Love and Obstacles

by Aleksandar Hemon

  My best turf was Blue Island, way down Western Avenue, where addresses had five-digit numbers, as though the town was far back of the long line of people waiting to enter downtown paradise. I got along pretty well with the Blue Islanders. They could quickly recognize the indelible lousiness of my job; they offered me food and water; once I nearly got laid. They did not waste their time contemplating the purpose of human life; their years were spent as a tale is told: slowly, steadily, approaching the inexorable end. In the meantime, all they wanted was to live, wisely use what little love they had accrued, and endure life with the anesthetic help of television and magazines. I happened to be in their neighborhood to offer the magazines.

  A smokestack of the garbage incinerator, complete with sparks flying upward, loomed over the town like a church spire. Perhaps that was why the deciduous leaves in Blue Island died so abundantly and beautifully, its streets thickly covered with yellow, orange, ocher, russet layers. One day I walked over a dry carpet of honey-colored leaves, up to a dusty porch littered with disintegrating sheets of coupons. A brushy black cat did not move as I walked by; a wooden figure of the Virgin Mary hung stiffly by the bell. Someone shouted, “Come in!” before I rang, and in I walked, into a cavernous dark room reeking of overcurdled milk and beeswax tapers. On the couch, in its center, sat a small priest—the solemn attire, the white collar, the silver-cross pendant—his toy feet barely reaching the floor. His face and bald dome were blighted with red blotches and flaking skin. In his right hand he had a glass of Scotch, the half-empty bottle on the coffee table in front of him surrounded by the rubble of newspapers and snack bags. On his potbelly ledge, around the cross, there were potato-chip crumbles.

  “What can I do you for?” he said, and belched. “Excuse me. What can I do for you?” He pointed at the armchair across the coffee table, so I sat down.

  A salesman’s job consists largely of mindless repetition of prefabricated phrases. Thus I offered him a wide selection of magazines that covered all areas of contemporary living. There was a magazine for everyone, whether his interest be in astronomy or self-betterment or gardening. I could also offer a wide variety of titles for a contemporary Christian reader: Christianity Today, Christian Professional, God’s Word Today . . .

  “Where’re you from?” he asked, and took a large sip from the glass. The color of the Scotch rhymed with the leaves outside.

  “Bosnia.”

  “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers,” he slurred, “for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

  I nodded and suggested a few magazines that would open new horizons for him in archaeology or medicine or science. He shook his head, frowning, as though he could not believe in my existence.

  “Have you lost anyone close to you in the war? Anyone you loved?”

  “Some,” I said, and lowered my head, suggesting intense soul pain.

  “It must have been hard for you.”

  “It hasn’t been easy.”

  Abruptly he turned his head toward the dark door in the back of the room and yelled: “Michael! Michael! Come here and see someone who is really suffering. Come and meet an actual human being.”

  Michael stepped into the room buttoning up, the impeccably white shirt closing in on a chest smooth and hairless. He was blond and blue-eyed, incongruously handsome in the Blue Island dreariness, sporting the square jaw of the American movie star.

  “The young man here is from Bosnia. Do you have any idea where Bosnia is, Michael?”

  Michael said nothing and strolled over to the coffee table, throwing his shoulders model-like. He dug up a cigarette from the coffee table wreckage and walked out, leaving a wake of anger behind.

  “He smokes,” the priest said, plaintively. “He breaks my heart.”

  “Smoking is bad,” I said.

  “But he works out a lot,” the priest said. “Absent in spirit, but present in body.”

  I had a selection of magazines just for Michael, I said. Men’s Health, Shape, Self, Body + Soul, all of them covering a wide range of interests: workout regimens, fitness tips, diets, et cetera.

  “Michael!” the priest hollered. “Would you like a subscription to Body and Soul?”

  “Fuck you,” Michael screamed back.

  The priest finished his Scotch and pushed himself awkwardly up from the couch to reach the bottle. I was tempted to help him.

  “If there were a magazine called Selfishness,” he grumbled, “Michael would be editor in chief.”

