The Question of Bruno

by Aleksandar Hemon

  Pennsylvania 1760

  Perhaps it is important to know that Andrea was an artist, indeed a painter. She showed Pronek her most recent finished painting, a couple of years old, picturing her between a hog and a sow—all three of them stared at Pronek, framed, presumably, by a farm fence. The pigs were adamantly pink. The hog seemed to enjoy the situation and it had two dun marks on its front hams, while the sow had swollen teats. The painting was entitled Home. She informed Pronek, who could not decide whether he liked it or not, but said he liked it anyway, that she hadn’t painted anything after that. “There are things I need to understand about myself before I can share them with people,” she said.

  She worked at the Art Institute, in the gift shop. In the mornings, she would suddenly erect her upper body in bed, the way maidens in horror movies wake up from torturous nightmares, just before the killer (who is always in the vicinity) leaps at them to slice them up. Then she would light a cigarette and look worried. Pronek could tell from the way she smoked that her life was an arduous task: her forehead would corrugate; she would slide her tongue between her gums and the inside of her lips, as if answers to all questions were hiding in oral corners along with food bits; she would wedge her elbow into the palm of her left hand, and prompt her right hand with a cigarette, close to her mouth, nibbling on the filter, inhaling in small, intense gasps, and then exhaling with a burdened, low sigh at the end, like a full stop. She would scratch her spine with her left-hand thumb, and her shoulder blades would move toward each other under the taut skin, only to retreat back to their starting positions.

  Pronek would hear the delicate scraping of her long nail against the skin, and, still steeped in his nightmare, he would worry about her birthmarks being ripped off her back.

  He would watch her stealthily, not making a sound. When she turned toward him, he would pretend to sleep, keeping his eyes and mouth closed, lest she kiss him, for he was ashamed of his putrescent morning breath. She would trudge to the bathroom, and he would hear the relentless hum of the shower, intermingled with splashing, as if she were resisting a deluge. Then the hair dryer buzz, after which, he suspected, she took care of her hair and her armpits and her lips. By the time she would come back to their room (albeit Pronek would have never referred to it as “our room”) he was asleep, and not even the bustle of her picking through her wardrobe, and the rustle of her rolling stockings up her legs would make him open his eyes.

  He would get up a couple of hours later and then follow her scent to the bathroom, where she would still be vaporously present, and the bathtub would still have the unfortunate vestiges of her hair, curled up here and there, waiting to be collected in the mass grave of the drain. Pronek would perform his morning toilet duties, trying to make his body presentable to America. There were three toothbrushes, two of which—Pronek’s and Andrea’s—lay side by side, as if sunbathing together, while the third one was, incidentally, on the verge of the sink.

  It was the third one that Pronek dipped in the toilet water.

  On some mornings, Pronek would salvage a plate, not yet engendering mold patches, from the dish-swamp, and eat some limp cheese (invariably mozzarella) and rancid crackers. Sometimes he would sip coffee from a cup that had lipstick scars on the opposite side of the brim, and kept staring at a blank page, only to write “Chicago, April 1992” in the upper-right-hand corner and then stare again, until he would finally abort the letter. He could never go beyond the place and the date, as if those were perfectly self-explanatory, and nothing else need have been said. He wanted to call his parents, but had no money to pay for it, and Andrea had said that he should ask Carwin, since he was “the phone man of the house.” Sometimes he would watch the news, showing barricades, and people running in panic, and white, innocent, armored vehicles parked in the middle of a Sarajevo street.

  On the days he didn’t go to work as a Pier 1 store manager, Carwin would get up and lodge himself on the sofa, stick his hand into his flannel shorts, and watch the news with our foreigner. He would say: “Man, I don’t understand this shit. Can’t they just chill out, man. I mean, what’s the big fucking deal?” Pronek would say nothing, stroking the purring Moskva, and then he would get on the downtown train to meet Andrea for lunch.

