You Don't Have to Live Here : A Novel

by RADOJCIC, NATASHA

• ISBN13: 9781400062362
• ISBN10: 1400062365
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-04-01
• Publisher: Random House

Summary

Shunted from Yugoslavia to Cuba to Greece among her Muslim mother and her Gypsy Christian father and a battery of more and less well-meaning aunts and uncles, finally making her own way to New York City, sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued Sasha can't seem to stay out of trouble. She ditches school. She runs away. She steals a neighbor's potatoes. She makes friends with heroin addicts. She falls in love too early and, as far as her family is concerned, with the wrong kind of men. She rages against the unfairness of her mother's illness and the hypocrisies of privilege and racism in Communist societies. Most important, she tells it like it is, and finds the goodness in not so obviously good people, including herself. In this picaresque narrative that is at once jagged and soulful, Natasha Radojcic has created a bittersweet coming-of-age story, an original immigrant song and a brave new character in fiction. Sasha is a strong and spectacular survivorclear-eyed and intelligent, hard-living, always loving. You Don't Have to Live Here is a visceral adventure about the running-from and running-to that we somehow recognize as growing up.

Excerpts

1

What remains of the early days begins with an image of my foot. It’s soiled and swollen from the heat. It presses into the chair. The chair is ordinary: four legs and a seat. Part of an average waiting room. The waiting room is in a Mental Building. My other foot dangles.

Mother is inside talking with the Specialist and the Policeman with the most stripes.

A gray-haired woman sits across from me. Her lips are smacking, mouthing, Help me, help me please, each time her attendant looks away. The creases on her face are deep and dirty. Her eyes heave with fear. I wonder where her family is. Then another attendant arrives, followed by a woman with a neat bun. They force the gray-haired woman to stand up. She stumbles a little, her arms caught behind her, and she whispers to me, Don’t leave me, please don’t leave me.

I am afraid for her, afraid of where they are taking her. But I don’t know how to help. Be careful, I call after her. Keep dry.



I am almost fifteen. I ran away, and the runaway children have to be examined by the Specialist. The Policeman who brought me here asked why I ran. I don’t know, I said. I just didn’t want to go home. I sat at the train station, under the swinging metal sign that said Track 8, and watched the soldiers walk through the steam with their big bags full of promises to our country, Yugoslavia.

Months before that I didn’t exist. Nothing of me existed. Just my long hair, the ribbons I wore in it. Mother picked them out. They were blue and yellow. I stayed in my room reading most of the day. Mother came home at night, lay down in the bedroom we shared, and sighed about the harshness of life, of the smoky heat in the classroom where she taught, of my father’s betrayal. Then I fled to the TV.



Our TV is black and white, shameful. We are the poorest part of our family. Poverty doesn’t stop Mother. She buys an old piano. For her girl, she says. For her baby girl. The piano is part of the ambition she has for me. I am going to amount to something. Be a lady. I loathe the instrument and I paint it white with cheap wall paint. The thin coat drips in black and gray stripes. It gathers inside the carved crevices and traps an unfortunate fly.

What did you do? Mother asks, pointing at the slow fluttering of the dying wings.

I wanted a white piano.

But look! It’s disgusting.

I know, I say.

•••

I never really understood Mother. Not after many years had passed, her death, my marriage, my divorce. The naïveté with which she pursued life. Her stubborn hunger after my improvement. Maybe it was the extraordinary poverty in which she had grown up that shaped and scarred her. Her grades were average. She had nothing, except for her beauty, that pale and cold perfection. It slayed men. After her divorce they came around and waited for her sign to stay. Any sign would have been sufficient. But she never offered.

•••

The day before I ran, I beat poor Yana, the ugliest girl in the entire school. The passive way she surrendered to her ungainly body, the dullness in her slaughterhouse eyes, infuriated me. At fourteen she had already capitulated. I beat her with my fists, pulled her hair, and spit on her. The other children circled around me shouting, Crazy, crazy. Mother was summoned. Father as well, but he didn’t come. I am the only child whose father never comes. The headmistress insisted that she didn’t know why everybody called me crazy, but it was enough that other children, well fathered and well mannered, thought I was. Look, she whispered into Mother’s delicately shaped ear, she wrote a story about the Devil and Angels and Wings and Chains and Heaven, and there is no room for such things in the mind of a true Communist youth. No room at all. Please get a firm grip. Or else.



