Nowhere Man

by Aleksandar Hemon

  Let’s go back to my friends.

  Pronek and Mirza went to Jahorina mountain for winter break, and spent weeks skiing and hanging out, shacking up in a friend’s family cabin or someone’s hotel room, all because of their entertaining skills. Here is the winter pleasure inventory: blue skies, white snow, suntanned faces, crisp air, speed, slopes, fireplaces, warm rooms, and hearing the scrunching of footsteps on a cold night, the moon like a silver coin. It was in a Jahorina cabin, after a particularly inspired performance of a Beatles set, into which “If You Know Her Name” was stealthily included, topped with a sevdah set, plus—when the party climax was reached—a few pseudo-Gypsy songs, producing a few yelps of pseudo-abandon . . . it was (let me start all over again) in a Jahorina cabin that Pronek climbed to an upstairs room with one Aida. She was willing to let him explore “the jungle below the equator.” Pronek, however, got completely lost in the jungle: he kept banging his knees against the sides of the bed, and his head against the wall. He had great difficulty pulling off Aida’s tight jeans, managing to bring them down to her ankles, whereupon he crawled in between her legs. With his underwear stranded at the Antarctica of his feet (the room was unheated, save for their cumbersome passion) he attempted to penetrate her panties, convinced that he was up against a sturdy hymen. It was an unmitigated fiasco—she started laughing uncontrollably, when Pronek, in the middle of it all, said: “Let me just love you.”

  It took them longer to disentangle than it took them to entangle. That night, Pronek confided in Mirza, who was expecting stories akin to the readers’ letters in his parents’ magazine. Pronek told him that he could never understand how making love could be pleasurable. He offered (rhetorically speaking) as evidence the bumps on his head, scratches on his knees, and bruises on his penis.

  A few days later, Pronek went with Aida for a mountain walk under a starry sky. They held hands, despite the thick wool mittens, and ended up in her room, where Pronek played a few songs—purely pro forma—while Aida mindfully wore a skirt, which kept sliding up her thighs. In a four-minute flurry of passion, Pronek was deflowered, at the blessed age of fifteen and a half, while Aida was flowered, so to speak, with his gratitude: he mindfully asked her if she had enjoyed it, and she, her kind soul glimmering in her green eyes, she said she did.

  It is hard to say whether Pronek and Mirza’s decision to start a band, again, was related to Pronek’s entrée into sexual adulthood, but it followed soon thereafter.

  They needed electric guitars—their long-untunable acoustic guitars reminded them unpleasantly of their innocent preadolescent days. They spent the summer of 1983 moving around sacks of cement for measly money, mainly in order to convince their parents they were serious about getting the guitars. Too tired to play or think, they drank beer after work, still gray with cement dust, well aware they were collecting legitimate life experience—toiling for a dream, even if only for a few weeks—that was not unlike a real rock-star life experience. The Beatles, after all, worked on the Liverpool docks, they would excitedly (and wrongly) recall. They imagined a future in which they played on huge stages, a firmament of stage lights above them, and the drummer twirling his sticks. They traveled around the world—London, Amsterdam, Chicago—on a bus with a fridge. They had millions of dollars: Pronek bought a house in Liverpool, where the Beatles (minus John) lived, and Mirza owned a horse farm and a riding range.

  By the fall of 1983, they had electric guitars (Harmonia, the cheap East German make). They started producing songs, drinking pitchers of raspberry concentrate diluted in water, as if it were the wine of divine inspiration. Pronek wrote the lyrics, in English (the bus with a fridge beckoning him), that would have, he hoped, universal appeal, while conveying love for the one that was meant for him (but the one that didn’t exist—he did not call Aida, and avoided her on the street). The one was present in the songs metonymically, mainly through her eyes, though sometimes her face would appear as well. Although those lyrics have been lost (in fact, they were probably burned by his parents in a little cast-iron stove during the siege), we still have the titles: “Her Eyes Are Like Stars”; “I Could Drown in Her Eyes”; “Her Face”; “Her Eyes Are Watching You”; “Did You See Her Eyes?” The paradigm for his songs was provided by “Yesterday,” and they resembled one another so much that Pronek often hallucinated he had a style. Yet, he was frequently tormented by the doubt that invades the heart of many an artist: that his art, excavated from the deepest recesses of his soul, was just plain shit. On some days, he would be so ashamed that he would cancel the practice. He could not bear thinking of his own songs—his talentlessness stretched before him like the Sahara before a tired traveler on a stinky camel. On other days, practicing stage moves in front of the mirror, he would admire his craftsmanship, even detecting the ineffable presence of his true self in some of his songs, particularly “Her Eyes Are Watching You.”

