Nowhere Man

by Aleksandar Hemon

  As if bent on punishing Pronek for his fantasies, the army’s idea of what becoming a man meant was the exact opposite of Pronek’s: perpetual humiliation was its main tool. First the conscripts went through a warehouse, where the soldiers distributing clothes threw pieces of uniform at them, guessing the size or simply indulging their whims. Pronek received a shirt too small, a cap too big, pants that could accommodate a small man beside him, and underwear that had no rubber band. Then his head was shaved and he was sent into the showers with two hundred other soldiers, one of whom decided to urinate on Pronek’s thigh, thereby baptizing him. The water coming from the showers was cold, and Pronek spent too much time soaping himself. The water was discontinued before he could rinse.

  Let us look at Pronek now, coming out of the latrines, a brand-new soldier of the Yugoslav People’s Army: the cap pressing down his ears, making him look jug-eared; his pants ballooning around his thighs; his underwear sliding down to his knees, impeding his step. Carrying his civilian clothes in a stinky white bag, he totters toward the promised land of manhood with his eyes teary from the soap dripping off his forehead.

  Pronek rolled in mud, ran up hills, ran down hills, ran through a forest with a gas mask, slamming into trees, marched across Macedonian plains, and guarded ominous magazines, learning to sleep on his feet. He was less than mediocre at the shooting range, because he closed his eyes when pressing the trigger. He stole his comrades’ clean socks and looked at pictures of their girlfriends, all presumably fucking someone else now. Pronek showed them Sabina’s picture—beautiful, on a sailboat, in a swimsuit—which he regretted when they started making lewd jokes.

  He silently endured shrieking corporals and the howling platoon commander, Captain Miloševi´c, who liked to alarm them in the middle of the night and have them stand at attention for hours. He tried to stay awake through the political-education classes as Captain Miloševi´c explained why socialism was the fate of America. You could never be alone: in the bathroom, in the dorms, in the canteen, at night, in the morning, in your dreams, there were young men—skinny, stinky, ever eager to talk about women and fear furtive homosexuals, ever hungry and ready to get drunk, ever sharing the same repertoire of jokes, uniformly revolving around farting. Sometimes, at the swearing-in of new soldiers, or at a celebration of a Party-congress anniversary, there would be an orchestra and Pronek would wistfully watch the guitar player absentmindedly strumming his strings, performing a song about the people’s joyful spirit.

  Pronek lied to his parents, presenting his army experience as one of bonding with other young men from all across Yugoslavia, strengthening the brotherhood and unity that kept the country strong and united. Sometimes he embellished his letters with appreciation of the simple soldierly life, or expressed pride that the good people of Yugoslavia, his parents included, were peacefully sleeping because Pronek himself was dwelling over their freedom. His dwelling was more due to the frantic nocturnal masturbation of Spasoje, a shepherd who had spent the past ten years alone with sheep in the mountains of southern Serbia and liked to bang his feet against the bunk-bed bars in the throes of self-passion.

  Pronek told the real story to Mirza, who already knew it, having scrubbed ship hulls in the navy and gone through the same spectrum of debasement. Both of them came to the conclusion that only an idiot can enjoy the army, and they felt guilty for not being patriotic enough, for not being tougher, for despising their comrades content with the pleasures of masturbation and bad cigarettes. Aware that the army censors might be reading their complaints, they conveyed their unpatriotic misery in the code of Sarajevo slang—which I regret not being able to translate well enough to render its impenetrability.

