Nowhere Man

by Aleksandar Hemon

  We all got up at the crack of dawn—Jozef had shaken me out of my weighty slumber—picked nocturnal crud out of our eyes, then crawled into a bus stinking of harsh cigarettes and machine oil. The bus took us to the train station, down the same desolate streets that I had roamed yesterday, which created a profound sense of moving in circles, even if there was a wobbly morning worker here and there. A statue of Lenin or a socialist hero ambushed us from behind every corner, invariably leaning forward, implying a future. I wanted to point out those things to Jozef, who was a few seats away from me, too far for conversation, close enough to be aware of me.

  The train station was swarming with citizens dragging their overstuffed bags and underfed children, anticipating torturous departures. There is a history in all men’s lives, figuring the natures of the times deceased. Pensive and ponderous I was indeed, squeezed in the middle of an alien rabble—a fog of garlicky sweat and exhaustion wafting about us. “Look on us, we are like salt going out of hand,” Jozef said. I envisioned identical grains of salt, slipping out of God’s furrowy palm. It was humbling, to say the least.

  The train was much too salty: the Soviet masses everywhere, wearing the expression of routine despair: women with bulky bundles huddled on the floor; stertorous men prostrate up on the luggage racks; the sweat, the yeast, the ubiquitous onionness; the fading maps of the Soviet lands on the walls; the discolored photos of distant lakes; the clattering and clanking and cranking; the complete, absolute absence of the very possibility of comfort. I thought that if another revolution were ever to break out in the USSR, it would start on a train or some other public transportation vehicle—the spark would come from two sweaty asses rubbing. I survived the prerevolutionary grappling only because I followed Jozef, who cheerfully moved through the crowd, the sea of bodies splitting open before him. We found some standing space in the compartment populated solely by our schoolmates—the only ones I recognized were Vivian and Vladek.

  There was Father Petro—whom Jozef called Father Petrol—a young, spindly, pimply Canadian priest, who kept touching his left tit as he spoke. I could easily see a future in which Father Petrol’s parish, somewhere deep in the Canadian Western provinces, was in a community-tearing upheaval, after Father Petrol had been caught innocently fondling a gentle boy. There was Tolya, a teenager from Toronto or some such place. She used every chance to press her melons against Jozef, who endured the assaults with a bemused, avuncular expression. Vladek, the man with a “Komsomol face” (Jozef)—wide-open eyes, freckles, and an impish lock on his forehead—kept hugging Tolya, trying to pull her away from Pronek, sharing his bottomless vodka flask with her and anyone interested, including myself. Priggish and prudish though I may have appeared, I had a few hefty gulps that scorched my throat and earned me approval from the mob and a smile from Jozef. There was Andrea, the Chicago woman, with whom I avoided eye contact, for I did not want to detect any common acquaintances, and she played along. Like all tourists, we wanted to believe that we were alone among the natives. Jozef kept glancing at her, and his upper lip teetered on the verge of a seductive smile. There was Vivian, sitting in the corner, refusing drinks, and, incredibly, trying to read, which she eventually abandoned for talking to Father Petrol about—as far as I could discern—martyrs and saints. In the next compartment—I peeked in, hoping against hope that there would be seating—there was Will, with two other guys who looked American in their flannel shirts and an assortment of traveler’s gadgets: backpacks rife with pockets, pouches pendant on their necks, digital wristwatches with an excess of useful little screens.

  Needless to say, windows could not be opened, and within a couple of hours moisture painted pretty sparkling pictures on the panes; the walls were sticky; my skin was itchy and I kept gasping for air. The train was speeding through a misty forest, through an army of parallel trees visually echoing the tranceful clatter. Then the train slowed to a stop in the middle of a ravine. In total silence, the trees around the ravine loomed over a couple of brawny does grazing.

  “It is beautiful,” Jozef said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “How can you kill them? I don’t understand?” Jozef said.

  “I don’t either,” I said.