Please, I begged Mother after the meeting. I want to be a writer.

You need to be something distinguished, not loose. A doctor, a lawyer. A rich wife, she ordered.

Being distinguished was far beyond my reach, but I didn’t want to disappoint her. So I decided to disappear.

I ran.

And slept on the bench. The train-station attendant noticed me and asked me how old I was. Almost fifteen, I said, and he disbelieved. You are so broad, so fleshy, so ample, he said. His breath was moist and close. You must be eighteen.

Fifteen, I said and peered at the grime lodged underneath his fingernails. It angered him.

The Policeman appeared and asked, Why aren’t you in school, where are your books, your parents, and where on earth do you live? He grabbed my arm and led me to the car. We passed the attendant, who yelled,

Eighteen.

•••

Even then I knew how to rouse them, the men. A little girl. A lost girl. I can see that image clearly. The young body is bent slightly forward, looking at the floor. The eyes are humble, always connected to the ground, while sending something into the air. It made them come: the attendant, the Policeman. It makes them come still. Rush.

Even then I was better at it than most women. Better even than Mother. I never succumbed to skin creams, clothes, intrigues. I never tried to be exquisite. I never tried. I was just thirsty. The thirst was always there. Long before I stopped the drinking and the heroin, long before I even started it. The thirst attached itself to me, changed me. I became thirst, and the men knew. Even today, right this minute, I am thirsty.

•••

Brought home in the police car, for the neighbors to see. Shame, shame, Mother cried. Nothing like this has ever happened. Once, a little girl was found wandering around the neighborhood in her underwear. Her family, who were some sort of war refugees, broke into the basement of our building and squatted. Mother came home pale that day. She threatened to kill herself if such shame tainted the underwear of our family. The girl had been tampered with, Uncle said. We are nothing like them, Grandmother comforted. We are not cattle. Lining up during the discount hours at the butcher’s on Tuesdays, feeding our children with cheap rice and small pieces of calf’s heart and chicken gizzards. We are not. We eat. We eat as much as we want. Big pieces of fresh meat, chunks of smoked cold cuts, pies filled with ground beef and cheese. We earned it. Fought Nazis for it. We are hard and full of pride.

Grandmother bore nine healthy children, six of them boys. She lost her husband in World War II. Her youngest wasn’t even kicking in her belly yet, she said. The next two still crawling. She was our pillar before senility turned her back into a child. Now she spends most of her time resting far up in the mountains of western Bosnia, and wears a diaper.

Mother and I live alone. A month after my birth, Mother abandoned her newlywed nest located in an attic of somebody’s house, the only thing Father could afford, and returned to Grandmother’s apartment. Now we live next door to the working Gypsy colony. The colony is a result of Tito’s idea of “Brotherhood and Unity” among the many people in our country, even the darkly colored. Now Gypsies with jobs are allowed to occupy the small cardboard shacks propped up with planks and mud. So long as they are employed as cleaners for a nearby train station they can maintain a solid roof over their heads.



People visit our apartment. We are respectable, worthy of a visit. A knock on the door, Salaam alikum if the visitors are Muslim, or just a hello if God doesn’t matter. Shoes are left outside. We are Communists, but walking barefoot indoors is an unwritten custom in Muslim homes not even the revolution can break. The coffee is ground, the water boiled, our legs folded under our bodies in the Turkish style.

I am young, so I listen. There are complaints about the godless Gypsy dancing, the dangerous trading in young girls’ flesh, and how government and the police turn the other way. There is talk of war. Of heroism and wounds. Uncle pulls up his trousers to show six holes. Three dumdum bullets. I kiss the wounds. It’s my duty.

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Excerpted from You Don't Have to Live Here: A Novel by Natasha Radojcic
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