The Question of Bruno

by Aleksandar Hemon

  Oh, what a lucky break for our immigrant.

  Pronek took part in a delightful interview with Andrea’s mother. “I know you’re a hard worker,” she said. “It is people like you who built this great country for us.” She patted him on the back with the tips of her fingers and sent him off to the agency supervisor, a man labeled Stephen Rhee by the name tag on his heart. He was an ex-Marine, he grimly informed Pronek, and there was no screwing around with him. He had a crew cut, an immaculately ironed short-sleeve shirt, a bushy mole on his cheek, which looked like a tiny bullet wound from afar, and a tattooed eagle holding a rifle on his forearm. He tended to have a toothpick in his mouth at all times, and when Pronek told him that he used to be a writer, Rhee informed him that Jack Kerouac was the greatest writer of all time. “Dust is our mortal enemy, vacuum cleaners are our M16,” he announced to Pronek, while showing him his locker, reeking of someone else’s sweat. Before sending the crews out in the morning, he would install his fists on his hips and give a speech:

  “I got four words for you: cleanliness, loyalty, shiny surfaces, privacy. We have to leave the house clean, ’cause this is a cleaning service, darn it. We work like a team, okay—if this guy leaves the bathroom filthy, then the work of that gal in the kitchen is all screwed up. Whatever is supposed to be shiny in that house must make you freakin’ blind. And—get this into your empty heads—we are entering the temples of other people’s lives. Don’t you even begin to think about touching anything that does not need to be cleaned. There must be no traces of your being there, other than absolute cleanliness.”

  Yep, they cleaned in Hinsdale, Orland Park, Deerfield, Highland Park, Glencoe, Schaumburg, Oak Park, Wilmette, Winnetka, Forest Park, Lake Forest, Park Forest, Kildeer, Lake Bluff, all over Chicagoland.

  Once they even went for a big job in Normal.

  Being a novice, Pronek became a bathroom cleaner, “the shit boy.” He would enter the bathroom and scan it first. He would look behind a shower curtain: the wall tiles smudged with soap and skin-froth; curled hair at the bottom of the bathtub, like earthworms who didn’t make it to the soft ground; the shower looming over the tub like a buzzard head; caged shampoos, hanging on the shower’s thin neck. The toilet gaping, the seat lifted and the bowl specked with urine droplets; pubic hairs stuck to its side, as if climbing up; a crumpled and soiled piece of toilet paper behind. The mirror dotted with toothpaste foam, sprinkled from someone’s mouth last night; toothpaste tubes writhing below the mirror, with a thumbprint in the middle; liquid-soap bottles, like limbless flamingoes, with the nozzles sticking out; stolid bottles of beauty: moisturizers, replenishing creams, aftershaves, conditioners.

  Upon inspection, Pronek would clean, slowly and mercilessly effacing all remnants and traces of bodies. He grew to like doing it, because he would stop thinking about himself and everyone else, focusing on hairs and stains, enjoying their steady, inevitable disappearing. The whole world would be reduced to a pimple-pus speck on the mirror, which he would swiftly wipe off. Everything in the bathroom would attain mind-absorbing magnitude, and he would become smaller and smaller, until he would completely abandon all thoughts of himself and everything outside that bathroom and become a transcendental cleaning force. Having finished cleaning, he would feel purified, as if his self changed profoundly while being away from him.

  In that manner, he became a true professional. His wage rose from $6 per hour to $6.50 per hour, and Rhee allowed him to go occasionally on “solo missions”—cleaning Lincoln Park or Gold Coast condos alone.

  Oh boy, did he like that: entering the apartment and the owner’s scent—perfume, shower gel, shampoo, deodorant—still lingering; furniture summoned around the TV, with a couple of proud dressers backed against the wall; maps of the world, ochre (which meant old), with dragons dipping in the corners; Ansel Adams’s photos of vapid gray desert valleys; small colorful carpets stretching on the floors like lazy, content cats; a tall CD rack, the Sears Tower of the condo; a staunch bookshelf with books standing straight like soldiers at attention: Independence Day; Seven Spiritual Laws of Growth; What’s Inside—A User’s Guide to the Soul; The Client; The Heart of Darkness; Eating in Tuscany; Investing Today; Mind for Dummies; Theodore Roosevelt: A Life; The Alienist, etc.; flower pots hanging from the ceiling like miniature gardens of Babylon; an array of family pictures on the piano gazing slightly upward, like afternoon sunflowers; a bowl full of trinkets: pennies, marbles, matchboxes, business cards, condoms, paper clips; a wine rack with black bottles, like a hearse; a sign on the wall saying “No Parking—Tow Zone”; a softball trophy, with a golden figure on a tiny pedestal throwing a golden marble (“Grace Cup ‘92”); the computer and its black screen closely monitoring his every move.