  Once, desperate for recognition and hoping to justify the financing of the electric guitar, Pronek made the cardinal mistake of performing for his parents. He played the complete Eyes song cycle, midway through which Pronek Sr., comfortable in the armchair, started snoring, which at first sounded like supportive humming—a delusion shattered by a loud oink. Mother Pronek’s face assumed an expression of encouraging interest, her hands in her lap grasping each other, as if preventing an uncontrollable applause, her eyes darting sideways. The final dagger in his artistic heart was her genial applause, waking up Papa Pronek, who leapt from his chair and swiftly assumed a karate fighting stance—a memory of his days in the police school, deeply inscribed in his body, still recurring in his dreams.

  Be that as it may, Pronek and Mirza still needed a rhythm section and a name.

  But the plans were put on hold when Pronek unexpectedly fell in love. Her name was Sabina—she beamed at him out of the crowd in front of the café-bar called Nostalgija. She gripped her drink with a sunny slice of lemon floating in it, ostensibly talking to a couple of tall potential boyfriends. When her glance first hit him, her eyes huge and strong, blood drove out of his head to the suburbs of his body and he stood paralyzed. The night after the original visual encounter, Pronek recalled in his bed the moment they were connected, respectfully keeping his hands out of the groin area.

  Sabina was his schoolmate—he had known she existed and had found her cute, but her gaze suddenly transformed her into an obsession of Pronek’s. He kept going back to Nostalgija, lingering in front of it for warm weeks in September 1983, hoping she would show up. And she did, wearing a light summer dress, her hair ponytailed, her lips carmined and easy to monitor: they touched the brim and squeezed the lemon slice. Pronek could not help feeling stupid, his skin constantly goose-bumped, all his antennas pointed toward her. Sometimes she wore tight white shirts and denim pants and the space around her body curved. He tried to exorcise her before going to sleep by playing the guitar. “Yesterday,” he sang, “all my troubles seemed so far away.” She was ruining his life, he didn’t go out with Mirza anymore, had only fitful phone conversations with him, giving him fallacious reports about the rhythm section search.

  Almost every day he would decide to go to Nostalgija no more, and showed up early, before anyone arrived. He would find a position from which he could see her coming up the narrow street, sipping his gin and tonic as if he were sixty (rather than sixteen) years old, his tongue dancing around the lemon. And then she would arrive and the same glance-waltzing would go on, the same torture, his body throbbing with anxiety. Her ankles were delicate, she had the long, elegant fingers of a piano player, she leaned forward when she laughed, pulled back when she asked a question, and her nipples were extremely sensitive to temperature fluctuations.

  Finally, he confessed to Mirza what his affliction was. Mirza, it turned out, knew her well—their parents were friends. It was decided that they would go to Nostalgija that night and Mirza would meet her, as if accidentally, and introduce Pronek to her. Pronek spent the night sweating, taking a few showers in the mi
ddle of the night, to the bafflement of his father (his mother was fast asleep), who got up to remind him that the electricity used by the water heater was not free of charge. While tossing in bed, as if on a barbecue grill, Pronek confronted the ugliness of his body; he envisioned his face with plantations of pimples stretching toward the horizon of his hairline. He met the pink dawn convinced that anyone who would have such low love standards as to get involved with him must be desperate and not worthy of his attention.

