Brass Read online

  “The rent,” I said. “It’s the first of the month, right?”

  “Oh, that,” she said and shook her head and whispered, though there was nobody around but us. “Just hang on to that for now.”

  So everything was fine, everything was settled, except, of course, for every part of my body, which was wound so tight that I trembled constantly and had to fill my cup only halfway with çaj mali so that it wouldn’t splash over the rim when I tried to bring it to my lips. I couldn’t tell people what Bashkim and I wouldn’t even admit to each other: that things were fine because we saw each other never, him making it home to bed just as I was waking up, me getting home after he’d already left for work. Yllka must have known that, but still she said one day, after she refused the rent check, “I’m glad you two have worked things out.”

  “Umm-hmm,” I said.

  “He told her that they should divorce, you know,” she said. “He told you that?”

  Even though it was only half-full, I managed to knock the cup of tea completely over. “Yeah, of course,” I said.

  “He just can’t leave her with nothing, you understand? Think about it from her perspective. All alone, her husband promising the world and then taking everything away from her all at once. And it’s not like America, women can’t just go out and make a life for themselves the way they can here. There a woman is for a family, and without a family she’s nothing.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “You don’t know. You can’t. Nobody here can understand how deep that thinking runs. And now things are falling apart over there. It’s almost worse now than it was before. At least with Hoxha you knew what kind of misery to expect. Why did she stay? Why, when she could have come here, where they could make some money and not worry from one day to the next if there will be bread to eat?”

  It was true that our shelves here overflowed with bread. In this city alone there were a dozen grocery stores the size of small Albanian villages with aisles dedicated to nothing but bread. There were outlets that sold the leftover bread on clearance, in the three-week state between fresh and moldy, and old people plucked up expired loaves by the fistful and threw the slices, chunk by chunk, into the ponds at Hamilton Park for the ducks to scavenge.

  I also knew, because it was the white stuff I smeared my peanut butter on in the morning, that there would never be enough bread to satisfy the kinds of things human beings the world over were hungry for.

  I said, “Yes, she shouldn’t have chosen to starve.”

  “What was he to do? You can’t just be married to someone on the other side of the world. She is so stubborn. She should have just come with him or divorced him there.” Yllka looked at me, then reached for my hand. “I’m sorry. I know it’s difficult for you to hear about her.”

  “Well, she exists.”

  “Yes, but not as his wife. Not anymore. It’s just a matter of ending it properly.”

  “No, it’s fine. I do think he owes her something,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “If he doesn’t keep his promises to her, why would he keep his promises to me?”

  “Right,” Yllka said, but she was looking sideways at me, and she touched my hand I think to check if I was hot, because it must have sounded to her like I was talking through a fever.

  Maybe the kid was making me softer, too, maybe it was just a hormonal shift, but it was true, I did feel a little bad for Aggie, stuck alone in all that mayhem, more loyal to her country than to her husband and totally let down by both. I’d found Bashkim’s pictures of her and didn’t retch even. Sitting in his sock drawer, underneath the fresh new pair he was saving for who knows what reason, was a plastic ziplock bag with a dozen or so snapshots undoubtedly taken on the kind of crap camera only a true Communist could get his hands on. Everything had a gauzy look to it, like the lens was smeared with Vaseline, but even still I could see that Aggie looked nothing like I thought she would. In my head she was middle-aged and heavyset and wore dark scarves over her head like in Time-Life photos of people who lived in villages instead of towns in countries whose names people never bothered to learn even when their social studies teachers made them memorize the entire world atlas. The real Aggie was young with eyes that weren’t black just because of the shitty film stock, and she smiled in the same obligatory way that I did in elementary school photos. She wasn’t beautiful, she wasn’t hideous, she was just regular, except for an outdated eighties sweatshirt that put her a little on the dowdy side of plain. I wondered if Bashkim had called her beautiful when they met, and if that was a generous or a cruel thing to do to a person like her, and I remembered what Bashkim had said to me a year before.

  I swear to Allah, you are the most beautiful girl I have ever seen.

  If only I’d known at the time that Bashkim didn’t believe in God.

  I put the photos back in the bag and tucked the bag back into its little nest of socks, as if the photos would incubate into some kind of living thing.

  Yllka was right that things were a mess back in the motherland. I knew that because Dan Rather corroborated it, telling us everything we needed to know about the state of Albania’s people before Snuggle and Lean Cuisine took over and told us everything we needed to know about the state of ours. It was almost a good sign: Albania made the TV! It was a real place after all, not just a made-up locale where the generic villains in generic thrillers might have come from, and being around people straight from a CBS News set made me feel kind of like a celebrity, or at least like a groupie. But Albania’s thirty seconds of fame didn’t come in the form of feel-good filler at the end of the evening news. It was more like live footage of a phoenix with clipped wings, Tirana a city in black and white even when it was filmed in color. Thousands of people that looked just like Bashkim, just like Aggie, hell, just like me if I wore flowy overcoats and had been weaned on a diet of cigarettes and çaj mali, rioting, crying, setting Yugos on fire, while riot police looked on, probably sucking down unfiltereds underneath their face shields and wondering if their own investments were as bunk as those of the wailing throngs around them.

