The Lazarus Project

by Aleksandar Hemon

  Rora walked out of the bathroom, glanced at the TV disinterestedly, and switched on the light: for a moment, the two narrow cots and the socialist-fifties furniture were overlit like a prison cell, until a couple of bulbs hiccupped and died; the air stank of lead-based paint and suicide. How do you get to be a karaoke star?

  The karaoke show ended. I could not sleep, so we went out for a stroll. The darkness was overtaking everything, and we had no map; we simply sought the less dark streets, guided by the rare, arrhythmic streetlights. Even the lit streets seemed abandoned under the pressure of the advancing murk.

  My grandfather had chicken blindness; he could see nothing in twilight, sentimental sunsets were invisible to him. Dusk often caught him out in the fields, where he went to fetch the cows and bring them back home. A crew of his grandchildren would be dispatched on a search mission, and we would find him staring into a darkness visible only to him. One of us would grasp his hand and take him home, while the rest led the cows dropping a trail of fresh turd behind them, as though planning to return to the same sweet pastures tomorrow.

  He eventually became completely blind. He had always been a slow man, but after he had sunk into the aquarium of darkness, he became even slower; now time flowed differently for him. We would take him for a walk to the hives, where he sat listening to the tranquilizing buzz of working bees. That was a distance of fifty yards or so from the house, but it took him forever. He put one foot an inch in front of the other, not lifting it, shuffling through dirt and grass and chicken shit. Shortly before he died, he would not even leave the house—we would take him to the front door, his legs and limbs so weak and tired that the threshold was much too high. He would stand there, facing the vast landscape of nothingness.

  After he lost his sight, he became entirely removed from the present: he could not remember our names, did not know us as his grandchildren. We became the Briks he had left behind in Ukraine to come to Bosnia in 1908: Romans and Ivans and Mykolas and Zosyas. He would talk to us, ask us questions we had to make up answers for (Did Ivan shake the bee swarm off the apple tree? Has Zosya fed the ducks?). Sometimes, he would snap out of his death-rehearsal slumber and yelp: “Why did you leave me in the woods?” It was very funny—nothing is as funny to kids as adult discombobulation—and then we would have to walk him around the kitchen, inch by inch, then return him to the sofa on which he was spending his final years. The circuit around the kitchen was his journey home. Once I took him for a kitchen walk, to the cupboard and back, a total of three yards that took us an eternity to cover. And suddenly we were in Lviv, he was nine, I was his father, we had gone to church, and now he wanted after-church rose candy as promised. When I said I couldn’t give it to him, my grandfather cried like a child. I returned him to the sofa, he turned toward the wall, prayed, and wept, until he fell asleep.

  So, here I was in Lviv again. We should look for some candy, I said to Rora.

  In Sarajevo under siege, Rora said, there was no electricity for months. When it came back, all the lights not turned off weeks ago would go on, all the radios and TV sets would start blasting, buildings would light up, coming awake. You could see the city in a different light, flashing out the weirdness of war: burnt cars like crushed cockroaches in the streets, dogs trotting away toward the safety of the shadow, couples making love in the darkness, suddenly recognizing the haggardness of their bodies. But after a few minutes the frail electrical system would collapse, and the darkness returned. It was for the better, for if the lights stayed on, our friends from the hills could pound us and kill us at night as well, picking out all the lit targets, Rora said. We dreamt of light, but hoped for darkness.

  Have you ever seen a fleet of tracer bullets in the night? he asked me.

  No, I said.

  It’s a beautiful sight.

  Early in the war, Rambo’s unit would go to requisition whatever was left in the stores. They went out at night, the truck’s headlights extinguished, smoking strictly prohibited. We were cleaning out a shoe store in Marin-dvor one night—I’ll remember it for the rest of my life, Rora said. We carried out boxes of goods: high-heel shoes, children’s sneakers, steel-toe boots, sandals, anything. I got a pair of stiletto-heel boots for my sister, but she never wore them. Rambo stood with the silver gun glintless in his hand, his adjutants’ rifles pointed up at the windows of the buildings around, in case some unwise witness-wannabe peeked from behind the curtain. There were no lights in those homes and the curtains blacked out the windows, so when some concerned citizen spread his curtain apart, Rora could see, from a hundred yards away, the white of his eye sparkling. Rambo would shoot at it and the eye would disappear. What does not need to be seen will not be seen.

