I’ve been sending letters for her through obscure Red Cross channels—it takes months for a Red Cross convoy to reach Sarajevo and even more for my letters to reach her. When they do, they’re already obsolete, they’re rendering someone other than myself, someone saner—a stranger not only to her but indeed to myself. When I’m writing those letters I have to accept my helplessness, I have to admit that someone else is writing them, using my body, my Pelikan fountain pen, my cramped right hand. Whatever I write, I feel it to be untrue, because it’ll be untrue in a day or two, if not in a moment or two. Whatever I say I am lying or will be lying. On the pages of the letter, the whiteness of the page stained with ink, a dismal present descends into a desolate past. That is why I tend to write her things that she already knows, tell her stories told wars ago. It is cowardly, I confess, but I’m just trying to create an illusion that our lives, however distant, may still be simultaneous.
The odor escaped Fatima’s room no matter what we tried to do. We stuffed the cracks between the door and the frame with rugs. We soaked the rugs and the door with vinegar and our useless perfumes (Obsession, Magie Noir). But the stench was always there—the sweet, dense, meaty scent of decay. In the midst of a rare and brief nocturnal lull in shelling, we decided to throw her out of the window, after my mother woke up screaming, having dreamt maggots coming out of her sister’s eye sockets.
Kevin and I, we get drunk over his stories, with bourbon that he keeps fetching from somewhere. He tells me then what he considers to be intimate things: about his long-time girlfriend, who was working as a real estate agent, having a dream of becoming a congresswoman. She was from a place called White Pigeon, Michigan, fifty miles south of Kalamazoo. While he was in the Gulf, she left him a message on his answering machine about leaving him because he was a “selfish dreamy idiot.” He tells me how he sees everything through a viewfinder. He has confidence in the camera objective. He feels natural with his camera, because “with the camera I see nothing alone.” There’s always another pair of eyes, he says.
A friend of mine asked me to help her identify some damaged buildings in Sarajevo; she sent me photographs hoping that I could recognize the buildings, but they were unidentifiable as far as I was concerned. They all looked the same: they all had shattered windows—black holes, as if their eyes had been gouged; there were rings of debris around them, as if ruins were being carved out of whole buildings; there were no people in the pictures. What was in the pictures were not buildings—let alone buildings I could’ve come in or out of: what was in the pictures was what was not in the pictures—the pictures recorded the very end of the process of disappearing, the nothingness itself.
People stand in line at Point A, waiting for their turn to run across. When it’s your turn, you cannot wait, you have to go, because the longer you wait, the readier the sniper is. Plus you don’t want to share the unspeakable fear of the waiting throng. The first time I ran from Point A to Point B, the fear was unspeakable indeed. Pain in your stomach, as if a big steel ball is grinding your bowels. Blood throbbing in your neck veins. Wet heat inside your eyeballs. Numbness of your limbs, increasing as you’re running. Sweat trickling down your cheeks, like a miniature avalanche of dread. You see no life unwinding before your eyes. All you see is one or two meters ahead of you and all the little things that you can trip over. You hear every tiny sound. Your feet brushing away dirt and rubble. Distant detonations. Cries of scared and wounded people. Whistling ricocheting bullets. The death rattle from the person behind you.
This is me in what’s left of the Library. If you could magnify this picture sufficiently you would see motes levitating around me—cold ashes of books. This picture was made on the day I got the bulletproof vest. It was one of the happiest days of my life, this life. A bulletproof vest significantly increases your (well, mine) chances of survival. The sniper has to shoot you in the head to kill you. Which is why I cut my hair so short, to make my head smaller. Sometimes I feel like a fucking Joan of Arc, except I have no army and no voices to guide me.
Mother and Father wrapped her up in a bedsheet, and then another one, and then another one, their faces distorted by the urge to vomit. I couldn’t watch when they actually pushed her over the windowsill, but I heard the thud. I thought, as if remembering a line from a movie: “Her life ended with a thud.”
