Aždaha
Short story
His fat ass was sunk abyss-deep into the brown corner sofa, his gaze leering at the TV, something about apprehended Bosnian Serb war criminals on a Bosnian satellite channel. He pulled up the one quarter full bottle of cheap whiskey from under the table, next to his foul-smelling bare feet. His feet, massive, like the rest of him, didn’t smell like dick cheese because he’d worked all day (he didn’t work), but because he rarely showered or bathed. My father. In life, his name was Meša Halilović.
He poured some whiskey into the special tumbler he’d bought on the ferry from Trelleborg to Rostock, and started to sip, the bottle still in hand. Only he was allowed to touch that tumbler. On the glass it said in black print: “Der moment när du börjar denken auf zwei sprache på samma gång.” He cackled every time he read that aloud. That was dad’s humor. It was like that pretty much every night those days, those years. Today, when I drink, I tend to instinctively run my fingers over my forehead and there’s always a greasy film on it, and I despair, and I pant, and I remember all kinds of things from that past.
Dad drank every day, either by himself or with his buddies in town. When he drank at home, he never placed the bottle on the table, but invariably by a table leg under it. It was one of his unique traits. He kept saying it was his apartment, even though my mom paid the rent. She worked all the time at the cement factory in town, so I barely saw her. She got him a job there too, when I was fifteen. I thought: amazing, maybe now I’ll be able to get some nice clothes and have some pocket money.
After his first day at work, he came back and started cursing and complaining, saying things like: “That’s a god damn slave factory! I’m not going back there again! It’d kill me! Never would such oppression have been allowed under Tito, never!” He sought to elicit some sympathy and pity from us, wanted us to praise him for his resignation, as if his quitting was an act of courage, a just rebellion against the crushing reality of Swedish factory work; at least that’s what I think he wanted. Mom and I tried to reason with him. He lashed out at us and threatened to use violence, not so much by what he said, but by the way he stared and angled his body. My dad’s career in Sweden can be summed up in this way: he went to work one (1) day and called it quits.
I still remember this: that day, on the table (with a cheap plastic cover with a flower motif) there was a round metal plate with fatty rings of Bosnian cold cuts, slices of white bread, and Swedish cheese cut into small cubes, each pierced violently with a toothpick by mom, because he told her to do it. She had, as usual, arranged the meze in neat rows by food category. It looked so pathetic and sad, all of it. A shiny film of greasy sweat covered dad’s forehead, inching into the receding hairline of his black curly hair. He was once a handsome man, head full of hair, my mom wistfully said on occasion. Now, his stomach hung lower than his dick, and I could see perennial revulsion in my mom’s eyes. She was like Sisyphus hauling her revulsion up the unforgiving hill of life, perhaps of love.
He put the bottle back down on the floor, clucked his tongue, and made a whistling sound, like when disgusting ugly men whistle after an attractive woman on the street, at least in movies, but probably in real life too. “Come here,” he said when he noticed I’d been standing, hunched over, paralyzed, under the doorway to the living room. Truth be told, I didn’t know what I was doing there in that particular moment. As usual, I was carrying on aimlessly in our little two-bedroom apartment. I sat down on the other end of the couch from him. “Got hair on your peaches yet, huh? Got girlies? No? Then fuck off, ho ho. And tell your mom to cut me some more of that svenska ust. Huh, how do you like my Swedish, good no?” I chuckled, pretended I enjoyed his stupid joke.
Oh dad, you vile, miserable, creature, you aždaha. What ancient bowel of the earth defecated you out, all slimy and powerful and angry and hurt, to terrorize other people so?
*
I’m convinced he hated me in all his powerful disgustingness. Not that he ever cooked or anything, but he never asked what mom and I wanted to eat. He never asked us to sit with him and watch a movie or a show together. Nothing I did was any good. He lashed out at me constantly. “Let’s do something nice for mom, it’s her birthday,” I’d say. “Shut up,” he’d reply, “she doesn’t need anything.” “Let’s get a Christmas tree,” I’d say when I was ten or eleven. “No, shit’s too expensive, and I’m not cleaning the needles and what not, besides we’re Muslim fuck do we need a Christian tree for,” he’d say by way of definitive reply.