  I CALLED MARY from Lviv the next day, after some aimless morning ambling. It was early in Chicago, but she was not home; I had visions of a telegenic doctor amusing her with medical double entendres; it took a few tries before she answered her cell phone. She had just finished a surgery; it was hot as hell in Chicago; she was going to Pittsburgh for the weekend. George and Rachel were going to Rome in a couple of weeks, she said; they had never been out of the country, but Rome was Mom’s dream. Dad agreed to go, because Mom had always wanted to see all the churches and pray with the Pope. Dad was worried about the fact that he couldn’t speak Italian, and he was worried about the Europeans. (I was the only European George the Dad knew, the obvious implication being that if all other Europeans were like me, there was reason to be worried.) Mary missed me; the hot summer made her pissy; she was working a lot; she was thinking about taking a long leave of absence when I came back. How was the Lazarus thing going? She was not happy I was away, I could hear it in her voice. “It’s going well,” I said. “I’m making a lot of mental notes.” “Great,” she said. “I’m so happy for you.” I told her Lviv was depressing; I told her about the natives not using deodorant, the women not shaving their legs, which ought to have discouraged her possible jealousy. I told her about the darkness, the filthy streets, and the Soviet architecture; about the slapdash currency-exchange booths attended by sweat-shirted goons laundering money by hand; about the decrepit man in Cossack attire, with an acrid, corpsy smell, selling fresh-off-the-press copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I told her about the weak water pressure in the hotel and how hard it was to take a shower. I listed enough grievances to make her feel that I was working hard, that the trip was nothing if not challenging. We ended the conversation loving each other.

  It seemed that we loved each other better when there were large swaths of two continents and an ocean between us. The daily work of love was often hard to perform at home. While she was in the hospital, I longed for her, and when she came back, she was too tired to attend to my needs and desires. I would get into complaining about her coldness and distance, about our marriage requiring more than reading the newspaper together on Sunday mornings. She was tired, she would say, because she worked a lot; someone had to earn some money. I would reassert that I wanted to write and was preparing to do so, and I would list all the things I had gone through in my life, all of my contributions to our marital unit. Every once in a while, we would find ourselves screaming into each other’s face, whereupon I would start furiously breaking things—I had been especially attracted to vases, for they flew well and shattered nicely.

  One morning in Chicago I had tiptoed to the kitchen with the intention of making some coffee. While customarily spilling coffee grounds all over the counter, I spotted a can in the corner whose red label read SADNESS. Was there so much of it they could can it and sell it? A bolt of pain went through my intestines before I realized that it was not SADNESS but SARDINES. It was too late for recovery, for sadness was now the dark matter in the universe of still objects around me: the salt and pepper shakers; the honey jar; the bag of sun-dried tomatoes; the blunt knife; a desiccated loaf of bread; the two coffee cups, waiting. My country’s main exports are stolen cars and sadness.

  When I stepped out of the post office
from which I called Mary, sadness seemed spread wide and thick all over Lviv: a couple of boys were washing a white Lada in the middle of the street; a man wearing an obsolete Red Army hat stood over a blanket stretched on the pavement on which the complete works of Charles Dickens were spread out; a Darth Vader-like Orthodox priest glided along the street, his feet invisible under the long black robe. The buildings with the high Austro-Hungarian windows and reserved ornaments were begrimed with a thick layer of despair.

  And I could see then that Lazarus griped to Olga about the meaninglessness of his egg-packing job, and she implored him to be patient, begged him not to write to Mother about it and worry her with his disappointments. But he was sick of living in the ghetto, exhausted by the cold in Chicago. People here snarl and frown a lot, he wrote; he had seen neither a smile nor the sun in months. What is life without beauty, love, and justice? Be patient, his mother wrote him back, it is just the beginning, think about the good things ahead of you. Many people want to go to America; you are lucky, you and Olga are together, you have a job. He wrote back about the crowded streetcars, about the Chicago beyond the ghetto, where streets were lined with gold, about his friend Isador, who was smart and funny. He worried about his mother’s health, her heart, her varicose legs; he was saving money to buy her good shoes. Do not stand on your feet for too long, Mother. And do not be oversad, for you must take care of your heart. Olga and I need your heart. I want to rest my head on your chest and hear your heart beating.

