"Mites" - Chapter 1
by Gregory Freedman
We begin the second week PILCROW’s Inaugural Serialized Novel Contest with Chapter 1 of Gregory Freedman’s Mites. Over the next two weeks, we’ll serialize the first few chapters of our remaining Finalist’s unpublished novels, and then subscribers (both free and paid) will vote on a Winner to be fully serialized here on the Substack (Finalists are awarded $500; the Winner $1,000.)
Our Finalists for this round:
Seasons Clear, and Awe by Matthew Gasda
Mites by Gregory Freedman
Notes on the State of Virginia by Michael Pilarz
We’re excited to have all of you as a part of this endeavor to forge a new path for fiction on Substack. If you believe in what we’re doing, please consider offering a paid subscription.
“Mites” tells the story of two expats in Kosovo and their buffoonish attempt to make a documentary film about Milan Tešić, Yugoslavia’s greatest bluesman. It takes the reader from a NATO-occupied bridge in Mitrovica to the most beautiful parking lot in Kaçanik, from the Kosovo Serb enclave of Štrpce to Pristina’s Old Jewish Cemetery. Along the way it examines the folly of searching for a home in a world where such places are going extinct, and the inflammations that such an innocent quest can produce.
Gregory Freedman is a writer currently based in Belgrade.
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The first time I saw Michal I was marching in the Pristina Pride Parade. She was dancing alone, wrapped in a rainbow flag.
It’s possible, I suppose, that I had seen her before. Pristina, in spite of its status as the national capital of Kosovo—recognized as such by 104 of the 193 members of the United Nations—is a small town. Some might call it a backwater, but doing so would imply the presence of water, and Pristina has none. There was once a Pristina River, they say, but no one can remember where. It was long ago replaced by dirt and rocks and concrete. Sometimes, when you turn on the tap late at night, nothing emerges but a sputter of wind.
And yet it’s a beautiful city, in spirit if nothing else. I had lived there for the previous seven months, wandering widely and aimlessly. When you’re an unemployed foreigner in Kosovo who drinks too much and has no local friends, you have to walk a lot. Otherwise, you might forget that you’re in Kosovo.
I would wake up hungover every morning in my 20-euro-per-night short-term vacation rental apartment in the Ulpiana neighborhood. I would nurse three cups of instant 2-in-1 coffee on the balcony overlooking a courtyard filled with graffiti and the crooked remnants of a basketball hoop. Then—back inside, eating muesli soaked in the local brand of liquid probiotic yogurt—I would talk to the photos on the wall: an Albanian mother and father and adult daughter, dressed in the clothes and sunglasses of the early 1980s, sitting outside on Pristina’s sunny cement and soaking in the last grim years of a country called Yugoslavia, which was an experiment that never wanted them but which they were stuck inside of anyway. These people were my landlord’s mother and grandparents.
“I overdid it a bit last night,” I might say to them on any given morning, “as you may have noticed. I had more than enough at the bar. I don’t know why I bought more beer on the way home.” I would pause, chewing my spoonfuls of fiber and good bacteria to ensure that my gut health stood a small chance under the assault of every other aspect of my lifestyle. “I don’t know why I’m lying to you,” I would continue, “since I know exactly why I stopped at the store for more beer. It’s because I wanted more beer. Three more beers. And also that cute girl works the night shift at Spar and she’s always nice to me and, unlike most of these judgmental Albanians—all due respect—she doesn’t seem to find it weird or unseemly that a clearly drunk foreign man might want three more beers before going home. Of course, she’s like nineteen, so I’m not going to mess around with her. Plus, she’s Albanian, so if I were to somehow miraculously convince her to mess around with me, I’d probably end up getting brutally stomped by her brothers and several of her cousins and uncles. Again, I say that respectfully. I admire how close-knit Albanian families are. I wish we were like that in America.” I would scrape the bottom of my bowl, gathering the final bits of grain. “I’ll be getting out of here soon. Don’t worry. I’m not going to lie around all day wallowing in my hangover and feeling sorry for myself. I’ll let you guys have the place to yourselves. I’m excited and happy today just like I’m excited and happy every day—please don’t look so skeptical—because I’ll be walking around my sweet Pristina. And it’ll be a long walk too. At least 20,000 steps. My body is demanding it. I think I’ll stroll down to the Albi Mall and have lunch at the food court. Maybe a döner kebab. They have two döner places there and I’ve only ever eaten at one. Maybe it’s time to try the other. Not the healthiest choice, sure, but since I’ll be doing 20,000 steps today and since I eat this repellent garbage for breakfast, I think I can justify it. I’m just going to lie down first.”
