Love and Obstacles

by Aleksandar Hemon

  “That’s Conrad,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s Joseph Conrad.”

  “No, no, no, no, never, sir. That ain’t no Joe Conrad. That’s the truth.”

  He played the “Stairway to Heaven” bridge over my head, closing his eyes, curling his lower lip. Natalie leaned away from me, slipped her hand between her cheek and a pillow and closed her eyes, producing a celestial smile. He dropped next to me, his back to Natalie’s stomach.

  “There’s a tribe here,” he went on, his voice lowered, “that believes that the first man and woman slid down from the skies on a rope. God let them down on a rope, they untied themselves and the boss pulled the rope up. And that’s exactly what happened, my friend. We were dropped down here and we wanna go back up, but there’s no rope. So here you are, Blunderpuss, and the rope is gone.”

  He spread his arms to point at our surroundings: the coffee table with a pile of formerly glossy National Geographics, on top of which was Natalie’s camera; an overflowing ashtray and a bottle of J&B; ebony sculptures of stolid elephants and twiggy warriors, one of them draped in his T-shirt.

  “But we can at least try to get up as high as possible,” he said, and excavated a tinfoil nugget from his pocket, unwrapped it with delectation, and showed me a lump of olive-green paste at its heart. “That’s why God gave us Afghanistan.”

  The day I smoked pot for the first time was also the day I smoked hashish for the first time. Spinelli chipped slivers off the lump, then stuffed it down the narrow asshole of a clay pipe, murmuring: “Yessiree, Bob!” to himself. This time I had no trouble inhaling and releasing the smoke impressively slowly.

  “I’m here,” Natalie said, and I passed the pipe to her. She smoked on her back, her eyes still closed. The smoke crawled out of her mouth, as though she were not breathing at all.

  “See, I was much like you when I was a kid. I looked for hours at the map of South America, and Africa, and Australia. I thought: There the fuck I go,” Spinelli said.

  He stared at me for an endless moment, as though he were looking at the map again. His eyes were dim; I had a hard time keeping my eyes open.

  “And here I am. Because I believe in something. Everybody’s gotta believe in something. You gotta know your way.”

  He leaned back into Natalie, who sneezed like a cat but remained impassive. My head and stomach were completely empty. I tried to inhale some air to fill the vacuum inside me, but it didn’t work. I was gasping, rapidly deflating, and it sounded like a giggle—I heard myself as someone else.

  “You might wanna munch on a banana or something,” he said. “You are pale as shit.” Abruptly he stood up, startling me, and charged off to the kitchen. Natalie’s face was ashen, her lips pink; a single hair stretched from her forehead to her mouth, where it curved toward the right corner. Before I could make any decision, I inhaled and leaned toward her, planting a kiss where the hair touched her mouth. She opened her eyes and widened her smile until I could see her tongue tip protruding between her teeth.

  I retreated into my throne of stupor just as Spinelli came back with a huge, blazingly yellow banana in hand. He offered it to me and said:

  “Would the monkey like a banana?”

  The monkey ate the banana, promptly passed out, and dreamt of two women, one fat, one slim, knitting black wool to the rhythm of drums, chanting angrily: “Spinelli! Spinelli! Spinelli!” Whereupon I woke to see Tata in his pith helmet and flannel pajamas yelling at Spinelli and shaking an enraged, ruddy finger before his face. Spinelli had his hands on his hips, and they slowly curled into fists; he was about to punch my father. I wanted to charge to Tata’s defense, but my limbs would not move. Natalie sat up and said: “Steve, let it go, let Bogdan take the boy home.” The bunched-up hair on the right side of her head had the shape of a harp, or half a heart.

  “All right, man, I apologize. We were just partying a little,” Spinelli said. “Hopefully, it’s all bridge under the water.”

  Walking downstairs was much like crossing an underwater bridge: an invisible stream pushed against my knees, I could not feel the solid concrete under my feet. Tata practically carried me, his hand grasped my flesh ungently, sternly. He talked to me, but I could hear only the tone of his voice: it was angry and quivering. Downstairs, Mama and Sestra sat on the couch like a two-member jury; Sestra watched me with slumberous amusement; Mama’s face was awash in tears. For some reason, it was all funny to me, and when Tata dropped me into the armchair across from them, I slid down to the floor and convulsed in laughter.

