Shards: A Novel (20 page)

The truth was that he only stayed for the first play to make sure we weren’t a bunch of scammers, and in that sense I guess we did our job well. In fact, the only time during that hour and a half when we did something that actually reached him had nothing to do with our art. Quite the opposite. The only thing that reached him was a mistake, a momentary absence of art in one scene when Bokal broke character and let reality become part of the make-believe world.

In the play, the character of the King rules a planet of which he’s the only inhabitant, and when the Little Prince shows up the King tries to convince him to stay so he can finally have a real subject. The Little Prince quickly figures out that the guy’s orders are meaningless and starts to leave. It was at that moment in the scene—right as I turned to the audience and was to deliver my “the grown-ups are certainly very odd” line that finished off each scene—when Bokal cleared his throat and boomed the following words:

“All right. You can go. You can go if Lendo lets you go.”

There was a gasp in the audience.

Some people scoffed, tried to pass it off as coughing, and then quieted down. For a few moments I felt disembodied, surprised by where I was, who I was, what I wanted, why I was so sweaty. I looked through my long wet hair and saw the general’s clenched jaw, his
adjutants looking at him, waiting to see what he would do. He held his mouth clenched for a second longer and then his face opened and he started to laugh. He laughed with abandon, like he was alone or with friends. The rest of the audience soon safely followed suit. I remembered, then delivered, my line and began walking to another planet as Omar played the melodious theme.

The next day we were told to gather proper papers and get photographed.

Luckily and disturbingly, nobody even noticed that Ramona’s Schmeiser was the real thing.

LATE JULY

Right after I had given up looking for anybody who knew Mustafa, a piece of information landed in my lap—his family’s supposed address somewhere in Mejdan. I went to Omar’s to get him to go with me, because Mejdan was a tough neighborhood, but he had found a bottle of paint thinner in his basement and he wanted to huff it.

“I can’t go by myself, man.”

“I know what can give you some courage,” he said, dangling a plastic bag with a soaked rag in it in front of my face.

I saw myself: I’m crying and kissing Asja on a bridge and she turns and walks away and I try to go after her but as I run around the corner it’s nighttime in a foreign city and the tumultuous skies are pouring water on me and wet I dart under the bridge and slip in the grass and fall down the embankment into the river which is frozen and I think I’m a fat child until I look down and see my camouflage
pants and the cold shaft of the Kalashnikov in my hands and the walls of the roofless house I’m in are eroding with projectiles until they disappear altogether revealing a gut-dropping view of a thin distant bridge stretching from a palmy shore across the ocean into the red of the setting sun.

When the high subsided some I marched up the hill to Mejdan and found the address as though in a daze. Once there I didn’t know what to do. It was hot and my mouth was dry and everything looked meaningful, so I sat on a makeshift bench across the dirt road from the property, looking at the little house, the yard.

This is where he lived.

In place of flower beds, every available piece of the yard except for the path to the front door was planted with vegetables in no discernable order. It was like a blind man had done it. There were heads of cabbage strewn among the flattened scallions, tufts of carrot hair popping out of the lettuce, bean vines overtaking the fence and squeezing the tomato plants. Three stalks of corn leaned against one another like drunken buddies. A sunflower was propped on its toes, looking for the master.

Somewhere behind me a radio murmured about no-fly zones, cease-fire agreements, and what Richard Holbrooke had said at the press conference about the Srebrenica massacre. And like that it is a week earlier and my mother wakes me up and tells me to get dressed. What are we doing? I ask, but she just says, Come with me. We go outside and she’s carrying this ocher plastic bag. What’s in that? I ask. Food, she says. Look, she says. I look and see a UN truck pass down Južna Magistrala and, for a second, cannot fathom what’s in it. We walk closer as we watch. It disappears but another one appears—it’s a convoy—and I look closer and still can’t see. I
see movement. Things are moving on these trucks. Here and there. We get closer, closer. Up close and we see the people, all women, so packed in the back of the open trucks that they look like solid, uniform blocks of human meat. The ones on the outside are pressed against the railing, immobile, their backs crooked, their arms jammed against their neighbors’, faces made of misery, eyes made of empty. We can hear wailing. Here and there. But mostly they don’t wail. They are so compressed that there isn’t enough air for breathing and wailing. Just breathing. Barely. What is this? I ask. Refugees from Srebrenica, my mother says. We walk and walk, alongside. Even when the whole convoy passes us and the street is empty, we walk. We walk where they are going. To the sports arena, where I saw my share of basketball games and handball tournaments, boxing matches and humanitarian concerts. Now I can’t see the parquet floors beneath the thousands of wailing women moving around like insects or sitting on yoga mats and blankets, their faces in their hands. We climb from the nosebleed section down to the court, and the place is deafening: wailing, sobbing, sniffing, screaming, shrieking, crackling of plastic bottles of water, calling of the names of the living, calling of the names of the dead, calling of the names of God, yelping, whining, sighing, banging of fists against the floor, singing of sad songs, singing of happy songs, cursing of mothers, swearing to Gods, blowing of noses, shuffling of clothes, crying of children, crooning of lullabies, and the sounds of my heart booming in my skull. Mother kneels on a blanket. The woman she’s trying to help is red. Veins bulge out of her forehead and neck. I can’t watch. I turn around. I smell shit. An old invalid flops on a mat. Only arms flop. Paraplegic. Incontinent. She calls a guy’s name. No one comes. I look up. The ceiling of lighting fixtures, the arena’s baskets on elaborate blue, metal arms folded against it. Nobody’s gonna score here for a long time.

