Nowhere Man

by Aleksandar Hemon

  “This is microphone,” Jozef said, and pointed at the fire alarm on the ceiling with frightening certainty. “Maybe also camera.”

  It made sense, of course, we were in the Soviet Union, in a Party school dorm—if there had been only one camera in Kiev, it would have been here. I started recalling all the things I might have done under the fire-alarm gaze: shaking my naked booty; singing aloud while dancing in my underwear; lying on Jozef’s bed, sniffing his pillow; investigating his suitcase and touching his things. I imagined the man who was watching me: a bored, mustached man, with a stainful tie; his armpits crusty with perspiration; playing chess with his ulcer-tormented comrade; not paying attention to the flickering screens, until they sense the motion of a funky American on one of them. Then they would ho-ho-ho and ha-ha-ha, and they would call the fatherly officer, who would come in, impeccable and humorless. He would not care that I put on Jozef’s shirts, still in the groove. He would loathe my weakness—as my father had when he caught me masturbating once—and order them to keep the camera on and bring him the tape every day.

  The camera annoyed me terribly, for your sense of sovereign self, of the completeness of your body, entirely depends on the illusion that no one can see inside you, that the only people you ever allowed to enter you would be the people you loved and knew well.

  Jozef, on the other hand, was waving at the camera and saying: “Hello, comrades. My name is Jozef Pronek and I am spy.”

  “Don’t say that,” I said. “Just don’t.”

  “And this is my friend Victor, also spy. He is American and he works for CIA.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Please come and arrest him. He was bad. I tell you everything what I know about him.”

  “Stop it,” I yelled. “Stop it.”

  So he did—yet another awkward silence—but then he got up and left the room, leaving me alone with the buzzing camera over my head.

  The camera incident notwithstanding, the days upon our return from Lvov were wholesome. We would wake up, my beloved roommate and I, into a blissfully sunny morning. The memory of the view from our room contains an implausible sheet of snow, covering the parking lot below and the tips of the trees on its edge, straight as pencils (beyond which, I learned, was Babi Yar), solely because the summer sunlight was so bounteous that it washed everything white. Jozef was one of those people who are happy in the morning: he started his day humming a song that was a sound track for his dreams (I recognized “Something Stupid” and “Nowhere Man,” for example); then he sauntered in his underwear, gabbing steadily. It was in the morning that he told me about his numerous girlfriends; about his crush on Andrea (which, he freely admitted, provoked serious erections); about his band (Blind Jozef Pronek and Dead Souls) and his best friend, the rhythm guitar in the band; about his ancestors (a granduncle shot by Stalin; another who worked for the Austrian railroad; another an orchestra conductor in Czechoslovakia, a long time ago); about his family (parents, aunts, uncles, hard to follow).

  I remember my brother doing pushups bare-chested on the floor next to my bed. His panting, yelping, and chest-slapping woke me up. Sometimes, I woke up scared, and my brother comforted me, stroking my hair, smiling. Then he did stomach crunches—it seemed to me that he was going through hurtful convulsions, but nothing could harm my brother’s morning joy. I am exactly the opposite: I had long ago—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth. Hence I passively absorbed Jozef’s cheerfulness, never quite responding, often wanting him to shut up, for I realized that he would talk to an armoire with the same morning enthusiasm. I wanted to be alone, but you couldn’t be alone with Jozef—he brought buckets of cold world into your life and poured it over your head and you gasped for air.

  We would head toward breakfast, down the stairs in synchronized steps, his hand on my shoulder, lodged gently on my collarbone. Seldom would we be alone at the table—all of a sudden he had an army of friends—which forced me into reticence or, worse, into nonsensical utterances, all sounding like pretentious misquotations: “Everybody knows someone dead”; “Words are grown so false that I am loath to prove reason with them.” Jozef would indulge in dalliance and glance-exchange with Andrea (“You had nice dreams?”), which would always make me recall his erection; he would tease Father Petrol (“You dreamed pretty women?”), which would make Father Petrol’s pimples sinfully purple; he would greet the Polish teenage twin brothers, who had been following Father Petrol like a double dose of temptation (“You switched names last night?”); he would provoke Vladek, asking him what kind of information he provided to the KGB (“Tell them I am spy”); he would make a crass remark to Vivian, whom he didn’t seem to like because she was a vegetarian (“I have sausage for you”); he would even address Will, reading the International Herald Tribune he brought with him (“What are news?”); and he would embarrass Tolya and me, suggesting that we could “make love” after breakfast. We all revolved around the axis of Jozef’s morning mirth, and the revolution could make you nauseated.

