I do not know what Bogdan made of Szmura, or how aware he was of his insanity. Perhaps he was misled (as I had been) by his occasionally human impulses: he bequeathed his Shake ’n Bake collection to the Uke church, to be distributed to newly arrived immigrants; he was known to leave a tip even if the waitress was not fuckable; and one time he left a note saying, If a bird flies in, let her out. Most misleading of all, I think, was the polite good-boy manner that Szmura employed when discoursing with Pany Mayska, his landlady.
The day after Bogdan moved in, Szmura took him across the hall and knocked at Pany Mayska’s door, a nosegay of fragrant lilies in hand. They heard the slow shuffle of her feet, and Szmura said, “Now, be nice here. No talking out of your ass.” He scowled and rescowled, raising his upper lip and distending his nostrils—a grimace that Bogdan would one day learn to recognize as threatening. Pany Mayska was puny, her face powdered and centered around a small rouged mouth, her hair sparse, exposing the white streaks of her skull. She wore a pointy bra that might have been alluring half a century before, but now served as a scaffold for her cavernous chest. Szmura greeted her in Ukrainian, kissed her on the cheek, while she grabbed his lilyless hand and did not let him withdraw it, pulling him in. Her fingers were like claws, withered and twisted. Her apartment reeked of pee and pierogi, of cleanliness and ironed bedsheets. The smell traveled quickly through Bogdan’s synapses until it reached the room where his grandmother had died: Ukrainian handiwork of the same geometric pattern multiplied on the tablecloth and the cushions; obsolete church calendars scattered around; a pensive etching of the poet Taras Shevchenko, glowering over his scrubby mustache; icons of bent-neck Virgins with chunky toddlers at their bosoms.
Szmura asked after Pany Mayska’s health; she said it was fine—both of them all hearty smiles. Szmura might have slapped her on the back, had it not been for her frailty. And how was Victor, her grandson? Oh, he was fine, uncovering ancient Slavic grave sites near Kharkiv. He’d be home by Christmas. And how was Oksana? Ah, she still didn’t have a boyfriend. “МИКОЛa, I would have liked so much to have you as my grandson-in-law.” “ПaНИ МaЙСКa, I am too young to get married,” Szmura said. At this, she sighed pensively, as if Mike Szmura were the unfulfilled love of her own youth, her vanished dream.
Bogdan sat and listened with a general grin that suggested that he was interested but not prying. Pany Mayska stood up with creaking difficulty and reached for a bowl on the immaculate counter. When she put the bowl down on the table, it was full of crescent cookies. “And who are you?” she asked, pushing the bowl toward Bogdan. He gently jerked his head to express his willingness to taste a cookie, and then he told her who he was, with fatigued detachment, as if retelling the plot of a tedious Eastern European movie.
Szmura had told him that Pany Mayska used to work as a radiologist, taking X-rays of smokers’ scorched lungs and the smashed hips of adventurous seniors. She was so fucking irradiated, Szmura said, that she glowed in the dark, bones coiling in her body, everything inside her rotting splendidly. Perhaps it was due to her radioactivity that Bogdan could always sense her before she knocked at their door. He would sometimes reach the door before she had even opened hers. Through the peephole, he could see her wobble over with a plateful of pierogi. She knew that Szmura was at work during the day, but she would always ask about МИКОЛа. She never agreed to come in, but she stood at the door and made him tell her, all over again, what he had told her the first time: He was a Ukrainian from Bosnia, from a small town called Prnjavor; he used to own a photo shop; he had been forced to fight for the Serbs in the war; he had escaped with nothing but the clothes he wore; and now he worked at a Jewel supermarket, packing bags until he could find something better. After Bogdan had delivered his last line, she’d hand him the plate, covered with a flimsy serviette, and displaying the same Ukrainian pattern that dominated the rest of her habitat. Then she’d deliver her own lines in the following sequence:
a. It was terrible what was going on in Bosnia; it reminded her of the Great Famine, when millions of Ukrainians died; she prayed that it would end soon.
b. Bogdan should just think about all the places where Ukrainians could be found: we were everywhere from Bosnia to the jungles of Africa.
c. Ukrainians were very visual people, people who liked pictures; take Disney, for example, who was one of us, a ДИСНИ—he got his many ideas, his artistic inspirations, from Ukrainian national culture, from our love of Nature.
