Love and Obstacles

by Aleksandar Hemon

  “I pay attention,” my father said, irritated. “Her mother was killed by a sniper, and her father died after the war.”

  “Listen to him. He never listens to me, or anybody else. That’s what I’ve had to deal with my whole life: I send him to buy detergent, he comes back with three cartons of milk, and we already have a fridge full of milk. What am I to do with all that milk?” my mother said. “I wish I had been shot by a sniper.”

  Naturally, when Alma came to Chicago to interview me, I didn’t dare ask her to sort out who in her family died of cancer and who was shot by a sniper. But she evinced the kind of serenity earned through suffering, therefore unattainable by—perhaps even invisible to—those who had not experienced severe loss and pain; I understood why my parents liked her. I watched her as she was mounting her digital camera on a tripod in my office: the short, ascetic hair and the deft, determined hands; the large, heart-shaped head dominated by grand, dramatically dark eyes; the delicate frown of focus. Her body bespoke a hardened core, an irreversibly petrified toughness, the scar tissue of the soul, but I could still see the little Alma in her, the way she used to be as a grammar school girl: wearing a white shirt and a blue skirt, white stockings and red shoes, her long hair shimmering, meticulously combed by her mother. “Okay, let’s go,” she said when she was ready, and I had no choice but to begin.

  I introduced myself to the camera, told it where I was born, described the part of Sarajevo by the old train station where I grew up. I am so old, I said by way of a joke, I can remember steam trains. We used to crawl under the trains resting in the station, then pull a plug and let the steam out; I burned my shins that way at least once. There was also a movie theater nearby, Kino Arena, and we would go to the movies all the time. My childhood was wonderfully socialist and there was no movie-rating shit, so we could watch whatever we wanted: spaghetti westerns, kung fu movies, German soft porn, communist war epics, all kinds of American trash—I grew up on a steady diet of sex and violence, I said, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with me, is there?

  Abruptly and indelicately, she asked me about the phase when I had impersonated an American commando, pretending to be speaking English all the time. My parents told her that I had had a rifle I would not part with; they had described how I had imagined and executed combat operations in my room, sometimes in the middle of the night, waking my little sister, who would in turn wake them with her screams.

  “Do you remember that?” she asked. “Can you tell me a little bit about you imagining yourself as an American?”

  Amazed once again that my parents could remember that particular phase, I could not fathom the point of recollecting that story. One builds one’s life on consistency; one invests it with the belief, however unsupported by reality, that one has always been what one is now, that even in one’s distant past one could recognize the seed from which this doomed flower has bloomed. Now I could not understand the devout thoroughness of my childhood obsessions, the myriad origins of my overactive imagination—I could not quite summon who I used to be. The camera, I am sure, duly recorded my fidgeting, the shadow passing over my face, the titillating doubt and vulnerability. But once you get in front of the inquiring lens, it is hard to look away; once you start inventing and soliloquizing, it is terribly hard to quit.

  Yes, when I was ten or so, I wanted to be an American commando, I admitted, but you have to understand the larger context.

  I spent most of my childhood fighting various wars. An early one was inspired by the TV series Quentin Dedward: we divided ourselves in two groups and had sword fights with sticks. Since young Quentin was fighting his enemies over a fair damsel, and we had no interest in girls as such, let alone fair damsels, it was over in a week, as soon as our sticks started breaking. Then there was an ongoing war in which we were the partisans fighting the Germans. This one was, of course, inspired by the narrative and the films of the Yugoslav liberation as accomplished by Tito and our heroic people. For the Liberation War, we used the sticks as guns. We set up ambushes in the bushes; we threw rocks as hand grenades in suicidal charges at German bunkers; we attacked the innocently passing streetcars, which were in fact enemy convoys delivering the necessary fuel and supplies to the desperate Army Group D. The trouble with this war was that we didn’t have a real enemy: none of us wanted to be a German, because nobody ever wanted to be evil. We shot at nobody, we threw rocks into thin air, the streetcar attacks were too risky to do too often, particularly since a conductor caught my friend Vampir and slapped him bloody. War is an entirely different thing when you can’t enjoy your wicked enemy’s dying a horrible, prolonged, painful death.

