The Book of My Lives

by Aleksandar Hemon

  Little by little, people in Edgewater began to recognize me; I started greeting them on the street. Over time, I acquired a barber and a butcher and a movie theater and a coffee shop with a steady set of colorful characters—which were, as I’d learned in Sarajevo, the necessary knots in any personal urban network. I discovered that the process of transforming an American city into a space you could call your own required starting in a particular neighborhood. Soon I began to claim Edgewater as mine; I became a local. It was there that I understood what Nelson Algren meant when he wrote that loving Chicago was like loving a woman with a broken nose—I fell in love with the broken noses of Edgewater. On the AiR’s ancient communal Mac, I typed my first attempts at stories in English.

  Therefore it was of utmost significance that Edgewater turned out to be the neighborhood where shiploads of Bosnians escaping the war ended up in the spring of 1994. I experienced a shock of recognition one day when I looked out my window and saw a family strolling down the street—where few ever walked, except in pursuit of heroin—in an unmistakably Bosnian formation: the eldest male member leading the way, at a slow, aimless pace, hands on their butts, all of them slouching, as though burdened by a weighty load of worries. Before long, the neighborhood was dense with Bosnians. Contrary to the local customs, they took evening walks, the anxiety of displacement clear in their step; in large, silent groups, they drank coffee at a lakeside Turkish café (thereby converting it into a proper kafana), a dark cloud of war trauma and cigarette smoke hovering over them; their children played on the street, oblivious to the drug business conducted on the corner. I could monitor them now from my window, from the kafana, on the street. It was as if they had come looking for me in Edgewater.

  * * *

  In February 1997, a couple of months before my first return to Sarajevo, Veba came to Chicago for a visit; I hadn’t seen him since my departure. For the first few days, I listened to his stories of life under siege, the stories of horrible transformation the war had forced upon the besieged. I was still living at the AiR. Despite the February cold, Veba wanted to see where my life was taking place, so we wandered around Edgewater: to the Shoney’s, the chess café, the kafana on the now-iced-over lake. He got a haircut at my barber’s; we bought meat at my butcher’s. I told him my Edgewater stories: about the young woman on the ledge, about the Bosnian family walking in formation, about Peter the Assyrian.

  Then we ventured out of Edgewater to visit Ukrainian Village, and I showed him where I’d lived; I took him to the Burger King where I’d fattened myself into American shape while listening to old Ukes discussing Ukrainian politics over sixty-nine-cent coffee—I used to call them the Knights of the Burger King. We wandered around the Gold Coast, spotting a Matisse in some rich person’s apartment, nicely positioned so that it could be seen from the street; we saw a movie at the Esquire. We visited the Water Tower and I spoke about the great Chicago fire. We had a drink at the Green Mill, where Al Capone used to imbibe martinis, and where every giant of jazz, from Louis Armstrong to Charlie Mingus, had performed. I showed him where the St. Valentine’s Day massacre had taken place: the garage was long gone, but the urban myth had it that dogs still growled when walking past, as they could smell the blood.

  Showing Veba around, telling him the stories of Chicago and of my life in Edgewater, I realized that my immigrant interior had begun to merge with the American exterior. Large parts of Chicago had entered me and settled there; I fully owned those parts now. I saw Chicago through the eyes of Sarajevo and the two cities now created a complicated internal landscape in which stories could be generated. When I came back from my first visit to Sarajevo, in the spring of 1997, the Chicago I came back to belonged to me. Returning from home, I returned home.

  REASONS WHY I DO NOT WISH TO LEAVE CHICAGO: AN INCOMPLETE, RANDOM LIST

  1. Driving west at sunset in the summer: blinded by the sun, you cannot see the cars ahead; the ugly warehouses and body shops are blazing orange. When the sun sets, everything becomes deeper: the brick facades acquire a bluish hue; there are charcoal smudges of darkness on the horizon. The sky and the city look endless. West is everywhere you look.