As rehearsed, Bogdan would extend his face into a serious smile and tighten his stomach muscles to suppress any laughter at the idea that Donald Duck was part of his heritage, that Goofy was Ukrainian. He grew to like Pany Mayska and her cookies and pierogi; he learned to bask in the glow of her radiation.
Since she had retired, she volunteered at the Museum of Ukrainian Culture and History, a funest three-story building right across the parking lot from the Jewel where Bogdan worked. Once I saw him wandering over there in a green apron and a cap that would have been fashionable in Eastern Europe decades earlier. (I was pretty sure it was he; I hadn’t met him yet, but the tired gait, more than anything else, gave him away.) Pany Mayska opened the door and waived the two-dollar entrance fee with an understanding nod. Bogdan stepped into a room suffused with a green darkness, its light dammed by heavy curtains.
She looked even smaller and more radiant in the sepulchral murk. Bogdan followed her, feigning interest, past painted wooden eggs and sallow bobbin lace, his chest reverberating with sorrow. It all made him think of the shabby armoire in his grandparents’ bedroom, which he had dug through as a child in search of the creased photos from their childhood. Pany Mayska ascended the stairs to a room that told, she said, the story of our people. The room was curtainless, with dust particles floating all around as the sunlight blazed outside. She pointed at a glass case under the window: a cracked bread trough; an eagle-shaped medal coated with psoriatic rust; a letter whose cursive was melting into bluish waves. Bogdan wondered whether the letter had been brought over from the old country or never sent back there from this one. Then they walked along the walls, studying photos of ghastly, famine-wasted peasants lined up for the camera, as if for execution, and portraits of stiff black-and-white men who had come over a long time ago, their eyes bulging as their tightly knotted ties cut off their airflow. Pany Mayska stopped in front of a picture of a pin-headed man with a thick mustache and round thin-rimmed glasses—that was her husband, she said, with a quiver in her voice. And then they went downstairs, to the small kitchen, where Bogdan accepted a glass of diluted raspberry concentrate, a bagful of almost expired TV dinners that she just happened to have lying around, and a report on how she had once caught Oksana and Szmura kissing, and they were only twelve years old.
I must confess that I waited in the Jewel’s parking lot, with the intention of intercepting Bogdan. It was time, I thought, for us to meet. He reminded me so much of myself, as I had been not so long before: I too had had to deal with the conundrum of the Social Security number, with the recondite rules of baseball, and the immutable laws of living with Szmura. I too had resisted the temptation to slurp Szmura’s soup and had accepted bags of TV dinners and dried Twinkies from Pany Mayska. Once she had even loaned me money, which I had never paid back—which was why I avoided her now, crossing the street whenever I saw her hobbling arthritically toward me.
When Bogdan stepped out of the museum, carrying a weighty paper bag, he appeared taller, clumsily hunched forward, much like Goofy. I accosted him close to the shopping cart rack. It surprised me that he wasn’t surprised. He recognized me, he said—I looked like my cousin Roman, with whom he had gone to school back in Prnjavor. I had practiced my lines. I had planned to inquire about his parents and offer him my generous help. I wanted to tell him to get the hell out of Szmura’s place as soon as he could. Instead, I found myself nodding meaninglessly, like a congenitally embarrassed American, to convey that he had my support and understanding, even if I could not co
mprehend what he was talking about. “You will never know what you escaped,” he said. “You will never know how lucky you are.” He told me how he had buried his parents in their backyard. He had been conscripted into the Serb army and fought at Derventa. He had seen unspeakable things: people forced into minefields, pregnant women cut open, eyes gouged out with rusty spoons, his fellow soldiers pissing into a mass grave. All he’d been able to think of was escape, so much so that he had felt relief when his parents died—though I don’t know whether he said this or I just inferred it. Jewel customers—young blond mothers, old men reeking of mothballs, drunks with paper-bagged Wild Irish Rose—were responsibly returning their carts to the rack. “It is painful to remember what I cannot forget,” he said, possibly quoting from a Ukrainian song I did not know. So I made up an incontestably urgent task, expressed my eagerness to get together soon, offered unspecified help, and took off across the lot. After that, I avoided him for years.
