The Lazarus Project

by Aleksandar Hemon

  He was a Baš Čaršija boy, grew up in the old town. His was an old merchant Muslim family that had always lived in and owned stores in Sarajevo; they had never married anyone born outside the city, so they had no country cousins. I can’t stand nature, Rora said to me, as I was leaning for the camera on a leafing tree. I couldn’t tell the difference between a cow and a sheep, he said. Both are wild beasts as far as I am concerned. He was ten when his parents died; an aunt took care of him and his sister. Azra, his sister, was a good, obedient child, went to school, studied, helped her aunt with house chores, but he just slept and ate at her house, he said. The Čaršija raised him; he started smoking at the age of eleven; he was making money playing cards at the age of twelve. Sometimes he would talk his sister into mischief. Once, they filled up with water the worshippers’ shoes left outside the mosque, and then watched the men slop and slip around the mosque courtyard. As an adolescent, he led stray foreign tourists to a side entrance of the Gazihusrevbegova Mosque, instructing them to leave their shoes, coats, and cameras outside, lest they insult Islam. He promised he would watch over their belongings, but as soon as they entered, he vanished with the loot, leaving the robbed tourists to wander barefoot on the cobblestoned streets. He would sell the booty to Rambo, a seasoned Čaršija criminal at the age of twenty or so, whose father used to be Rora’s father’s best friend. At the beginning of the war, Rora would join Rambo’s unit, because it was one of the few Bosnian units with weapons. Before the war, Rora had extended his services to many a foreigner who wanted a picture taken in the midst of the illustrious Sarajevo history. He would guide them around and photograph them in front of fourteenth-century synagogues and fifteenth-century churches and mosques from the Middle Ages which had all actually been built a hundred years ago; he painted broad pictures of bloody battles that had never taken place; he brought tears to their tourist eyes by telling them tales that, he claimed, everybody in the city knew: two young lovers had hurled themselves from that minaret; in that store, the legend had it, magic carpets were woven by the blessed hands of a young man named Ahmed, until one day he wove one for himself and flew away to a distant land, never to be seen again. Tourists loved the ghosts; the stories inspired them to pull the wallets out of their traveling pouches and tip him in hard currency.

  This guide and photographer experience helped Rora when he slipped through the Tunnel out of the siege in ’94. He caught a ride to Medjugorje with a reporter from the Washington Post who wanted to write a story about the tens of thousands of pilgrims coming to see the place where the Virgin supposedly announced herself to undefiled shepherd girls—engrossed in the pursuit of eternal salvation, the good Christians failed to notice the slaughter of Muslims a few dozen miles away. Rora thus ended up in Medjugorje, undercover as a Catholic Croat who called himself Mario. He could speak a few languages, never parted with his camera, so he got himself a job leading herds of worshippers to the place where the shepherdesses saw the Mother of God; he took pictures of them glowing with spiritual arousal. Now, Rora had heard of Jesus—Isus Krist—for he was a famous person, like Madonna or Mel Gibson, but he had never been inside a church, knew little about the Christian—or any—theology, and cared even less. The silly rituals and soul-healing nonsense, however, were ever easy to pick up, and it took him about a day and a half to learn how to push the buttons of exaltation. The tourists wept under the cross as Rora declaimed what he had picked up from the brochure, with some embellishments. They loved it, all those good people from the Philippines and Ireland and Mexico; touched by the spirit, they tipped him generously.

