Love and Obstacles

by Aleksandar Hemon

  I met Muhamed D. for the first time in 1991, at a café called Dom pisaca, or Writers’ Club, adjacent to the offices of the Bosnian Writers’ Association. He was short and stocky, suddenly balding in his mid-forties, his expression frozen in an ugly permanent frown. I shook his hand limply, barely concealing my contempt. He spoke with the clear, provincial inflections of Travnik, his hometown, and was misclad in a dun shirt, brown pants, and an inflammable-green tie. I was a cool-dressed city boy, all denim and T-shirts, born and bred in the purest concrete, skipping vowels and slurring my consonants in a way that cannot even be imitated by anyone who did not grow up inhaling Sarajevo smog. He offered me a seat at his table, and I joined him, along with several of the other anthology veterans, who all wore the suffering faces of the sublime, as though they were forever imprisoned in the lofty dominion of poetry.

  For some demented reason, Muhamed D. introduced me to them as a philharmonic orchestra conductor. My objections were drowned out as the other poets started howling the “Ode to Joy” while making conducting gestures, and I was instantly nicknamed “Dirigent”—Conductor—thereby becoming safely and permanently marked as a nonpoet. I stopped trying to correct the mistake as soon as I realized that it didn’t matter: it was my role to be only an audience for their drunken, anthological greatness.

  Muhamed D. sat at the head of the Table, governing confidently as they babbled, ranted, sang heartbreaking songs, and went about their bohemian business, guzzling ambrosial beer. I occupied the corner chair, witnessing and waiting, dreaming up put-downs that I would never utter, building up my arrogance while craving their acceptance. Later that night, Muhamed D. demanded that I explain musical notation. “How do you read those dots and flags?” he asked. “And what do you really do with the stick?” Although I had no idea, I tried to come up with some reasonable explanations, if only to expose his ignorance, but he just shook his head in discouragement. Almost every night I spent at the Table, there was a point where I failed to enlighten the poets as to how music was written, thereby confirming their initial assumption that I was a lousy conductor, but a funny guy. I wondered how Muhamed D. could write a poem about Beethoven while being entirely oblivious of the way the damn notation system worked.

  But the poets liked me, and I hoped that some of the pretty literature students who frequently served as their muses would like me too. I particularly fancied three of them: Aida, Selma, and Ljilja, all of whom pronounced soft consonants while pouting their moist lips, emitting energy that caused instant erections. I kept trying to get at least one of them away from the Table, so that I could impress her with a recitation of “Love and Obstacles.” Not infrequently, I got sufficiently inebriated to find myself loudly singing a sevdalinka, sending significant glances toward the three muses, and emulating conducting moves for their enjoyment, while a brain-freezing vision of laying all three of them simultaneously twinkled on my horizon. But it never worked out: I couldn’t sing, my conducting was ludicrous, I never recited any of my poems, I wasn’t even published, and instead I had to listen to Muhamed D. singing his sevdalinka with a trembling voice that opened the worlds of permanent dusk, where sorrow reigned and the mere sight of a woman’s neck caused maddening bouts of desire. The eyes of the literature muses would fill with tears, and he could pick whichever volunteer he chose to amuse him for the rest of the night. I’d totter home alone, composing a poem that would show them all that Muhamed D. had nothing on me, that would make Aida, Selma, and Ljilja regret never having let me touch them. I celebrated and sang myself on empty Sarajevo streets, and by the time I had unlocked the door and sneaked into my bed without waking up my poetry-free parents, I would have a masterpiece, so formidable and memorable that I would not bother to write it down. The next morning, I would wake up with my skin oozing a sticky alcoholic sweat and the sappy masterpiece gone forever from my mind. Then I would embark upon a furious series of un-rhymed, anarchic poems, ridiculing Muhamed D. and the Table and the muses in impenetrably coded words, envisioning the devoted scholar who, one day, after decades of exploring my notes and papers, would decode the lines and recognize how tragically misunderstood and unappreciated I was. After writing all day, I’d head off to the Writers’ Club and start the whole process again.

