My Cat Yugoslavia Read online

  I couldn’t stand it. Each student was a clone of the next. Their lives were one way, mine was another, and their conversation was so painfully boring that I had no desire to spend time with them.

  Don’t people in this country understand how desperate life is for the majority of the world? That people die every single day, that they are thrashed with leather whips and made to eat rat poison, that bandits force their way into their homes, desecrate, steal, or burn their possessions, and cart the victims off to dark cells or work camps where they spend such a long time that they forget where they have come from?

  I treated them with disdain, contempt, I despised their lifestyles, their choices and problems. I rolled my eyes at them, openly loathed their public discourse, and laughed at the books they wrote. For what did they know about real life and real suffering? Absolutely nothing.

  They even asked me about it. When are immigrants going to get off their asses and do something? When are they going to stop shafting the welfare system, lazing about, and harassing women? Sure, they’re not all the same. Like you, I mean, you’re an exception, you’re just the kind of immigrant we welcome here. But most of them.

  And I said it’s because of people like that that the world is becoming ill. It keeps coughing, won’t stop, because it’s got carbon monoxide poisoning from the filth you churn out. Imagine having to abandon your family, having to witness your loved ones die in an explosion. Or imagine being so desperate that you turn to God though you don’t believe in him. You would, and don’t say otherwise.

  And don’t interrupt me. Tell me, what would you do if you were forced to move to a country that despises your faith and you’d never be able to go home again? If you had to learn a foreign language taught in a foreign language, how quickly do you think you’d be able to land a customer-service job? No, don’t answer that, because I never want to hear your voice again. Don’t ever speak to me again. This is it.

  I wanted to punch them, grab them by the hair, and smash their heads against the wall or the table, push them into a revolving door or under a car, run a cheese grater down their sickening faces.

  The worst of it was that I started thinking the same kinds of things as they did. I wondered what job I might end up doing, how much work I could do, how long it would take for my career to pick up. I wondered what grade I’d get for my thesis, I lost sleep wondering whether it would make more sense to work for a few years and then go back to my studies. And I wondered whether I should take out my student loan immediately and buy an apartment there and then, or whether I should wait until I’d found someone with whom to share the expenses.

  —

  After this outburst I was sitting in a tram wondering what to do with my life. I could always leave, start afresh somewhere else. I could leave everything behind, refuse to look at anyone or listen to anyone, I could change my name and get new official documents. I could have a nose job and get cheek implants to make me look completely different. Then nobody would know the first thing about me because I wouldn’t look like anyone with those looks and a name like that who had ever achieved anything or ever existed. There might be nothing to leave behind and nobody to tell that I was leaving, but a fresh start, a clean slate would help me realize that I don’t really need anything, that there were only a few things that I could never live without.

  I could travel the world, I thought. I could wash dishes in Spanish tavernas, pick South African passion fruit on sun-drenched farms, look after stray dogs in an American shelter, bring aid to people caught up in natural disasters. I’d ask them to listen and look them in the eye as I repeated what I could tell them. We will survive. I’d take them by the shoulders and smile, and they would smile back at me with such power that I would feel to my core how close I was to the essence of life.

  I started to laugh at myself. So that’s what you’re going to damned well do, I scoffed. Are you thinking of leaving because you imagine you’re different from other people or because you think you’re above them?

  A young woman got on the tram and sat down next to me. She was beautiful and well dressed, her perfume smelled of freshly picked berries, and a strip of bare skin was showing beneath her all-too-short jacket. She pressed her leg against mine and pretended to look elsewhere. I turned to look at her. I could have invited her to my place, and she would probably have come. Or I could have reacted in a different way altogether. What the fuck are you doing, I could have asked, she would have turned to look at me, and I would have looked down at her leg, which by then she would have moved away. Sorry, she’d say absentmindedly.

  I left the tram without saying a word, closed my apartment door, hung up my coat, and walked straight into my bedroom. I looked around at the bright white walls and my cluttered desk, the ceiling-high wardrobes and the snake, which had moved from the living room into the bedroom and had climbed up to the windowsill. It looked like a bunch of darkened bananas.

  My clothes started to constrict me, clinging to my limbs like tight nylon. I slipped them off, huddled beneath two duvets, gripped the snake by the tail, and pulled it down from the windowsill. And little by little it slithered next to me, without struggling or thrashing, and eventually positioned itself around me like a protective wall, a halo, and it was cool and rough and its skin gave to the touch like a ripe avocado.

  “I’ve no idea,” I said after a while as I stroked the snake’s skin. “No idea what to do.”

  I wanted to tell it that I was lonely. So lonely that I sometimes spoke to myself in the apartment, that every now and then I walked to the park, sat down on a bench, and spent hours watching people who had come there with their loved ones, and I wanted to tell them how small and insignificant I felt when they started to eat and laugh together, how it never ceased to amaze me how people could find a shared rhythm like that, and I wanted to tell the snake that all those years of loneliness had been so brutal that sometimes it felt as though nobody knew I even existed.

