By: Saida Mustajbegovic
Someone is knocking on the door. It'll soon be dawn. Many red games have passed by. Many red and white pearls have disappeared. Someone is knocking. Louder and louder. I cannot open the door. I don´t know if it has just started. Or is it already over? The warm, sleepy head doesn´t care either way.
Eventually my father wakes me up. With a quiet, apprehensive voice he says: “Go and open the door. You needn´t be afraid.”
What should I be afraid of anyway? It´s just someone. Someone who´s knocking.
A uniform. I didn´t even know that you´re supposed to be afraid of uniforms. Apparently, though, people are. This particular uniform is not the mailman. He´s also not the forest ranger. He´s – horror. More uniforms enter, but they don´t knock. They surround my father. My father doesn´t speak, only his eyes do: You needn´t be afraid, they say, it´s alright. But I know they are not telling the truth. He´s my father. He´s lying to me. “You needn´t be afraid” – the sentence echoes in my head.
I walk up to the small room, my knees are trembling. It used to be my grandmother´s kitchen. Now it´s a trap. I suppose we are trapped in it – Mom, I and my cousin. As if we weren´t even together. But we are. For a short while we aren´t even aware of each other, we are lost in fear, each in our own. A cry startles us, beckons us. Mom is crying. My cousin grabs me and won´t let go. As if I could, in my weakness, my weariness, my fear, protect her in any way. The uniform is at the door. Necklaces of steel. Automatic rifle. I stare at the bit of walnut stuck in the rifle´s barrel. I guess this would be walnut. Only the walnut tree produces wood as dark as this. A dry, heavy sigh of pain, coming from my mother, startles me. The uniform puts his hand on the bit of walnut. I always thought you´re supposed to hold a rifle by its tin banana. But look, that´s not how it´s done. Mom is sobbing. The uniform has a face, too. A familiar face, somehow, but familiar from where? I hear wood cracking in the house, they are probably tearing up the parquet flooring. It´s made of beech wood. The chamber is a cloud of pain, it reflects the paralysis of the woman who gave birth to me.
A familiar face
“It feels like we´re criminals. What are the town people going to say? Fortunately we´re on a break, and I don´t have to deal with my classmates.” I whisper. It´s winter. It´s probably fifteen degrees below zero. But it doesn´t feel that way. I´m burning up.
“What´s this crap, then?” So the uniform has questions too. The uniform takes a look at my religious books. Books about cosmic wisdom. The world of dancing images. They tell you how to lead a good life. The heavenly silver rope is in these images. The Quran, too. The uniform doesn´t know a thing about calligraphy. The uniform probably doesn´t even know that they are letters. The uniform doesn´t care about writing. Mom´s cries, her convulsions of pain don´t reach him.
“The books are about faith.” My voice is mechanical, stunned, unfamiliar when I say this. Now, finally, I recognize the uniform´s face. He turns to Mom and hisses: “Your husband is such a bastard.” The uniform´s face is the face of our neighbor Miloš. Mom doesn´t breathe.
Miloš looks completely different in uniform, which is why I didn´t recognize him at first. Our neighbor is glowing this morning. Glowing with hatred. How is that possible? Why? What have I done to him? What has father done to him? I don´t know. But I can´t ask Miloš. Today, Miloš is a uniform. And he calls my father a bastard. And Mom is still sobbing.
Mom wipes the tears from her face that aren´t there. Only now does she say something, she is almost composed: “He has always been good to you. And you know this. He was always there for you when you needed help. He respected all your festivals, your religious holidays. You grew up together after all.”
The uniform takes a deep, angry breath. The uniform barks out commands, other uniforms arrest my father and take him away. They also take the books.
Mom is sobbing. Again. We´re sitting in the middle of the living room, everything has been turned upside down. Yesterday this was our home. I wish I could wipe away her tears, I wish I could lie to her and tell her it´ll be alright. That she shouldn´t be afraid. We don´t know it but we have switched roles, the morning veils our future, which is palpable in the ransacked room – the podgy teenager has turned into a feisty, furious woman, and Mom has turned into a scared little girl. My cousin still won´t let go of me. Mom is still sobbing. The phone rings. It rings like crazy. Mom is right there by the phone, but she doesn´t hear, no matter how urgently it rings. She is all misery, her impotence suffocates her.
“Hey girl, why don´t you ask your mother if she wants to have coffee?”, says our neighbor Mubera. She can see everything. Mubera sees when we sit in our rooms and read by our reading lights. Mubera always tells on me, she tells my parents everything. Mubera hasn´t seen the uniforms. Maybe she would tell that to my parents, too. I hate her for not telling. Even though I know it´s not her fault. Uniforms act according to their own rules.
The phone is ringing again. It rings like crazy. Again and again and again. No one knows anything. No one has seen the uniforms. But they´re all calling. Now they see. I don´t want to talk. I don´t want to talk to anyone. But I have to. There´s no one else who could. Just Mom, but she keeps sobbing. Well into the night. I´m sitting by her side, waiting for her to start again. Then I wake her up, and she stops, and I can get some sleep. I don´t know if she´s asleep. But I know how awful it is to wake from her wails when I have just nodded off. I can´t help thinking she´s like a hurt animal. I don´t even know why, I have never heard an animal that trembles with pain or fear when her brood is attacked, her nest, her cave, her home. I only know the sounds my Mom makes: “Police, police … father … don´t leave me behind!” I just hold her. I can´t tell her that her father isn´t here, mine isn´t either.
In the company of sobs
The days go by. The women are starting to come by now. No man even comes near the house. When grandmother was still alive she would say: “A house needs a man, it´s hard otherwise.” At the time I didn´t understand what she meant. How could I have, I was just a child. The last time the women from our neighborhood showed up like this was when she passed away. Mom was sobbing back then, too, just this one time. And then she made coffee. Now she´s sobbing again, and I make coffee. Lots of it. As I set up the little cups I hear the pained cries of one person who is consoled by others. Nobody consoles me. And why would they? I have become a woman overnight, and she has nothing left but grief.
It takes days for us to clean up the mess. There is no point anyway. We haven´t got a home now. My childhood is gone, too. I go, day after day, and knock on the door of the uniforms. I have one thought only – if they have killed him, what remains of my home? I think about this for days. About my home that doesn´t exist. Like my father doesn´t exist. Like peace and quiet don´t exist – anymore. I live in the company of sobs of a woman who has lost her lover.
I haven´t counted the days, just like I haven´t counted my mother´s sobs. Father returned eventually, he never did convince us that things were alright. And we didn´t ask a lot of questions. He would never go anywhere without us now, which was important. The uniforms didn´t return – and they didn´t have reason to, like they didn´t on that morning. To this day no one has apologized to him. His crime was his name, his religion. The books were responsible, the images in which God can be seen, so they say. Our neighbor Mubera is dead, she never found out how much I detested her, and she never had a chance to forgive me for it.
And our home? They cut it up into three parts, crossed it out. It won´t ever have a single roof again. But it´s still beautiful. Every once in a while, Mom sobs when she dreams. I don´t.
(Translated by Marica Bodrozić and Gregor Hens)
Source: Al Jazeera