  Later, in the middle of the night, I tottered to the kitchen, found the trash bin in the darkness, pressed the pedal to open the lid, and then pissed a thick, pleasurable stream into its mouth.

  There was no talk given by my parents, no warnings about drugs and alcohol, no lectures about self-respect, no complaints about cleaning up the piss lake on the kitchen floor. They just stared at me, mute, across the dinner table: Tata worrisomely pouted, contemplating the troubling questions of my future; Mama pressed her hand against her cheek, shaking her head at the extraordinary bad luck in having me for a son, tear gems forming in the corners of her eyes.

  I was forced to go everywhere they went: to Lolo La Crevette, where we devoured shrimp with Vaske, a malarial Macedonian prone to delivering unhurried reports on his talkative cockatoo; to the Portuguese club, where I watched two decrepit Frenchmen ineptly play tennis and scream at a skinny boy fetching their scattershot balls; to the Belgian supermarket, pristinely overlit, where everyone was immaculately white, as if the place had been magically transported from the pallid heart of Brussels. I often carried Heart of Darkness around and tried to read when no one was talking to me, which was very far from often enough. All I wanted was to be alone.

  But I was alone only when I smoked on the balcony in the tarrish heat, hoping to see Spinelli or Natalie on the street, and I never did. There was no shuffling of the feet upstairs, no slamming of the door, no drumming or hollering along with Led Zeppelin. When I thought of our time together, I could not recall our doing anything or being anywhere. All I could recollect was his voice, mouthy and squeally, reciting his adventures: Spinelli going up the Congo with a crew of mercenaries, looking for a fallen Soviet satellite; Spinelli running into cannibals who thought he was a god because he produced a coin from behind the ear of a warrior; Spinelli in Angola, submerged in a shallow river up to his eyes, like a hippo, invisible to the Cuban patrol searching for him; Spinelli with a defector-to-be in a Durban restaurant, spooning raw monkey brain out of a cut-open skull.

  One Sunday we went to the Czechoslovakian ambassador’s garden party in Gombe. There was beer and champagne, maracujá juice and punch; there were piles of nibblets and fruit, offered on vast trays by a couple of humble servants; there were the blonde twin daughters of the Romanian ambassador; there were Our Excellency and his wife; and there were a lot of wily communist kids scurrying around and taunting the angry chimpanzee in a cage by the garden shed. I wanted to find a quiet spot and read, but Tata compelled me to join a volleyball game. We played on the sandlot between two enormous palms whose leaves, like monster quills, hung high over the net. We were on the same team with a squat Bulgarian whose many gold chains rattled every time he swung to miss the ball, and with the Romanian twins, who leapt for the ball gracefully and fell down on their asses stupidly. Fortunately, there was also a Russian named Anton, tall and lanky, potato-nosed, gray-eyed. He was by far our best player and handily destroyed the other team. He showed me how to make my fingers flexible so the ball floated high enough for Tata to smack it into our ambassador’s excellently flabby flesh.

  Anton was the only man who did not smoke or drink after the game; indeed, he did not even drink water; he knew how to retain control. I followed him and Tata to a table under an enormous umbrella; they spoke Russian to each other, and Anton’s voice was deep and curt, used to giving orders. He tapped on the table with his agitated finger; Tata threw his ar
ms up; they looked at me every now and then. I did not understand what they were talking about, but I could hear the name Spinelli rising out of the Slavic gibberish. A flare of hope went up in my chest, and when I turned around I saw Natalie walking barefoot toward me in a diaphanous white dress, the sun transforming her tresses into a halo. But it was in fact one of the Romanian twins, guzzling beer out of a large mug, two streaks curving from the corners of her mouth toward her bepimpled chin.