  Sometimes, Pronek would sit in a comfortable armchair, and try to imagine his life in this condo: he would walk in through that door, still checking the mail—stacks of letters from his friends, from all parts of the world—take off his shoes and wiggle his toes. He would go to that tall, handsome bottle of scotch and pour himself a generous drink, sip, and let the warmth slowly coat his bowels; he would check the messages (“Hi! Ahmm … this is Grace, returning your call… Ahm … I’ll be real busy next week, but I think I can squeeze you in next Friday … Ummm … I kinda like Italian food, I guess …”). He would go, still sipping his drink, to the closet, slide the mirror, and hang up the navy-blue jacket, shirts, and suits hiding coyly behind each other’s backs, still happy to see him. And in the morning he would turn on the radio (“Inbound Dan Ryan pretty packed … Outbound Kennedy moving smoothly …”). He would fry a couple of eggs in the Teflon pan, while brushing his teeth, spitting the foam into his kitchen sink. He would have parties on weekends, invite his friends, and then, afterward, after the last drunken guest had left, he would make love to Grace—a voluptuous blonde from White Pigeon, Michigan—on the sofa (because they were too horny to make it to the bedroom), watched by a chorus of martini glasses, some of them violated by a cigarette butt. Sometimes, when truly blue, he would dim the lights, open a bottle of Chardonnay, play some blues (I’d Rather Go Blind Than See You Walk Away from Me), and get slowly drunk, until he passed out.

  Having cleaned the condo, he would then go back to his apartment—a hollow, furnitureless studio, looking at the El tracks, which he had recently rented for $285—lie on the floor mattress, watch the ceiling fan revolving above like a gigantic demented dragonfly. Pronek understood that to maintain the sameness of every day the fan had to keep revolving; he had to leave for work at the same time, and come back with the same train; his lunch always had to be the same baloney with Wonder bread. As long as every day was as any other day, his parents would be alive, still waiting to get on the convoy.

  As we’re charting the foreign territory of Pronek’s mind—expanding westward, as it were—we must not omit the marshes of involuntary memories he mired in for a while.

  The first one overwhelmed him abruptly, as he was gorging himself on farmer cheese mixed with sour cream, with green onions and rye bread. As soon as the medley of tastes—the cool milkiness of farmer cheese, the pungent, sneezeful greenness of green onions, the sweetness of bread crumbs scratching his tongue—reached the palate, a shudder ran through him. A billow of warm sorrow invaded his senses, a feeling isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. He took the second morsel, chewed it sluggishly and—as the mulch slid down his throat—a memory raised slowly, like leavening dough: a summer afternoon, late July, in Sarajevo, on their balcony, looking westward at the sun setting behind the squareness of the building with big, red letters on it reading: “Long live Tito”; he was reading a comic book (“Tarzan vs. Interpol”), dropping moist chunks on the pages (Tarzan fighting a villain on the Eiffel Tower); his father reading obituaries in the back of the paper, sighing pensively, paper rustling; his mother watering flowers, their turquoise trumpets twinkling around the edges in the counterlight, niggled by bees; a bunch of his loud friends (Vampire, Cober, Deba, Armin) sh
outing from the park under the balcony: “Pronek, come down, bring the ball out. Let’s play cowboys and Indians!”; the sun crawling behind the “Long live Tito” building, and all the shades on the balcony disappearing from the concrete exuding warmth, until the night blanket covered everything.

  Thus began a period of some twelve months in which Pronek was perpetually dazed, for the involuntary-memory sensations were no longer routine perceptions, but rather an unpleasant burden, which forced him to wallow dolefully in his previous life.

