The Lazarus Project

by Aleksandar Hemon

  Love was what I had felt for Mary when she took me to Vienna for our second anniversary, just weeks before 9/11. She had booked a fancy hotel with gilded convolutions on the walls and ceilings; she had Googled the best restaurant in town, bought a suit for me and a chancy red dress for herself to wear for the anniversary dinner. After the dinner, we roamed Vienna; we held hands, the hands were warm, the night was cool, the streetlights glinted. I told her about my family and the empire and their journey to Bosnia, a story she had heard before, but this time it seemed that everything around me was evidence that I had not made it up. Now she had to believe me, that I had had a life, that my family had a history, that it was all connected through a powerful and loving, if perished, empire. We were walking down the Main Strasse, whatever you call it, with a lot of modern shops she would have been interested in had I not been so compelling, when, as if on cue, we heard an angelic voice singing the Ukrainian song my grandfather liked to sing. The singer must have been trained: he rounded his mouth and breathed like a pro, but he was blind, holding a tall white cane in front of himself like a biblical staff. An unshaven man in a filthy checkered jumper stood next to the blind singer; he scanned the crowd, his role to prevent the coins in the hat from being filched away. The song was a heartbreakingly sad one—“Ridna Maty Moya” it was called: My Sorrowful Mother. We stood there, squeezing each other’s hands as though trying to press through the flesh to the bones and then beyond. She kissed my cheek and neck, and I felt the joy of omnipresent love—everything around me speaking about me with affection, and Mary was listening.

  A HUMONGOUS tinted-window Mercedes SUV roared down the street, then stopped right in front of the café garden. Out came a brawny driver with black sunglasses, his waist snap-narrow, his biceps like ostrich thighs, his chin menacingly dimpled. He opened the back door and we first saw small leather-shoed feet, from which grew short legs in white khakis followed by a tight torso of an Olympic wrestler. The man wore a cell-phone holster on his belt, much akin to the way Soviet commissars used to wear Lugers. He sat down, pulled out his phone, and slammed it against the table, as though about to begin interrogation, and took up that sitting position peculiar to Slavic men: one hand on the thigh, the fingers nearly touching his groin, the other hand hanging over the table’s edge, ready to spring into action. He scanned the café and called over a waitress who obediently scurried to his table. Having placed a curt order, he plugged his head into the cell phone; he spoke in brisk, moneymaking sentences. He was, may no one dare doubt it, a businessman. The driver leaned on the vehicle and lit a cigarette.

  The rest of us were all aware, perhaps even aroused, that we were privy to possibly criminal transactions; nobody dared stare, yet everybody wanted to see. The café rearranged itself around the businessman: he was the center, while the dumb bodyguard angel marked the border of his domain. I kept looking over to him, for I felt I needed to memorize the menacing frown looming over his small eyes, the dilating nostrils bespeaking anger and disdain, his hairy forearms, his widely spread legs, which he did not seem able to cross due to a weapon tucked in his waist, or a hard-on, or both. Rora kept drinking his coffee and smoking, his Canon quiet in his lap, as though he could not hear the businessman barking power-wielding Russian into the cell phone, as though he were oblivious to the goon leaning on the car and watching.

  These people, these gangsters, Rora said, they are the same wherever you go—the same smirk, the same cell phone, the same goon. There used to be a guy named Pseto, a big gangster in Sarajevo just before the war. His business was racketeering. He ran a crew, including a few cops, who would break up a vendor if he did not pay for protection. He had a jewelry shop for money laundering, and sometimes he wore half of his inventory: diamonds and gold all over. He walked down Ferhadija Street with that Sarajevo-street-thug strut, and people would part reverentially. (I could see him: throwing his shoulders and jerking his neck, pursing his lips, the mouth half open to show that he was halfway to being very pissed.) He would walk into a bar and the owner would have to buy drinks for everybody present, as though Pseto were the king. As his headquarters, he used a café called Djul-bašta (I knew exactly where it stood); the owner was blessed with his protection but had no customers other than the people who came to do business with Pseto. He had trained the owner to bring him a short espresso every half an hour by the clock, and he would sit there, drinking coffee all day. Once he made a disobedient cop suck his cock. And when a stupid journalist wrote about the collusion of the police and Pseto, he had sent goons to bring the fool and had him tied to the tree in front of the café. He put a gun at the journalist’s temple and told him to bark, so he barked. And he barked all day, was fed pizza leftovers, and had to fetch a stick.