  Many years later, in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, while canvassing for Greenpeace, Pronek would for a few instants stand in front of a woman who had Sabina’s eyes. The woman would slam the door in his face, and he would spend the evening remembering that first night, which had commenced with him facing a cruel mirror, drained of hope so thoroughly that he didn’t care anymore. For the rest of the evening he would canvass in a daze that guaranteed many befuddled door-openers and many slammed doors. He would call Mirza in Sarajevo and ask him if he knew where Sabina was. She had lost both of her legs in the breadline shelling, Mirza would say. He saw her on TV, lying in the middle of the mayhem, her husband pressing his torn shirt against her blood-spurting stumps. But he heard she was in Germany now, with her husband and daughter.

  Back at Nostalgija, Pronek stands with his hands hanging awkwardly at his sides—too sweaty to be pocketed, too weighty to be moved around in expressive gestures. Mirza is introducing him to Sabina, flanked by two squeaky friends, who keep asking questions he cannot comprehend. The conversation is burdened with unwieldy silences, incomprehensible jokes, and bulky laughs. The only thing Pronek is aware of is her scent—the anchor that keeps him from being blown away by this storm of nonsense—her lemon-and-milk scent coming from the hidden meadows of her skin. He inhales it like a mountain-climber reaching the summit, the world sprawling all around.

  He walked her home, up the steep streets of Džidžikovac. They reached her building panting and leaned against the wall, next to beaten-up, pillaged mailboxes, saying nothing. A car drove by and lit a couple clinched on a bench in the park, and they both looked away. Pronek knew that he had to ask her out, since he had gotten this far, but could produce no words. Finally, without warning, he grasped her hand and kissed the valley between her middle and index fingers, her ring touching the corner of his mouth. She said: “It took you awhile.” He said: “It always takes me awhile.” With those words uttered, they were officially dating, and were to meet tomorrow night in front of Nostalgija, whereupon they would go to a quiet place to touch each other.

  Then came the days of sharp falling in love; of eagerly agreeing with whatever the other had to say; of cautious kisses in the dark halls of her building, Pronek’s palms gliding along her back under her shirt; of pushing through the crowd in front of Nostalgija as a unit. Then months of groping on benches in dark parks, occasionally interrupted by a drunk who fondly remembered his first gropings on the same bench, years ago, and then shared with them the fear of the Medea waiting for him at home. They waited for her parents to go away for the weekend, then ventured into the first penetration in their bed, followed by frantic washing of the bedsheets. They went to parties and danced in clubs, managing to explore each other’s mouths and necks while spinning and jumping. They had romantic nights: candles, wine, sexy songs leading to soft caresses and equal attention to many areas of the body, culminating in lovemaking that made them dizzy and happy to be alive.

  Pronek would always remember the moment of seeing Sabina on TV, marching in the opening ceremony of the Sarajevo Olympics, in a snow-white suit, ahead of the Chinese national team, tall and lank and elegant. He could always recall the warmth and tranquillity he felt at that moment, which he would understand as an epiphany of love, a moment that was to become unrepeatable once his world had collapsed.

  Then a couple of years of relationshipping. He condescendingly tried to explain to her why Patti Smith was shit. She felt uncomfortable around Mirza, who, she claimed, was checking her out. They spent time with each other’s parents, trying to seem respectful as the parents talked nonsense and made tasteless marriage jokes. They camped at the seaside in the summer, frequently fighting over who was to wash the dishes. She told him that he didn’t understand women, after he tried to explain that he only liked to look at other women, but they didn’t really interest him. He had intermittent bouts of fury, whereby he would destroy things around him—once he snapped in half all the poles his mother used to support her plants and flowers, and Sabina cried, seeing all the flowers bowing down, as if their spines were broken. And a sense sneaked upon them, a sense that love was not enough to keep them together—they sat on a bench on the Vilsonovo and watched deflated soccer balls roiling in a Miljacka whirl. They were eighteen, and felt very old.