After an hour in bed staring at my phone, I would usually manage to drag myself to the bathroom. There were three switches on its outside wall, each labeled in faded Serbian, even though the language of Kosovo had long been Albanian: “Svijetlo” - light; “Grejanje” - heating; “Bojler” - boiler. The svijetlo switch controlled the light. The grejanje switch controlled the boiler. The bojler switch didn’t control anything.
Assuming I had remembered to turn on the grejanje switch, I would enjoy a hot and invigorating shower. If, as was often the case, I had forgotten, I would endure a cold and enervating one.
If they asked me who these friends were, I would say their names were Zog and Enver. If they asked me for Zog and Enver’s last names, I would say that I never learned them, or had forgotten them, because my simple American mind had trouble retaining beautiful Albanian surnames. If they asked me to contact Zog and Enver, I would say that I couldn’t, that Zog had moved to New York and promptly been arrested for drug smuggling, and that Enver and I had a falling out. If they asked me what the falling out was over, I would tell them it was over a beautiful Albanian woman.
And then I would roam the streets of Pristina. By June of 2024, when the events I’m going to describe commenced, I figured I had walked down every street in the city proper.
Perhaps, on one of these walks, I had caught a glimpse of Michal. She had been living in Pristina the whole time. But I don’t think I did. It’s impossible that I saw her before. I would have remembered her.
I was waiting at a dentist’s office when I found out about the Pristina Pride Parade.
At this point I was, I guess you could say—if you’re old-fashioned—an illegal alien. I had been in Kosovo for more than twice the ninety days I was permitted. The anxiety I felt surrounding my status had peaked on day ninety-one and eased a little with every subsequent day.
I had a story mapped out if the authorities ever confronted me. The border between Kosovo and Albania was often open for motorists with either Kosovo or Albania license plates. There were no document checks; the cars were just eyeballed and waved through. So if the authorities ever accused me of overstaying, I would simply tell them that they were making an understandable mistake, and that I had in fact spent several months in Albania before returning to Kosovo, and that neither country had registered my exit or entry due to the open border. If they asked for any proof of my stay in Albania, such as online hotel reservations or receipts, I would tell them that I stayed in the private residences of my friends. If they asked me who these friends were, I would say their names were Zog and Enver. If they asked me for Zog and Enver’s last names, I would say that I never learned them, or had forgotten them, because my simple American mind had trouble retaining beautiful Albanian surnames. If they asked me to contact Zog and Enver, I would say that I couldn’t, that Zog had moved to New York and promptly been arrested for drug smuggling, and that Enver and I had a falling out. If they asked me what the falling out was over, I would tell them it was over a beautiful Albanian woman. They would surely understand.
But, as the months passed, I stopped expecting a knock on the door from the police. I was staying out of trouble and spending money. There was no need to deport me.
Most of my money went to the Beer Garden, a local bar popular among expats, but, thanks to an abscess I had been neglecting for weeks, I was about to start spreading it through the dental industry as well.
As I waited for my pus-draining and root canal, I scrolled through Instagram. I hated scrolling through Instagram, and considered it a shameful pastime that, like masturbation, should only be indulged in at home, in bed, alone, and as little as possible, even if “as little as possible” is in fact quite a lot. But the anxiety surrounding my impending procedure made both reading an ebook or sitting in silence sound equally nauseating. So I opted for the soothing, idiotic rhythms of Instagram.
