The Book of My Lives

by Aleksandar Hemon

  4

  After a couple of years of regular playing at the Atomic Cafe, I became pretty good for a patzer. To go beyond that, to have a crack at being a truly good player, I would’ve had to go back to analyzing the great games. That was not going to happen: not only was I too old and lazy, I had no time for studying chess either, as I had to earn the money to feed and clothe the body that sheathed the inner space. Moreover, after a few years of feeling stuck between my mother tongue and my DP language and being incapable of writing in either of them, I finally began writing in English. In doing so, I delimited a new space, where I could process experience and generate stories. Writing was another way to organize my interiority so that I could retreat into it and populate it with words. My need for chess was dissipating, as it was being fulfilled by writing.

  Now it seems to me that the last game I ever played was against my father, though that is almost certainly not true—it was just the last one that mattered. I was visiting my parents in Hamilton, Ontario, sometime in 1995, and I challenged Father to a game. Having settled in Canada, my parents were at the nadir of their refugee trajectory, and, it seemed at that time, at the end of their rope. Tormented by the brutal Canadian climate, uncomfortable in the language they were forced to live in, short on friends and family, they were prone to devastating nostalgia and hopelessness.

  I was not capable of helping them in any way. During my visits, we argued much too often: their despair annoyed me, because it exactly matched mine and prevented them from offering comfort to me—I suppose I still wanted to be their child. We argued over the smallest things, hurtfully remembering and bringing up unresolved fights and unforgotten insults from before the war, only to make up a few minutes later. We missed each other, even while we were together, because the decaying elephant in the room was the loss of our previous life—absolutely nothing was the way it used to be. Everything we did together in Canada reminded us of what we used to do together in Bosnia. Hence we didn’t like doing any of it, but had nothing else to do. I spent entire days on the parental sofa (donated by a kind Canadian), watching reruns of Law and Order. I would snap out of my TV coma with the urge to scream at somebody, akin to what had driven Peter to terrify the hapless Loyola students.

  One of those hopeless days, I challenged my father to a game. I admit I was burning to beat him; having gone through the Atomic Cafe boot camp, I was ready to discard his shadow after a few decades of not playing against him. I could now redress the long-lasting imbalance between us by winning and putting him in a position to feel what I felt as a boy. I offered him my fists, each clenched around a pawn, to choose; he picked the black one. We set up the pieces on a tiny magnetic board; we played; I won; I found no pleasure in it. Neither did he. It is possible that he finally let me win. If he did, I didn’t notice it. We shook hands in silence, like true grandmasters, and never again played against each other.

  KENNEL LIFE

  Sometime in 1995, in the teachers’ room of a vocational school where I was teaching English as a Second Language, I met L. In the course of our small-talking she declared that Robert Bresson was her favorite film director. There was a Bresson retrospective at Facets that week and I suggested that we go to see Pickpocket together; she consented. On her way to the classroom to teach, she made a little leap getting around a chair and a thought—if that is the word—appeared in my head: I am going to marry that woman. It was not a decision nor a plan; it was unrelated to desire or a sense of connection. It was simply a recognition of an inescapable future: I recognized that I would marry her, the way I recognized it was night at night.

  We went to see Pickpocket, then, later, Lancelot du Lac, which relates the story of Lancelot and Guinevere while stripping it of any romantic fluff—when the knights walk around in their armor you can hear it relentlessly creaking and you imagine the flesh inside it, the rotting sores and all. Afterward, we went for a drink at the Green Mill and I kissed her at the bar; she stood up from the stool and left. She had a boyfriend at the time, and she tracked him down at a party where he was jumping up and down to some exhilarating song; she brought him down to the ground and broke up. Thus we started dating. A year and a half later we were living together; two and a half years later I proposed to her, while tying my shoe—practicing, as it were, the cliché of tying the knot. She didn’t hear what I said and I had to repeat it. I had no ring on hand, but she accepted.

  We did things together. We traveled: Shanghai, Sarajevo, Paris, Stockholm; I taught her to ski; she had grown up in Chicago and told me stories of the city I could not have known otherwise; we lived in a house where the front door-bell rang if you stamped your foot at a particular spot on the kitchen floor; we bought an apartment with two fireplaces; we had a cat and it died. Once, she took the ring off to wash her hands and it fell and rolled across the floor straight into a heating vent, never to be found. We both thought of ourselves as decent people and loved each other enough to cover up the cracks, which started appearing pretty soon.

  It took a few years for me to gradually realize we shouldn’t have tied the knot, but I’d inherited the concept of marriage from my parents that was contingent upon, like everything else in their lives, hard work. Thus the operating metaphor of our marriage for me was the mine—as in, being married was like descending into a mine every day and digging for some valuable ore. The possibility of a functioning, rewarding marriage was dependent on the grueling effort put into it, which is to say that being simply happy was perpetually deferred into some hypothetical future—if we kept digging we would one day be happy. But there might never have been enough ore for us to dig; and at the end of each daily shift, I was angry and exhausted. Soon, periods of reasonable calm, squeezed between destructive fights, were taken to be the ore of happiness. We reached the point of accepting not-fighting as the goal and purpose of our marital union. We showed and recognized love only in the form of trying hard to make up. What we offered to each other in lieu of deep affection was gestures of either reconciliation or aggression—sometimes, confusingly, both at the same time. I had frequent outbursts of anger, the congealed life-inflicted hurt I did not know how to heal; I flung it around hatefully, like offal.

