Love and Obstacles

by Aleksandar Hemon

  Szmura even took him out for drinks once, to the Rainbo Club, where they would have picked up two redheaded sisters, had it not been for Bogdan’s reticence. I watched them, from the far corner, where I was partly hidden behind an excitable pinball machine. Szmura did the charming, while Bogdan stared at his almost empty glass—he avoided finishing the drink because he couldn’t afford to buy a round. He didn’t say a word, just kept looking up at one of the sisters (her name was Julia) and smiling sheepishly. Szmura kept buying drinks, and finally he delivered his killer pick-up line: “When you get fucked up, we can take you home.” Such bold-facedness had worked for him before, but this time the sisters just stood up and left, Julia bestowing a parting glance at Bogdan, which Szmura interpreted as an invitation to a fuckfest. Bogdan spent the night taking long imaginary walks with Julia, holding her imaginary hand, but didn’t, in the end, dare to imagine making love to her on the spine-twisting Puerto Rican. Dawn arrived with a fanfare of chirruping sparrows, and Bogdan passed out under the weight of what could very loosely be called happiness.

  He woke up late and scratched his stomach and buttocks for a while, yawning. He sauntered over to the kitchen and poured himself a cup of the feeble coffee that Szmura had kindly prepared. Then he read the note that Szmura had left on the table. He stood up to add cream to his coffee, then read it again, and this time he understood what it meant:

  I am afraid, Bo,

  You gonna have to go

  I need your room

  Michael is bringing Michelle

  Pussy protection program

  Pay what you can

  And leave

  In Bosnia, there is a typically cruel and precise idiom that is used to describe the behavior and movement of a frightened person—such an individual is said to be acting like a beheaded fly. Here was the headless Bogdan flying to his room to take off his pajamas, then collapsing on the Puerto Rican to stare for a long time at the unreal fireplace. Finally, he made it back to his room to put on his Jewel uniform, and then he headed for the pantry, as if looking for a place to hide. There he found himself facing the soup collection, despair grinding in his bowels. He read every label carefully, examined each can—but Asparagus remained stubbornly silent, Split Pea and Spinach regarded him with hatred, and he had no choice but to put his faith in the strength of Tomato. He poured what resembled congealed blood into a pot and waited for a blistery boil to break the surface. He ravenously slurped up the potion, while reading the note again, his blue shirt sprinkled with drops of red.

  Pany Mayska’s radiation enveloped him before he had even knocked at her door. When she appeared, wearing slippers with pom-poms at the end of their curled tips, as if she were an aging princess from Baghdad, he told her about Szmura’s note. She pressed her hand against her chest and gasped, acknowledging the imminence of hurt and humiliation. But she believed that МИКОЛа had only done what he had to do, he meant well, and it was a very small room anyway. Bogdan wanted her dried lips against his cheek; he wanted her to hold his perspiring hand and comfort him, as his grandmother would have done, but she stood away. She offered to let him stay at the museum—there was an empty room in the back—until he figured something out. A cloud-let of boiled-dough smell wafted out of her apartment, and Bogdan had the tormented feeling that he was saying goodbye to her. She gasped understandingly again, and withdrew into the darkness of her home.

  The door to Szmura’s room was as heavy as cast iron, as if it led to a dungeon. Bogdan entered, fully aware that once he was inside, there would be no turning back. He saw a disheveled bed, the scree of a comforter in the center, a head crater in the pillow. A full beaker of water stood by the bed, the bubbles pressing their little faces against its glass wall. A tie stretched across the chair seat, like a severed tendon. The digital clock hysterically flashed 12:00. A book (Chicken Soup for the Baseball Fan’s Soul) spread its wings on the floor. From under the bed, a pair of stolid twenty-pound dumbbells protruded just enough for Bogdan to stub his big toe. In the closet, suits were lined up, in a spectrum of colors from azure to navy; below the suits, Szmura’s shoes stood in an impeccably slanted row, like cars in a parking lot. The underwear occupied different shelves: boxers on the top, jockeys on the bottom, undershirts in the middle, all precisely aligned in stacks.