  He refilled the glass and returned into the depth of the couch. He scratched his dome and a flock of skin flakes fluttered up in its orbit.

  “Michael wants to be an actor, you see. He is nothing if not vanity and vexation,” the priest said. “But he has only managed to be a fluffer in the odd adult movie. And to tell you the truth, I cannot see a future in fluffing for him.”

  It was time for me to go. I was experienced enough to recognize the commencement of an unsolicited confession. I had stood up and left in the middle of a confession before—no doubt adding to the confessor’s flow of tears—because it had been the prudent thing to do. But this time I could not leave, perhaps because the drama was titillatingly unresolved, or because the priest was so minuscule and weak, whole parchments peeling off his forehead. Having been often pitied, I savored pitying someone else.

  “I’ve known Michael since he was a boy. But now he thinks he can go off on his own. It is not good that the man shall be alone, it is not good.”

  Michael appeared out of the room in the back, his hair immaculately combed but still quivering in exasperation. He stormed past us and left the house, slamming the door behind him.

  The priest finished off the Scotch in the glass in one big gulp.

  “We all do fade as a leaf,” he said, and threw the glass toward the coffee table. It dropped on top of the mess, and rolled down, off the table, out of sight. It was time for me to go; I started getting up.

  “Do you know who Saint Thomas Aquinas was?” he said, raising his finger, as though about to preach.

  “Yes, of course I know,” I said.

  “When he was a young man, his family did not want him to devote his life to the church, so they sent a beautiful maiden to tempt him out of it. And he chased her away with a torch.”

  He stared at me for a very long moment, as though waiting for a confirmation of my understanding, but it never came—understanding was not my job.

  “Be not righteous overmuch,” he said, fumbling the word “overmuch.” “I never had a torch.”

  The door flung open and Michael charged back in. I sank into the chair, as he walked to the priest and stood above him, pointing his index finger at him, shaking it, his jaw jutted sideways with fury.

  “I just want to say one thing, you sick fuck,” he said, a few loose hairs stuck to his sweaty brow. “I just want to say one more thing to you.”

  We waited in the overwhelming silence, the priest closing his eyes, anticipating a punch. But Michael could not think of one more thing to say, so he finally said nothing, turned on his heel, and marched out, not bothering to slam the door this time. The priest grabbed a couch pillow and started banging it against his forehead, howling and hissing in pain. I took the opportunity to slither toward the open door.

  “Wait,” he wailed. “I want to subscribe. I want subscription. Wait a minute.”

  So I signed him up for two plum two-year subscriptions. His name was Father James McMahon. For the rest of the evening, I went around the neighborhood telling everybody—the old ladies, the young mothers, the cranky ex-policemen—that Father McMahon had just subscribed to American Woodworker and Good Living, wouldn’t you know it? A few asked me how he seemed to be doing, and I would tell them that he had had a big fight with his young friend. And they would sigh and say, “Is that so?” and frown and subscribe to Creative Knitting and FamilyFun. It was by far my best day as a magazine salesman. At the end of the shift, waiting to be picked up by the turf manager, I watched
the flickering TV lights in the windows and the sparkling stars up in the sky, and I thought: I could live here. I could live here forever. This is a good place for me.

  Szmura’s Room

  He stands at Szmura’s door, his left hand suspended in midair, reluctant to knock. Flanked by two suitcases, one of which is held together by a frayed rope, he palpitates, out of shape and undernourished. He is clad in a dark coat, the collar striated with lint and dandruff, the sleeves tragicomically short, exposing his dirt-rimmed shirt cuffs. When Mike Szmura opens the door, wearing nothing but pajama bottoms and a front of frightening chest hair, Bogdan utters his lines in stuttering English. “Right off the boat,” Szmura says in a maliciously nasal voice. He steps aside to let our boy enter the apartment, the roped suitcase banging at his ankles, the other one smashing against Szmura’s knee.