  The end of my first marriage came unexpectedly, even if it was a long time in coming, because the pain and misery were now habitual, a side effect of descending daily into the mine. I kept finding myself angrily building my case against L., ever waiting for an opportunity to lay out the irrefutable evidence that none of it was my fault, that I was in fact the one wronged, the one with more pain inside. It finally ended at the top of the umpteenth screaming match, unremarkable in and of itself. The confrontation had a recognizable, well-practiced pattern that inescapably led to my screaming and smashing objects at hand. It would have been normally followed by a period of horrible guilt on my part for losing control and hurting L. yet again—guilt was all that was left to connect us toward the end. This time, in the middle of it all, a thought—if that is the word—appeared in my head: I could not do this anymore. There was nothing I wanted to say or prove to L.; nothing was worth fighting and nothing was worth trying. My bottom fell out and, as in a Zen parable, I was emptied of all the anger and love in an instant—I ended my mining life in less than a minute. That night in January 2005, I drove L., through a torrent of tears, to her mother’s place in Indiana, then drove back to our empty apartment.

  * * *

  Once a marriage ends, what is left is the heavy-footed dance of dissolution. I could not bear staring at the cold fireplaces, and within a week I was looking for temporary, furnished lodgings, where I could stay until the mess was sorted out. My funds were limited, which meant the places I was hurriedly considering were rather dismal. Each of the dreadfully furnished apartments was shown to me by a building manager who despised the people desperate enough to live in such places; each had a door opening directly into the world of thick, gloomy loneliness. One studio available in the fancy Gold Coast neighborhood looked as though someone h
ad just been murdered in it and the management had been considerate enough to whitewash the blood-spattered walls.

  After a few days’ search, I settled for a studio on the top floor of a three-story building on Chicago’s Northwest Side. The landlady—let us grace her with the name Mary—lived on the second floor. She was an adoption lawyer; she showed me pictures of happy, overlit couples, the babies bewildered by their new destiny in their adoptive parents’ laps. Mary appeared to me as a generous, embracive woman, the kind that accepted derelicts, canine and human. She didn’t ask too many questions and had no interest in my unimpressive credit history, so I gallantly wrote her a check on the spot. Check in hand, she said she hoped I didn’t mind dogs, for she kept several and was active at a dog shelter. I loved dogs myself, I confessed, and told her a little bit about Mek; she oohed and aahed. Her place seemed as good as any for my upcoming bouts of self-pity.

  I went back to my former home, packed a couple of suitcases, loaded them into my Honda Civic along with my stereo, and rode west into the sunset.

  One of the few tapes in my car at the time was Hank Williams 40 Greatest Hits, and I listened to it every time I drove. The sense of entering a new life can make almost anything seem significant or prophetic, and I couldn’t help imagining myself as a ramblin’ man—the man old Hank had written the song about—as I drove to Mary’s mansion on the hill.

  The signification haze, however, somehow failed to envelop the overwhelming stench I noticed a couple of days after moving in. I tried to remember whether I’d smelled anything when Mary showed me the studio but I could recall nothing irking my nose. I spent a lot of time parsing the stench, as though understanding it would make it bearable—a common intellectual fallacy. Besides the expectable dog shit and piss, there were other perplexing ingredients: generic miasma, a touch of rank cat litter (for there were, it turned out, a couple of cats as well), fetid coffee, a whiff of weak disinfectant. Most dominant was cheap dog food, somehow tucked inside the smell of Crisco, as though Mary deep-fried it for her puppies.

  Ready for any and all new challenges, I thought I could get used to the odor, but it was getting worse by the day. At some point it was so intense that I went to a supermarket on the spur of a particularly stinking moment, determined to splurge on luxurious air fresheners. But slouching toward a divorce made me cheap—I found Air Wicks on sale and I bought enough Green Apple and Honeysuckle to offset the reek of a house full of rotting cadavers. At first, there was nothing but the sugary scent in my studio, but then the two smells merged. I’d never before known anything like the olfactory concoction of the deep-fried dog food and Green Apple and Honeysuckle, and I hope I never will again.

  Soon I met the dogs themselves. As I was going down the back stairs to the laundry room, I was intercepted by three proud mutts. Two of them were overweight, with wide hips and dull eyes; the third one was small, skinny, and manic, and quickly recognizable as a humper—indeed he instantly tried to fuck my shin. Mary introduced them to me, and I’m afraid I can remember only the name of the biggest one—he was Kramer. On my way back from the laundry room, they followed me, and the moment I stepped into my studio, before the door was even closed, Kramer pissed at my doorstep.

