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  He is a Serb and I am an Albanian, and by rights we should be enemies, but now, as we touch, there is nothing between us that is strange or foreign to the other, and I have an unwavering certainty that we two, we are not like other people, and the feeling is so visceral, so bright and clear that it is as though it has come from on high, like a message addressed to us, and we don’t care in the least how many people roll their eyes or ask us to move out of the way, how many snigger as they pass us, perhaps at the fact that we are unable to form words, neither to them nor to each other.

  And when he eventually asks whether I’d like to see him again in the same café next week around noon, when he allows his face to break into a hint of a smile, which he instantly tries to control like an inappropriate bout of laughter, to which I respond with a smile of my own and say, let’s meet a week from today in the same café, my life splits in two, into the life before him and the life after him, everything until this moment becoming an almost insignificant detail, surpassed like a hastily conjured white lie.

  It is early April, and I desire another man so unmistakably that for the rest of the day he is with me in my prayers, in which I shamelessly ask god to give him to me.

  * * *

  —

  That same evening my wife serves me a meal of bean soup, fried bell peppers dressed in cream sauce, feta cheese, tomatoes, cucumber, and ajvar. While I am eating, she sits down across the table, her expression worried, as though she were holding her breath or stuck in uncomfortable company.

  * * *

  —

  Ajshe and I were married young, in early summer four years ago at the behest of my father, who later succumbed to liver disease. I was only twenty, the sole child in my family. My father said Ajshe was an exceptional woman, demure and obedient, intelligent despite her lack of education, skillful, well-mannered, and from a good family. I was promised there could be no wife more decent, no mother more dutiful than Ajshe.

  And so, at the dying wishes of my father, I said I would take her to be my wife, as long as her father consented and promised that Ajshe would live up to the impeccable words that had been spoken about her. When Ajshe’s father was assured that I was an upstanding and trustworthy young man, that I didn’t believe in the fist, that I would never commit adultery, that I would never lose so much as a dinar in gambling and the bottle was no threat to me because, just like my father, I understood the value of education and was about to enroll at the university, I was granted his permission to marry her.

  We wed each other for a simple reason: because it’s better for people to live with someone than to live alone, because a man should have a woman by his side and because a woman should have a man by her side too, and because a man, especially a man like me, is expected to reproduce and continue the family line; it’s important for a man to have at least one son to whom he can leave his house, land, and money.

  Our countryside wedding was traditional, Ajshe was getting herself ready for weeks, preparing her trousseau and bidding farewell to her former life, and I started making space for her and hoped she would get along with my parents. The worst scenario would have been if Ajshe had proven stubborn, bad at taking advice, or if my mother had turned her nose up at her new daughter-in-law’s ways of doing housework.

  On our wedding day, she was brought to me. She was remarkably beautiful, silent as a drape, as was expected of her, her wedding dress looked like folds of pleated golden-edged silk paper sprinkled with glitter, and as I lay with her for the first time that night she breathed heavily only a couple of times, though she bled, though I could see how much pain she was in.

  After showering separately, I told her that she had looked stunning all day, that I had never seen a more beautiful woman, and that I was happy she was my wife, and she said she too was happy and proud that I was her husband and the father of our future children, and we soon fell asleep; I drifted into a restless dream and she slumbered in pain.

  “I promise to look after you as best I can, to be your right hand, your rock,” Ajshe said the following morning as though she were reading a hymn, putting on the heart-shaped earrings I had given her as one of many wedding gifts, and in her words there wasn’t the slightest worry about the future and not a trace of the discomfort of the previous evening.

  My father died two months after our wedding. He had been ill for a long time, and in his final weeks he was very weak, but his death was good because he got to see me with a woman like Ajshe.

  To my relief, Ajshe is exactly the kind of person I was promised. She is patient and understanding, bighearted. She’s always listened and encouraged me, and she’s never spoken out of turn to me or my parents, and when I told her that one day I wanted to write a book set in ancient times, a story of war, of the centuries-long humiliation of the Albanian people perhaps, the most breathtaking love story ever written, she said: “What kind of people write books if not men like you? Just tell me if there’s anything I can do to help you.”

  She is proud of me, as though I were already a writer immortalized in books and magazines, the embodiment of my dream. She said things like this, unaware of how much time and energy such a profession required.

  When my mother fell ill with cancer two years later, Ajshe took care of her; she washed her and changed her clothes, fed her, kept her company and listened to her. All the while she managed to cook dishes one more delicious than the last, even though we didn’t have much money, because alongside my studies I could only do occasional shifts as a waiter at a restaurant in Pristina to make ends meet.

  After my mother’s death, I sold the house to my relatives and bought an apartment near the center of the city. I had to give up my car, but at least I was closer to the university and my job. I also wanted to get away from my family village, because the twisted rural pastime of spying on people and talking behind their backs has never suited my character.

  We swapped our nice, large three-story detached house for a one-bedroom unit in a run-down apartment block in Ulpiana, where Ajshe is to remain quiet as a mouse whenever I need to study or write or sleep. She never protests, though I know her true desire has always been to live in a large house, somewhere peaceful where she can bring up children, have animals, and take care of the land. But wherever I go, she will follow.