  He would enter an apartment to be cleaned, and walk into a cloud of fragrance (Magie Noir) left by an absent woman, and he would instantly recall burying his face in Zu’s hair, the tickling silkiness on his cheeks; he would clean the bathtub and the chlorine stench of the cleaning potion would bring back cleaning squat toilets in the army, his hands burning afterward, the steel ball of nostalgia grinding his bowels; the smell of burned grease in the kitchen, as he was scrubbing the stove, followed him through Bascarsija, where kebab shops spewed barbecue smoke, and the uneven stone pavement under his feet made him wobble; the dust aroused by the vacuum reminded him of Saturday mornings, the cleaning time in their home, when his mother would make him crawl under the bed to reach the clusters of dust backed up against the wall—he would lie there, enjoying seclusion, his cheek stuck to the cold parquet, until his mother’s stodgy feet appeared by the bed; a sun-smudge quavering on the wall above the piano was the same one as the one on the inside of the tent wall, as he drowsed tranquilized by the heat, the tent full of the cheap coconut smell of sunscreen; pencil shavings in the basket by the desk had the same pungent, wooden smell as the color pencils he shared with Mirza, his best friend in elementary school, bringing back the September scent of waxed floors and wet chalk boards and clean children’s clothes; an array of books on the desk—three of them spread like pinned butterflies, pressing against the desk surface, their spines sticking out, as if they were doing push-ups—was on his desk once upon a time.

  His head became bigger and heavier; his spine was slowly curling into a question mark; and he walked—when he walked at all—bent forward, his gaze fastened to his toes, like a dummy slowly deflating.

  A Rose for Pronek

  But while we were up to our waists in Pronek’s stream of consciousness, dear reader, fly-fishing for the psyche, the world did not stop revolving, the clock did not stop ticking. For three years have inconspicuously passed, and we’re sprouting back into the spring of 1996. In the meantime, Pronek’s parents never got on the convoy; Pronek’s father was wounded by a sniper; the TV screen became saturated, oversaturated, under-saturated, and then the exactly-opposite-of-saturated with images from Bosnia: several more broadcast massacres in the city; the mauling and massacre of Srebrenica; some more Western muscle flashing; friends shot by snipers or killed by shrapnel; rape camps; starvation stories; burning villages; Karadzic, Mladic, Milosevic shaking hands with someone; the end of the siege of Sarajevo and the war; talking to his parents once a month or so. Pronek went through all this in an aching daze, never—we’re proud to say—underperforming at his work. In fact, he became a single-condo specialist, developing a healthy herd of steady customers, who never saw him but regularly left tips for him under the fruit bowl, or on the coffee table. Now he was able to save up some money and rent a one-bedroom apartment in West Rogers Park. The apartment had slanted floors; door posts askew; hissing, hysterical silver radiators; an ancient, pink, four-legged bathtub; and an army of medium-sized cockroaches, clearly comfortable, if not excited, to have him in the apartment. We’re able to submit a telling image from the first night he spent alone in the apartment: Pronek on the floor, sandwiched between two thin, gentle blankets, the floor pleasurably hard; he’s looking across the room, the freshly polished floor glistening, like the lake on a moonlit bonanza night; in the opposite corners, miles away, in the dimness of otherness, his two suitcases, like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza—the thin, tall suitcase full of books and papers, and the fat one bulging with dirty clothes and a couple of soggy towels.

  In the morning, he would wake up in pain, and proud of it. He would sit on the only chair and eat cereal and milk out of a leaking wooden bowl between his knees (he hadn’t had enough to buy a table), and watch a morning sunbeam coyly entering his apartment, like a curious squirrel. Oh, the nippy mornings of the 1996 spring. The warm winds peeled off the snow cover, but there were still decaying snow patches around, like spit-foam. As he was riding somnolent buses down Devon on his way to the El that would take him to work, his past nightmares transmogrified into the haze of the morning present. He watched the street gliding by, looking for signs that he was awake and, indeed, alive: a revolving breasted bust in the wedding-dress store window; Beanie Babies piled up in Noah’s Ark; women in saris walking down Mozart Street; World Shoes; East-West Appliances; Universal Distributors; a man in a white shirt installing a bucketful of roses in front of his flower shop; Cosmos Press; Garden of Eden Cocktail Bar; leaflets taped to light posts, signposts, mailboxes reading “Pray for wisdom for Mike”; Miracle Medical Center; Acme Vacuum; a tailor-on-duty sign held by a tailor dummy. Every morning was like the first morning, because Pronek would forget the morning at the end of the working day.

