Nowhere Man

by Aleksandar Hemon

  I did not know who Marcus was, but I walked into the room; it smelled of sharpened pencils and paper glue and Robin’s perfume and burnt coffee and chalk. On a round table there was a nightmarish chain of cup rings and a coffee cup (the possible culprit) next to an abandoned dictionary.

  There was a pile of newspapers on the table, the front page facing me: DEFENSES COLLAPSE IN GORAZDE. When I was thirteen I had spent the summer at a seaside resort for Tito’s pioneers and fallen in love with a girl from Goražde. Her name was Emina, and she taught me to kiss using my tongue, and she let me touch her breasts—she was the first girl I had ever touched who wore a bra. U.S. SEIZES BOAT CARRYING 111 IMMIGRANTS, a headline read. My palms were sweating, my fingertips moist, and the paper smudged up my whorls, making them visible. I had once read a pulp novel in which there was a genius criminal, the notorious King of Midnight, who had altered his fingertips, but the master detective recognized him by his distinctive voice. The ceiling fan revolved on the coffee surface, slightly curved. Someone named Ronald “Ron Rogers” Michalak had died—he was the beloved husband of the late Patricia. Sunny skies warmed most of the nation. The Bulls bowed, but did not look back. Chicago Jews celebrated Passover.

  A woman opened the door and stepped in, still holding the door with her left hand, as if ready to escape. “Is Robin around?” she asked. The sleeves of her blue shirt were rolled up and I could see the sinews on her forearms tighten, fighting off the weight of the door.

  “No,” I said. “She went to find Marcus. I am waiting for her too.”

  “I’ll just come back later,” she said, and turned around, and I recognized the back of her head: the edge of her blue collar, and a lean neck with a feathery vine growing toward the mainland of her hair and the gentle twirl on her pate—she had been on the train too, sitting in front of me. I could see the wings of her earrings on the insides of her earlobes, and stray hairs touching the tips of her ears as she slipped out. MASSACRES RAGE ON, a headline read. BODIES PILE UP IN RWANDA.

  Robin seemed to have oversized glass marbles instead of eyeballs, like a doll—she was either not blinking or she was blinking when I was blinking. Her eyelashes bent abruptly upward, like little scythes. Marcus was puckering his upper lip so his mustache hair could touch his abundant nostril hair, as if forcing them to couple. He looked at me cautiously, his hands comfortably placed on his belly ledge.

  “Do you have any previous teaching experience?” Robin asked.

  “No,” I said. “But I have huge learning experience.”

  “These people can be demanding,” she said. An ambulance passed down the street chirruping hysterically.

  “This job,” Marcus said, with a scrupulously nasal voice, “requires patience. Petulance just would not do it.”

  Robin glanced at him, frowned and blinked, but then restored her grimace of befuddled doll. I had no idea what “petulance” meant, and the dictionary was beyond my reach.

  “What is your point of origin?” Marcus asked.

  “Sarajevo, Bosnia,” I said.

  “Oh, man,” Robin said. “That is so neat.”

  “I spent years studying other cultures,” Marcus said. He stood up and walked toward me; he had a squash-shaped body, with the small, narrow feet of a ballet dancer. He leaned toward me and whispered: “I used to work for the government.”

  “Really,” I said. Robin’s perplexion was flaming now—her cheeks ruddy, burning through the blanket of makeup.

  “Yes. In the NSA, the DLI, the Slavic languages section, translating all kinds—all kinds—of information,” Marcus said. “I can peruse seventeen languages.”

  “Wow!” Robin said.

  “Dobar dan!” Marcus said.

  “Dobar dan!” I replied.

  “Da li je ovo zoološki vrt?”

  “Holy moly!” Robin said. “What does that mean?”

  “Good day. Good day,” I translated. “Is this the zoo?”

  Someone knocked and peeked through the door and said: “Teacher, I can talk to you?”

  “Not now, Mihalka,” Robin said. “Wait outside.”

  “It is a must,” Mihalka said.

  I turned around and looked at him: his head was ascetically shaved, his scull scarred, and his face punched in by an immense force, as if he had been a boxer. A mountain ridge of wrinkles rose across his forehead. He reminded me of my uncle, who lived in Canada now, working as an exterminator.

