Nowhere Man

by Aleksandar Hemon

  “It’s three in the morning, for God’s sake.”

  Pronek turned on the light in the kitchen, then determinedly got on all fours and crept along the floor. Rachel stood at the door, barefoot and cold.

  “Listen.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  Pronek went under the table in the corner, she could see only the soles of his feet. “Mouse!” he shouted, and banged his head against the table. Something darted past Rachel’s cold feet and she trotted for an instant as if dancing. It ran along the walls of the living room and went behind the sofa. Pronek got out from under the table holding his pate and got up.

  “It’s the mouse,” he said.

  “It’s behind the sofa.”

  Pronek strode toward the sofa, then pushed it away from the wall. The mouse was in the corner shivering, huddled, a light-tentacle reaching its tail.

  “Give me something,” Pronek said. The mouse was fat, a short evolutional step from a rat, its cheeks bulging as if it had been caught eating and still was chewing the food.

  “What do you want?”

  “Something.”

  Rachel grabbed a book off the shelf: “Here.”

  Pronek took the book, looked at the title page, and flipped through it—it was The Idiot.

  “Not this one.”

  “You gotta be kidding me! What difference does it make?”

  “Not this.”

  She put the book back on the shelf and stood, with her hands pressing against her back, choosing another one:

  “Do you want fiction or biography?” she asked, irked.

  The mouse dared to move, its back against the wall, but Pronek stomped his foot.

  “Here is Death in Venice,” she said.

  Pronek grasped the book—it was a small paperback, thick and reeking of library must. He slammed the mouse—once, twice. The mouse squealed and squeaked and writhed as Pronek kept hitting it until it stopped moving and producing sounds.

  “God!” Rachel said.

  “I think it’s dead.”

  “What are we going to do now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He was still holding Death in Venice, his eyes fiery—he had just killed a living creature and felt nauseated, as if he had swallowed blood. Rachel came back with a broom and a dustpan and offered them to Pronek.

  “Why me?”

  “All right, step back.”

  She pushed the mouse onto the bin with the broom and it rolled over, but then it shook its head and flexed its legs, as if waking up from a long sleep.

  “Jesus, it’s alive,” she grunted.

  “Fuck,” Pronek said, and realized that if someone were listening he’d think Pronek was saying it like a real American. “Motherfucker,” he said.

  “Get a bucket and fill it up with water,” Rachel said.

  Pronek found a tin bucket in the bathroom, emptied it of rags and sponges, and filled it up halfway with water—he watched the deluge coming out of the faucet and imagined himself at the bottom of the bucket, the water coming down crashing on him.

  Rachel was pressing the mouse down on the pan with the broom. She dropped it into the bucket. For a moment the mouse floated on its back, a grin of horror on its little pointy face, but then it turned over and started swimming. The water was clear, they could see the bottom. The mouse was scratching the walls with its claws, trying to climb up, but it was clearly hopeless.

  “Drown it,” Rachel said.

  “I can’t.”

  “Drown it!” She pressed the mouse’s head with her index finger, the mouse sank but then resurfaced. She pressed it again, but then recoiled when it tried to grab her finger. The mouse flapped around with its tiny paws, its tail snaking behind. When it reached the bucket wall, it scratched it frantically.

  “Maybe we can leave it there,” Pronek said.

  “I don’t think so. I don’t want to listen to its death throes all night long.”

  “Maybe we can throw it outside.”

  “No, it has to die.”

  “I have never seen the mouse like this.”

  “A mouse like this.”

  “What?”

  “A mouse like this. Not the mouse like this.”

  “Why you have to correct me all the time?” He stood up and turned away in anger from Rachel and the bucket.

  “Why do you have to correct me all the time?”

  “What’s difference? You understand me.”

  “What’s the difference.”

  “Stop it!” he yelled.

  “Don’t you yell at me!” Rachel screamed back.