  Soon thereafter we went east for the promised safari. A man was waiting for us on the tarmac of the Goma airport; we saw him as soon as we stepped out of the plane. He wore dark shades, a white shirt, and a black tie; he walked up to Tata and shook his hand diplomatically, as though welcoming a dignitary. He spoke to him in French, then switched to English for us—or me, rather, even if he was looking at Mama—welcoming us to Goma and wishing us a pleasant stay at the Karibu Hotel, as well as a successful safari. His name was Carlier; he assured us he was at our service, and kissed Mama’s hand while she tried to extract it from his grip. He stroked Sestra’s hair and nodded at me, as if he thought I was tough and he respected it.

  Carlier was slurring his words, and I could not figure out whether that was his accent or he was drunk. Except for his shades and a large diamond ring on his middle finger, he resembled a butcher in a poor neighborhood: a heavy, fat-rounded head, large ears with meaty earlobes, blood speckles on his mercilessly scraped face. He bribed our way through the ovenlike airport, extending his money-stuffed hand to uniformed officers and importantly frowning Small Vegetables. Outside the airport, he chased away a swarm of cabbies and crap-hawkers and led us to a van next to which a man stood at attention in a full suit with a tightly knotted tie. Carlier barked at him and he leapt like a leopard to open the door for us.

  The streets of Goma were enveloped in roiling clouds of black dust. In an uncanny, disturbing moment, I recognized that everyone in sight was barefoot, and I could not remember what the purpose of shoes was. But then I saw booted policemen standing on the porches, leaning against the walls, like idle villains in westerns, and the world of straightforward facts was restored. When we stopped to let a skittish herd of goats pass, nobody approached the van to offer us carved human bones or knitting needles.

  “You make a right turn here,” Carlier said, “and you are in Rwanda.”

  We turned left, got out of town, and drove through the fields of black lava rock surrounding intermittent islands of jungle verdure. A gray mountain beyond the green-and-black landscape exuded smoke; the earth appeared unearthly. “Nyiragongo,” Carlier said, as if the word were self-explanatory.

  The Karibu Hotel consisted of huts scattered along the shore of Lake Kivu, which, Carlier told us gleefully, contained no life: the last time Nyiragongo had erupted, the volcanic gases killed every living creature in it. Sestra and I shared one of the huts, redolent of clean towels, insecticide, and mold. As she unpacked, humming to herself, I stared out the window: a pirogue glided unhurriedly on the wave-less water; the sky and the lake were welded together without a joint; a pale moon levitated in the haze. The sun was setting somewhere; everything was returning to darkness after an unhappy day out.

  The ban on my wandering seemed to be suspended here; I left Sestra sprawling on her bed, happily attached to the Walkman. Heart of Darkness in hand, I took the uphill path going past other bungalows. I was hoping to escape dinner with my family; I needed to be elsewhere and alone. On the way from the airport they felt foreign to me, not unlike hired actors mindlessly performing gestures of care and kinship: Tata in his absurd pith helmet; Mama smirking, routinely scared of the future; Sestra approaching everything with useless curiosity—I could remember that I used to love them, but I could not remember why, and I was terrified.

  The carefully trimmed hedges were moist with dusk; low, mushroomlike lanterns flickered by the path. I walked onto a terrace extending from a vast restaurant hall. At its center, like an altar, was a table laden with food and flowers. And there, with his back to me, picking slices of meat and chunks of fruit, mounting them on his plate, was Steve Spinelli. I recognized his triangular torso and narrow hips, his claw curls and cowboy boots. For a blink, I considered sneaking out, but then he turned—a veritable hillock of victuals on his plate—and looked at me with no surprise whatsoever.

  “Look what the bitch dragged in,” he said.

  He walked out onto the terrace, and I went with him to his table; he offered me a seat and I took it, determined to leave as soon as possible, before Father caught me here. Without being asked, I said:

  “We are going to Virunga National Park tomorrow, for a safari.”

  “It’s a fun world, Blunderpuss,” Spinelli said. “Getting funner every day.”

  “Is Natalie with you?”

  “She is.”

  “Why are you here?”

  He dug into the foodstuff with a spoon and chewed heartily with his mouth open, ignoring me. Between spoonfuls, he puffed on a cigarette, then put it back in the ashtray.

  “For a vacation,” he said. “And while I am here, I might as well discuss an important matter with your father.”

  “Like what?”

  “You, maybe. Or maybe not. We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.”