Since April I have received no letters from Aida. From that time on I had to make up her letters, I had to write her letters for her, I had to imagine her, because that was the only way to break the siege and stay connected with her. I’m sure she’s alive, I’m sure that one of these days I’ll have a bundle of her consecutive letters stowed in my mailbox, I’m sure she’s writing them this very moment.
This war, my friend, is men’s business. The other day I heard a “joke”: “What is a woman?”—“The stuff around the pussy!” The men in the camouflage uniforms thought it was so hilarious that they kicked the floor with their rifle butts. I sensed that the joke was for me. We’re expected to remain silent, spread our legs, breed more warriors, and die with motherly dignity. I think what I fear the most is rape. When a sniper bullet hits you, your body and yourself die simultaneously. Provided, naturally, that you’re killed instantly; which you usually are, because they’re so fucking good. But I don’t want my body to be mutilated, mauled, violated. I don’t want to witness that. When I’m gone I’d like to take my body with me. Have you heard about the rape camps?
When I got this job, I moved to the TV building, going home only occasionally, to check if my parents were alive and well. I’d usually go on Sunday afternoons, after the morning transmission of Friday leftovers. But then I stopped doing that because I realized that my local sniper was waiting for me. Before I ran, everything was silent, and several people ran across the parking lot without being shot at. When I started crossing it, bullets buzzed around me like rabid bees. He watched me. He knew I was coming. He waited for me and then toyed with me. Now I go to see them at different times, using different routes, trying to appear differently each time in order to be unrecognizable to the sharpshooter, who could be one of my ex-boyfriends for all I know.
While my head was still on the pillow, my nightmare not completely erased by the sudden awakening, I opened my eyes and saw a cockroach running from the stove, over the gray kitchen-floor tiles, getting on the carpet, running a bit slower, as if on sand, going beneath the chair, coming diagonally across, going around my slippers, trying to reach the safe space underneath my futon. I watched it, it was running fast, never stopping, going straight without hesitation. What was it running from? What was running that little engine? Desire to live? Fear of death? The instinctual—perhaps, even, molecular—awareness of the gaze of the supreme sharpshooter? What a horrible world, I thought, when every living creature lives and dies in fear. I reached for my left slipper, but the cockroach was already underneath the futon.
Snipers often kill dogs, just for fun. Sometimes they have competitions in dog-shooting, but only when there aren’t any targetable people on the streets. Shooting a dog in the head gets you the most points, I suppose. One can often see a dog corpse with a shattered head, like a crushed tomato. When snipers shoot dogs, antisniping patrols refrain from confronting them, because of the constant danger of a rabies epidemic. When an unskilled, new, or careless sharpshooter only wounds a dog and the dog frantically ricochets around, bleeding, howling, biting anything that can ease the pain and fear, a member of the antisniping patrol might even shoot the dog, aiming, as always, at the head.
The other day I took Kevin to a tour of my favorite places in Sarajevo. He took his camera. What I like about Kevin is that you don’t have to explain everything to him. He just sees what you want him to see. What’s more, he doesn’t say that he understands. You just know. We both knew, for instance, that the places on our tour were between being a memory and being reduced to nothing but a pile of rubble. The camera was recording the process of disappearing. There is a truce in place these days, wh
ich always scares me a bit. Partly because silence is often more terrifying than the familiar relentless noise of shelling. Partly because I’m afraid that Kevin might get bored and leave. Which is why, I suppose, I took him on the tour. He followed me with his camera like a shadow. I showed him our school. I stood in the wrecked window of our classroom and he shot me waving to his objective. I stood on the corner from which Princip shot those historic shots. My little feet were fitting, as always, into the concrete shapes of his feet. I took him to the few bars we used to frequent. Some of them were closed—the owner dead or something—and some of them were full of black marketers and men in uniform, their rifles conspicuous on the bar-stand before them. I took him to the park, now treeless—desperate firewood demand—where I used to take boys and make them touch my breasts, while they were being too pusillanimous to go further. I told all that to the camera, and he circled around me, his knees bent, as if genuflecting. And then I told him, as I am telling the invisible you now, that I was pregnant.
