My Cat Yugoslavia Page 2

  For a long time the snake remained silent and still. It hissed faintly and moved cautiously as I prized open the lid, letting in some light, and I caught a glimpse of its lazy, clammy body, the triangular black patterns along its brown skin, its noble movements. As it squeezed against itself, its dry skin rattled like a broken amplifier.

  I’d imagined it would be somehow different, stronger, noisier, and bigger. But it seemed more afraid of me than I was of it.

  I own you now, I said. Eventually I built up the courage to open the lid fully. And when I finally opened it, the snake began writhing so frantically that I couldn’t tell where the movement started and where it ended. Its forked tongue jabbed back and forth on both sides of its triangular head and it began to tremble as though it had been left out in the frost. Soon it poked its head out of the box, and its small black eyes flickered as though plagued by a relentless twitch.

  Once it had slowly lowered its head to the floor, I lifted the box and tilted it, the quicker to get the snake out. It slumped to the floor like a length of play dough and froze on the spot.

  It took a moment for the snake to start moving. It glided smoothly forward in calm, even waves. The motion seemed unreal, timid and slow but purposeful and vivacious all at once. It explored the table and sofa legs, raised its head to look at the plants on the windowsill, the wintry landscape opening up behind the window, the snow-covered trees, the brightly colored houses, and the undulating gray blanket of cloud across the sky.

  Welcome home, I said and smiled at it. That’s right, welcome to your new home. When the snake withdrew beneath the table and coiled itself up, as though it was afraid of my voice, I felt almost ashamed of the place into which I had brought it. What if it didn’t feel at home here? What if it felt shackled, threatened, sad, and lonely? Would what I could offer it be enough? This pokey apartment, these cold floors, and a few pieces of furniture. It was a living creature for which I was now responsible, a creature that didn’t speak a language I could understand.

  Then I began to approach it. I checked from the reflection in its small dark eyes many times that I was in its line of sight, before slowly sitting down on the sofa in front of it and waiting for it to come to me.

  —

  And eventually it unraveled itself and slithered up to my feet, sniffed my toes, and finally twined itself round my legs. Then it raised its head into my lap, pressed it into my groin, under my armpit, and behind my back. Everywhere.

  I gripped the snake with both hands and wound it round my neck, and as its scaly sides touched my bare skin, as it touched my neck with the tip of its tongue, goose bumps appeared all over my body. Its slow progression across my bare skin felt like a long, warm lick.

  And for a while we remained there, sitting on the sofa, its head beneath my chin, its body around my body like metal armor, my arms extended to the sides, the rhythmic, tense, considered movements of its forked tongue against my quivering skin.

  We will be together forever, I thought, me and it. We would never stop loving each other. Nobody must ever find out about this. I will guard this like I do my own life, I thought. I will give it a home, everything it needs, and it will be content with me, because I know what it wants. I will learn to understand it so well that it won’t have to say a single word, and I will feed it and watch as it digests its food, watch as it grows and grows and grows.

  Spring 1980

  PEOPLE ON A MOUNTAIN

  As someone well respected by the locals in our village, my father assured me that love for the man with the beautiful smile and the stubble that barely showed against the light, the man whom I was to marry at the age of seventeen and who strode along a dirt track winding away from the main road toward a cluster of three houses, that love for that man would come later if it wasn’t there to start with. And as the eldest of seven children, I trusted my father.

  Because my father was like fathers in the cinema: handsome, western features and a face that narrowed toward the chin, a commanding voice and a military posture. He was loved and admired, a Kosovan man of the highest caliber, a man people trusted and valued, burrë me respekt, and his face was always clean, he changed his undershirt daily, he never allowed his beard to grow beyond a thin stubble, and his feet never stank, like those of men who have lost their self-respect or care nothing for it.

