The Book of My Lives

by Aleksandar Hemon

  Nowadays in Sarajevo, death is all too easy to imagine and is continuously, undeniably present, but back then the city—a beautiful, immortal thing, an indestructible republic of urban spirit—was fully alive both inside and outside me. Its indelible sensory dimension, its concreteness, seemed to defy the abstractions of war. I have learned since then that war is the most concrete thing there can be, a fantastic reality that levels both interiority and exteriority into the flatness of a crushed soul.

  * * *

  One day in the early summer of 1991, I went to the American Cultural Center in Sarajevo for the interview that was supposed to determine my suitability for the International Visitors Program, a cultural exchange run by the now defunct United States Information Agency—which I hoped was a spy outfit whose employees went undercover as culture lovers. Even being considered for an invitation to America was flattering, of course, because you had to be deaf, dumb, blind, and comatose to avoid American culture in the Sarajevo of my youth. By the time I graduated from high school, in 1983, my favorite movie of all time was Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. I worshipped Patti Smith, Talking Heads, and Television, and CBGB was to me what Jerusalem must be to a devout believer. I often imitated Holden Caulfield’s diction (in translation) and once manipulated my unwitting father into buying a Bukowski book for my birthday. By the time I graduated from college, in 1990, I could act out with my sister chunks of dialogue (mispronounced) from His Girl Friday. I’d get angry at people who couldn’t recognize the genius of Brian De Palma. I could recite Public Enemy’s angry invectives, and was up to my ears in Sonic Youth and Swans. I piously read American short-story anthologies, available in translation, in which Barth and Barthelme reigned. I hadn’t really read Barth’s famous essay, but I thought that the notion of the literature of exhaustion was very cool. I wrote an essay on Bret Easton Ellis and corporate capitalism.

  I met the man in charge of the center, chitted and chatted about this and that (mainly that), and then went home. I didn’t think that my visit to America would ever come to pass, nor had I noticed the man actually evaluating me. Despite my fondness for American culture, I didn’t care all that much. Even if I thought it would be fun to Kerouac about in America for a while, I had no particular desire to leave Sarajevo. I loved my city; I intended to tell stories about it to my children and my grandchildren, to grow old and die there. Around that time, I was having a passionate on-and-off relationship with a young woman who was working hard to get out of Sarajevo and move abroad because, she said, she felt that she didn’t belong there. “It’s not about where you belong, it’s about what belongs to you,” I told her, possibly quoting from some movie or another. I was twenty-seven (and a half) and Sarajevo belonged to me.

  I’d pretty much forgotten about my summer chitchat when, in early December, I received a call from the American Cultural Center inviting me for a monthlong visit to the United States. By that time I was exhausted by the onslaught of warmongering, and I accepted the invitation. I thought that being away would provide some relief. I planned to travel around the States for a month, then, before returning to Sarajevo, visit an old friend in Chicago. I landed at O’Hare on March 14, 1992. I remember that day as vast, clear, and sunny. On my way in from the airport I saw for the first time the skyline of Chicago—an enormous, distant, geometrical city, less emerald than dark against the blue firmament.

  By this time, the Yugoslav People’s Army’s troops were fully deployed all over Bosnia, following the previously denied plan; Serbian paramilitaries were crazy-busy slaughtering; there were random barricades and shootings on the streets of Sarajevo. In early April, a peaceful demonstration in front of the Bosnian Parliament building was targeted by Karadžić’s snipers. Two women were killed on the Vrbanja Bridge, a hundred yards or so from teta-Jozefina’s apartment, quite conceivably by the same good sniper who later maculated the walls in the room of my conception. On the outskirts of the city, in the hills above, the war was already mature and raging, but in the heart of Sarajevo people still seemed to think that it would somehow stop before it reached them. To my worried inquiries from Chicago, my mother would respond, “There is already less shooting than yesterday”—as though war were a spring shower.

  My father, however, advised me to stay away. Nothing good was going to happen at home, he said. I was supposed to fly back from Chicago on May 1, and as things got progressively worse in Sarajevo, I was torn between guilt and fear for my parents’ and friends’ lives, kept awake by worries about my previously unimagined and presently unimaginable future in America. I wrangled with my conscience: if you were the author of a column entitled “Sarajevo Republika” then it was perhaps your duty to go back and defend your city and its spirit from annihilation.

