The Lazarus Project

by Aleksandar Hemon

  Rora was good with the audience, as judged by my unflagging, unquestioning, decades-long interest in his stories, this journey included. He could measure the intensity of my involvement; he could balance suspense, withhold information, manage asides, read my face, qualify my laughter. It was pleasant, I have to say, to be subjected to such studious storytelling. I used to be reasonably good myself, but now I feared distrust, the listeners’ questioning gazes likely to bore into my hollow heart.

  Anyway, an edentate man led a bloated, mouth-foaming goat down a road webbed with knee-deep gullies. Andriy asked him how to get to Krotkiy; he pointed up the hill without a word and up we went. There was a schoollike building at the top of the hill; the fields around were yellow with blooming clover; a gaggle of ducks wobbled toward a puddle. The school was condemned; in front of it, a winged monument to a long forgotten victory had one of its wings broken. Across the road, there was a gateless cemetery; this was where we stopped and disembarked. Rora’s black, polished, possibly Italian shoes looked uncannily out of place on the dirt road—he picked a stone out of his leather sole and threw it over his shoulder, as though performing a good-luck ritual. It seemed that we disturbed a world of birds, for they twittered madly, spreading the news that three strangers had appeared.

  I knew of no Briks living in Krotkiy; the family memory contained only the idyllic images of pristine Ukrainian landscapes devoid of people with names, as depicted to me by my grandfather; he left these parts when he was nine. I trudged through the unkempt cemetery, looking for any Brik graves. Some of the tombstones emerged from high grass, some were swallowed by thorny bushes; death was experienced here. But there were a few newer tombstones, the marble bright and fresh. Some of them had solemn dun-and-beige pictures of the deceased, below which there were their names and dates: Oleksandr Pronek 1967-2002; Oksana Mykolchuk 1928-1995. The whole life a dash between the two arbitrary numbers. Hoydee-ho, haydee-hi, all I want is not to die.

  Is this you? Rora asked, pointing at a tombstone under a cherry tree; the cherries were ripe, perfect red beads. There were two pictures: the woman’s face was framed with a black head scarf, her eyes two dark holes. Her name was Helena Brik and she was firmly dead: 1929-1999. The man’s name was Mykola Brik; he was born in 1922; he seemed to have died last week: 2004 was at the other end of his dash. His side of the grave was covered with a mound of recently wilted flowers, his picture on the tombstone untainted by rain and birdshit. He’s your tribe, Rora said. He looks like you. He certainly did look like me—in fifty years or so: the same large nose and low forehead, the same prominent cheekbones and large, apish ears, the same hirsute eyebrows.

  A human face consists of other faces—the faces you inherited or picked up along the way, or the ones you simply made up—laid on top of each other in a messy superimposition. When I taught ESL, I had students who would come to class with a different face every day; it took me a while to remember their names. Eventually, from a certain angle, I could see what was buried under their fleeting grimaces, I discerned the deep faces beyond their acting out the person they imagined themselves to be. Sometimes they would flash their new, American face: the raised eyebrows and the curved mouth of perpetual worry and wonder. Mary could see no deep face of mine, because she did not know what my life in Bosnia had been like, what made me, what I had come from; she could see only my American face, acquired through failing to be the person I wanted to be. I did not know what shadows Rora saw, comparing my face and the one on the tombstone, but I did not think him crazy. Mykola Brik may have been someone who had settled here—here in the narrow passage between my brain and my gaze—before I was even born. Nobody can control resemblances, any more than you can control echoes.