* * *

Across the road some old-timer came out of his house, slowly, as though his shoes were too small and made of wood. He wore the black French beret that generations of Muslims traditionally wear in these parts. It was too small for his big, white head and looked clownish. He went around the house, reappeared with an ax in his hand, and painstakingly made his way to a dried-out plum tree in the corner of the yard.

Is this his grandfather?

He looked up at the tree, shook his head with sadness, put his hand against the sun-bleached trunk, and pushed at it. The treetop rustled and some brown leaves parachuted down into the yard.

His father?

Chop went the ax. The old-timer’s swings were measured and slow but he knew what he was doing. Splinters of wood flew from his ax like sparks.

“
Merhaba,
grandpa,” I heard myself say, and felt myself walk across the road toward him. The man turned to look who it was, then put down the ax and leaned on it like on a cane.

“
Merhaba
, son,
merhaba
.”

“Time for doing some work, huh?”

“Yeah . . . we got hit this spring. One of their . . . shells. It hit right there at the base of the house, you see, and all the bullets made all kinds of mess in the yard.”

“Not bullets, grandpa. They are called shrapnel.”

“They’re metal and they go fast and they kill and break things. They’re bullets.”

“Makes sense,” I said.

“Of course they’re bullets . . . I didn’t mind the broken windows or the goat but they hit this here plum tree. Thirty years ago I put a stick no thicker than my little finger into the ground and look at it. Every winter I wrapped it in plastic. I picked bugs and worms off
of it with my fingers, one by one. I scraped pigeon shit off the roof, mixed it with water, and used that to feed it. It was the best plum tree in Mejdan. But these animals . . . these mountain people . . . and look at it now.”

He reached up and bent one of the small branches, which snapped off in his hand.

“Look,” he said and broke it effortlessly in three places and showed me the lamentable twigs. “Nothing.”

“It’s not nothing,” I said. “It’s good firewood.”

“I guess,” said the old man. “My sons said the same thing but I didn’t let
them
cut it. I told them, I said, I don’t wanna see you near it. I thought it might pull through, you know, rejuvenate itself. God can do that. But I can’t look at it anymore. Every time I see it something cracks in my chest. What a pity. Thirty-some years. Burn it up in a stove.”

I shook my sympathetic head. We both stood there for some time looking up at the tree. The old-timer’s eyes were wet slits, trifurcating into crow’s feet.

“You don’t happen to be a Nali
?” I asked him, to my own surprise.

He came closer to his side of the fence—holding down his beret as if afraid that a gust of wind might nab it off his head—and looked at me.

“Nope.”

“Do you know any Nali
s?”

“I had a couple of refugees living with me, brothers.”

“Mustafa?”

“Yeah, he’s in the army now.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Commando, I hear.”

“Big guy, with a beard?”

“You know him?”

“I was drafted on the same day as him.”

“What unit are you with?”

“I don’t know. I go in September.”

“Mustafa’s been in the army for a year now, son.”

I looked at a wristwatch I didn’t have, rubbed the place where it would have been if I had one.

“When’s the last time you heard from him?”

“Yesterday. He brought me some cornbread.”

“I think I have the wrong Mustafa, then,” I said, backing away.

“I was looking for the family of the guy who died in the last shelling, at the Gate.”

“You mean Bakir?”

“Who’s Bakir?”

“Mustafa’s brother. He died at the Gate.”

“Why does the grave say Mustafa?”

“The grave says Mustafa?”

“There’s a picture of Mustafa on it, too.”

“Are you kidding me, son?”

“No, I swear to God, grandpa.”

“I have no idea,” he said. “I’ll have to ask Mustafa.”

My neighborhood lit up just as I was walking across a children’s soccer game in the parking lot in front of my building. As soon as they saw the lights they all started to cheer and ran home to their TV sets and Atari pedals in full gallop. Three or four seconds and they were all gone. Only the boy with whose ball they were playing lingered for a moment longer to retrieve his property from under a shell-mangled Cinquecento; then he, too, disappeared into one of the vestibules.

For the first time in who knew how long I used the elevator.

When I opened the front door I could hear the pressure cooker hissing in the background already, some terrible turbo-folk music from one wing of the apartment and the demented ramblings of World Wrestling Federation’s Macho Man Randy Savage from another. I knew exactly where every member of my family was and what they were doing. I also knew that there was no way of avoiding them. The only unoccupied room was my parents’ bedroom and I had no desire to go in there.

I stood in the corridor by the coat hooks, trying to decide where to go. I took two steps toward the living room—where I knew my father, dressed in his sweatpants, was sitting in the rocker and hoarding the remote—then halted, and went the other way. The door to my room was ajar and I saw my brother jump, elbow first, off of a chair onto a sofa cushion on the floor. The crowd cheered loudly through the speakers, as though for him. I took a deep breath and started to go in but then just stopped and stared at a sticker on the door, a yellow and red triangle with a silhouette of a guy being struck by a serrated spear of electricity.
HIGH VOLTAGE
, it read. I exhaled.