The Lazarus Project

by Aleksandar Hemon

  The one thing I remembered and missed from the before-the-war Sarajevo was a kind of unspoken belief that everyone could be whatever they claimed they were—each life, however imaginary, could be validated by its rightful, sovereign owner, from the inside. If someone told you he had flown in a cockpit or had been a teenage gigolo in Sweden or had eaten mamba kebabs, it was easy to choose to believe him; you could choose to trust his stories because they were good. Even if Rora lied, even if I didn’t always believe what he told us had taken place, he was the only person who could be cast as a character in those stories—he was the only possible cockpit gigolo fond of mamba kebabs. I had my own set of implausible stories, like all of us, featuring people I would like to be, many of my stories variations on the piteous theme of a cool, cynical writer. Besides, Rora’s stories were true to our shared adolescent reveries—I had elaborate sexual fantasies which invariably featured the Swedish lady. He lived out our dreams; all of us wanted to be like him because he was like nobody else we knew.

  I wouldn’t see him much after high school, for he was always away, and I became a studious student of English language and literature. I would run into him on the street, we would shake hands, inform each other that not much had changed in our lives, and then he would outline his most recent trip for me. I would follow his roamings all over Europe on the imprecise, incomplete map in my mind, planting little Sarajevo-youth flags in the European capitals where Rora had cleaned up playing speed-chess and then blew the money on a Gypsy band that played the life out of their instruments all night and all of the day; in the rich towns where he had set straight some haughty Westerner by sleeping with his idle wife and his spoiled daughter on the same night; in the coastal resorts where he would distract tourists with taking their photos while his pickpocketing partner relieved them of their wallets. When he told me about his incredible adventures, I felt the vicarious thrill of facing the world with our impertinent Sarajevo tongue in our insolent Bosnian cheek. Besides, here was a picture of the Gypsies; here you could see mother and daughter; here was my buddy Maron, the greatest pickpocket of Central Europe.

  I last saw him in March of 1992. He had just come back from Berlin; I was about to leave for America; everything was falling apart; there was a bizarre early-spring blizzard. We ran into each other on the street as the snow was lashing, and spoke against the howling wind, as in an epic poem. He wore a long, elegant camel-hair coat, his neck snug in a mohair scarf, his curly hair messed up with wet snow. He peeled his lambskin gloves to shake my freezing hand. Both of us were well, given the circumstances; things around us were getting rapidly worse; the weather was bad, the future uncertain, the war certain; other than that, everything as usual. We stood on the street, in front of the stately Energoinvest Company building, the cold was munching my toes, but I listened to him telling me, apropos of nothing, how in Berlin he used to sell pieces of the Wall to the American tourists chasing the shadows of true experience. He had spray-painted a block of plain concrete and broken it into chunks—the bigger pieces were more expensive, and for the biggest ones he provided a certificate of authenticity, signed by himself. He almost got into trouble when cops caught him on the street standing behind a pile of the Wall chunks, a wad of dollars and deutsche marks in his pocket, bargaining with a couple from Indiana who carried empty rucksacks to fill them up with concrete history. He got out of trouble by telling the cops that he was selling replicas, which was all right, somehow, with the cops and the Americans. His last words to me were of advice about the U.S. of A. Over there anything is true, he said, and turned away, walking back into a blizzard—or so I like to picture it, creatively, retroactively. In reality, however, he walked me to the Pofalići intersection, where he flagged a cab and I waited for a streetcar. In both versions, he dropped a glove without noticing. I picked it up and took it home, where it was to disappear in the war.

  Assistant Chief of Police Schuettler immediately takes charge of the investigation. He speedily dispatches his men to look for clues and witnesses, while he heads over to Chief Shippy’s residence. The hallway of the Shippy residence still reeks of cologne, gunpowder, and blood; the stair carpet crawls upward toward the higher darkness. William P. Miller, the Tribune’s first pen, is already in the living room, sucking on a cigar, ever dandily dressed. Schuettler nods at him, exchanges a few words with Chief Shippy, who is wincing in pain as Foley is bandaging his forearm. He carefully steps over the carmine blood puddle, shaped like an obscure ocean on the light maple floor, to land on the carpet where the young man’s body lays supine. From the floor, he picks up the envelope the young man handed to Chief Shippy. He opens it, reads the note in it, then pockets it. Miller notices, but asks nothing. The chandelier crudely tinkers as someone is walking heavy-footed upstairs. The ceiling is light blue, like the summer sky. “Mother is very upset,” Chief Shippy says.

