The Lazarus Project

by Aleksandar Hemon

  Look

  Loom

  Loose

  Loot

  Lop

  Lopsided

  Loquacious

  Lord

  Lore

  Lose

  Lost

  Lot

  Loud

  Louse

  What could these mysterious words tell her now? She moans, rocking back and forth as if praying, as if becoming nothing on her way to nothing.

  Lout

  Lovable

  Love

  Lovely

  Lover

  Low

  Lower

  Lowland

  Lowly

  Lord, what have I done?

  Olga, is that you? Olga?

  She yelps with horror, coils up to protect the good book and her heart from whatever it is that is speaking to her. The voice is source-less and hoarse, coming from the darkness around her. More lightning, her feet are freezing. With unbearable relief she considers the possibility that she has lost her mind.

  Dear Mother,

  Lazarus is dead, and I am mad. We’re fine otherwise and think of you a lot.

  Olga, it’s me, Isador, the voice says. I am down below.

  The splashing underneath is unmistakably real.

  Isador?

  It’s me, Olga. I am down in the shit. I am dying here.

  What in the world are you doing down there?

  I love swimming in shit. What do you think? They are looking for me all over the city.

  Olga is staring into the stinking black hole; bile rises through her chest and she retches.

  How do you know they are looking for you? How did you get in there?

  I was coming to see you when the police arrived, so I hid. Good people had told me to stay away from the law.

  If you did nothing wrong, there is no reason to hide, Olga says without conviction.

  I was told I am the curly-haired accomplice to the crime, Isador says. Except I am not curly-haired and there is no crime.

  Did you want to kill Shippy?

  Don’t be a fool, Olga. Why would I want to do that?

  What was he doing at Shippy’s doorstep?

  I don’t know. Listen, I have to get out of here. I am freezing and starving. The shit is rising.

  It was all your anarchist nonsense, all the angry talk. What was wrong with the life he had?

  We just wanted better things. We were just reading and talking, Olga. I am going to die here.

  You are lying, Isador. You enticed him.

  Olga, you know me. I ate at your table. He was my brother. You are my sister.

  I am not your sister. I had a brother and you led him to death.

  He was his own man. He made his choices.

  You took him to listen to the Goldman woman, to all those red troublemakers; you fed his heart with anger. Let your anarchist sisters get you out of shit.

  She cannot see him and she does not know how deep below he is. She never looked into the hole in daylight. Everything has become a different reality. Isador used to be just another loudmouth boy, and now he is the most wanted anarchist in Chicago.

  There is police everywhere around, one in my hallway, she says. They are waiting for you here. If I don’t go back soon, they’ll come looking for me.

  I have not eaten anything in two days. Rats are walking all over me. I am going to die. I don’t want to die.

  I can call the police and they can get you out.

  Isador is silent; the storm has rumbled away. The outhouse door has a heart-shaped hole; the draft is browsing through a pile of newspaper patches. Olga’s skull itches under the wet sworls of hair.

  Give me one reason why I shouldn’t call them, she says.

  Lazarus was innocent and was killed by the police; I am innocent and will be killed by the police. Two reasons. If you want more I am sure I can dig some out of this shit.

  Olga cannot feel her toes and fingers, and her heart is turning into ice, too. Why not just stay here and fall asleep and put an end to it all? Everything should stop. Lord, why did you leave me in these dark woods?

  Olga, please. Just help me get out of the hole and bring me some food and a blanket.

  You can’t stay in the outhouse forever.

  Let me just get through the night. We’ll think of something.

  I hate you, Isador, all your world-changing, all the grandstanding. You don’t live in this world. Why couldn’t you just let us be?

  All I have ever wanted is to live in this world with some dignity. Help me out, Olga. Please.

  She puts the dictionary down and reaches inside the darkness until Isador’s slimy hand grabs her wrist, nearly pulling her in.

  Plague on you, Isador, on you and your kind, she says. The dictionary slips into the hole, hits Isador in the face, splashes, and sinks.

  What was that? Isador gasps.

