The Question of Bruno

by Aleksandar Hemon

  While in Los Angeles, Pronek met John Milius, because he wrote the script for Pronek’s favorite movie, Apocalypse Now. His office was in the building that Selznick constructed to stand in for Tara in Gone With the Wind— just the front part, in fact, because the building was only one room deep. Besides John Milius, who sat at his vast desk suckling on a cigar as long as a walking stick, there was a man who introduced himself as Reg Buttler. He was abundantly mustached and had on a pale-denim shirt, across whose chest an embroidered line zigzagged, like an EKG-line. He shook Pronek’s hand, and, additionally, heartily slapped his shoulder. There was a signed copy of the Apocalypse Now script (“From John to Reg”) on the table in front of him. Pronek was allotted a large glass of bourbon and a giant cigar.

  “Cuban,” John Milius said. “The only good thing that communism ever produced.” Reg Buttler lit Pronek’s cigar, which kept wiggling, too large to handle, between his feeble fingers.

  Then Reg Buttler put his right ankle on his left knee, and pulled the leg violently toward his pelvis, apparently trying to break his own hip. The sharp tip of Reg’s elaborately engraved cowboy boot was directly pointed at John Milius, and Pronek thought that if he had a secret weapon in that boot—something that would eject poisonous pellets, for instance—he could kill John Milius in an instant.

  “Do you people in Sarajevo like Sam Peckinpah?” Milius asked.

  “We do,” Pronek said.

  “No one made blood so beautiful as the old Sam did,” Milius said.

  “I know,” Pronek said.

  “I didn’t know you could watch American movies there,” Reg Buttler said.

  “We could.”

  “So what’s gonna happen there?” Milius asked.

  “I don’t know,” Pronek said.

  “Thousands of years of hatred,” Reg Buttler said and shook his head compassionately. “I can’t understand a damn thing.”

  Pronek didn’t know what to say.

  “Hell, I’ll call General Schwarzkopf to see what we can do there. Maybe we can go there and kick some ass,” Milius said.

  “Like we kicked Saddam’s ass,” said Reg Buttler. “Damn, that was fuckin’ good. We kicked that bastard’s ass.”

  “General Schwarzkopf told me,” John Milius said, “that the Marines were the best. Those boys are the best.”

  Pronek inhaled too much cigar smoke, so he abruptly coughed and spurted bourbon on the Apocalypse Now script, while a rivulet of snot ran down to his chin.

  “War brings out the best and the worst in people,” Milius said. “And only the fittest survive.”

  Pronek took out his hanky and wiped his nose, his chin, and the Apocalypse Now, respectively. Reg looked determinedly to the right, then to the left, clearly mulling over a profound thought.

  “Do you want to stay in this country?” Milius asked Pronek.

  “You should,” Reg Buttler said. “It’s a damn good country.”

  “I don’t know,” Pronek said.

  “I’ll call General Schwarzkopf and see what we can do about it. Listen, if you have nothing to do tomorrow, we can go out to the shooting range and raise some hell.”

  “I’m there with ya!” Reg Buttler said.

  But Pronek had a meeting that he couldn’t miss (which we know was not true) so he politely declined. Before he left, he had a picture taken in front of the building that used to act as Tara. There he is—our foreign friend—teeny with the house in the background, sturdy pillars all lined up behind, like cousins in a family picture, lawns glaring green. He is standing a foot away from Reg and Milius. Milius’s hand is resting on Reg’s shoulder, the two of them like Scarlett O’Hara and her pop, except there is no fake, painted, blood-red sunset, against which they could appear to be shadows, as the music reaches an orgasmic pitch.

  Mud Miracle

  Before it began circling like a hawk, waiting to bury its claws into the runway, the plane hit some turbulence, so orange juice leapt out of the trembling plastic cup, looked around and gleefully landed on Pronek’s beige pants. Chicago under snow looked like a frosted computer-chip board seen from high above, and—while our foreigner was being lowered—moving vehicles became discernible, little bytes being exchanged between the chips. There was a person with two yellow sticks waving at the plane, as if mesmerizing a dragon. Unbuckling the seat belt, which echoed cavernously all around the plane, Pronek realized that the juice stain had attained the subtle hue of urine.

