The Book of My Lives

by Aleksandar Hemon

  Eventually, we found a way to act upon some of our revolutionary fantasies within a socialist youth institution, which gave us a space, ensured that we had no interest in getting paid, and made clear that we were not to overstep the borders of decent public behavior and respect for the values of socialist self-management. A few more friends joined us (Guša, living in London now; Goga—Philadelphia; Bucko—Sarajevo). We adorned the space with slogans hand-painted on bedsheets sewn together: “The fifth dimension is being created!” was one of them, straight from a Russian Futurist manifesto. There was an anarchy sign and a peace sign (a concession to the socialist-youth people) and Kasimir Malevich crosses, although we had to repaint some of them, because, in the blurry eyes of the socialist-youth hippies, they alluded to religion. This thing of ours was called Club Volens-Nolens, a ludicrously pretentious name.

  We hated pretentiousness; it was a form of self-hatred. Planning the opening night, we had fierce discussions over whether to invite the Sarajevo cultural elite, the idle people who attended all the openings, and whose cultureness was largely conveyed by wearing cheap Italian clothes bought in Trieste or from the shady guys on the streets pushing contraband. One idea was to invite them, but to have barbed wire all over the place, so their Italian clothes would be subversively ripped. Even better, we could do the whole opening in complete darkness, except for a few stray dogs with flashlights attached to their heads. It would be fabulous, we agreed, if the dogs started biting the guests. But we realized that the socialist hippies would never go for that, as they had to invite some socialist elite to the opening in order to justify the whole project. We settled for inviting a few local thugs along with the elite, hoping that fights might break out, bloodying an upturned nose or two.

  Alas, it was not to happen. No dogs, no bites, no fights—the opening was attended by a lot of people, who all looked good and behaved nicely. Thereafter we had programs every Friday. One Friday, there was a panel discussion on alcoholism and literature with all the panelists drunk, and the moderator the drunkest of all. For another Friday program, two comic-book artists came from Serbia to speak about their art and show their work in an exhibit. One of them got terribly drunk and stage-frightened, so he locked himself in the bathroom, refusing to come out. The audience waited while we begged him to open the stall. Eventually, he collected himself, left the security of the bathroom, and got on the stage, from which he hollered at the audience: “People! What is wrong with you? Do not be fooled by this. This is bullshit!” We loved it. Then there was the time when we showed a film called Rani radovi (The Early Works), suppressed in Yugoslavia because it belonged to the film movement from the sixties known as the Black Wave, which painted a not-so-rosy picture of socialism. It had never been shown in Sarajevo and we all wanted to see it, so we found a copy, rented a projector, and brought in the director from Belgrade, who was flattered by the invitation from a band of fawning young enthusiasts. The film was heavily influenced by Godard: young people walked around junkyards discussing comic books and revolution, and then made out with mannequins, those immortal symbols of consumerist alienation. The projectionist, conditioned by the soft demands of soft porn, switched the reels and showed them out of order. Nobody noticed except the director, who was tipsy and excited that his film was being shown at all. We organized a performance of John Cage’s music, the first (and possibly the only) one ever in Sarajevo: we played records with a composition performed by twelve simultaneously screeching radios, and the infamous “4:33”—a stretch of silence on the record which was supposed to provide the time for the audience to create its own inadvertent, incidental music. The audience, however, consisting by this time mainly of the idle elite, didn’t notice that “4:33” was playing at all, didn’t give a diddly fuck about the music it was itself producing, and was, instead, getting happily drunk. Then the performer, who had traveled to Sarajevo forgoing a family vacation at the peril of divorce, stepped in front of the microphone. The few audience members who glanced at the stage saw a hairy man eating an orange and a banana in front of the microphone, performing, unbeknown to almost everyone present, the John Cage composition appropriately titled “An Orange and a Banana.”

