The Cat I Never Named: Chapters 6–14

Like a butterfly in a garden, my mind flits from one fanciful possibility to another.

After Amar’s death, I feel like I don’t dare be the cause of any more strife for my poor parents. So I have to be perfect.

When he’s gone, though, she tells me honestly that the army is besieging the city. She doesn’t know if we’re surrounded or not, but right now it would be too dangerous to try to leave.

But Cousin Vesna and her husband own several ćevapi restaurants, and their nearby house has a huge finished basement where they store all the food and restaurant supplies. I immediately see the wisdom of staying there: safety and provisions all in one place.

One of the neighbors staying with us bursts into tears when Tata tells her the blast that woke us destroyed her house.
“But your family is safe,” Mama chides her. “Things can be replaced. People can’t.”

The hours of bombing have subdued us.

A toilet perches at the edge of a ragged precipice in the bisected bathroom, staring at the street.

Some, who have come out of hiding for a few breaths of air, are running back to the dubious safety of the indoors.

A few people make quick forays outside to get food and other supplies, but the bombs are still falling.

Without my lessons, without the challenge of math and physics and literature, I feel bereft.

Maci spends every night with him, and the next day, stiff and sore from sleeping on the hard floor, Tata regales us with tales of Maci’s heroism.

With a sigh, Tata sets out into our besieged, beleaguered city.

She feels things as deeply as Tata, I think, but she knows one of the two has to be stoic, so she keeps her feelings inside much of the time.

Ejub is the only boy in a family of girls, and my mother and her sisters adore him, dote on him.

Then Mama’s self-control shatters and she begins to keen, a low and terrible sound I never want to hear her make again.

Just a few minutes later we leave the safety and stagnation of our bunker and go back to living our lives.

Under Tetka Fatma’s patient guidance I embroidered cheerful scenes. One shows a little girl in shorts chasing a butterfly with a net, in front of a red-roofed house. It is an idyllic scene, so full of innocent joy.

I could feel the joy emanating from him. It was the first time in years that I saw him so full of enthusiasm.

It was such an old-fashioned thing for my liberal, progressive mother to say.

She stood there that day in a brown flowered dress covered in an immaculately clean apron, and all but begged me to come with them. “It’s so nice this time of year,” she wheedled.

It certainly is a cynical way of looking at things. But that is what my world is like now. We all expect the worst.

I love to learn, to process information. I revel in stories—reading them and telling them.

Dino, who for all his life has followed the example of his strong older sister, loses his energy too and lies on the other side of the rug, as listless as I am.

Mama tries to make the best of it, cooking unpalatable dishes with as much gusto as the finest French chef.

It is the need for solitude that finally stirs me a little bit. I love my family dearly, but all my life I was always able to escape from them. One afternoon the need for a few moments alone is enough to combat my lethargy.

The plane is an object. It has no volition. It is the man inside the cockpit doing this. He has a choice.

Everything edible has gone into our meal, except for some of the viscera, which Maci gobbled up.

But she takes something as utilitarian and dull as a housewife’s dress and gives it a style all her own.

“I don’t flirt with him,” I reply indignantly. “He’s just a friend.”

The streets are pitted with craters and deeply gouged with bullet holes.

One building is scarred with a million marks as if it were splattered with paint. As I pass I can’t help but examine those wounds on the facade.

All around me, at sporadic intervals, I hear gunfire.

Then I hear a whistling overhead, a thin, reedy sound. An instant later I see a flash as a missile hits a house on the bank of the Una, on my home side of the bridge.

But this little boy understands his loss, and he is suffused with helpless, inarticulate rage.

The United Nations is supposed to be here to help the suffering, to facilitate peace.

I don’t know which I’m more afraid of: that I’ll get in trouble or that my parents will be worried about me.
When I get to the Blue Bridge I balk.

So what if school is in the middle of missile attacks and strafing from planes. School is the place I feel most comfortable.

Your grades were, ahem, lost in the transition. Your teachers, the ones who stayed, have been doing their best to compile your academic history from memory. It would be helpful if tonight you could all write as much as you remember of your grades over the past several years. We’ll corroborate your notes with our teachers’ and create a new record.

The scope of this book is broad, beginning with linear equation systems and proceeding to matrix algebra, finite dimensional vector spaces, and concluding with matrix representations of linear transformations.

Yet as the numbers and concepts in the textbook coalesce into something I can comprehend, I feel strangely calm.