  In a park by a church, kids in holey canvas shoes played soccer with a deflated ball, the smallest one in a shirt with Shevchenko stamped on its back. A cluster of old men convened around a bench, watching a chess game. I wondered what happened to Lazarus’s mother after his death. Olga probably wrote her a letter, the letter must have traveled for months, the letter that said Lazarus was no more. As it traveled, Lazarus was still alive for her: she worried about his working so hard, about him walking out in the cold with his hair wet, about his congenital sadness. She hoped he would marry a nice Jewish girl; she had a feeling Isador was a ruffian. Then she got the letter from Olga and read it and reread it, arguing against it, thinking up misunderstandings that could be undone so he could be restored to life. She asked Olga for his picture, demanding of her that she deny the words of the previous letter, still talking about Lazarus as though he were alive. Oh yes, he got a job as reporter for the Hebrew Voice, she would say to Madame Bronstein. And his boss thinks he has a great future ahead. She probably did not live long after Lazarus, her heart finally giving out.

  And did the biblical Lazarus have a mother? What did she do when he was resurrected? Did he bid her good-bye before he returned to his undeath? Was he the same son to her undead as he was alive? I read that he sailed to Marseilles with his sisters afterward, where he may or may not have died again.

  A crowd disembarked from a streetcar at the Rinok stop; I followed three young women who linked their arms and walked across the square in unison, toward a place that called itself Viennese Café, toward Rora, who was there refueling on espressos and cigarettes while waiting for me. I let the three graces get ahead; I stopped to listen to a group of singing pensioners who stood in the middle of the Rinok, belting out an old Ukrainian song: squat old ladies clutched their grocery bags; old men, their pants short enough to expose the disarming combination of brown socks and sandals, entangled their hands on their rotund bellies and looked up when reaching for the high notes. From what I could understand, the song was about a wounded Cossack who was nursed to health by a young lassie, but then cruelly left her once he could ride again; he quickly forgot her, but she never forgot him. Hear my sorrow across the steppe, the pensioners sang. Hear my sorrow, may it break your Cossack heart.

  I did not want to tell Rora about my conversation with Mary; I wordlessly joined him at the table. The three graces were holding their cigarettes in an identical manner: their palms facing upward, the cigarettes downward, the fingers slightly bent, the smoke crawling around their long painted nails. Rora took a picture of them, and the click made the blondest one turn toward us, her face pale, her cheeks rouged—she smiled, and Rora smiled back. The waitress came in her fake-lace-hemmed white apron and black skirt and I asked her if they had any rose candy. She did not know what it was, what I meant by it, and my Ukrainian was not good enough to explain, the dictionary forgotten in the hotel room. A Viennese coffee, then, I said. And one more for him.

  Rora put his black Canon down in his lap, then under the table. He snapped a picture of the graces’ legs, covering the click with a false cough.

  Why did you take that picture?

  That’s a stupid question, Rora said. I take pictures.

  Why do you take pictures?

  I take pictures because I like to look at the pictures I take.

  It seems to me that when people take a picture of something, they instantly forget about it.

  So what?

  So nothing, I shrugged.

  They can look at the picture and remind themselves.

  But what do you see when you look at a picture you took?

  I see the picture, Rora said. What’s with these questions?

  When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

  Drink more coffee, Brik, Rora said. It will pick you up.

  The waitress came by with our coffees, so I drank more of it. Each of the three graces looked at us at least once and Rora smiled each time.

  Do you know the Lazarus story from the Bible? I asked Rora.

  Can’t say that I studied that particular section, Rora said.

  Well, Lazarus is dead and his sister is friends with a certain Jesus Christ, the local prophet and miracle worker, so she asks him to do something about it. So Mr. Christ does his gimmick, goes to the cave where the dead Lazarus is stashed away. He calls him forth and Lazarus rises from his death. Then he totters back into life and vanishes. And Mr. Christ becomes even more famous.

  That’s not much of a story.

  It is rather weak, I agree. But Lazarus went to Marseilles with his sisters afterward. Now that’s a story. I wonder if he had a new life there. Perhaps he never died again. He might still be around, still undead, entirely forgotten, except for being the white rabbit in Mr. Christ’s magic show.

  What the fuck are you talking about? Rora said. How is that related to anything?

  I have been thinking about the Lazarus stuff.

  Stop thinking, Rora said. Have some coffee.

  We sipped coffee in silence. Hear my sorrow, may it break your fucking heart, I hummed to myself. But I could not be quiet.

  I talked to Mary, I said.

  That’s nice.