  He was well mannered and handsome. One of his many good quirks was the way he always said, Everything will be fine. He said this even when he knew things were going badly, when it was perfectly clear to everyone that we were in for a long winter and that the pickled vegetables would barely last until April. Another quirk was his habit of stroking my hair, of smoothing and straightening any stray strands of hair and massaging my scalp with his long, chunky fingers. He did this a lot, because doing household chores had started giving me the same headaches as Mother always had.

  My father didn’t so much speak with his mouth but with his face, which was glorious and expressive. You never tired of a face like that. You could sink into it, stare at it forever. You could always forgive a face like that. He only ever began talking once he’d decided what to say. For instance, he used to say that the poor have the best and the most imaginative dreams. There was no use wasting time daydreaming if you were too close to your own dreams, because there was a greater likelihood that those dreams would come true, and then you’d have to accept that making those dreams come true wasn’t quite everything you’d imagined. And that—the disappointment, the anger, the bitterness and greed—that was a fate far worse than never making your dreams come true at all. A man should always strive for something he can never achieve, my father used to say.

  He told me that when he was younger he’d wanted to be a musician, to perform on great stages, or to study hard and become a respected brain surgeon, because his large, steady hands were made for detailed, painstaking work. Then he held out his hands and winked at me. That’s right, his hands were like two sculptures, strong and unfaltering.

  After getting married at the age of eighteen and having his first child at the age of nineteen, he gave up dreaming and began hoping instead. He hoped for the small things in life, fatted calves, muscular horses and hens that shot out eggs, a rainier summer, and the sea, because he believed it was the only thing that everyone should see in his lifetime. The only thing that truly bothered him was that Kosovo was nothing but a little blob of land in the middle of the Balkans without even a sliver of coastline to call its own.

  Over time he learned the same thing everyone had learned before him: people from villages like ours didn’t move to the cities through hard work or by immersing themselves in learning. That only happened in the movies.

  —

  I would wake up at five in the morning to take care of the animals on our farm. After that I’d help my parents in the field. The field was enormous, as we grew almost everything by ourselves: lettuce, cabbage, watermelon, peppers, onions, leeks, tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, and beans. In fact, the field was so big and hard to look after that it was no surprise my mother had had her work cut out having seven children in twelve years. After my chores I left for school and I was always home again by half past two. Each day was precisely the same.

  My mother was a typical Kosovan mother and housewife. She was hardworking, good to her husband, and strict with her children. And my siblings were typical, daydreaming Kosovan children. My sister Hana was a year younger than me, a sensitive and emotional girl who always looked as though she had a secret that nobody would ever find out, while Fatime, eighteen months younger than Hana, was the polar opposite.

  I spent my evenings dreaming. I would sit on a large boulder on the cliffside and dream, lean against the oak tree in the copse behind our house and think, listen to the radio and fantasize. Listening to my favorite songs I imagined I could have become a singer for all I knew. Or an actress. I could learn to act, I thought, and they’d show pictures of me on the television, people would talk about me on the radio, and my life woul
d be so interesting that people would write about it in the newspaper, talk of my red dress would be on everyone’s lips, my legs would be long, slender, and smooth as a baby’s. Nothing would be impossible or beyond my reach, just as long as I made the right choices, and that’s why I dreamed so hard that I was moved to tears by my own imaginings.

  On Sunday evenings we gathered round the television to watch music programs on the Radio Televizioni i Prishtinës channel. These programs usually consisted of men sitting cross-legged on mattresses on the floor and singing, dressed in national costume: tëlinat, long trousers ringed with black stripes, a xhamadan, an embroidered vest, a shokë, a red scarf round their waist, and a plis, a white felt hat on their head. They sang songs about love, war heroes, and honor, and accompanied themselves on the çifteli.

  We watched lots of films too, mostly war films about the partisans during the Second World War. One of them was set during the Battle of Sutjeska in Bosnia, when the Nazis besieged Tito’s partisans on the plains near the village of Sutjeska. We sat in a row in front of the television, crying our eyes out as we saw what longing and agony can do to a person, and how we empathized as the partisans’ honor turned first to patriotic spirit and then to rage.