  Then there was a war over the control of the playground that was misfortunately situated between two architecturally identical buildings; our gang lived in one, the other gang in the other. The playground had swings and a slide, a merry-go-round and a sandbox, and was framed by bushes in which we liked to store stolen things and hide when hiding was required—the bushes were our loga, our base. The Playground War had a remarkable intensity, with many battles fought; there would be dozens of kids in each army, crowding the playground, using sticks as cudgels to their pain-inflicting maximum. I recalled for Alma raising high my grandfather’s walking stick to crash it through a cardboard shield that another kid put up as his pitifully feeble protection. We lost the final battle and the rights to the playground when the enemy army received reinforcements from two eighth-graders on their way to school: they swung their book-heavy bags with murderous delight and mowed us mightily as we retreated in disarray.

  So we had to relocate our loga—our flags, our armory, our pride—to the garden behind our building. The garden was rather large and belonged to the old people who lived in the house at the far end of it. The house was decrepit; the walls had large water stains, resembling old maps of imagined oceans; the shingles would simply and suddenly slide off the roof. Before the Playground War, we seldom ventured there, for we were wary of the old people, who would come out of the house and bark crazily: the old woman flung her arms around like a demented windmill; the old man waved his stick at us as if conducting a hallucinatory orchestra. They were clearly sick: both of them wore heavy vests and sweaters in the summer; their legs were swollen like tree stumps; the smell of rot and death wafted out of their windows when they, seldom, opened them. But the garden was a vast territory of potato and cabbage patches and little forests of pole beans and corn, where we could hide and replenish our supply of war sticks. In the fall there were pumpkins; in the spring there were the green bunny ears of young onions. In the winter, it all turned into a mud field, which would slow down any enemy suddenly charging at us; and if there was snow, we could build an unconquerable ice bunker. There was even an apple tree that we could use as an observation tower, on which we could hang our flag. It was hard to believe that we had not thought of the garden as the loga before.

  So we invaded it and conquered it, ignoring, indeed taunting, the old couple whenever they tottered after us in ridiculously hopeless pursuit. At last they accepted the defeat; we threw a rock through their window, and there was nothing they could do. Pretty soon we were ripping out their cabbage heads and beating them to shreds with our sticks; we were killing lizards in our rock-throwing practice; we were immolating snails by pouring lighter fluid into their shells and igniting them. The garden was our liberated, sovereign territory now, our home turf.

  “And how is this related to your American-commando phase?” Alma asked, somewhat brusquely.

  “I’m getting to that,” I said. “Be a patient young lady.”

  A few weeks later, a crew of men in blue overalls drove up in a big truck and started putting up a board fence around the garden. It didn’t take them long to finish it, and we soon realized that we couldn’t just walk in to get our sticks or collect sacrificial snails. When we eventually sneaked inside, we found out that the old people’s house was roofless now; two sweaty men were tearing up the walls with sledgehammers; a bulldo
zer was lying in wait to turn it all into a nebulous pile. The following day, the workers completed the fencing off, and the garden was entirely out of bounds for us, the fence tall and surprisingly solid, devoid of cracks and holes. We could hear ditch-diggers and jackhammers and the din of demolition and construction, but we could not see what was happening inside. Suddenly we were banished from what had always been our rightful territory.

  Finally, Vampir, being the youngest and the smallest of us, was hurled over the fence for a reconnaissance mission. We waited for his return at the steps of our building, passing around a cigarette, discussing, as we were wont to, masturbation and ways to die. He came back with a bleak report. The potato patch was gone, the apple tree was uprooted, the house was leveled, the bean poles and the corn were cut down; there was a huge hole in the ground, its edges marked by stakes connected with a rope on which yellow flags were hung. Djordje thought that was because they had mined it all. There was a brigade of heavy machinery scattered all around, Vampir went on. And near the gate, they were just about to complete a wooden barrack, with doors and windows, obviously their future headquarters. They had no intention of leaving, Vampir said. We were going to make them leave, Djordje insisted, and they were going to regret ever coming.