  One day, he was leading a platoon of elderly American pilgrims, fresh out of Indianapolis. With his gigolo experience and Čaršija- accented English he charmed the clean pants off their Catholic asses. When they reached the annunciation site and the pilgrims shed the conventional tear, they implored Rora to lead the prayer in his language, the request implying an Indiana-sized tip. Rora had heard prayers before, he was well aware that Isus Krist featured in them, he knew the sound well, but knew none by heart. Still, he fell down on his knees, put his hands together, bowed his head—an embodiment of piety—and prayed:

  Pliva patka preko Save

  Isus Krist

  Nosi pismo navrh glave

  Isus Krist

  U tom pismu piše

  Ne volim te više

  When I was a boy, there was a division of labor between my parents: my father told stories about his fairy-tale childhood populated by clever domestic animals; my mother sang songs or recited nursery rhymes. One of those nursery rhymes was about a duck swimming across the river Sava with a letter on its head reading: I don’t love you anymore—Ne volim te više. The letter always perplexed me and I spent sleepless nights on its exegesis: Why did the duck carry it on its head? What was the significance of the river? Who was the addressee? Who was not loved anymore? Rora’s prayer was that same nursery rhyme, with the incongruous addition of Isus Krist, and it was while I listened to his story that I understood the rhyme’s inherent cruelty, which was connected in my mind to the inherent cruelty of Mr. Christ’s cult.

  For I remembered being forced to go to church by my grandparents. They lived their traditional Ukrainian lives in the Bosnian countryside and my parents would ship me out of Sarajevo to spend summers with them. All I ever wanted to do was read, but I often had to help with farmwork, water the cows, or fetch my grandfather, who couldn’t find his way back home from the fields. On Sunday mornings I would have to get up at the crack of dawn and they would make me wear my long pants, white shirt, and clip-on tie and we would walk to church, which was four high hills over. In church, only the old folks had seats, while I had to stand, thirsty, tired, and bored, my feet hurting, my ass sucking up the sweaty underwear. Worst of all was the funereal air, the sickly solemnity: the choir wailing songs of suffering, crucifixes everywhere, candles expiring before icons, their smoke sooting up the walls, the hands of the oldest people trembling on the handle of their walking sticks, the younger going down on their knees, growling from the ache in their joints. Everything in the church bespoke death, the heavy-clothed, airless, blind and deaf and decaying death. More than once I peed in my pants. (Why is it that churches have no bathrooms? Did Mr. Christ have no bladder?) At least once I passed out. There was vomiting, there were nosebleeds, too, but there was never any mercy—all suffering was insignificant in comparison to the crucified gymnast’s, and nobody cared about me. I would have nightmares for a week; over the phone, I begged my agnostic-cum-Communist parents to protect me from my grandparents’ spiritual zeal, but they never would, for the dangers of staying alone at my grandparents’ house while they were at church, what with all the knives and matches and garden tools available, concerned my parents far more than my martyrdom—they worried about the preservation of my body far more than that of my soul. My salvation came when I figured out that I could smuggle books into church: behind everyone’s back, in the darkest corner, I strained my eyes to read, say, In Desert and Wilderness, imagining myself roaming the vast, bright spaces of freedom, while everyone else in church acknowledged their sins and contemplated the flimsiness of their earthly existence. Not only did the book do away with bodily discomforts, but I also found intense pleasure in the fact that I was enjoying it unbeknownst to all of the kneeling worshippers. Therefore I appreciated, tremendously— indeed, orgasmically—the image of the oblivious American pilgrims on their knees, struggling to imitate Rora’s incantation, the loveless duck slowly gliding across the river.

  BY THE TIME he told me the duck-prayer story, we were shooting in Uptown: the junky liquor stores; the rusty El overpass at Lawrence; the loitering gangbangers, their pants halfway down their tough asses; the boarded-up Uptown Theater; the run-down old hotels serving as halfway houses and mental institutions; the crews of crazies roaming the streets, dazed and drooling. After 9/11, these crazies became as patriotic as everyone else, I said. They had little American flags sticking out of their matted hair
; there was a barefoot guy who put a sticker reading UNITED WE STAND on his fore- head—his multiple personalities united for the war on terror. Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

  There was a crazy guy in Sarajevo, Rora said, who jogged all over the city under siege whenever the shooting slowed down. In an undershirt and red shorts he ran and ran, and people tried to catch him and save him, because the Chetniks never really stopped shooting, but nobody could catch him, he was pretty fast. He would stuff a plastic lemon in his mouth, and when he didn’t have a lemon he would scream like the sheitan. If you asked him, he would say he was training for the Olympics. Then one day, Rora said, he ran with a bunch of people across the airport tarmac as the UNPROFOR and the Chetniks shot at them. But they shot at the crowd, and he was far ahead of them, the plastic lemon in his mouth, so he made it across. Then he ran all the way to Kiseljak. And now he is in Saint Louis, Rora said.

