Shards: A Novel by Ismet Prcić Read Free Book Online Page B

whistling. He walked by my mother and started locking up the shed, avoiding her blazing eyes.
    “You said you wouldn’t give it back,” Mother hissed.
    “What?”
    “The scythe.”
    “When did I say that?”
    “Last week.”
    “I don’t remember saying that. Are you sure?”
    Mother’s hand flew to the scar in her hairline. She turned from him and walked to the barbed wire and stared into the woods until he had the car packed up. On the drive back to Tuzla he said “Fuck the scythe” again, but Mother said nothing. The Fiat’s belt squeaked. The air was hard to breathe. In the backseat Mehmed squeezed my hand. I took it away from him. Father whistled through his teeth.
    * * *
    In 1990 the weekend house was done. The final addition was a beautiful outside stairway to the large attic room, which was my favorite place to be. There I had my collection of comic books and magazines, my futon bed, my posters on the wall, a TV, and a secret stash of candy, everything a tubby fourteen-year-old boy needed to avoid boredom indoors. As for the outdoors, it was impossible to be bored there.
    One particular morning, a Saturday near the beginning of autumn, while we were waiting for our mother’s side of the family to show up and spend the weekend with us—which meant that we would have another boy, cousin Adi, to get in trouble with— Mehmed and I were playing the stealth game. The goal of it was to sneak, with our ninja masks on, from the well on one end of the property, through the garden, behind the rows of raspberry plants, around the house, around the shed, to the car, which at this time of year was never parked under the pear tree because of the falling fruit, and to the gate on the other side, without being noticed by our parents. After we had both accomplished this wondrous feat several times, we decided to up the ante and try to retrieve something from inside the house, the candle in the shape of a cat from the top of the downstairs TV or a Pluto mug from the kitchen, without being seen. That proved to be next to impossible because Father was watching tennis and Mother was kneading dough. We were going to change the rules a little bit, but that’s when everyone showed up: Grandma, Uncle Medo, Aunt Suada, Adi, and his two sisters.
    My father had the annoying habit, which I have regrettably inherited from him, of carrying on with a joke or a prank for much longer than necessary.
    That day Father led our guests to our brand-new stairway and told them that he himself had designed it. That was hilarious to me because I knew he couldn’t pick a straight line out of a group ofcurvy ones. I’ve always been puzzled as to how he got his engineering degree—probably paid somebody off. I knew for a fact that he could not even imagine a shape in his head without seeing it with his own eyes first, no matter how perfectly you described it to him. That’s why he never read books. That’s why Mother had to build a model of the weekend house and explain where every piece of furniture would go before my father would green-light any expenditure.
    The guests didn’t know that Father was pulling their leg, and he kept at it, dropping names of fake schools of architecture and nonexistent designers whose work, supposedly, inspired him and coining design-related nomenclature full of crude puns, all with a straight face. My aunt and uncle intuited that something was not right but were too polite, too conditioned by provincial Communism and their own sense of blue-collar unworth to overtly question somebody who went to college. My grandma actually believed him and kept saying “really” and “Mašala” and “good, good.” They trusted and respected him because he was an engineer, because his family descended from the begs and agas of the proud Ottomans, because (as he told me and my brother on a million occasions) his grandfather owned half of Tuzla before the Communists took it all away.
    They respected him for all the wrong