He went hiking with his father more often. It was fall already, and they didn’t go far because it was cold and wet and they had heard rumors of army patrols shooting at people who drifted close to their positions. Father Pronek, in fact, saw army units digging trenches in the mountains near Sarajevo, but he thought they were doing that to protect the city. The last time Pronek went with his father, in October, they looked at Sarajevo, muffled by the dusk. They heard a hum, a gigantic hum, like the Big Bang echo. It was the sum of all the life noises Sarajevo produced, his father said: the clattering of dishwashers and buses; the music from bars and radios; the bawling of spoiled children; doors slamming; engines running; people fucking—and he nudged his son. They looked up and there were disinterested stars in the sky. Some of those stars didn’t exist any longer, they had become black holes, Pronek said. Black holes, Father said, and nudged him again.
In November, he got a call from the American Cultural Center and the director’s secretary said (the director had left, because Sarajevo was becoming unsafe) they were inviting him to visit the USA and learn more about it, as he was a young journalist likely to promote the values of freedom. “When can I go?” Pronek asked immediately, though he was not sure what his relation to freedom was.
So, here we are at the Sarajevo airport, January 1992. Pronek’s father drops him off without entering the airport, because there is no parking. Pronek watches the jalopy car pulling away, his father slouching over the steering wheel as if shot in the back. He can see his hairy neck and his eyes in the rearview mirror, tired and old. Pronek feels abrupt sorrow, dragging his suitcase with its blocked hind wheels leaving two trails behind, like the heels of a corpse. He waits for his plane in the airport restaurant, sipping vinegary coffee. He watches a family cluster: bags, suitcases, children, surrounded by men smoking and women wiping their eyes.
Then he is on his plane, buckling up, looking warily at the mountains encircling the airport. The seat next to him is empty. The plane goes up, his stomach goes down, and he is careful not to show that he is afraid to die. He looks down and can see a line of dots trickling out of the airport building toward another plane.
One of those dots is my head, with a hairless medallion in its center, following Pronek like a shadow, moving toward my plane and my destiny. I look up and see the plane disappearing into the clouds. Pronek takes the last look at the city sprawling in the valley, as if kissing a dead person, the fog creeping along between buildings. He is oblivous to me, as a wall is oblivious to a shadow dancing on it.
The plane penetrates the clouds and Pronek can see nothing. By the time the plane exits the dark wool of clouds and enters the bright starless sky, he already cannot remember what happened yesterday. The sun is blazing through the window, so Pronek pulls down the shade.
3
Fatherland
KIEV, AUGUST 1991
Meantime we will express our darker purposes. Chicago, London, Amsterdam, Vienna, Warsaw, whence I took a cheap train to Ukraine. I boarded my train, found the couchette waiting for me, enveloped in thick veils of smoke and an obscure cologne called Antarctica: I watched the man in the bed across splashing a few palmfuls out of a gelid-blue bottle before the train left the station. He unbuttoned his shirt, as if stripping for me, slowly divulging his sooty tapestry only to stop an inch above his navel. The discomfort I felt then I am inclined to see now as a sense of momentousness—doubtless a rearview interpretation. The man lit a cigarette, eagerly opened a booklet with a chesty damsel in sexy distress on the cover, with a title that I—the uncertain, occasional speaker of an obsolescent Ukrainian dialect—decoded as The King of Midnight.
The King of Midnight offered me a sip now and then from a smudgy bottle. Having quickly slurped his way to the bottom, he threw himself on his bed with such force that an earthquake suddenly took place in my dream: the earth cracked open, swallowing swarms of citizens; roads whiplashed, throwing cars around like matchboxes; buildings collapsed flat. As the train crawled through Poland, I crept through a series of nightmares—all sequels to the earthquake one and involving a Wal-Mart and the Sears Tower, plus mice, midgets, brooms, and other Freudian gewgaws. The final one was staged on the Soviet border: a mob of shabbily uniformed men with humongous flat hats waited in a shower of sallow, gnat-infested light; they stepped into the shadows and then onto the train. They alternately looked into the King of Midnight’s passport and into his woozy face, as if comparing them until they matched. They flipped through my American passport, determinedly not impressed with the plentiful freedoms it implied, let alone the rich collection of visas collected on my existentialist peregrinations. They still let me in, albeit with a humbling frown, conveying that they could stop me, indeed vanish me, had they only wished to. But they wished other, more profitable things, so they practically threw my passport at me. I went to have breakfast in the dining car.