  One night, Muhamed D. recited a new poem called “Sarajevo,” which had two boys (wisely chewing gum, / swallowing peppermint words) walking the streets with a soccer ball (They throw the ball through the snow, across Mis Irbina Street / as if lobbing a hand grenade across Lethe). They accidentally drop the ball into the Miljacka, and the ball floats until it is caught in a whirlpool. They try to retrieve it with a device I had used once upon a time on my own lost ball: a crate is strung on a rope that stretches from bank to bank, and boys on either bank hold the ends of the rope, manipulating it until the ball is caught. Muhamed D. watches them from a bridge:

  Whichever way I go, now, I’ll reach the other shore.

  Old, I no longer know what they know: how to regain

  what is meant to be lost. On the river surface

  snowflake after snowflake perishes.

  He began his recitation in a susurrous voice, riding a tide of iambic throttles and weighted caesuras up to thunderous orgasmic heights, from where he returned to a whisper and then ceased altogether, his head bowed, his eyes closed. He seemed to have fallen asleep. The Table was silent, the muses entranced. So I said, “Fuck, that’s old. What are you now—a hundred?” Uncomfortable with the silence, doubtless as jealous as I was, the rest of the Table burst out laughing, slapping their knees. I sensed the solidarity in mocking Muhamed, and for the first time I thought I would be remembered for something other than conducting—I would be remembered for having made Muhamed old. He smiled at me benevolently, already forgiving. But that very night, everybody at the Table started calling him “Dedo”—Old Man.

  This took place just before the war, in the relatively rosy times when we were euphoric with the imminence of disaster—we drank and laughed and experimented with poetic forms into the late hours. We tried to keep the war away from the Table, but now and then a budding Serbian patriot would start ranting about the suppression of his people’s culture, whereupon Dedo, with his newly acquired elder status, would indeed suppress him with a sequence of carefully arranged insults and curses. Inevitably, the nationalist would declare Dedo an Islamofascist and storm off, never to return, while we, the fools, laughed uproariously. We knew—but we didn’t want to know—what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.

  Around that time I found a way to come to the United States for a little while. In the weeks before I left, I roamed the city, haunting the territories of my past: here was a place where I had once stumbled and broken both of my index fingers; I was sitting on this bench when I first wedged my hand into Azra’s tight brassiere; there was the kiosk where I had bought my first pack of cigarettes (Chesterfields); that was the fence that had torn a scar into my thigh as I was jumping it; in that library I had checked out a copy of The Dwarf from a Forgotten Country for the first time; on this bridge Dedo had stood, watching the boys recover the ball, and one of those boys could have been me.

  Finally, I selected, reluctantly, some of my poems to show to Dedo. I met him at the Table early one afternoon, before everyone else arrived. I gave him the poems, and he read them, while I smoked and watched slush splash against the windows, then slide slowly down.

  “You should stick to conducting,” he said finally, and lit his cigarette. His eyebrows looked like hirsute little comets. The clarity of his gaze was what hurt me. These poems were told in the voice of postmodern Old Testament prophets, they were the cries of tormented individuals whose very souls were being depleted by the plague of relentless modernity. Was it possible, my poems asked, to maintain the reality of a person’s self in this cruelly unreal world? The very inadequacy of poetry was a testimony to the disintegration of humanity, et cetera. But of course, I explained
none of that. I stared at him with watery eyes, pleading for compassion, while he berated my sloppy prosody and the cold selfcenteredness that was exactly the opposite of soul. “A poet is one with everything,” he said. “You are everywhere, so you are never alone.” Everywhere, my ass—the water dried in my eyes, and with an air of triumphant rationalism I tore my poetry out of his hands and left him in the dust of his neo-Romantic ontology. But outside—outside I dumped those prophetic poems, the founding documents of my life, into a gaping garbage container. I never went back to the Table, I never wrote poetry again, and a few days later I left Sarajevo for good.