I scrolled past the usual dreck the algorithm fed me—Balkan meme accounts, expat humor accounts, sexy pictures of Dua Lipa—until I found something that surprised me: a post from the official Pristina Pride account cheerfully indicating that the city’s Pride parade would commence in fourteen days.
While I supported queer liberation, always and forever, in whatever form it was manifesting itself in currently, I had never attended any Pride events in America. It wasn’t my struggle, after all, and queer Americans had no need for any conspicuous allyship from the likes of me. But, as soon as I saw the Instagram post, I knew I would have to attend Pristina’s parade. It was, after all, a Pride parade in Pristina, Kosovo. It promised to be an unusual experience. Not many people I would meet in the ensuing years, I assumed, would have ever been to a Pride parade in Pristina, Kosovo. So having been to one myself would be quite the feather in my cap.
“A Pride parade in Kosovo? Wow, what was that like?” they would ask me.
“Interesting,” I would reply.
Of course, I wouldn’t actually participate in the parade. I was a loner—more of one every day—and I didn’t march. I would resist getting swept up into it. I would just watch it from the sidelines, and maybe clap and give a thumbs up.
As I imagined standing on those sidelines and clapping and giving that thumbs up, the dentist called me in.
I’ll spare you the details of the wading pool of rotten-smelling pus that was drained from my abscess by this painfully beautiful dentist who was wearing a thong underneath translucent white scrubs. And I won’t describe the subsequent root canal that cost me a mere thirty-five euro.
But I cannot omit what happened next: my skin started to clear up.
Roughly two years prior, during the summer before I escaped from America to Belgrade, my face turned red. I didn’t let it bother me. I assumed it was lupus or some arcane side effect of the COVID vaccine or perhaps a well-deserved punishment from an angry God for wasting my life, and I declined to consult a doctor. I wasn’t vain, and I was confident that whatever the treatment turned out to be—if such a treatment existed—would be worse than the symptoms. So I ignored it. And as my travels around the Balkans proceeded, it got worse. Persistent crusty eczema became my constant companion, along with yellow-headed pustules erupting from my nose.
My condition affected my confidence, which in turn eradicated any promise of a European sex life. But, still, I eschewed medical treatment, until I found myself repeatedly bleeding onto hotel pillowcases. The issue had become one not of my own vanity, but of someone else’s laundry. And thus it became incumbent upon me to see a dermatologist.
A doctor in Sarajevo scraped some samples of my face onto a slide and examined them under a microscope. She then informed me that microscopic bugs known as demodex mites were multiplying throughout my face, and they were causing my acute flare-ups of rosacea. Everybody, she assured me, had demodex mites on their faces. It was just that I, and people like me, had a whole lot more of them. She prescribed antibiotics and some antiprotozoal cream and said that, if I maintained that course of treatment, then my skin would probably clear up. For a while, at least. Unless it didn’t.
The treatment worked, but I did not maintain it. The stress of living abroad—mild as it was—was all that I could handle. I could not add to that stress frequent dermatologist visits in whatever country I happened to be inhabiting. And so, by the time I settled in Kosovo, my skin was worse than ever.
And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. Whether it was a side effect of the antibiotic I took for the dental abscess or it was my body reacting to the vanquishing of a long-festering infection and the restoration of holistic balance, I did not know. But within days of my root canal my pustules and eczema were gone, and after a week the redness had faded almost entirely. If you were really looking for it, you could still find it, but even then you would only take note of it if you knew just how redness-free I had been before the mites had colonized my face.
On the day of the parade, I was feeling more confident in my appearance than I had in the two years since the mites had arrived. I had quietly come to accept that I would never have sex again, since it was not the sort of thing that was available to people who looked like me. It was worse than being ugly. Plenty of ugly people had sex all the time. But no one wanted to fuck a plague victim.
But I no longer looked pestilent. My beautiful dentist had accidentally cured me. I was on the sexual marketplace once again.