  Oftentimes I think how lucky I am that she is my wife and that she has precisely this kind of character, especially when I hear stories about how a woman who has entered the household has broken the peace by arguing with her in-laws, bringing shame on her husband by constantly disagreeing with him, or neglecting her duties of housekeeping and childcare.

  At other times I think I don’t deserve her—when we make love, for instance, when she sees how I rush then, how I pretend to ejaculate, how I avoid her touch or touching her—and I slip into dejection because I realize that I am not worthy of her, that she is far too good to be mine, to spend this life with me.

  Worst of all is the knowledge that Ajshe would never tell me if she wanted to live differently. Or, no, worse still is the fact that respecting each other has turned into something of a competition, one in which I always lose.

  The affection she gives me and the love she lavishes upon me—I often wonder if I will ever be able to respond to it.

  * * *

  —

  That night, as we sit at the kitchen table, Ajshe says my name in a way that she has never said it before. Her voice is so quiet, so feeble that I almost know what she is about to say, and I know she is afraid of those words too.

  “I am pregnant,” she continues abjectly, lowers her eyes, then looks up at me again, then down again and clasps her hands on the table.

  “Are you sure?” I ask and put down my spoon.

  Why does the child have to come now, I wonder, why couldn’t it have come earlier, back when we had enough space for it, in the years we said would be perfect for our firstborn?
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  “Yes,” she says slowly. “I couldn’t tell you sooner, I wasn’t sure until I went to the doctor today. I’m sorry I did this without telling you, but I wasn’t sure why my stomach has been so restless recently. The doctor told me the pregnancy is already quite advanced, though my period has continued as normal. The baby is due in July.”

  For a long while we look at each other in silence; making the slightest sound or movement feels wrong and inappropriate.

  She is the first to look away, her eyes moving along the serving dishes, the walls, the windows, she looks at everything except me. And something happens, I can’t explain what happens within me, but I stand up as though wrenched from my chair and take a few steps closer to Ajshe, who now seems emotionless, like a complete stranger.

  Then, for the first time ever, I slap her with the back of my hand.

  Her head jolts to the side and she lets out a hopeless whimper, and when with her eyes shut she asks for forgiveness, I learn that violence only begets more violence.

  We spend the night in separate rooms. I go to bed wondering whether this could be the best and worst day of both our lives.

  * * *

  —

  The following week I see him again. The morning mist lingers, stiff as a tortoise rolled on its back, what is left of winter slowly giving way to spring. Every day feels more anxious, more ominous than the previous one, and the people are increasingly restless; even the houses are on their toes.

  He sits at the same table, in the same uncomfortable-looking position, with a cup of coffee, two small apples, and a pouch of juice. I walk right up and stand across from him. As soon as he notices me, he picks up one of the apples and takes a bite.

  “Hi,” I say and sit down.

  “Hi,” Miloš answers and places the bitten apple back on the table.

  I order myself a macchiato, light a cigarette, and begin restlessly swinging my leg under my chair as he munches on his apple.

  “How’s it going?” he asks once the waiter has brought my coffee.

  “Fine. You?” I say a moment later—and I realize I’m staring at his mouth.

  “Fine,” he replies and licks his lower lip.

  We are quiet for a while, but there’s nothing awkward about our silence. I commit to memory the way he leans back, the contours of his arms, the way he carries himself as he crosses his legs, his high cheekbones and his skin, like dry bread, his hips, small and round like those of a young girl, the way he speaks, meticulously and cautiously, as though he were giving careful consideration to every syllable, his white teeth, and the way his smile spreads across his angular features, wide and wrinkled like the stomach of someone sitting down.

  I start talking about whatever comes to mind, my patchy sleep, the book I am currently reading, about how shortsighted, unsustainable, and damaging it is to everyone that the Serbian government has hounded Albanian teachers and students out of the university, about my part-time job in a Serb-owned restaurant not very far from here, about customers who order only a coffee and occupy the tables for hours, about how disappointed I am with President Rugova and the way he merely repeats the same things day after day, asking the Albanians to hold on, hold on, about the courses I am undertaking in all kinds of places, in Albanian-owned private apartments, empty warehouses, offices, and basements, and of how humiliating it feels, and he smiles at me empathetically as though we have known each other forever, and as he tells me more about his studies at the faculty of medicine, about his one-room apartment a few blocks from the campus, about his summer job—he works at a restaurant too—he allows his eyes to run the length of my body, uninhibited; he looks at my arms and shoulders, he looks at my neck and chest, my sides, he looks at my lips and forehead, just as I look at him, all of him, so that every moment we spend not touching each other feels stolen.

  “Do you want to get out of here?” he interrupts at some point.

  “Yes,” I reply instantly, like a ravenous animal.

  “To my place, I mean,” he whispers.

  “Yes,” I say and stand up.

