When the bus finally left the station, I was unsettled by the feeling that we could not return now. Where can you go from nowhere, except deeper into nowhere? Before we even left Chernivtsi, my head was dipping into the well of bad dreams, following the rhythm of obstreperous, incomprehensible banter between a sleeveless lad and the young woman he was flirting with. Rora never slept in motion; the moment the wheels started rolling, he was wide awake and ready to talk.
When you went into the Tunnel under the tarmac, Rora said, you entered darkness and immediately slammed your forehead against the first beam. Your eyes adjusted, you bent your neck, and went on, deeper and deeper. It was like descending into hell, and it smelled just like it: clay, sweat, fear, farts, aftershave. You stumbled and touched the cold, earthen walls; you were in a grave and a corpse could grab you and pull you deeper into the earth. There were no markers, you didn’t know how far into the Tunnel you might be; you just had a sense of the person ahead of you. You lost all sense of time, you lost air—older people regularly passed out—and just as your breathing was about to cease you felt the slightest of breezes, barely a wisp, and the tiniest modulation of light, and then you were out into what looked like all the lights of the world ablaze at once. I’ve read about the people who died but then came back. They described it as passing through a tunnel. Well, the tunnel they passed through was under the tarmac of the Sarajevo airport.
Death must be pleasant, the pain and shock of its infliction notwithstanding. A bullet tearing through your lungs, a knife slitting your windpipe, your forehead smashed in by a steel rod—I concede those would be rather unpleasant. But that pain belonged to life, the body had to be alive to feel it. I wondered if George’s living body and its pain would be undone when he died, as he was going to, if he would experience the bliss of release and relief, the joy of completion and transformation, of dumping the garbage of existence. Never mind Mr. Christ’s eschatological circus—there must be the postorgasmic moment of absolute peace, of coming home, the moment when the fog of life floats away like gun smoke and everything is finally nothing.
Perhaps that was what Mr. Christ deprived Lazarus of. He may have been okay dead; it was all over, he was home. Maybe Mr. Christ was showing off in order to lay—spiritually speaking, of course— Lazarus’s sisters; maybe he wanted to show that he was the boss of death, as he was the boss of life. Either way, he couldn’t just leave Lazarus alone. Once Lazarus was thrown out of the comfy bed of eternity, he wandered the world, forever homeless, forever afraid to fall asleep, dreaming of dreaming. It all made me so goddamn angry. I said nothing to Rora, however.
Instead I said, Moldova is a weird place. When it was part of the U.S.S.R., it produced wine sold all over the Motherland. There are endless cellars, tunnels upon tunnels, where they used to store wine and champagne. Now they have nobody to sell it to. I had read up on this: there are parts of Moldova where people use dung for heating, because Russia cut off coal and gas supplies. Everybody wants to leave it; one-quarter of the population is missing. The rest are trying to think up ways to use wine as fuel.
Do you know the story of the Moldovan underwater hockey team? Rora asked.
What the hell is underwater hockey?
Two teams push the puck on the bottom of the pool.
Why?
They just do. Anyway, there was a women’s underwater hockey world championship in Calgary, and the Moldovan team was supposed to compete, but at the opening ceremony not one of them showed up. The moment they landed in Canada they all dispersed and vanished without a trace. It turned out that some clever Moldovan businessman heard about this idiotic sport, charged the ladies fifteen hundred dollars to join the national underwater hockey team so they could get visas to escape Moldova and get to Canada. Some of the ladies could not even swim, let alone push the puck.
How do you come up with stories like that?
I knew someone who knew the businessman, Rora said. It’s all about knowing the right people.
IT TOOK US FOREVER to cross the Ukrainian-Moldovan border. First, we had to get out of Ukraine, which was not all that easy. We had to step out of the bus and give our papers to Ukrainian border guards. After they cursorily checked everybody else’s local IDs, they devoted all their attention to our passports, reading them like books. It must have been a while since any Americans crossed this border—neither of us cared to brandish our patriotic but useless Bosnian passport. Rora’s weary American passport was an absolute page-turner: the border guards passed it from one to the other, reverently, paying particular attention to the smudged stamps. They pointed at a couple of pages with runny smears and I translated Rora’s answer: he had once been caught in the rain. Even I knew it was an old trick: washing your passport to cover up for the missing entry stamps. But the Ukrainians were happy enough with it to let us leave and become a Moldovan problem.