  After breakfast, we were expected to go to classes and expand our knowledge of Ukrainian history and culture. I usually skipped the Ukrainian language classes, but I went to the Ukrainian history class, much with the same interest that would make me gawp at a train wreck, but also because Jozef was in the class. We would sit high in the amphitheater, almost at eye level with the solemn pictures of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, looking down at Vivian’s emaciated back as she took notes, looking at Will’s persistently raised hand, and at a puny Toronto professor who had written a thousand-page book on Ukrainian history. I made intermittent notes, chiefly out of graduate school habit, while Jozef frantically drew herds of butterflies and demented rectangles. I was raised with my father’s version of Ukrainian history in which frequent and regular defeats were in fact triumphs of martyrdom; in which feeble intellectuals and hesitant politicians misled the common man and betrayed the hero; in which pogroms were merely self-defense; in which Ukrainians preserved Orthodox Christianity from Poles and Communists. “Empty story, yes?” Jozef said. He liked the empty story about the Cossacks throwing mud at their elected chief as part of the inauguration ritual. He thought that everybody should do it, and add some shit to the mud too. Once, as the Ukrainian SS division was being wiped out by the Red Army in its first and only battle, our knees touched, and a little furry animal of troubling pleasure moved for the first time in my belly, but I quickly smothered it with the soft pillow of denial.

  In the evenings, we would go out, stroll by the Dnepro, while the greatest fleet of mosquitoes ever assembled attacked us, wave upon wave, some of them resembling small storks—it was hard not to think of Chernobyl, and evolution taking a different turn in these parts. We would embark upon a quest for beer, up and down Andriivski Uzhvis, usually ending up in an Armenian restaurant, frequented by all the other foreigners in Kiev. Once the entire school crowd went to the restaurant and ordered a whole piglet—Jozef’s royal idea. He delightfully gnawed on the bones, greasing up and licking his fingers, daring everyone to try the brain, and no one dared except Andrea. (Vivian paled at the far end of the table.) I retch at the very thought of eating pig’s brain, but they put the decadent morsels into each other’s mouths with delight. Strange is the taste of desire.

  We would go back to the dorm and drink in someone’s room, cheerfully exchanging funny anecdotes, talking over each other, though I cannot remember what about. Jozef would disappear to make out with Andrea, and I would be stuck with a ranting-in-Russian Vladek, whose idea of fun was to drink vodka out of a vase; with Father Petrol, who would pontificate (mainly to the twins) about the spirituality of beekeeping; with Vivian, who was somehow always sitting next to me, trying to commence a quiet conversation about bad food or the water shortage in the dorm. I would depart only when I was sure that Jozef was not in our room with Andrea, quietly humping in the darkness, while a moonbeam sneaked into the room and tickled his bare dolphin-like back.

  One day, all the Americans in the
school were summoned to Igor’s office. I cannot say that the possibility of a summary execution of the imperialist enemy did not cross my mind, but I went nonetheless. There were six of us: there was Will, with his flaxen hair, half-open mouth, and undergrowth of blond hair on his tight forearms—he in fact came with a tennis racket in his hand. There was Mike, whom I hadn’t ever talked to, from Schenectady, with a large Slavic head and an itch in his crotch, to which he responded by constantly touching his penile area (“You play tennis?” he asked Will). There was Vivian the Vegetarian, with her translucent skin and knobby joints. There was Andrea, with her rangy Chicago prettiness, freckles and all (“You’re from Chicago too?” I asked her. “Yup,” she said, and that’s all the conversation we had). There was Basil from Baltimore, with thin-rimmed spectacles, positioned at a studied equidistance from anyone, and a stack of money neatly held together by a silver clip—he was a banker (“I am a banker,” he said). And there was me, a graduate student, mired in the middle of a project called “Queer Lear.”

  Thus, in streaming bad English, spoke Igor: the American president George Bush was coming to Kiev for a goodwill visit. The people of Ukraine wished to welcome and accommodate the American president, because the people of Ukraine had a lot of respect for the American president, and they wanted to develop friendship with the American people, and so on in a portentous voice. He said we were needed, since we could speak Ukrainian and English, to be on hand as interpreters. “Sure,” Will said instantly. “I’ll be proud to serve my country,” Basil said. “Bush is a prick,” Andrea said. “No way I’m gonna do it.” Then Vivian and Mike agreed, and it was up to me. The way I remember it, which is most certainly inaccurate, is that they all turned toward me, in slow motion, tilted their heads slightly—it took me a few long moments to decide. I am one of those people who is always a little embarrassed to stand up and turn toward the flag at a baseball game, though I always do it, my father’s invisible hand pushing me. And I never thought that my brother’s death was quite worth it. But it was different now: there were these people in a foreign country and I knew them—we were a “we.” I was tired of confusing, unrelenting perceptions and feelings. I wanted to go to a familiar place. I said: “Okay,” and avoided Andrea’s gaze.

  A bus was supposed to pick us up Thursday. We would be accompanied by a person from the consulate. Igor thanked us very much and told us how important it was that our school could be part of the historic visit. Igor had no shoes on, just snow-white socks, except for a red blot on his left foot, suggesting that his big toe was painfully bleeding.