The dining car is a generous description of a few tables adorned with tablecloths that looked like a canvas of the local Jackson Pollockovich. A painfully bored attendant was reading the papers, his body telling—begging—the tired traveler to go away and never come back. Two men were sitting at one of the tables, their foreheads occasionally touching above the full ashtray in the table’s geographic center. They argued over something, downing a glass of vodka (which, for a moment or two, I hoped was water) between florid bursts of rhetorical affection. From what I could understand, the focal point of their argument was one Evgenij, whose distinguishing feature was that he was simultaneously a filthy bastard and the kindest man alive. You could never know with Evgenij, who would stick a knife between your eyes, but who would also give you the undershirt off his back if you asked him: they agreed and kissed and downed a glass of vodka, and then another one. It struck me then—and I still have an ocean-shaped bruise where it struck me—that there was no reason whatever to talk about me, that I was extraneous to almost all of the conversation taking place in this world at any given time. And I envied Evgenij, the kindest living son of a bitch.
I went back into the couchette. I fell asleep again and woke up only after the train entered Kiev with a poignant decrescendo. The King of Midnight sat up with a grunt, clawed at his chest for a minute, then hawked and mindfully spat into one of the empty bottles.
Humid evening heat; the streets covered with a dark, oily placenta. A man named Igor was waiting for me, holding a sign with my name on it. He was blond, blue-eyed, sinewy as a marathon runner, cautiously clever—painted with many colors, as they say. I present that as a fact, while it was barely a somnolent impression at the time. I got off the train, stepping on top of a steam cloud (though the train was not a steam train—what we have here is a remake of Karenina getting off the train to be welcomed by Karenin and his banal big ears), walking slowly toward the station building as the arriving women kissed the waiting men. I got into Igor’s car, which reeked of vomit and pine. A man named Vladek silently sat in the back seat, inhabiting a magnanimous smile. We glided through the streets of Kiev, entering light from darkness, darkness from light. I could not speak, as I was tired and dazed. I managed to understand whatever Igor was saying in his guttural Ukrainian, but what he was saying I do not remember. I do remember occasionally looking back at Vladek, to check if he still existed, and he grinning with the demented enthusiasm of full-fledged existence, flexing his eyebrows and winking at me, as if we had already become fellow conspirators in an obscure plot.
Everything in the building was exceptionally orderly, hall carpets stretching straight, walls white like Christmas snow. Igor told me that the place was a Party school, normally, but that they were permitted to use it for the summer.
He opened the door of a room, I walked in reluctantly, Vladek dropped my suitcases, and winked the final wink. My roommate-to-be was frisking a pillow, bare-chested, wearing only shorts with an anchor pattern. “I am Jozef,” he said, and offered his hand, still warm from patting the pillow. “Jozef Pronek.” Allow me to introduce myself: I am Victor Pl
avchuk. Nominally I came here for the sake of connecting with my roots, but really was looking for something to do until I figured out what to do. Now allow me to invoke Jozef’s slouched shoulders, his square chin, and his eyes: almond, dark, and a mile deep. This is how I remember it now—the excitement is ex post facto—but it was much different then: thus is his cheek a map of days outworn. We stared at each other for an embarrassed moment, waiting for Igor to say something and pull us out of the mud of silence. Then there is a confusing blank: what we did or said after Igor left, I do not remember.