The internet had informed me that it was safe to take my antibiotic with alcohol, but that excessive alcohol use could hinder its effectiveness, and, since my alcohol use tended toward the excessive, I had decided to take a short vacation from booze, for the length of my antibiotic cycle and perhaps a week or two longer, just to make sure everything went as planned and the pus didn’t start accumulating again. And so I was unable to show off my new face at the Beer Garden, where I normally spent my evenings, and where, once I was drinking again, I would surely connect with all sorts of embassy staffers and international organization workers and local Albanian women who would, after writing me off for so long, suddenly realize that maybe, now that my skin had cleared up, I was a worthy avenue to go down in pursuit of a Green Card.
And so, abstinent from alcohol as I was, and thus completely isolated, the first opportunity I had to show off my new skin and find a local sexual partner was the Pristina Pride Parade.
For a man in search of a woman, a Pride parade would be a moderately counterintuitive destination. But it was all I had, and so I was going to keep my eyes—which were no longer encrusted with eczema and surrounded by redness—wide open for sexual opportunities. After all, it’s not like the openly queer community of Pristina was that large. I assumed that a significant chunk of the people in and around the parade would be heterosexual foreigners.
And, in this assumption, I was correct. On the day of Pristina Pride, a modest crowd gathered beneath the Skanderbeg statue in the main town square and, while I didn’t do any kind of survey or head count, the gay Albanians in attendance constituted a small plurality at most, and perhaps not even that. Huge swaths of the demonstrators were obviously foreign, and, highly represented among the foreigners were men with their wives and women with their husbands. People carried signs that said, “Celebrate Love,” and, “Celebrate Diversity,” printed above little American flags and the logo of the U.S. Embassy. A very large contingent of attendees wore t-shirts that proclaimed, “Germany Loves You Just the Way You Are.”
The whole thing felt rather weird and inorganic, but it wasn’t like I was going to be marching in it—I was still planning to observe from the sidelines as the paraders accumulated, and then I would wave goodbye as they made their way down Mother Teresa Street, unless my wildest ambitions materialized and I fell in with an attractive woman who was not entirely opposed to heterosexual activity.
It was a bigger crowd than I might have expected, but a smaller one than you would find at a Pride celebration in a comparably sized American city. I lurked on its outskirts, probably more inconspicuous than I should have been, given my suddenly burning desire for a woman who would appreciate my clear skin and brave commitment to progressive causes. Our presence there, after all, was hardly risk-free. Pride parades in the Balkans had been known to attract violent protesters, so participation could be seen as somewhat courageous, even though violent anti-gay protests were really more of a Belgrade thing. It was important for Kosovo’s international reputation and EU ambitions to present Pristina as an anti-Belgrade—to be the most well-behaved team player in the entire region. While some passersby sneered at the gathering paraders, or laughed, or rolled their eyes, there was never a hint of anyone caring enough to protest.
And then the leader of the parade appeared: the prime minister of Kosovo, in his crispest white dress shirt with a sleeveless undershirt visible underneath, and the bootcut blue jeans he awkwardly wore once a year.
The arrival of the prime minister and his security detail indicated that the parade was about to get moving. The prime minister of the Republic of Kosovo had no time to mingle in Skanderbeg’s shadow with scattered queer Pristinans and their allied foreigners. He shook hands with the other local dignitaries who would be leading the parade with him. He smiled sincerely while shaking hands with the most fabulous member of the parade-leading contingent, who was someone who had biologically been born a male but was wearing a lovely pastel dress worthy of a Disney princess. I didn’t know whether he was a drag queen, or if she was trans, and I had no one to ask and I surely wouldn’t have anyway, but, either way, I had to quietly salute a person living so freely and openly in a place like Pristina, where acceptance must have been difficult to find, and where everything from mockery to violence were probably more common. And, to a lesser degree, I had to salute the prime minister for so casually and convincingly greeting a person who was either trans or a drag queen, when doing so surely invited the sort of domestic political headaches a man in his precarious position did not need, even if he was, in the end, mostly doing it for cynical international political plaudits.