  Andrea was waiting for him at the exit, and as his co-passengers elbowed their way into the molasses of the airport crowd, she offered him her right cheek and her upper body attached to it, while keeping her lower body a couple of feet away, as if a contact between their pelvises would ignite a ferocious intercourse. She told him she was so happy to see him and asked him about his trip. Pronek pointed at the urine-orange stain and joked that his bladder was so small that urine just had to fight its way out, until it could breath freely, the wretched refuse.

  Did she laugh? Indeed she did not.

  They stood on the moving walkway, gliding through a dark tunnel with sinuous neon lights crawling all over the ceiling, and a synthetic female voice warbling: “Do not leave your baggage unattended!”

  Desperate to be charming, Pronek said: “If thing that takes you up is escalator, would this be levelator?”

  “Yeah, right,” Andrea said.

  And now, why not, a quick step back into their common past:

  Pronek met Andrea in the summer of ’91, in Ukraine. They had a lot of fun, flirting and witnessing the August ‘91 putsch. They held hands in front of the Ukrainian parliament when it declared independence, while everywhere around them people ruddy with patriotic excitement waved blue-and-yellow flags and demanded freedom and stuff like that. She had a Brit for a boyfriend, who wore a pinkish headband at all times and kept looking for a rave all over Kiev, but never found one. We know that he worked as a cameraman for the BBC, and on the day independence was declared, he was—God bless his hollow heart—very busy. So they walked to the Dnieper and bought a Red Army officer’s hat for a couple of dollars, which she wore thereafter. They ate a frisbeesized pizza, with carrot-and-beets topping. They watched the Dnieper gently flowing, with the scattered, starry glitter of dead-fish bellies. Pronek investigated the inside of her thighs, never getting over the wall of the panty-line, while the tips of their tongues clumsily collided in midair. In a fit of inexplicable giddiness, Pronek susurrously sang a Frank Sinatra song into her ear: “Eye praktis ehvree dai to faind sum klehvr lains to sai, too maik da meenin cum tfruh …”

  That was one of the songs that his blues band, Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls, well known and liked in Sarajevo, used to play, and, miraculously, she found it endearing.

  But the next day she went with her camera-boyfriend to Kharkiv. Pronek went back to Sarajevo and wrote to her a series of, arguably, love letters, full of shades, ochre and auburn, of autumn leaves and reminiscing about the time (the total of some fifty-three hours) they had spent together. She wrote back that she sorely missed him and that she would like to see him again—a desire, Pronek feared, fueled by the unlikelihood of its fulfillment. They fabricated their past days together: in one of her letters they drank sweet wine, whereas in Kiev they had drunk infernal vodka all the time. He remembered her fragrance, although they were both perpetually stinky and sweaty in the city where water pressure was eternally low, so no one knelt under the faucet to wait for moribund droplets. They remembered, with painful intensity, dancing cheek to cheek—in reality (and reality is our business), they idiotically trotted to the rhythm of anachronistic German disco, while hirsute Ukrainian men swarmed around her, repeatedly trying to rub their perspiring bodies against hers. They failed to remember that Pronek could muster no puissance to repel them, while her boyfriend was having a coquettish conversation with the Canadian embassy undersecretary. Having forged a sufficient number of counterfeit memories, she suddenly invited him to Chicago, prompted, perhaps, by a news repo
rt about the war in Croatia and “tensions” in Bosnia. It was a gracious invitation—neither of them thought it could ever happen, but then Pronek got the invitation to visit the United States in the capacity of a freedom-loving writer, so he put Chicago in his itinerary.

  Therefore, they were happy to be together again.

  She looked different when he saw her at the airport: she was paler, her hair was shorter and darker, and she proudly wore a silver nose ring. Nevertheless, he was glad to be going down the highway with her, their car being sluiced with other cars toward the downtown gutter. The skyline looked flat against the blank sky, like the bottom of the Tetris screen, except there were no rectangles coming from above to fill the angular gaps.

  Andrea drove through downtown, pointing at humongous, astringent buildings that admitted little light, and announcing their function. It all sounded like oversized gibberish to Pronek: the Board of Trade, the tallest building in the world, the biggest something, the busiest something else. Pronek rolled down the window—the cold pinched their ears instantly—and looked up. He could not see the end of those buildings. “This is how cockroach sees furniture in apartment,” Pronek said. “I’m sure,” Andrea said.