  IN HER BED, Olga pulls the covers over her head, fending off the cold and shit stench, knowing that neither would ever again abandon her body; it will be a miracle if she does not get brain inflammation. She took a blanket and the dry bread loaf to Isador, both hidden under her dress. “Busy bowels, eh?” said the politsyant with a smirk of disgust. He doesn’t seem to be too bright, but Olga worries about him going to the outhouse. Don’t worry, Isador said. They don’t shit with Jews.

  There he is now, Isador, beshitten on the absurd throne, wrapped in a flimsy blanket, thinking up free worlds in which everybody has indoor plumbing. I just hope I don’t have to relieve myself, Isador said, but she didn’t laugh. She will never laugh again. She has washed herself over the basin, scrubbed her hands many times, but the stench is pasted against the walls of her nostrils.

  Here is Lazarus coming home with Isador and three dozen eggs in a newspaper cone, not one of them broken. They slowly deposit them into a bowl, arguing over whatever it is that they heard at the Goldman woman’s lecture. Isador flails his arms with silly seriousness; Lazarus is like a clumsy fledgling.

  Isador is in the outhouse; policemen are everywhere around; Lazarus is dead; I stink of shit and sorrow; there is an endless storm outside; I am lost in a foreign country. Overall, not a bad lot.

  Dear Mother,

  I don’t know how to begin

  She turns to the side, slips her right hand under the pillow, hears straw crepitating in it. Isador could sneak out before dawn, when everybody is dead asleep; the storm must have been exhausting. If I fall asleep and wake up dead, I could be rid of this sickening grief.

  Look

  Loom

  Loose

  His face was so angry in the morgue, so tense, his lips frigid and sharp. What made him angry? He talked about anarchy and liberty, police and justice and America. Because a few possess everything, he said, the many possess nothing. We are the many, this is the life of the many. Do you know, Olga, that I do not feel anything in my fingertips after work? When I write, I cannot hold the pen. Whatever I touch feels like an egg. He daydreamed about being a reporter for the Hebrew Voice. He would travel the world and write about it. He cut bread with long, slow moves, as if sawing it. His arms were so bony, his elbows were like featherless wingtips.

  Isador cracks one of the eggs against the table edge and, before it can dribble out, he drops the yolk and the white into his mouth. His long throat swells briefly with a gulp. He would be handsome if he weren’t so obtuse. Lazarus tries to crack his egg, but smashes it against the table instead.

  Lose

  Lost

  Lot

  Loud

  She hears knocking on the door, leaps out of bed, because there are two short and two long knocks—the way that Lazarus, conspiratorially, likes to do it. She opens the door and there he is: tall and shabby, shoeless, with holes in his socks, his suit hanging on him like a blanket. The scrawny sternness of his face stretches out into an ear-to-ear smile. She gasps with joy and gushes into tears, hugging him around his biceps. She presses her cheek against his chest, his heart is beating, one o
f his buttons leaves an impression on her ear. Where were you? she asks him frantically. Why do you play hide-and-seek with me? But he says nothing, kisses her head, and shrugs her off. He slumps into her chair, breaks off a piece of rye bread, and, with his mouth full, shakes his head despondently, as if to say, You have no idea what I’ve been through. She falls on her knees in front of him, lays her palms on his thighs to calm him down. Low Louse, he says, his eyes unsteady like mercury bubbles. Loom Lopsided Lord Lost. Lower Lowland Lowly.

  Nobody in Lviv was going to have memories of us, not the casino bruisers, nor the waitress at Vienna Café who pricked up her ears at my obsolescent Ukrainian, nor the young ladies who smiled at us, beaming signals of availability. The only person who might remember us was the driver I hired to take us to Chernivtsi. I had gone to a taxi stand at the bus station and talked to the youngest, healthiest-looking driver with the best car. His name was Andriy and he drove a blue-and-rusty Ford Focus; he had a moony face and bright, open eyes that bespoke either deviousness or innocence, possibly both; he seemed sober and wore a wedding ring. He wanted a hundred dollars of the Susie money, plus food and gas; it would take five to six hours. I told him I would like to stop by the village—Krotkiy—where my grandfather was born. That would be a hundred and twenty, Andriy said. Other drivers, undershaven and cantankerous, stood around, listening to the negotiation, snorting with approbation, one of them attempting to offer a lower price. Andriy just glanced at him scorchingly and the man retreated.

