhood. We spent our days throwing rocks into this large pond the color of white coffee that the local kids told horror stories about. They said that there were a couple of entire houses under the water and that someone named Vedran Tomaševi
had drowned there—after taking on a dare to bring something from the very bottom, he had dived right down into a chimney, got stuck, and died. They took us to a German bunker from the Second World War and told stories of gang rapes and bludgeonings, Nazi ghosts and overdoses, and they pointed to beer bottles, syringes, and used prophylactics as pieces of evidence. We believed. We had our doubts. We spun our own wild tales.

At the house Mother would turn into a bitch when the news was on and would apologize, kiss our foreheads, and give us snacks when it was over. I imagined what Father was doing in the apartment all by himself. I envied him in a way.

Mother took on the house and cleaned, scrubbed, scoured, polished, washed, sponged up and down, and threw basins of dirty, dark water into the overgrown yard. She revealed dormant colors of wooden furniture and cooked thrifty but scrumptious meals that Mehmed and I pushed around our plates. She sobbed when she thought we weren’t around and sang when she thought we were. She held her fist against her stomach and belched her quiet belches, doubled over by her numerous ulcers. She cut off all her hair in front of the mirror and adopted the look of a mental patient, complete with the eyes of glass, long wall stares, and overly eager song.

Father called sporadically, telling tales of empty stores, deadly shellings, and basement-dwelling dynamics. He said he had to let our parakeet loose because he ran out of birdseed. He said that the hamster was still around.

I read and watched TV and read. I sneaked downstairs and rummaged through the stuff of our unknowing hosts, stealing books, trinkets, tapes they left behind. I jerked off to their magazines, family albums, medical books. I caught flies on their windowpanes and threw them into giant spiderwebs, watching them try to free themselves. Giddily, I observed the spiders tie them up with their butcher’s twine and store them off to the side for later. Mostly, though, I read books.

A day came when Mother decided that she didn’t have anything to lose and she was going to go out and try to feel like a normal person again, despite everything. She made us breakfast of bread and honey and tea and then put on her best outfit, reddened her lips and blackened her lashes, tied a scarf over her jagged do, and walked into the town. She checked out some shops, ran her fingers over fabrics, asked if they had this blouse in a more neutral color or a better size. She bought a fashion magazine, stopped at the corner café, ordered
a cappuccino, and asked the waiter if they had any Bosnian music, anything from across the Sava. He found some bad pop and she sat there in the shade, flipping the colorful pages, her mind in a knot.

In time, she switched to beer, hoping it would loosen her up, which it did, and when she came back to the house the skin around her eyes was mucky with mascara, and she told both of us what had happened, how, while sitting there, she had this amazing vision of standing on top of a mountain, on the edge of a crude road, facing an abyss of crispy pastures and tumultuous foliage in the early, green morning air. She described to us a flock of shivering sheep draped with a gauze of patchy, disappearing fog. She said it was an omen. A good one.

Father telephoned out of nowhere after not being heard from in two weeks. He said he was at the bus station in Ðakovo and needed directions to the house. He had arrived there on one of the first buses to successfully sneak out of the siege of Tuzla. I flew recklessly across the street to Pepa’s house, screaming my brother’s name and jumping over things.

Father was sallow and thin. His clothes caved in on the places where protuberances should have been. There was film in his eyes like he was dead, or old, or just born, or drunk. He ate fast. He was unshaven. When he talked, he talked low. When Pepa would give him wine he talked louder and more often. He shook his head like he still couldn’t believe what he had seen, felt. But talking about war he still was optimistic, still claimed it would not last long, that people were not that stupid to drag it into the winter. At night he talked with Mother, and Mehmed and I lay under our covers, eyes wide open, holding hands, and trying to eavesdrop. We caught words
like
America
and
Zagreb,
Mother’s crying, and Father’s consoling mumbles.