  Much of that wrangling I did while incessantly roaming Chicago, as though I could simply walk off my moral anxiety. I’d pick a movie that I wanted to see—both for distraction and out of my old habits as a film reviewer—then locate, with my friend’s help, a theater that was showing it. From Ukrainian Village, the neighborhood where I was staying, I’d take public transportation to buy a ticket a couple of hours before the show and then I’d wander in concentric circles around the movie theater. My first journey was to the Esquire (now no longer a movie venue) on Oak Street, in the affluent Gold Coast neighborhood—the Esquire was my Plymouth Rock. The movie was Michael Apted’s Thunderheart, in which Val Kilmer played an FBI agent of Native American background who pursues a case to a reservation, which somehow forces him to come to terms with his past and heritage. I remember the movie being as bad as it now sounds, though I don’t remember many details. Nor do I remember much of my first Gold Coast roam, because it has become indistinguishable from all the other ones, the way the first day of school is subsumed in the entirety of your educational experience.

  I subsequently journeyed to movie theaters all over Chicago and walked in circles around them. I saw more bad movies in so-called bad neighborhoods, where, the movies notwithstanding, nothing bad ever happened to me. There was always plenty of space for walking, as few cared to crowd the streets in those parts of Chicago. When I had no money for the movies—my main source of income was the card game Preference, which I had taught my friend and his buddies to play—I would explore the cinema-free areas of Wicker Park, Bucktown, or Humboldt Park (Saul Bellow’s childhood neighborhood), which was adjacent to Ukrainian Village and, I was warned, gang-infested.

  I couldn’t quit. A tormented flaneur, I kept walking, my Achilles tendons sore, my head in the clouds of fear and longing for Sarajevo, until I finally reconciled myself to the idea of staying. On May 1, I didn’t fly home. On May 2, the roads out of the city were blocked; the last train (with my parents on it) departed; the longest siege in modern history began. In Chicago, I submitted my application for political asylum. The rest is the rest of my life.

  * * *

  In my ambulatory expeditions, I became acquainted with Chicago, but I didn’t know the city. The need to know it in my body, to locate myself in the world, wasn’t satisfied; I was metaphysically ailing, because I didn’t yet know how to be in Chicago. The American city was organized fundamentally differently from Sarajevo. (A few years later I would find a Bellow quote that perfectly encapsulated my feeling of the city at the time: “Chicago was nowhere. It had no setting. It was something released into American space.”) Where the urban landscapes of Sarajevo had been populated with familiar faces, with shared and shareable experiences, the Chicago I was trying to comprehend was dark with the matter of pursued anonymity.

  In Sarajevo, you possessed a personal infrastructure: your kafana, your barber, your butcher; the streets where people recognized you, the space that identified you; the landmarks of your life (the spot where you fell playing soccer and broke your arm, the corner where you waited to meet the first of the many loves of your life, the bench where you kissed her first). Because anonymity was well nigh impossible and privacy literally incomprehensible (there is no word for “privacy�
� in Bosnian), your fellow Sarajevans knew you as well as you knew them. The borders between interiority and exteriority were practically nonexistent. If you somehow vanished, your fellow citizens could have collectively reconstructed you from their collective memory and the gossip accrued over the years. Your sense of who you were, your deepest identity, was determined by your position in a human network, whose physical corollary was the architecture of the city. Chicago, on the other hand, was built not for people to come together but for them to be safely apart. Size, power, and the need for privacy seemed to be the dominant dimensions of its architecture. Vast as it is, Chicago ignored the distinctions between freedom and isolation, between independence and selfishness, between privacy and loneliness. In this city, I had no human network within which I could place myself; my Sarajevo, the city that had existed inside me and was still there, was subject to siege and destruction. My displacement was metaphysical to the precisely same extent to which it was physical. But I couldn’t live nowhere; I wanted from Chicago what I’d got from Sarajevo: a geography of the soul.