  He would walk down the Magnificent Mile, sweating in his dark coat, dotted with lint, reeking of traveling and the past. Often, he would be thinking about The Magnificent Seven and Seven Samurai and there was nothing magnificent about the mile: morgue-like buildings and lugubrious stores promising all kinds of purchasable joys. Whenever he found himself walking down the Magnificent Mile, he had a burning craving for a McDonald’s burger, which he normally hated and considered inedible, respectively.

  Perhaps this could be Pronek’s contribution to the psychology of architecture.

  He would stroll past people clutching their purses or briefcases, frowning at the wind. “Who are they?” he wondered. “Where do they live? What do they do?” Once he realized, schlepping through the goo and yuck of wet April snow, that he was utterly superfluous walking down the Magnificent Mile, that everything would be exactly the same if the space his body occupied at that moment were empty—people would walk with the same habitual resolve, clutching the same purses and briefcases, perhaps even infinitesimally happier, because there would be more walking space without his body. When he shared his thoughts with Andrea, she said, with a nasty giggle: “The land of the free, the home of the brave.”

  Pronek would wait for Andrea to get her lunch break, and he would roam the shop, browsing through postcards, trying on aprons adorned with Picasso or Monet pictures, reading books on African art. Once he located all the cameras in the store, disinterested little eyes gazing from distant upper corners, and tried to find a spot not covered by a camera, and found none. Sometimes he would just find an inconspicuous position in the store, hiding behind a curtain of posters, or pretending to be reading a book, and he would watch Andrea smiling at the customers, gracefully returning their credit cards, or handing a bagful of artful merchandise over the counter. Then she would get off and they would drift through the museum, never holding hands. They would hide in the American Furniture and Arts section, where they would venture into illicit, deliciously dangerous, touching, under the worried, worried gaze of George Washington; or under the conjugal gaze of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Hubbard—Daniel’s promontory chin reaching into the glorious revolutionary future; or the sovereignly chaste gaze of Abigail Cheseborough. Of course, most of these names meant nothing to Pronek, but they all looked devoutly uncomfortable. Pronek and Andrea would pussyfoot around a Lincoln staring at marble tiles under their feet, apparently pensive, in duck-beak boots and with a duck-beak beard, stepping forward, his hands locked on his leaderly butt. And there was a Lincoln welded to an uncomfortable brazen chair, worried all over again, wearing the same boots, except Pronek could see the big-toe lumps and imagine the sweaty, swollen feet and the ingrown toenails causing a lot of banal pain.

  They would roam through the armor section, where metal man-sheaths suggested an eerie presence, as if the bodies that were meant to fill those armors were stored somewhere in the warehouse. They would follow a battalion of high school kids, predominantly blond and obese (“Cornfed,” Andrea would whisper), who were hee-hawing in front of naked-lady paintings, as their faces worked on the spring collection of pimples. They would start looking at paintings of the fourteenth century, and then move chronologically, with everyone else, counterclockwise. It seemed to Pronek that between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries the main human activities were suffering, torture, fear, and rape. “Did you have the sixteenth century in Sarajevo?” Andrea asked him once. “Yeah,” our friend said. “But it was different.” He would try to sound cultured and civilized—to play the role of a European, as it were—and make the most of his two-hour visit to the Louvre, which he had mainly spent lost in a nightmarish eighteenth-century wing. He would try to devote a reasonable portion of thinking to each painting, but woul
d often find himself staring at the carved frames and blank walls around the painting, yawning like an excited monkey. In the room that contained some Rape of Lucrece he stared at Lucrece’s torn pearl necklace eternally in midair and thought about the incredible amount of yawning that could be witnessed in museums, mainly because of the lack of air circulation, as if breathing would impair understanding of Great Art.

  A senior citizen in a glaring pink jacket stopped in front of the Rape and gasped.

  Her favorite painting was humongous and completely black—black wrinkles, black smudges, black puckered paint, and Pronek liked it, but didn’t know why. They would gawk at it for a while and Andrea would say: “Who are we in the hands of an angry God?”

