"Mites" - Chapter 2
by Gregory Freedman
We continue the second week of PILCROW’s Inaugural Serialized Novel Contest with Chapter 2 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 Over the next two weeks, we’ll serialize the first few chapters of our remaining Finalist’s unpublished novels, and then subscribers (both free and paid) will vote on a Winner to be fully serialized here on the Substack (Finalists are awarded $500; the Winner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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Falling in love with a woman from afar was always a dicey proposition, especially for a middle-aged man who should know better. But doing so at a Pride parade made even less sense and prompted even more avenues of pain and disappointment to open up.
But I figured, first of all, that she probably wasn’t a total lesbian. She was draped in a rainbow flag and dancing at the front of the parade, sure, but that sort of behavior was perfectly consistent with that of any given mostly-straight woman from any given North American or Western European country. And I was pretty sure she was from one of those countries. She didn’t look like any Albanian I had ever seen and, by that point in my life, the number of Albanians I had seen was far above the international average.
So, sure, she probably identified as queer in some aspect, and maybe her pronouns were even she/them, but I felt in my loose, antibiotic-addled guts that she liked to have sex with men, at least occasionally, and that maybe—just maybe, given my newly clear face and the odd confidence that came with it, and the equally unexpected passion that her body inspired in me—she would like to have sex with me. Perhaps several times. Perhaps for the rest of our lives.
I wasn’t generally an optimistic person, or a resolutely theistic person, but there came times, every few years or so, or perhaps once every decade, when I was sure that God was smiling on me. It never turned out to actually be the case, or, if He had been smiling on me, it was in some ironic or inscrutable way that would only become explicable in the hereafter. I usually had more basis for believing in these divine smiles than seeing a beautiful woman at a parade. But somehow I was surer than I had ever been that I had somehow caught God’s ineffable notice, and that my suffering and loneliness were about to be redeemed, and that I was going to find love with the woman from the parade, or if not love then at least some great sex.
The spell lasted a long time. It lasted longer than the parade, which eventually trailed off onto the university campus, where a concert and a drag show were about to commence, and where the prime minister had an SUV waiting which swept him away after he shook a few quick hands, and he went off to shove his Pride outfit into a closet for another year.
Somewhere in the bottleneck between Mother Teresa Street and the concert at the University of Pristina, when the anti-genocide chants at the back of the parade really started to give off some sparks and most of the German embassy workers quickly peeled off and returned to their rigidly structured weekends of bicycling, I lost sight of Michal. I assumed she’d be at the concert, still wearing her flag, still moving her sublime body to what was sure to be a less mainstream and dated set of queer and queer-friendly anthems. But she was gone. Even before the prime minister fled, she had vanished.
I could have been discouraged. There was a woman I had never seen before, and I was meant to be with her, and I had finally found her, and then she was gone.
But I wasn’t discouraged. God was working for me.
The concert wasn’t really my scene so I left shortly after it began. Michal was gone, and it wasn’t worth waiting around amid the oppressive noise to see if she would return. I knew that I would see her again. And if I didn’t—if I was wrong; if God didn’t exist; or if He did exist and was indifferent to my struggles, or actively hostile to them—then I would simply forget about her. It had happened plenty of times before.
It was a busy night at the Beer Garden, as Saturday nights generally were, but I arrived early enough that I would be good and drunk by the time it got truly crowded. It was a warm summer night, so most of the drinkers—including a few stray Germans whose t-shirts reminded us that they loved us all just the way we were—congregated on the front patio. I took a small table inside in the air conditioning and, as usual, I spoke to no one, drinking half liter after half liter of Peja beer. I oriented my face toward one of the televisions, which was showing what I gathered was Australian rules football.
I didn’t look at my phone. I hadn’t ended my alcohol fast early just to stare at my phone. I was there to meet the woman from the parade. I had never seen her at the Beer Garden before, but I knew she would be there that night. God was on my side and God did not mess around once He’d taken an interest. I kept my eyes up, mostly on the football but also at every body that entered the room to approach the bar or wait in line for the single toilet.