  After three months of basic infantry training, Pronek was nowhere near the pledged masculinity. Indeed, he took a step back when he was transferred to the kitchen. It was a cozy duty, precisely because it was nearly absolutely mindless: he washed skyscrapers of oven pans and dishes; he peeled galaxies of potatoes. Pronek worked, ate, and slept, while time crept. He got a potato-peeling companion, a Bosnian from Banja Luka named Ahmed. Ahmed was a cook, but had been demoted after repeatedly talking back to his superiors, all of whom, according to Ahmed, were first-rate motherfuckers. He was a huge hairy man who talked in an abrupt, peevish manner, as if insulted by the other person’s unflinching existence. The first time they peeled the potatoes together, Ahmed kept scowling at Pronek’s dumb ways, criticizing the unnecessary thickness of the peel, and kept showing him the right knife angle. It shortly turned out that Ahmed knew Pronek’s cousin in Banja Luka, that he believed that sevdah was the Bosnian version of blues, and told him he should listen to John Lee Hooker and Zaim Imamovi´c and he would see. They came up with their own sevdah-blues songs, describing the potato peeling and the horrors of the army and faraway women. Ahmed liked to read—he was to study literature after the army—and would tell Pronek abbreviated, even if often convoluted, versions of the novels he had read. He liked hard-boiled detective novels and Dostoyevsky. He gave Pronek The Idiot to read, and Pronek found it mind-numbingly tedious and never finished it, but said that he liked its philosophy. After Ahmed went back home a month earlier, Pronek slept sixteen to eighteen hours a day, getting up only to eat and supervise the potato peeling of the kitchen novices, whose hands were covered with cuts and incisions, the buckets in front of them full of bloody water.

  After coming back from the army, Pronek refused to answer any of his parents’ questions and provide them with any reason to be proud of his newly acquired manhood. Then he started his studies of General Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy. He chose General Literature chiefly because he had heard from Ahmed that you didn’t have to work much, just read a lot, and that you could bullshit extensively. Within a month of commencing his studies, he stopped attending the classes. It was hard for him to get up in the morning and go to a class knowing that he would have to listen to the self-important suit-and-tie professors delivering their lectures on Ancient Greeks or the lives of Serbian saints. He could not bear to look at the comely, coy young women, ready for a lifetime in a library; scruffy young men, with goatees, and rotten teeth, for whom the line between being drunk and being inspired was forever blurred. Pronek did not hate them or despise them. Looking at them resulted in sorrow clawing at his heart—couldn’t they see how untrue and pointless it all was: the future librarians making copious notes; the poets scribbling their latest confession to themselves in a dog-eared notebook; the professor reading in a droning voice about the saint suffering on top of a mountain?

  Thus Pronek skipped early morning classes and spent the morning in bed, staring at the ceiling—a dot here and there, mosquitoes murdered years ago—feeling as if a heavy black cat were sitting on his chest, growling in his face, ready to gouge his eyes out if he just moved. He would try to think up a reason to fight the cat and get up, but couldn’t think of any.

  It was on one of those mornings that Pronek entered his poetry-writing period. The first lines of poetry he ever wrote in his native language translate as: “What’s that thing growing out of me/Like a tumor on a sunny day?” The poem was about nothing in particular, apart from his ambition to get the ceiling-staring feeling out. He entitled the poem “Love and Tumors.” The second poem was tougher: he sat facing the empty, blazingly white sheet of paper, and tried hard to think of something he needed to say. Before he wrote the first line, he had the title: “The Deep Sleep.” And so it went—he got out of bed to write poems. They never rhymed, had no stanzas, and made no sense. Soon he started believing that what he wrote was not poetry, but something else, something deeper and more ineffable; something that expressed his feeling of life: a taut heart, tears hiding from his eyes, the liberating hopelessness. Those poems were blues, Mirza ascertained, no doubt about it, and Pronek had an epiphany: he saw himself old and black, sitting on a ramshackle porch with a rambling guitar, delivering narratives of his woes and metaphysical peregrinations. And he was blind too—the only thing he
could see was the darkness of his soul.

  Quickly did “Love and Tumors” become a blues song. So did “The Deep Sleep” and “I Am Hiding Tears from My Eyes” and “Do Not Close Your Eyes.” Pronek spent days, while his parents toiled for his sustenance, in his room singing, howling (like Howlin’ Wolf), and screaming (like Screaming Jay Hawkins), sometimes getting things out from such depths that their neighbor, a streetcar operator who worked night shifts, banged his fists furiously against the wall and offered to strangle him with his bare hands.