  2. The way people in the winter huddle together under the warming lights on the Granville El stop, much like young chickens under a lightbulb. It is an image of human solidarity enforced by the cruelty of nature, the story of Chicago and of civilization.

  3. The American vastness of the Wilson Street beach, gulls and kites coasting above it, dogs sprinting along the jagged waves, barking into the void, city kids doing homemade drugs, blind to the distant ships on their mysterious ways from Liverpool, England, to Gary, Indiana.

  4. Early September anyplace in the city, when the sunlight angles have abruptly changed and everything and everyone appears better, all the edges softened; the torments of the hot summer are now over, the cold torments of the winter have not begun, and people bask in the perishable possibility of a kind and gentle city.

  5. The basketball court at Foster Street beach, where I once watched an impressively sculpted guy play a whole game—dribbling, shooting, arguing, dunking—with a toothpick in his mouth, taking it out only to spit. For many years he was to me the hero of Chicago cool.

  6. The tall ice ranges along the shore when the winter is exceptionally cold and the lake frozen for a while, so ice pushes ice against the land. One freezing day I stood there in awe, realizing that the process exactly replicates the way mountain ranges were formed hundreds of millions of years ago, tectonic plates pushing against each other. The primeval shapes are visible to every cranky driver plowing through the Lake Shore Drive mess, but most of them look ahead and couldn’t care less.

  7. Looking directly west at night from any Edgewater or Rogers Park high-rise: airplanes hover and glimmer above O’Hare. Once, my visiting mother and I spent an entire evening sitting in the dark, listening to Frank Sinatra, watching the planes, which resembled stunned fireflies, transfixed with the continuous wonder that this world is.

  8. The blessed scarcity of celebrities in Chicago, most of whom are overpaid athlete losers. Oprah, one of the Friends, and many other people whose names I never knew or now cannot recall have all left for New York or Hollywood or rehab, where they can wear the false badge of their humble Chicago roots, while we can claim them without actually being responsible for the vacuity of their front-page lives.

  9. The Hyde Park parakeets, miraculously surviving brutal winters, a colorful example of life that adamantly refuses to perish, of the kind of instinct that has made Chicago harsh and great. I actually have never seen one: the possibility that they are made-up makes the whole thing even better.

  10. The downtown skyline at night as seen from the Adler Planetarium: lit windows within the dark building frames the darker sky. It seems that stars have been squared and pasted on the thick wall of a Chicago night; the cold, inhuman beauty containing the enormity of life, each window a possible story, inside which an immigrant is putting in a late shift cleaning corporate trash.

  11. The green-gray color of the barely foaming lake when the winds are northwesterly and the sky is chilly.

  12. The summer days, long and humid, when the streets seem waxed with sweat; when the air is as thick and warm as honey-sweetened tea; when the beaches are full of families: fathers barbecuing, mothers sunbathing, children approaching hypothermia in the lake’s shallows. Then a wave of frigid air sweeps the parks, a diluvial shower soaks every living creature, and someone, somewhere loses power. (Never trust a summer day in Chicago.)

  13. The highly muggable suburbanites patrolling Michigan Avenue, identifiable by their Hard Rock Café shirts, oblivious to the city beyond the shopping and entertainment areas; the tourists on an architectural speedboat tour looking up at the steep buildings like pirates ready to plunder; the bridges’ halves symmetrically erected like jousting pricks; the street performer in front of the Wrigley Building performing “Killing Me Softly” on the tuba.

  14. The fact th
at every year in March, the Cubs fans start saying: “This year might be it!”—a delusion betrayed as such by the time summer arrives, when the Cubs traditionally lose even a mathematical possibility of making it to the play-offs. The hopeless hope is one of the early harbingers of spring, bespeaking an innocent belief that the world might right its wrongs and reverse its curses simply because the trees are coming into leaf.