  It was irritating not to be irritating to the elite, so even on the nights when we just spun records, the goal was to inflict pain: Guša, the DJ, played Frank Zappa, Yoko Ono screaming in dissonance, and Einstürzende Neubauten, the fine German musicians who liked to use chain saws and power drills to produce music. The elite was undeterred, though it shrank in numbers—we wanted them to be there so as to experience severe mental pain. This concept did not fly too well with the socialist hippies.

  The demise of Club Volens-Nolens (which means “willy-nilly” in Latin) was due to what is usually called “internal differences”—some of us thought we had made too many compromises: the slide down the slippery slope of bourgeois mediocrity (the socialist version) had clearly begun when we gave up the stray dogs with flashlights. Before we called it all off, we contemplated having stray dogs, this time rabid, for the closing night. But Club Volens-Nolens went out with a whimper, rather than a mad bark.

  After the demise, we sank back into general ennui. I busily wrote self-pitying poetry, eventually accumulating about one thousand dreadful poems, the subject of which flip-flopped between boredom and meaninglessness, with a dash of hallucinatory images of death and suicide. Like many young people raised in the comforts of socialism, I was a nihilist and living with my parents. I even started thinking up an Anthology of Irrelevant Poetry, sensing that it was my only hope of ever getting anthologized. Isidora was willing to do it, but nothing came of it, although there was a world of irrelevant poetry everywhere around us. There was nothing to do, and we were quickly running out of ways to do it.

  2. THE BIRTHDAY PARTY

  Isidora’s twentieth birthday was coming up, and she—ever disinclined to do it the normal way—did not want it to have the canapés-booze-somebody-fucking-in-the-bathroom format. She thought that it should have the form of an art performance. She couldn’t decide whether it should be modeled on a “Fourrieristic orgy” (the idea I favored) or a Nazi cocktail reception, the template for which could be found in the patriotically proper movies of socialist Yugoslavia: the Germans, all haughty, decadent bastards in impeccable uniforms, throwing a lavish party, in 1943 or so, while local whores and “domestic traitors” lick their tall, shining boots, except for a young Communist spy who has managed to infiltrate the inner circle and who will make them pay in the end. For some unfortunate reason, the orgy lost out to the Nazi party.

  The birthday party took place on December 13, 1986. The young men donned black shirts and had oil in their hair. The young women wore dresses that reasonably approximated gowns, except for my teenage sister, who was cast as a young Communist girl, so she wore a girly Communist dress. The party was supposed to be taking place sometime in the early forties, right after the beginning of the German occupation. The narrative featured all the implicit decadence seen in the movies, and then some pseudonihilistic whimsy. There were mayo swastikas on the canapés; there was a sign on the wall saying “In Cock We Trust”; there was a ritual burning of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo in the toilet; my sister was detained as a young Communist in one of the rooms, designated as a makeshift prison; Guša and I fought over a bullwhip; Veba (who lives in Montreal now) and I sang pretty, sad Communist songs about fallen strikers, which we liked to do at every party; I drank vodka out of a cup and wore tall boots, as I was cast as a Ukrainian collaborator. In the kitchen (you can always find me in the kitchen at parties) we discussed the abolishment of the Tito cult and the related state rituals, still running strong. We entertained the idea of organizing demonstrations: I would be looking forward, I said, to smashing some store windows, as some of them were ugly and I liked glass shards. There were people at the party and in the kitchen whom I didn’t know, and they listened very carefully. The morning after, I woke up with a sense of shame that always goes with getting too dr
unk, usually remedied by a lot of citric acid and sleep. Yet the sense of shame wouldn’t go away for a while. Indeed, it is still around.