  We leave the café terrace and walk out into the street, and suddenly I feel frightened, as though the entire city can hear my thoughts, as if everyone knows where we are going and why.

  We pass a dressmaker’s, a small newspaper kiosk inside which a teenage boy in a baseball cap is smoking a cigarette, a busy restaurant with four Serb soldiers sitting at a table outside looking smugly around, then we skip past a thrift shop, its wares spilling out across the pavement, and arrive at his apartment building, and barely has he opened the door and closed it behind us than I am all over him—there in the dark urine-smelling stairwell, scraps of paper and cigarette ends all over the floor, there against the wall mossed with ingrained dirt, I kiss him.

  His lips taste sweet like fresh fruit, I note in my all-consuming desire, my eagerness to see him naked, then he pulls me behind him up the flight of stairs to his apartment, his small studio where we make love like filthy dogs, we tear the clothes from each other, he kisses me and touches me all over, and I kiss him everywhere, insatiable, without rhyme or reason; as though he were about to slip from my hands I grip his wrists, harder, as though he wasn’t real, as though his body temperature wasn’t absolute, I press my body against his body, tighter still, and though he gives me power over him, I wrest him off and shake him as if in a fit of rage, I sniff him and the air between us, the salty scent of his skin, and I admire his slender build, his bulging veins, his sides where his ribs shine through like yellowed strokes of a paintbrush, his smooth, freshly shaved body, and I stick a finger between his buttocks, press my tongue between them, then into his mouth too, and push his head against the pillow. His flesh yields to my commands like dough; I decide what happens to him now, and that is what he wants.

  A moment later, we lie next to each other on the sweaty bed, and I feel both heavy and light as a breath, I feel guilt and happiness, the two do not cancel each other out, and I don’t feel shame either, though he too looks a little hollow and bereft.

  “You are so handsome,” he says eventually and gives a short laugh, stands up, and reaches for his trousers, from the pocket of which he pulls out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

  “Thank you,” I say. “You are…too. Beautiful.”

  He takes a cigarette for himself, then hands me one and lights them in the same order. After the first puff I am about to ask him, almost out of habit, to start getting dressed, when he voluntarily picks up my shirt and trousers and places them in my lap, then begins putting his clothes on, the cigarette still burning between his lips.

  I look at the apartment, a kitchenette just big enough for a small fridge and with little counter space; in the hallway a door standing slightly ajar leads into a bathroom with a darkened bathtub and cracked yellow tiling, and in the main room there’s a sofa bed, a two-seater table, a wonky TV stand, bare white walls, and a dark blue threadbare carpet to which the sheets have fallen, still bearing our shapes.

  I have slept with a man; the thought scurries at the edge of my mind. I have just slept with another man, I repeat to myself and smile, and it felt better than in my most unbridled imaginings, insane and insanely good.

  I finish my cigarette, quickly pull on my clothes, and leave the apartment nodding to the question he asks from the bed, almost with a grimace, as I leave: “Want to meet tomorrow? Here, after midnight?”

  As I wander around downtown, it feels as though the earth moves beneath me, slowly rising to the rhythm of my footsteps like ruins waking from a dream. I watch with surprising calm as children chase one another in front of the Boro and Ramiz Hall, kicking a ball and teasing one another, but by the time I reach the theater I am so agitated that I almost trip over my shoelaces and stumble under a bus, and I stop at the newspaper kiosk to buy a chocolate bar and some chewing gum, which I stuff into my mouth.

  When
I arrive home, I tell Ajshe that this is the worst possible time for a new life, and she nods in agreement.

  “Yes, it is,” she replies and strokes her stomach.

  That night I wake to the sound of rain. A wild shower frantically whips the roads and rooftops, lapping the grit and dust from the ground and carrying it away like a gray gruel, eventually flushing it down the drains, out of sight.

  27 FEBRUARY 2000

  Do you ever wonder what you and I might have become, how happy we might have been in another time, another place maybe? I think about it all the time, here I have all the time in the world to think and write, to think what to write in this journal they gave me.

  Some say people remain the same throughout their life, but while I’ve been here I’ve realized that turning into something else, someone else, is just child’s play, the flick of a switch, all it takes is the desire to change, the ability to close your eyes, the imagination, the determination to walk unwavering through painful memories, to progress through the rising tide of past cruelties to a place where the landscape by the side of the road is new, the air thick with tomorrow.

  My imaginings are lovely, they move me, because in those thoughts we are not looking backward or to the sides but at each other, and I’m so pleased, so proud of us that I could snap in two like a twig—can a person even be this happy, I ask myself then, and asking that question always means that you are close enough that I can sense you and smell you, whenever I want, you are not going anywhere and neither am I.

  There I will see you again and everything will start over from the beginning, nothing that happened or didn’t happen between us matters, and there will be no sense of time, no earth that will not carry us, no wars no beliefs no people to push us apart, but there will be a house and a garden near the shore, sand and young forests and level fields, and now and then the rich smell of grass will rise to our nostrils, and from the window we can see all the way to the sea and as far as it stretches.