Shards: A Novel by Ismet Prcić Read Free Book Online

minds about everything. Side A(merican) and side B(osnian). I wish I could find a way to drop off the face of the planet and leave my minds behind, get a new one. I dream of disappearing, cutting all ties, becoming a derelict, free to rave. I’d be calmer, happier. Or better, going back to Bosnia and telling no one, not even you. Just live there in the same city, grow a beard, and watch you go to the market from a café across the street through a pair of sunglasses, never letting you know who I am.

(. . . premonitions . . .)
    The fall of 1990. My mother said:
    “There’s going to be a war.”
    On TV some suited fathead behind a podium yelled into a microphone and shook his sausage finger in the air. The crowd in front of him roared, sporting his framed photographs and holding lit candles. My mother repeated her sentence absentmindedly, staring into the corner of the coffee table on which meze was served. My father, chewing on smoked beef, laughed and said that it was all just talk, that people were not stupid.
    He poured himself another slivovitz. The parakeet screeched in its cage and pecked at its cuttlebone. Mother just kept on staring.
    To me and my brother, after my mother went to sleep, he said:
    “Don’t listen to her, she’s paranoid. It’s from the concussion.”
    A month before, she had walked into a low stop sign in front of our building on the way to the corner store and knocked herself out. She was in a coma for a day.
    Every once in a while from then on she would act . . . weird: say weird things, stare off into space for hours, clean maniacally. Mehmed and I were scared for her. Father told us everything would be fine.
    But nothing was fine.
    The people were stupid.
    There was a war.
    Sometime in the eighties, seeing how most of his friends were doing it, my father was persuaded, after an all-out nag attack from his mother and sister, who themselves were not doing it, to take out an onerous bank loan and buy a piece of land on the outskirts of Tuzla on which to build a weekend house. He was notorious for his indecisiveness, waiting for the last moment, always making the wrong decision anyway and drunkenly lamenting his choices for years to come with I-should-haves, I-shouldn’t-haves, if-I’d-been-smart-I-would-haves, if-I-knew-then-what-I-know-nows, and so on and so forth. Bereft of imagination or creativity, he believed himself an adherent of a philosophy of sorts, which could be summarized by the counsel he gave me some years later, shortly before I was to flee Bosnia:
    “Ismet,” he said, “if you don’t know what to do in life, just look around and see what other people are doing and then do the same thing.”
    After months and months of making up and then changing his mind about the location, he had settled for a verdant parcel in Kovačevo Selo, a predominantly Orthodox Christian village some fifteen kilometers outside our town. He acquired it from Drago Stojkovi, a rich farmer who lived with his clan in a huddle of buildings on top of the hill overlooking all his land. To get to it you had to suffer through an off-roading experience. First there was a nerve-racking 40 kph roll across a shimmying bridge. If you attempted to cross at a slower speed, it would droop in the middle like a hammock andemit agonizing groans. Then there was a sinuous, hilly, mud road that slalomed between scattered houses and sheds and made the cars wheeze going up and whoosh going down the hill.
    Our parcel was the last in a row of five others, which all already contained pretentious attempts at the idyllic: picturesque cottages in various stages of construction, loud beds of flowers, absurd white statues of swans, lions, and armless Greeks. All of them were wrapped and rewrapped in barbed wire and guarded by overly passionate dogs and owners who yelled and brandished their double-barrel shotguns if you dared to pick up a plum that fell from their trees. Our little plot of land was a forty-by-eighty-meter rectangle