"Mites" - Chapter 3
by Gregory Freedman
We conclude the second week of PILCROW’s Inaugural Serialized Novel Contest with Chapter 2 of Gregory Freedman’s Mites. Next week, we’ll serialize our third Finalist’s chapters, 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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“What?”
“I don’t know. You just have such a glazed empty look to you. I actually thought for a second that maybe I had met the first alcoholic unemployed American expat living off his rich parents who wasn’t a failed artist. That would have been so fucking refreshing. But instead—” She trailed off with a contemptuous gesture in my general direction.
“What kind of failed artist are you?” I asked.
“I’m none kind of failed artist, you clever fellow. I’m a successful artist.”
“Aha.”
Before I could follow up she asked, “So what do you write?”
“Fiction,” I said.
“‘Fiction,’” she repeated in a dopey voice. “What kind of fiction?”
It was my least favorite question, and probably the least favorite question of every writer who didn’t write science-fiction or mysteries. I gathered that describing the plot of Inflammation would not lead to any edifying exchanges, so instead I said, “If I could sum that up in a sentence then I wouldn’t need to write novels.”
“Very good,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said. I remembered that I had to pee. I should have excused myself to go wait in line at the toilet, but for some reason—acute alcohol intoxication, I assume, or loneliness—I still didn’t want to let Michal get away.
“So you’re a successful artist?” I said.
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“I’m American,” I said, out of habit, and also perhaps as a joke.
“Yes, I’ve heard you speak. Which United State are you from?”
“California. Los Angeles.”
“L.A.,” she said.
“So you’ve heard of it.”
“I know it all too well.”
“Where are you from?”
“All over.”
“Where is that?”
“Colorado,” she said.
“You don’t seem very Coloradan,” I said.
“What the fuck does that mean?”
I thought it was obvious when I said it but apparently I would have to explain. “You seem kind of intense for Colorado.”
“Oh I do?”
I remembered that I had a useful anecdote about a Coloradan. “I was drinking at a bar in Oxnard, California, once.”
“I know where Oxnard is,” she said.
“That’s good.”
“I mean, you don’t need to specify that it’s in California like I’m ignorant.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So you were, shockingly, drinking at a bar in Oxnard. And?”
“Right, and I was talking to the bartender, and he said he was from Colorado, and I asked him how exactly it was that one starts in Colorado and ends up in Oxnard, California. And he said that he was hiking on this trail and it ended in Oxnard, and he didn’t have anywhere else to go, so he decided to just get a job and stay there a while.”
“Okay?” she said.
“And that’s the sort of mentality I associate with Colorado.”
“I see,” she said. She looked around the patio and sipped her beer. “You know, actually, you’re kind of right. That’s one of the reasons I had to get out and never go back. The way people live back there is indefensible.”
“I suppose I agree with that.”
“You suppose?”
“I mean, yeah, I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter. People should do what they want.”
“I suppose I agree with that,” she said, somewhat mockingly but she wasn’t completely committed to it.
“So where did you go when you got out?”
“I moved to Israel,” she said.
“Aha,” I said.
“That’s all you have to say about that? ‘Aha’?”
“I guess. What should I say?”
“That’s up to you. But it seems like there should be more to say than ‘aha’.”
“I don’t see why.”
“You don’t?”
“Not really,” I said, though I did see why, but I wanted to avoid that whole area because I wanted her to like me and if I said the wrong thing about it then maybe she wouldn’t.
“You have no thoughts?” she said.
“I don’t have many thoughts about anything right now,” I said. “I guess I’m curious to know why you moved there.”
“I once had a threesome over there with an Orthodox Jewish mother of five and a Palestinian college girl. I don’t think sharia would allow for that.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that one. I wanted to hear more—every detail that she was willing to share—but I figured asking for it would sound creepy and would inspire her to make fun of me. So I just stood there, rocking vaguely from side to side.
“Are you a Jew, Jonathan?”
“Well,” I said.
“Jonathan. That’s a mega-Hebrew name, but that doesn’t mean anything. Most American Jonathans are goys.”
“My father,” I said, and I didn’t have to finish explaining that my father was Jewish and my mother wasn’t, and as such I wasn’t much of anything, because, as usual, she immediately believed she understood the whole story and, as usual, she was essentially correct.