  One day, shortly before the war, Rambo came to see him, pulled out his gun, and clipped him right there, Pseto’s mouth full of espresso. And then he sat down, Pseto still dying at the next table, and ordered himself a double espresso with a touch of milk.

  I REPLAYED RORA’S STORY in the sordid Business Center room, unable to fall asleep, owing to gallons of Viennese coffee, and turn it all into a dream so I can forget about it. Rora, naturally, was asleep—he had trouble neither with coffee nor with the memory-dream transitions. I flipped through channels, spending some time on a skin flick featuring a lot of frantic licking, then another CNN story about another suicide bomber in Baghdad, then the World Series of Poker. I have to confess that I was aroused by the dispirited cunnilingus on the TV screen as well as by the utopian iniquity Rora’s story implied, by the plain possibility of the world governed by the depraved triumvirate of power, survival instinct, and greed. Rora had visited, perhaps had even inhabited, such a world, which meant I was but one step removed from it. That would be the true land of the free. In such a country I could do what I wanted—no marriage would matter, I would not owe anything to anybody, I could spend the Susie grant, the infinity of grants, on my pleasures. In such a world I could stop caring what I promised, what I committed myself to, because I would just not care who I was and become somebody else on a whim. And I could do it whenever I wished. I could be the sole meaning of my life.

  A harbinger from that utopian land arrived at my door: I heard a coy knock, and when I stood up and opened it, hiding my erection behind the door, there was the pretty-faced prostitute. She had rather striking eyes and very fake long lashes; she was propped on top of high platform heels, thrusting her hefty cleavage toward me. She pulled her top down, exposing her pear-shaped breasts with hardened nipples, and said, in English: “Love.” For a moment I thought, Here it is, then, why not? But then I shook my head, and closed the door.

  I was still too weak to pursue my pleasures at the expense of others, certainly not at the expense of Mary or this wretched harlot who was probably going to be slapped by her pimp for failing to fuck a God-given American. And I was not unselfish enough not to be tempted by pursuing pleasure with abandon. Forever stuck in moral mediocrity, I could afford myself neither self-righteousness nor orgasmic existence. That was one of the reasons (unspoken, to Mary, or anybody) why I absolutely needed to write the Lazarus book. The book would make me become someone else, go either way: I could earn the right to orgasmic selfishness (and the money required for it) or I could purchase my moral insurance by going through the righteous processes of self-doubt and self-realization.

  Mary witnessed my moral waddling; from her high position of surgically American decency she could see me struggling through permanent confusion. She wanted me to emerge from it, to move up the moral ladder, but I kept missing the next slippery rung. She was patient with my not showing her any of my writing, or with my refusing to rise early in order to look for munificent employment. She found triple-X cookies on my hard drive and was appropriately disgusted, but she didn’t really think I would have an affair or hire an experimental escort. She tolerated my revulsion for things spiritual, just as she put up with my uninterest in children and home adornments. But what did truly bother he
r was that I couldn’t see that the project of our marriage was the pursuit of a perfect state, the transition from the marriage of bodies to the marriage of souls. I was not pulling my weight (as a matter of fact, I was gaining weight), but she was still stoically forbearing. I did want to be a perfect husband, and I did love Mary, her hands bloodied daily by love, but I never stopped being aware of the possibilities that existed beyond the boundaries of our marriage, of the freedom to pursue gratification instead of perfection.

