into a chemical industrial complex unmatched in all of Yugoslavia. As the air in the region became more polluted, the workers’ wages went up. In ten years’ time the county’s cancer rate had hit new heights, and Mustafa’s grandfather had accumulated enough money to build a house his father would gasp at if he saw it. He filled it up with books and children. When each one was born he swore to make himself unlike his father, to modernize his views and improve upon things for his children’s sake, but the old way, the code, was too ingrained in his fibers to be eradicated by sheer conscious effort. It was like trying to repel darkness by boarding up windows with planks.
His offspring turned out to be an intelligent, honest, and well-behaved bunch, yet also meek and voiceless, subservient to anyone older even if he happened to be stupider than dirt. They all, without exception, had ragebubbling in their stomachs, unyieldingly tight lips, and eyes watery with heat.
His wife, tired of waiting for him to bring electricity to their shed, which she used as a summer kitchen, did it herself without any training apart from remembering how the electricians put it in the house. And when her first son went to serve the mandatory year in the army, she taught herself to read and write, so she could send him letters. The letters were crookedly written and grammatically hilarious.
In 1983 cartons of various cleaning products began vanishing from the factory’s warehouse. This went on for a few weeks, until it dawned on Mustafa’s grandfather that one of his coworkers, someone who knew how religiously he stuck to his half-hour patrolling routine, was probably at fault. Greatly disappointed that someone could be so vile, he forced himself to alter the order in which he checked the buildings and discovered, one night, a laborer by the name of Sead loading a fortune in furniture-polishing liquid into a raggedy white van. When he tried to stop him the young man knocked him down, called him an old fart, and then walked off and started the vehicle, snickering. As he pulled away Mustafa’s grandfather unholstered his handgun for the first time in his life. Running alongside the vehicle, he took short, concentrated aim and fired a single round through the van’s side window and into Sead’s neck. Death was next to instantaneous.
There was a trial. Not guilty.
When he came back to work, his coworkers regarded him with a mixture of respect and fear. Even the bigwigs, who had barely given him a glance as he wrote down their names inthe morning, now smiled and said hello. Their handkerchiefs dabbed worriedly at their foreheads. He was congratulated on his industriousness and given a small plaque for protecting the Workers’ Property and for helping the Brotherhood and Unity of the nations of Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. Behind his back people laughed at his rigidity. Behind his back only.
Privately, he stopped using utensils and became obsessed with death. He moved up to the attic and spent whole nights practicing religious calligraphy in Arabic under a single naked bulb. To fall asleep and not wake up screaming was an achievement; his eyes, over time, dropped into the shadowy craters of his skull, where they gleamed with red, magmatic intensity. His veins seemed to run not under his skin but on top of it. His teeth got loose and tipped to the right. His hair thinned. He started addressing persons not present and often failed to answer simple questions without going on and on about the destiny of mankind and about how many times a day one had to remember death in order to go to heaven.
Another war in 1992. Ancient grudges that had lain dormant for some time awakened full-grown and rested, and new pillagers, while waiting for their beards to grow, cast away their red stars and pinned the hateful emblems of their fathers back on their coats and here they came again, with crunchy boots and swearwords.
The factory was shut
His offspring turned out to be an intelligent, honest, and well-behaved bunch, yet also meek and voiceless, subservient to anyone older even if he happened to be stupider than dirt. They all, without exception, had ragebubbling in their stomachs, unyieldingly tight lips, and eyes watery with heat.
His wife, tired of waiting for him to bring electricity to their shed, which she used as a summer kitchen, did it herself without any training apart from remembering how the electricians put it in the house. And when her first son went to serve the mandatory year in the army, she taught herself to read and write, so she could send him letters. The letters were crookedly written and grammatically hilarious.
In 1983 cartons of various cleaning products began vanishing from the factory’s warehouse. This went on for a few weeks, until it dawned on Mustafa’s grandfather that one of his coworkers, someone who knew how religiously he stuck to his half-hour patrolling routine, was probably at fault. Greatly disappointed that someone could be so vile, he forced himself to alter the order in which he checked the buildings and discovered, one night, a laborer by the name of Sead loading a fortune in furniture-polishing liquid into a raggedy white van. When he tried to stop him the young man knocked him down, called him an old fart, and then walked off and started the vehicle, snickering. As he pulled away Mustafa’s grandfather unholstered his handgun for the first time in his life. Running alongside the vehicle, he took short, concentrated aim and fired a single round through the van’s side window and into Sead’s neck. Death was next to instantaneous.
There was a trial. Not guilty.
When he came back to work, his coworkers regarded him with a mixture of respect and fear. Even the bigwigs, who had barely given him a glance as he wrote down their names inthe morning, now smiled and said hello. Their handkerchiefs dabbed worriedly at their foreheads. He was congratulated on his industriousness and given a small plaque for protecting the Workers’ Property and for helping the Brotherhood and Unity of the nations of Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. Behind his back people laughed at his rigidity. Behind his back only.
Privately, he stopped using utensils and became obsessed with death. He moved up to the attic and spent whole nights practicing religious calligraphy in Arabic under a single naked bulb. To fall asleep and not wake up screaming was an achievement; his eyes, over time, dropped into the shadowy craters of his skull, where they gleamed with red, magmatic intensity. His veins seemed to run not under his skin but on top of it. His teeth got loose and tipped to the right. His hair thinned. He started addressing persons not present and often failed to answer simple questions without going on and on about the destiny of mankind and about how many times a day one had to remember death in order to go to heaven.
Another war in 1992. Ancient grudges that had lain dormant for some time awakened full-grown and rested, and new pillagers, while waiting for their beards to grow, cast away their red stars and pinned the hateful emblems of their fathers back on their coats and here they came again, with crunchy boots and swearwords.
The factory was shut
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