“Say no more. I got it. Well, my parents are pretty hardcore right wing Jews, so it was always kind of understood that when I turned eighteen I’d move to Israel and serve in the IDF.”
“Oh wow.”
“Does that cause you to feel conflicted about talking to me?”
“No.”
“Are you sure, Jonathan?” I hated the way she said my name with her flat Rocky Mountain accent. It reminded me of why I had been Jon for so many years.
“Yeah, I’m sure. I’ll talk to anyone. I like people.”
“Of course, I forgot, you’re a writer. You need to listen to all sorts of people so you can understand them and credibly represent them when you use them in your novels.”
“Yeah.”
“So you just listen and nod and say ‘aha’ and ‘wow’ and ‘yeah’ like you’re not judging, but then someday you’ll be writing one of your stories and you’ll be inspired to make a character who’s this attractive, blonde, surprisingly Jewish dyke who served in the IDF, and you’ll present her as a tragically unrepentant child killer because your lazy, no-stakes, faux-radical politics require it.”
“I try not to write about politics.”
“Unless I’ve got you wrong. This is the Balkans, after all. You could be a fascist—a right wing manosphere sex tourist type who came here because you thought it would be full of ripe young pussy desperate for a Green Card, and you’d fuck them all until you found the most perfectly submissive girl in all the Balkans who’d be willing to fulfill all your fantastically obsolescent gender roles by cooking for you and cleaning up after you and popping out little quarter-Jewish babies for you. If you’re that kind of guy then you probably like Israel and revere the IDF.”
If she was actually entertaining the thought that I was that kind of guy then I didn’t want to immediately disabuse her. I didn’t like the kind of guy she was describing but it still felt kind of interesting that I might be mistaken for one of them. I gulped my beer and looked in her eyes and held in my pee.
“But obviously that’s not you,” she said. “I mean, first of all, I saw you hulking along like a lost Frankenstein at the Pride parade, and a right wing American expat in the Balkans wouldn’t be caught dead at an event like that unless he was looking for potential rape victims. Plus I don’t think those guys tend to land in Pristina, given all the ‘allahu akbars’ you have to listen to here. I guess some of them go so far around the bend that they end up converting to Islam, but I don’t think that’s you, given your active alcoholism. So my guess is you’re not a fan of Israel.”
I’d forgotten during the course of her meanderings that our ostensible subject was Israel. “I don’t really think about it that much,” I said.
“Oh great, you’re a coward about it too. That’s lovely. You should at least have the courage of your convictions and tell me you think it’s a rotten, violent, racist, genocidal apartheid state.”
She was correct—I did think that—but I didn’t want to give her the victory, and plus I was being honest when I said I didn’t think about it much, and at the moment I was thinking far more about whether I was going to be able to hold in my urine than I was about genocide. “Most countries have problems,” I said.
“Most countries have problems,” she sang back to me mockingly. She had a lovely voice.
“So you liked it there?” I said.
“God no,” she said. “It’s a rotten, violent, racist, genocidal apartheid state. Cynical too. When people criticize them they point to people like me and are like, you know, since women in Israel are legally allowed to eat each other’s pussies without getting beheaded by the state, then the rest of the world should look the other way when it was literally my job to murder Palestinian children.”
“That was your job?”
“Of course it wasn’t my job.”
“But you said—”
“No, Jonathan, it wasn’t literally my job. The fact that you believed it was—”
“I didn’t.”
“—goes to show how unwilling people are to think rationally about this stuff. You think the IDF literally has a position called ‘Palestinian child murderer,’ and people on the other side think that every Palestinian is some kind of scimitar-wielding medieval psycho who wants to exterminate the Jews and institute Sharia. Which, I assure you, isn’t true.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“I once had a threesome over there with an Orthodox Jewish mother of five and a Palestinian college girl. I don’t think sharia would allow for that.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that one. I wanted to hear more—every detail that she was willing to share—but I figured asking for it would sound creepy and would inspire her to make fun of me. So I just stood there, rocking vaguely from side to side.
“You look uncomfortable,” she said.
“No.”
“Does this subject make you uncomfortable?”
“No,” I said. “I just have to pee.”
“Then go pee.”