Then we watched over it, the white pile that used to be my aunt, from the window that was hidden from snipers. We watched the bundle of decomposed flesh, as if we were on a wake, but a wake for something other than Aunt Fatima, and transcendentally important nonetheless. We would take turns, we would have shifts. Father even asked me, taking his shift, if everything was all right. I said: “No, nothing will ever be all right.” I’m terrified with the calmness, even if ostensible, with which I’m telling you this. I feel I might burst out into madness.
In the corners of my room, there are elaborate cobwebs, but I haven’t seen any spiders. It seems that the cobwebs have a purely symbolic function—they’re there to remind me that I am trapped and that, at any given moment, a tooth or a sting will inject poison into my body and then suck out my blood. The space I inhabit becomes me—the room speaks about me, as if the walls were pages of a book and I were a hero, a character, somebody.
So I had the morning shift. And right after it dawned, I saw a pack of dogs coming toward us. There was a rottweiler, a poodle, and several mongrels. They tore the sheets and I turned my head away, but I could not leave. The only thought I remember having was about skiing. I had a vision of myself coming down the slope, going very fast, and air slapping my cheeks, and the sound of the skis brushing snow away, like a speeded-up recording of waves. When I looked out again, I couldn’t look at the place where the corpse was. I looked around it, as if making a compromise. I saw the rottweiler, trotting away, with a hand in his jaw. I wish I’d had a camera so I wouldn’t have to remember. I’m sorry I had to tell you this.
My hair is all gray now. How is Chicago? Write, even if your letters can’t reach me.
With a lightning move of my hand superbly handling the knife, I split the cockroach in two: the front half continued running for an inch or two and then started frenetically revolving around the head; the back half just stood in place, as if surprised, oozing pallid slime.
I woke up bleeding, in a bed soaked with blood, by the Heathrow Airport, in an expensive bland hotel, having waited for Kevin for more than a week. Kevin, who didn’t even bother to call me. I tried to reach him in Amsterdam, Paris, Atlanta, New York, Cyprus, even Johannesburg, leaving messages and curses. But then I just wiped myself off and went back to Sarajevo, leaving a heap of bloody towels and bedsheets, an empty refreshment bar, a broken glass in the bathroom, and an unpaid bill, to Kevin’s name, with his Cyprus address. So here I am now, un-pregnant, as sanguine as ever, but never as sad.
I bought a Polaroid camera to explore my absence, to find out how space and things appear when I’m not exerting my presence on them. I took snapshots—glossy still moments with edges darker than the center, as if everything is fading away—I took snapshots of my apartment and the things in it: here’s my ceiling fan not revolving; here’s my empty chair; here’s my futon, looking like somebody’s just got up; here’s my vacuous bathroom; here’s a dried cockroach; here’s a glass, with still water not being drunk; here are my vacant shoes; here’s my TV not being watched; here’s a flash in the mirror; here’s nothing.
When you get to Point B, the adrenaline rush is so strong that you feel too alive. You see everything clearly, but you can’t comprehend anything. Your senses are so overloaded that you forget everything before you even register it. I’ve run from Point A to Point B hundreds of times and the feeling is always the same but I’ve never had it before. I suppose it is this high pressure of excitement that makes people bleed away so quickly. I saw deluges of blood coming out of svelte bodies. A woman holding on to her purse while her whole body is shaking with death rattle. I saw bloodstreams spouting out of surprised children, and they look at you as if they’d done something wrong—broken a vial of expensive perfume or something. But once you get to Point B everything is quickly gone, as if it never happened. You pick yourself up and walk back into your besieged life, happy to be. You move a wet curl from your forehead, inhale deeply, and put your hand in the pocket, where you may or may not find a worthless coin; a coin.