  The mouse was swimming in circles. Pronek felt rage leavening in his stomach, something pushing the inside of his temples, the heat swarming in his eyeballs. He stood facing Rachel, who looked at him with belligerent disgust. It became clear to him at that moment that he didn’t want to be there—the thought spread out before him like a ski slope—and there was nowhere he wanted to be. He heard the mouse scraping the bucket, the horrible din. And then, with a motion of his foot that seemed incredibly slow to him, but startled Rachel, he kicked the bucket and it flew toward the wall, the water splashing and sloshing around, stray droplets sparkling. He felt the release inside—the fury deluge broke the dam in his stomach and flooded his body as the bucket smashed into the wall.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Rachel grabbed her hair and pulled it.

  “Correct this!” he screamed, and flung The Idiot across the room. He grabbed the marble bowl and emptied it on the floor—the marbles cackling hysterically and rolling away in myriad directions. He smashed a flowerless vase against the wall. He swept the picture frames off the TV and they crashed on the floor, the shards scattering around. He kicked the pumpkin-shaped clock like a soccer ball and it landed on the sofa. He walked over the shards toward the Kiss-Me-I’m-Irish mug and pitched it at the floor. He flung the tin frog toward the kitchen, stomping over the shards, cutting his soles. In the kitchen, he ripped the map of the world off the floor and stamped on it, leaving bloody smudges.

  “What are you doing? I’ll call the police!”

  He grabbed a pomegranate and smashed it against the wall, the pomegranate exploding like a head, the crimson brains everywhere.

  “Call the goddamn police. Let them throw me out of this fucking country!”

  He snatched Rachel’s photos off the wall and smashed them. He pulled books off the shelves, tore them apart, and launched the pages toward the ceiling. And all along there was a tranquil nook inside him, from which someone else was calmly observing him wreaking havoc.

  “What got into you?” Rachel cried. “I love you! What did I do to you?”

  He pulled the phone cord and the receiver split from the phone and fell on top of the book pile. He pushed the TV off the stall and it came down with a thud. Rachel ran toward the bedroom, and Pronek followed her, ready to do the bedroom too. He punched the bedroom door, bloodying his knuckles.

  She emerged from the room with the camera. She started pressing the camera button frantically, saying: “What did I do to you?” and Pronek saw the aperture blinking.

  “You want to take a picture of me? You want to take a picture of me?”

  He started ripping his pajamas apart, the buttons flying like ricocheted bullets. He ripped off his undershirt, then his underwear, and stood naked, the sweat glistening on his skin. He tottered toward the camera, with his hands extended toward it.

  “You want to see me? You want to see the real me?”

  He banged his chest with his fists, as if trying to break it open.

  “Here! Here!” he screamed, until he lost his voice.

  And here we are: he is down on his knees, bleeding; he is surrounded by the debris. Dizzy with the violent adrenaline, he closes his eyes, and waits for Rachel to stop taking pictures and touch his cheek, redeeming him. A hand touches his face, tenderly, delicately, sliding its tips across the hollow of his cheek. He gasps and slowly, one sob at a time, he starts to cry.


  But he doesn’t know that the hand stroking his cheek is mine. He cannot hear me saying to him: “Ne plači. Sve ´ ce biti u redu.” Calm down, I’m telling him, everything will fall into place. Let us just sort through this destruction. Let us just remember how we got here. Let us just remember.

  7

  Nowhere Man

  KIEV, SEPTEMBER 1900–

  SHANGHAI, AUGUST 2000

  On the horizon you could see black, bloated, heinous clouds leading a storm charge. And the sea kept licking the rusty ship—the Pamyat—loaded with destitute men, officers and soldiers alike, left with nothing but their honor, still wearing impeccable uniforms, exuding a faint scent of the Trans-Siberian railway. The officers’ wives, the finest ladies all, choked with swallowed tears, waving at their loyal servants on the shore, lined up like a choir in a great tragedy, hating the Bolsheviks even more than their mistresses. There was a young captain going around, politely imploring the ladies to get rid of excess baggage, and they obeyed—what difference did it make now? You could see millions of rubles in fur, bobbing in filthy water, like rat corpses. Amid the sinking fur and suitcases, there was a little lap dog barking shrilly, paddling feebly with its tiny paws, slowly losing its strength, until it drowned. Our hearts sank with it.