  In the young man’s coat pocket, Assistant Chief discovers a streetcar transfer issued from the 12th Street streetcar, suggesting that the assassin was an inhabitant of the South Side Jewish ghetto, and another one from the Halsted streetcar, dated March 1—he apparently came up to North Side on a reconnaissance mission. There is a slip of paper torn from a calendar pad (date: February 29) with the following numbers: 21-21-21-63; around the 63 is a broken circle, and over this an X. Assistant Chief Schuettler’s first guess is that these are the numbers the assassin drew in some kind of anarchist lottery, which was to decide which one of them would commit the crime. His suspicion is confirmed by a bag of white lozenges much akin to poison pills—the young man was clearly willing to die for his misguided cause. Assistant Chief Schuettler also uncovers, folded into the inner band of the anarchist’s hat, a piece of cheap scribbling paper with the following sentences:

  1. My shoes are big.

  2. My room is small.

  3. My book is thick.

  4. My soup is warm.

  5. My body is very strong.

  It is clear that the sentences are a coded description of the stages of the murderous plot. Neither does Assistant Chief find it insignificant that the anarchist has been meticulously shaved, probably that very same morning, and that his hair was carefully cut. His clothes are musty and worn, but he doesn’t exude any stench; the man has without a doubt taken a bath recently. It is not customary with alien men of that class to take care of their persons, Assistant Chief tells William P. Miller. It looks as though he didn’t expect to come back alive. “He looks like a Jew to me,” Chief Shippy says, as Foley is tearing the end of the bandage with his teeth to tie it up. Assistant Chief unbuttons the man’s pants, pulls them down, then does the same with his long underwear; in doing so, he slips on the blood and brains, nearly falling on the body, but quickly regains his balance.

  “He’s a Jew all right,” he announces, leaning over the young man’s crotch. “A Jew is what he is.”

  As nostalgically curious as I was, I had no strong desire to see Rora outside the confines of celebrating our roots, independence, and deracination, but I did want to get from him the picture of Susie and me, because in my overexcited mind, getting the Susie grant was contingent upon the photo. Back at the event, Rora had said he would be happy to let me have it. With a straight, bluffing face I had offered to buy it, hoping he would wave away my bid and promise to give it me for free. He estimated its value at a whopping $100, but I was willing to pay the price. He said he would call me when the picture was done. Perhaps he needed the money; perhaps it was that he could not give it to me for free as a matter of principle. Perhaps it was that I could be featured as a dupe in one of his future stories, just another American he sold worthless crap to.

  Be that as it may, some weeks later—it was almost May already, which I knew because I had submitted the grant application on April 1 and I was now getting ready to invite Susie to lunch—I was at Fitzgerald’s, an Irish pub in Andersonville, with a pocketful of twenties, feeling the pleasant tingle of vague illegality, staring at the wall with the pictures of various
cops and firemen stereotypically clutching their beer pints. Breakfast at Fitzgerald’s was my suggestion, owing much to the fact that it was Mary’s favorite pub, the place where we connected with her Irish roots by way of imbibing stout. Rora was late, so I worried, as I am wont to, about him not showing up. When I was a kid and played hide-and-seek with other kids, more than once I had found myself seeking my play-mates at dusk, looking for them in the bushes and basements and behind cars, chasing shadows, while they were being bathed by their caring mothers, having all left the game without telling me. Consequently, whenever I waited for someone, I spent some time contemplating the possibility of that person never coming. I sometimes imagined Mary not coming back home from the hospital; I imagined her so sick of my writerly ambition and the accompanying underemployment that one day she would just decide not to return from work and leave me hanging there until I recognized that my parasitic existence was no longer acceptable to her. This time I was sitting in the window of Fitzgerald’s, facing the empty space across the table, expecting Rora to stand me up, habitually anticipating humiliation. The waitress came by every once in a while to check if I was still hoping for a breakfast mate. I should have never told her that I was expecting somebody.

  But then I saw him coming down the street, tall and skinny, his dark hair impeccably curly, in a leather jacket new and shiny, his sunglasses reflective and cool. He stuck out in the morning Andersonville crowd embarking upon their day’s work of achieving perfection. I recognized him then; that is, I finally comprehended what I had known but had never been able to formulate: he had always been complete. He had finished the work of becoming himself, long before any of us could even imagine such a feat was possible. Needless to say, I envied him.