*
One day, I was playing football with some friends from the neighborhood. I remember I had just turned seventeen. We were having so much fun on the cement court not far from the apartment that I lost track of time. Those are the best moments in life: when you lose track of things, but things keep happening, and you’re part of the things, the happenings, the people, time, and you disappear into the existence that keeps existing.
Anyway, it got to be late, maybe ten o’clock, and it was a school night. There were some tall bushes separating the court from my apartment building. Usually, you had to walk around the bushes to get to the path that snakes between the ugly buildings in the ugly neighborhood, but you can go through them, and some of us did go through them, but it required nimbleness and a willingness to endure scrapes and cuts from thorny branches.
I didn’t think my dad was such a man that would go through the bushes. But there I was, sweaty after playing for hours, joking around with my friends, when I heard a heavy rustle coming from the bushes. All of a sudden, I saw my dad busting out from the dense foliage, running at me like a raging bull. First I thought: wow, mighty nimble for such a fat fuck, and admired his prowess a little bit. He yelled at me like I’d raped a woman or brought some awful shame to the family. “Get back in the house, you little piece of shit! You know what time it is?!”
My friends Miro and Selim were there. They were usually unfazed by anything. They liked to fist fight, mostly the Nazis around town, other dudes in the night club in Ystad, and occasionally each other when they were bored. I don’t know what happened to them. I cut ties with everyone after I left. Anyway, their fathers and mine used to drink together. Miro and Selim turned pale as ghosts when they heard my dad, who was known among I guess everyone for having a hot temper. Imagine how I felt? Because I had to follow this demon back to the hell I called home.
In a slightly less insane voice, he told me inside the apartment: “Don’t you ever stay out that late again on a school night, you hear me?” I looked away, said nothing, endured, went to my room, where for hours I imagined all the ways I could kill him without being caught.
By God, I hated my father. One of my life routines in those years was wanting to kill him in all kinds of violent ways, but sometimes I fantasized about all the ways he could croak of relatively natural causes: massive heart attack, metastasized liver cancer, some of the Nazis beating him to a pulp and then to death in the most violent way possible.
The relief I felt at such moments of indulgence soothed my anger and hatred. Anger and hatred, these had become my fire, my reason for existing, and they sent a fierce tingle through my body, let me know I was still alive. In his last moments, if I happened to go there in my fantasizing, he’d look at me for some comfort, some pity, and maybe, finally, he’d say he loved me and that he was so, so sorry for everything he did. At that point in the fantasy, if it went that far, I never knew what to do: turn away, spit on him, curse him out, laugh at him, hold his hand, plunge a kitchen knife into his heart and finish him off and take pleasure in seeing life lifting from his eyes? We all have our dragons, our demons, to slay, don’t we?
All this I’m recounting was over thirty years ago. He’s been dead for ten years now. I wasn’t there when he died, and I didn’t go to his funeral.
*
When I was eighteen, I was invited to a party. It was April, our senior year in high school. My classmate Johan’s parents were away for the weekend, so he invited our whole class to come and drink his parents’ heavy liquors and beer (I remember tequila, vodka, Jägermeister, Pripps Blå, Guinness), which was great because I had no money or other means by which to procure alcohol or snacks. Fifteen of us showed up.
I drank and I drank, more than the others, but the others drank a lot too. I told Rebecka to smack me on the face really hard, as the two of us sat alone in Johan’s parents’ kitchen, drinking beer and eating tiny pretzels. I thought it was a good idea. She hesitated and acted all coy the first three times I asked. After the fourth time I asked, she smacked me so hard I wanted to cry. I really liked her, and I thought that this was my way in with her, because all her other boyfriends had been criminals, and such. I was a virgin back then, but I lied to everyone and said I wasn’t. I made up a whole series of girls I’d slept with, all from out of town: Ystad, Malmö, Eslöv, Kristianstad, and so forth.
At the party, we ate disgusting kebab pizza that Johan had ordered from the one pizza place in town, ran by Osman Tümruk, a Turk who’d lived in our small town by the sea for twenty years, during which time he’d engaged in all kinds of entrepreneurial escapades: a hot dog stand, a video rental store, a ping pong family arena, and now, after all the others had tanked, a pizza place called Tutti Frutti Pizzeria Gusto Bene. He also sat on the municipal council for the conservative party.