  The does looked up at us as if aware we were talking about them. Jozef said nothing, but raised his hand slowly and waved at them. One of them made a little step forward, as if trying to see us better—I swear to God the does knew we were watching them, they did see him waving at them. It seemed like a natural, ordinary gesture, just a simple motion of the hand. I did not dare do it, because I realized Vivian was looking at me, and I was embarrassed. The train moved on, the clatter accelerated, and the does turned their butts toward us and galloped away. Jozef and I stood wordless for an hour or so, our backs pressed against the damp coldness of the pane. I often recall that moment (the moist morning mist, the collective clamminess; the mirth of Jozef’s body, etc.), and I am forced to own up to the fact that I had never had—and then lost it again—what Jozef had: the ability to respond and speak to the world. Then it was Lvov, and we disembarked from the train together, stepping into a nipping, eager air. We inhaled deeply, simultaneously, as if holding hands. What country, friends, was this?

  It was in Lvov that Will the Tennis Player fully entered my field of vision. He stood in front of the glum Lvov train station, with his arms akimbo, giving assured directions to the random somnolent sojourner. He had piercing blue eyes, sinewy tennis arms—his right asymmetrically thicker than his left—and the squat, sturdy body of a Ukrainian peasant, no doubt the sludge from his ancestors’ genetic pool. Quickly did I succumb to his wise leadership—he led me and Vivian and Vladek and Tolya and the others toward a bus identical to the one that transported us in Kiev. I took a window seat, and looked out, when Jozef slumped his body next to me. In front of us, Vladek was telling a lame joke in lamentable English to Vivian, who managed to produce a gracious giggle.

  I woke up in front of a morose building, with my cheek pressed against the promontory bone of Jozef’s shoulder. Will informed us—he always seemed to know where we were and why—that was the student dorm that would provide lodging while we were in Lvov. The students coming in and out retracted their heads between their shoulders, their chins poking their chests, their mood clearly surly. I could tell that the showers in the dorm did not work.

  Jozef and I shared a room, which was, to put it mildly, ascetic: bare walls (although my memory keeps stretching on its toes to hang up a Lenin picture); steel-frame beds with thin, sunken mattresses; a wobbly chair and a wobblier desk, which sported two symmetrical nails on the insides of its rear legs, a student-torture contraption.

  Will burst into our room, asked us—me, in fact, for Jozef ignored him—if everything was all right. It was, I said. Will announced that he was trying to find out if we could have better accommodations, and stormed away.

  “Who is this?” Jozef said. “I don’t like him.”

  “He’s okay,” I said. “He just wants to help.”

  “Maybe,” Jozef said, and then just as abruptly walked out. I did not want to be abandoned in this dreadful place, but I could not just follow him. So I was alone, sitting on a bed that reacted with a screech to the minutest muscle contraction, staring at an empty wall that called for a Lenin. I pressed my hands with my knees, until they were numb, distilled almost to jelly with the act of fear.

  I thought of the day when my father took me to a baseball game, after years of my pleading and weeks of my mother’s lobbying. He loathed baseball—hitting a ball with a stick for no discernible reason, producing mind-numbing, indulgent boredom, that was how he saw it. He had informed me that there would be no hot dogs or soda for me, but I was still giddy with excitement. We sat in the Wrigley Field bleachers, and I had my baseball mitt (a present from my mom), which had spent long months closeted. I was convinced that I would catch a ball, that it was my day, when everything would come perfectly together. My father refused to stand up for the na
tional anthem, because he was still Ukrainian, as if “The Star-Spangled Banner” wounded his Ukrainianness. He made me stand up, he wanted me to appreciate America, for I was born here. During the game, he was bored out of his mind, and he kept looking anxiously at his watch. It did not happen, I caught nothing. We left in the sixth inning, and I hated my father for being a fucking foreigner: displaced, cheap, and always angry.

  Whereupon Jozef walked in with a handsome bottle of vodka, unscrewed the cap, and said: “You want drink?”

  “Hell, yeah,” I said, and took a throat-parching gulp.

  “Do you like baseball, Jozef?” I asked him.

  “It’s stupid,” he said. “You kick ball with stick, it is nothing.”