  He flirted with the waitress, speaking first French to her, then German; she was from Palos Heights and thus unresponsive; he ordered a well-done cheeseburger without uttering please or thank you. I wanted a waffle, they didn’t have waffles, so I ordered a medium-well-done cheeseburger. Then we turned to small mumbly talk in Bosnian: he had lived in Edgewater for many years; my habitat had been Uptown since Mary and I had gotten married. I said, It’s a miracle that we hadn’t run into each other sooner. He asked, Did you know you could get the freshest seafood in the city at the hardware store next to Miracle Video? A Bosnian Rora knew was a fishmonger, supplying ocean creatures to the best Chicago restaurants; the Bosnians who wanted octopus fresh from Florida could just call him and he would drop the order off at the hardware store, owned by a certain Muhamed. There were buckets full of fish splashing in the back of the store, just under the chainsaws— the place smelled of ocean and turpentine.

  And here was the feeling familiar from the high school bathroom: it seemed for a moment that this drab, disciplined, soulless world could accommodate exquisite aberrations like the black mamba kebab or a hardware store offering buckets of octopus. Out of my recently acquired habit of American reasonability I challenged him, suggesting that he might be brazenly embellishing, but he calmly proposed that I go there right now and see for myself. I demurred, naturally, and chose to believe. There was no need for a confirmation photo either, because I could see the hardware store through the window.

  The cheeseburgers arrived in all their greasy splendor. I waffled through mine; we kept guzzling coffee until my ass was sore with fidgeting. I told him my story: I was here when the war started; I had odd jobs, until I finally started teaching English as a second language. Then the column gig came in; I wrote about the experiences of my students, not at all unlike my own: looking for a job, getting the Social Security number, finding an apartment, becoming a citizen, meeting Americans, dealing with nostalgia, that sort of thing. The column did pretty well, though it paid very little.

  People liked it because it was honest and personal and they found the quirky immigrant language endearing. Three years ago, I married an American woman, and she was great.

  It was the speech I often delivered to people who break awkward silences at dinner parties by asking flaky questions. I never thought they would care about particularities, so I never told them that Mary and I had met at a singles night at the Art Institute, where loneliness, transnational as it is, had brought us together. We got quite drunk, Mary and I, sat on the stairs of marble, and slurred about life, art, and poetry. I impressed her by mauling Larkin (“In everybody sleeps sense of life loved according to live . . .”), then almost screwed it all up by trying to grope her too soon. She was tipsy enough to be forgiving; we tottered to the lake appropriately adorned with baby waves, sat on the sand of Oak Street beach until cops told us it was time to go home; we went to hers. I proposed a year later in front of Monet’s breathtaking water lilies. She was beautiful; my breath was taken; we were still lonely; she said yes. Our first child’s name was to be Claude or Claudette, or, we joked, Cloud and Cloudette. When she cooked her stews she wore an apron with a water-lily pattern. Sometimes I thought I had made it all up.

  The party inquisitors were often given to gushing over the neatness of my immigrant story; many would recall an ancestor who came to America and followed the same narrative trajectory: displacement, travails, redemption, success. I couldn’t bring myself to tell them that I had lost my teaching job and that I was pretty much supported by Mary. She liked the narrative trajectory too, for her people also had a history of displacement and replacement, though I was pretty sure that she was disappointed that my success stage seemed to have been suspended. Still, she mailed the column clips to her parents in Pittsburgh, who obediently put them up on their fridge; she suggested that I was greatly talented and would one day write a great book. They couldn’t wait for it to happen, my in-laws. I think they believed that I did not want to have kids before I finished my book, and they could not wait for grandkids. In any case, she was great, very supportive. I was very happy, I assured Rora, because she was great, Mary Field was. She was a surgeon who never cried over dead patients. And her family was great, too. They were Irish-American.

  Rora told me about an Irishman he met in the war. His name was Cormac, and Rora ran into him in the Tunnel, where they got stuck because a crate of wine bottles broke somewhere in the darkness ahead of them. While the smugglers were salvaging the wine that was intended for the black market, the two of them waited and talked. Cormac was entering Sarajevo for the first time. Cormac’s plan was to organize the Pope’s visit to the besieged city. They sat on the cold ground, in the clayish, sepulchral murk, smelling the swill, and Cormac told him he had already talked to the Pope on the phone and His Holiness had agreed to come, with only one condition. I took a great picture of Cormac, Rora said, once we got through: his face muddy, grinning like a lunatic, happy to have emerged from the underworld.