  The few people that walked, bundled, down the streets were trying to retract their heads into their chests. They scuttled toward the warmth of building lobbies, while a chalky mist kept rushing past their shoes, in pursuit of a windless patch of pavement. Andrea and Pronek drove up Lake Shore Drive. Ice floes lingered in the harbor, as if hiding, shivering, from the waves that were clawing at thick layers of dun ice on the piers.

  This is a rendition of Pronek’s coming to Chicago, in March 1992, on a flight from L.A., with an uncouth stain in his groin area, and love in his heart.

  When Andrea unlocked the door (which had a sign saying: “Violators will be towed”) of her apartment, a pungent wave of smoke-and-French-fries stench washed off the walls of Pronek’s nostrils. “My roommate is a slob,” she said, as Pronek (and we with him) panned over the walls specked with ketchup (rather than blood, Pronek decided); a sofa with fluffy stuffing hatching out of its cushions; a stereo and a TV besieged by CDs and videos; a table buried under a wretched army of McDonald’s paper bags and cups viciously pierced by slim straws. There were smothered carcasses of cigarette packages and ashtrays brimming with butts and ashes. The window looked, dimly, at a generic brick wall. A porcine black cat (“Her name is Moskva,” Andrea said) glanced at Pronek, and then, having found nothing of interest in Pronek’s existence, continued staring out the window, at the wall.

  Andrea pressed the “play” button on the stereo, and a Madonna song—“Material Girl,” we believe—made the cat slither off the sash and run to the kitchen, followed by Andrea and her foreign friend. “I hate fucking Madonna,” she said. “She’s a living sexist fantasy. My roommate is a fucking moron.” On the kitchen table, there was a mob of beer bottles with their labels ripped off, as if the stout bottles had been tortured and were now awaiting execution. The sink was overflowing with dishes, submerged in murky liquid. Every once in a while, a bubble would reach the surface, eventually bursting with a barely audible belch. There must have been, Pronek thought, a monstrous creature embedded in the sludge at the bottom of the sink.

  “Who is your roommate?” Pronek asked.

  “He’s my boyfriend,” Andrea said. “But we have separate bedrooms.”

  “So, how long you have been together?”

  “On and off, about ten years. But I hate the fucker, I think I wanna break up.”

  “Does he know about me?”

  “Oh, yeah. He sure as hell does. I told him you were coming. He doesn’t give a fuck. He knows everything.”

  Well, we happen to know he didn’t.

  She pushed aside the bottles and they helplessly clinked against each other, until they settled, thick as thieves, on the left side of the table. She pulled two chairs together and put two large cups of coffee at the liberated end of the table, whose surface, Pronek discovered, had prickly tobacco crumbles strewn and stuck to greasy film.

  He wanted to touch her apple cheeks, and the shimmering gossamer on the nape of her neck, and the slope of her shoulders, and the little cavern under her breasts, which he had entered but once, in Kiev, and which was, once upon a time, delectably perspirant. He was mesmerized by her lips barely touching each other as she uttered her bs and ms, and her teeth flashed at him as she formed her fricatives. More than anything, it was the way she laughed: leaning slightly to the left and holding her tummy, as if protecting her viscera from spurting out, protruding the tip of her tongue—and finally producing a delightful chortle.

  Pronek had fantasized about her, about her “unmediated body”—she did nothing to adorn herself. Her body was an instrument of investigation (this is, mind you, what Pronek thought), not an object to be packaged for men, so she could get them to like her. Pronek was sick of all the Sarajevo men and women who spent time performing little love rituals, designing themselves desirable. He wanted—he believed—true love and a true body with it. Andrea was his Statue of Liberty, a symbol of emotional freedom, a proof of the possibility that two people can be (Pronek’s italics) for each other, rather than perform love for each other. She could make, he imagined, all those Frank Sinatra songs, all those movies (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Brigadoon, Gigi) about the inevitable, unconquerable, transcendental love, she could make that come true.