  But more than anything I was waiting for Zdravko Čolić, quite possibly the most handsome man in the universe, to start singing, or for the station to show videos of his songs. I knew every song on his album Ako priđeš bliže by heart, though I didn’t understand the Serbian lyrics in the least. But it was the emotion with which he sang the song “Nevjerna žena” that convinced me he was singing about a woman who had broken his heart. “Produži dalje,” on the other hand, was a more upbeat song, his voice so much more self-assured that it must have been about something more fleeting and superficial than love. Only love can make a voice quaver like that.

  When Zdravko Čolić finally started to sing, we all fell silent and sang along in our minds. I was jealous of his background dancers who could all talk to him after the performance, of the photographers who could return home and tell people they’d seen Zdravko in the flesh, of the male TV hosts whom Zdravko embraced after the show.

  —

  Then one perfectly normal day, when I was about fifteen years old, I awoke to the realization that I lived in the middle of the countryside, that I was at best an average student, and that I wasn’t even a very good singer, though I wanted to be the best in the world. I realized that I couldn’t speak convincingly and that I couldn’t write my own thoughts clearly enough. I couldn’t draw or count, because I found it hard to concentrate on prolonged activities. I couldn’t run very far, and I couldn’t cut hair. I was only pretty and good at housework, or so I’d been told, and after writing down the things I was good at I shuddered, because neither of them was an achievement but rather a self-evident truth.

  —

  I looked at myself in the mirror and wondered whether I was stupid. It was a hard question to ask, but asking it wasn’t half as hard as the later realization that I probably was, a stupid and unimportant person. I didn’t understand anything about politics or society; I didn’t know how Yugoslavia worked or what had happened during the Second World War, though I’d watched all those films about the partisans. I could only barely remember which nations made up Yugoslavia at all.

  When people on the television talked about the disputes between the Albanians and the Serbs, I didn’t bother listening; the news anchor might as well have been speaking Chinese. What’s more, I felt as though I lacked the potential to become any the wiser, lacked a teacher to tell me about politics, lacked parents who wanted their daughter to become a singer.

  I’d spent my entire life until then on altogether the wrong things—chatting with friends, gossiping about the boys, learning to do housework and cook food, fretting about what I looked like at school and at parties. When I realized the only reason I went to school in the first place was because an illiterate woman had no chance of marrying a decent husband, the bile rose up to the back of my throat and my food no longer tasted of anything. And when I realized my life would be no more extraordinary even if I got top grades in all my subjects, I started to feel physically ill. I had never heard of a single female politician, a female teacher or lawyer, I realized, and I gripped the edge of the table and took deep breaths through my nose.

  I shook my head and began wondering what I could hope for instead of dreams. And with that I hoped that my future husband would be good to me. And I hoped he would be handsome, that he’d organize the biggest, most beautiful wedding anyone had seen, and that his family would treat me just as well as he did, and once I had gone through this list of hopes in my mind, I ran into the kitchen, grabbed the mixing bowl, and vomited.

  —

  Our village nestled at the foot of a mountain. The road leading to the village didn’t run between the mountains but wound its way back and forth across the mountainside. On one side of the mountain the road was long and winding, and on the other side, our side, it descended almost in a straight line. My father was in the habit of cursing the people who had built this road every time he drove along it.

  On one occasion—as he kept a tight grip on the narrow steering wheel of his red Yugo Skala and wondered out loud why on earth the road was so badly built, so that people heading for the village first had to drive all the way round the mountain—I bit my lip and answered his question, though it was never intended as a question.

  “Maybe it’s because it was built by an Albanian,” I said and turned to look right at him.