  Lazarus and Isador went to a brothel together. Lazarus had received some money from his mother; Isador convinced him to invest it in deflowerment. They went to Madame Madonskaya’s; she pinched their cheeks; the girls giggled as the two of them blushed. Isador picked the one with the largest bosom and went upstairs, leaving Lazarus surrounded by a gaggle of whores, until one of them took him by the hand and led him to her room. Lazarus was scared wordless, he could say nothing. She introduced herself as Lola; she had a dog in her room—a tiny, half-blind mutt who barked at him hysterically. As Lazarus undressed, the dog sniffed at his shins, and he broke into tears.

  I turned off the TV and listened to Rora’s breathing, conjuring up crashing waves. Outside, a man and a woman were talking and giggling, stumbling on something. A dog barked, then squealed; then there was the sound of glass crashing and shattering. Rora did not stir; the woman’s voice trilled with mirth. The dog started howling, screaming, and yelping, all in the midst of breaking glass, and it went on for a while, the tortured whining, until it faded into a whimper. The man and woman had thrown the dog in the garbage container full of bottles and then must have watched it writhing, shredding and slicing itself, trying to escape.

  The red flag of anarchy was dragged yesterday through the pulpits of Chicago. Aroused by the attempt on Chief Shippy’s life by a Russian Jew of the terrorist type, clergymen, irrespective of their denominations, denounced the conditions that have resulted in the malignant growth of such a sect. The Tsar of Russia, lax immigration laws, gross ignorance of our lower-class foreign residents, congenital laziness, and degeneracy common in their respective countries, along with the lethal concoction of the saloon, gambling, and atheism, were all mentioned as direct causes.

  At the temple at Indiana Avenue and Thirty-third Street, Rabbi To-bias Klopstock delivered an address extremely bitter in its denunciation of anarchism and its profane pronouncements. “The spirit of anarchy is flaunting itself in its attack against the integrity of our government,” Rabbi Klopstock vociferated in front of a substantial crowd of Jews. “It is no surprise that Chief Shippy, as the most relentless enemy of the anarchist golem, was their target. We know it is time to call a halt when America, the land of liberty and freedom, loses itself in godless lawlessness. We Jews, as citizens of this free country, must join our Christian brethren in their opposition to the spread of revolutionary teachings on the soil of America.”

  From the pulpit of the Holy Heart of Resurrection, Father George Field bemoaned the barbaric ignorance of the newly arrived immigrants. “Upon their disembarkment, many fall into the hellish pits of anarchism, out of which they have no way of climbing,” he thundered yesterday. “For the souls of those who accept neither the hand of God nor the hand of America are lost unless we redeem them with our stern Christian love. Let us pray for the soul of Lazarus Averbuch and hope that he may rise in Christ like his beloved namesake.”

  IT IS LATE MORNING when Olga limps into the Central Police Station, past a couple of policemen sniggering and exchanging lewd jokes about this disheveled tart, one shoe heel missing. Olga announces to Deputy Sergeant Mulligan that she wishes to speak to Assistant Chief Schuettler. The sergeant laughs and says: “And who might you be, lassie?” But William P. Miller, lingering at the station in hope of a scoop, immediately recognizes she is dramatically distraught; her Semitic features emanate fathomless suffering, her olive skin has a tragic quality—one day, her people will sing songs about her. He whispers something into Mulligan’s ear, and Mulligan shakes his large, cubical head dominated by a broken nose. Olga insists she must see Assistant Chief Schuettler, and Miller is already opening his notebook, pulling a pen, like a comb, out of his inside pocket. Olga Averbuch—strong-headed Jewess, suffering tragedienne—contains multitudes and stories. He puts on a charming grin and offers to walk her to Schuettler’s office, but she does not even look at him. “You must consider having a bath, ma’am,” Mulligan says to her back. “You smell like shit.”