  Hence he carried his two boxy suitcases to her room: her minuscule underwear lounging everywhere; her brassieres hanging, like rabbit skins, from doorknobs; a bag full of shoes and stacks of books on the floor, like a little downtown; the bed with crumpled green covers, kneaded by her body.

  That night, they made love.

  But before they did, she unrolled a scroll of condoms, and Pronek had to wear one. “This is the nineties,” she said. “People can touch each other only if they wear rubber gloves.” So he awkwardly put on his one-fingered glove in front of the entertained Andrea. As they were grinding the sheets, and the bed enthusiastically creaked, and the cat, having jumped on the bed, brushed his face with her downy tail, Andrea kept asking: “Isn’t this good? Do you like this? Isn’t this great?” It was good—the room reeked of bodily fluids and skin friction and dust. They breathed into each other’s faces and let their abdomens adhere. Then their little sex unit fissioned, and she went to the bathroom—her silhouette against the kitchen light, Pronek realized, was gorgeous. He disrobed his penis and lay in bed, the condom hanging from his hand, and he thought about his life. We are in a privileged position to assume what his train of thought might have been freighted with: What is going to happen to me? he asked himself. The things back home will never be well. War in Bosnia was likely, if unimaginable. He imagined marrying Andrea and having a writer’s career, teaching at a woodsy university. He would wear a tweed jacket with suede patches on the elbows; he would become jug-eared and bespectacled and gray-bearded; he would have season tickets for the symphony; he would frown often, and chuckle at the New Yorker cartoons; they would have children who would go to Harvard. He envisioned Andrea and himself, old, yet still in love, their bones shabby, their hair gray, their voices weak, sitting by a fireplace, their backs warm, reading books of the Old Masters, and their lawn would be green and colorful, while carefree warblers would hop all over their modest property. Then a sudden, rapacious itch in his crotch derailed the American-dream train, and Andrea walked in, spreading the scent of a heavenly shampoo. He kissed her wet hair on his way to the bathroom, carrying a dangling condom before him, as if it were a dead rat.

  And the moment before he was to step into the bathroom, its doors amicably opened, the steam speedily leaving it, a man walked into the apartment. For reasons inexplicable, Pronek didn’t slip into the bathroom (“Come in,” whispered the steam), but stood there, nude as a piglet, suddenly aware of the hairlessness of his chicken chest, and general grotesqueness of man’s frontal nudity, not to mention the gooey condom in his han
d.

  “Hi!” Pronek said.

  “How’re you doin’?” the man said.

  “Good.”

  “Good.”

  Silence.

  “Who are you?” the man asked.

  “I am Andrea’s friend.”

  “I guess,” he said. “I’m Carwin.” He was fashionably unshaven and had unruly hair, which, to us, signified cynical rebelliousness. He wore an unbuttoned flannel shirt and a T-shirt underneath, with a picture of a crucified, blond angel.

  “Are you Russian?” he asked.

  Pronek’s bare feet were cold, so he put his left sole on his right calf, and stood there like a Masai warrior, with a used condom instead of a spear.

  “No, I’m from Sarajevo, Bosnia,” Pronek said. “But we met in Ukraine.”

  “Well, it’s nice to meet you,” he said. “I hope I’ll never see your fucking face again.” Then he hollered toward Andrea’s room: “Now you started bringing in fucking foreigners. American dick is not good enough for you, you fucking bitch!”

  “Fuck you, you fucking Anglo asshole!” she yelled back.

  It was then that Pronek finally slipped into the bathroom. The condom wouldn’t sink in the toilet bowl, so Pronek kept flushing it, but it would always come back up from the toilet throat, defiantly bobbing. A roll of toilet paper hid behind the toilet seat, like a frightened hedgehog. We can attest that Pronek felt profound helplessness at that moment. A jury of plastic bottles, bemused by the ablution he had to perform, was lined up on the shelf: Natural Care, Head & Shoulders, Happy, Antarctica, Morning Mist, Mud Miracle (Swiss Formula), No More Tangles. He looked into the mirror and saw vermilion dots on his face and sallow teeth and a square Slavic head with a flat pate and a tuber-nose and greasy hair, sticking to his low forehead. “What am I doing here?” he asked himself (Patience, dear fellow, patience). But there was nothing that could be done, there was nothing more inevitable than taking a shower at that moment.