  In a message posted all over our building, we indicated that the situation was very serious. We summoned all the veterans of previous wars, all the kids who had enjoyed the garden of freedom, for a war council where we were to decide what to do. The congregating place was a basement storage room belonging to the fifth-floor homosexual. We had broken the lock and established our temporary headquarters there, knowing that he would never come down. The storage room was full of suitcases, which were full of old magazines, which were full of pictures of sunny seaside resorts and people on the beaches. The suitcases were stacked haphazardly, so they formed a kind of shaky amphitheater that could host a lot of kids. But only seven showed up: Djordje, Vampir, Boris, Edo, Mahir, myself, and inexplicably, Marina.

  “What happened to them?” Alma asked.

  “When?”

  “In the war.”

  “Which war?”

  “The real war.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I have to think about it.”

  Djordje was presiding; he presented the situation in the starkest overtones. The garden had been overridden by strangers who seemed to be building something in its stead. We had been expelled so many times before that we no longer had anyplace to go. If we lost the garden, there would be nothing we could call ours. If we let them build whatever they were building, the loss would be irreparable and irreversible. We had to do something, now, we all agreed. War seemed inevitable, but there were only seven of us. I proposed that we issue a warning to the Workers—as our enemy was called from then on—to tell them they had encroached upon our lawful territory and so they must leave without delay. The proposal was submitted for a vote, and it passed; the only one against was Djordje. (I was particularly pleased that Marina raised her dainty hand: she had raven-black hair and even darker eyes.) I was given the task of composing the letter of warning. I put my advanced literacy to work and wrote a preternaturally verbose missive using phrases such as “righteous wrath,” “blood-soaked liberty,” and “the course of justice.” I signed it “The Insurgents,” the name inspired by the history of Yugoslavia, whose many nationalities traditionally died in various freedom-seeking insurgencies.

  The Insurgents was a name I had thought up without discussion or approval. Djordje disliked it, as did Edo. But I had written it in blood-red ink, for dramatic effect, and it had taken a few ink-stained drafts to get it right, so rewriting would have taken a long time. Besides, the name Djordje proposed—The Motherfuckers—was too much, most of us thought, as was the way he formulated our anger in his draft: “If you don’t leave, we’ll fuck your mothers and sisters and children.” Thus it stayed as I wrote it, with the understanding that we could and should crank it up in the follow-up. We hurled Vampir over the fence again, and he spat on the back of the ultimatum and stuck it to the barrack door.

  “Now, I have to ask,” Alma said. “What do you mean when you say you hurled him over the fence?”

  I don’t like when people interrupt me; I like to tell stories as I see fit. But Alma asked firmly and, perhaps as an unconscious forewarning, looked into the camera’s viewfinder. It was important to me that she liked me, that she understood my experience.

  “Well, two of us would make a square with our forearms, grabbing each other’s wrists”—I showed her, grasping her thin, fragile wrists lightly—“and then Vampir would step on it and we would throw him up on the fence. He was so light-footed, so limber and dexterous, that he could stand on the fence for a moment before jumping down on the other side.”

  “Why did you call him Vampir?”

  “He had no body. He was so weightless that he left no footprints in the snow.”

  “What happened to him?”

  I paused before I responded, and when I told her he had been shot by a sniper, in 1992, in front of our building, her face showed no emotion. I wondered if the word “sniper” necessarily brought up in her mind the killing of her mother, or her brother, whichever it was, so I hurried to continue the story.

  In any case, the Workers did not leave. The next warning was written by Djordje, who threatened them with harsh motherfucking, overlooking the fact that fucking was not the strongest weapon of prepubescent boys. He gave them a week to leave, and to show them how serious we were, Vampir was to throw a rock through a barrack window after delivering the threat. But he stood too close to the window and merely cracked it; for all we knew, the Workers could have concluded that a sparrow crashed into it, breaking its neck.