  Last night, the unwieldy, ungainly silence of the city would not allow her to sleep, reminding her of the absence. Lazarus’s cheek was like marble, his hair straw-dry. The politsyant was murmuring in his sleep when she went to the outhouse, carrying a towel, her long velvet skirt and a knitted scarf in her bosom. He was still asleep when she came back, so that when Isador, reeking of the cesspit, walked by him in woman’s clothes, his face tucked into the scarf, he woke up only to utter a comment about stinking foreigners, but was too dazed to notice anything. It was her idea to go see Schuettler, hoping they wouldn’t come to pick her up and find Isador in her bedroom, folded painfully inside her wardrobe, behind a suitcase and a pile of rags. This will be good practice, Isador said, for when you are married and I am your lover. On her way to the police station, she imagined the Fitzes beating him with cheerful ardor, as they beat Isaac, presently gasping for air in his bed, his ribs thoroughly cracked. Even if he deserved a good beating, Isador would never live through it; some bones were never meant to be broken.

  Assistant Chief Schuettler is under the desk; it appears that he is looking for a cuff link or a dropped coin. She watches his bottom wiggling, until he emerges from the kneeling position, slowly uncoiling himself, like a snake. He looms over Olga, smoothing out his sleeves, as she tries not to lean on her heelless side. “You’ve come to confess the crimes of your brother, Miss Averbuch? Perhaps denounce his anarchist companions? Or tell us where we can find the young Maron?”

  Defiantly she faced Assistant Chief Schuettler, William P. Miller will write. She in her malodorous, maculate robe, he in his impeccably tailored suit; she with the wildness of the steppe gleaming in her eyes, he with the strength of law and order exhibited in his square, wide shoulders. It was a battle of wills: masculine versus feminine; American versus Semitic; civilized versus anarchist. In no uncertain terms, the suffering woman demanded her brother’s body back so that he could be buried according to the ancient Jewish rituals. Howling foul words at Assistant Chief Schuettler, who stood stolidly facing her, she threatened with the wrath of the international Jews and depicted a modern-day apocalypse. With animal passion in her eyes, she promised long years of general terror, decades of anarchy that would destroy our freedom and everything we hold dear. But Assistant Chief Schuettler stared her straight in the eye. “Miss Averbuch,” said he, “my job is to uphold law and order, and for law and order I must do what is best. Let your brother lie in peace, so this tormented city may finally return to tranquillity.” At that the wounded Jewess stormed out, cursing with such foul fury that it would not have been out of place in hell itself.

  A politsyant with a handlebar mustache slaps Olga’s behind on the way out, and she totters out onto the street. Miller watches her, not laughing, even though the policeman nudges him—like the sister of the biblical Lazarus, she would go to any length to save her brother. She walks randomly, crossing the street only to cross back again. She finds herself lost in a maze of crates full of chickens and rabbits, then steps in front of a piebald horse dragging a cart of pendant tin pots hysterically banging against one another. The horse looks straight into her eyes, its eyelashes ridiculously long, and neighs, as if greeting her. She stops in front of a candy store, looking into the window and not seeing the pink and the blue and the swirling candy, not seeing the licorice or the sugar cotton. A three-legged mutt runs up to her, as if recognizing her, and sniffs her. A newspaper boy shouts at the corner: “Washington to take the first step in purging the nation of foes to government and individual lif
e!”

  Dear Mother,

  This letter is coming from a better world: by the time you receive it, Lazarus and I will be together waiting for you.

  Somebody is picking up his change in the store, while the man behind the counter glares out the window at Olga, as if warning her against coming in. She feels bodies passing her, brushing against her outskirts. A hand touches her shoulder and a man behind her says: “Would you like some candy?” Without responding, she strides away, bitterness climbing up her throat—had she eaten anything since yesterday, she would have vomited. “I am a friend,” the man says, catching up with her. “I aimed to introduce myself at the police station.” His voice is deep, his English un-American. She hurries forward, hobbling, catching with her hip a basket laden with fish, their doll eyes bulging. “I’m very sorry about your brother, Lazarus,” the man says, panting a bit. “There are a lot of people who believe”—he scurries after her, losing his breath—“who believe that the complete truth about his unfortunate death has not come out yet.” Olga slows down but does not turn back. This might be another politsey joke; her other heel is shaky, she can feel it quiver. The man, still at Olga’s heel, begins the next sentence with a bass cough: “There are people in this city who believe we might soon witness a pogrom.”