  One day, Pronek and Andrea descended to the miniature rooms. “Begin to your left,” said the sign on the wall, and when they began to their right, an elderly lady, the Cerberus of the miniature rooms, with a puffy hairdo and thin lips, issued a warning with a fiery glance and a significant tightening of her lips, so they began to their left. There was a fair-haired brat darting around like a crazed colt, and occasionally peering behind the pane into the miniature rooms. Then he would start running around again and holler: “Awesome, baby! Awesome, baby!” The rooms were small, very small. Pronek had never seen anything like that. A “Pennsylvania 1760” room had minuscule armchairs and desks, and a minute fireplace, with tiny fake flames. There was a little carpet and wee windows, and, behind them, a garden illuminated by an invisible sun. Pronek was the only one looking into the “Pennsylvania 1760” room, so he was the only one to see a minikin figure, with long white hair, and an impish mini-grin, running across the miniature room. Pronek could hear the tapping, the barely audible, evanescent, echoes of the creature’s tiny steps, which then disappeared into the garden.

  Doubtless, a hallucination.

  The brat was revolving around a center invisible to anyone but him, still shrieking; “Awesome, baby!” but then he got much too dizzy and collapsed on the floor. He lay right below a “Virginia 1790” room, holding his blond watermelon in his hands, panting, still saying: “Awesome, baby!”

  Andrea went with Pronek to check out his coat, and Pronek said: “How can you ever know that you’re getting right coat? Maybe everything you have is replaced by something else. I think, maybe they’re going through your pockets. They’re photographing what’s in there, making keys, and changing everything. So when you get out, everything is different, and your memories don’t look right, so you change them.” He put his coat on. “You know what I mean? I cannot ever know that this is my real, old coat, but I must wear it anyway, because there’s no other coat, and I must make memories about it.”

  “You Eastern Europeans are pretty weird,” Andrea said.

  When Pronek came back home (albeit it was Andrea’s home), Carwin leapt off the couch, in all likelihood interrupted while masturbating, and hurried to his room. Pronek changed the channel from The Dukes of Hazzard to CNN and saw a crowd of people in front of the parliament building in Sarajevo, cowering and hastening to find cover, or just roaming, confused by the sniper fire. There was a quick shot of a sneakered foot paired with a sneakerless foot, both twitching, and a rotund big toe protruding, while the rest of the body was obscured by a cluster of people trying to help, some of them crying and wiping their tears with bloody hands.

  Then there was the national weather forecast, so Pronek got up and got himself a dirty glass of ginger ale.

  The Question of Bruno

  Jozef Pronek decided to stay in the United States, possibly for the rest of his life, in the middle of a snowy night, as snowflakes were pressing their crystal faces against the window pane, after Carwin dropped a pot of rotting spaghetti on the floor and said: “Fuck!” He woke up, his heart pounding again (yes, it had pounded before), having dreamt of dogs tearing his body apart—a German shepherd going for his throat, a poodle for his calves. Through the door ajar, he could see Carwin trying to clean and spreading the red mush, as if painting, all over the floor. It looked like blood and brains to Pronek. He imagined himself lying on that floor, the insides of his head slowly leaking out, feeling no pain, just dizziness. Carwin, having pensively scratched his crotch, decided to abandon the cover-up, said: “Fuck!” once again to seal his uncompromising decision, and then stomped toward the couch to watch TV.

  Next morning he woke up ill, with his forehead and the nape of his neck throbbing. Andrea was gone, he heard the TV, but he couldn’t get up, so he closed his eyes and plummeted to the bottom of slumber. He kept coming in and out of listless dreams about Sarajevo, in which (for example) he would try to draw the map of the city in English, but couldn’t do it, because he couldn’t draw in English. Or he would be walking down his street (passersby carrying pointed black umbrellas, looking at him askance) and it would impossibly intersect with the wrong street, so he couldn’t find the right direction.

  The banal symbolism of these dreams notwithstanding, we should note that they suggest the situation of being in a maze.