As Rora and I walked across the no-man’s-land toward Moldova, I worried we could be thrown into a Moldovan dungeon—formerly a wine cellar, no doubt—and then taken away, hooded, by our American compatriots. Our fellow travelers, already cleared by the Moldovans, stood by the bus like a choir, smoking and sweating, arguing as to the degree of our unquestionable international criminality. The sleeveless guy left the group and strolled over to the ramp that marked the entrance to Moldova. He looked suspicious; he probably didn’t even have a passport, but he was fearlessly talking up the guard at the ramp.
The Moldovans were impressed with our passports as well. They took them inside a shack at the far end of the no-man’s-land and got on the phone. The choir was antsy; they reentered the bus and pressed their melting faces against the grimy window, watching us. I saw the boy conductor climb into the bus, shrug his scrawny shoulders, and say, “Amerikantsy,” by way of explanation.
The sleeveless guy was now squatting under the ramp, below the sight line of the guard in the booth; everyone else was looking toward the guards in the shack, where they were relating the gripping story of our passports to distant authorities.
Can you take a picture of that guy? I asked Rora, who looked over with a bit of disinterest and said, Borders cannot be photographed. They would take away my camera.
When Lazarus was crossing the border between the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian empires, a long column of refugees stretched down the road for miles. He carried the leather bag Papa had given him; inside it, a scarf Chaia knitted for him, a shaving kit (a present from Olga), socks and underwear, and a few books he would not be allowed to import into the good empire. Once he crossed, he looked back and recognized, without sorrow or excitement, that he would never return. He could only go forward, deeper into the tunnel of the future.
The sleeveless guy frog-walked under the ramp, the top of his head actually touching it. He stayed low enough so that the guard could not see him, then stood up and ambled calmly for a few dozen yards down the road. He lit a cigarette, pulled out a comb from his back pocket and dragged it through his recalcitrant hair, as though erasing the traces of his self-smuggling.
It was most fascinating and encouraging, his disrespect for international—indeed, all—law, his absence of fear of armed, uniformed power. I couldn’t even begin to contemplate such an operation, because I had places to go and get back to. There was home and away-from-home in my life, and the space between the two was rife with borders. And if I violated the laws governing the home/away-from-home transitions, they would keep me away from home. It was that simple.
Once upon a time, when I was going through a heavy-drinking phase after I lost my teaching job, I came back home at dawn and found, to my inebriated surprise, that there was a door chain barring access to our nuptial bed. Naturally, I kicked the door a few times to break it down, but only left black marks I would later have to scrub off. I kept kicking until Mary’s furious eyes burnt holes in my forehead through the door ajar. Wordlessly, she shut the door and locked it, leaving the key in. I kicked the door an additional couple of times and then walked away, determin
ed never to return. Outside, an angry spring storm had started—I broke through the sheets of it, getting soaked within a befuddled thought. I had nowhere to go: I walked up and down the streets of Ukrainian Village, where we lived then. Chestnut trees were coming into leaf, the dawn was redolent of tree bark. I was never going back home, I kept swearing, kept walking, until I was overwhelmed by fatigue and sat down on a playground bench piebalded with tiny puddles. If I had a job, I would have gone straight to work and from there to a hotel. But, as my cold underwear crawled up my crack and rivulets of rain ran down my forehead, I understood a simple fact: if you can’t go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world—indeed, nowhere is the world. I returned home, remorsefully, rang the bell, contritely, and begged to be let in.
Finally, the Moldovan border officer returned our passports and we boarded the bus. I dispatched a few futile apologetic American smiles to our bus mates, but they were uniformly ignored. The guard lifted the ramp and we entered, stopping shortly thereafter to pick up the sleeveless, passportless guy, who inexplicably winked at me before he reinstalled his armpit over my head.