BLIND JOZEF PRONEK
&
DEAD SOULS
And, finally, when after sneaking from dresser to closet, he had found piece by piece all he needed and had finished his dressing among the furniture which bore with him in silence, and was ready at last, he stood, hat in hand, feeling rather embarrassed that even at the last moment he could not find a word which would dispel that hostile silence; he then walked toward the door slowly, resignedly, hanging his head, while someone else, someone forever turning his back, walked at the same pace in the opposite direction into the depths of the mirror, through the row of empty rooms which did not exist.
—BRUNO SCHULZ,
Mr. Charles
FOR
SEMEZDIN MEHMEDINOVIC
The Red Scarf
As soon as Pronek stepped out of the plane (an exhausted steward, crumpled and hoary, beamed an “Auf Wiedersehen” at him), he realized that he had left his red wool scarf in the luggage compartment, with a mustard stain from the Vienna airport café. He contemplated going back to fetch it, but the relentless piston of his fellow pilgrims pushed him through the mazy tunnel, until he saw a line of booths echoing one another, with uniformed officers lodged in them reading little passport books, as sundry passengers waited obediently behind a thick yellow line on the floor. There was a man holding a sign with Pronek’s name misspelled on it (Proniek), monitoring the throng winding between black ribbons, as if the man were choosing a person to attach the name to. Pronek walked up to him and said: “I am that person.” “Oh, you are,” the man said. “Welcome to the States.”
“Thank you,” Pronek said. “Thank you very much.”
The man led him past the passels of people clutching passports, pushing their tumescent handbags with their feet. “We don’t have to wait,” he said, nodding at Pronek for some reason, as if conveying a secret message. “You’re our guest.”
“Thank you!” Pronek said.
The man took him up to the booth filled to the glass-pane brim with a gigantic man. Had someone abruptly opened the door of his booth, his flesh would have oozed out slowly, Pronek thought, like runny dough.
“Hi, Wyatt!” said Pronek’s guide.
“Hi, Virgil!” said the dough man.
“He’s our guest!” said Virgil.
“How’re you doin’, buddy?” said the dough man. He was mustached, and suddenly Pronek realized that he resembled the fat detective with a loose tie and an unbuttoned shirt from an American TV show.
“I’m very well, sir, I thank you very much,” Pronek said.
“Wha’re you goin’ to do here, buddy?”
“I do not know right now, sir. Travel. I think they have program for me.”
“I’m sure they do,” he said, flipping through Pronek’s red Yugoslav passport, as if it were a gooey smut magazine. Then he grabbed a stamp and violently slammed it against a passport page and said: “You have a hell of a time, y’hear now, buddy.”
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“I will, sir. Thank you very much.”
What we have just seen is Jozef Pronek entering the United States of America. It was January 26, 1992. Once he found himself on this side, he didn’t feel anything different. He knew full well, however, he couldn’t go back to retrieve his red scarf with the yellow mustard stamp.
Virgil began explaining to Pronek how to get on the plane to Washington, D.C., but Pronek wasn’t really listening, for Virgil’s spectacular head suddenly became visible to him. He saw the valley of baldness between the two tufts of hair, stretching away in horror from the emerging globe. The skin of Virgil’s face was inscribed with an intricate network of blood vessels, like river systems on a map, with two crimson deltas around his nostrils. Hair was peering out of his nose, swaying almost imperceptibly, as if a couple of centipedes were stuck in his nostrils, hopelessly moving their little legs. Pronek didn’t know what Virgil was saying, but still kept saying: “I know. I know.” Then Virgil generously shook Pronek’s hand and said: “We’re so happy to have you here.” What could Pronek say? He said: “Thank you.”
He exchanged money with a listless carbuncular teenager behind a thick glass pane, and obediently sat down at a bar that invited him with a glaring neon sign: “Have a drink with us.” He was reading dollar bills (“In God we trust”) when the waitress said: “They’re pretty green, ahn’t they? Wha’ canna gechou, honey?”
The Question of Bruno Page 11