  On the wall above Szmura’s desk hung a map of Florida, with an inset of the Keys. On the desk, there were piles of inscrutable papers; several scattered pencils (calling up the smell of school in Prnjavor: pencil shavings, the wet chalkboard sponge, girls’ freshly washed hair); a computer monitor in which Bogdan could see a curved reflection of himself; a cookie box containing baseball cards, fluorescent condoms, a pouch of pot. In the drawer, a black ball of socks; a grotesquely orange orange; a roll of twenty-dollar bills. Bogdan unrolled it and counted the money: twenty-three hundred dollars—he took eighty, then rolled it back up. There was a holstered .38 in another drawer, loaded and heavy. He unlocked it and pointed it at the window. Bang. Bang. He put the barrel in his mouth: it tasted metallic bitter and sweet.

  A tongue of paper was hanging out of the fax machine, “Stock Alert!” and a confirmation from South Beach Heaven, “An Escort Service You Can Trust.” In the garbage can he found a drawing of a dog humping a smiley face with the inscription “Fuck Ya!” On the windowsill a rotten cactus perched over a pile of photos, almost all featuring Szmura with a multicolored cocktail in his hand, surrounded by a choir of sunny young men and women. At the bottom of the pile was a sallow photo of a boy sitting sideways on a luge, his wool-capped head deposited despondently on his knees, surrounded by flat whiteness. Bogdan recognized the soporific sadness of the boy, the feeling of being stuck outside in the cold when one wanted to be inside, at home and warm.

  He was folding the photo to put it in his pocket when Szmura charged across the room, leaping over the bed, and blew Bogdan’s left eye right out of the socket with his first punch.

  The Bees, Part 1

  THIS IS NOT REAL

  Many years ago my sister and I went to see a movie with our parents. The movie was about a handsome lad on a treasure hunt in Africa, in the course of which he meets a beautiful young lady he seems to get along with. Mother passed out instantly—moving pictures regularly put her to sleep. Father snorted derisively a few times, whispering into my ear: “This is stupid.” He started turning to people around him, touching them as if to make them snap out of their dreams, imploring them: “People, don’t believe this! Comrades! This is not real!” The audience, deeply invested in the trials and tribulations of the hero, who was presently dangling topsy-turvy over a pit of ravenous crocodiles, did not respond well to my father’s prodding. An usher came by and tried, in vain, to silence him. My sister and I pretended to be focused on the screen, while our mother was woken by the ruckus only to find herself in the middle of an embarrassment. In the end, Father stormed out furiously, dragging my sister and me, Mother apologizing to the peevish audience in our wake. We took a departing look at the screen, as distant as a sunset: the hero and the disheveled (yet fair) damsel, deep in the jungle teeming with invisible villains, riding a pair of comically trotting mules.

  THE NIGHTMARE IN INSTALLMENTS

  My father developed his hatred of the unreal back when he was at university. One morning in his dorm room he emerged from his slumber with a clearly remembered nightmare. He immediately described it to his two roommates, the experience still disturbingly fresh in his mind. The dream involved danger, pain, and mystery, although there was also an encounter with a woman. His roommates were transfixed listening to him, while he led them down the steep, untrodden paths of his subconscious. But a moment before the face of the woman was to be revealed and the dream resolved, my father came to.

  The following night, the nightmare resumed just where it had ended—the woman was beautiful and held my father’s head in her lap while he wept. Then he wandered and roamed in absurdly changing landscapes; he came across talking animals, including a dog from
his childhood whom his father had killed with an ax blow to the head; there were more women, including his dead mother. Then he held a watermelon with the distorted face of someone he knew but could not recognize, and when it broke open, he found a letter addressed to him. He was just about to read it when he woke up.

  My father’s roommates, who skipped their morning classes to hear the new developments in his troubling dreams, were sorely disappointed not to find out what was in the letter. In their afternoon classes, recounting Father’s nightmare to their fellow students, they kept speculating— titillated by the fact that it all meant something they could not grasp—what could have been in the letter, and whether the beautiful woman would ever return.