  One morning in April, Pronek saw, through the mizzly curtain, the tailor dummy waving at him. He decided to go to Sarajevo, because he realized it was all right, because the incredible thing was that every place had a name, and everybody and everything in that place had a name, and you could never be nowhere, because there was something everywhere. The only way, Pronek thought, to be nowhere was not to be at all.

  How is this related to his decision, we cannot fathom.

  In any case, he saved up a little more money, bought a plane ticket, and flew to Sarajevo, via Vienna, in May. Presently, we will give him his voice back and let him talk for himself. Ideally, of course, he would speak in his native language, but, unfortunately, that is not possible. Here are, then, his authentic, fresh, and realistic experiences:

  As the plane was descending, I saw ochre patches, like scars, in the greenness of the mountains.

  The houses along the runway were bullet-ridden, and as the plane was touching down, I felt as if I were inside of a bullet speeding toward the target.

  I gave my passport to the man behind the glass pane. He looked at the passport, then he looked at me, then he looked at the passport. Be-hind his back, there was a young man in a dusk-blue suit and a tie as thin as a wicker. He had a cellular phone, and glanced around, monitoring the arriving passengers. Then he leaned over the uniformed man’s shoulder, glanced at my passport, then at me. He was a spook.

  Dobrinja, across from the airport, looked like it was marauded by a world of ravenous termites. It looked built of holes and about to crumble. There was yellow tape stretching everywhere, reading “Mines.”

  The cab driver did not turn on the taxi meter and I suggested he should do it. He said, with a gorgeous mumbling Sarajevo accent, What are you worried about? You’ll pay. But how will I know the amount, I asked. You’ll know, you’ll know, he said. We argued, until he pulled over, turned toward me, unbuttoned his shirt to show me a scar near his navel and said, Listen, I didn’t spend four years in the trenches, defending this city, to turn on the taxi meter now, all right? All right.

  Building after building pockmarked with bullet holes, gouged out windows and lives that used to go on in those apartments, piles of rubble, burnt cars, burnt buses, burnt kiosks, burnt streetcars. This is the movie theater where I saw Apocalypse Now for the first time, burnt.

  As soon as I stepped out of the cab, I saw Aida. I hadn’t seen her for years. When we were kids, she drew a heart on her forearm and inscribed my name on it, with a ballpoint pen. I was happy to see her, I hugged her. She was married, she had a son, born in the middle of the siege. I was so happy to see her. How is life? I said. How is your mother? Her mother used to make heavenly baklava. Her mother was killed, she said, by a sniper, at the beginning.
She saw it, because her mother ran ahead of her across a sniper-watched street, she was struck and killed instantly.

  My mother and my father were waiting in front of our apartment building. My father embraced me, and we stayed locked, saying nothing. Then my mother embraced me, and she wept and wept.

  A bullet had hit my father in the left cheek and then had simply gone out the other side. He had two scars on his cheeks, like two symmetrical warts, and he lisped now. He said, Had I had my mouth shut, I would’ve been dead. The Kalashnikov bullet is very light, he explained, but has a high velocity so when it gets inside the body and hits the bone, it doesn’t stop, it ricochets around, tearing everything apart. See, he said, if the bullet hit my teeth before it went out, it would have bounced around all over my head, shredding my brains, until my head was all mushy inside, like a watermelon.

  I went through my parents’ apartment, touching everything: the clean, striped tablecloth; the radio, with seven ivory-colored buttons and a Donald Duck sticker; the grinning African masks; the carpets with intricate, yet familiar, geometric patterns, full of gashes, from under which the parquet was gone, burnt in the rusty iron stove in the corner; the demitasse, the coffee grinder, the spoons; Father’s suits, damp, with shrapnel slashes; the black doorknobs, the cuckoo clock, now defunct; the crystal vase, the complete works of Joseph Conrad, half of which were gone, burned in the stove; the dripping faucets; the pictures, black-and-white and color. There’s the three of us on the beach in Makarska, my mother on the left with a scarf and dark sunglasses, my father on the right with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, me in the middle, sitting on a confounded, sad donkey with a sombrero on its head.