  Thus they broke up: tears; meaningless late night phone calls; a few letters in the handwriting of love and helplessness; a series of Pronek’s late night guitar-playing sessions, interrupted by his sleepy parents, demanding the cessation of the wailing. Mirza told him that whatever didn’t kill him made him stronger, and gave him a 45 with the song entitled “I’d Rather Go Blind Than See You Walk Away from Me.” It was mortifyingly sad, and Pronek played it over and over again, sinking into the blue depths of pain. Somewhere along the way, he finished high school, and went to the prom night, where the carousing drunken teenagers squealing with joy irked him terribly. He left early, and wandered the streets, ending up on a bench by the Miljacka, watching the same soccer balls still revolving, like planets in turmoil.

  The following summer was long and torturous: he spent a few weeks in Makarska with his parents, whose idea of vacation was lounging on a pebbly beach (many a pebble tar-coated) and then playing Ping-Pong, his father winning every single game hands down. They went for family walks in the evenings, Pronek walking a few paces behind them, so as to appear sovereign, licking ice cream, which always had the same taste regardless of the alleged flavor. Worst of all were the bonding attempts on the part of his father, who would take him out for a beer. “The men will have beer tonight!” he would announce to Mother, and then made him drink raspberry juice. Father Pronek would tell his son endless, pointless stories about their Ukrainian ancestors, about his childhood growing up barefoot and poor. It was important that he understood, Father said, that this family rose from poverty and now can drink beer and raspberry juice just because they felt like it and not because they were thirsty. Now they could have vacations in Makarska—“Look around you!” Father demanded. Pronek did and saw a cheap touristy town, with armies of lobster-red bodies marching, hauling the bodies of screaming children; and here and there an attractive body clinging to a hairy forearm, well beyond his reach, painfully implying Sabina’s absence. Sometimes, Father would tell him his police stories, a story about the prison guard who killed nine people because he saw them covered with gnats; about the mother who killed her son with a knife in the back because he came back late that night; about a mailman who attacked his neighbor with a chainsaw, but stumbled and sliced off his own foot.

  Pronek spent sleepless nights sharing the room with his parents, listening to the tussling under the sheets. Without his guitar, stuck in the room at the age of eighteen with his own horny parents, Pronek reached the edge of tears, and then stopped there, forcing himself to think about a year in the army, only a couple of months away.

  He fantasized about the tough army life, about doing thousands of pushups, crawling under barbed wire, astonishing his commanding officer at the shooting range with his precise eye. He imagined coming back from the army strong—his shoulders wide, his face hardened and hairy, with a scar across his cheek (barbed wire). Having entered the pleasant space between fantasy and dream, Pronek went on reconnaissance missions, sneaking up on an unsuspecting enemy guard, ready to break his neck or cram a blade into his kidney. He put out an enemy sniper on top of a tall building, Pronek’s bullet hitting him between the eyes. Pronek spent months in the trenches with Mirza, sharing the food, waiting for the enemy t
o attack, and once the enemy poured into the trenches and overcame them, he detonated a hand grenade and died for freedom. When he slipped into the realm of pure dream, there were mushrooms on the horizon and enemy soldiers naked and aroused, and he would be stuck in a cave full of mice and frogs. Once his father put his gun to his temple and said: “Should I kill you now or after the cartoons?” Pronek sprang back into the reality of a hot Adriatic night, cicadas producing a steely, twangy sound, as if sawing the trees outside. His father peacefully snored, and Pronek could see his mother’s feet peeking from under the cover, her corns moonlit.

  Pronek’s father had some army connections and he wanted to use them to arrange for Pronek to serve in the military police. Pronek, however, hoped to serve his country in an army orchestra, somewhere close to Sarajevo, but was too attached to his fantasies to say no to the masculinity a military-police boot camp would provide. Strange are the ways of the military, however: Pronek ended up in an infantry unit, in a Macedonian town called Štip, which reeked of coconut-flavored chewing gum, as a candy factory was the only thing beside the army garrison.