  I wondered, but could not see, what this world of Ukrainian peasanthood, the routine and exotic suffering, looked like to Rora. He was a descendant of the Halilbašić brothers who, way back in the sixteenth century, had fought the Morić brothers for control of the Čaršija—songs were still sung about those street battles. His great-grandparents had owned one of the first cars in Sarajevo; his great-aunt was the first Muslim woman in the city to wear pants and had self-published a book of love poetry. Rora’s grandfather had his suits done in Vienna, went on the hajj many times, stopping over for a vacation every time: Lebanon, Egypt, Greece. The world had always been available to the Halilbašićs. Whereas my grandfather grew up in the Bosnian countryside, in a mud-wall house the family shared with cattle and chickens—and this was a step up from the life his parents had lived in Krotkiy—leaving it only to go to church. Nobody in Rora’s family knew anything about slaving in the arid fields; there had never been any dirt under their nails; they had a street in Sarajevo named after them. What did he see when he looked at those graves and the miserly fields of retarded corn beyond? Rora was smoking, nothing around us moved, except for the hysterical birds high up in the trees. Andriy was passed out in the front seat of the car, impervious to the potential poignance of the moment.

  It is so much easier to deal with the dead than with the living. The dead are out of the way, merely characters from stories about the past, never again unreadable, no misunderstandings possible, the pain coming from them stable and manageable. Nor do you have to explain yourself to them, to justify the fact of your life. I could see them but they could not see me: Mykola had a pointed chin; Helena trudged on her varicose legs toward the stove to steam the week-old bread. Splendorous temples were built on the belief that death does not erase the traces of those who lived, that someone up there busies himself with keeping tabs, and is going to send down Mr. Christ or some other delusional prophet to resurrect all of the disintegrated nobodies. The promise is that even when every trace of your life vanishes absolutely and completely, God will remember you, that He might devote a speck of thought to you while reposing between putting up universes. And here they were, Helena and Mykola, rotting uninterruptedly under my feet. For a moment, I contemplated lighting candles for my distant relatives’ souls, packed in a wooden box for eternity, roots pushing through their eye sockets.

  Rora put out his cigarette on the ground and said, I knew a guy in Sarajevo called Vampir, because his bright idea was to take his ladies to the Koševo cemetery for a fuck. He figured it was clean, nobody would bother them, she would cling to him out of fear, and there were always candles if the chick was a romantic one. So once he and his lady had just finished banging and buttoned up when two cops caught them. What are you doing here? the cops ask. Without blinking, Vampir says, We’re visiting my grandfather’s grave. Which one is it? the cops ask. So Vampir says, The one over there. The cops look at the tombstone he pointed out, and it belongs to a woman who died at the age of twenty-five. What’s this? the cops ask. Vampir looks at them and says, I am shocked, officer. Never did I think that my own grandfather was such a two-faced liar.

  THE SUN BEATING into my chest woke me up. The windows of the Ford Feces were solidly shut, no air available. On top of the shit stench, Andriy was smoking—I’d neglected to inquire when I hired him if there was any air-conditioning. I dramatically huffed and puffed, but Andriy either did not care or failed to understand, his squirrel face expressing little. “Could we open a window?” I finally asked with a deliberately weakened voice, lest I insult him. He said nothing, pressed a button, and the window on my side slid halfway down.

  Unprompted, I explained my partial Ukrainianness, as though being from the same people, partly, should entitle me to more air. But he pressed the button again, and the window went up, until only an inch or so was left open. Still I went on: I told him about my cousins in Bosnia, England, France, Australia, Canada, about my life in America, where there are lots of Bosnians and Ukrainians. I told him about the churches and delis and credit unions the Ukes had in Chicago, in the part of town called Ukrainian Village. He pricked up his ears. “Is there work?” he asked. “There is always work if you want to work,” I said. I told him that at the beginning I had served food at the Ukrainian Cultural Ce
nter; I had done data input for a real estate broker; I had worked as a teacher of English. I assured him it was very easy to make money in America. I wanted him to think that my life in America was all about hard work, rather than an embarrassing mixture of luck and despair.

  Andriy was clearly contemplating his hypothetical American life: he was imagining himself with a job, making and saving money, buying a house; the corner of his mouth quivered toward a grin.

  “Are there women to marry?” he asked.

  “Plenty,” I said. “My wife is American.”