  In response the snake turned slightly and slid its head across my chest so that I could see myself reflected in its eye.

  Spring 1980

  THE SECOND MEETING

  The man’s name was Bajram, and his name meant “celebration.” He was a broad-shouldered man, his body was big and muscular, there was a masculine swagger to his steps, pronounced chest muscles could be seen through his dark-red shirt, and his hefty buttocks barely fit in his trousers as he strolled along the path leading to our house and peered around as if he was trying to locate me. Sand crunched beneath his feet, and the tobacco smoke billowing from his mouth hung in the air like a thick cloud of dust.

  I’d left the front door ajar and stood watching them approach the house. My breathing was heavy, and I tried to remain as quiet as possible because I was afraid that Bajram or his father, whom I now saw hobbling along behind him, might hear me. My stomach was churning like a pot of boiling water, and my hands were clammy with sweat.

  I had learned to believe that women shouldn’t think things like that. I must have been ill or going mad—to be so excited at the thought that I might soon touch his skin or smell him, that he might touch my skin, that I could press my lips against his lips and wrap my arms around his powerful body. I imagined that if it was natural to think about things like that, let alone to experience them, I would have heard people speak of them before.

  On the one hand I wanted him, but on the other I was ashamed of the place they had come to meet us. The flaking paint on the walls of our modest white house showed that we didn’t have much. The incomplete building work on the house revealed that we’d run out of money. The large field behind our house suggested that in the summer months we lived on vegetables we’d grown ourselves and during the winter we ate the same vegetables preserved in vinegar.

  As they approached the terrace, I snuck into the kitchen. A moment later Bajram and his father stepped inside and walked into the living room to discuss my future life. I hadn’t seen him since he’d asked my name there on the boulder, te
guri i madhë, and now they had arrived to talk about the wedding, which would be held on the first weekend of May, to discuss how and when I would be fetched and taken to him, what would happen through the course of the day, for there he was. My husband.

  After greeting them I listened to their conversation from the kitchen, though I couldn’t make out the words. I couldn’t hear Bajram’s voice; he didn’t have permission to speak over them. He could only speak once his father had finished, and he was supposed to shake hands first with my father and then with me. He had to step into the house with his right foot, accept the cigarettes that would soon be offered to him, the juice and the tea, though he mustn’t be seen to eat too many of the nuts, salted sticks, and llokum laid out on the table.

  I was holding a tray with assorted savory and sweet nibbles, three glasses for tea, and two Turkish teapots, one with brewed tea leaves and the other with boiling water. I had tied my hair back and dressed in a black sweater and a long black skirt.

  I wrapped my fingers around the tray and lifted, but when I noticed that the bowls were clinking against one another I put the tray down again. My hands were still trembling.

  It was only then that I realized I would live with that man for the rest of my life, and the thought struck me in the side like a wrecking ball ripping through the walls of a building. My cheeks were burning as though someone had rubbed them with hot biber. I felt stupid, betrayed, cheated. What if we never learned to love each other? What would happen then?

  The thought of living with him and bearing children tugged at me like an angry farmer pulling up weeds. I began to worry that I would be unable to live up to his expectations, that I wouldn’t be able to give him children, that I wouldn’t even be able to live by his side. I wondered how I would greet him in the morning, how I could tell him about my women’s problems. But what worried me even more was the thought that he was just as worried. If he was thinking the same things, we would be like two factory workers thrown into an operating room and expected to perform heart surgery.

  I swallowed the thought, gripped the tray, and walked into the hallway but came to a stop outside the living-room door. I gave my head a shake, cleared my throat, pushed the door open with my foot, and walked into the living room regardless of the trembling, and what a happy surprise it was to see how divinely handsome my groom was. Up close he looked much better than from a distance. There’s nothing to it, I thought, nothing difficult at all; it’s not as if I’d be marrying an ugly, hairy man. His face was smooth and symmetrical. He looked like a model: full lips, a straight nose, brown eyes like pastilles, shiny white teeth, and neat eyebrows. What more could a woman wish of her husband’s appearance?

  The passion, the attraction that I felt for him at that moment was something almost supernatural. How did love ever flicker into life, if not from a meeting such as this? I wondered.

  My father was sitting on one couch, and Bajram and his father were sitting opposite him on the other.

  “You are a good man for her, Bajram, the right man,” I heard my father say and saw him clap Bajram on the shoulder. “This is God’s will.”

  Bajram watched his future bride, as was customary. He assessed the order in which I placed the teacups on the table in front of them, watched whether I handed the first teacup to his father, then to him, then to my own father, scrutinized the way I poured the tea, watched to see whether it was strong enough, whether I stopped pouring at the right point, at the last line, or whether I had been brought up carelessly, whether my mother might be e dështuar, a worthless woman who had failed the task of teaching her daughter how men should properly be served.

