Shards: A Novel (19 page)

I staked out the graveyard trying to meet somebody he knew. Nobody prayed at his grave.

I asked around about him, about his family, his friends. Nobody knew them but people told me things anyway:

“That kid’s name is Mustafa, Mu
e they called him. He used to work at the lodge renting hunting equipment. Ooh, is that kid messed up.”

“He lost his father, too.”

“I don’t know where he’s from, some place in the valley of the Drina, I bet, but people say all kinds of stuff about him, that he’s not all together. They say, and you can believe it or not, that he wasn’t right to begin with but that the war really pushed him over.” “He loved his father.”

“Nali
? Nali
s are crazy! There are stories about a Nali
who killed a man over a pumpkin. Stabbed him in the gut with a knife, and then went insane and starved himself to death in his attic.”

“He killed his own father. Everyone knows that.”

“He lost his whole family, the poor bastard.”

“My neighbor lived next door to them, pure truth, this. Refugees. When the Chetniks came into their village, he saw his father hide in the septic tank. When they came to their house, they took away his mother and sister to rape them—who knows?—and cut off a bunch of his older brother’s fingers, his nose, his ears, gouged his eyes and sliced open his scrotum, and made him, Mustafa, chew on the stuff—eat it—horrible things. Then they said that if he wanted to live he had to cut his brother’s throat and that he did it. Can you imagine that? I can’t vouch for that last thing, but the other stuff is pure truth.”

JUNE

Branka’s office at the Home of the Youth smelled of bureaucratic dust and conservative perfume and oniony sweat. It wasn’t much of a dressing room. There was furniture everywhere: boxy desks, orphaned chairs, yellow, top-to-floor cabinets filled with tomes that made you feel bored and exhausted just looking at them. The girls’ stuff was strewn everywhere. Prop and costume boxes cluttered the floor and looked like their innards had exploded. It was our turn to get into costume now—the girls had dibs on the office first and had taken their sweet-ass time—and now we had only fifteen minutes before the show.

It was kind of like a dress rehearsal marathon, all three of our plays in a row with fifteen minutes between each, starting at three o’clock. Branka was trying to make the Edinburgh thing happen and had invited all the bigwigs and all the military brass to watch it. In Bosnia, the bureaucratic machine in charge of issuing papers to the citizenry was vast in peacetime, but now it also included the military, who had the final say. No matter how you sliced it, any citizen leaving the country in wartime was a matter of national security, especially with
the population numbers dropping precipitously on a daily basis and the end of the war nowhere in sight. Branka in her diligence nagged all levels of officials until she got the promise that General Lendo, the guy whose signature on your passport made it valid, announced that he would attend this afternoon.

“What if I did the show like this?”

The three of us guys turned and looked at Bokal, who was standing by the door in black socks, baby blue briefs, a laboriously ruffled white shirt, and with a crown upon his head. He played the King in the
Dream About the Little Prince,
the first play on our list tonight. We all laughed.

“I’m not kidding. It’s fucking hot, man.”

He wasn’t kidding. It was forty degrees Celsius all day and the air was hotter on the way in than on the way out of your lungs. Every place where one part of your body touched another was moist. Even eyelids stuck together when you blinked and it took some force to pry them open. You just wanted to be naked and spread-eagled and suspended in the air.

“Don’t you say a word,” Asmir said, already drenched in sweat in his soiled winter coat and a beanie. He played the Drunk. Little Boro and I giggled. Our costumes were identical and pretty light compared to theirs.

There was a light knock on the door and then Branka’s blonde head was in the room with us.

“He’s here,” she said.

“Mom!” Boro protested.

“It doesn’t matter who’s here,” Asmir said. Branka beamed at him with hatred.

They had this dynamic of disgust toward each other. Asmir thought her a heartless, talentless, self-promoting bureaucrat, and Branka thought him a selfish, pretentious, uneducated asshole;
neither hid their feelings from each other or anyone else. They were both control freaks who needed each other and hated their predicament.

“Yes it does, Asmir. We have to show him that we are serious about this if we want to get the papers.”

“
We,
” Asmir said, indicating us and brazenly excluding Branka, “are serious about this. We always have been. We don’t have to do anything extra to show anything to anybody, especially not some career soldier who never read a book in his life.”

Branka’s eyes turned into slits. I looked over at Boro and we both grimaced and rolled our eyes. Bokal on the other hand was very loyal to Asmir, and as soon as he saw the struggle ensue between them, he hurried to tip the scale to Asmir’s advantage. Nonchalantly, he took off his briefs. Asmir sniggered like a teenager.