  “Just wait outside, Mihalka,” Robin said.

  “Some of them possess scintillating minds, and some have rather perplexing personalities,” Marcus said.

  “I am sorry,” I said. “I do not understand everything that you say.”

  “He is from Czechoslovakia,” Robin said. “You are from Czechoslovakia too, right?”

  “He is from Yugoslavia,” Marcus said. “It’s a wartorn country.”

  “I am from Bosnia,” I said.

  “You know,” Marcus said, “I was on a mission in Bosnia once. I met some brave men and beautiful women there.”

  “When was that?” Robin asked, and rubbed her temple. The skin on it wrinkled and unwrinkled under her finger, the pain still untouched. It must have been taking a lot of strength to maintain the expression of permanent bafflement.

  “Long time ago,” Marcus said. “I fell in love with a majestic, passionate woman, but circumstances too-fatuous-to-detail took me elsewhere.”

  Mihalka’s head popped in again without knocking and Robin’s face changed into a grimace of mild annoyance.

  “Teacher,” Mihalka said. “I must tell you.”

  Robin got up, rolled her eyes to the tilt, and went out. Marcus surveilled my face, trying to get into my eyes, then nodded, having found the expected evidence.

  “You know a lot about hardship, don’t you?” he said.

  “I do not know,” I said, uncomfortably. “Which hardship?”

  “You look like someone who knows a lot.” He sighed, as if recalling a host of pleasant memories, and turned toward the window.

  Robin walked back in, shaking her head and rolling her eyes, as if she had just heard the strangest confession.

  “Why don’t we visit a few classrooms,” Marcus said, “so you can see what takes place in them.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “I do not understand these people,” Robin said, still shaking her head. “I simply do not.”

  We walked up the stairs, awkwardly careful not to be too far from or too close to one another. The back pocket of Marcus’s pants gaped open as he tiptoed delicately upward, and a bundle of envelopes was about to fall out. I ascended in the wake of Robin’s sugary perfume and the wet-bandage smell of her armpits. We stopped in front of one of the classroom doors, Robin conspiratorially whispering to me:

  “This is level two, pretty basic. You might be teaching a lower level, so this could be interesting to you.”

  “Do not be vexed by the student body,” Marcus said. “They are a little sedate occasionally.”

  “Okay,” I said. Robin opened the door, and we walked in.

  “Hi, guys!” the teacher said, the moment she saw us. “I am Jennifer.”

  She had a dear-blue sweater and a lacy collar, a narrow waist and a wide skirt. She had pink lips, a pair of glasses that magnified her eyes, and a willow-tree crown of hair. There was a map of the world on the wall behind her—North America was at its center and the oceans of the world were the same hue as Jennifer’s sweater.

  “Do not be surprised,” Marcus said, slowly, to the class. “We are just visiting different classes, exposing him”—he pointed at me—“to the trials and tribulations of language acquisition.”

  As Marcus was speaking, the people in the class tightened, as if the classroom had contracted: the older women in the first row, the veteran mothers, sporting gigantic amber brooches on their bosoms, gripped their pencils; the men behind them, with tuber noses and the yellowish faces of chain-smokers, sunk in their chairs; a young man in the corner wit
h a long, unkempt beard bent over his notebook. I could see a herd of distorted pyramids in the margins.

  “All rightie,” Jennifer said. “We don’t mind guests, do we?”

  She beamed at the class, expecting them to beam back, but they didn’t.

  “Do we?” she said with a tinge of threat in her voice.

  “Yes, we do,” the class chanted back.

  “You mean: No, we don’t,” Jennifer said.

  “No, we don’t,” the first row, only, responded.

  “Okie dokie,” she said, went to the chalk board, erased “Simple Present Tense,” and wrote “Passover.” We hovered near the door, ready to escape. Marcus knotted up his arms on his chest, while Robin blinked incessantly.

  “What is Passover?” Jennifer asked, and with an optimistic face panned over the class. They stared at her, not moving, congealed in collective silence.

  “What is Passover? Sergei?”

