Love and Obstacles

by Aleksandar Hemon

  “You can’t get it up, can you,” he said, chortling. “You can’t get it up. Let me show you something.” He quickly unfastened his eagle-buckled belt and let his jeans drop down. His dick leapt at me and stood in my face like an erect cannon. Its head was perfectly purple; the blue veins seemed to be throbbing.

  “A solid torpedo, and ready to explode,” Spinelli said, and stroked it. “Do you wanna touch it? C’mon, touch it.”

  Natalie sighed but did not open her eyes; the candle flickered, nearly going out. With indescribable effort, I finally stood up and pushed him away. “Hey!” he said, stumbling backward with his pants at his ankles. Still, I expected him to grab me from behind as I was walking out, I was ready for him to smash my head against the door until I blacked out, but nothing happened.

  Outside, a tremulous lightwake stretched itself toward the cataractous moon. My heart was playing the bridge from “Stairway to Heaven,” but beyond the noise in my veins, beyond the limp limbs, beyond the cold-sweating skin, was a serene flow carrying me away from everything that had been me. Up the path, past an oddly azure pool with a school of insects drowning in it, I walked back toward the restaurant.

  And at the restaurant there would be my family: my sister picking the green beans off Father’s plate; Father slicing his steak, still wearing his pith helmet despite Mother’s nagging; Mother parting the mashed potato and carrots on Sister’s plate, because Sister never wanted them to touch. I would take my place at the table, and Father would ask me where I had been. Nowhere, I would say, and he would ask me nothing more. You’d better eat something, you look so pale, Mother would say. My sister would tell us how much she looked forward to our safari, to seeing the elephant and the antelope and the monkey. Tomorrow is going to be really great, she would cry, clapping with joy, I simply can’t wait. And we would laugh, Mother, Father, and I, we would laugh, Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, hiding desperately our rope burns.

  Everything

  Before I opened my eyes, I listened: Against the sound wall of a clattering train, two male voices; one of them was mine-deep and spoke with a southern Serbian accent; the other was mumbly and uttered words with the inflections of a Sarajevo thug, the soft consonants further softened, the vowels stuck in the gullet. I wasn’t sure what they were talking about, but there was gurgling in the bottle neck, the crackling of a burning cigarette.

  “France,” the Sarajevan said.

  “Refused entry.”

  “Germany.”

  “Refused entry.”

  “Greece.”

  “Never went.”

  “Refused entry.”

  “Got me there,” the Serbian said, and chortled.

  The train slowed to a stop; I heard the doors opening. One of the men got up and stepped out of the compartment; the other followed him. I opened my eyes; the doors slid shut. They pushed the window down and were smoking. A man and a woman ran toward the train, each with a couple of suitcases banging the sides of their calves—there was a gash in the woman’s leg. I contemplated escaping from the compartment: I had a bundle of money and my life to worry about. But my fellow travelers pressed their butts against the door, the Y-crack peeping out of the pants of one of them. The train lurched and started moving; they flicked their cigarettes and came back in. I closed my eyes again.

  “Did you know Tuka?” asked the Sarajevan.

  “No.”

  “How about Fahro?”

  “Which Fahro?”

  “Fahro the Beast.”

  “Fahro the Beast. His nose was bitten off?”

  “Yes, that Fahro.”

  “I didn’t know him.”

  “Which cell block were you in?”

  “Seven.”

  “Rape?”

  “Burglary.”

  “Burglary was Six.”

  “Well, I was in Seven,” the Serbian said, peevishly.

  “I was in Five. Manslaughter.”

  “Nice.”

  “I was a little drunk.”

  “Life is death if you don’t have a little drink every now and then,” concluded the Serbian wisely, and chugged from the bottle. They fell silent, watching me. It was not unreasonable to believe that they could smell my fear and were just about to cut my throat and take the money. When I sensed one of them shuffling his feet and moving toward me, I opened my eyes. They were staring at me with bemused expressions.

  “The child’s awake,” the Sarajevan said.

  “Where are you headed?” the Serbian asked me.

  “Zagreb,” I said.