  My story is boring: I was not in Sarajevo when the war began; I felt helplessness and guilt as I watched the destruction of my hometown on TV; I lived in America. Dedo, of course, stayed for the siege—if you are the greatest living Bosnian poet, if you write a poem called “Sarajevo,” then it is your duty to stay. I contemplated going back to Sarajevo early in the war, but realized that I was not and never would be needed there. So I struggled to make a living, while Dedo struggled to stay alive. For a long time, I didn’t hear anything about him, and to tell the truth, I didn’t really investigate—I had many other people to worry about, starting with myself. But news of him reached me occasionally: he signed some petitions; for one reason or another, he wrote an open letter to the pope; to an audience of annoyed Western diplomats he recited Herbert’s “Report from the Besieged City” (Too old to carry arms and fight like the others—/ they graciously gave me the inferior role of chronicler). Once I heard that he had been killed; a hasty paper even published an obituary. But it turned out that he had only been wounded—he had come back from the other side of Lethe with a bullet in his thigh—and he wrote a poem about it. The paper that published the obituary published the poem too. Predictably, it was called “Resurrection.” In it, he walks the city as a ghost, after the siege, but nobody remembers him, and he says to them:

  Can’t you recall me? I am the one

  Who carried upstairs your bloodied canisters,

  Who slipped his slimy hand under the widow’s skirt.

  Who wailed the songs of sorrow,

  Who kept himself alive when fools were willing to die.

  Then he meets himself after the siege, older than old, and says to himself, alluding to Dante, I did not know death hath undone so much. It was a soul-rending poem, and I found myself hating him for it: he had written it practically on his deathbed, with no apparent effort, as his thigh wound throbbed with pus. I tried to translate it, but neither my Bosnian nor my English was good enough.

  And he kept writing like a maniac, as though his resurrected life was to be entirely given over to poetry. Poems, mimeographed on coarse paper, bound in a frail booklet, were sent to me by long-unheard-from friends, carrying the smell (and microorganisms) of the many hands that had touched them on their way out of besieged Sarajevo. There were, naturally, images of death and destruction: dogs tearing at one another’s throats; a boy rolling the body of a sniper-shot man up the street, much like Sisyphus; a surgeon putting together his wife’s face after it has been blown apart by shrapnel, a piece of her cheek missing, the exact spot where he liked to plant his good-night kiss; clusters of amputated limbs burning in a hospital oven, the poet facing the toy hell. But there were also poems that were different, and I cannot quite define the difference: A boy kicks a soccer ball up so that it lands on the nape of his neck, and he balances it there; a young woman inhales cigarette smoke and holds it in as she smiles, everything stopping at that moment: No tracing bullets lighting up the sky, / no pain in my riven thigh / no sounds; a foreign conductor hangs on a rope, like a deft spider, over his orchestra playing the Eroica in a burnt-out building. I must confess that I believed for a moment that I was the conductor, that I was part of Dedo’s world, that something of me remained in Sarajevo.

  Still, living displaces false sentiments. I had to go on with my American life, keeping Dedo out of it, busying myself with local survival, getting jobs, getting into graduate school, getting laid. Every once in a while I unleashed the power of his words upon a sensitive American woman. The first one was Cheryl, the idle wife of a Barrington lawyer, whom I met at a Bosnian benefit dinner that she was kind enough to organize. At least one Bosnian was required to benefit from her benefit dinner, so she tracked me down through a friend, an expert in disability studies with whom I had read a paper at a regional MLA conference. Cheryl was generous beyond the dinner; before she went back to Barrington, I took her to my tiny studio—a monument to the struggles of immigration, with its sagging mattress, rotting shower curtain, and insomniac drummer next door. I recited Dedo’s poems to her, pretending they were my own. She particularly liked the one about the man walking, during a lull in shelling, with his rooster on a leash, a soul fastened to a dying animal. Then I removed the permed tresses from her forehead so that I could kiss it and slowly undressed her. Cheryl writhed in my embrace, kissed me with clammy passion, hoisted her hips, and moaned with pleasure, as though the intensity of her orgasm would directly succor the Bosnian resistance. I could not help thinking, in the end, that she was fucking Dedo, for it was his words that had seduced her. But I took what was given and then rolled off into the darkness of my actual life.

