imam.
Another world war started and some bearded men of Orthodox Christian persuasion, exploiting the lawlessness of the time, ambushed the Muslims of Međaš at dawn one day. They raped and murdered the slow and scattered the quick. The houses were ravaged. Mustafa’s grandfather’s married brother, seeing ten men with tall black woolen caps and sashes of bullets across their chests advancing up the hill, split his wife’s head open with an ax. He couldn’t risk her being raped. When they broke down the door, he brought down the ax again, taking off the first pillager’s left ear, snapping his collarbone like a pencil and continuing downward through the heaving rib cage. The others shot him in the legs and took their sweet time carving crosses into his flesh. They disemboweled him, then burned him alive next to an ancient wooden ottoman, the only piece of furniture he owned.
His parents and siblings were some of the quick ones. They returned to their property two days later to find it still smoldering in the morning rain, some crows jumping sideways through the damp ashes.
Having no place to live, Mustafa’s grandfather married into a farming family from Gornja Tuzla and left his home behind. This would turn out to be a very fortunate decision. In 1945, just as he was finishing up his degree, the same bearded men from four years earlier realized that the Communists were winning the war. They shaved their beards, replaced their nationalistic emblems with red stars, and joined Tito’spartisans before pillaging Međaš once more, in somebody else’s name now but for pretty much the same reasons. The Nalis weren’t as quick this time around.
After the war a new country was born, bloody all over and enveloped in a new ideological placenta. Its people, divided by faith before, were now forced to unite in godlessness. God was beaten, threatened, blackmailed, tricked, and lured out of the starving populace by the new regime. It was the worst time in the world to be an imam.
Religious institutions were shut down or heavily monitored, and Mustafa’s grandfather found himself jobless. He lived with his wife and three quick children in a house that looked like a clammy cardboard box. They survived on the sporadic donations of secretly pious villagers and his wife’s awesome ingenuity. At one point he was offered a job as a secretary in an elementary school and accepted wholeheartedly. But when a colleague asked him to partake in some slivovitz to celebrate, he declined, citing his religion. He was fired on the spot for being an enemy of the party. From then on, every once in a while, in the middle of the night, beefy men would show up at his door, take him away in his pajamas to a dark concrete cell where they would drip water on his head for hours, and then let him go in the morning without a word of explanation.
But everyone gets a break at one time or another. Mustafa’s grandfather was hired in 1951 as a security guard at a new detergent factory in Tuzla by one of his neighbors, who worked there as a staff supervisor. This man never mentioned to his comrade-bosses that the skinny, ghostly man who wasto be the guard was not a proud member of the Yugoslavian proletariat, nor that he was a God-fearing man. It was an act of courage that brought Mustafa’s grandfather to tears. The neighbor was named Salko, and that name was uttered in the Nalihousehold only with deep reverence. It gained the status of a family savior.
The job consisted of sitting in a booth in front of the building and writing down in a notebook the name and ID number of everyone coming in and out of the factory and the time at which they passed him. That was the day shift. At night, every half hour, he patrolled the premises with a handgun to make sure that nobody was stealing the detergent. He took his job seriously and performed his duties with methodical dedication despite their tedium.
And better times came. The factory took off and mushroomed
Another world war started and some bearded men of Orthodox Christian persuasion, exploiting the lawlessness of the time, ambushed the Muslims of Međaš at dawn one day. They raped and murdered the slow and scattered the quick. The houses were ravaged. Mustafa’s grandfather’s married brother, seeing ten men with tall black woolen caps and sashes of bullets across their chests advancing up the hill, split his wife’s head open with an ax. He couldn’t risk her being raped. When they broke down the door, he brought down the ax again, taking off the first pillager’s left ear, snapping his collarbone like a pencil and continuing downward through the heaving rib cage. The others shot him in the legs and took their sweet time carving crosses into his flesh. They disemboweled him, then burned him alive next to an ancient wooden ottoman, the only piece of furniture he owned.
His parents and siblings were some of the quick ones. They returned to their property two days later to find it still smoldering in the morning rain, some crows jumping sideways through the damp ashes.
Having no place to live, Mustafa’s grandfather married into a farming family from Gornja Tuzla and left his home behind. This would turn out to be a very fortunate decision. In 1945, just as he was finishing up his degree, the same bearded men from four years earlier realized that the Communists were winning the war. They shaved their beards, replaced their nationalistic emblems with red stars, and joined Tito’spartisans before pillaging Međaš once more, in somebody else’s name now but for pretty much the same reasons. The Nalis weren’t as quick this time around.
After the war a new country was born, bloody all over and enveloped in a new ideological placenta. Its people, divided by faith before, were now forced to unite in godlessness. God was beaten, threatened, blackmailed, tricked, and lured out of the starving populace by the new regime. It was the worst time in the world to be an imam.
Religious institutions were shut down or heavily monitored, and Mustafa’s grandfather found himself jobless. He lived with his wife and three quick children in a house that looked like a clammy cardboard box. They survived on the sporadic donations of secretly pious villagers and his wife’s awesome ingenuity. At one point he was offered a job as a secretary in an elementary school and accepted wholeheartedly. But when a colleague asked him to partake in some slivovitz to celebrate, he declined, citing his religion. He was fired on the spot for being an enemy of the party. From then on, every once in a while, in the middle of the night, beefy men would show up at his door, take him away in his pajamas to a dark concrete cell where they would drip water on his head for hours, and then let him go in the morning without a word of explanation.
But everyone gets a break at one time or another. Mustafa’s grandfather was hired in 1951 as a security guard at a new detergent factory in Tuzla by one of his neighbors, who worked there as a staff supervisor. This man never mentioned to his comrade-bosses that the skinny, ghostly man who wasto be the guard was not a proud member of the Yugoslavian proletariat, nor that he was a God-fearing man. It was an act of courage that brought Mustafa’s grandfather to tears. The neighbor was named Salko, and that name was uttered in the Nalihousehold only with deep reverence. It gained the status of a family savior.
The job consisted of sitting in a booth in front of the building and writing down in a notebook the name and ID number of everyone coming in and out of the factory and the time at which they passed him. That was the day shift. At night, every half hour, he patrolled the premises with a handgun to make sure that nobody was stealing the detergent. He took his job seriously and performed his duties with methodical dedication despite their tedium.
And better times came. The factory took off and mushroomed
Similar Books