  A full-blooded American, she was. She took me to baseball games and held her hand on her heart to sing the anthem, while I stood next to her, humming along. She used the national we when talking about the U.S. of A. “We should have never gone into Iraq,” she would say. “We are a nation of immigrants.” She often craved cheeseburgers. George and Rachel had bought her a car for her sixteenth birthday. She had the bright, open face that always reminded me of the vast midwestern welkin. She was routinely kind to other people, assumed they had good intentions; she smiled at strangers; it mattered to her what they thought and felt. She was often embarrassed; she dreamt of learning a foreign language; she wanted to make a difference. She believed in God and seldom went to church.

  “There are a lot of good women there,” I said. Fully grinning, Andriy was conjuring up a healthy, fecund American woman in his mind. Then he asked, gloomily:

  “And problems?”

  “What problems?”

  “If you have family and house, you want to protect them. But this world is crazy. Homosexuals, crazy Muslim terrorists, problems.”

  In a desperate attempt to escape this dialogue, I turned to Rora and asked him, Are you sleeping?

  I am listening to you, Rora said. In a week I’ll be able to speak Ukrainian, but maybe you should tell him now that I am a Muslim problem.

  I ignored the suggestion. The road was straight between the hills, as though they parted for it. Andriy was speeding, disregarding the complicated pothole constellations; the engine was screaming, he might have forgotten to shift gears. My primary problem was to put out of my mind the possibility of the feculent vehicle turning into a ball of fire. I wasn’t going to say anything, lest we continue the conversation. Clouds and cloudettes were bunching up over a distant hill, as if getting ready for an assault. Andriy occasionally honked madly at a car crossing to our side to pass a truck, but not for a moment did he consider chickening out. I closed my eyes and started composing a letter I decided I would send from Chernivtsi:

  Dear Mary,

  Ukraine is huge, endless. The steppe seems exhausted from stretching so far. One feels so small in this place. This must be how settlers felt facing the prairie.

  But Andriy finally slowed down and shifted gears and the Ford Feces was now purring and rocking, and my letter transmogrified into a dream.

  I WOKE UP only because we had stopped. Rora and Andriy smoked outside, the smoke whirling around them; Andriy was laughing as if he were clearing his throat after vomiting.

  I am Muslim, I heard Rora say to him, in Bosnian. I have seven veiled wives, forty-three children.

  I got out of the car. We were at the bottom of a hill, on top of which there was a spireless, disconsolate church, or, perhaps, a godforsaken monastery. There were only trees around, writhing under the wind; the landscape seemed eminently conducive to monasteries. In my country, monasteries had been turned into sanatoriums for war criminals.

  “He says he is Muslim,” Andriy said to me, as if letting me in on a joke, hissing with joy. He made a circle with his hand around his head to suggest that if Rora were Muslim his head should have been wrapped.

  Why are you laughing? Rora asked him with a grim face.

  “He is Muslim.” I nodded.

  Andriy looked at Rora, then at me, at Rora again, tittering still, giving us a chance to laugh it up with him and stand united in the extended joke. The wind was slapping the tree crowns, like a teacher slapping children. Rora’s right hand flew into his left hand straight up like a tower, he produced a roaring-engine sound, then collapsed his left hand, slapping his thigh.

  That was me, Rora said, and Andriy laughed even louder, riotously. I am not sure he understood what Rora was referring to, but Andriy was going to tell all of his friends about the crazies he had driven from Lviv to Chernivtsi.

  Mujahedeen, Rora said and pointed at himself. Homosexual, he pointed at me, laughing in concert with now hysterical Andriy, slapping him on the back.

  Stop it, I said.

  We are the problems, Rora said. Big problems.

  It took Andriy a while to calm down. Back in the car, I tried to buckle up again, but Andriy said, giggling: “Not necessary.” But I defiantly buckled up, and he unsmiled, looked ahead, and did not say a word for a long time.