  After the charitable Cheryl, I was somewhat ashamed and for a while I could not stand to look at Dedo’s poetry. I finished graduate school; I sold my stories; I was an author now. And somewhere along the way the war ended. On my book tour, I traveled around the country, reading to minuscule audiences, talking about Bosnia to a mixture of international relations and South Slavic languages students, simplifying the incomprehensible, and fretting all along that an enraged reader would stand up and expose me as a fraud, as someone who had no talent—and therefore no right—to talk about the suffering of others. It never happened: I was Bosnian, I looked and conducted myself like a Bosnian, and everyone was content to think that I was in constant, uninterrupted communication with the tormented soul of my homeland.

  At one of those readings, I met Bill T., a professor of Slavic languages. He seemed to speak all of them, Bosnian included, and he was translating Dedo’s latest book. With his red face, long, curly beard, and squat, sinewy body, Bill looked like a Viking. His ferocity was frightening, so I immediately flattered him by saying how immeasurably important it was to have Dedo’s poetry translated into English. We went out drinking, and Bill T. drank like a true Viking too, while detailing the saga of his adventures in Slavic lands: a month with shepherds in the mountains of Macedonia; a year of teaching English in Siberia; his interviews with Solidarnosz veterans; the Slovenian carnival songs he had recorded. He had also spent some years, just for the hell of it, in Guatemala, Honduras, and Marrakech. The man had been everywhere, had done everything, and the drunker I got, the greater he was, and the more of nothing I had to say.

  This was in Iowa City, I believe. I woke up the next morning on Bill T.’s sofa. My pants were laid out on the coffee table. Along the walls were dusty stacks of books. In the light fixture above me I could see the silhouettes of dead flies. A ruddy-faced boy with a gossamer mustache sat on the floor next to the sofa and watched me with enormous eyes.

  “What are you doing here?” the boy asked calmly.

  “I don’t really know,” I said, and sat up, exposing my naked thighs. “Where is Bill?”

  “He stepped out.”

  “Where is your mom?”

  “She’s busy at the moment.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Ethan.”

  “Nice to meet you, Ethan.”

  “Likewise,” Ethan said. Then he grabbed my pants and threw them at me.

  It was while I was slouching down the linden-lined street, where people nodded at me from sunny porches and able-bodied squirrels raced up and down the trees—it was then that the story Bill had told me the night before about Dedo fully hit me and I had to sit down on the curb to deal with it.

  Dedo had come to Iowa City, Bill sa
id, to be in the International Writing Program for twelve weeks. Bill had arranged it all, and volunteered to put Dedo up in the room above his garage. Dedo arrived with a small duffel bag, emaciated and exhausted, with the English he picked up while translating Yeats and a half-gallon of Jack Daniel’s he picked up in a duty-free shop. The first week, he locked himself in above the garage and drank without pause. Every day, Bill knocked on the door, imploring him to come out, to meet the dean and the faculty, to mingle. Dedo refused to open the door and eventually stopped responding altogether. Finally, Bill broke the door down, and the room was an unreal mess: Dedo had not slept in the bed at all, and it was inexplicably wet; there were monstrous, bloody footprints everywhere, because Dedo had apparently broken the Jack Daniel’s bottle, then walked all over it. A box of cookies had been torn open and the cookies were crushed but not eaten. In the trash can were dozens of Podravka liver pâté cans, cleaned out and then filled with cigarette butts. Dedo was sleeping on the floor in the corner farthest from the window, facing the wall.

  They subjected him to repeated cold showers; they cleaned him up and aired out the room; they practically force-fed him. For another week he wouldn’t stick his nose out of the room. And then, Bill said, he began writing. He did not sleep for a week, delivering poems first thing in the morning, demanding translations by the afternoon. “American poets used to be like that,” Bill said wistfully. “Now all they do is teach and complain and fuck their students on the sly.”