  It was still dark the following morning when he threw our bags in the trunk and shook our hands, sealing the covenant. Rora was looking at him over his sunglasses—apparently predawn Lviv was not lightless enough for him. I took the passenger seat, and as I was pulling the belt down to buckle up, Andriy grabbed my hand and said: “Not necessary.” I tried to explain he should not take it personally, but he said again, sternly: “Not necessary.” I was going to trust him with my life; Rora chuckled in the back. If it is your time to go, it is your time to go, he said. I don’t want to go, I said, but did not buckle up. The Ford Focus smelled of feces.

  We left the city on a poorly lit road, heading east, seeing only a horse cart with a cage full of rabbits, the man holding the reins slouching like a refugee. A boxy truck rumbled from the opposite direction and left us in a cloud of nocturnal dust; we must have been raising clouds behind us; once the dust settled it would cover our tracks.

  Had Lazarus lived, would he have become Billy Averbuch? Would his children have become Avery or Averiman or, who knows, Field? Would he have begotten a latter brood of Philips and Sauls and Bernards and Eleanors, who would have begotten Jameses and Jennifers and Jans and Johns? Would his anarchist proclivities, receding chin, and simian ears have been tucked deep inside the family history, inside the glorious American dream? There are so many stories that could be told, but only some of them can be true.

  RAMBO LIKED TO take Miller for a ride down the streets of Sarajevo. He would hop in the six-cylinder Audi he had requisitioned from the Bosnian Parliament’s prewar car fleet, get Miller in the passenger seat, and drive, unbuckled, at insane speeds. They did it for the thrills: Rambo swerved and skidded through the debris, corpses, running civilians, sniper hail, and Miller would look at his watch for the time; they drove from the headquarters in Radićeva, down to Stup, where the unit fought. The Audi was riddled with bullet holes, but somehow no bullet ever hit them; they were taunting death, and had a hell of a time doing it. Miller loved it; Rambo let him drive every once in a while, and he would nearly pass out from the adrenaline rush. They drove at night, too, with the headlights out; Rambo claimed he was so good he could do it blind, and driving in the complete darkness of a Sarajevo night was much like that.

  And when Rora was in Scania, Sweden, once, he played gin rummy with a guy who got all beside himself when he heard that Rora was from Sarajevo. The man barely noticed that Rora skinned him alive. He took Rora home in his Bentley, large as a house, the seats made of leather so fine that you could hear the spirits of the slaughtered calves sigh—he needed to show him something, he said. The man collected old cars; he had Ford Ts and the Nazi editions of the Volkswagen and a Bugatti that could still race. But the collection was not what he wanted Rora to see: on his garage wall, lit like an altar, was a steering wheel and a horn, the kind that used to be used for talking to the driver from the backseat. They came from the automobile in which the archduke and archduchess had died in 1914 in Sarajevo: in the backseat of this car World War One had begun, the first casualty the pregnant archduchess. The man was drunk and high from losing a lot of money; he talked fervently about the driver’s sweat absorbed by the steering wheel, about the archduke’s last breath, about the hard, German, throttled consonants stuck in the horn. Those ancient microscopic residues were all that was left of the man who was going to be an emperor. The steering wheel of the empire was last touched by an anonymous, terrified driver, who must have thought that they would blame him for everything, the man said, crying. (I looked at Andriy’s hands firmly gripping the Ford’s steering wheel, two knuckles on his left hand bruised—he must have punished the price-lowering colleague.) To Rora it seemed that somebody had scammed the Swede, because you could find that kind of antique-looking crap anywhere. Rora used to know a tailor in Berlin who fashioned old war uniforms; and there was a guy in Milan who wrote sixteenth-century love letters; and he had heard of a blacksmith in Amsterdam who cast ancient samurai swords. But he let the man believe what he needed to believe.