  15. A warm February day when everyone present at my butcher shop discussed the distinct possibility of a perfect snowstorm and, in turn, remembered the great snowstorm of 1967: cars abandoned and buried in snow on Lake Shore Drive; people trudging home from work through the blizzard like refugees; the snow on your street up to the milk truck’s mirrors. There are a lot of disasters in the city’s memory, which result in a strangely euphoric nostalgia, somehow akin to a Chicagoan’s respect for and pride in “those four-mansion crooks who risk their lives in crimes of high visibility” (Bellow).

  16. Pakistani and Indian families strolling solemnly up and down Devon on summer evenings; Russian Jewish senior couples clustering on Uptown benches, warbling gossip in soft consonants against the blare of obsolete transistor radios; Mexican families in Pilsen crowding Nuevo Leon for Sunday breakfast; African American families gloriously dressed for church, waiting for a table in the Hyde Park Dixie Kitchen; Somali refugees playing soccer in sandals on the Senn High School pitch; young Bucktown mothers carrying yoga mats on their backs like bazookas; the enormous amount of daily life in this city, much of it worth a story or two.

  17. A river of red and a river of white flowing in opposite directions on Lake Shore Drive, as seen from Montrose Harbor at night.

  18. The wind: the sailboats in Grant Park Harbor bobbing on the water, the mast wires hysterically clucking; the Buckingham Fountain’s upward stream turned into a water plume; the windows of downtown buildings shaking and thumping; people walking down Michigan Avenue with their heads retracted between their shoulders; my street completely deserted except for a bundled-up mailman and a plastic bag fluttering in the barren tree-crown like a torn flag.

  19. The stately Beverly mansions; the bleak Pullman row houses; the frigid buildings of the La Salle Street canyon; the garish beauty of old downtown hotels; the stern arrogance of the Sears Tower and the Hancock Center; the quaint Edgewater houses; the sadness of the West Side; the decrepit grandeur of the Uptown theaters and hotels; the Northwest Side warehouses and body shops; thousands of empty lots and vanished buildings no one pays any attention to and no one will ever remember. Every building tells part of the story of the city. Only the city knows the whole story.

  20. If Chicago was good enough for Studs Terkel to spend a lifetime in it, it is good enough for me.

  IF GOD EXISTED, HE’D BE A SOLID MIDFIELDER

  FIRST, A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ME, THOUGH I AM NOT IMPORTANT HERE

  By Bosnian standards, I’d been an athletic person. Even though I’d for years smoked a pack and a half a day, had started enjoying alcoholic potions at the ripe age of fifteen, and was fully dependent on a red-meat-and-fat diet, I’d played soccer on the gravel and parking lots of Sarajevo once or twice a week since time immemorial. But soon after my landing in Chicago, I gained weight due to nutrition based on Whoppers and Twinkies, exacerbated by a series of torturous attempts to quit smoking. Furthermore, I couldn’t find anybody to play with. My Greenpeace friends deemed rolling joints as physical exercise and only occasionally arranged a lazy softball game, where no score was kept and everyone was always doing great. I couldn’t get past understanding the rules, but I did stubbornly try to keep score.

  Not playing soccer tormented me. I didn’t really care about being healthy as I was still young enough—for me playing soccer was closely related to being fully alive. Without soccer, I felt at sea, mentally and physically. One Saturday in the summer of 1995, I was riding my bike by a lakeside field in Chicago’s Uptown and saw people warming up, kicking the ball around while waiting for the game to start. It seemed they might have been getting ready for a league game, for which you had to have registered as a member of a team. But before I had time to consider the humiliating prospect of rejection, I asked if I could join them. Sure, they said, and I kicked the ball for the first time after an eternity of three years. That day I finally played, twenty-five pounds heavier, wearing denim cutoffs and basketball shoes. In no time I pulled my groin and quickly earned blisters on my soles. I humbly played defense (although I’d preferred to play as a forward) and strictly obeyed the commands of the best and fastest player on my team—one Phillip, who had been, I’d learn later, on the Nigerian 4 × 400 relay team at the Seoul Olympics. After the game, I asked Phillip if I could come back. Ask that guy, Phillip said, and pointed at the ref. The ref wore a striped black-and-white shirt and introduced himself as German. He told me there was a game every Saturday and Sunday and I could always come.

