My Cat Yugoslavia Page 3

  When we came out of the bazaar the sun was beating down above Prishtina like an immense spotlight. I tried to commit to memory everything that I saw around me, because I knew this would be the last time I went to Prishtina with my father. The tall, ten-story buildings, their façades painted with white slogans. The men and women with their shopping bags striding past little children selling tobacco, chewing gum, and lighters on the street. Long lines of one and the same car, the Yugo Skala 101, the car that my father and every Yugoslav adored. The newly paved roads, the smell of asphalt, the small newspaper and tobacco kiosks, the gardens outside great shopping complexes, the old men sitting in cafés playing chess and zhol.

  My father bundled me into the car, then walked round to sit down in the driver’s seat. Before starting the engine, he asked me, “Do you know what happens after death?”

  He started the car just as I opened my mouth to give him the answer he wanted to hear.

  “I’m sorry, Father,” I said and lowered my head. “I know what happens after death.”

  “Never do anything like that again,” he said.

  We drove for a long time without speaking to each other. The city and all its people fell into the distance behind us, and ahead of us was nothing but a long straight road with orange-roofed houses on both sides and behind them tall mountains that looked almost as though they had been etched into the landscape. Only once the city was long behind us did he stop grinding his teeth.

  He allowed me to open the window. A cool breeze fluttered inside. The chill felt liberating, my sweaty forehead soon dried, and the sun’s warmth wrapped around my skin and face like soothing music.

  “I’ll never do anything like that again,” I swore.

  I knew that making excuses would have been pointless, because it wouldn’t have changed his mind in the slightest. For a long time he’d talked to me about how unfair it was to my siblings that he always took me with him on these trips.

  If I’d had the courage to defend myself the way I would today, I would have said that after death we meet God, but that meeting God means the absence or lack of God, because you cannot describe God, you can’t fit him onto a sheet of paper, into the universe. God is something so immense that his presence actually means his absence, and his absence his presence. God will decide whether or not to reach out his hand to the dead; that is the correct answer. God will decide where the deceased shall spend the rest of eternity, for all this, these roads and these trees and these mountains, this time and this land, are simply an illusion, they are a test in which, according to my father, there is only one question: Have you been dutiful to your God?

  My father smiled and placed his hand on my thigh. It was warm and clammy; I could feel the damp of his hand seeping into the fabric of my trousers. The wind whipped my hair around my head; cars driving past beeped their horns as they saw my father.

  I don’t know why, but I thought of the man at the bazaar. Everything about him, his expressive face, the confidence of his gestures, his brown shining eyes, his masculine shoulders, what his short stubble, his strong hands would feel like against my skin.

  There was a tingling at the bottom of my stomach, something I couldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams. I closed my eyes, and for the rest of the journey I thought only of him, and I thought of him throughout the following years, for after that I never again visited Prishtina with my father. Every night and every morning I thought of the man at the bazaar, until one day I met another man.

  Spring 1980

  THE FIRST MEETING

  From my vantage point on the boulder you could see the whole small village, its unfinished houses and fields, their edges marked with razor-sharp precision. Behind them the low-standing mountains rose up like soft pillows covered with dark-green forests. There were clusters of houses, small orange-roofed houses. It was my favorite place in the whole world, and I’ve never found anything to match it.

  One April morning, when the sun was still rising and I’d finished my morning chores earlier than usual, I climbed up the mountainside and sat down on the boulder on my way to school. A moment later a car pulled up on a dirt track a short distance away. I couldn’t see the driver’s face. All I could see were his hands, his muscular, hairless, sturdy hands.

  —

  The driver craned out of the window to take a closer look, as though he didn’t quite believe what he saw. He blinked until he finally plucked up the courage to gesture to the girl sitting on the boulder; she quickly turned her head and looked away. As if by design, a gust of wind caught the girl’s long, nut-brown hair, and the sight was like something from a film in slow motion. And behind that hair was a face all the more beautiful: symmetrical, strong, and flawless, and the man clearly liked what he saw, as he began to shuffle his feet restlessly beneath the steering wheel.

  “What are you up to?” the man asked warily before adding a smile that revealed his white, straight set of teeth and deep-set dimples, which the girl quickly peeked at and which she liked very much, though at this point the girl wouldn’t dare admit it even to herself.

  The girl quickly clambered down from the boulder, as though someone had discovered her secret hiding place, irrevocably violated its sanctity. For a moment the girl wondered whether the boulder would ever be the same for her, now that someone had seen her there, though the view down into the village and the girl’s fascination with it were no secret to the local villagers.

  “Nothing,” the girl answered quietly after walking back to the road. “I’m on my way to school. Have a nice day,” she added bashfully.

  It was only a few miles more to the school. After walking past the car, the girl continued with determined steps; class would be starting soon and she would be late if she didn’t walk more briskly, and she didn’t want the teacher to rap her on the knuckles.