  And the Pamyat sailed off, and no one on it could take their eyes off the beautiful shoreline, the lush forests and the curved mountains under the clouds: our Russian land, our mother’s breasts. We all wept, women and men, waves slamming the ship, as if they were waves of tears. And I stood at the prow, the Pacific wind ripping the skin off my face [he touches his scar], Vladivostok devoured by the mist behind me. You must believe me, I was deliberating whether to shoot myself, to empty my head and my heart, the devil take it all, for what is life, little sister, what is life without Russia. But then I heard my men singing with deep sonorous voices, coming straight from their Russian hearts, singing as no men had sung before: “Do not close your eyes, Mother Russia, for it is not time to sleep.” And it gave me strength. I did not kill myself, and here I am in Shanghai now, alive and swimming, although there are days, and this is one of them, when I regret that I did not blow my brains out, on the Pamyat, with my final gaze locked on Russia.

  This is the story that Evgenij Pick—Captain Pick—told to Russian ex-princesses and ex-baronesses and ex-nobodies earning their paltry living in Shanghai as prostitutes and taxi dancers, even dressmakers. They would listen to him, swooning, warm tears in their Russian eyes, stroking their new, local lap dog until they hurt it with their hands shriveled from the work they had never done before, the dog slipping off their lap. They would not even notice Captain Pick’s nimble hand crawling up their thighs, then deeper, much deeper, and he never paid them for anything.

  To drunken Russian ex-officers, surviving in Shanghai as bodyguards and extortionists (or not surviving at all), prone to scorching their nostalgia with poisonously cheap vodka, he would tell about the saber given to him by his father, a Cossack colonel, on his deathbed. His father made him swear on the saber that he would defend Mother Russia’s honor until his last breath. It was with that very saber (resting now in a pawnshop, he said, waiting for better days) that he decapitated a Jewish Bolshevik, in Smolensk, in 1919. Sometimes he would use a watermelon to demonstrate how the head flew in a perfect arc (“rainbow-like”) and fell on the ground with a thud that implied hollowness. His audience would always enjoy the joke, ordering more vodka for Captain Pick. He would cut open the watermelon with his rosewood-handle knife, and they would gorge on the crimson insides, using their fingers, kissing each other after every downed glass of vodka. And he would keep them enraptured, dizzy with common memories and alcohol, telling them how the Germans caught him in 1914, and how he escaped—he just walked out of the prison, ordering the guards in a thunderous voice to open the gate and they had to open it, saluting him, because even in large numbers and heavily armed they were afraid of a real Russian. The Germans caught him ten more times, and he escaped ten more times—he would slam his hand against his chest and holler: “They thought I was the devil himself!” and the crowd would proudly guffaw, delighted that the devil is Russian, one of our own. Pick would then start singing, “Do not close your eyes, Mother Russia, for it is not time to sleep,” and they would weep, as they wept leaving Vladivostok. Not infrequently, a mob of wobbling Russian patriots would carry Pick on their shoulders to their favorite brothel or an opium den, where they would pool money to treat him with a cure, admittedly temporary, for his wounded Russian heart.

  At the beginning, a few of them would have trouble remembering his being on the Pamyat. Nor could the officers from the units he claimed to have served in remember him serving with them. Some of them even recalled a man with the same face, albeit scarless, working for the Soviets in Harbin and Shanghai under a different name. But after a while his stories, told in minute, plausible detail, absorbed along with a China Sea of vodka, displaced their memories, and they started generating their own, new memories featuring trench brotherhood with Captain Pick, his doughty feats, and legendary drinking binges, from which some of them never recovered. Eventually, Pick—Captain Pick—became the dearest brother of every true Russian in Shanghai.