  As we walked down Lawrence, a bus disgorged a gaggle of high school kids right in front of us. I could not understand their yelping—the only discernible words were “I was, like . . .” They proceeded toward the El entrance. A couple of boys, one of whom wore the Mexican national soccer team jersey, leapt over the bar without sliding his fare card and ran upstairs in long strides. The rest of the kids roared in excitement, becoming even louder as they heard the train above their heads coming to a halt in the station.

  Stand right here, Rora said, and pushed me so I faced the row of kids waiting to purchase their fare cards at the machine. Now look at the camera. A little to the side. That’s it. Don’t look at them, look at the camera. Good.

  I wanted my future book to be about the immigrant who escaped the pogrom in Kishinev and came to Chicago only to be shot by the Chicago chief of police. I wanted to be immersed in the world as it had been in 1908, I wanted to imagine how immigrants lived then. I loved doing research, poring through old newspapers and books and photos, reciting curious facts on a whim. I had to admit that I identified easily with those travails: lousy jobs, lousier tenements, the acquisition of language, the logistics of survival, the ennoblement of self-fashioning. It seemed to me I knew what constituted that world, what mattered in it. But when I wrote about it, however, all I could produce was a costumed parade of paper cutouts performing acts of high symbolic value: tearing up at the sight of the Statue of Liberty, throwing the lice-infested Old Country clothes on the sacrificial pyre of a new identity, coughing consumptive blood in large, poignant clots. I kept those pages, but shuddered at the thought of reading through them.

  Naturally I told Mary everything about my book before I had anything I could show her. In my country, it is bad luck to talk to your wife about your dreams, but, as always, I wanted to impress her. She was, as always, fairly supportive of my literary ambitions, but the reasonable, concrete woman that she was could not help but cut gaping holes in the Lazarus canvas I had painted for her. She found my idea of a Lazarus who struggled to resurrect in America a tad pretentious, particularly, she said, since my own American life was nothing to complain about. I had to know a lot about history to write about it. And how could I write about Jews when I wasn’t one? It was much too easy for me to imagine my book failing and Mary leaving me for a successful anesthesiologist whose eyebrows she had long admired across the surgical table. Much too often I avoided thinking about my Lazarus project, as though my marriage depended on it. Naturally, the more I tried to avoid it, the more I thought about it, the more I needed to do it. And now the Susie grant hovered on the horizon of glorious possibilities.

  Therefore I desperately needed to discuss it with someone. After a long morning of posing and listening to Rora, I could no longer keep my mouth shut. We were having coffee at a newly opened Starbucks that smelled of fresh toxic paint and some extraordinary shittychino. Severely caffeinated again, I talked to him about Lazarus Averbuch, his short life and long death. After Shippy had shot Averbuch, Chicago was in hysterics, because people here still remembered the Haymarket Massacre and the trial and execution of the alleged anarchists who were allegedly responsible for the blood-shed. And there had also been the assassination of President McKinley, by a Hungarian who claimed to be an anarchist. America was obsessed with anarchism. Politicians ranted against Emma Goldman, the anarchist leader, called her the Red Queen, the most dangerous woman in America, blamed her for the assassinations of European kings; patriotic preachers raved against the sinful perils of unbridled immigration, against the attacks on American freedom and Christianity. Editorials bemoaned the weak laws that allowed the foreign anarchist pestilence to breed parasitically on the American body politic. The war against anarchism was much like the current war on terror—funny how old habits never die. The immigration laws were changed; suspected anarchists were persecuted and deported; scientific studies on degeneracy and criminality of certain racial groups abounded. I had come across an editorial cartoon depicting an enraged Statue of Liberty kicking a cage full of degenerate, dark-faced anarchists bloodthirstily clutching knives and bombs.