  More walking was needed, as was, even more pressingly, reasonably gainful employment. Nothing in my experience had taught me how to get a job in America. Neither De Palma’s oeuvre nor the literature of exhaustion contained any pointers about getting urgently needed work. After a few illegal, below-minimum-wage jobs, some of which required me to furnish someone else’s Social Security number (fuck you, Arizona!), I received my work permit and entered the crowded minimum-wage labor market. For restaurant managers and people in temp agencies looking for bouncers and bartenders, I created a vast and partly false universe of my previous life, at the center of which was a familiarity with all things American. They couldn’t care less; it took me a few weeks to learn that (a) rambling about American movies could not even get you a most penurious job; and (b) when they say “We’ll call you!” they don’t really mean it.

  My first legal job was canvassing door-to-door for Greenpeace, an organization inherently welcoming to misfits. When I first called the Greenpeace office to inquire, I didn’t even know what the job was, what the word canvassing meant. Naturally, I was terrified of talking to Americans on their doorsteps, what with my insufficient English, devoid of articles and thickly contaminated with a foreign accent, but I craved the ambulatory freedom between the doors. So, in the early summer of 1992, I found myself canvassing in the proudly indistinguishable, dull western suburbs (Schaumburg, Naperville); in the wealthy North Shore ones (Wilmette, Winnetka, Lake Forest), with their hospital-size houses and herds of cars in palatial garages; in the southern working-class ones (Blue Island, Park Forest), where people invited me into their homes and offered me stale Twinkies. Soon I learned to assess the annual income and political leanings of the household based on the look of the lawn, the magazines in the mailbox, and the makes of the family vehicles (Volvo meant liberal). I enabled myself to endure questions about Bosnia and Yugoslavia and their nonexistent relation to the nonexistent Czechoslovakia. I grinned through lectures on the spirituality of Star Trek and confirmed, calmly, that, yes, I had been exposed in Sarajevo to the wonders of pizza and television. I smiled at a young man who implored me to understand how broke he was, as he had just bought a Porsche. I had lemonade at the home of a soft-spoken Catholic priest and his young, gorgeous boyfriend, who was bored and tipsy. I sought shelter with a couple who had a beautiful Alphonse Mucha print on the wall, after their neighbor had shown me his gun and his willingness to use it. I discussed helmet laws with a herd of pot-bellied balding bikers, some of them veterans who believed that what they had fought for in Vietnam was the freedom to spill their brains on the freeways of America. I witnessed African American fellow canvassers being repeatedly stopped by the police protecting their quaint suburban domain.

  My favorite turf was, predictably, in the city: Pullman, Beverly, Lakeview, and then the Parks—Hyde, Lincoln, Rogers. Little by little, I began to sort out the geography of Chicagoland, assembling a street map in my mind, building by building, door by door. Occasionally, I took my time before canvassing and slacked off in a local diner, struggling to enjoy the burnt-corn taste of American coffee, monitoring the foot traffic, the corner drug trade, the friendly ladies. Every once in a while, I skipped work entirely and just walked and walked in the neighborhood assigned to me. I was a low-wage, immigrant flaneur.

  * * *

  At the same time, I was obsessively following TV reports from the besieged Sarajevo, trying to identify people and places on the screen, to assess from afar the extent of the devastation. Toward the end of May, I watched the footage of a massacre on Vase Miskina, where a Serb shell hit a bread line, killing scores of Sarajevans. I attempted to identify the people on the screen—writhing in a puddle of rose-red blood, their legs torn off, their faces distorted with shock—but I couldn’t. I had a hard time recognizing the place as well. The street I’d thought I owned, and had frivolously dubbed the city artery, was now awash in the actual arterial blood of those I’d left behind, and all I could do was watch the looping thirty-second stories on Headline News.

  Even from Chicago, I could guess at the magnitude of my hometown’s transformation. The street that connected my neighborhood (Socijalno) with downtown was rechristened Sniper Alley. The Željo stadium, where I’d eavesdropped on the pensioners, was now controlled by the Serbs, its wooden stands burned down. The little bakery in Kovači that produced the best somun (leavened pita bread) in town, and therefore in the world, was also burned down. The Museum of the 1984 Winter Olympic Games, housed in a beautiful Austro-Hungarian building of no strategic value whatsoever, was shelled (and is still a ruin). The pseudo-Moorish National Library was shelled; along with its hundreds of thousands of books, it burned down.

