would wake up in the middle of the night to pee and find my mother in the darkness of the kitchen/dining room staring through the closed lace curtains with a pair of opera glasses eight stories down to the street on which convoys of military vehicles moved to and fro nightly. She would take a cigarette break and give me the number of the moment.
“They just moved in forty cannons,” she’d whisper from the fuzzy darkness.
“So what?” I’d say. “You should go to sleep.”
“You go. I’m not tired.”
Sometime in April, in the new apartment, just before my parents sent Mehmed and me away, my mother got to say her first I-told-you-sos.
Prior to that, my father’s blind optimism had turned into the worst kind of selfish naïveté; he saw the war with his eyes, but the message had yet to reach his brain, or at least the part of it in charge of self-preservation. He would come home from work and, while kicking off his shoes, peck my mother on the lips for my benefit. This performance of affection was transparent, insulting. It was supposed to make me feel better, like the family unit was intact, like the parents knew what they were doing, like there was no reason for alarm. He would walk into the bedroom to change, and Mother would follow, closing the door. I would sneak closer and listen to the hiss and the mumble of their muted conversations, which wouldalways end abruptly with him emerging in his sweatpants, with a face like a red mask, white only around the lips, which were pressed together hard. He would take the kitchen route and materialize in the living room with a shot glass and a bottle of brandy in his hand. His chair would squeak when he dumped his weight into it. I would get shushed and the TV would pop on and blink at us all night with pain and violence and talk.
Despite recognizing his stubborn denial of facts and beginning more and more to believe my mother, I did my share of blocking out the shit when I was with my friends. We avoided talking about politics and religion. Instead, all horny and in love, we walked the streets hoping to catch glimpses of our “girlfriends,” who were clueless that we even existed. We drank Cokes and coffees in crowded cafés, went to one another's houses, and played cheesy computer games and out-of-tune guitars. We lied to one another about sexual experiences, traded Italian comic books and German porn mags, told gross jokes, and bitched about school.
The number of friends eroded with each wave of impending violence, though. Suddenly Boban had a sick grandpa in Pančevo and had to go visit him for a while. Sead’s family decided to move to Germany with his uncle, and we had a good-bye party in his weekend house before they sold it. Jaca left for Slovenia with her dad; Tarik flew to Turkey, and my friend Mile went to Banja Luka for his cousin’s wedding. Planes and helicopters flew over the town a lot.
The next thing I knew my brother and I were quickly kissed and hugged, then hurried into the back of a white Opel Kadett belonging to our cousin Garo. The interior was solid with that new-car stench, and the pungent, coconut-scented air freshener hanging off the rearview mirror made me want to retch. With Garo driving and his sister Amela yammering nonstop from the shotgun side, Mehmed and I looked at the scenery, vaguely scared and perceptibly giddybecause most of our friends were in school that morning and we were going on a trip to stay with some family of ours in Zagreb until this whole thing simmered down. For a week or two, my father said.
Zagreb, 1992. The two-house complex on Ilica Street was already teeming with my father’s distant relatives, some of whom were natives and most of whom were refugees from other parts of Bosnia. It was like hanging out in a locked-down airport terminal with people sleeping among their luggage, sitting on lined chairs, eating bread and smoked sausages off their hanky-covered laps, with their toddlers running amok and
“They just moved in forty cannons,” she’d whisper from the fuzzy darkness.
“So what?” I’d say. “You should go to sleep.”
“You go. I’m not tired.”
Sometime in April, in the new apartment, just before my parents sent Mehmed and me away, my mother got to say her first I-told-you-sos.
Prior to that, my father’s blind optimism had turned into the worst kind of selfish naïveté; he saw the war with his eyes, but the message had yet to reach his brain, or at least the part of it in charge of self-preservation. He would come home from work and, while kicking off his shoes, peck my mother on the lips for my benefit. This performance of affection was transparent, insulting. It was supposed to make me feel better, like the family unit was intact, like the parents knew what they were doing, like there was no reason for alarm. He would walk into the bedroom to change, and Mother would follow, closing the door. I would sneak closer and listen to the hiss and the mumble of their muted conversations, which wouldalways end abruptly with him emerging in his sweatpants, with a face like a red mask, white only around the lips, which were pressed together hard. He would take the kitchen route and materialize in the living room with a shot glass and a bottle of brandy in his hand. His chair would squeak when he dumped his weight into it. I would get shushed and the TV would pop on and blink at us all night with pain and violence and talk.
Despite recognizing his stubborn denial of facts and beginning more and more to believe my mother, I did my share of blocking out the shit when I was with my friends. We avoided talking about politics and religion. Instead, all horny and in love, we walked the streets hoping to catch glimpses of our “girlfriends,” who were clueless that we even existed. We drank Cokes and coffees in crowded cafés, went to one another's houses, and played cheesy computer games and out-of-tune guitars. We lied to one another about sexual experiences, traded Italian comic books and German porn mags, told gross jokes, and bitched about school.
The number of friends eroded with each wave of impending violence, though. Suddenly Boban had a sick grandpa in Pančevo and had to go visit him for a while. Sead’s family decided to move to Germany with his uncle, and we had a good-bye party in his weekend house before they sold it. Jaca left for Slovenia with her dad; Tarik flew to Turkey, and my friend Mile went to Banja Luka for his cousin’s wedding. Planes and helicopters flew over the town a lot.
The next thing I knew my brother and I were quickly kissed and hugged, then hurried into the back of a white Opel Kadett belonging to our cousin Garo. The interior was solid with that new-car stench, and the pungent, coconut-scented air freshener hanging off the rearview mirror made me want to retch. With Garo driving and his sister Amela yammering nonstop from the shotgun side, Mehmed and I looked at the scenery, vaguely scared and perceptibly giddybecause most of our friends were in school that morning and we were going on a trip to stay with some family of ours in Zagreb until this whole thing simmered down. For a week or two, my father said.
Zagreb, 1992. The two-house complex on Ilica Street was already teeming with my father’s distant relatives, some of whom were natives and most of whom were refugees from other parts of Bosnia. It was like hanging out in a locked-down airport terminal with people sleeping among their luggage, sitting on lined chairs, eating bread and smoked sausages off their hanky-covered laps, with their toddlers running amok and
Similar Books