“That museum, it creeps me out, man,” Szmura said, shuddering. “Why the fuck would Bo go there?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it reminds him of home. Maybe he gets cozy with the old Mayska.”
“Maybe you can write a nice story about that one day,” Pumpek said. “Right now, you gotta deal.”
“I don’t understand those people. That old fucking bitch has lived in this country for fifty fucking years, and all she talks about is our people and the famine and Disney and fucking Ukraine,” Szmura said.
“Deal,” Pumpek said.
“It is heartbreaking,” I said. “All that sorrow.”
“Yeah, sure. What it is is dick-breaking,” Szmura said. “You know what the Uke anthem is? ‘Ukraine Hasn’t Died Yet.’ Hasn’t fucking died yet! Well, let it die, man. This is America, not a psychiatric, you know, facility.”
“Deal,” Pumpek said.
I dealt, to Szmura and Pumpek and the two realtor guys, who said nothing, all gambling ice and calculation. One of them kept shuffling his chips while staring straight at me, obviously (and foolishly) designating me as the sucker. The other stood up and got himself a beer. I realized they were brothers.
“I am worried about Bo,” Szmura said. “I want him to start living in America, stop living in the past. Those old vampires are not good for him. And he’s not even from Ukraine, he is from fucking Basnia. I’m gonna take him under my wing. We gotta integrate him in this society.”
“ ‘Integrate,’ ” the brother with the beer said all of a sudden. “Where’d you learn such a fancy word?”
And so Szmura took Bogdan under his vulture’s wing. He gave him impromptu lessons in American history: he made him admire the big balls that graced the groins of the Founding Fathers; he narrated in several installments the great epic of saving the world from the freedom-hating menace (Vietnam, Grenada, the Gulf); he encouraged him to watch television to appreciate the richness of American culture; he painted the vast canvas of capitalism in a few simple strokes: free market, free enterprise, money in the bank.
One day, he invited Bogdan to sit in on a business meeting he was going to have with an acquaintance. Perhaps Bogdan was truly excited to learn something at the Szmura Institute of Integration, but more likely it was much too complicated for him to say no. Besides, Szmura had offered to let him sleep, on weeknights, on the Puerto Rican couch.
“All I want you to do,” Szmura said, “is to sit there and say nothing. If I start going after the guy, or grab him by the neck, stop me. I want you to stop me.” He installed Bogdan in the Puerto Rican, put a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the center of the coffee table, and a bowl of cherry tomatoes next to it. He told Bogdan that the guy who was coming over needed a favor and that it was hard for him to say no, “ ’cause the guy’s father is the mayor of Bolingbrook.” That, of course, did not sound particularly impressive to Bogdan, but before he could ask anything, Szmura was off to the kitchen to get glasses. Light filtered through the whiskey bottle, and an ocher penumbra flickered on the table.
“Everyone knows that Bolingbrook is a mob town,” Szmura yelled from the kitchen. “This guy’s dad has, you know, connections, and they could be useful when I’m with the FBI.”
Naturally, Bogdan was uneasy at the idea of being caught between the Mob and the FBI, but he was titillated too, as anyone would be. When the doorbell rang, he leaned back in the Puerto Rican, crossed his legs, intertwined his fingers over his stomach, and tried to relax his face so it would appear sullen and cold. Szmura walked in with a tall, skinny dude in a baseball hat, seated him in the armchair, and sat next to Bogdan, whom he introduced as his “friend and associate.” Jack was poured (by Bogdan), thoughts were exchanged on certain celebrity chicks and their fake tits. The skinny dude was sweating, and Szmura was spreading his arms across the back of the Puerto Rican, his forearm touching the back of Bogdan’s head. He and the skinny guy both glanced at Bogdan at the same time, as if he were a conduit for an encoded transmission.
“Tell me, Michael,” Szmura finally said. “How can I help you?”
“Here’s my problem,” Michael said, “and I don’t want you to misunderstand my position here.”