  It was a tactical error to issue all the threats, for instead of taking them seriously the Workers poured concrete into the hole in the ground and built a foundation for what looked like a huge building. Moreover, while we waited for their response, school was out, and we consequently lost Boris, Edo, and Marina, who were shipped off for the summer to their respective grandparents. Come to think of it, I can’t remember why I was not shipped off to my grandparents’ that summer.

  “Because your mother was going through a treatment for ovarian cancer,” Alma said.

  That was news to me. I shook my head in disbelief; she nodded, confirming.

  “How the hell do you know that? I’ve never heard of my mother having ovarian cancer.”

  “She told me.”

  “She told you? My mother? She told you about her cancer? Why didn’t she tell me?”

  “She didn’t want you to worry.”

  Honestly, I don’t know whether I would have worried, being busy with the Garden War and all. But my mother’s cancer explained a lot. For example, it explained why I had been enrolled in a summer course of English, despite my strenuous objections—they had wanted me out of the house, yet close to them; they did not want me to know but could not let me go too far, to my grandparents’. And now I knew why I could stay out and dedicate the late summer nights to our war efforts, and why they had bought me a lot of unsolicited toys, including the rifle I loved so much, an AK-47 replica I mistook for an American weapon. They wanted me distracted, and distracted I was. It was because of my mother’s cancer that I became the American commando. Imagine that.

  Anyway, I hated the English classes. We had to sit in a small, hot room, the sun beating into the green shades, whole inhalable galaxies of dust particles levitating around us. I preferred observing their rotation and random movement to listening to a visibly bored teacher, who perked up only when we sang songs in English. We idiotically repeated the words she fed us, following her lead as she belted them out; it appeared her secret passion was to be a famous singer. We sang “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” “Amazing Grace,” songs I could not even hum now without retching. Her favorite, however, was “Catch a Falling Star.” She translated the lyrics for us, and whenever she sang i
t she would reach out to catch the imaginary falling star and put it in her pocket. It was pathetic; we elbowed one another and giggled.

  You see, I had acquired a rifle I loved, I was learning a language only I could speak, I had parents who left me alone—for whatever reason—and what I needed was the right identity that would absorb it all. I discovered it in the movie in which a small unit of American commandos destroyed a mountain serving as a secret weapons factory for the evil Germans. The slow-motion images of the apocalyptic blast greatly impressed me: the mountain belching before its top vanished in a cataclysm, the curlicues of fire emerging from the black-cotton-candy smoke, and then the peace of absolute destruction afterward, the ashes of oblivion floating down, the silence. And there was a beautiful scene in which an American commando was tortured by the Germans, and instead of breaking down under the duress, instead of selling out his buddies, he sang “Clementine.” The movie was called The Mountain of Doom, and having seen it twice in two days, I began crawling on the carpeted floor of my room imagining it as a mossy mountain slope; I hid under the bed as if under a truck; I assumed shooting positions behind the furniture in wait for a German who did not know that his death was around the corner. Hence it was an obvious and natural step to become a sniper watching from my window a Worker pushing a wheelbarrow. I imagined a bullet entering and exiting his head, followed by a spurt of brain offal. At some point, I spoke to myself in what I thought was the American language, a distorted combination of the sounds I had picked up watching movies and singing in class, pronounced according to the rule that my father had once established: Unlike British English, which you pronounce as though your mouth were scalded with hot tea, American English requires chewing imaginary gum. Fow dou sotion gemble, I would say under my breath, my gun pointed at a Worker hosing down his rubber boots. Fecking plotion, camman. Yeah, sure.

  My conversion into an American commando coincided nicely with the escalation of the armed struggle against the Workers. They had not left, of course, for they were well into raising the building, what with the steel rods sprouting out of the concrete and the first-floor walls being put up. When Djordje said that now was the time to fuck some mothers, nobody objected, and therefore the war was commenced.