  The likely story, we have to say, is somewhat different. Evgenij Pick is born as Evgenij Mihailovich Kojevnikoff, in Kiev, in September 1900, son of a Cossack army colonel and a raped Jewish mother, who dies giving him birth. His father takes some care of him, paying an unmarried, crazy aunt to bring him up, until Papa gambles away all his money and kills himself, leaving Pick nothing but embarrassing debts and the unpaid aunt’s fury, conveyed through a beating with a broom handle. There is no record of the saber whatsoever. Apart from the broom-induced anguish following his father’s demise, little is remembered about Pick’s childhood, boyhood, or youth. After a few blank years, we find him serving in the Russian army in 1917, until he is captured by the Germans, but only once. We do not know when and indeed if he did escape, but in the fall of 1917, he is in Sankt Petersburg, caught up in the Revolution. It seems that the revolutionary fervor, not to mention numerous opportunities for pilfering and plundering, excited him enough to become a revolutionary. His duty becomes the duty of a political commissar, his job is to deliver speeches on a rich selection of injustices, and when he raises his arm and points in the general direction of bloodthirsty capitalist bloodsuckers, his audiences are always eager to go there, however distant and dangerous there may be.

  His good revolutionary work allows him to study in Moscow, from 1919 to 1922, at the Military Academy and, simultaneously, at the Academy for Music and Drama. After graduation he is said to have worked as an assistant military attaché in the Soviet embassies in Afghanistan and Turkey—jobs whose uneventfulness would be unbearable, were it not for the abundant availability of first-class opium.

  In 1925, he arrives in Shanghai, via the Trans-Siberian railway, Vladivostok, and Harbin. His official duty is as an assistant to the Soviet military mission there—that is, a spy—working undercover as a businessman, selling advertising space in Russian papers. He really serves the Comintern, building networks, acquiring acquaintances who can provide fruitful information, some of which he fails to share with his comrades, but rather hoards it for the day he might need it.

  And the day arrives in 1927, when, according to Wasserstein, he turns coat and furnishes the British intelligence in Shanghai with a carefully assembled collection of pertinent information, embellished with fantastic sub-narratives of ubiquitous Comintern conspiracies in China and—why stop there?—the world at large. All of it is delivered in a reasonable, measured, yet mesmerizing tone—all the accents are in the right places, and the ephemera (useless characters, pointless details, frequent digressions regarding his own unremarkable, woeful self) is effectively scattered throughout Pick’s narrative, providing the inevitable randomness of common existence, the sloppiness necessary for the illusion of a real, uncontrollable life. His briefers, all from good families a
nd universally educated at elite British universities—evidently intellectually superior to an effusive Russian vagrant—cannot have enough of his stories. They promptly and passionately send Pick’s confession to the Foreign Office, followed by a note from the British ambassador, Sir William Senson, saying that “while [the accuracy of Pick’s information] cannot be guaranteed, it has the ring of truth.”

  The ring of truth is a golden one, it seems, for with the generous British reward and the profits from small but lucrative deals with his acquaintances Captain Pick is able to open his own theater in Shanghai. The theater has the ambitious name of the Far Eastern Grand Opera, and he is the impresario, stage manager, opera singer, ballet dancer, and its star actor. Let it be noted that his stage name, ever present on the glamorous marquee of his theater, is Eugene Hovans.

  It is on the Grand Opera stage that Pick/Hovans performs his greatest role—the role of Chichikoff in Gogol’s Dead Souls. In Hovans’s rendition, Chichikoff becomes a Moses, leading the spiritless, soul-dead people of Russia to the promised land. The culmination of the performance was Chichikoff’s troika speech, inevitably resulting in women pulling their nicely combed and coiled hair off their heads in tufts, and men pulling out their guns and threatening to shoot themselves, right there, the devil take it all, enough of this misery. “Ah, you horses, horses—what horses!” vociferated Hovans, thumping his chest with his fist, as if intent on breaking it open and taking his heart out to exhibit its purity to the audience. “Your manes are whirlwinds! And are your veins not tingling like a quick ear? Descending from above you have caught the note of the familiar song; and at once, in unison, you strain your chests of bronze [chest thumping] and, with your hooves barely skimming the earth, you are transformed into arrows, into straight lines winging through the air, and on you rush under divine inspiration . . . Russia, where are you flying? Answer me! [sobs, hair-pulling, revolvers cocked, etc.] There is no answer.”