Osman’s son Umut, a tall and lanky sixteen-year-old from our school, delivered the ten pizzas. I opened the door and paid with the cash Johan had given me. Umut tried to peek inside, over my shoulder. “Oh, you’re having a party bitchis moddafackas? You’re gonna fucka, fucka, fucka all night?” Umut said, and made a repeated thrusting motion with his pelvis.
“Just give me the pizzas and get the fuck out of here Umut,” I said. “Alright, alright, no need to be rude man,” he said and sauntered away. Umut had a beautiful older sister called Ayşe, one of the smartest girls in school, so not just pretty, and I used to masturbate to her image. I imagined myself entering Ayşe as I watched Umut walk away.
Johan asked me what I was going to do after graduation. “Don’t know, I said, except getting the fuck away from here, I know that.” I ended up leaving Sweden and drifting all over Europe for years, working in bars, drinking, doing all kinds of drugs, partying, and so forth. I came back to Sweden with long hair, all tan and addicted to cocaine. I enrolled in university to become a civil engineer. Like my father, I’ve always had a knack for numbers, mechanics, calculations, that kind of shit that perhaps can put food on the table, but leaves something in you wanting, insatiable, mean, hollow. Dad wasn’t an engineer though. I’m not sure what he did for work in Bosnia. He never said.
Anyway, back at the party, around midnight I started feeling the irate bubbling in my stomach, the first hints of kebab-induced cramps, which I ignored because I was so drunk. I kept drinking for another two hours.
Halfway home from the party, I felt like my bowels were going to whoosh out of my ass in one big gush, like a monsoon rain. For sure the poor toilet bowl would rise and flood over the rim, and I thought anxiously if I could mentally induce myself to shit in installments, so as not overwhelm the bowl. If I could get home on time, that is. This wasn’t the first, or last, time my bowels found themselves in such a precarious situation. Fucking kebab, I never did learn. I had to run home, tripping over my feet as drunk as I was, holding my ass with the palm of my hand like that would hold the shit from erupting.
I made it home, and ran straight into the bathroom, my shoes still on. The bathroom was being renovated by the company that owned the apartment building. The company finally gave in after my mom had pestered them for a good five years. The bathroom hadn’t been renovated in fifteen years, the Polish construction guys told me. The mud-colored linoleum on the floor and walls was stripped away, laying bare, to my surprise, ugly discolored cement. It looked like the basement in a horror movie, I kid you not. There was one light bulb that hung and swayed pathetically from the ceiling, eerie as fuck when you turned it on at night. There was only a new toilet in there. Next to it there were rolls of cheap toilet paper stacked one on top of the other and a two-liter bottle of Coke filled with water. The toilet wasn’t fastened to the floor yet, so it made this heavy scraping sound if you moved even a little while sitting on it. The plastic ring seat had a black mark the size and shape of a melted coin; a turd of ash had dropped from mom’s cigarette as she smoked on the toilet one day.
I sat down and closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to take in the ugliness that enclosed me, but the darkness in my head spun around from the alcohol. My insides were on fire, my intestines wrung and twisted, torturing me. It gushed out of me then stopped, then gushed out of me again. I couldn’t stop twisting and turning from the pain. I almost flipped over the toilet. The sounds were epic.
My mother can sleep through artillery fire (which she has done, in fact). My father, a light sleeper, awoke. I heard his heavy steps. I heard him mumbling in his deep voice. I imagined, in fright, a demon coming for me. He’d beaten me many times before, but the last time had been two years ago. Then: knock, knock, knock, with his mighty fist. “You jerking off in there?! Stop it, I’m trying to fucking sleep!” I said nothing, just stopped moving. I finished thirty minutes later.
I got out of the bathroom, drained, tired, lighter than a feather, relieved in body and in mind. I felt blissful. My father had gone back to sleep in the living room. He and mom didn’t sleep in the same room anymore. The house reeked of his alcohol-infused body odor. As I passed the living room I whispered “die, you miserable piece of shit, limp dick motherfucker” to myself and smiled. The part about the limp dick: I’d never seen him hug or kiss mom, or show any kind of actual sexual or erotic desire. I think he just pretended to have sexual or erotic desire.
Lying in my bed, I thought to myself that night: one day, very soon, I’ll leave this hell. That day came exactly six months later, and it was the happiest day of my life.