  I could not detect the connection between what I had been saying (what was it?) and the Pope story, but of course I wanted to know what His Holiness’s condition was. The waitress dropped off the check and, before passing it on to me, Rora said to her: “Ah, that is too much. Can we negotiate?” The waitress seemed tired and emaciated, her flaxen hair slipping the grip of a couple of clips, but she smiled. He was a big charmer, Rora was. In my country, charmers used to be as endemic as land mines were now.

  What was the condition? I asked.

  What condition?

  The condition the Pope had.

  Oh, that they end the war, Rora said. Cormac was coming to Sarajevo to tell the people that if they stopped fighting, the Pope would come to visit them for a couple of days.

  How did he get the Pope on the phone?

  He got the number from that singer, Bono. He’s buddies with the Pope.

  After the breakfast, Rora wanted to have more coffee. We went to Kopi Café, a venue reeking of patchouli and former-colony teas. I was already nearly blind from caffeine, but I could not say no, as I still hadn’t gotten the photo. A twerpy waiter, his short little arms ravaged with baroque psoriasis, took our order. Rora presumptuously ordered a double espresso for both of us and gave a precise
set of instructions as to how to prepare them. The waiter listened to him in disbelief, tapping his pen against the notepad, until Rora said, sternly: “Write it down.” A scabbily dressed man trembled in the corner; a yuppie in a full-fledged suit was ordering his grand latte; the espresso machine hissed like a geyser. On a bookshelf along the wall there were travel books about far-off lands: Spain, Norway, Swaziland, China, New Zealand, Ireland.

  What could I do? I drank my watery double espresso (the waiter having clearly ignored the instructions) and, my hands shaking, I finally asked Rora for the photo. I did not mention what I intended it for. It was black-and-white and the glorious absurdity of my predicament was well manifested: kneeling like a klutzy knight in front of an aged lady, touching her shriveled knee with my left hand. I have to say, however, that my face was beautiful. Noble, I dare suggest. There was some honest innocence behind the veneer of panic—I could imagine Susie liking the picture. And the fact it was black-and-white made it all look old and wise, belonging to a different, vanished, therefore better, world. I liked that picture a lot—that was me in it, as I envisioned myself. I demanded the negative.

  You haven’t paid me, he said.

  You haven’t given me the negative, I said.

  He gave me the negative; I paid him. Leaning forward, he looked at my face, as though to assess what I would look like in a portrait.

  I would like to do photos of you, Brik. You would look good, he said.

  Why?

  Why not? Every face is a landscape. Besides, maybe they’ll want to publish a picture next to your column. Or you might need it when they publish your book.

  OTHER THAN GATHERING courage to call up Susie Schuettler, I had nothing better to do. The following week, I posed for Rora, like an honest tourist, in front of various Chicago landmarks: the Picasso, the Art Institute, the Hancock Building, the Magnificent Mile. We also did some dark and narrow back alleys, some cheerful parks, then walked to the Oak Street beach. The day was cold; the lake was the lichen color it acquires when the winds are northwesterly. I confess I was pursuing the nobility visible in the kneeling photo as I postured pensively, frowning, freezing. I gazed at the watery horizon; in a thoughtful profile I contemplated the vast eternity the lake implied. I sat on an embankment wall, focusing on my facial muscles, on the angle of my chin, on my lips being open just enough to suggest a sagacious enunciation on mortality. It could have been excruciating with all the joggers-by stopping to kibitz, particularly since I was constantly asking myself why I was doing it at all. It would have been painful, if it hadn’t been for Rora dispensing stories with intractable disinterest, as though he wanted to return the favor by way of enlightening and entertaining me. Not once did he ask me about my life, plans, or experiences, but I remembered that it was the Bosnian manner: nobody asked you anything, you had to make your story be heard. Rora mumbled when he spoke, swallowing the vowels and slurring the consonants in that particular Sarajevo way. I loved the sound of it; it always recalled for me the faint rattle of the first streetcar of a spring day, when the air is humid enough to muffle the city sounds.