RAMBO LIKED TO BE in the pictures, Rora had to take pictures of him all the time. I suppose he imagined himself a hero, someone who would always be remembered. He provided film to Rora, his headquarters had a darkroom for him; he looted a camera shop just for his photographer. He liked to look at the photos of himself: here was Rambo bare-chested, pointing his silver gun at the camera; here he was with an automatic rifle in hand, its butt resting on his thigh; here he was clutching in jest the hair of a young woman smiling, painfully, next to him; here he was sitting on top of a corpse of one of our soldiers, some poor sap who stood up to him in front of the wrong audience—the boy’s eyes were glassy and wide open in surprise, Rambo on his chest with a cigarette in his mouth, as if he were in a commercial for a vacation in Iraq.
Rambo thought that the war would never end because it could never end; he thought he could forever be the guy with the biggest dick in town. But he became an inconvenience to his political friends. See, he did business with the Serbs on the other side; he would recover the bodies of the Serbs killed in the besieged Sarajevo and then transport them across the river to his Chetnik partners; they would be paid by the families of the dead and split the money with Rambo. Rambo’s men would collect the bodies from the morgue, or off the street, smuggle them through the Rat Tunnel, which was a huge sewage pipe by the Field Museum, then carry them across the river. Business was brisk, and for an exorbitant price he would smuggle out even some living Serbs. During a truce, business slowed down, and Rambo deployed Beno in search of more profitable Serb corpses, so people started disappearing. A few wrong ones got killed, however, and people started talking, journalists started asking questions. Rambo had to dress down a curious French TV crew—he took away their bulletproof vests and their cameras and cars, and slapped them around to boot. Even Miller was showing impertinent interest and had to be taken by Rora to Mostar to report from there, which left his nose out of shit.
But Miller slipped Rora in Mostar and returned to Sarajevo. Explaining that careless inattention to Rambo would have been a big problem, a huge problem—Rambo had his crazy moods, he could enter a fog of rage, and you did not want to be around him then. No friend, no brother, nobody was safe from Rambo’s fury; and he never forgot: those who did wrong by him were never forgotten or forgiven. Rora had a choice: if he were to go to Sarajevo, Rambo might kill him; he could try to escape from Mostar via Medjugorje, go to Germany or somewhere, but he had no money, knew nobody there. But then he heard that Rambo had almost got assassinated. Someone waited in ambush near the Chinese restaurant; Rambo’s car was blown up by a handheld missile launcher. He was in the backseat for some reason, had let someone else drive, and only the driver got killed. The official version was that it was a Chetnik attack, but Rambo knew better. He knew it was someone close. If I didn’t go back, Rora said, Rambo would have thought that I was involved in that and he would have tracked me down to the ends of the earth.
Were you involved? I asked.
Are you out of your fucking mind?
Who was it, then? I asked.
Why do you want to know? You know nothing about these people, Brik. Nothing about the war. You are a nice, bookish man. Just enjoy the story.
Who was it? You can’t tell me a story like this and not tell me who it was.
He looked at me for a long time, as though deciding whether to initiate me, whether I was ready to enter the parallel universe of iniquity and murder.
Tell me, I said. Come on.
Well, it was Beno, obviously. Somebody high up in the government promised him he would he boss if he took Rambo out, and so he sincerely tried. And fucked up.
Why did the government want Rambo out?
He was crazy. They couldn’t control him. They thought they were using him, until it dawned on them he was using them. They thought Beno would be more pliant, promised him friendship and steady business, and he went for it.
What happened to Beno?
What’s with the questions? You are not going to write about this, will you?
No, of course not. I’ve got another book to write.
Rambo caught him. He beat him for days, then stuck his gun up his ass and fired. He bragged all over town that the bullet came out through Beno’s forehead.
Good God.
He was going to catch whoever put Beno up to it. He was going to kill him, and no government could stop him. He was crazy. Rambo’s own men hid from him, because they knew that if he came upon them he might accuse them of being in cahoots with Beno.
What about you?
I had to come back from Mostar. No point in running away, he would have found me. I had to find Miller before Rambo ran into him and make him give me an alibi, tell Rambo we were together the whole time. I had to be very careful not to end up face-to-face with Rambo. He was avoiding the government liquidators, hunting down his enemy; he was crazy. Those were crazy days. In the beginning, every war has a neat logic: they want to kill us, we want not to die. But with time it becomes something else, the war becomes this space where anybody can kill anybody at any time, where everybody wants everybody dead, because the only way you are sure to stay alive is if everybody else is dead.
