Free Shards: A Novel by Ismet Prcić Page B

judging by the gleam in her eye, probably wouldn’t get to finish it. Even Zana walked out of the bedroom in her nighty, her face like a storm on the horizon, hissing her deeply wounded whys.
    “Thank you for all the help,” Mother said, “but we’ve been here over a month now and it’s time for us to leave. We don’t want to be a burden anymore.”
    “Where are you gonna go?” asked Zvonko, as if calling a bluff. There was nowhere to go.
    “To the Red Crescent with the rest of the refugees,” she said and gave me a crazy look, signaling. I swallowed, put the book on the coffee table, rose, and picked up one of the big bags.
    “Think of your children,” boomed Zvonko from the top of the stairs as we made our way to the front door.
    We sat on our bags in front of the Zagreb mosque, in the parking lot, in the sun.
    The heat made the black asphalt look like crusted-over lava, throbbing and emitting visible waves of the red hell that seemed to boil beneath it. Cars wavered in this radiation, their contours melting, collapsing. Shirtless Bosnian men sat on curbs or squatted in the patches of grass, staring vaguely in the direction of the closed doors of the Red Crescent, their skin baked from field work, their spines, pelvises, ribs evident through it in detail. Their head-scarfed wives, sisters, mothers sat clustered on towels and blankets, fanning one another miserably with newspapers, calling their ill-groomed children to come back.
    Mother smoked and rummaged through our bags, zipping open all the compartments and slipping her hand inside them, looking for something or satisfying a compulsive need to touch everything she owned. She offered us sandwiches and consolations and every half hour or so walked over to a phone booth on the corner. Through the glass we saw her go through the same motions of putting a card into the phone, pressing buttons and listening, listening, listening for a while, then hanging up, pulling out the card, putting it in her purse, stepping outside, and lighting a cigarette, every time.
    Then at some point Cousin Seka showed up in a van with this blond man in a faded Hawaiian shirt. Zvonko had called her and told her what happened, where we were going. Both Seka and the man worked for the Red Crescent, driving food and medicine over treacherous terrains in monthly humanitarian convoys to besieged Bosnians. Mother told us to watch the bags and they walked off a little way and Mehmed and I watched them talk, trying to discern what they were saying from their gestures and body language. When they finally started walking back there was a different aura around my mother.
    “Let’s go, guys,” she said, picking up a bag.
    “Go where?” asked my brother. I lifted our biggest bag, but the blond man patted my head and took it out of my hands.
    “Your cousin Pepa’s in Ðakovo,” Seka said. She had a man smoker’s voice and cool little eyes. I had never heard of any cousin Pepa.
    “But we’re not staying in their house,” Mother corrected her. “We’re gonna have a place of our own.”
    “Does that mean that we’re not refugees anymore?” asked my brother and everyone’s heart broke a little. Mother put down her bag and hugged us.
    Ðakovo is to Zagreb what low shrubbery is to a redwood forest.
    The tallest things around were several grain silos and a full-size, redbrick cathedral, the proud symbol of the township. From the steeple, they told me, you could see fields of corn and wheat as far as your eyes could reach.
    Cousin Pepa, a jolly gray man, showed us the house where we were to stay. It belonged to his Serbian neighbor, who had left for Belgradethe night before the war and asked Pepa to take care of his plants. The place was dark, unfinished, an architectural vomitus. Humidity had turned the layers of dust into invisible syrup that coated everything. Fingertips stuck to it like to wet envelope glue and you had to peel them off surfaces with a slight force. The second floor had