  At that he got angry. I knew he would, I knew it before I’d even decided to answer him. He raised his hand between us, as if to strike me, and pulled his lips tightly together. He said I shouldn’t use language like that, shouldn’t speak ill of my own countrymen, because Allah is great and he makes a note of everything I do for the final day of judgment.

  But I knew why he was really angry. He didn’t care for the road or who had built it any more than I did. We had spent the day at the Old Bazaar in Prishtina, where my father used to buy great quantities of wheat and corn flour, sugar, oil, salt, and meat. I always tried to give the impression I didn’t care for our trips to Prishtina. When we came home I would tell my siblings that the city was a dangerous place, that the rickety stalls looked like they might collapse at any moment, and that the entire bazaar area was covered in thick tarpaulins, which brought the temperature up to almost 120 degrees Fahrenheit, making the air thick and muggy.

  I was afraid that, if I showed him how much I enjoyed our trips to Prishtina, he would no longer ask me to accompany him. And I had nothing else to look forward to except those visits when I could watch all those city folk, those handsome young men, those beautiful young women who went to work and wore such stylish clothes. I wanted to be just like them, I wanted their lives, their clothes and looks.

  I held my father tightly by the hand as he walked through the city, always dressed in the only suit he had, and looked inquisitively around me, though I was scared to death of accidentally tripping over people’s toes. The stalls were full of wares—black leather shoes, shirts, trousers, an array of spices, fresh vegetables, and meats—and some stalls held items designed for girls and women, such as lipsticks, eyeliners, and pretty dresses. The bazaar succeeded in smelling of everything all at once, but in the baking heat the only smells that stood out were fake leather, tobacco, and sweat. Small flies swarmed around the meat, and the vegetables’ skins were damp and shriveled, so that the vendor had to wipe them dry with a paper towel. All around there was the drone of loud, emphatic speech, arguments, the clink of coins, the creaking of wood under heavy piles of goods.

  When my father stopped to negotiate with the owner of a meat stall, I slipped a few stalls farther on. I imagined I’d have plenty of time to look at the items on the stall, the tights and the beautifully cut gold-embroidered dresses, because haggling with a stall owner could take anything up to half an hour. Giving way always meant losing—even when it meant
that the stall owner ended up getting more than he’d asked for. I’d be back by my father’s side before he even noticed I was gone.

  I picked up a small handheld compact from the stall table and looked at myself in the mirror on its lid, adjusted my hair, and turned my face from side to side, until I noticed that the stall owner, a man of about twenty, had been eyeing me for an unsuitably long time. I raised my eyes from the mirror, the better to see him. All of a sudden he winked at me. Po ku je moj bukuroshe, he said in a loud voice and licked his lower lip. I didn’t understand quite what he meant—nobody spoke to little girls like that, and it was highly improper to refer to them as bukuroshe. The man lowered his eyes to my chest, raised both hands to his cheeks, shook his head, and shouted, “O-paa!”

  I froze on the spot. My back curled and my shoulders hunched up toward the corners of my chin so that the small mounds, which had been growing on my chest for the last year, might be hidden. I gripped the compact in my hand and tried to pull the long sleeves of my blouse down, but my body wasn’t listening. I began to tremble, hot sweat started trickling from my scalp, and my knees quivered like those of an old woman. When the man licked his lower lip for a second time, I dropped the compact to the ground. I crouched down to pick it up, and at that the man gave a loud whistle—and all at once the attention of the men standing at the surrounding stalls turned to me.

  “O-paa!” he shouted between wolf whistles. “So young?” he continued and burst into a volley of laughter.

  It was then that I noticed my father, who had left the haggling behind and now wrenched me by the wrist. Pthui, he spat on the items the young man was selling and dragged me bullishly out of the bazaar. The journey seemed to take forever. He yanked my hand, and in his rage it seemed he had momentarily lost his sense of direction. I stumbled over people’s feet and apologized. I didn’t try to resist him, but above all the noise I tried to apologize to him too, to tell him how sorry I was, but he didn’t hear me.