  Once the guests had made themselves comfortable and sat down, depending on the time of day they were to be offered either dinner or tea or coffee with something small to eat, either sweet or savory. Before dinner began in earnest, guests were served a glass of lemonade, mineral water, or natural water. If guests were to be served dinner, before the meal the youngest women in the family—generally the wives of the younger brothers in the house—carried in a pail of water, a jug, and a towel. One of them would have a towel draped over her left wrist while she poured water with her right hand in order for the guests to wash their hands. The water was then collected in a large pail held by another of the young women, which she emptied at regular intervals. Or: when guests drank their tea from Turkish teacups, the cups emptied quickly because of their size. The women had to be quick on their feet and fetch fresh water from the kitchen. Tea should be poured generously; the women should only stop pouring once the guests said mjaft, enough. Leaving teapots in the room in which the tea was to be drunk was a sign of indifference, disrespect, and laziness, while pouring tea sparingly showed greed and miserliness.

  Once the tea I was pouring was a perfect shade of brown and red and precisely reached the last line in the cup, and when I’d done everything just the way I should, Bajram squinted his eyes, gave me a trusting smile, and looked at me even more piercingly than before, as though he remained oblivious to how uncomfortable his scrutiny made me feel.

  Stepping backward, I began taking the teapots back into the kitchen. As I turned in the doorway, I felt his gaze burning my back. Once I had returned to the kitchen and placed the teapots on the counter I had to catch my breath. I looked out of the window at my siblings running and playing at the edge of the field, my mother peering expectantly toward the house. She was annoyed that my father had driven her out of the house while Bajram and his father were visiting.

  I drank a glass of water, and when a moment later I returned to the living room carrying a tray, Bajram was still smiling his charming, magical smile. I wanted to press my fingers against the wrinkled corners of his eyes, caress his dimples, stay there with him, alone, touch his arms, because I couldn’t believe what I saw in front of me was real. Can a man really look so handsome when he smiles?

  “How are you, zotëri?” I asked his father as he dropped three lumps of sugar into his teacup. I held the tray in front of my hips.

  “Very well,” he replied.

  “And how is your wife, nana?”

  “She is in good health,” he answered and stirred his tea.

  “And Bajram and the girls?”

  “They are well too, healthy,” he said.

  “And the cattle? The field?”

  “Very well.”

  “God’s blessing.”

  He asked me the same questions, as etiquette required, and I gave him the same answers. Then we went through the same list of questions with Bajram, he replied the same way as his father and asked me exactly the same questions, and I gave the same answers I had already given his father. All was well. It’s a good thing there were only two of them, I thought. Greeting everyone individually took a frightfully long time, and standing in front of everyone felt like being on stage performing a role without knowing the right lines.

  After hearing my answers, Bajram turned to look at my father. I saw his profile, his angular chin, the straight line of his nose and his round head, and what an attractive silhouette they formed, but also I noticed how there was now something different about the way he was smiling at my father. His smile was modest, timid even. The smile meant for me was personal, he lowered his jaw slightly, as though he didn’t care for the conversation going on around him. He sat on the couch, his hands on his thighs, and his forehead shone; he was surely as nervous as I was.

  Again I left the room but stood behind the door listening to their conversation.

  “You shall treat my daughter well in your house,” my father began.

  “Of course,” said Bajram’s father.

  “Bajram,” said my father and turned to look at Bajram. “I do not accept gambling or other women,” he continued, his tone serious.

  “I’m not that kind of man,” Bajram tried to assure him.

  “You have seen my daughter. You don’t come across girls like that every day. What’s more, Emine is good with her hands, she is hardworking and careful,
she has been the answer to my prayers, and I believe she will be the answer to yours too,” my father continued every bit as seriously, and as he said this I began smiling to myself.

  “A good man works hard, and after work he returns home to his wife and children. And his wife shall keep the house in order,” my father continued.

  “Then we understand one another,” Bajram’s father said confidently. “Bajram has yet to complete his studies at the university in Prishtina. As you see, he is handsome, but more than that he is wise and upstanding, and one day he will end up in a well-paid job.”

  “I assure you, zotëri, I will take good care of your daughter,” Bajram added.

  “Good,” my father said contentedly. “Because I am not afraid of prison, and neither am I afraid of death,” he said, and for a moment it was so quiet that I knew my father was giving them a very meaningful stare.

  I must be a hardworking, obedient wife to him, I thought. My mother had told me countless stories about the various reasons for which women were sent back to their own homes. One had accidentally farted while pouring the tea, one had neglected to iron her husband’s shirts, a third had washed her husband’s feet in almost boiling water because he hadn’t shown her due respect. Such rejection would be shameful, the whole family’s reputation would be destroyed, and nobody wanted a woman who had already been driven out of one home.

  Then my father asked whether they would be staying for dinner.

  “Unfortunately we are unable to stay for dinner,” said Bajram’s father, and they began to take their leave.

  —

  Once we had said our good-byes, held out our right hands in the all-important order, first to the oldest man, then to the younger men, after that to the oldest woman, then to the younger women, my father said he’d never met a family as fine as this one. He praised their speaking skills, their ability to take care of things quickly, the way that they didn’t brag about their possessions though they had good reason to do so, and how their handshakes were firm and unflinching.