  When my father woke up the following morning, the room was full of people sitting in silence, patiently waiting, their breathing slow and deep. Many eyes stared at him, as if trying to read the denouement from his face. Whatever dream my father might have had evaporated the instant his roommates asked him what was in the letter. Father did not dare disappoint them, so he opened the letter and made up the content—there was a woman who was kept in a dark dungeon by an evil man. Thence my father spun an epic narrative, obviously influenced by the archetypal picaresque stories he had read and the horror movies he had seen at the university cinema hall. Yet, even making it up, he didn’t know how to end his nightmare narrative. He reached the point of confronting the evil man, but could not think of what to say, so he insisted he had to hurry to his international relations class.

  And so it went on: My father would wake up to face an audience simultaneously demanding the resolution and hating the prospect thereof. But he got entangled in all his subplots and minor narratives and kept evading the conclusion, hoping it would come to him eventually. His audiences dwindled, until one of his roommates (Raf, who was to become a manic-depressive flight controller) accused him of lying. It hurt my father, for he was an honest man, but he knew that he could not say that Raf was not right. He was trapped by his own imagination, my father; he slid down the slippery slope of unreality and could not crawl back up. That was when he learned his lesson, he said. That’s when he became committed to the real.

  MY LIFE

  One day Father came back from work with a Super 8 camera, which he had borrowed from one of his coworkers (Božo A., who had a black belt in karate and a budding brain tumor—he died before my father could return the camera). The camera was smaller than I had imagined, possessing a kind of technological seriousness that suggested only important things could be recorded with it. He announced his desire to make a film that would not lie. When my mother asked what the movie would be about, he dismissed the question as immature. “The truth,” he said. “Obviously.”

  Nevertheless, Father wrote the script for his film in a week, at the end of which he declared that it would be the story of his life. I was cast to play the young him, and my sister to play his sister (he didn’t say which one—he had five), and my mother would be his assistant. She instantly resigned from her assistant director position, as she wanted to spend her vacation reading, but the shooting was scheduled for the middle of June 1986, when we were supposed to go to the country to visit my grandparents—we would shoot, as they say, on location.

  My father refused to show us the script, uninterested in the fact that the actors normally get to see scripts: he wanted life itself to be our inspiration, for, he reminded us, this film was to be real. Nevertheless, during our regular inspection of his desk (my sister and I went through our parents’ documents and personal things to keep apprised of their development), we found the script. I’m able to reproduce it pretty accurately, since my sister and I read it to each other a few times, with a mixture of awe and hilarity. Here it is:

  MY LIFE

  1. I am born.

  2. I walk.

  3. I watch over cows.

  4. I leave home to go to school.

  5. I come back home. Everybody’s happy.

  6. I leave home to go to university.

  7. I’m in class. I study at night.

  8. I go out for a stroll. I see a pretty girl.

  9. My parents meet the pretty girl.

  10. I marry the pretty girl.

  11. I work.

  12. I have a son.

  13. I’m happy.

  14. I keep bees.

  15. I have a daughter.

  16. I’m happy.

  17. I work.

  18. We are by the seaside, then in the mountains.

  19. We are happy.

  20. My children kiss me.

  21. I kiss them.

  22. My wife kisses me.

  23. I kiss her.

  24. I work.

  25. The End

  FAREWELL

  The first scene we were supposed to shoot (and the only one that was ever shot) was Scene 4. The location was the slope of the hill on top of which my grandparents’ house was perched. I, in the role of my father at the age of sixteen, was supposed to walk away from the camera with a bundle hanging from a stick on my shoulder, whistling a plaintive melody. I was to turn around and look past the camera, as if looking at the home I was leaving—and then I would wave, bidding farewell. My father would pan to my grandparents’ house, though, strictly speaking, that house was not the home he’d left.

  The first take failed because I didn’t wave with enough emotion. My hand, my father said, looked like a limp plucked chicken. He needed more emotion from me—I was leaving my home never to return.

  The second take was interrupted as my father decided to zoom in on a bee that just happened to land on a flower nearby.