  THE TIBETAN GOALIE

  German was not in fact German—he was from Ecuador, but his father was born in Germany, hence his name (Hermann) and nickname. He worked as a UPS truck driver, and was in his mid-forties, suntanned, wearing a modest pompadour and a mustache. Every Saturday and Sunday, he’d arrive by the lake around 2:00 p.m. in a decrepit, twenty-some-year-old van, on which a soccer ball and the words “Kick me make my day” were painted. He’d unload goalposts (made from plastic pipes) and nets, bagfuls of single-color T-shirts, and balls. He’d distribute the shirts to the guys who came to play, put a board on the garbage can, and, on top of it, a number of cheap cups and trophies, little flags of different countries, and a radio blaring Spanish-language stations. Most of the players lived in Uptown and Edgewater and came from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Peru, Chile, Colombia, Belize, Brazil, Jamaica, Nigeria, Somalia, Ethiopia, Senegal, Eritrea, Ghana, Cameroon, Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, France, Spain, Romania, Bulgaria, Bosnia, USA, Ukraine, Russia, France, Vietnam, Korea, et cetera. There was even a guy from Tibet, and he was a very good goalie.

  Normally, there’d be more than two teams, and they all had to rotate, so each game lasted for fifteen minutes or until one team scored two goals. The games were very serious and contentious, as the winning team stayed on the field for the next game, while the losing one had to wait on the sidelines for its turn to come back on. German refereed and he almost never called a foul. He’d follow the game with glazed eyes, as though watching soccer made him high; it seemed he needed to hear the sound of a breaking bone to use his whistle. Sometimes, if a team was a player short, he’d referee and play simultaneously. In such a situation, he was particularly hard on himself and once gave himself a yellow card for a rough tackle. We—immigrants trying to stay afloat in this country—found comfort in playing by the rules we set ourselves. It made us feel that we still were a part of the world much bigger than the USA. People acquired their nicknames based on their country of origin. For a while, I was Bosnia, and would often find myself playing in the midfield with, say, Colombia and Romania.

  Ever hurting to play and fearing that I’d be left out if I was late, I’d often be the first one to arrive before games. I’d help German set up the goals and then hang out with him and others, talking soccer. In his magic van, German had albums of photos in which people who had played with him were recorded. I could recognize some of the guys when they were much younger. One of them, whom everyone called Brazil, told me he had been playing with German for more than twenty years. German had been the one organizing games from the beginning, although he’d had some drug and booze problems and had taken a few years off at one point. But he came back, Brazil said. I understood, for the first time since my arrival, that it was possible to live in this country and still have a past shared with other people.

  It wasn’t clear to me why German was doing it all. Even though I like to think of myself as a reasonably generous person, I could never imagine spending every single weekend putting together soccer games and refereeing, subjecting myself to verbal and other abuse, dismantling the goals and loading up the van lo
ng after everybody had left, then washing a large number of T-shirts stinky with worldly sweat. It was clear that without German those pickup games would not be happening, but he never asked for anything in return from us.

  I abused for years German’s inexplicable generosity. As we often played in the winter in a church gym in Pilsen, which was beyond the reach of my bike, I’d catch a ride in his clunky “Kick me make my day” van, holding the passenger-side door, whose lock didn’t work. On the way back, I often feared for my life, as German was prone to celebrating the successful completion of yet another game with a few beers—he always had a well-stocked cooler in his van. He’d talk incessantly, driving and sipping beer, telling me about his favorite team of all time (the Cameroon of the 1990 World Cup) or about his search for an heir, someone who’d continue organizing the games once he retired and moved to Florida. He had a hard time finding the right person, he said, because few people had the guts to commit. He never suggested that I take over, which slightly offended me even if I knew that, gutless as I was, I’d never be able to do it.