And did you find Miller?
Eventually.
Ah, Moldova! (How did I get to Moldova?) The rolling hills overgrown with sunflowers; the deserted villages, the driveways between the houses overtaken by grass and weed; the peasants huddling together to mark a bus stop; the city called Balta, fit to be used as a postcataclysmic movie set; a mob of people trying to board our overcrowded bus. Moldova now had nothing but independence, its entire population dying to join their underwater hockey team.
I was never so afraid for my life, Rora said, ever stimulated by motion. I couldn’t find Miller. I felt that everybody was after me—the Serbs in the hills, the Bosnian government, Rambo himself. He went completely insane: the government sent, stupidly, a couple of young policemen to arrest him, and he killed them on the spot and sent their balls back in an envelope addressed to their bosses. He wanted Beno’s government protector, and he was going to get him.
Did he get him?
No. Rambo got shot by a sniper. The sniper must have waited for days before Rambo came by Djul-bašta. He got a bullet an inch away from his heart. He needed an urgent surgery, but he knew that if he went to the government-controlled hospital, he would surely expire on the surgical table, to everyone’s relief. He forced a surgeon at gunpoint to operate secretly. He was smuggled into the hospital under a different name; the bullet was taken out, and he was removed from the hospital immediately afterward. He was then smuggled out of the city and driven to Vienna.
Who was the doctor?
Another useless question, Brik. Nobody you know.
And how did he slip out of Sarajevo?
Will you lay off? Isn’t this enough?
&n
bsp; You’re full of shit. You start telling me the story, you tickle me and titillate me, and then you pretend to be surprised when I want to hear the end of it.
Rora said nothing, of course. I had a point. He looked out the window; I nearly dozed off while he was contemplating whether to answer.
Well, the corpse-smuggling business with the Serbs never stopped, not for a moment—it was too lucrative and there were people in the government who were ready to take over. Rambo got out through the Rat Tunnel, pretending to be a Serb corpse. They wrapped him in a shroud, they put an amputated, rotten limb in with him to make him stink; two policemen carried him across the river to the other side. His Chetnik friends arranged everything else; once he got across the river he was resurrected, and they drove him straight to Vienna.
Every once in a while the police stopped our bus and the teenager copilot talked to the policemen in Russian or Romanian; they would appear stern and determined, they would flip through the papers and shake their heads. Then the kid would announce that we had been fined for some traffic violation or other and that we needed to collect some money; to pay for it or we couldn’t go on. We delivered our money; we had no choice: I forked out a few un-crisp Susie dollars. The teenager would then give the money to the police, they would count it and give him back some, which he would pocket in plain sight. Rora would stop talking during that racketeering routine and watch the transaction with disinterest. For him it was but low-level graft, motivated by the survival instinct; it was like watching children quaintly playing. For me, however, it was nauseating, as everything merged into one foul whole: the armpits, the rolling hills, the gun up the ass, the empty villages, the bullet an inch away from the heart, Rambo sitting on a dead Bosnian soldier, my dry mouth, Rora’s world-weariness, the precociously nefarious teenager, the heartbreaking stench of it all.
I recalled Mary, her strained, half-assed Catholic innocence, her belief that people were evil due to errors in their upbringing and a shortage of love in their lives. She just could not comprehend evil, the way I could not comprehend the way the washing machine worked or the reason the universe expanded into infinity. For her, the prime mover of every action was a good intention, and evil occurred only if the good intention was inadvertently betrayed or forgotten. Humans could not be essentially evil, because they were always infused by God’s infinite goodness and love. We had conducted long, unerotic discussions about all this. I also heard it from the high horse’s mouth, from George the Dead himself, who once upon a time contemplated becoming a priest. I deigned to suggest to him that it was also the American thing—America was nothing if not good intentions. Damn right it was, George said. For a while, I had believed her; it was gratifying to understand everything around me—Chicago, my American life, the politeness of our neighbors, Mary’s kindness—as a result of generally intended goodness. I had believed her that our good intentions would bear fruit, that we could reach the far horizon of immaculate marriage.
The Lazarus Project Page 16