And so the night progressed. The front patio got more and more mobbed, which led to the bar’s modestly sized interior getting more and more crowded, to the point where I felt vaguely guilty about monopolizing a table, but not guilty enough to do anything about it. Three French guys, forced to stand, eyed my table covetously. Normally I would have gone outside to drink while standing, or I would have closed my tab and gone home to drink while lying down. But not that night. On that night I would not cede my table. I was waiting for someone. A problem did arise, however, when the fifth liter of Peja settled into my belly and I realized I really had to pee. In my experience, French guys in Kosovo didn’t observe one’s right to use the restroom while maintaining one’s claim on a table. A conflict loomed. “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying” played at an inappropriately high volume.
And then she was there, sitting across from me. She was wearing the same clothes that she wore at the parade, except the rainbow flag had been replaced by an overstuffed backpack. She spoke to me but I didn’t hear what she said, since my ears were unfocused, and there were lots of people around us talking, mostly in English but also in several more obscure languages, and the indie pop from the speaker above my head was blaring.
The shock of seeing her in front of me, and somehow speaking directly to me, wouldn’t affect me until much, much later—the next day, perhaps, or even the next week, or the next month, or perhaps it wouldn’t happen until right now, as I try to reinhabit the moment. Everything was unfolding so fast that I had no trouble acting casually. My jaw didn’t drop and my head didn’t explode. I just raised my eyebrows and moved an ear slightly toward her, indicating that I hadn’t heard what she said.
“Are you gay?” she repeated. Her accent was North American.
I looked confused by her question, since I was confused by it, and she interpreted my look correctly, recognizing that I had heard her this time but was a bit taken aback since I had never been so bluntly interrogated about my sexuality.
“I saw you at the parade,” she said. “I was just wondering if you were actually gay.”
“Only in the pejorative sense,” I managed to say.
At first I thought she hadn’t heard me. I hadn’t spoken in several hours. I didn’t need to order at the Beer Garden and the staff didn’t like me so they never made conversation. When I walked in, whoever was working would smile insincerely and pour me a large Peja, and after that the extent of our communication rarely went beyond a raised finger asking for one more. And so I sensed that, when I spoke, my voice had come out in an overly quiet croak.
But she had heard me. She was just considering my answer. “What do you mean?” she said.
“You know when an unenlightened person dismisses something by saying, ‘This shit’s gay’?” I said. “I’m that kind of gay.”
“Okay,” she said. “So you’re annoying?”
“Yeah.”
“But heterosexual?”
“Correct.”
After a pause, during which she looked around, I assumed for someone more interesting to talk to, she said, “I believe you.”
“That I’m heterosexual?” I said.
“I guess. I don’t know what you fantasize about at night. I meant I believe that you’re annoying. Gay in the pejorative sense.”
“Okay.”
“Why else would you be drinking alone at the Beer Garden on a Saturday night?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s a friendly place,” she said. “If you’re all by your lonesome here then it must be because everyone has already talked to you before and they know how annoying you are. Or maybe you’re just scared to talk to people, which is also pretty gay-in-the-pejorative-sense.”
Both of her hypotheses were partially true, but I didn’t know how it would reflect upon me if I admitted it. I didn’t want her to think I was sad about it.
“How do you know so much about the Beer Garden?” I said. “I’ve never seen you here before.”
“Oh, every foreigner in Pristina ends up here now and then. Resistance is futile. Though I usually hang out at Dit’ e Nat’,” she said. Dit’ e Nat’ was a cafe around the corner from the Skanderbeg statue. It had a cute cat and was known for being queer-friendly and otherwise alt, and so I was perfectly pleased by its existence. But it was the sort of place where you might see foreigners with AirPods crammed in their heads working on laptops all day, and that was very much not what I came to Pristina to be around, and so I chose not to patronize it, which was an ideal arrangement for me, the business, and its patrons. “But because of Pride it’s like half the girls I’ve fucked since I came to Kosovo are there. It was so awkward that the Beer Garden actually started to sound like a good idea.”
“Oh,” I said, “so you are.”
“So I am?”
“You are one?”
“I am one what?”
I was embarrassed to find myself halfway toward asking her about her sexuality. I didn’t finish my question.
“A lesbian?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“You’re allowed to say it. I know you’re reaching the age where you feel like you can’t keep up and you’re scared of using the wrong word, but I promise, it’s still an accepted nomenclature.”
“Okay.”
“Go ahead, say it.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Suit yourself,” she said.