  In a bullet-riddled Range Rover, Rora drove with Miller all around Bosnia. At some point, Miller had to leave Sarajevo more often because New York was sick of yet another story about Rambo and his brave unit. So the two of them would go to Mostar and Goražde and Doboj. Miller was a heavyweight, what with his New York credentials and a bulletproof vest and a word from Rambo preceding him so that he couldn’t be harassed too much; sometimes the Chetniks who knew him would even wave him through. Rora had a fake press pass Rambo had arranged, and the name on it was not Muslim—otherwise, he could have been clipped at a checkpoint by anyone sufficiently drunk. Once they were stopped up near Sokolac, and the checkpoint Chetnik was someone Rora had played poker with before the war. He had a long warrior beard and a red beret and spoke with a labored Serbian accent, but Rora recognized his eyes, for into his eyes he had stared across the table blanketed with mixed currencies, reading them. His name was Zlojutro, and he instantly recognized Rora. He checked Rora’s pass, then his face, and shook his head dismayingly, as if saying: How stupid of you to try to fool me. He asked Rora: What are you? Rora could either lie and say he was a Serb, which the Chetnik would know was not true, or he could admit he was a Muslim, for which they could accuse him of being a spy—either way, he could be shot. So Rora said, I am a gambler.

  It is dark already when the body of Lazarus Averbuch is disposed of in the potter’s field at Dunning. No friend of the young man, nor his sister Olga, are at the burial; only Assistant Chief Schuettler and William P. Miller are present. In the driving rainstorm, not unlike the beginning of a biblical deluge, the body, wrapped in cloth, was rolled into the grave, half-filled with water. After watching clots of mud fill up the hole, the two of them trudge through the darkness as thick and wet as broth, guided by headlights. As the car leaves Dunning behind to take them home, they share their concern for Chief Shippy’s welfare; the assassination attempt might nudge him toward retirement, they sigh in simultaneous agreement. The car is warm, the rain lashes the windshield. Miller resists the temptation to doze off, as Assistant Chief talks, rather poetically, about the world that resists order, about all that needs to be done, now or never, to rid it of evil for good.

  THE AIR IN Sam Harris’s Place is turbid with smoke; the stove in the corner is belching and regurgitating; the lamps are so sooty that it seems they are just producing more darkness. William P. Miller’s feet are wet, as is his coat and his shirt and his undershirt; he pours rain out of the brim of his hat. There are two men standing at the bar; one of them has a long beard and a yarmulke. The man should not be here; in fact, the saloon should not be open at all, for it is past closing time; the bartender should be wiping or picking up glasses, but that is not what he is doing—there is a whole battalion of steins lined up on the bar. Stroking his pointy mustache, the bartender glances at Miller and signals with his head toward the back.

  Guzik is waiting in the back, in the corner away from the light, his hands in his armpits, his thick thumbs straining to meet on his chest. Only as he approaches the table does Miller see a fat, round-headed little man, the size of a child, leaning over his beer on the table. Miller joins them without a word; hi
s wet shoes have already picked up a coating of sawdust off the floor.

  “Friend here must take you where you want go,” Guzik says. “You know what is my price, his price he tell you. Don’t tell nothing to police. This only is for you.” The fat little man is quiet, his eyes are bright, with long eyelashes, a boy’s face pasted on a watermelon.

  “Does your friend here have a name?” Miller asks.

  “No. He don’t have no name,” Guzik says.

  “No name,” says the fat little man. His voice is high-pitched and hoarse. Miller wonders if his feet are touching the floor at all; he is probably protected from the rising sawdust.

  “What’s the word on Averbuch? Who put him up to it?” he asks Guzik.

  “Ach, friend, who put him up to it. Who put him up to it? Who knows. He was dreamy boy. People here are not happy. They don’t go to your part of town, you don’t go here. When somebody from here go north, it’s problems.”

  The fat little man nods wistfully, as though remembering the one time he went north without problems.

  “What about Maron? Is he a member of Edelstadt?” Miller asks.

  “Maron. Maron is snake. He like to tell bad stories about good men. Big snake.”