  In December 1994, I briefly volunteered at the International Human Rights Law Institute of DePaul University’s College of Law, where evidence of possible war crimes in Bosnia was being collected. By then, I’d quit canvassing and enrolled in graduate school at Northwestern, and I desperately needed another job, so I showed up at the institute’s downtown office, hoping that they would give me one. There was no way for my prospective employers to know who I was or had been—I could easily have been a spy—so they offered me what they thought were simple volunteer tasks. At first, I did some data input for the concentration-camp database, where every testimony or mention of a camp was filed. But eventually I was given a stack of photos of destroyed and damaged buildings in Sarajevo, as yet unidentified, and asked to note their locations. Many of the buildings photographed were roofless, hole-ridden, or burned, their windows blown out. There were few people in those pictures, but what I was doing felt very much like identifying corpses. Now and then I could recall the street or even the exact address; sometimes the buildings were so familiar they seemed unreal. There was, for example, the building at the corner of Danijela Ozme and Kralja Tomislava, across from which I used to wait for Renata, my high school girlfriend, to come down from Džidžikovac. Back then, there was a supermarket on the ground floor of the building, where I’d buy candy or cigarettes when she was late, which was always. I’d known that building for years. It had stood in its place solid, indelible. I’d never devoted any thought to it until I saw its picture in Chicago. In the photograph, the building was hollow, disemboweled by a shell, which had evidently fallen through the roof and dropped down a few floors. The supermarket now existed only in the flooded storage space of my memory.

  There were also buildings that I recognized but could not exactly place. And then there were the ones that were wholly unknown to me—I couldn’t even figure out what part of town they might have been in. I have learned since then that you don’t need to know every part of a city to own the whole of it, but in that office in downtown Chicago it terrified me to think that there was some part of Sarajevo I didn’t know and probably never would, as it was now disintegrating, like a cardboard stage set, in the rain of shells. If my mind and my city were the same thing then I was losing my m
ind. Converting Chicago into my personal space became not just metaphysically essential but psychiatrically urgent as well.

  * * *

  In the spring of 1993, after a year or so of living in Ukrainian Village, I moved to a lakeside neighborhood called Edgewater, on Chicago’s North Side. I rented a tiny studio in a building called Artists in Residence, in which various lonely and not exactly successful artists resided. The AiR provided a loose sense of community within the city’s anonymity; it offered a rehearsal space for musicians, dancers, and actors, as well as a public computer for those of us who harbored writerly hopes. The building manager’s implausibly appropriate name was Art.

  Back then, Edgewater was where one went to acquire cheap—and bad—heroin. I’d been warned that it was a rough neighborhood, but what I saw there were varieties of despair that exactly matched my own. One day I stood on Winthrop Avenue looking up at the top of a building on whose ledge a young woman sat deliberating whether to kill herself, while a couple of guys down on the street kept shouting, “Jump!” They did so out of sheer asshole malice, of course, but at the time their suggestion seemed to me a reasonable resolution to the continuous problem we call life.

  I was still working as a canvasser for Greenpeace, walking different city neighborhoods and suburbs every day, already becoming far too familiar with many of them. But every night I came back to the Edgewater studio I could call my own, where I was beginning to develop a set of ritualistic, comforting practices. Before sleep, I’d listen to a demented monologue delivered by a chemically stimulated corner loiterer, occasionally muffled by the soothing sound of trains clattering past on the El tracks. In the morning, drinking coffee, I’d watch from my window the people waiting at the Granville El stop, recognizing the regulars. I’d occasionally splurge on breakfast at a Shoney’s on Broadway (now long gone) that offered a $2.99 all-you-can-eat deal to the likes of me and the drooling residents of a nursing home on Winthrop, who would arrive en masse, holding hands like schoolchildren. At Gino’s North, where there was only one beer on tap and where many an artist got shitfaced, I’d watch the victorious Bulls’ games, high-fiving only the select company of those who were not too drunk to lift their elbows off the bar. I’d spend weekends playing chess at a Rogers Park coffee shop, next to a movie theater. I often played with an old Assyrian named Peter, who, whenever he put me in an indefensible position and I offered to resign, would crack the same joke: “Can I have that in writing?” But there was no writing coming from me. Deeply displaced, I could write neither in Bosnian nor in English.