  My in-laws want to go to Rome and hang out with the Pope.

  Nice, Rora said. I could tell he wanted me to shut up, but I went on. It could well be that I had already ingested too much coffee.

  My in-laws are very religious, I said. I had to get married in a Catholic church. I refused to do it, but Mary would not hear about it. I knelt under a cross, the priest sprinkled me with water.

  Not only did I kneel before the nailed gymnast, but the Fields, the biggest Catholics in goddamn Pittsburgh, made me bow my head many a time, whereby I pretended to contemplate the frightening evanescence of my earthly existence. I remember the first Christmas we spent at the Fields’; Mary and I had just been married and I officially inducted into the family, Mary’s love vouchsafing me despite my unreliable foreign background. We sat at a round table, and the Fields uttered their grace and then passed, counterclockwise, the ham and the gravy and the mashed potato. I accepted it all and then passed it on. It brought tears to my eyes, that circle of familiarity. So I bowed my head at every subsequent Christmas, for back then it all seemed worth a little pretending. Mary and I, George and Mrs. Field, sometimes the Pattersons would be there; they read from the Bible, while I, bookless, patiently counted the ham slices, admired their even thi
nness. And later I would join the effortless dessert talk, no issue ever pressing, complimenting the apple pie (“Rachel, this apple pie alone was worth coming to America!” I would cry, everybody earnestly laughing). Mary and I would hold hands between our plates, I would make statements featuring the first-person plural (“We like to keep our book on our chest when we read in bed”), and endure teasing questions about possible babies. After dinner we would take long walks, discussing matters of little importance at a slow pace, the cold gnawing at our cheekbones. George would sometimes make me lag behind so he could ask me trick questions pertaining to my financial instability, but Mary would save me from his scrupulous grip. Yet, I often felt at home; there was comfort in those rituals.

  So you are Catholic? Didn’t know that.

  I am nothing, I said. God knows God is no friend of mine. But I envy people who believe in that crap. They don’t worry about the meaning of life and things, whereas I do.

  Let me tell you a joke, Rora said.

  Mujo wakes up one day, after a long night of drinking, and asks himself what the meaning of life is. He goes to work, but realizes that is not what life is or should be. He decides to read some philosophy and for years studies everything from the old Greeks onward, but can’t find the meaning of life. Maybe it’s the family, he thinks, so he spends time with his wife, Fata, and the kids, but finds no meaning in that and so he leaves them. He thinks, Maybe helping others is the meaning of life, so he goes to medical school, graduates with flying colors, goes to Africa to cure malaria and transplant hearts, but cannot discover the meaning of life. He thinks, maybe it’s the wealth, so he becomes a businessman, starts making money hand over fist, millions of dollars, buys everything there is to buy, but that is not what life is about. Then he turns to poverty and humility and such, so he gives everything away and begs on the streets, but still he cannot see what life is. He thinks maybe it is literature: he writes novel upon novel, but the more he writes the more obscure the meaning of life becomes. He turns to God, lives the life of a dervish, reads and contemplates the Holy Book of Islam—still, nothing. He studies Christianity, then Judaism, then Buddhism, then everything else—no meaning of life there. Finally, he hears about a guru living high up in the mountains somewhere in the East. The guru, they say, knows what the meaning of life is. So Mujo goes east, travels for years, walks the roads, climbs the mountain, finds the stairs that lead up to the guru. He ascends the stairs, tens of thousands of them, nearly dies getting up there. At the top, there are millions of pilgrims, he has to wait for months to get to the guru. Eventually it is his turn, he goes to a place under a big tree, and there sits the naked guru, his legs crossed, his eyes closed, meditating, perfectly peaceful—he surely knows the meaning of life. Mujo says: I have dedicated my life to discovering the meaning of life and I have failed, so I have come to ask you humbly, O Master, to divulge the secret to me. The guru opens his eyes, looks at Mujo, and calmly says, My friend, life is a river. Mujo stares at him for a long time, cannot believe what he heard. What’s life again? Mujo asks. Life is a river, the guru says. Mujo nods and says, You turd of turds, you goddamn stupid piece of shit, you motherfucking cocksucking asshole. I have wasted my life and come all this way for you to tell me that life is a fucking river. A river? Are you kidding me? That is the stupidest, emptiest fucking thing I have ever heard. Is that what you spent your life figuring out? And the guru says, What? It is not a river? Are you saying it is not a river?