She still hadn’t confirmed that she was one—a lesbian—but her reference to fucking enough girls in Kosovo that it could make a night out at Dit’ e Nat’ uncomfortable was not encouraging for my prospects. But I figured there was still hope. I couldn’t articulate what that hope was but I could sense its presence.
“Do you want a drink?” I said. She didn’t have a glass and she didn’t seem drunk.
“Are you offering to buy me one or just get the waiter’s attention?”
“I’ll buy you one.”
“Of course I want a drink.”
I beckoned a waiter who was passing behind her. I didn’t know his name. I knew most of the staff’s names but not this guy’s even though he was the nicest one. It was obviously too late to ask him.
He approached. “One more of these,” I said, pointing to my almost empty glass of Peja. “And—” I gestured to my companion.
“Yeah, same,” she said, barely looking at the waiter. I pointed to myself, indicating that it should go on my tab, but the waiter was already walking away. We’d figure it all out later, or we wouldn’t. The Beer Garden wasn’t always precise about counting drinks.
She and I stared at each other for a moment. She was the first to break eye contact. It should have felt like a small victory in the battle that is getting to know someone. But it didn’t. If I had broken eye contact it would have looked like I had grown uncomfortable with it, and become self-conscious under the hell of being seen. But when she broke eye contact with me it was clear that she was just tired of looking at me and waiting for me to come up with something interesting to say, and so she had decided to look elsewhere, to see what else was going on, to plan for an escape once her beer arrived and she took however many sips were required to thank me for buying it. I poured the remaining beer in my glass down my throat so I wouldn’t have to endure the indignity of having two glasses in front of me. There was slightly too much left for a comfortable gulp, but I managed to get it down without choking.
“So,” I said, with my breath slightly short, “are you?”
“Am I what?”
“A—lesbian?”
“Why do you keep asking me that?”
“You never answered.”
“So seeing me dance in a rainbow flag at Pride wasn’t definitive enough for you?”
“No, not really.”
“And then mentioning all the women in town I’ve fucked?”
“That was a little more—” I said, “definitive.”
“But you still couldn’t move on until you heard me pronounce the words, ‘I am a lesbian’?”
“Yeah,” I said.
Our drinks arrived. I was disappointed but, as with the shock that should have befallen me when she sat across from me, it had trouble penetrating my shield of drunkenness, which exerted its tendency to make everything that is the case feel inevitable. And anyway, I told myself, the fact that she was a lesbian didn’t necessarily preclude any further developments between us. We probably wouldn’t be getting married and pursuing a fabulous life as the Scott and Zelda of Roaring 2020s Pristina, but we might still have sex. Pretty much all of my exes—from back in the days before my skin condition, back when I used to socialize and have sex and so forth—had been straight, and they had all been known to have sex with women. Some lesbians were surely subject to a similar fluidity. So perhaps it was time for me to form an emotionally complex and fundamentally hopeless relationship with a lesbian who would now and then deign to have sex with a man—preferably me.
From where I sat at that moment, as our drinks arrived and she took her first quick sip, the main barrier between the two of us hooking up wasn’t so much her lesbianism as the fact that she already seemed to strongly dislike me.
“Do you want to go outside?” she said.
I didn’t immediately respond.
“You don’t have to,” she replied to my hesitation. “But I’m going.”
My lack of response, of course, had nothing to do with a lack of desire, but instead was the product of shock, which I then managed to tamp down.
“Yeah,” I said, “let’s go.” The French guys were still ogling my table. They could have it.
She moved quickly but I still had time to stare at her ass as she seamlessly weaved through the crowd. It moved something in me, in a way I hadn’t felt in a long time—at least while that drunk. I was far too old to be able to get an erection with as much beer in my belly and alcohol in my brain as I had. But watching her walk away from me, I felt an absurd and obscene stirring in the last place I expected to feel movement. I felt young.
A vacant high-top table rose under a light at the edge of the front patio. She placed her beer upon it and turned around and looked at me as I joined her. I took a sip and put my beer down across from hers. It was my first opportunity to really look at her. She wasn’t moving now, spinning with her rainbow flag caped around her, and it wasn’t dark like it was in the barroom. She was standing under the light, and I could see her cool blue eyes for the first time, underneath her fair-colored eyebrows, which made me wonder about her pussy hair.