  “What for?”

  “To visit my grandfather.”

  “If Grandma had balls, she would be Grandpa,” said the Sarajevan, for no apparent reason.

  “Do you have a pretty sister we could be very nice to?” the Serbian asked, and licked his lips.

  “No,” I said.

  My grandfather was dead, and when he was not, he did not live in Zagreb; I had a sister too. The truth was, my destination was Murska Sobota, I had a wad of money in my pocket, my mission to buy a freezer chest for my family.

  Some weeks before I set out on this journey, my father had summoned a family meeting. “There arrives a time in the life of every family,” he had said in his opening words, “when it becomes ready to acquire a large freezer chest.” The ice box in the fridge was no longer spacious enough to contain the feed—meat, mainly—for the growing children; the number of family friends was so large that the supplies for an improvised feast had to be available at all times; “the well-being of our family requires new investments,” abundance demanded more storage. My father used to like meetings like this, the family democracy game. We often had to sit through such a congress so we could vote on a decision he had already made. There were no objections this time either: my mother rolled her eyes at the rhetoric, even if she wanted a freezer chest; in the usual seventeen-year-old manner I made sure I was visibly indifferent; my sister was keeping notes, much too slowly. She was thirteen at the time, and still invested in the perfection of her handwriting.

  But to my utter surprise, I was unanimously elected to be the purchaser of the freezer chest. Father worked in mysterious ways: he had tracked down the biggest chest—the six-hundred-liter model—available in the lousy market of socialist Yugoslavia; he somehow discovered that the best price was in Murska Sobota, a small town deep in Slovenia, not far from the Hungarian border. I was to take the night train to Zagreb, then a bus to Murska Sobota; I was to spend a night at the hotel ambitiously called Evropa; the next day I was to deliver the money to someone named Stanko, and that was where my mission ended. Stanko was to arrange the shipment, and all I needed to do was come back home safely.

  The Sarajevan looked at me intently, possibly deciding whether to do me in because I obviously lied. He wore a suit and a tie, but his shoes looked shitty, the soles peeling off. Blinking very slowly, as if his eyes were counting time, he asked me:

  “Do you fuck?”

  “What?”

  “Do you fuck? Do you use your dick the way it is supposed to be used?”

  “A little,” I said.

  “I love to fuck,” the Serbian said.

  “There is nothing sweeter than a fuck,” the Sarajevan said.

  “Yeah,” the Serbian said wistfully, and rubbed his crotch. He had tattooed knuckles; he wore a leather jacket and shoes so pointy that it seemed he had sharpened them so they could easily penetrate the skull.

  Despite her voting for my deployment on the freezer-chest mission, my mother had worried about my traveling. I was excited: Murska Sobota sounded exotic and dangerous. This was the first time I would be away alone, on the road by myself, my first opportunity to live through experiences from which many a poem would spring. For I was a budding poet; I had filled entire notebooks with the verses of teenage longings and crushing boredom (always the flip side of longing). I equipped myself for the expedition: a fresh notebook; extra pencils; a book of Rimbaud’s—my bible (As I was floating down unconcerned R
ivers / I no longer felt myself steered by the haulers . . . ); packs of Marlboros (rather than the usual crappy Drinas); and a single contraceptive pill I had gotten in exchange for Physical Graffiti, a double Led Zeppelin LP that I no longer cared about, as I had moved on to the Sex Pistols.

  I was an unwilling virgin, my bones draped in amorous flesh. Consequently, I held a belief, not uncommon among adolescent males, that beyond the constraining circles of family, friends, and prudish high school girlfriends lay a vast, wild territory of the purest sex, where the merest physical or eye contact led to copulation unbound. I was ready for it: in preparation for the journey, I had tested a number of scenarios in my hormone-addled mind, determining that the crucial moment would be when I offered her the pill, thereby expressing my manly concern and gentlemanly responsibility—no female could say no to that.

  “You look like a smart kid,” the Sarajevan said. “Let’s see if you can figure out this riddle.”

  “Let’s hear it,” the Serbian said.