  Andrea came back home after work, made some tea for Pronek, gave him a bowl of Wheaties floating in glistening milk, kissed his cold forehead (in between surges of fever) and then took off to a gallery opening. She didn’t come back that night, and Pronek kept sweating, until the sheets were so soaked, sticking to his febrile body, that he had to get up and rummage through her closets, looking for virgin sheets, only to find a notebook with a little lock, under a pyramid of towels. But Pronek was shivering and had no strength to read it, fearing that he might find out things he didn’t care to know. So he took a couple of towels and spread them, like magic carpets, on the naked mattress, and proceeded to perspire. He didn’t know how long he stayed in bed—intermittent kisses, tepid cups of tea, and waking up in a cold, moist bed all merged into one long repetitive action, like a busy signal. If we were to ask him now, he could probably remember the wind banging at the window, and infernal electronic voices shrieking “Touchdown! Hee hee hee … !” He would have a dim recollection of calling his parents: his father told him it would be unwise to come back to Sarajevo, while his mother told him that there already was less shooting than yesterday, and that they missed him.

  Once he mustered up some energy, while the fever was recovering somewhere in his body, and found Carwin and a legion of his buddies gathered around the TV, which had a porn flick on. It took Pronek a while to recognize the gaping vagina—the slurping sound it was making confused him. But they weren’t watching it, they were deeply invested in throwing a hacky sack at the revolving ceiling fan, which would slam the hacky sack against the wall every now and then. In celebration of the fan’s success, someone would say, “Shit!” and get to suck on the pot pipe, shaped as the Grim Reaper.

  There was a guy named Chad, and he was a history student.

  Chad stayed for the rest of the week, sleeping on the couch, because he had to play a season of Tecmo Bowl with Carwin: Carwin was the Cowboys, while Chad was the Redskins. Pronek spent that week between the bed and the kitchen table, sometimes trying to write letters, but all of his sentences would fall apart before reaching the paper. Andrea had disappeared. Carwin claimed that she went to DeKalb for a couple of weeks, because she needed a break. Occasionally, between virtual football games and porn flicks, Pronek got to watch Headline News and learn that paramilitary (“Pornomilitary” punned Chad) units were entering Bosnia from Serbia. Carwin and Chad watched images of men in fatigues and a woman talking about massacres of Muslims in the eastern parts of Bosnia.

  “This is depressing,” Carwin said.

  “What’s with you people,” Chad asked. “Can’t you chill out?”

  “They just hate each other over there,” Carwin said.

  “Are you going back?” Chad asked.

  “I’m supposed to fly back in couple of weeks,” Pronek said.

  “Why don’t you stay here?” Chad asked.

  “What can I do?” Pronek said. “My family is there.”

  “Man
, I wish I’d never see my fuckin’ family again,” Car-win said and wedged his hand furiously into his pants.

  “You should stay and get your family out and let those fuckers kill each other if they want,” Chad said. Chad had an uncanny ability to bend his legs so much that he would effortlessly sit in the lotus position, like an Indian sage, while playing football, his thumbs pressing the buttons with incredible speed.

  “I mean, fuck, war is good. If we didn’t have war, there would be way too many people, man. It’s like natural selection, like the free market. The best get on the top, the shit sinks. I don’t know much about you, Russkie, and I don’t like you, but if you got here you must be worth something. It’s like those immigrants, man, they were shit at home, they got here, they became fucking millionaires. That’s why we’re the toughest motherfucking country in the world. Because only the fittest survive here.”

  Carwin was sucking on a McDonald’s straw, watching the news about the Bulls. “Man,” he said. “We’re gonna kick ass this year again.” Pronek crawled back into his (well, Andrea’s) room and lay there, while the dusk was setting in, until he could see twig shadows trembling on the wall.

  Andrea came back from DeKalb the next morning, refreshed. “Boy,” she said. “I was tripping for days.” When she entered the room, Pronek was heading to the bathroom to look in the mirror, stepping over the red pasta-sauce sea on the floor. He had two weeks’ worth of minuscule growth on his face, which made his face look smudged with coal dust, and he was wearing her bathrobe, his shorts barely hanging on to his hips.