  They called them banks, just like Bashkim did, but really they were pyramid schemes set up by their own countrymen who must’ve honed their crafts in places just ahead of the curve, like Russia, the mean, scary older cousin of all of Eastern Europe. I didn’t understand how pyramid schemes worked, but I understood that they had nothing to do with the pharaohs and everything to do with people trying to make something out of the nothing they’d known their whole unhappy lives. Dan Rather didn’t have to explain that part of it to me, that lust for anything other than bread and water, just the details of the operation, and he had to do that because my ambassador to it all, Bashkim, still hadn’t said a peep about it. I didn’t dare ask, and neither did Yllka. She said being in the kitchen at the Ross was like working at a funeral home, but I doubted that funeral home workers saw their own failure in the faces of the corpses they stared into every day, unlike Bashkim and Adem and Fatmir, who’d rather go days without talking than have to look each other in the eye at that point. And what did they really have to be ashamed of? Two million people just like Bashkim handed over their money on promises that it would triple or quadruple, everyone imagining what scents of air fresheners they would get for all the Mercedes they would buy. Everyone needs to feel like a winner sometimes, even me. I used to enter all the tickets I bought in my middle school penny auctions into the canisters for the prizes nobody else wanted, like weird homemade crocheted headbands and secondhand copies of Lee Iacocca’s autobiography, just to not feel empty-handed for a moment. And yet there they were on the TV, thousands of Bashkims marching around with the pockets of their slacks turned inside out, yelling at something the cameras never panned to. They looked like the Monopoly Man on the Chance card that sent you straight to jail, minus the top hat and the part where you get to fold up the board after you lose and shove the game back into the closet.

  I understood it. They were embarr
assed. They’d been duped. It was easy to recognize on other people, but it wore disguises when you looked in the mirror.

  —

  Later that week, when Bashkim came home early and sat down on the sofa next to me and touched my arm, I flinched, both because I wasn’t used to him touching me anymore and because I knew he was going to tell me something he would need to apologize for.

  “Things have gotten really bad,” he said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “We cannot afford to keep doing this.”

  “I know.”

  “She is going to have to come.”

  I touched my stomach, confused. Of course things had gotten bad, the two of us acting like boarders in the same house, barely talking, never mind preparing for her arrival, but of course she was going to have to come. I might have looked like an idiot to him but I understood the birds and the bees, and as much as I was scared to bring up the near future with him, seething as he was about the present, I was relieved to hear him acknowledge that we had to get back to planning for the baby. I was relieved, too, to hear him refer to the baby as a she. I hadn’t even told him that I was sure what I was carrying was not the son he wanted, not wanting to add more disappointment to his quarry full of it.

  “I know. Another month or so,” I said.

  He put his head in his hands. “Sooner. It has to be sooner.”

  “Bashkim,” I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  Again I was confused. So it was clear Bashkim hadn’t learned anything about capitalism growing up, but did he also miss the lessons on basic human biology? You didn’t even need school for that. You just needed some kids a few years older than you to take you out to a barn and draw some crude diagrams. If the kids were rotten and hormonal enough they might even try to demonstrate on you. I was pretty sure this was a universal lesson, since as far as I can tell, every civilization was built around the very concept.

  “You know I can’t do anything about that, right?” I said.

  “I don’t expect for you to do anything about it,” he said.

  “She’s coming when she’s coming.”

  “She is on her way already.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know. She’s been on her way for a long time now. Eight months or so.”

  “No, just yesterday.”

  “What?”

  “She left just yesterday. She is on the coast, waiting to get to Italy.”

  The baby had been kicking this whole time, but she hushed up then, too.

  “What?” I said.

  “Agnes,” he said, using her formal name, as if he could make her into a distinguished guest, a diplomat who we were lucky enough to host.

  “But that,” I said and wasn’t sure what to follow it up with, and anyway, I had to press my tongue to the roof of my mouth because I began to feel very sick, as if I’d been blindfolded and spun around and brought to a place that would be familiar if only the room would stop spinning.

  “It has gotten very dangerous there. The government is gone. It is just riots and gangs in the streets, and she has nowhere to go, she has nowhere there to live.”

  The baby was kicking again. She had come back alive and was raging, but I was still just sitting there, trying to catch enough air to make me feel like I wasn’t suffocating.

  “Her parents are already in Greece, her brother is in Texas. She will go down there eventually, but first she has to come here so we can”—he paused—“take care of things.”

  “But you can’t,” I said.

  “I will come right back. Nothing will change. It is just a duty.”

  “But you have a duty here,” I said. I wasn’t yelling, because I wasn’t mad. I didn’t understand enough to be mad. Surely he meant something else, and he was like those newscasts, getting lost in translation. I was sorry enough for Aggie that I didn’t argue about the money he sent her when we were still sleeping on rubber, the changing table in the baby’s room still empty of diapers, and the pantry empty of formula, but I felt sure that if she knew about me she’d feel sorry, too. All she had was nothing; we had a big something, a someone, who would be born with needs that couldn’t be deferred the way the rest of us could train ourselves to do. There was hunger, and there was hunger, and all of us, I thought, had to know the difference.