  Sergei—a man in his forties, with a collection of warts sprouting randomly all over his face, with the greenest eyes I had ever seen—scowled at Jennifer.

  “What is Passover, Sergei?”

  Sergei tightened his lips, and straightened up in his chair, clearly determined not to say a word.

  “What is Passover?”

  “Jewish vacation,” said a woman in the first row, in a voice like whistling steam.

  “A Jewish holiday. Great!” Jennifer said. “And what do Jewish people do for Passover?”

  A chair screeched in the back. The veteran mothers flipped through their books languidly. The young man in the back looked out the window. The raindrops began crawling down the pane.

  “What do Jewish people do for Passover?” Jennifer asked again, not giving up on her smile, but glancing at Marcus warily.

  They said nothing.

  “How many of you are Jewish?” she asked, and stepped away from the chalkboard and toward them.

  “Don’t be frightened,” Marcus said.

  Two first-row women raised their hands, and then another half a dozen.

  “Okay,” Jennifer said. “Sofya, can you tell us?”

  Sofya took her glasses off—her eyes were blue and she had a crescent scar under her left eye.

  “Jewish people run from Egypt,” she said, reluctantly, as if it were a well-kept secret.

  “But what do they do today?” Jennifer asked.

  The silence filled up every corner of the classroom. We could hear the staccato rain against the windows and the swooshing of trees, the anger and the sorrow.

  “We must depart,” Marcus announced, without waiting for an answer, as Sofya’s words stopped at the edge of her lips.

  “Dosvidanya!” Sergei said.

  So we departed, and as we did I could hear Jennifer saying to her class: “Oh, guys, you can do better than that.”

  “This is level seven,” Marcus said. “A rather demanding body of knowledge.”

  He opened the door without knocking and we burst into a small room, startling the teacher and four students. Robin slowly closed the door behind me. On the board, “Siamese twins” was written, along with “abdomen,” “ache,” “dysfunction,” “solitude.”

  “You may proceed,” Marcus said. The teacher was the woman from the train, and I realized how pretty she was. She feebly smiled at us and said: “We are reading an article about Ronnie and Donnie, the Siamese twins.” She had a pointed chin; fair, boyish hair; dark eyes with two delicate eyebrow horizons. She gave us photocopies of the article. Ronnie and Donnie were facing the camera, their abdomens attached, their faces identical: large glasses, big jutted jaws, torturous smiles. They had four legs, and only one torso.

  “Ugh, gross!” Robin said, and ardently widened her nostrils.

  “Pretty bad,” Marcus said.

  “I must say,” the man whom I recognized as Mihalka said, “that it is not perfectly pleasant when I watch them.”

  “They are monsters,” said a woman in a dark, stern suit. She had long, immaculately combed white hair that tenuously touched her shoulders.

  “Monsters,” repeated the young man sitting next to her. It was obvious that he was her son: the same stout apple cheeks; the same oval nostrils, the same pierogi-shaped ears; the same intense frown, as if the cheeks and the forehead conspired to squeeze the eyes out.

  “They are humans,” Mihalka said, then lifted his index finger, annunciating an important statement. “When I had been a little child, I had had a friend who had had a big head.”

  He made a vast circle around his head with his index finger, suggesting the immense circumference.

  “Every child had told him about his big head and had kicked him with a big stick on his head. I had been very sad,” Mihalka said, nodding, as if to show the painful recoil of the big head.

  “We are learning Past Perfect,” the teacher said to us, and smiled benevolently—I readily smiled back. She had chalk smudges all over her denimed thighs. The white-haired woman and her son exchanged glances.

  “I must know Past Perfect,” Mihalka said, and shrugged resignedly, as if Past Perfect were death and he were ready for it.

  “The Nazis,” the fourth man said, “killed all people like that.”

  He had a square, large head, and his face was familiar, with the grimaces of someone from former Yugoslavia: generous facial movements and oscillating eyebrows. He shaped and then sliced obscure objects in front of him with his hands, as if angry at the molecules of air.

  “They cooked them and tooked their bones and put them in museum,” he said. “They wanted German people to watch monsters.”