  She hadn’t walked far when she heard the car she’d left behind turning. Her father had warned her about this, she thought. He’d always said you couldn’t trust young Kosovan men, that they stopped young girls in the town, at work, anywhere, and distracted them, dishonored them. Për me ja marrë fytyrën, he said, placed a cigarette between his lips, and lit it with his left hand while stirring a cup of tea with his right.

  The car soon caught up with the girl, who felt too nervous either to run away or to face the man.

  “Can I give you a lift to school?” he asked and bit his lower lip as he looked at her back.

  “No, thank you, I’m nearly there. Have a nice day,” the girl repeated in an attempt to indicate to the man that she had no interest in continuing the conversation.

  The man drove alongside her all the same.

  “Suit yourself,” he said cockily. “This might sound embarrassing, but I think you’re the most beautiful young woman I’ve ever laid eyes on. I’d like to know your name.”

  Her whole body warmed and her guts seemed to melt. With that the girl’s nervousness lifted, and a few seconds later she turned to look at the man, still smiling from inside his car. The girl tried to replay the encounter in her mind like a roll of film, careful not to break it, for she quickly came to the conclusion that the encounter was perfect in every way. She had just been called the most beautiful woman in the world. The girl thought how wrong her father had been. Miracles happened all the time, and not all men were devious.

  “Emine,” she replied.

  No! She suddenly let out a noise somewhere between a gasp and the sounds she was trying to enunciate and quickly clasped her hand across her mouth as though she had just said something she should not have uttered under any circumstance. It was as though the girl wanted to slit her name’s throat and give another name instead, so convinced she was of what telling someone your name really meant.

  “Thank you,” the man replied, winked at her, and turned his car in the opposite direction.

  The following week an old man arrived in the village. He went from door to door until he found what he was looking for: the house where there lived a
young woman by the name of Emine. The old man asked to speak with the head of the family, and when he appeared at the door, the stranger explained that a certain young woman and a certain young man had encountered each other by chance and took a liking to each other, and for that reason the young man’s father now suggested the youngsters marry each other. The young woman’s father contemplated this for a moment, but when the young man’s father assured him that his son would promise the young woman a decent life, food and happiness, enough work and a loving family, beautiful children and a large house, the young woman’s father consented to give his daughter’s hand in marriage without further explanation. The two men shook hands and agreed to meet again in a few weeks’ time to discuss details of the wedding.

  It was a definitive moment in both their lives: the girl’s father ceased to be the girl’s father and the girl ceased to be her father’s daughter. The girl wondered whether everything her father had said about love and happiness must have meant something else, for once they had met each other a man and woman weren’t always able to get to know each other in peace; they couldn’t go to a café or the pictures first and get married afterward, and love didn’t start when they first looked each other in the eye. At most it was a fascination that had started, she thought, but it was a long journey from fascination to love. And the girl’s father shook his head and deemed the girl’s ideas of love and happiness childish and unrealistic, because what’s most important in life is not love and happiness but peace.

  And so the girl’s father took the girl out of school and began adding up his assets, and together with her mother and sisters the girl began preparing her trousseau. The girl’s mother began telling her daughter about the wedding ceremony, making sure at regular intervals that her daughter was listening because, despite her adroitness at household chores, the girl often seemed so absentminded that her mother wondered how on earth she’d get on. Didn’t she appreciate quite how many different traditions and customs there were, or that they differed from one village to the next? Or how important it was to keep your husband satisfied?

  Eventually she gave her daughter a little slap and told her she didn’t know how lucky she was, because only a few decades ago traditional weddings used to be full of acts of indescribable cruelty.

  “Like what?” asked the girl.

  About a week before the wedding, the villagers snared a cat. They kept it locked up, waiting, the girl’s mother explained in passing as though this was a detail that didn’t require any explanation. But because she wanted her daughter to prepare for any eventuality, she told the girl that in some places it was customary for the groom to bring the cat to his newly wed bride on their wedding night and kill it with his bare hands to demonstrate to his wife his supremacy, to teach her to fear him.

  The girl was shocked at the story. She imagined the sound of a cat’s neck snapping, what the cat would look like as the groom tore it apart with his bare hands, and how much blood would pour out of it, what the room would smell like after the killing of the street cat. The girl shuddered, the fair hairs on her neck were suddenly like damp wool, and she started scratching her fingertips with her thumbnail.

  Finally, the girl’s mother advised her daughter not to smile or get a tan, because there was nothing more beautiful than a serious-looking, pale-skinned bride.

  2

  I tried to convince myself that sinking all my savings into a snake, a terrarium, a climbing tree, a heated mat, a water bowl, and frozen mice was a sensible decision, though our first days together didn’t go particularly well. I don’t know what the snake had been fed at its previous home, but thawed mice from the freezer didn’t arouse the slightest reaction. I placed them right in front of its rubbery snout, but it blinked its eyes as though it was far more interested in wrapping itself around my arms or my body. It did this from morning to night; it was following me.