  “But you can’t,” I said again.

  “I have to,” he said again, a little sharper. “This is not about what I want, it is about what I have to do. It is too dangerous there, and I was stupid enough to marry her and she was stupid enough to stay behind and now it’s time to stop being stupid.”

  “But you can’t,” I said.

  “Stop saying that!”

  So I thought for a second, because he was right, what I was saying wasn’t making any sense. He could do whatever he said he was going to do, and I couldn’t stop that.

  “But I can’t,” I said instead.

  “What do you mean, you ‘can’t’?”

  “I can’t do this,” I said.

  He still looked angry, but his voice was lower, and he unclenched his fists. “You can’t do what?”

  “I can’t do this alone. I don’t know how to do what comes next.”

  “You will not be alone,” he said. “I told you I will be here. Your mother is here, your sister. Aggie is alone. You have plenty.”

  I shook my head.

  “You have to grow up,” he said. “We cannot have a house full of children.”

  The fault line inside of me had been active for a while, and all the constant little tremors had been shaking stuff loose. But the big one was coming, the one that would break me off and make me into an island, and it was only right of me: I had to warn him.

  “Go,” I said.

  “Not yet.”

  “Go,” I said. “Leave. Now. Forever. I don’t care. I want you to.”

  “You are a child,” he said.

  “I hate you,” I said. “Loser.”

  Then my cheek was cold. I put my palm to it and felt that it was wet, too. Bashkim’s lips were still pursed, and I realized that he’d spit on me, as if I were some peasant who’d stolen his bread, not even worthy of the space in a jail. I wiped the spit off with my hands, smelled it to make sure it wasn’t poison, and then, before I had a chance to think things through, or consider what the consequences of that kind of action would be, I let rage fill all the spaces in me where confusion and fear and regret had lived seconds before.

  I flailed my arms in a rock-’em, sock-’em kind of way, like some primal martial art, but I couldn’t make contact with anything, and it just made me wilder. The hate took my breath away. There was air around me but I couldn’t get to it, just like I couldn’t get to any of the other necessary things that seemed to be all around me.

  “You think I’m a loser? You don’t know what losing is. I will show you what losing is,” Bashkim screamed. He punched the wall beside me, my head just inches from the plaster spiderweb his fist left behind. Then he drew back his fist and aimed it just to the left, this time the bull’s-eye drawn straight on me. I closed my eyes and braced for the impact, but I didn’t cover my head with my arms or think about ducking or running away. I just stood there waiting to feel something, fight or flight or bone on bone, regret or cool blood or anything at all. When I couldn’t bear the wait anymore, I opened my eyes and saw Bashkim on the other side of the room, fist still cocked, as if an invisible claw had pulled him away and pinned him to the wall.

  There was no claw. It was just a knocking at the door, Gjonni’s voice on the other side of it asking if everything was all right. I looked down at my belly. The baby was kicking so hard she made little flutters in my shirt, then landed one in the ribs that made me crumple in half. Bashkim was gasping, too, sympathy pains or something.

  “Oh my god,” he said. He ran to the door, but not to answer Gjonni. I heard his footsteps on the stairs, Gjonni calling after him, the sound of the Fiero turning over.

  Even when my breathing
returned to normal, it took a while before it felt quiet again, and then it wasn’t quiet again because the phone was ringing, so I ripped it from the wall and told it to leave me the hell alone, screaming, I don’t want to listen to any of you anymore. I don’t need any damn one of you.

  —

  I didn’t scream it loud enough. People kept trying to come through for me. The girls insisted on throwing a baby shower, and by girls, I mean almost every woman I’d so much as said hello to in the past year: Mamie and Greta, Yllka, Cheryl and Janice from the Ross, the inspectors at Ferrucci, even a few of the gruas, the wives of Bashkim’s friends, who I’m sure Yllka threatened with deportation in order to get there. It was nice; it was lovely, lovely, a word I’d never used in earnest in my life, a word that sounded right only coming from a finishing school cadet. From me it sounded sarcastic, even though I didn’t mean it to be.

  “This is lovely,” I said, and I meant it. It’s just that I didn’t round out the sentence with what I felt, which was lonelier than I’d ever been in my life, and that was saying something for a girl who’d spent all of her birthdays with only her mother, her kid sister, and sometimes, on the special ones, Fudgie the Whale. Everyone there knew what they were doing, and it wasn’t celebrating the impending birth of my child, hoisting me above their shoulders for a job well done. They were picking up my and Bashkim’s slack, finishing off the job we started but weren’t seeing through to the end, and though I would never have described a single one of them as a gentle person, they were kind enough to disguise their rescue mission with the pastel-colored camouflage of streamers and cellophane. They’d already made up the crib with one of the half dozen sets of sheets Bashkim and I had neglected to buy, and then finished it off with a crib bumper that Bashkim and I had neglected to know was even a thing that we needed.

  Mamie handed me a cup of punch and sipped from the second serving of her own.

  “This is spiked,” I said.

  “I know,” she answered.

  “I can’t drink booze.”

  “Oh, sure you can. That doesn’t count toward the end.”