When I woke up the next morning, Jozef was still in bed, hence I pretended to sleep, so as to eschew the awkwardness of waking in a room with a stranger. I heard him straightening up in his bed, scratching (his chest? his thighs?) with such unfaltering vigor that I suspected masturbation for a moment. Then he rummaged through his stuff, closing the door, then leaving—his steps echoing in the hallway. I got up with a heavy steel ball in my belly—the regular morning meaninglessness of everything, when all the uses of this world seem weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable. I unpacked my stuff, hung up my shirts next to my roommate’s. The color of his shirts was predominantly Eastern European bleak, and the sneakers at the bottom of the closet were well worn, so I was self-conscious putting my attire next to his: my sandals, my sneakers, my shoes, and a lavish collection of khakis and colorful shorts in need of ironing. For an instant, I could not remember why I had them all: the arbitrariness of those choices appeared abruptly transparent, and all the other choices I had ever made seemed absurd. I liked (and still do) the smell of his clothes—the musty smell of a lived life.
When my roommate walked back in, I was sitting on the bed with my head in my hands, looking at my toenails in dire need of truncation.
“Good morning,” he said earnestly, which forced me into replying.
“How are you?” he asked. I was pretty tired.
“You want one coffee?” he asked. “Bosnian.” Sure, I said.
“You Americans always say sure,” he said. I didn’t see the point of arguing, so I said sure, and he chortled.
My name was Victor. “I know,” he said. He put a little pot with a long handle on the table between our beds. He dipped what seemed to be two razors attached to a wire, with a button between them, in the pot, then plugged the bare ends of the wire into a socket. I calmly realized that he was risking his life, along with my mental welfare, by doing that.
“I know this from army.” You were in the army? Whose army?
“Yugoslav. We must go. It was many years ago, when I was eighteen.” How old are you now?
“Twenty-four,” he said.
He had a rotund nose, which seemed swollen, and thick meaty lips, which he kept open. He had the darkest eyes I have ever seen, like two perfect marbles. We sipped coffee, too bitter and biting—I furtively abandoned it. The birds just outside the window warbled, and someone in the room above ours was apparently tap-dancing. He was from Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. He used to have a band and write for papers. His father was Ukrainian, just like mine, though his was born in Bosnia. He came to Ukraine to see his grandfather’s fatherland, but he also wanted to be away for a little while from “crazy things” in Yugoslavia. He had this idea they (who were they?) put things in your head and that you have to make it empty. I had stomach cramps and needed to go to the bathroom.
“We must go and eat breakfast,” he said. “I wait for you.”
Sure.
It was while spending time in Eastern Europe that I learned to appreciate unremarkable things, and the cafeteria I entered, following Jozef, occasionally bumping into him (our steps had not yet synchronized), was spectacularly unremarkable. The light in it was gray; a window wall looked out at a parking lot, which had no cars other than a gigantic black Volga, like a beached walrus. On one of the walls there were men leaning forward with fiery eyes and mountainous muscles bulging under their work uniforms. The women in folk uniforms facing them off hugged tall stalks of wheat that used to be golden and now were merely washed-yellow. There was a long line of people sliding their screeching trays down a rail, toward the food. Some of them were foreigners, recognizable in their clean, crumpled clothes, glancing around, trying to figure out where they might be. We took our trays and they were sticky, still wet in the corners, reeking of socialist grease.
I piled different sorts of blebby pierogi and a cup of limpid tea on my tray. The young woman in front of us, with arms that were bones coated with skin—Jozef introduced her as Vivian—put on her tray one pierogi, which looked like a severed, ashen ear. I lost my appetite instantly. I sat across from Jozef, and he munched his pierogi, while I sipped the absolutely tasteless tea.
“What are you doing?” he asked me, looking straight into my eyes.
“I am drinking my tea,” I said, suddenly perplexed as to what it was that I really might be doing.
“No, in your life.”
“Oh,” I said. “In my life.” My life. Ripeness is all, and I ain’t got it. “I am writing a Ph.D. thesis.”
“I see. What are you studying?” Let it be made clear, I did not want to have that conversation. I did not want it to be known that I was not doing what I claimed I was doing.
“Shakespeare,” I said.