  Almost every time I went down to the laundry room I had to slalom between shit piles and piss puddles, only to encounter the dogs. Occasionally the trio would be reinforced with a new mangy mutt Mary’s neighbors had dropped off in her backyard, which appeared to serve as a makeshift dog shelter. New mutts came and went, but Kramer and Skinny Fuck (as I referred to that adorable little creature) and the Third One were a steady lineup.

  They, I learned, had distinct, well-defined personalities. Kramer was the decider, Skinny Fuck was a skinny fuck, the Third One was slow and lazy. It was easy to differentiate among them as I lay sleepless in bed and they performed their nightly repertoire of howling and barking. They would start their recital with a choral piece, often set off by a passing bus, but after midnight they usually performed solo, in sequence: the Third One kept me awake for a few hours with a steady, slothful yelp; Skinny Fuck was as enthusiastic about his excitement at two a.m. as he was at any other time; and Kramer covered the early-morning shift, his deep, obdurate voice driving me crazy through the dawn, at which time I was prone to fantasizing about canine crucifixion, one at a time. Once or twice, I spent part of the night remembering Mek and his quiet Irish setter manner—the way his eyes widened when my father whispered something in his ear, or the way he put his head on your thigh, demanding nothing in particular.

  Kramer, on the other hand, was my nemesis, the reigning male of the house. He liked to let me know who the big dog was by sniffing me authoritatively every time I walked by, or by defecating disdainfully at my door. Mary mentioned a husband every once in a while, but all the mail was addressed to her and I’d never seen or heard any man on the premises. It was hard to imagine anybody—other than Mary and, with the dubious help of Green Apple and Honeysuckle, me—putting up with the fetid air, but the husband was rhetorically and mysteriously present. I wondered about Mary’s missing hubby the day I found the front door of her place wide open, Chief Kramer patrolling the entrance hallway like an Arizona Minuteman. I’d never seen the inside of Mary’s apartment. Whenever I’d knocked at her door to deliver the rent check or ask a question, she would open it ajar, because, she would claim, she didn’t want to let the dogs out. I was on my way to put in a shift of writing at a fresh-smelling coffee shop, but the open door troubled me. I yelled Mary! from the hallway, reluctant to step in lest Kramer tear at my throat, but there was no response. I could see Skinny Fuck stretching and yawning contentedly on top of a laundry pile mounted on the sofa. Mary! I envisioned Mary’s partially devoured body on the kitchen floor. Cautiously, I went in, Kramer close at my heels. To the right, there was a bedroom, and from a pillow on the bed, the dull snout of an unknown mutt stared at me indifferently. All over the apartment, on every surface, including the floor, there was aged, unfolded laundry, ancient newspapers and coupons, food wrappings, and stuff whose shape and purpose were indeterminable. A body could be hidden anywhere in the apartment and safely rot away, the dogs preferring the fresh cadaver to the fried shit notwithstanding. Mary’s apartment looked like one of those places that would have to be razed upon the owner’s death because it presented a health hazard and could never be cleaned. I ventured deeper into the apartment, closely monitored by the sovereign Kramer, who seemed confident that I could be easily neutralized if I found anything compromising in his domain. A couple of cats sat high up on the kitchen cabinets, glaring at a cage with two birds. The Third One lounged on the floor in the kitchen, where there was a lot more crap—unwashed dishes and Tupperware full of mold, more unfolded laundry and things unknown, the stove buried under a heap of pans, the cat litter I could smell but not see. I was steadily retching by this point. I had discovered the mother lode of the stench, but there were no visible bodies, and I didn’t wish to investigate any further. If there were things to be sniffed out, I was going to let the neighbors and the police deal with it. I left Mary’s den and went on my way.

  * * *

  Driving to the coffee shop, I slid in the Hank Williams tape, and by typically significant coincidence, the song that started playing was “Move It on Over.” I had become fully obsessed with the caninity of my new life. I would refer to my place of lodging as “the kennel”; I would embark upon ecstatic, baffling monologues describing my present dog life to my friends, who often asked why I hadn’t moved out—to which I had no answer, and still don’t. I might well have suffered from a bad case of disaster euphoria. I would much too frequently use phrases and terms like dog days, dog’s life, going to the dogs, doghouse; I looked up the whole family of canine-related words: canicide, caniculture, caninity, canivorous, et cetera. I even found significance in the fact that there was a great hot dog place around the corner from the kennel. It was perfectly natural, then, that I could see myself in “Move It on Over,” the so
ng in which Hank comes back home at half past ten to find that his wife has locked him out: “She changed the lock on our front door. / My door key don’t fit no more,” so he goes to sleep at the doghouse and sings “Move over skinny dog, fat dog’s moving in.” I’d been a Hank-like man, fully identifiable in these lines: “This doghouse shared is mighty small / But it’s better than no house at all.”