  At least, that is how Szmura described it to us later, exhibiting the obscure alleged bruise on his knobby knee. We had interrupted our poker game (my two jacks were waiting to lure Szmura and Pumpek into surrendering their weekly income) so that Szmura could use his meager narrative talents to depict and embellish Bogdan’s arrival. The other players, Pumpek and a couple of realtor buddies he brought along to serve as suckers, were unabashedly American and uninterested, and they impatiently waited for Szmura to finish so the game could go on. But in a likely attempt to distract me from the game, Szmura added, “He is from your lousy country, Basnia, whatever you call it.” My two jacks promptly responded to the insult, and by the time I had raked in the loot with both hands, I had forgotten all about the forlorn foreigner at Szmura’s door.

  At subsequent poker games I learned more. Szmura attempted to entertain us with a repertoire of dumb-foreigner acts and bad-accent jokes featuring Bogdan, and from these performances, I gathered that Bogdan was much like me, an oddity: a Ukrainian from Bosnia, although, unlike me, he was not from Sarajevo. Szmura had no interest in internal Bosnian cultural differences and presupposed that there was a deep, essential kinship between us, which is to say that by mocking Bogdan he was making me the target. I preferred taking his money to taking exception—he had reached the point of writing promissory notes, and I kept them, as if they were love notes, even after he’d made good on them.

  Bogdan had been delivered to Chicago through some lamentably narrow refugee channel—a Uke priest knew a Uke priest who knew about a cheap room at Szmura’s. The size of a closet, the room was in the apartment that Szmura rented from his ex-girlfriend’s grandmother, who blissfully chose to ignore the fact that Szmura had permanently and irreversibly dumped the apple of her eye shortly after banging her.

  As small as the room was, it echoed with emptiness. Bogdan parked his suitcases flat in the windowless corner; took a sheet and a blanket out of the unroped one and spread them under the murky window—unequipped with mattress or duvet, this was where he would sleep. The room resembled an installation in a vacuous art gallery, the reflection of the ceiling bulb on the wood floor intended to signify the false surface of existence, the felled suitcases embodying the transitory nature of life—or more specifically, the life of the subject, shrimped up in the corner against a bare, mispainted wall. Naturally, it was all very funny. During another poker game at Szmura’s (which I missed), everyone filed into Bogdan’s chamber and found the installation uproariously amusing: they guffawed to the verge of retching and fell to the existential floor, while Bogdan sat in his corner, perplexed by all the wisecracks about his artsyfartsiness.

  He did eventually get an official tour of the apartment—an introduction to the Szmura world and its impenetrable mysteries. In the living room, with a sweeping movement of his hand, Szmura offered his furniture to Bogdan’s eye: the claret velvet armchair facing a pseudo-Oriental coffee table, all Chinese curves and Japanese angles; the crimson sofa, with its wide U shape and stern, flat armrests—for some reason, Szmura referred to it as “the Puerto Rican.” Bogdan was allowed to peruse the Puerto Rican when Szmura was absent, he was told; otherwise the armchair was available. Then Bogdan had to inspect the collection of objects on the mantelpiece, which consisted of an upright bullet-casing that Szmura’s venerable father had brought back from Vietnam; a glass ashtray full of foreign coins (mainly kopecks and zloty); a bottle of Grolsch beer (“Be very careful,” Szmura said, “ ’cause this bottle is from Florida”); and a figurine of a cow, complete with a swollen udder, that was left unmentioned. Bogdan also glanced out the window, although it looked over the same alley as did the window in his room. There was nothing to see, of course, except a garage door inching downward like a stage curtain, and a few fallen deciduous leaves slipping inside before it closed.

  In the bathroom, Bogdan was shown the hooks that Szmura used to hang his upper-body (navy blue) and lower-body (azure) towels and his carmine silk robe with a fire-breathing dragon on the back—Bogdan was assigned the fourth hook. He was also told that he must make a habit of lifting the toilet seat, should he put it down for the big dookie, and that he must never shave or piss in the shower. Finally, Szmura pushed a little jar into his face, its bottom lined with yellowish mites—this was where Szmura collected the wormy stuff from his nose pores.