“I’m Michal, by the way,” she said as I pictured her vagina. She hit the Hebrew “ch” sound in the middle particularly hard, in a way that sounded almost parodic.
“Michal?” I said. The “ch” sounded more like an “h” the way I said it, because I was making an effort not to overdo it.
“Close enough,” she said.
It felt good to receive an unprompted introduction. Balkan people, I had found, never introduced themselves. Or at least they never introduced themselves to me. If I wanted someone’s name I needed to ask for it. It got tiresome so I ended up never knowing anyone’s name.
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
“And you are?” she said. I was sufficiently out of practice—or perhaps just drunk—that I had forgotten that it was customary to introduce myself too.
“Jonathan,” I said.
“Jonathan?”
“Yeah.”
“Not Jon?”
I was about to give her my stock spiel about how I had always been Jon back in America, but that, ever since coming to the Balkans, I had embraced the full name that I had always hated, since it sounded a lot cooler in the local accents. But before I could get any of that out, she said, “What’s that?” She was pointing to my face.
I wiped my cheek, though I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten, so I wasn’t sure what could be smeared there.
“No, the red. The rosacea. Is that from demodex mites?” she said.
I had been under the impression that the redness had been cured, but I of course couldn’t reveal that, because that would have compounded the humiliation of having the redness in my face called out.
“Are you a dermatologist?” I said.
“No, just educated,” she said.
“Well,” I said, “yeah, I’ve got bugs in my face.”
“That’s fucking gross,” she said.
“I strongly agree.”
“I’d do something about that if I were you. I wouldn’t be able to stand having bugs living in my face.”
“They’re not so bad.”
“They’re not?”
“I mean, they’re just looking for a home like the rest of us. One might admire their determination.”
“And yet one would rather not.”
“Everybody has them. It’s just people with rosacea have them more.”
“That’s just something they tell people who have rosacea so you won’t feel like freaks.”
“So there’s not a single demodex mite on your face?”
She smiled at me. It was a luminous smile, and completely insincere. She pointed at herself. “You’re telling me you think there are bugs crawling on this?”
“I guess I don’t see any.”
“What you see is what you get,” she said. “I’m an open book.” I briefly thought about criticizing her for speaking in cliches, but I wanted her to like me, so I decided not to, but then I realized that she would probably like me more if I weren’t afraid to lightheartedly insult her, but by the time I figured that out too much time had passed and she was already talking again.
“Why are you in Kosovo?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I like it here.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. Why? Don’t you?”
“It’s fine, I guess. It’s just most people I ask have better reasons than that.”
“What’s a better reason?”
“Well, for example, they’re being punished by the government or NGO they work for, and so they’ve been sent to Pristina, and once their penance is done they can’t wait to be sent back to a more desirable post.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. It was true. Most people I talked to at the Beer Garden didn’t want to be in Pristina and longed for the day when they would be sent elsewhere. That’s partly why I had stopped talking to people at the Beer Garden. I couldn’t relate to people who didn’t appreciate Pristina. “That’s a better reason.”
“But you’re here by choice?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“What do you do?”
“I don’t know. I walk around, mostly.”
“For a job, I mean.”
“Oh. I don’t have a job.”
“Living off your rich parents?”
“No, not really,” I said. I was actually living off an inheritance from my grandmother, so I wasn’t lying.
“Uh huh. So what kind of failed artist are you?” she asked.
“What makes you think I’m a failed artist?”
“I suppose it’s possible that somewhere in Europe there’s an unemployed alcoholic expat American living off his rich parents who isn’t a failed artist, but you’d be the first one I’ve met.”
That was the first time it occurred to me that I might really hate Michal. There were indicators that flew by me earlier, because I was too drunk to really grasp them or too dazzled by her sexiness or too wrapped up in coming off as likable myself that I failed to consider whether I liked her. But one thing I truly loathed was when a person was arrogant enough to think that, just by observing me for a moment, they knew everything about me, or at least had come to some fundamental understanding of me. That lack of humility, and the disrespect for the complexity of all that makes us human, was one of the least appealing traits a person could exhibit. I could spend years with someone and, even if I could predict everything they were going to say, I never suspected that I truly knew them, or knew more than a fraction of a percent of who they were. We are all vast landfills, and the most anyone can really know about another is the stray individual-sized Doritos bag.