  Thus was Blind Jozef Pronek and Dead Souls born of pain and confusion. Mirza, naturally, was the first Dead Soul. They played in the overcrowded Dental Students Club, called predictably Zub (the Tooth) and the Medical Students Club, called, a little less predictably, Kuk (the Hip), to an audience of drunken students, horny and uninterested. Pronek tap-tap-tapped his foot, like Blind Lemon Jefferson did with his cane, Mirza played his short, heartfelt solos, inaudible over the speakers, drowned in the noise of students eager to forget bleeding gums, jars full of fetuses, and spongy hearts. But sometimes, everything would be just right and the smoke from people’s nostrils floated toward them and formed a cloudy aura, like fog coming from the Delta swamps. Pronek would see a pair of eyes watching him just above the surface of the crowd, as if trying to see through to his sinful soul. I could have been the owner of a pair of eyes, as I went to Kuk and Zub, but I do not recall listening to a blues band in those places—I could have been simply too drunk to notice. Toward the end of the song, he would skillfully close his eyes, suggesting that he had just plunged into his own depths. He felt the tickling of gazes moving across his face and neck like long-legged, lithe spiders.

  Soon enough, Mirza and Pronek recruited a bass player, named Zoka, and Sila the Drummer, a punk who worked in the Maternity Hospital as maintenance and liked to drink like a fish at Kuk. Sila demanded an explanation of Pronek’s lyrics—he didn’t want to play what he couldn’t understand. Pronek didn’t quite know what the songs were about, except that they were about his feelings. Under Sila’s ferociously inquiring gaze, Pronek had to spin out an elaborate exegesis, comparing himself implicitly to John Lee Hooker and Dostoyevsky, which did not help clarify the lyrics at all. Finally, Pronek used soccer references to explain that “Love and Tumors” was about the game you knew you were losing but you still wanted to score, while “Do Not Close Your Eyes” was about being aware what position you were playing on the soccer field of the universe. They played more gigs, even having a couple of shows in Zenica and Mostar, where they almost got beaten up because an idler in bermuda shorts demanded “normal music” and Sila rhetorically fucked his mother. There were no stars in Sarajevo, as everybody knew everybody, and nobody ever forgot the days when you rolled in mud or played marbles, and the local thugs would set you straight if you were too cocky. But there were young women smiling at Pronek and Mirza and even at Sila on the main street. A rotten-teeth poet from General Literature told him that they expected a lot from him. Mirza’s cousin’s boyfriend, who worked for a student paper, asked Pronek if he wanted to write music reviews. “Little money,” he said, “but you’ll have a voice.” “I already have a voice,” Pronek said, but consented.

  And a couple of years after coming out of the army on a Tuesday morning, Pronek woke up happy, leapt out of bed, and left his room singing to himself “Something Stupid,” the Sinatra song. He cordially wished a good morning to his flabbergasted parents—indeed, he had coffee with them and showed some interest in their welfare. His mother suffered from arthritic pain, and his father had been demoted to desk duty—new people were coming, he said, their ethnicity their only qualification. Then Pronek went to the offices of Valter, the student paper, to submit a scathing review of the new Bijelo dugme album, which he described as “the lowest form of Balkan peasanthood hidden under the gingerbread veneer of hard rock stolen from the stadiums of America.” He kept repeating it to himself, as if it were a poem.

  The trouble with happiness was that it was not a good foundation for blues—Pronek wanted to cover “Something Stupid,” but the song could not be taken for blues, not even in Bosnia, as remote from the Mississippi as a country can be. Sila refused to play “Something Stupid,” demanding that their songs be heavier. He wanted more steel, he said—he was into The Cult. He even brought in his own songs, determinedly not in English, with titles that translated as “Dig Your Grave, Disco Brother,” and “I’ll Cut the Throat of Love.”

  The issue was unresolved when Mirza and Pronek went to the seaside in the summer of 1990. They spent it entertaining throngs of dark-skinned, blond young women from Hungary and the Czech Republic, getting laid frequently and indulging in a fantasy that life would never end. When they came back to Sarajevo on a rainy August day and said good-bye to each other they had a profound sense that something was over. And it was: Blind Jozef Pronek would not practice for months, as Zoka was preparing for a medical exam and Sila discovered heroin and was shooting up in the bushes by the Miljacka. Pronek wrote more reviews, only occasionally playing old Beatles songs with Mirza, and even went back to studying General Literature—he enjoyed reading The Divine Comedy. He spent more time mountain hiking with his father, who had been forced to retire. His father told him stories: about the unresolved murder of a soccer referee, found in the Miljacka, with his asshole cut out; about his great-granduncle who left Ukraine and went to Chicago, where he was a hotel detective, while his brother went to Bosnia; about old Ukrainian songs his mother sang, which he could still remember to a word. They stood looking at Sarajevo at the bottom of the cauldron of mountains: streets curving like furrows on a great palm; people flowing in the streets like ant columns; the buildings reflecting the setting sun, as if in flames. It was incredible, his father said, how one could clearly remember the things that took place so many years ago and could not remember what happened just yesterday.