  I grabbed his Marlboros and lit up. The possibility of a drug-laced cigarette crossed my mind, but it tasted good. He seemed to speak to me from a space in which no life mattered—all the roles and purposes had already been assigned, and I did not know what mine were. I fidgeted and tapped the ashes from my cigarette until the ember broke off.

  “I hear that you are a good volleyball player,” he said. “Did you like Antonyka?”

  “How do you know him?”

  “I know a lot of people. Anton is a remarkable gentleman, as well as a communist cocksucker.”

  He waved at Carlier, who was just walking into the restaurant hall accompanied by a tall man with sideburns and a scaphander Afro. Carlier spoke to the man brusquely, pointing at the meat tray, then at the flowers—there was some disorder to be redressed. “I know Carlier too, for example,” Spinelli went on. “We used to run guns to Angola together.” The tall man took notes, looking at Carlier with dismay, which tightened the muscles and sinews in his forearms. I envisioned him suddenly punching in Carlier’s face, blood spraying onto his white shirt, Carlier falling to the ground and screaming for help.

  “Your dad also played with you and Anton, didn’t he?” Spinelli said. “I bet you played pretty good together.”

  Carlier left the tall man to deal with the problem at hand, and dropped into the chair next to Spinelli. He pulled a pipe out of his breast pocket, with his pinkie picked some detritus from its mouth, but didn’t light it.

  “Whipping would be too good for Monsieur Henri,” Carlier said peevishly.

  “One day, Carlier, he’s gonna slit your throat,” Spinelli said. “And I’ll cry over your corpse till I can piss no more.”

  Scoffing with approbation, Carlier picked up my book, looked at it without interest, and put it down. I took it from his hand and bade them good night.

  The mushroom lamps cast a feeble light on the path, but on nothing else. The lava gravel crunched under my feet. Obscure creatures rustled in the black trees and bushes. The sky was splattered with stars, smeared with the Milky Way. I was lost; I could not remember the number of my hut, identical to all the others; the path seemed to be a circle.

  I don’t know why I behaved like a lunatic. I heard footsteps coming down the path behind me; I stepped off into the darkness and ducked behind a tree with a precise clarity of action; somebody had already done it once and I was just repeating the exact motions. I dropped my book; whatever was concealed in the tree shuffled its way higher up, and I did not dare pick up the book. The tree bark was smooth and fragrant, my hand sweating against it. The footsteps stopped.

  “Come out, Blunderpuss. I can see you.”

  I was afraid to move or look at him, exhaling to the end of my br
eath, then inhaling through my nostrils, getting air-headed and elated as if that were the way to make myself invisible. Something fell on my head from above—a leaf, an insect, monkey hair—but I did not brush it off. It was so easy here to forget everything, to lose all bearing. An army of insects screeched at a high, buzzing pitch, as though cutting through a steel cable; then they stopped. I stepped out on the path.

  “Let’s go and say hi to Monkeypie,” Spinelli said. “She’d love to see you.”

  “Maybe later,” I said. “I must go.”

  “She’s crazy about you, you know. She talks about you all the time. She’d love to see you.” He put his arm around my shoulders; I felt the weight of his forearm on my neck, as he softly pushed me forward.

  Their room smelled of burnt sugar; the ceiling fan was dead. Natalie lay on her side, her hand tucked between the pillow and her cheek, a tranquil smile on her face lit by the bedside lamp. Around her biceps, a loose rubber rope twisted. On the nightstand were a syringe and a spoon and a burning candle. I was an instant behind myself: I saw what it all was, but the thought could not encrust itself with meaning. Spinelli caressed her forehead with the back of his hand and moved a stray hair from her cheek.

  “She is beautiful, isn’t she, so peaceful,” he whispered. “Would you like to fuck her?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  “She’s a little out of touch, but she’d love it, believe me.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “What’s your problem, Blunderpuss? When I was your age I had a hard-on twenty-four/seven.”

  He stood above her with his hands on his hips. I couldn’t move, until my knees got so weak I sat down, my back to Natalie. In her oblivion, she did not budge when I leaned on her belly. I had reached the farthest point of navigation. Dear Azra, the leaves have covered my path. I do not know if I will ever see you again.