  The following week I was cordially invited over the phone to visit the State Security offices—a kind of invitation you cannot decline. They interrogated me for thirteen hours straight, in the course of which I discovered that all the other people who attended the party had visited or were going to visit the warm State Security offices. Let me not bore you with the details—let’s just say that the good cop, bad cop routine is a transcultural cliché, that both of the cops knew everything (the kitchen listeners listened well), and that they had a big, very big problem with the Nazi cocktail reception framework. Naïvely, I assumed that if I explained to them that it was really just a performance, a bad joke at worst, and if I elided the kitchen demonstration fantasies, they would just slap our wrists, tell our parents to whup our asses, and let us go home, to our comfy nihilistic quarters. The “good” cop solicited my opinion on the rise of fascism among the youth of Yugoslavia. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I strenuously objected to such tendencies. He didn’t seem too convinced. As I was sick with flu, I frequently went to the bathroom—no keys on the inside, bars on the window—while the good cop was waiting outside, lest I cut my wrist or bang my head on the toilet bowl. I looked at myself in the mirror (which I could have broken to slit my throat) and thought: “Look at this dim, pimply face, the woozy eyes—who can possibly think I am dangerous, let alone a Nazi?” They let us all go, eventually, our wrists swollen from slapping. My mother was out of town visiting family, my father was in Ethiopia (“We send him to Ethiopia,” the bad cop said to me, “and this is how you thank us?”), and I refrained from informing them that I had been detained by State Security, thinking it would all just go away.

  But away it did not go. A few weeks later, the Sarajevo correspondent of the Belgrade daily Politika—which was on its way to becoming the hysterical nationalist voice of the Slobodan Milošević regime—received an anonymous letter describing a birthday party at the residence of a prominent Sarajevo family, where Nazi symbols were exhibited and values belonging to the darkest recesses of history were extolled in violation of everything our society held sacred. Rumors started spreading around Sarajevo, the world capital of gossip, speculating about who might have been at the party and at whose home it had taken place. The Bosnian Communist authorities, often jitterbugging to the tunes from Belgrade, confidentially briefed their members at closed Party meetings, one of which was attended by my mother, where, without naming anybody, they described what happened at the party, with many details made available by the good services of State Security. She nearly had a heart attack when she recalled my wearing the borrowed tall boots on the way to the party (the concept of which I had not bothered to explain to her), thus realizing that both of her children were there. She came back home shaken, and I offered a full confession, worrying all along that she might simply collapse. My mother’s hair became all gray early and I am afraid much of it was due to my adventures.

  In no time letters started pouring in to the Sarajevo press, coming from concerned citizens, some of whom were doubtless part-time employees of State Security. Many unanimously demanded that the names of the people involved in organizing a Nazi meeting in Sarajevo be released to the angry public, so that the cancerous outgrowth on the body of socialism could be dealt with immediately and mercilessly. Due to pressure by the obedient public, the names of the “Nazi Nineteen” were happily announced in January 1987: there was a TV and radio-broadcast roll call, and the list was published in the papers the next day, for those who missed it the night before. Citizens started organizing spontaneous meetings, which produced a slew of demands for severe punishment; university students had spontaneous meetings, some recalling the decadent performances at Club Volens-Nolens, concluding with whither-our-youth questions and demands for severe punishment as answers to those questions; Liberation War veterans had spontaneous meetings, whereby they expressed their firm belief that work had no value in our families, and they also demanded severe punishment. My neighbors turned their heads away, passing me by; my fellow students boycotted an English-language class because I attended it, while the teacher quietly wept in the corner. Friends were banned by their parents from seeing us. The whole thing felt to me like reading a novel in which one of the characters—a feckless nihilistic prick—had my name. His life and my life intersected, indeed dramatically overlapped. At some point I started doubting the truth of my being. What if my reality was someone else’s fiction? What if, I thought, I was the only one not seeing what the world was really like? What if I was the dead end of my own perception? What if I was just plain stupid?

  Isidora, whose apartment was searched, all her papers taken by State Security, fled with her family to Belgrade and never came back. A few of us who stayed pooled our realities together. Goga had her appendix taken out, and was in the hospital, where nurses scoffed at her, and Guša, Veba, and I became closer than ever. We attended the spontaneous meetings, all in the vain hope that somehow our presence there would provide some sense of reality, that we could explain that it was all a bad performance/joke gone wrong, or that, in the end, it was nobody’s business what we did at a private party. Various patriots and believers in socialist values at those meetings replayed the same good cop, bad cop games. At a Communist Party meeting I crashed at my college, as I had never been and would never be a Party member, a guy named Tihomir (the name could be translated as Quietpeace) was the bad cop. He kept yelling at me “You spat at my grandfather’s bones!” and kept moaning in disbelief whenever I suggested that this was all just ridiculous, while the Party secretary, a nice young woman, kept unsuccessfully trying to placate him.