Bogdan felt the intense presence of Szmura and Michael in the room; he smelled their semi-criminal arousal, and everything, everything decelerated. There was a woman, Michelle. She was a great, fantastic chick, and Michael sort of loved her. (Bogdan imagined her: tall, graceful, and pensive.) But she had been having a bit of a drug problem. It had started out in college; a little pot, some E, occasionally some hard stuff, but only on weekends and holidays, when everyone else was doing it. (Bogdan saw a dark basement thumping with degenerate music, youths slumped in the corners, the whites of their eyes webbed with blood.) Michael himself had dropped it all, due to his baseball and all, and he’d been working real hard, no booze, no drugs, just clean pussy. There had been some interest from minor-league teams, pretty serious too, the Cubs’ stable team, no less, a lot of money in the offing, a lot. Michelle, though, had not quit partying. She swore she got high only on weekends, but then Michael found out from a buddy of his that she was, in fact, doing shitloads of drugs. She had been fucking her dealer too, his buddy said, so Michael confronted her. (Bogdan envisioned a soundless screaming match, tears pouring off her round cheeks.) She was sorry and shit, but she admitted that she was full-hooked on coke and owed a lot of money to her dealer, some cultural-studies creep. He had forced her to fuck him. (A close-up of a woman’s hand against a hairy back.) Michael went and talked to the creep, told him to fuck off. But the multiculti motherfucker wanted his money back, he was entitled to it, he had earned it, and he had some pretty big ass-whupping friends. Michael was afraid that he might force Michelle to fuck other guys to pay him off. (A tableau of panting, unctuous bodies, limbs entangled like mating snakes.)
“I hear ya,” Szmura said. “So you wanna pay him off?”
“Yeah,” Michael said. He needed to clean up the mess, he needed to put his money where his dick was, otherwise it would fuck up his baseball career, and baseball was his life. Bogdan did not entirely understand all of this, but the grandeur of Michael’s dilemma did not escape him.
“There’s plenty pussy in the sea,” Szmura said.
“I am afraid I like to swim in my own pool.”
“Why don’t you talk to your dad?”
“My family is not known for sensitivity,” he said. “I just wanna pay the motherfucker and get my woman off his dick. I’d love to have his limbs scattered all over rural Illinois, but I gotta be realistic.”
“Sure,” Szmura said, and looked at Bogdan, as if telepathically consulting with him. “Twenty-five percent. Standard rate among friends. How much do you need?”
“Ten G’s.”
“I’ll have the money for you tomorrow, and a promissory note to sign too.”
“I’ll sign whatever you want me to.”
“Fantastic,” Szmura said with a snort of approbation. He grabbed a handful of tomatoes and popped them, one b
y one, into his mouth.
“Don’t take this personally, Michael,” he said, “but I feel that it is my professional obligation to mention that I would have to take measures, you know, should you fail to make a scheduled payment. I might, for one, have to talk to your dad.”
“Understandable,” Michael slurred.
“And for the sake of my business image”—he glanced at Bogdan, who beamed with voyeuristic trepidation—“I might have to punish you. Nothing big, certainly not enough to endanger your baseball career, but I’m gonna have to send Bo here to address the problem.”
“Understandable,” Michael said, and looked at Bogdan, who, out of discomfort, folded his hands into fists—doubtless looking to Michael as if he were getting ready to smash his face in.
“Bogdan here,” Szmura said, “is from Basnia. There was a war there, horrible stuff. He has seen things that you and I cannot begin to imagine. They slice people up over there like fucking kielbasa. So he is a little troubled, if you get what I mean. He’s a bit beyond therapy. But I’m sure he’ll be able to control himself, now that he knows you.”
Here Bogdan fully assumed his role: he flexed his neck; he grinned at Michael, and his left incisor sparkled with the menace of a war criminal. Then he muttered, “Yes,” in a deep, Slavic voice, and grabbed a couple of tomatoes. Szmura leaned back into the Puerto Rican and spread his legs triumphantly, as if to exhibit the size of his testosterone-choked testicles.
A few days later, spring parachuted into Chicago: the air was abruptly warm and fragrant, the grass was suddenly green, as if it had been painted overnight. Bogdan started growing a mustache and dreamt of buying a camera. He established an after-work ritual that involved lounging on the Puerto Rican, reading the weather forecast (Mild with clusters of gusty morning T-storms. Clear skies in the afternoon), while sipping a thimbleful of Jack on the rocks. His life began to contain small, repeatable pleasures.
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