  After shedding its initial timidity, it slid across the floor like a block of wet soap and found its way into every imaginable place. That morning it had wound itself round the toilet bowl, in the afternoon I found it on the hat rail above the coatrack, and in the evening it had folded itself across the back of my office chair like a pile of clothes. I had received detailed instructions on how to look after it: a happy snake requires love, calm, and above all boundaries. But no amount of love and calm, no amount of boundaries could make the snake what it was destined to become.

  I’d understood that snakes should be left to their own devices and that they would come to trust their handlers over time. It would acquaint itself with the terrarium first and only then begin to explore larger sections of the apartment; otherwise it would become agitated at the size of its new territory and would be unable to protect it. However, as I placed it in the terrarium and switched on the heated mat it started wriggling and writhing so aggressively that the terrarium’s glass walls all but shattered at the force of its agonized spasms.

  When I let it climb into my lap, it wrapped itself around me tightly, almost as though it was escaping something, and when I tried to uncoil it and put it back on the floor it gripped me all the harder, meaning I was forced to show it who was boss by vigorously clenching its jaw. It often hissed, and I always gave in and backed off.

  It bit me. It would nibble the back of my hand, my face, and though I raised my voice and chided it in no uncertain terms, though I clasped its springy jaw, my nails white from the pressure, it didn’t learn but always bit me again so that I could feel its curved fangs and the two tips of its moist, forked tongue against my skin.

  A few days later, life simply had to go on. The time reserved for getting accustomed to each other, acquainted with each other, was up, and I had to leave it in the apartment by itself. As I walked to the tram stop in the cold November morning, as the ground gray with frost crunched beneath my feet, I realized that I missed the snake, missed its timidity, its dependence on me. And its appearance, its beautiful, symmetrical, zigzag patterning. Of all the snakes in the world my snake was the largest, the strongest, and the most beautiful, I said and watched as my words billowed in clouds of frozen air in front of me, because my snake had the smallest head and the slenderest jaw and the tightest scales, the most mysterious personality, and the thickest skin, which my snake shed faster than any other snake of its kind.

  I stepped onto the tram, sat down by the window, gave a heavy sigh, and closed my eyes. I arrived at the stop in front of the university and walked in through the doors of the main building. I opened the door of the lecture hall and sat toward the front; a few condescending nods from the other students and the lecture began.

  The lecturer started by talking about a change in the assessment of this course; instead of a final exam we would have to work in groups, produce a thirty-page study of one of the subjects covered in the course. My stomach felt as though I’d just swallowed a stone the size of a fist, and once we’d been split into groups of four and forced to sit with one another I didn’t introduce myself to the other members of the group but said I felt ill, high temperature, and that unfortunately I’d have to go home. In fact, I said, I feel so weak I’ll have to go right away.

  —

  I didn’t enjoy my time at the university, though I’d convinced myself that study was my path to a better life. When I was accepted to the university to study philosophy, straight out of high school, I imagined that’s how I would meet the right kind of people and so on and so forth. When I saw my name on the list of accepted candidates, I was so proud and overjoyed that I believed it was something in which I would find satisfaction for the rest of my life. I would study cultural theory, history, foreign languages, and linguistics. I would become wise and influential, able to formulate coherent arguments in German, English, and Swedish. I thought that in doing so I would be able to make different choices from those of my parents, who arrived in this country and had to start their lives again from scratch. I would find work and achieve a good life, affluence and a decent pension, the freedom to do everyt
hing differently. And friends whose encouragement would give me the determination to do just that.

  But the more I studied and the more job applications I sent off, the quicker I realized that that doesn’t happen to people like me. Immigrants have to grow a thick skin if they want to do something more than wait hand and foot on the Finns, my father used to say. Go ahead, do as they do. Ruin your life by being like them, but one day you’ll see that if you try to become their equal, they’ll despise you all the more, and then you’ll end up hating yourself. Don’t give them the satisfaction.

  And he said this too: Don’t do your work too well, only to notice that it won’t lead to anything. Why is it so important to get good grades? To sit up night after night learning things by rote, things that are of no use whatsoever? Is there any sense in that? Sitting up at two in the morning, your eyes swollen from your reading lamp, giving yourself headaches and winding yourself into a fit of rage and tears at such a young age, just because you can’t remember words in a foreign language, the names of plants and birds and trees, dates, turning points, historical figures, equations, conjugations, eras, genres, terms for parts of the heart, the lungs, the kidneys, the bowels? I’ll only tell you this once: never try to be better than them.

  I didn’t get to know anyone and didn’t have a single friend. I did odd work in shops and for a maintenance company, cleaning hospitals and delivering the mail. The chitchat I occasionally picked up in the university corridors sounded meaningless: everyone was talking about student loans and the cost of food and rent and badly paid jobs, income levels that were too low, dilapidated student housing, the dreary program of events at student parties.