“Will you be here when I get back?” It just slipped out and I was humiliated. It sounded pathetic. My presence was more or less irrelevant to the course the conversation was taking, and to the limited extent that my being there mattered it was to accept her abuse. But I didn’t want to let her go. I hadn’t come to the Balkans to hang out with Americans, particularly Americans who seemed to hate me. There were plenty of them back home. But it felt so good to be talking to someone. And it was someone with a native speaker’s nuanced grasp of the English language. With Michal, I could make an offhand joke and I could feel confident that she would know I was joking. She wouldn’t think it was funny, but she would surely recognize it as a joke. Such was rarely the case with the local Albanians. If I dared to make an ironic aside on those unusual occasions when I found myself speaking to them, I would be greeted with silent confusion, followed, at best, by the words, “Oh, you are joking.”
“I don’t fucking know,” she said.
At least there was hope. I scurried back into the barroom and was gratified to discover that the door to the single restroom was open, meaning the toilet was miraculously unoccupied. A local woman I kind of knew was walking toward it. Her name was Afërditë. She and I had hit it off one night, in that we had a conversation that lasted longer than a minute, but once we stepped outside under the brighter lights of the patio and she saw the full scale of my skin condition, she had excused herself for the evening, telling me she had to go home, even though I saw her still there and talking to another foreign guy an hour later. It didn’t offend me too much. My disgusting red skin was a reasonable third strike, following my unemployment and my drinking. My personality probably played a role as well. And then there were the strikes I wasn’t even aware of.
“Hello,” Afërditë said, as we came together at the foot of the corridor leading to the restroom. I was a step ahead of her.
“Oh hey,” I said. Normally I would have let her go ahead of me, even though I was never sure if that was the gentlemanly thing to do at a bar with a single toilet. Perhaps, I thought, a lady would prefer to use the toilet second, or she might assume that a man offering to let her use the toilet in front of him was not being chivalrous but was in fact being a pervert.
I had no time for any such considerations. After greeting Afërditë with two syllables and a tight smile, I continued into the bathroom, where I peed for a solid minute and a half.
When I returned to the patio Michal still stood alone at our table, staring at her phone, not scrolling or typing, merely looking, appearing as lovely as I had ever seen her in the dual lights from above and below. I could barely believe that she hadn’t fled, either away from the Beer Garden entirely or to a more compelling table, but there she was. Her glass was empty. Mine had been empty for a while.
“Buy me another drink?” she said without looking up from her phone as she sensed me standing in front of her.
I turned around and walked back inside, where I quickly established eye contact with the nameless waiter, lifted my eyebrows, raised two fingers and then pointed outside. He seemed to understand.
I returned to the table.
“They’ll be here shortly,” I said, “I think.”
She slipped her phone into the back pocket of her denim shorts. “They wanted me in the Sayeret Matkal,” she said.
“What?”
“You don’t know what the Sayeret Matkal is?”
“Remind me.”
“It’s this super elite unit of the Israeli special forces. They wanted me to be the first woman to join.”
“Well sure,” I said. “You closed the deal on a threesome with a Jewish mom and a Palestinian college girl. That should qualify you for anything.” My emptied bladder was providing me with temporary clarity and confidence.
I was hoping for a chuckle but instead she looked annoyed. “You don’t believe me?”
“Why wouldn’t I believe you?”
“You tell me.”
“I didn’t even know what the Sayeret Matkal was until two seconds ago. I don’t have strong opinions about who they would or wouldn’t offer membership to.”
“Well anyway, I turned them down.”
“Why?”
“Why?”
“It sounds pretty prestigious. Especially being the first woman.”
“And prestige is something important to you?” she said.
“Not really,” I said, unsure if I was lying. “But it is to a lot of people.”
“Being part of an insanely racist occupying army takes its toll on you, Jonathan,” she said. “I understand that you don’t have experience doing anything difficult, but, trust me, it’s true. Moving up into the elite war crimes unit just wasn’t palatable to me. I’d killed enough.”
Our beers arrived. We started drinking them without a toast.
“Do you ever feel guilty?” I asked.
“No, I served my time. I did my job. My parents just about died of shame when I told them I turned it down. They wouldn’t talk to me for months. Things still aren’t the same between me and my father.”
“No, I meant, guilty about the other stuff. The killing and everything.”
“Why would I feel guilty about that?”
“I don’t know. The normal reasons. You said that it was a racist occupying army doing war crimes.”