  The Party, however, was now watching how we behaved. Or so I was told by a man who came to our home, sent by the County Committee of the Party, to check up on us. “Be careful,” he said in an avuncular voice, “they are watching you very closely,” whereupon I understood Kafka in a flash. (Only a few years later, the same man would come to our house to buy some honey from my father, who was dealing it out of our home. The man wouldn’t talk about the events regarding the birthday party, except for saying “Such were the times.” He would tell me that his ten-year-old daughter wanted to be a writer, and would show me a poem that she wrote, which he proudly carried in his wallet. The poem would look to me like a first draft of a suicide note, as the first line read: “I do not want to live, as nobody loves me.” He would tell me that she was too shy to show him her poems—she would drop them, as if accidentally, so he could find them. I remember him walking away burdened with buckets of Hemon’s honey. I hope his daughter is still alive.)

  Eventually, the scandal noise fizzled out. On the one hand, a lot of people realized that the level of the hullabaloo was inversely proportional to the true significance of the whole thing. We were scapegoated, as the Bosnian Communists wanted to show that they would nip in the bud any attempt by young people to question the sacredness of socialist values. On the other hand, larger, far more serious scandals were to beset the hapless Communist regime. Within a few months, the government was unable to quell rumors about the collapse of the state company Agrokomerc, whose head was good friends with Central Committee big shots and created his mini-empire on nonexistent bonds, or the socialist version thereof. And there were people who were being arrested and publicly castigated for thinking and saying things that seriously questioned the undemocratic Communist rule and the pseudoreligious cult of Tito. Unlike ourselves, those people knew what they were talking about: they had developed ideas, they spoke from defined intellectual and political positions, their principles were a category different from confused late-adolescent feelings. Only later would I understand that we were our own stray dogs with flashlights, and then animal control arrived, and the only thing anyone would remember was the dog shit left behind.

  For years afterward, I’d run into people who were still convinced that t
he birthday party was a fascist meeting, and they were as ready as ever to send us to the gallows. Understandably, I didn’t always volunteer information about my involvement. Once, up in the wilderness of a mountain near Sarajevo, while called up in the army reserve, I shared the warmth of a campfire with drunken reservists who all thought that the birthday-party people should have been at least severely beaten. And I wholeheartedly agreed—indeed I claimed, perversely, that they should’ve been strung up, and got all excited about it. Such people, I said, should be tortured at length, and my distant-cousins-in-arms nodded in bloodthirsty agreement. I became someone else at that moment. I inhabited my enemy for a short time, and it felt both frightening and liberating. Let’s drink to that, the reservists said, and we did.

  The doubts about the reality of the whole thing kept nagging at me for a long time. It didn’t help matters that Isidora, now in Belgrade, did eventually become a downright, unabashed fascist. Belgrade in the nineties was fertile ground for the most virulent fascism, and she was at home there. She had public performances that celebrated the rich tradition of Serbian fascism. She dated a guy who would become a leader of a group of Serbian volunteers, cutthroats, and rapists known as the White Eagles, operating in Croatia and Bosnia at the time of the war. Later, she would write a memoir entitled The Fiancée of a War Criminal. Our friendship had long ceased, but I could not help questioning what had happened—maybe the fascist party had been concocted by her fascist part, obscure to me. Maybe I hadn’t seen, blinded by the endless possibilities of Irrelevant Poetry, what she had seen; maybe I had been a pawn in her chess musical. Maybe my life had been like one of those Virgin Marys that show up in the frozen-food section of a supermarket in New Mexico or some such place—visible only to believers, ludicrous to everyone else.