  “It has no head, but it has a hundred legs, a thousand windows, and five walls. It is never the same, but it is always almost the same. It is black and white and green. It disappears, and then it comes back. It smells of dung and straw and machine oil. It is the biggest thing in the world, but it can fit into the palm of your hand.”

  The Sarajevan watched me, wistfully stroking his three-day beard, as though remembering himself when he used to be my age, before he boarded the drunken boat of adulthood, before he knew the answer to the riddle.

  “It’s a house,” the Serbian said.

  “No house has a hundred legs, you stupid fuck,” the Sarajevan said.

  “Don’t call me stupid,” the Serbian said, and rose to face him, his hands rolled up into fists.

  “All right, all right,” the Sarajevan said, as he stood and embraced the Serbian. They hugged and kissed each other’s cheeks several times, then sat down. I hoped the riddle was forgotten, but the Sarajevan would not let go; he poked my knee with his shitty shoe and said: “What is it, kid?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “An elephant,” the Serbian said.

  “Shut up,” the Sarajevan said. The Serbian leapt up, ready for a punch; the Sarajevan got up; they embraced and kissed each other’s cheeks; they sat down.

  “Respect,” the Serbian muttered. “Or I will crack your fucking skull open.”

  The Sarajevan ignored him. “What is it?” he asked me. I pretended I was thinking.

  “Everything,” the Serbian said. “It is everything.”

  “With all due respect, brother, that is probably not the correct answer.”

  “Who says?”

  “Well, everything usually does not work as an answer to any riddle, and it does not disappear and come back.”

  “Says who?”

  “Everybody knows that doesn’t happen.”

  “I say it does.”

  “Everything cannot fit into the palm of your hand.”

  “I say it can,” the Serbian said, and got to his feet, his fists clenched as tightly as ever. The Sarajevan stayed in his seat, shaking his head, apparently deciding against smashing the Serbian’s face in.

  “All right,” he said, “if it is that important to you, it is everything.”

  “Because it is,” the Serbian said, and then turned to me. “Isn’t it?”

  The blazing clarity of dawn: light creeping from beyond muddy fields; a plane leaving a white scar across the sky; drunken soldiers howling songs of love and rape in the next compartment. The two men had quieted down, exhausted by their babbling, and I dropped off. When I woke up, they were gone, leaving the stench of sweaty mindlessness behind. I checked my pocket for the money, then wrote down the conversation and the riddle as I remembered them, and there were many other things to note. On this trip, I was happy to experience, everything was notable.

  In Zagreb, I boarded a bus to Murska Sobota. The quaint hills of Zagorje, the picture-postcard houses and occasional fairy-tale castle mounted on a hillock; a healthy, well-dressed peasant leading a herd of healthy, fat cows across the horizon; chickens picking worms in the middle of a dirt road. I voraciously scribbled it all down—it seemed someone had cleaned and prettied up the land for my arrival. The man sitting next to me was invested in a crossword puzzle; he frowned and refrowned, fellating his pen. His cuffs were threadbare; his knuckles bruised; his ring stone was turned toward the middle finger. Many of his letters stretched beyond the little squares of the puzzle, the words curving up and down. At some point he turned his impeccably shaven face to me and asked, as though I were his assistant taking notes: “The biggest city in the world?” “Paris,” I said, and he returned to the puzzle.

  This happened in 1984, when I was long and skinny; my legs hurt, and I could not stretch them in the dinky bus. Pus accumulated in my budding pimples; there was an arbitrary erection in progress. This was youth: a perpetual sense of unease that made me imagine a place where my discomfort would be natural, where I could wallow in my wounds, in heavy air and sea. But my parents believed that it was their duty to guide me to a good, pleasant place where I could be normal. They arranged spontaneous conversations about my future, during which they insisted I declare what it was that I wanted, what my plans for life and college were. I responded with the derivations of Rimbaud’s rants about the unknown quantity awakening in our era’s universal soul, the soul encompassing everything: scents, sounds, colors, thought mounting thought, et cetera. Naturally, they were terrified with the fact that they had no idea what I was talking about. Parents know nothing about their children; some children lead their parents to believe that they can be understood, but it is a ruse—children are always one step ahead of their parents. My soul soliloquies often made Father regret that he hadn’t belted me more when I was little; Mother secretly read my poetry—I found traces of her worried tears staining the pages of my notebooks. I knew that the whole purpose of the freezer-chest project was to confront me with what Father called “the laundry of life” (although Mother always did his laundry), to have me go through the banal, quotidian operations that constituted my parents’ existence and learn that they were necessary. They wanted me to join the great community of people who made food collection and storage the central organizing principle of their life.