“What about Shakespeare?” He was an unrelenting bastard, looking straight at me all along. Look away, you knave, look at the men with fiery eyes, look at Vivian nibbling her pierogi, preparing herself for a bout of bulimia. “What is called your thesis?”
I must have blushed. I sat there facing a Jozef from a crumbling country, up to my neck in fucking Kiev. I said: “Queer Lear.” I was about to say: “The Collapse and Transformation of Performative Masculinity in King Lear,” but Jozef said:
“My little horse he thinks it is queer, that there is no house near.”
“Not quite queer in that sense,” I said. It occurred to me that what I was doing was inapplicable, that I could spend days explaining it to Jozef to no avail, under the forlorn mural, the world’s fresh ornament. I used the opportunity to change the subject. “You like Robert Frost?”
“I was reading him on faculty,” he said. “I am also studying litrch—litrchoo—I am studying books.”
It was as he was fumbling the word literature that I befriended him. It was painful for me too to utter that word, and I grinned in warm understanding, wanting to hug him like a stack of wheat. Even now, when I teach, when I am forced to utter the world “literature,” I have a strange sensation—my nipples tickle, my eyes well up with tears.
There was a time, I freely confess, when I thought it noble not to know where one was heading. I thought that being lost meant being in mid-chapters of one’s own Bildungsroman, but then I became very lonesome climbing up the steep, craggy cliff of self-knowledge. I kept reading and thinking, and thinking and reading, and drinking, in order to figure out what life was all about, and whose fault it all was, before I even started living. Then I went to graduate school. I learned that desire was important, in a class populated by lonely, insecure searchers who sought people like themselves in literature written centuries ago. (The teacher’s claim to academic fame was entitled “Karaoke and (Re) Presentation.”) My father once asked me what I desired in life, and I was happy he used the word desired, for by that time I considered myself an expert on the matter. My father was the kind of man who fixed old chairs and obsolete magnetophones, thereby restoring the original order—no search, just restoration. Anyway, I followed the path of desire, but it led me nowhere, and I roamed and wandered, and became a typical American young existential tourist—Jack Kerouac was my travel agent. And for reasons I could not fully understand at that time, I had a terrifying feeling that sitting in front of Jozef, answering questions he had no right to ask, I had reached the terminus.
“You want to eat that?” Jozef asked, and pointed at the remains of my sorry breakfast.
“No,” I said.
“Can I eat that?”
“Sure.”
<
br /> He grabbed a pierogi and devoured it.
“Always is sure,” he said.
“Sure,” I said, and laughed, with a gurgle of pleasure, for we had already acquired an inside joke. He stood up with the tray and said: “See you later, alligator.” I resisted an urge to follow him, studying instead the differently shaped grease blotches on the table, and their relation to the straight lines that ran across the table—the configuration all made sense then, as if it had been a coded message. I looked at Vivian. “Hi,” she said, in a whispery voice, and nodded as if to confirm that she really meant it.
Vivian was a graduate student too, but in Slavic languages—she spoke five of them, including Ukrainian. She was in school in Madison. She told me there were other Americans here, and pointed vaguely toward the undiminished food line. There was Will, who was a tennis player, he was from Somewhere, California. And there was Andrea, who was from Chicago. And there were Mike and Basil, who never had breakfast. Vivian would punctuate the end of every sentence with a nod, and an occasional tucking of her hair behind her ear, on which a fence of rings stretched across her earlobe. I could not see her eyes, because she kept looking down at her plate. She had a shirt with a sunflower pattern, with a wide, open collar, which exposed her chicken chest and the slight curves of her breasts. She told me that this place was okay, that she spent a lot of time in the library here, that we were all going to take a train to Lvov tomorrow, early in the morning, and stay in Lvov for a couple of days. I complained about not being informed about it, allowing for some good old-fashioned solidarity of Americans in a hostile foreign country, then took off, having made up my mind to spend the rest of the day sleeping. Good night, lady, good night, sweet lady, good night, good night.
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