  I was not entirely sure he could follow my monologue, for he said nothing, asked no questions. Still, I told him the story of Wawaka, a town in Indiana that received a letter threatening it with complete destruction unless the good Wawakians paid up seven hundred and fifty dollars. The letter had been posted in Brooklyn and signed “Anarchists,” so the little town rose up in arms and sought foreigners to get rid of them. But they couldn’t find any in Wawaka, so they stopped trains passing through town, which otherwise would not have made a stop, and thus happily managed to lynch a couple of unlucky Mexican farmhands.

  Finally, Rora spoke up and told me about a Bosnian who had recently been killed by the San Francisco police. The Bosnian had been smoking on the patio of a nonsmoking Starbucks and refused to leave the premises before he finished his cigarette. When the cops arrived, complete with wailing sirens and Kevlar vests and cool shades, he told them, in polite, restrained Bosnian, that he would be happy to leave, but only after he had finished his cigarette. They couldn’t understand him, and they wouldn’t wait for someone to interpret. Ever in a hurry to enforce law and order—for law and order never have time to spare—they choked him to death in front of a disinterested choir of healthy grand latte guzzlers. His name was Ismet; he had been in a Serbian camp, snapped after the war; Rora knew his sister.

  Lazarus came to Chicago as a refugee, a pogrom survivor. He must have seen horrible things; he may have snapped. Was he angry when he went to Shippy’s house? Did he want to tell him something? He was fourteen in 1903, at the time of the pogrom. Did he remember it in Chicago? Was he a survivor who resurrected in America? Did he have nightmares about it? Did he read books that promised better, new worlds? I speculated and rambled; Rora was sipping his fifth espresso. Out of the blue I suggested that we drive down to Maxwell Street and look at the places where Lazarus had once lived, perhaps he would want to take some pictures. Why not, Rora said. Rora made his decisions quickly, without hesitation.

  We crossed erected bridges on our way to Maxwell Street, passed arbitrary stop signs, drove by ghastly warehouses that were to be converted into ghastly lofts; we followed a Peoples Energy truck into Chicago’s New Great Neighborhood, where the ghetto once stood. Nothing from the days of Lazarus survived. Among glassy buildings and condemned church spires, there were colossal crane skeletons. Money castles rose over the space where the Maxwell Street Market used to be, where in Lazarus’s times peddlers had peddled and liquefied rot had clotted in the gutters, where the streets used to teem with people and gossip used to spread like flu. Here children had grown up; here families had lived on different floors of the same tenement, sorted by generations, yet often dying out of order—children first, grandparents last. Here the English language taught by charitable churchgoing American ladies had been transformed by their students into a sonorous mess of Old World inflections. Here lunatics, alongside socialists and anarchists, had stood on the corners in wait for various messiahs, all ranting about the f
ast-approaching better future. Here it was now, the future, it had arrived; here was the vacuum of profitable progress; here it was. We drove down Roosevelt, the former 12th Street. Here Lazarus used to lodge in a cramped tenement house with his sister, Olga. Now there were vacuous junk-littered parking lots, portable shit-booths, and dispirited weeds. Past Ashland, just before the spanking-new Cook County Jail, meaningless fences and condemned houses clustered; in front of the only two uncondemned houses, two thoroughly rusted cars were parked. On the eastern horizon, the dark beacon of the Sears Tower loomed. We didn’t even stop the car; we drove through the debris of the present without touching it, no pictures taken, no film exposed.