Shards: A Novel (36 page)

—Legion of Merit award citation given by Harry S. Truman, President, The White House, March 29, 1948

Underneath, in Cyrillic longhand, someone has written:

The highest award the U.S. government can bestow upon a foreign national.

Your whole life, since you were six years old, your teachers have told you that “Draža” Mihailovi
was a bad man,
a quisling, someone who fought with the Nazis against the Yugoslav Army and ordered the slaughter of thousands of Yugoslavs who were not of his faith. But here he is, an ordained American hero. You stagger away in rage. In fear.

No one’s come out of the bathroom yet. You go farther down the corridor, into a bedroom, and find a phone. You dial your apartment and after two rings your roommate picks up.

“Hello.”

“Eric, I need a ride from you, dude. I’m in a pickle.”

“Where are you?”

“In the Valley.”

“Still at that party?”

“No, I’m in the house of a psycho and need to get the fuck outta here, pronto.”

“Can it wait? I’m making ramen.”

“You should be in the car right now, dude.”

As you say “dude” there are four pistol shots in rapid succession:
BANGBANGBANGBANG!
You look around and notice an envelope on the bed stand addressed to some other Cvetkovi
;. The mother.

“Are those gunshots?”

Ignoring the question, you read the address into the phone twice. You’re pleading now. “Come get me, man.”

You hear some commotion out in the corridor, and turn around in time to catch a glimpse of Miloš and his mother hurrying down the hall, arguing about where to hide the pistol, fussing.

You remember a cataclysmic night on the front line, when the snow was the color of bone in the close-to-f moonlight and the branches were spread above you like blood vessels on the anemic belly of the night sky and the
bullets dove from nowhere, crashing into soft things and bouncing off hard things, and the enemy mortars smashed everything into powder. You remember the story the Claw told you that night, the one about how, some time ago, he was given orders to crawl up a hill and rendezvous with another squad of guys who were crawling up from the other side. He was supposed to wear a white band around his left arm to distinguish himself from the enemy, since otherwise their uniforms were virtually identical. He told you about how he reached the top and lizarded his way into a trench full of guys with white armbands on their left arms, squatting there, shooting the shit, until finally he realized that they were actually Chetniks, that by some strange twist of fate they’d decided on the same white armband to set themselves apart. You see the Claw keeping his cool, creeping backward, silently cocking his Kalashnikov, and killing them all from behind.

The bathroom’s open now and you lock yourself in, determined to wait it out. The little room is decorated in belabored beige: beige tiles, beige shower curtain, red and beige towels, your own beige face in the mirror. You splash water on yourself, take some into your mouth, spit it out, take it in, and spit it out. Through the small, pebbled window you can see the accordion player typing an intricate Balkanesque melody on two keyboards simultaneously, acting like no shots were fired at all. You sit on the beige toilet lid, put your head into your beige hands, and stare at the tile grid on the floor, at a wastebasket, at the grid again. You think of death and Mother. You try to figure out what’s right.

The wastebasket is small, wicker, and lined with plastic. You push at the base of it with the edge of your foot and the
wads of tissue tumble and rearrange themselves, exposing a dull glint beneath. You reach in and retrieve Jovan’s gun.

Your hand knows what to do with it; your index finger turns inward. The grip feels good. You sniff the barrel and it smells of youth, of Bosnia. You switch the safety off and stand up. You cock. In the mirror you look like the Claw, standing there against the beige. You lean closer. Your eyes are all pain.

Police sirens start off low and grow higher until they shut up the accordion player and silence the clamoring Serbs. There are conversations you can’t really hear. Questions are asked. Things are blamed on the kids, fireworks. Apologies are given and warnings issued. You realize you’re standing there with a gun in your hand. Where is Eric? How long does it take to get here from Thousand Oaks in an Oldsmobile?

You pace the bathroom. You hide the gun. You pick it up again. Hide it. Pick it up. You lift the tank lid, toss the gun in. You close the tank.

Half an hour later a car horn sounds and you know it’s your ride. There’s a party going on in the backyard again. You focus on what you need to do, take a deep breath, and get out of the bathroom and down the hallway. There are kids sitting around the table in the kitchen, laughing. You make your way across the living room. The white front door is the only thing you see. You can feel it, this elation in your chest, this glee in the muscles of your face. Your lips curl. You reach for the doorknob and wrap your fist around it.

“Soldier!” Jovan yells from behind you. “Where are you going?”

He stumbles toward you, pushing himself off the walls, almost falls but doesn’t. He makes it to the back of the giant armchair and, with fifteen or so feet ahead of him without
anything to balance himself on, stops there and leans on it with both hands.

“Stay a while longer.”

“I have to go, sir. I didn’t mean to stay this long. I have some things I have to do.”

He grunts. “Eh, okay. Okay, but come over here before you go so I can thank you for what you’ve done for us.”

He raises his arms, stumbles forward, and catches himself just before he hits the back of the chair with his face. The car horn sounds again. You can see the brown Delta 88 right in front of the house.

“That’s my ride,” you tell him, and start to step out the door.

“Tell me one thing.”

You wait. You turn to him.