It’s hard to create fictional characters with the illusion of three-dimensionality when you don’t believe you’ve ever known another human being. My skepticism of my—or anyone’s—ability to know anyone else was, I believed, one reason I had failed as a writer.
And that was another reason I found myself hating Michal so much at that moment, in spite of her sexiness, and in spite of the fact that, in addition to hating her, I was also pretty sure I was in love with her: everything she said about me was essentially correct.
Of course I was a failed writer. Or, at least, I alternated between being a failed writer and a failing writer. During those months in Pristina, I was being a failed writer, since I was not writing and—as I had been so many times in the past—I was fairly certain I would never write again, in spite of a recent short-lived spurt of encouragement from the literary world.
The previous winter, during a brief vacation to North Mitrovica—a Serbian town across the river from an Albanian town, connected by a bridge policed by NATO—I decided to pass the time by digging through my Google Docs. Sometimes, when I felt sad, I would read novels that I had written long before, and I would find myself thinking the words, “Say, this is actually pretty good,” and doing so would salvage my mood, because I would then be able to descend into bitterness at the third-rate culture that had rejected me, which was one of my favorite pastimes. Of course, just as often, what I would read of my old work would make me think the words, “Say, this is absolute shit,” and the result would be deepened despair. So it was a risky box to open up, but given how low I was feeling that holiday season, I had nothing to lose.
That day in Mitrovica, I found myself reading a piece called Inflammation, a short novel I had written while living in Niš, Serbia, the previous spring, and which I had dismissed as hopeless. It was divided into two parts. The first part was a lightly fictionalized account of two weeks I had spent in Banja Luka, the de facto capital of the Bosnian Serbs—so lightly fictionalized that I hadn’t even bothered to change my name or my skin condition. In the second part, the whole thing devolved into a bizarre fantasy where “Jonathan” falls in love with a severely disabled Bosnian Serb woman and is drawn into life in the Balkans as he always fantasized about it—aimless days in the village, rakija-drenched family gatherings, circle dances, knockoff tracksuits, Gypsy trumpet music, all that garbage—and then it climaxes with him having ambiguously consensual sex with his disabled girlfriend and being chased into the Vrbas River by an angry mob following the Republika Srpska Day parade.
And, upon revisiting it, I thought it was okay. It exhibited many of the same flaws and crutches that always characterized my writing, but, still, I thought it said something about life, and loneliness, and Balkanism, and the pathetic arrogance of even the most well-meaning American expat. I thought maybe I had been wrong to dismiss it as a misfire.
Upon arriving back in Pristina, I dedicated much of my downtime—which is to say, my time—to sending queries out to agents and trying to get Inflammation representation. In the bio section of the query letter, I simply wrote, “I am a novelist currently based in Pristina, Kosovo,” since being based in Pristina, Kosovo, was the only potentially interesting thing about my life. I suppose I could have written, “I am an alcoholic unemployed expat American living off his dead grandmother in Pristina, Kosovo,” but that delightful characterization had not yet been introduced into my consciousness, and most agents presumably would have found it somewhat less than alluring.
I received the usual form rejection letters and silence from all the agencies except one, which requested the first fifty pages. I assumed that would be the end of that, but after reading the first fifty pages, they requested the entire manuscript. That had never happened before.
Alas, after a week of waiting and drinking more heavily than usual—even the staff at the Beer Garden, who usually acted impeccably indifferent to me, seemed concerned—a form rejection letter arrived from the agency. I guessed that the quasi-rape scene of the young disabled women probably put them off, though, honestly, the whole second part of the novel was rather thinly imagined. But I couldn’t say for sure, since they provided no guidance.
I briefly considered writing back to the agency, perhaps thanking them for their consideration and soliciting any further commentary beyond the form letter, but I realized how humiliating that would be, and I knew it wouldn’t be worth it. The odds of getting a novel published in 2024 were so minuscule anyway, the thought of degrading myself in order to slightly improve my chances sounded obscene. It would be like accepting a deal where, to double your odds of winning the lottery, from one-in-four-hundred-million to one-in-two-hundred-million, you had to show everyone at 7-Eleven your flaccid penis every time you bought a ticket.
“I’m a failed writer,” I said to Michal.
“Oh fuck,” she said.
Gregory Freedman: nice prose!