  In the kitchen, Bogdan was warned that the mug inscribed MИКОЛА, its chipped brim adorned with a traditional Ukrainian pattern, was never to be touched. The fridge contained a bowl of intensely red vine tomatoes (“They make the blood strong”), along with Szmura’s black dress shoes on a tray; a plate of rotting shrimp; and a jar of Vaseline, which Bogdan could not fail to conclude was deployed for some form of self-abuse. He and Szmura did not dwell long over the contents of the pantry. Suffice it to mention a large number of Shake ’n Bake boxes stacked on the bottom shelf, and an impressive collection of soup cans lined up in alphabetical order on the top two shelves: Shelf No. 1, from Asparagus to Minestrone; Shelf No. 2, from Mushroom to Zucchini. The soup was not for Bogdan, Szmura declared. Were he ever to open a can, he would have to replenish the collection the very same day. Concluding the tour, Szmura flung open the door of his own bedroom, and exposed briefly a darkness into which the light cut a lambent rhomboid. Bogdan was never to enter this room, not even if invited. “Think of it,” Szmura said, “as a minefield.”

  Szmura, however, would often freely enter Bogdan’s room, opening the door violently. He would launch into monolithic monologues welcoming Bogdan to this great country, which had been built by immigrants, including Szmura’s own grandparents, who’d had to work hard to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and now had a condo in Orlando—which was great because it meant that there was an opportunity for everybody in this country, even a fuckface. D.P. like Bogdan. Bogdan could tell that Szmura enjoyed these speeches; he would stroke the hair coppice on his forearms as he spoke, as if petting himself.

  Szmura’s manner of door-opening was closely linked to his fantasies of becoming an FBI agent: he was an intern at a law office and watched COPS regularly, all in preparation for the FBI entrance exam, which he would take as soon as he graduated from the University of Illinois law school. Bogdan was made privy to Szmura’s FBI fantasies after he unwisely agreed to a demonstration of a submission technique. He found himself on the floor, with Szmura’s knee pressing against his jugular, his elbow and shoulder about to pop. “I could kill you, if I wanted to,” Szmura said matter-of-factly before he let him go.

  Szmura was also a note-leaver: every morning, Bogdan would find on the kitchen table a note in a taut, wiry handwriting that corresponded somehow to the essence of Szmura—the letter T was like his body: straight, slim, angular. The notes occasionally welcomed him again (Feel at home), but more often they were directives (Wash the damn dishes) or announcements (Rent due Tuesday). There were some that stretched themselves thin between nonsense and poetry (The fireplace is not real). When Szmura, abruptly and inexplicably, started writing them down in verse form, Bogdan began collecting them. One day, from the desert covering the ruins of Chicago, a rusty box full of faded patches of paper will be
excavated, and some good archaeologist will discover the soul of a perished civilization in these abstruse verses:

  The door is either

  Open or locked

  I like

  Locked

  Or:

  Your socks are all over

  How many fucking feet do you have?

  You are not alone here, buddy

  Not alone

  Predictably, Bogdan often retreated to his hollow room, lying in the dark, palpating the wall, as if looking for an escape tunnel. Szmura would sometimes bring home a woman—he had an unmistakable taste for the meretricious kind—and Bogdan would listen to their coital exchanges, which always seemed rehearsed, as though they were auditioning for a porn flick: she would implore Szmura to put his big dick inside her, and he would say, Oh yeah, so that’s what you want, bitch, and she would say, Yeah, gimme your big dick, and he would say, Oh yeah, so that’s what you want, bitch, and so it would go, until they approached the climax, when she would squeal in frequencies peculiar to the sound of a wet finger rubbing against glass, while Szmura would embark upon a volley of fucks: fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. He occasionally encouraged his sticky companions to knock on Bogdan’s door and volunteer some secondhand erotic kindness. Only one of them actually did: wearing nothing but roller skates, a buxom part-time Wicker Park waitress purred kittenishly and scratched on his door. Unable to comprehend what was going on, frightened by the screeching of the roller skates on the floor, Bogdan didn’t stir. The following morning, Szmura left a note saying, It was a hit and run / Bo / That’s all it was.