Pavement/ Bite Down - First Instalment
Passages
In the middle of the night, there’s a song that only I can hear.
In my dream, I dance to the edge of a tin roof.
My footsteps sound like gunshots,
my footsteps pelt like rain.
My mother sings, my grandmother sings.
We hide. We say Allo?
My parents talk to me about the military.
My father hates America.
My grandfather smokes Winston Blues
in the living room where I watch Tom & Jerry
and tap on the glass at a mourning dove that has laid her eggs. Made a nest there.
She has made a home on the ledge of another home; in the apartment that my father, my middle sister and I have been children in.
In this apartment my grandfather tells me a story about how my great uncles had to break him out of prison during the war and I imagine him jumping over a big brick wall in black and white pyjamas. When I get a bit older I start thinking that maybe my grandfather was lying because he had been forgetting things ever since I could remember. And now that I live next to a prison I know that the brick walls surrounding them are much too big to jump over. But my father says that was one story that was true.
In the middle of the night, there’s a song that only I can hear,
and I can’t make out the tune, but I know that it’s a song because I am singing.
In my dream, I dance from the edge of one tin roof to another.
My footsteps sound like they’re out of sync.
My footsteps sound like I have four feet.
When I look down, I can see myself dancing underneath myself; a dance partner made out of tin. And I think about how instead of pushing down, I am pushing up into myself. Her feet My feet into my feet.
My mother sings.
My grandmother teaches me how to play dominoes.
We cross the border. Sometimes on foot.
And even as a child I can see that the body of the land by the border bears the marks of something bad.
A political hangover.
I don’t know what politics are yet, but I know my uncle says that word sometimes and my father gets angry at him and they slam their hands onto the dinner table
and my cup of Coca Cola fizzes so hard that all the bubbles nearly go flat. When my uncle’s wife serves me more I try to drink the froth before it evaporates, I press the foamy brownness to the roof of my mouth- its acerbity makes Coca Cola come out of my nose.
My parents talk to me about those three nights in the interrogation house.
My father tells me they took his camera.
My grandfather cries when he squeezes my hand.
I see my father on TV some years later, speaking with a woman about our family name and I learn that our surname is an accident. That the D at the end of Mehmed is a mark of the regime on the body of our name. I also learn that the Albanian word for corpse is kufamë (ku-fah-muh).
When I go to sleep, I think about my father and the story he told me about the tunnel you pass through when you cross from Kosova to Macedonia. How there was so much snow one night that he left his car and walked to Skopje through that tunnel in the dead of winter. How it was so dark that you couldn’t see out of either end, and all you could hear was the whistling of the wind.
I think about how many times I’ve crossed that border myself. On the bus. In the car. On foot. About the boy selling blueberries to us as we waited at passport control, scrolling on our iPhones. About the men being taken out of the buses and being sent somewhere with the barrel of a gun to their backs. About the border control men asking what is in our trunk, how we’d say Nishto, then they’d nod and wave us through.
They’ve built a motorway now- Autostrada Shkup Prishtine-
that cuts through the mountains in forty minutes.
Forty minutes of rivers impaled on concrete antlers and
red roofs of houses like blood poppies on the valley.
When we’re on the motorway, my mother doesn’t talk much and my smallest sister gets nosebleeds because the heat in August is so oppressive and the air so dry. I pinch her nose and wipe her mouth with tissues. Once, when she had just been born and didn’t have a passport yet, we smuggled her through border control.
Recently, I wake in the middle of the night, there’s a song that only I can hear.
It’s my mother’s voice.
And this time I’m not dreaming,
and she is singing the song
that she never stopped singing.