I was a bit starstruck by the prime minister, though it’s embarrassing to admit. I’m from Los Angeles, after all, and thus I have gotten drunk in bars in close proximity to honest-to-God Academy Award winners—Cuba Gooding Jr., specifically—so being in the presence of people I’ve seen on the TV is pretty meaningless to me. But the prime minister of Kosovo was different. He was more important than any Cuba Gooding. He was a player in the chaotic history of the most fascinating region in the world. He had been a leftist agitator and advocate for Albanian nationalism, imprisoned and beaten by the Serbian authorities during the NATO bombing campaign. Years later he completed his inevitable transition into electoral politics, a move that culminated in his coalition replacing the brittle, corrupt, and war criminal-tainted establishment party that had ruled Kosovo since its de facto independence. A brief, American-orchestrated parliamentary coup brought down his first government, but he was promptly returned to power with a much stronger and more enthusiastic mandate, which he used to become an even bigger pain-in-the-ass for America, Europe, and his country’s Serbian minority. His mandate had become wobblier in the intervening years, but he was still standing upon it the day I found myself ten feet away from him in Pristina with his security detail eyeing me warily.
And then I saw someone even more interesting than the prime minister.
The parade was beginning, and, having failed to find a girlfriend after not trying particularly hard, I was about to check out, to head back to my apartment, or maybe to sit at the cafe in Medresa I liked for a macchiato and some people-watching. I had done my part, having lent my support by my brief presence, and I had snapped a few photos of the growing crowd and the prime minister, so I could show people—should anyone ever care—that I had been there. I certainly wasn’t going to march from Skanderbeg Square down Mother Teresa Street to the university campus, all while listening to antiquated queer anthems like “Born This Way”, which had just started playing at a scarcely bearable volume.
But when I saw her I changed my mind.
Her name was Michal, though I didn’t know that yet. I saw her from the back at first, her hair long and golden all the way to its frontier with yellow, a hue that I assumed had to be fake, until later when I saw the degree to which it matched her eyebrows. At first the back of her body was covered by the rainbow flag she held, draping it over herself like a cape, but as she danced, she rotated it, and as she lay it over her shoulders, I saw it. And I wanted her completely.
With some people, the attraction is instantaneous and comprehensive. The older I got, the less often it happened—I’d learned about twenty years before that there was not one single soulmate out there for me, without whom I would drop dead—but it still happened. Often it didn’t even make sense; the woman inspiring such feelings might be standing right next to a woman who was far more conventionally attractive. Desire is nothing if not mysterious. But, in Michal’s case, it was more straightforward. She was beautiful, and perfect. Her butt was extremely flat, sure, but that was a common affliction in the former Yugoslavia, and one that I had not only come to accept but to actively fetishize.
I had to follow her body. Which was all I was doing at first: following it. Then, imperceptibly, as the parade proceeded, in staggered bursts of movement interrupted by incessant pauses during which the press took photos and some people danced and others, toward the back, chanted for the freedom of Palestine, their righteous voices failing to rise above Lady Gaga and Rihanna, I realized that I was no longer following her body. I was following her. I was overwhelmed by an adolescent certainty that someone who attracted me so much would have to be perfect for me, in every way. I wanted all of her.
I couldn’t see from the moderate distance that I kept, but her eyes were as blue as the Pristina River—a blue so perfect that it could only exist in a faraway, idealized memory. They were slightly almond-shaped, and they rested below a long forehead and above a somewhat wide and upturned nose. Her lips were pale pink and, at least amid the celebration of sexual and gender diversity and freedom that surrounded us, they smiled easily. I couldn’t tell how old she was, since I had lost that ability with the onset of middle age—everyone looked impossibly young or impossibly old to me—but I later found out from the internet that she was thirty-three.
In the press photos of that day on Mother Teresa Street, I figure prominently. I’m at the very front of the parade, to such a degree that one might assume I was a leading member of Pristina’s queer community, or one of its most fervent allies. But if you looked closely—as, surely, no one ever did—and you zoomed in on my eyes, and the photo in question had a high enough resolution to show them with clarity, you would see that they were not fixed upon a hopeful future of queer equality in the Balkans. They were, perpetually—that day and for the days after—fixed upon Michal, who was wrapped in her rainbow flag, always at the front of the parade, dancing the whole way, alone, beautiful.