  “Ugh, gross,” Robin said, and shook her head, with her tongue out.

  “Yes,” the teacher said pensively, with her index finger touching her chin. Her wrist was dainty, with two slightly asymmetrical knobs. I imagined stroking that wrist, then her forearm, then her shoulder, and, finally, her neck. She continued: “They would show the skeletons of midgets and Siamese twins in public exhibitions, in order to convince the German people they were superior.”

  The fourth man was watching the storm, jerking his left knee.

  “There had been one scientist who had gathered human heads, and he had wrote one book for Himmler and his soldiers must have read it to think Jews had been monsters,” Mihalka said.

  “I think you use Past Perfect too many times,” the woman with the son scoffed.

  “Excuse me,” Mihalka said. “But I must know Past Perfect.”

  The fourth man smiled wistfully at Mihalka, and I suddenly recognized the smile: the raising of the left side of the upper lip; the exposing of teeth, which had evenly wide, spitting-conducive gaps between them, the toy-dog nodding; the narrowing of the eyes. I knew that man, but had no memory of him. I stared at him intently, waiting for more familiar signals.

  “Okay,” the teacher said. “Let’s read on. Paul, why don’t you read the paragraph beginning with: It is true—they often have . . .”

  “It is true,” Mihalka began, “they often have—the same—dreams. They also feel the same pain, which is not surprising—surprising—since they share a few internal—internal—organs. The pain, they like to say, is usually—evenly—disturbuted—distributed, or sometimes even—doubled.”

  The fourth man propped his chin on his left hand. His Adam’s apple flexed a little, like a Ping-Pong ball. He stroked his chin with the back of his hand, occasionally looking out the window. His ears were small, like a child’s.

  “Thank you, Paul,” the teacher said. “Do we understand this?”

  “Doubled means two times. Yes?” the son said.

  “Yes,” his mother said.

  “Okay. Joseph, why don’t you go on?” the teacher said.

  The fourth man began reading in a very low voice, as if confessing:

  “Ronnie and Donnie give a new meaning to the word insep—inseparable. ‘A lot of people think that the worst thing is the lack of—privacy,’ Ronnie says, ‘but they don’t understand what is it like—what
it is like—to share not only your life, but your body as well, with someone that you love. Donnie is me, and I am Donnie.’”

  A boy kneeling on the soft ground over a constellation of marbles, brushing away pebbles and twigs and litter between the two marbles a foot apart: one of those two marbles was small with three orange fins inside the glass globe; the other one was solid marble white. He picked up the orange marble, got his knees off the ground, and squatted. He wrapped his index finger around the marble, put his thumbnail behind it. The fist contracted, ready to launch the marble. He aimed at the white marble, closing his left eye, squinting with his right one, then released it. His marble flew low over the dirt, and then hit the white one—ping!—and the boy smiled. The white marble was mine and I lost it, and the boy was Jozef Pronek, the man reading about Ronnie and Donnie. I remembered him, there he was, out of nowhere. I was bedazzled by the clarity of the memory.

  “‘What people often don’t realize,’ Ronnie says, ‘is that if one of us dies, the other one is going to die too,’ ” Pronek read.

  He had lived in the building across the street from mine, which had displaced a set of decrepit houses with overgrown gardens. My friends and I used to roam the gardens, as if they were unexplored continents. We would eat cabbage as if it were exotic fruit; we would burn cabbage snails in sacrificial pyres; we would protect our territory from intruders, other kids. We found a stray, scabby dog and imagined it to be our guard dog and we patrolled the gardens. So when they built a fence around the gardens and started digging them up, the world went askew. They built an ugly high-rise, which we hated along with its tenants. So we would throw stones into the windows of the building and set their garbage on fire. We would corner a kid from the building and beat him up viciously. Pronek lived in the building and when we cornered him, he would never put up a fight—his nose would bleed, and he would look at us with scorching fury, and then he would just walk away. Eventually, the war against the building withered away, and we ended up playing with those kids. They were not our enemies any longer, but they were not our friends either. They were still newcomers, some of them spoke with strange non-Sarajevan accents, and we were the natives. We let them settle, but they were still in our land, and we never failed to let them know that.