“I’d feel guilty if I hadn’t done it. I mean, Israel is what it is. No one is particularly happy about it. And, given what it has become, it needs humans to come in and carry out the war crimes. They haven’t been able to fully automate it yet. So if it hadn’t been me doing the crimes it would have been some other poor Jew. And what’s so great about me that I should be exempt from doing the necessary crimes? Just because I was born in Denver instead of Tel Aviv then someone else should have to oppress the Palestinians instead of me? That’s not a morally defensible stance, Jonathan. I would just be riding high on my privilege.”
“I suppose.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to understand. You’re happy to let some West Virginia hicks do the American army’s dirty work instead of you just because you were born a rich kid from L.A. and they weren’t. Who should feel guilty in that scenario? You or the war criminals?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I’m not surprised that you don’t.”
I was having trouble getting a grasp on her politics, and I wasn’t sure if it was because I was drunk or if it was because she was incoherent, or perhaps it was because I was—in spite of my status as a political free-thinker, or someone who didn’t think about politics at all, I couldn’t decide which—ideologically incapable of thinking about politics outside of the idiotic American boys/girls, dogs/cats, Republicans/Democrats binary. Maybe she was the only politically coherent person I had ever met. Israel was racist and violent and criminal, she seemed to be saying, but all of that was in fact okay. But when I thought about it that way I realized that maybe her point of view wasn’t that unusual after all. I decided to change the subject.
“Why are you in Kosovo?” I asked.
“Do you want to get out of here?” she said.
“Not particularly. I’ve been to all the neighboring countries and none of them is particularly calling me back. I mean, I love Serbia, but that’s just—”
“Do you want to get out of this bar?” she said.
I looked down at my beer. “I’m still drinking this.”
“When we’re finished with our drinks.”
“Okay. Where do you want to go?”
“To your apartment,” she said.
“Really?”
“No, not really. To another bar. I don’t like this place.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Where is your apartment?”
“Ulpiana.”
“What do you pay for it?”
Balkan people were pretty open about personal financial matters and protected health information, discussing it all casually with strangers even if the strangers in question didn’t ask. I was surprised to discover that a fellow American was acting the same way rather than honoring our national taboos. She must have been in the region a long time, I thought. She must have gone native. Or maybe it was an Israeli thing.
“Twenty per night.” I waited for her to reprimand me for getting screwed.
“Studio?”
“No, one bedroom, actually. It’s pretty big. Nice living room. Sectional couch. Balcony, kitchen, washing machine, faded photos of dead Albanian people on the wall. There’s a pipe underneath the ceiling in the bathroom that sprays water all over the place in the middle of the night sometimes, but there’s a drain in the floor, and I’m ninety percent sure it’s clean water.”
“For only twenty euro? That’s a pretty good deal,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“So do you want to go?”
“To my apartment?”
“To another bar.”
“Don’t you want to finish your drink?”
She finished her drink. I finished mine too.
“Let’s go,” she said.
“I need to pay.”
“Don’t they know you here?”
“Not, like, intimately.”
“Can’t they put it on your tab?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“You’re honest and you’ve got plenty of your parents’ money. Let’s just go. You’ll pay them tomorrow.”
“I’m sort of a guest in this country.”
“Yeah, I noticed.”
“So, I mean, I try to be respectful. I follow the laws and I don’t run out on bar tabs.”
“God, you’re such a hypocrite. Fine, go pay for our drinks, you baby.”
“How am I a hypocrite?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know.”
“I don’t think I’m pretending.”
“You’re plundering this country like every other foreigner. I mean, are you going to tell me you’re living in Pristina of all places because you love the culture and the history? Or the awful food? Or are you here because you can get a gigantic beer at the most expensive bar in town for three euro and a big furnished apartment for twenty euro a night?”
“The food isn’t that bad.”
“I’m not trying to make you feel guilty. If you’re able to plunder you should plunder. It’s stupid not to. That’s the only law there’s ever been. Not the laws you think you’re respecting or whatever. Hell, Americans gave their lives to free this place from whoever the hell was oppressing them.”
“The Serbs.”
“Right. So if that doesn’t give you the right to a little guilt-free plunder then I don’t know what those brave boys died for. You should make them proud of you by running out on your tab.”
I considered her point. “I’m going to go pay. I’ll be right back.”