  My two aunts suddenly appeared in the third take, as my father was panning from my poignant good-bye to the house. They stood grinning, paralyzed by the lens for a moment, then casually waved at the camera.

  Each time, I had to walk uphill to my starting position, so I could walk away downhill in the next take. My legs hurt, I was thirsty and hungry, and I could not help questioning my father’s directorial wisdom: Why wasn’t he/I taking a bus? Didn’t he/I need more stuff than what could fit in a bundle? Didn’t he/I need some food for the road?

  During the fifth take, the camera ran out of film.

  The sixth take was almost perfect: I walked away from home, my shoulders slouching with sorrow, my pace aptly hesitant, the bundle dangling poignantly from the convincingly crooked stick. I turned around, completely in character, and looked at the home and life I was about to leave for good: the house was white with a red roof; the sun was setting behind it. Tears welled up in my eyes as I waved at the loving past, before heading toward an unknowable future, my hand like a metronome counting the beats of the saddest adagio. Then I heard a bee buzzing right around the nape of my neck. My metronome hand switched to allegro as I flaunted it around my head trying to defend myself. The bee would not go away, revving furiously its little engine, and the sting was imminent. I dropped the stick and started running, first uphill, toward the camera, then downhill, until my heels were kicking my butt, my arms flailing, all semblance of rhythm abandoned. The bee pursued me relentlessly and unflinchingly, and I was more terrified by its determination than the forthcoming pain: it would not quit even as I was hollering, throwing in the air all the arms I could muster, lunging at incredible speed, a manic mass of discordant movements. And the more I ran, the farther I was from any help and comfort. It was in the moment before I tripped and tumbled head over heels that I realized the bee was entangled in my hair—the attempt to escape was meaningless. I felt the sting as I was rolling downhill, toward the bottom I would never reach. I was stopped by a thornbush, where the sting became indistinguishable from many a thorn.

  Need I say that my father kept filming it all? There I am, verily flapping my arms, as if trying to take off, a clueless Icarus leaping downhill farther from the skies, while a cow watches me, masticating with a sublime absence of interest, suggesting that God and his innocent creatures would never give a flying fuck about the fall of man. T
hen I tumble and hit the bush of thorns, and my father, with a cold presence of his directorial mind, my father fades me out.

  OTHER WORKS

  To my father’s creative biography I should add his carpentry, which frequently reached poetic heights: more than once we witnessed him caressing or kissing a piece of wood he was about to transform into a shelf, a stool, or a beehive frame; not infrequently, he forced me to touch and then smell a “perfect” piece of wood; he demanded that I appreciate the smooth knotlessness, its natural scent. For Father, a perfect world consisted of objects you could hold in your hand.

  He built all kinds of things: structures to hold my mother’s plants, toolboxes, beds and chairs, beehives, et cetera, but his carpenterial masterpiece was a nailless kitchen table he spent a month building. He paid a price: one afternoon he emerged from his workshop, his palm sliced open with a chisel, the blood gushing and bubbling from its center, as from a well—a detail worthy of a biblical miracle. He drove himself to the hospital, and afterward the car looked like a crime scene.

  He also liked to sing anything that allowed his unsophisticated baritone to convey elaborate emotional upheavals. I remember the evening I found him sitting in front of the TV, with a notebook and an impeccably sharpened pencil, waiting for the musical show that was sure to feature his favorite song at the time: “Kani Suzo, Izdajice”—“Drop, You Traitor Tear.” He wrote down the words, and in the days that followed he sang “Kani Suzo, Izdajice” from the depths of his throat, humming through the lyrics he couldn’t recall, getting ready for future performances. He sang at parties and family gatherings, sometimes grabbing a mistuned guitar from someone’s hand, providing accompaniment that comprised the same three chords (Am, C, D7) regardless of the song. He seemed to believe that even a severely mistuned guitar provided “atmosphere,” while the harmonic simplification enhanced the emotional impact of any given song. There was something to be said for that: it was hard to deny the power of his baritone against the background of the discordant noise worthy of Sonic Youth, a tear glimmering in the corner of his eye, on the verge of committing betrayal.