  The food—bah! I forgot to touch the chicken-and-pepper sandwich my mother had made for me. In my notebook, I waxed poetic about the alluring possibility of simply going on, into the infinity of lifedom, never buying the freezer chest. I would go past Murska Sobota, to Austria, onward to Paris; I would abscond from the future of college and food storage; I would buy a one-way ticket to the utterly unforeseeable. Sorry, I would tell them, I had to do it, I had to prove that one could have a long, happy life without ever owning a freezer chest. In every trip, a frightening, exhilarating possibility of never returning is inscribed. This is why we say good-bye, I would write. You knew it could happen when you sent me to the monstrous city, the endless night, when you sent me to Murska Sobota.

  I had never checked into a hotel before going to Murska Sobota. I worried about the receptionist at Hotel Evropa not letting me in because I was too young. I worried about not having enough cash, about my documents’ being unexpectedly revealed as forged. I ran over the lines I was to deliver at the reception desk, and the rehearsal quickly turned into a fantasy in which a pretty receptionist checked me in with lassitude, then took me up to the room only to rip her hotel uniform off and submerge me into the wet sea of pleasure. The fantasy was duly noted in my notebook.

  Needless to say, the receptionist was an elderly man, hairy and cantankerous, his stern name Franc. He was checking in a foreign couple, attired for traveling convenience in sneakers, khakis, and weatherproof jackets. They wanted something from him, something he wasn’t willing to concede, and from their open vowels and nasal whining I recognized they were American. I didn’t know then (and still don’t know now) how to assess the age of human beings older than I, b
ut the woman looked much younger than my mother, perhaps because of her smooth, unworked hands. Her husband was shorter than she, his wrinkles rippling away from his eyes, a dimple in his chin deep enough to put a screw in. He had both of his knuckly hands on the reception desk, as if about to mount it and charge at Franc, who was proudly bent on not smiling under any circumstances. As the woman kept shrilling, “Yeah, sure, okay,” the receptionist kept shaking his head. He had a thin mustache closely tracing his upper lip, like a hair sediment. On his neck were parallel sets of sinister fingernail scratches.

  I remember all this, even if I didn’t write it down, because I spent an eternity waiting for the Americans to complete their check-in. I began imagining a conversation I would have with the woman, should we happen to share an elevator ride, while her unseemly husband was safely locked up somewhere in a distant reality. In my high school English, I would tell her that I liked her face flushed with pilgrimage, that I wanted to hold the summer dawn in my arms. We would stagger, embracing, to her room, where we wouldn’t even make it to the bed, et cetera. Her name, I chose, was Elizabeth.

  “Thank you,” she finally said, and stepped away from the desk, her husband closely following her, as though blind.

  “You’re welcome,” Franc said to their backs.

  He had no interest in me, for I presented no challenge: he could speak Slovenian to me and not care whether I understood (I did); he could easily disregard any of my pipsqueak demands (he did). He took my ID and money, and gave me in return a large key attached to a wooden pear with “504” carved in it.

  Elizabeth and her husband were still waiting for the elevator, talking in whispers. They glanced at me and did what Americans do when they make unnecessary, unwanted eye contact: they raise their eyebrows, roll their lips inward, and brighten up their face so it can bespeak innocent indifference. I said nothing, nor did I smile. On the pear that Elizabeth held I saw the number of their room, 505, and so when they stepped out, I followed them. My room was directly across from theirs, and as we entered our respective rooms, Elizabeth turned toward me and flashed a splendid smile.