And she told me something I had not known. She told me that her grandfather, a Jewish Shanghailander, had been detained after the Japanese took over the International Settlement, and she told me that it may have been Pick who tortured him. My wife’s grandfather never talked much about it, but they all knew what it had been like: he had tied him tightly in wet sheets, until his blood vessels were bursting into blotchy bruises (I saw them once, on his chest, shaped like unknown continents, when we went to visit him in Florida). Then the sheets slowly dried, almost squeezing him to death, until the body was so senseless that the only thing left was the part of your mind that could feel the pain. We immediately left the Humble Administrator’s tranquillity behind us, and boarded the train to Shanghai, where a devastating fever was awaiting us—we kept wiping the sweat off our bodies, but the perspiration would not stop.
That night someone tried to break into our room—I leapt out of my feverish dream, and charged to the door, yelling, “Who is it? Who is it?” but there was no response. As my heart was slamming against my chest walls, my wife’s screams fading, as our nightmares were merging, I imagined Pick’s painted face on the other side of the door. When I looked outside through the fish-eye peephole, there was, of course, no one outside, just the vacuously buzzing hall. I did not share my vision with my wife, but she must have known what I was thinking. In her eyes, I could see the somnolent terror twinkling as the ludicrous reflection of the exit sign.
But we, of course, knew that it must have been a drunken hotel guest trying to open our door, the wrong door, for that happens in every hotel, anywhere in the world.
The night of August 9—the anniversary of Pick’s last supper—I was woken up by my wife squeezing my hand (we held hands sleeping). I heard a body falling on the floor with a feeble thump, and then moving through the room: noises ebbing and flowing rhythmically, purposefully. We listened and received sounds coming from different corners, sometimes simultaneously. We sensed every whiff of air, vibrations of the space around us, frozen with fear, interrupting our breathing to hear better. We could not say anything, but we expected Pick to appear before us, in his magician’s cape, and begin to sing in his bass voice, replete with blood-curdling nostalgia: “Do not close your eyes, Mother Russia, for it is not time to sleep.” We heard Pick’s song in the rustle and bustle of the creature in the darkness, in the pitter-patter of little paws, in the pallid, oval field of the weak firelight, in the center of which there was a mouse, stopped to look at us, waiting for us to make an uncertain move before vanishing. I lay in the darkness, awake, paralyzed, biting the knuckle of my index finger, waiting for the evil to hatch out of the furry lump pulsating with life, and come right at me, and it did. It is right inside me now, clawing at the walls of my chest, trying to get out, and I can do nothing to stop it. So I get up.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Question of Bruno, which appeared on Best Books of 2000 lists nationwide, won several literary awards, and was published in eighteen countries. Born in Sarajevo, Hemon arrived in Chicago in 1992, began writing in English in 1995, and now his work appears regularly in The New Yorker, Esquire, Granta, Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories.
Also by Aleksandar Hemon
The Question of Bruno
PUBLISHED BY NAN A. TALESE
AN IMPRINT OF DOUBLEDAY
a division of Random House, Inc.
1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036
Doubleday is a trademark of Doubleday,
a division of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hemon, Aleksandar, 1964–
Nowhere man: the Pronek fantasies / by Aleksandar Hemon.
p. cm.
1. Sarajevo (Bosnia and Hercegovina)—Fiction.
2. Bosnian Americans—Fiction.
3. Chicago (Ill.)—Fiction. 4. Immigrants—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3608.E48 N69 2002
813'.54—dc21
2002066208
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Portions of this book have appeared, in slightly different form, in Esquire, Ploughshares, and the Paris Review.
ISBN-13: 9-781-40007-6-369
ISBN-10: 1-400-07636-6
Copyright © 2002 by Aleksandar Hemon
All Rights Reserved
v1.0
Nowhere Man Page 21