  “Yeah, I know.” I told him the sad story of the eternal misunderstanding between my father and baseball. Jozef listened to me not with the mandatory we-have-all-been-there interest, but with a detached, patient involvement, leaning slightly, and kindly, toward me. Now I realize that it could have been because he was trying to decode my English words, which still does not diminish my belief that he understood me better than anybody, precisely because he could go beyond my vapid words. He told me how his dad used to punish him: he would sentence him to twenty-five belt lashes for a transgression (going through the pockets of his father’s suits, or stealing) and determine the time of the execution—normally, Jozef said, after the evening cartoons. He spoke in his broken English, with articles missing, with subject, verb, and object hopelessly scrambled—yet I understood him perfectly, clearly visualizing the sequence of punishment. There was no screaming or yelling, no random disorderly violence—so much unlike my father, who would rip off kitchen cabinet doors and slam them against the walls. After the cartoons, they would go into the bedroom, and the lashing would take place, red butt cheeks and all—I am loath to confess that I envied him for having had those moments.

  “Fathers,” Jozef said. “They are strange.”

  Then we talked about our mothers, and their domestic sufferings. Jozef remembered how he had always hoped that his mother would come into the bedroom and stop the lashing, but she never did. I told him how my mother would throw things out of the kitchen cabinets onto the floor, smash the plates, fling pot lids at my father like Frisbees, and they would bounce off him. We talked about women, our first loves—a topic that required some embellishing and enlarging on my part. We talked about our childhoods, the friends that we had had and were now gone—except Jozef’s were not gone, they were all in Sarajevo. The silly adventures in school: snorting Kool-Aid in order to sneeze in the biology class (Jozef), smoking pot in the tenth grade, and then being high and afraid to climb down the rope in the PE class (me). The trite acts of rebellion which seemed revolutionary in our adolescence: saying “Fuck you, bitch!” to a nun (me); throwing a wet sponge at a Tito picture (Jozef). We compared Chicago and Sarajevo, how lovingly ugly they were, and how unlovingly parochial. Our mouths went dry, vodka diluted our blood and rushed to our heads. I was so drunk and excited at dawn that I wanted to hug him, but did not want him to think that I was strange. When we finally went to bed at dawn, I lay with my eyes open, watching the sunlight crawl across the wall above Jozef’s bed, discovering stains shaped like Pacific islands, my heart throttling in my chest. I could still hear Jozef whispering, telling me the funny story about the loss of his virginity. His breath kept tickling my earlobes, even as he was tossing in bed, and the soft nurse would not come and stroke my curls.

  Oh, Lvov, with your old downtrodden monuments of comfortably bourgeois times; your Mittel-European ornaments on the facades, barely visible through the thick filth of progress; your squares with nameless statues of obscure poets and heroes! Did I fail to mention I had never been in Ukraine before? All I knew I heard from my father, who had left a long time ago. Jozef and I wandered the streets of the old town and were sickened by the geometrical landscapes of the new town—to him all of it had familiar Eastern European shapes; to me it all seemed like a dream dreamt by another dream. Somewhere there—but where I knew not—was the Lvov my father had grown up in and had since left, and, bad son that I was, I had little interest in seeking it out.

  Jozef needed to have coffee in the morning, so he was on a quest: we found an Armenian coffee shop, where we drank the muddy liquid, not unlike Jozef’s Bosnian coffee. I am an herbal-tea man, so having had coffee that you could spread on a slice of bread, I was jittery and warbly, could not stop talking. Everything had to be told, and fast. I talked about my father, about his being born in Lvov. I talked about all the things he had never told me, things I found out eavesdropping on my mother’s furious rants when they fought. I told him that my father had been a member of a secret Ukrainian organization—very secret indeed. They prepared for a war of liberation, and hated Russians, Poles, and Jews. And then in World War II, he was an eighteen-year-old fighter with Bandera partisans, fighting Bolsheviks and avoiding fighting Germans. Bandera himself was imprisoned by the Germans and then was shot by the KGB after the war and . . . “I know,” Jozef said. Anyway, my father and his fellow fighters hid in the woods around Lvov, here and there robbing a truck of supplies, paying a high price in lives. They drank water from poisoned wells, ate cattle corpses found in villages burnt by the Germans or the Bolsheviks, then died of animal diseases, boils exploding all over their faces. Man’s life was as cheap as beast’s. The few surviving fighters slipped into the disorder and carnage of the German defeat, and ended up happily imprisoned in the Allies’ POW camps. My father had been a student of music—he was a baritone—so he sang in those camps: old Ukrainian ballads, Italian arias, and prewar Paris chansons that had somehow reached Lvov. He went to England, lived in Liverpool, worked on the docks, then he was off to Canada, where he ran the memberless Ukrainian-Canadian Opera Society and sang at weddings and funerals—mainly funerals. Then he went to Chicago, where he conceived my miserable self.