  After a six-month hiatus, Pronek got his band together in the winter of 1991 and they had a sloppy rehearsal—the songs sounded weak and hollow, completely devoid of feeling. A couple of days later, Pronek and Mirza went to the rehearsal space—the basement in Zoka’s deaf grandmother’s house—and discovered that all their equipment had been stolen. Many months later, they would find out that it was Sila who had stolen it and sold it for heroin, after he was caught pilfering money in the Maternity Hospital from the purses of women in labor.

  The year 1991 flew by Pronek, as if he were watching a passing train, the lit window strip rushing by in the night, and he barely able to discern the faces of people going in an unknown direction. In March 1991, he dreamt that he was shooting up heroin, and the blessed calm that came upon him in his dream was so pleasant that he woke up fearing he had become a junkie without ever even trying junk. In May, he often found himself wandering parks and the Vilsonovo, nagged by a titillating possibility of picking up women sitting alone on benches—he ogled them with crazed glances that made the women get up and pick up their pace. In June the trouble in Croatia started—the news arrived of skirmishes between Croatian volunteers and the army and roaming murder-units coming from Serbia, conveyed with images of corpses with gouged-out eyes and cut-off noses.

  In July, Pronek was invited to visit the American Cultural Center and talk to its director. The young director spoke woeful Serbo-Croatian and Pronek, tempted a few times to correct him, had a hard time following him. The director said that Pronek’s writing had attracted favorable notice and asked him about his “life and work.” He sped through his life in a few brief, uneventful sentences. It appeared to him as perfectly fraudulent, and he feared that the American would accuse him of lying, pulling out documents and photographs that proved differently: he had never had a band; he had never studied English; he had never been in the army—and here we have a photo of you playing the accordion at your cousin’s wedding! The interview, it seemed to Pronek, was a catastrophe. The same month, his father told him that a man he knew in the Association of Bosnian Ukrainians was looking fo
r someone who wanted to go to a summer school in Kiev, to learn more about their heritage. Pronek had no interest in his heritage, as he had suffered through his father’s histories, but he thought that leaving Sarajevo and the war in Croatia for a month would help his mental health. He went to Ukraine.

  But that is a different story, and I have never been in Ukraine—someone else will have to talk about that part of his life. He met a woman he would one day visit in Chicago, thus reaching the place where he would live unhappily ever after and where I would recognize him in a classroom. I know he was in Kiev when the putsch happened, when the Soviet Union collapsed, which caused his parents some worry—both the collapse and his presence there. He came back older, perhaps even wiser, having witnessed a historic event, having fallen in love. He joked that he had gone to the USSR to fix a few things, and now, he said, was ready to fix Yugoslavia.

  Upon his return, Sarajevo was under a heavy cloud. Mirza, a law student at a lawless time, was working on moving to Canada, because, he said, he could not think here anymore—it was as if his brain were invaded by the Serbs and Croats, slashing each other’s throats. Pronek frequented clubs and bars, as he couldn’t stand being at home and listening to his parents talking about dying soon. He watched people dancing half asleep and picking up whoever was left on the dance floor. Pronek did it himself—at dawn he would be groping in the main park with a woman whose name he didn’t quite catch and whose beer breath he inhaled, trying not to gag. In the morning, he hated himself, but, he thought, who didn’t. He stopped writing poetry, or playing his guitar, just wrote idiotic reviews nobody read (“The guitar solos are a rich boy’s idea of a slave’s pain, and they sound like amplified masturbation”). A guy he knew offered him heroin one night and Pronek accepted, but then reneged when he saw the guy vomiting, having rubbed the junk into his gums—he had lost his syringe, he said.