“How many of them did you—,” he stops, dragging his left forefinger across his neck, “—with your own hand?”

You look at him, this son of a bitch. His eyes smirk. You want to say,
I’m Mustafa Nali
,
but you can’t. You want to forgive him. In your heart you want to hug him but you’re afraid you’d break his spine. You want to shake his hand but you’re afraid you’d pull his whole arm out of its socket. You want to kiss his cheek and spit upon it.

“One night I infiltrated an enemy trench and killed six with one clip. They thought I was one of them. They were joking around. I just mowed them all down.”

He smiles and nods his head.

“Good for you,” he says.

Excerpts from Ismet Prci
’s Diary
from June 2003

Melissa is gone,
mati
. Gone.

We kept fighting. For months she kept . . . she said she found motel receipts and drugs in my dirty jeans while doing laundry. WHAT?

She became so . . . cold, like she does, and I felt like I was gonna shoot her, so I stormed out of the place before I did. Drove all night. Camped in the woods. When I came back she was gone.

She’s still gone. Ben and Jen (roommates) are gone, too, but they will be back in San Diego tomorrow. From outrigger racing in Hawaii. Melissa won’t be. She left for good. I’m alone with Ben’s cat, drinking.

I called Dr. Cyrus at midnight. Like a broken record.
Take a Xanax and write,
he said.
Write everything
. He wants everything? Here’s everything:

(. . . a full minute of everything,
for cyrus . . .)

. . . home sweet home and on a love seat reclined groggy with alcohol and a five-day camping trip with ticks and bears and giant trees you sit in the low glow of a 40-watt bulb with a journal and the TV on and Johnny cat is psychotically chewing his fur off and the insides of his hind legs are even more bare than when you left and his eyes are huge and loveless and the aquarium sits half-f or half-empty the fish have been moved elsewhere since it started leaking and shorted out the answering machine and there’s a week’s worth of
Los Angeles Times Orange County Editions
still in their plastic auras unread and splotched with desert dreamscapes broken wire fences camouflage uniforms and mushroom clouds and everything is a mess and clustered against the cyclorama of colorful junk mail offering junk food and junk dreams for prices a junky could afford are white envelopes reminding you of approaching due dates and a lady longlegs pokes her appendages at the old wine stain under the strict surveillance of the cat too lazy to get off his fat ass and hunt his own food and a car drives into a desert sunset on-screen and the metallic letters spell out
NISSAN
and then the angry young white man comes back on his baby face wrinkled with tough at
titude his whiny voice gets bleeped a lot and he swears by artistic expression and spits on censorship and laughs all the way to the bank and his song bounces in the background and your hand slips to the floor and investigates around until it finds the “Kai Elua Outrigger Canoe Club” mug half-f or half-empty of diet orange soda and Albertsons vodka out of a plastic bottle purchased with your Discover card since your bank account said $18.69 last time you checked some months ago and the liquid goes down with painful ease and your eyes get a bit watery from all the mess around so you press a button to change the things you can change at the moment and the angry young white man vanishes into a representation of a faraway land on-screen with tongue-breaking names for towns split sometimes with a dash and the south is scribbled on with red and black arrows pointing north and the drawings of tanks and planes are harmless and look like something from the Cartoon Network and a white-haired white-collared white dude with a foot and a half in the grave points a pointer with his sagging hand and explains in a loveless voice “what we are doing” using sports rhetoric like “we hit the target” and “our team is easily maneuverable” and “we have the best team in the world” and fairy-tale rhetoric of bad guys and good guys victims and bullies right and wrong and somewhere across the globe civilians are being “liberated” liberated of their lives personal property culture pursuit of happiness and you press the button again as your eyes water a little bit more and the cat licks his ass and more liquid goes down and you find a bump on your back and it better not be another tick that Lyme disease shit is nothing to laugh about and some other white-haired white-collared white dude talks to a handful of white-haired white-collared white dudes about his newest book on multicultural diversity and you mute the sucker silent and imagine him running a marathon in sweltering heat and drinking Gatorade that turns his sweat green and for a
moment everything is silent—then the phone screams too loud and the cat sprints into the corridor and your mind flashes to Bosnia and to a mortar shell hitting your high school gym and its detonation tossing you over three meters of tiled floor into a pinup board and your head buzzing like a hysterical motherboard and you barely hearing the sirens you know are shrill and your thoughts are comatose with the overwhelming flashback forcing itself into your awareness reminding you that things might not be so peachy after all and your heart pumps hard but off beat and the way the air escapes out of you without your control over it foreshadows the impending panic attack that freezes you in your tracks and you should go and answer that phone before it rings again screams again but you cannot move and everything is suspended as if paused by a remote control so that the being watching you dreaming you inventing you on the spot can go and take a leak squeeze a zit out and marvel at its chiseled facial features while you wait for the crushing collapse of your inner system and the ascent of baseless fear paranoia will destroy ya but it doesn’t come a false alarm and you are relieved and sweaty and only if your heart would start again and then it does and you start for the phone which screams again but this time you’re ready and prepared and you put aside the remote control get off the love seat step over a bunch of crap and pick up the telephone.

It isn’t Melissa.