  My father rendered his pre-American days in disconnected details: how during wartime they all shared cigarettes when they had them, and smoked lint from their pockets when they didn’t; how he was the handsomest, most sonorous singer in Lvov; how the POWs wept when he sang “Ukraine Hasn’t Died Yet”; how he and his best friend embraced in the snow, warming each other up with their breaths, until his best friend’s breathing ceased; how he had sung opera only once, in Kitchener, Canada, in the role of Wotan, terribly miscast in a local production of Die Walküre. Sometimes, at home, he would break out into the Magic Fire Song, which always scared the crap out of me.

  Boy, was I on a roll, I kept babbling—it is very possible that Jozef did not understand most of my prolix monologue. As a matter of fact, out of the blue sky, so I was a little irked, he said:

  “You know, Bandera, when he was young, he wanted to be strong, to not feel pain. So he put his finger in door and then close door so he can see how long can he feel pain. He has did that every day.”

  What could I say? I said: “That’s crazy.”

  Anyway, after the demise of the Opera Society, my father drove a truck—my mother told me once that one of the things he had transported was foreigners across the border. He drove his truck to the US and he met my mother in Chicago. My mother was a South Side Irish girl, nineteen at the time. He knocked her up, possibly deliberately, in order to get American citizenship (my mother screamed out that secret in the middle of one of their more destructive fights). In any case, he married her, maybe for his sense of manly duty, maybe for the passport—I did doubt it had been love, for love was hard to come across in my father’s words and deeds. He was, I attested, an unaccommodated man.

  “It’s like American novel,” Jozef said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  But that could be because my older brother, born a few months after they had got married, was killed in Vietnam (“Vietnam—big war,” Jozef said). I remembered him as this remote uniformed presence, someone who had thrown a baseball at me not trying to hit me in the nose. Here on my desk (Please, take a look!) I h
ave a picture of him in his uniform, smiling, with a baseball mitt, yawning like a carnivorous plant, on his left hand. My brother was blown to pieces by a land mine. Years later, we received a visit from his army buddy, who was now peddling booze money in exchange for the true story, and who in pathologically gory detail described my brother’s death: spilled guts still throbbing in the dirt, ungodly howling, a Charlie sniper shooting off his knees, etc. My mom blamed my dad for her son’s death, she blamed all his fallacious army stories, all that sleeping-in-the-woods bullshit that deluded my brother into thinking that the army built a man’s character—it kills the body, she wailed, screw the character, my son’s body is gone. My father thought that every man needed character—that a life that produced pain built your character the way that door built Bandera’s. So my brother’s absence, the paint of his death on the walls of our home, that had built my character. My father, nunckle motherfucker, never talked about it, just went to the Chicago Avenue church, sang in the choir, his jaw eternally clenched. My brother was killed a week before he was to be discharged. He was twenty-three, his name was Roman.

  “Very interesting,” Jozef said. “Roman means novel in my language.”

  “Oh, fuck you,” I said, and that was the first time I got mad at him. But it didn’t last long: we sat on the bus next to each other again, in silence, and I was just about to tell him I was sorry, when I realized he was asleep, the wanton boy, his head on my shoulder, his saliva dribbling on my sleeve out of the corner of his mouth, my hand levitating above his nape, a touch away from his gentle neck.

  Returning to Kiev a couple of days later was like coming home: the smell of socialist grease and vinegar was as familiar as my mother’s kitchen; in the humble room, a pair of silk socks I had taken off upon my arrival waited crumpled under my bed. Jozef dropped his bag, leapt out of his shoes, and threw himself on the bed, its steel edge leaving a scar on the wall. I did the same thing, but a little more cautiously. We stretched on our respective beds, staring at the ceiling, in silence, as unspecified words were choking me—I wanted to talk, because silence seemed to be undoing our friendship.