“Asmir, can I talk to you outside?” Branka asked.

“There’s no time. I need to get ready. Can it wait?”

Bokal made a show of leaning bare-assed into one of the prop boxes and rummaging through it.

“It’s about what we talked about.”

Asmir had told us earlier that Branka wanted him to cut some things out of the play to appease the brass, stuff that was making fun of the military. In Saint-Exupéry’s
Little Prince,
the main character leaves his tiny planet to see the world of the grown-ups and finds out that it is absurd, that everyone is alone in their own fictional world, which they perpetuate ad infinitum. In his adaptation Asmir added a character of an archetypal soldier because it was relevant to our daily experience.

The second and bigger problem that Branka had with this portion of the play was that there would be a real weapon on the stage. Ramona, the girl who played the role of the Soldier, brought
her grandfather’s WWII Schmeiser from home for every rehearsal. The weapon was an antique and was obviously empty, but the military had ordered all citizens to turn in any and all weapons in 1992 when the war started because there was a serious shortage. If General Lendo saw it used in an artsy-fartsy play instead of being in the hands of one of his men on the front lines, he might not be as sympathetic to our cause. I agreed with Branka on this one. The gun was not crucial. It was not like we could have taken it to Scotland with us anyway. Asmir just wanted to exercise his ego, to piss Branka off.

“I’m not changing a thing,” Asmir said simply. Branka’s chin trembled.

“Do you understand what you’re doing?”

“I’m doing my job and maintaining the play’s artistic integrity.”

“You’re sabotaging everybody, including yourself. Not to mention possibly ruining all the work I put into making this happen.”

“What work? And what did you make happen?
We
got invited to the Fringe. The troupe. Doing the play the way we do the play. Not you, not the Home of the Youth.”

“You can only leave the country as an institution.”

“We can be an institution.”

“But you’re not. As far as the government is concerned you’re a bunch of individuals trying to leave the country in the time of war. You’re not an official company, you have no credentials, no business cards, no bank account, no permanent or mailing address, no telephone, no fax, and you don’t pay taxes on anything. To the state, you’re virtually nonexistent.”

There was a knock on the door and Branka opened it without looking. Ramona stood there in a stylized black uniform with a cap that was reminiscent of Parisian gendarmes. The submachine gun
hung horizontally across her midsection. At the sight of her, Bokal turned away from the door and scrambled into his royal breeches. Ramona tore her eyes from his ass.

“I’m sorry but we’re starting,” she said.

Branka turned to Ramona.

“I really think it’s not smart showing that to the military.”

Ramona looked up at Asmir.

“The gun stays. The costume doesn’t work without it.” Asmir pushed past Branka, almost knocking her into the door frame. “Thanks to you, now we don’t have time for our meditation.”

Somewhere, Omar played the first notes of his original score on the piano. I took Boro’s hand and we ran like mad through two corridors to the open doors of our rehearsal room, in front of which all the girls in their costumes gestured for us to hurry with almost synchronized arm movements.

“What took you so long?” they whispered and straightened out Boro’s costume. On the third measure of the piano melody, right on cue, Boro turned on his flashlight and walked into the room.

“Which one is him?” I asked the girls, scanning the clammy and uncomfortable faces of the audience members sitting along the wall with their arms crossed or balled up in their laps. Seven or eight of them were in uniforms. The girls pointed to a massive man with white hair and a bald spot, his black beret shoved through his shoulder strap, his camouflage shirt damp under the arms. I watched him. His brow was downcast but something in his eyes almost showed fear. He listened to Boro’s opening speech as though ashamed of something. You could see he’d rather be anywhere else but here where this long-haired child with big eyes was putting simple but crushing words into his skull. You could see he preferred the front lines, where the world was divided into us and them and you lived in your muscles instead of your head because matters were crystal
clear and nothing was up for interpretation and there was no need to use the head at all apart from planning maneuvers, dreaming, and remembering.

I could say that the reason he let us go to Scotland was that we knocked him on his ass, that our art, the truth of it, got to him, and that he realized we really deserved to show the world that there was beauty in Bosnia, and heart, and love, and that we weren’t just victims of madmen, experts at suffering, beggars crying for help, vegetating in our towns and waiting to be picked off while the world watched it on CNN. I could say that, but it wouldn’t be the truth.