  And Rora’s uncle, Murat, was drinking with his buddies the night before he was supposed to travel to Mecca for the hajj. He missed the flight, so when he woke up, hung over, he caught a cab on the street and when the driver asked him, “Where to?” he said, “Saudi Arabia.” The driver drove him to Mecca, it took them a few days. But then Uncle Murat didn’t think that it would be right if the driver went back alone, so he paid for his lodging and food and they worshipped at the Kabba. On the way back they bought some cheap carpets in Syria, some fine demitasse in Turkey, resold them in Sarajevo, and made a little money.

  And so Rora went on, one story after another. I had never heard him talk so much; it was as though moving through the verdant, depopulated landscape prompted his stories; indeed he would take photos, lazily, without interrupting his narration. Even Andriy seemed mesmerized by his voice, with the steady stream of soft, epic, Slavic sounds. I wanted to write some of those stories down, but the Ford Feces leapt over potholes, my forehead steadily banging against the side window as Andriy passed trucks, entirely uninterested in the oncoming traffic.

  I used to tell stories to Mary, stories of my childhood and immigrant adventures, stories I had picked up from other people. But I had become tired of telling them, tired of listening to them. In Chicago, I had found myself longing for the Sarajevo way of doing it—Sarajevans told stories ever aware that the listeners’ attention might flag, so they exaggerated and embellished and sometimes downright lied to keep it up. You listened, rapt, ready to laugh, indifferent to doubt or implausibility. There was a storytelling code of solidarity—you did not sabotage someone else’s narration if it was satisfying to the audience, or you could expect one of your stories to be sabotaged one day, too. Disbelief was permanently suspended, for nobody expected truth or information, just the pleasure of being in the story and, maybe, passing it off as their own. It was different in America: the incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth—reality is the fastest American commodity.

  Once upon a time Mary and I were at a wedding in Milwaukee. Her cousin, who worked for the governor of Wisconsin, was getting married, and we shared a table with eight other people, all couples invested in state politics. As it happens at weddings, they all started talking about their fateful encounters: Josh and Jennifer met at their gym; Jan and Johnny were a college couple, broke up, later found themselves working for the same law firm; Saul and Philip met at a toga party, by a keg of
Miller Light. Everybody was happy now, you could tell, the table laden with bliss and future, no sardines of sorrow served.

  So as to contribute to the discourse of momentous attraction, I told them about the Cold War rabbits. It was Rora who had told me this story once upon his return from Berlin. All along the Wall, I/Rora said, there were grass-covered minefields, so there were a lot of free-running rabbits, too light to set off a mine, no other beasts to prey upon them. At mating time, the hormone-crazy rabbits would smell a partner on the other side, and they would go crazy, producing the pining-rabbit sound, trying desperately to find a hole in the Wall. The rabbits would drive the guards out of their minds, but they could not shoot them because they had to save their bullets for the humans trying to defect. Everybody in Berlin knew that the rabbit-mating season was the worst time to attempt to escape across the Wall, because the rabbits made the guards very trigger-happy.

  Outrageous though it may have been, I always found the story funny and poignant—the unnaturalness of the Cold War, the love that knew no boundaries, the Wall brought down by horny rodents. It required no effort for me to suspend my disbelief and admire Rora’s narrative embroidery. But my Wisconsin audience stared at me with the basic you’re-okay-but-strange smiles, waiting for a more potent punch line. Whereupon Mary said: “I find that hard to believe.” She was hurt and annoyed, I know for a fact, because I didn’t tell our own falling-in-love story (the sand between the toes, the reflections of Chicago shimmering on the lake, the waves licking the breakers), but it was rather humiliating to be publicly distrusted by your own wife. Josh asked: “Why didn’t the rabbits find a mate on their own side of the Wall? Why would they only be interested in a rabbit from the other side?” I had no answer, as it had never crossed my mind to ask Rora such a question; the story and its reality disintegrated right before me. What’s worse, I felt that Mary was speaking from across the wall that divided us and that all the verifiable reality was on her side. Never could I tell that story in Mary’s presence after that.