  But there was throats to be cut and work to be done: we boarded a humble bus, with smudges on the window panes probably pre-dating Brezhnev. And in that decrepit ark we sailed together with other unnamed Americans, collected around Kiev, who all sat in the front seats. We were heading to the airport, we were told by a red-haired young woman in a neon-blue suit. She was from the consulate, her name was Roberta, and she said she was delighted to see us, but then she instantly forgot us, firmly focused on the Kiev streets ridden with potholes and her goals—say, a position in the Moscow embassy and an affair with a good-looking CIA man. I liked the way she raked her fluffy hair with her carmine claws.

  I sat next to Vivian, attracted by her scent of coconut sweat and her radiant skin—she gripped the handlebar on the seat in front of us and I could see her velvet veins bulging. I could also hear her breathing, her tresses’ ends dithering from her breath. Her bare legs brandished a bruise here and there, amid goose bumps. It terrified me to see how fragile she was. I believe that Vivian was aware of my gaze, for she looked straight ahead, only occasionally smiling, exposing her gums reluctantly.

  But then Will threw his tennis body onto the seat in front of us, and said: “Roberta said we might get to see the president.”

  “Wow,” Vivian said.

  We arrived at the airport, at a back lot, with no one around, except a square-shouldered man in a dark suit, a cubical jaw, dark sunglasses, a gadget in his ear, his hands lethal weapons—exactly how I had imagined a presidential bodyguard. I get a kick out of meeting someone who is a cliché embodied. It produces a pleasant feeling of a world completed, of everything arranging itself without any of my involvement, yet not veering out of control. And a diminished Vivian was reflected in his sunglasses. He ushered us into a waiting room, told us to wait in a voice that sounded synthesized, and then vanished.

  There we sat waiting.

  We were killing time, choking every little minute with the muscly hands of mortifying ennui. There was absolutely nothing in the room: no pictures on the walls, no magazines, no paper or pencils, no crass inscriptions on the chairs, not even dead flies in the light bowls. I exchanged irrelevant information with Vivian: our favorite Dunkin’ Donut (same: Boston Kreme); our favorite TV show (Hogan’s Heroes); our favorite Beatles song (“Yesterday,” “Nowhere Man”); our favorite salad dressing (she had none, I couldn’t think of any). We agreed on almost everything, and that cheered Vivian up. But I must confess—and if you are out there somewhere, Vivian, reading this woeful narrative, find it in your heart to forgive me—I lied about everything, agreeing with her only because that was much easier than professing the flimsy beliefs I had never firmly held, and it was nice to see her smiling.

  We turned to silence, and time simmered until it evaporated. They took us back to the school, but they told us that the president would speak at Babi Yar that evening and that we might be needed again. ’Tis the time’s plague, when madmen lead the blind.

  The Babi Yar ravine was full of people, swarming against the green background of trees. They grew out of pits that once upon a time had been filled up with human flesh, which had on me a disturbing effect of feeling unjustly alive. President Bush walked on stage, in the long dumb strides of a man whose path had always been secure—around him a suite of tough motherfuckers bulging with concealed weapons and willingness to give their lives for the president. We were close to the stage, over which the monument loomed—I could not make out what it was: a cramped lump cast in black bronze. We—Will, Mike, Basil, and Vivian, and I—watched him appear before the Ukrainian crowd that followed his every move, like a dog watching a mouse, with detached amazement: it was now in front of them that he became real. His bland, beady eyes scanned the crowd for a loyal face—a habit from back home, where voters grew like weeds. He looked at his watch, said something to a man carrying a clipboard, all efficient and chunky. The man nodded, so the president approached the microphone. The microphone screeched, then the president’s voice cracked in the speakers. He touched the microphone head with his lips, receiving a jolt from it. He tried to adjust the unwieldy microphone, as if choking a snake, speaking all along. His voice then came from a tape recorder deep down inside him, plugged into the electric current of his soul. Nobody was translating.

  “Abraham Lincoln once said: We cannot escape history . . .” he said somberly, still wrangling the microphone. Under the stage, there were men in uniforms, squatting, leaning on their rifles. Their heads brushed against the wooden beams. They had striped sailor-shirts under the uniform, which meant they were from the KGB. They smoked and seemed absolutely oblivious to what was happening right above them.

  “Today we stand at Babi Yar and wrestle with awful truth.” He pronounced Yar as Year. The men under the stage were laughing about something, one of them shaking his head in some kind of disbelief.

  “And we make solemn vows,” the president went on, his voice getting deeper, the microphone making a wheeee sound. I spotted Jozef in the crowd, his face beaming out of the crowd’s grayness, standing close to the stage, with his hands in his pockets, Andrea next to him.

  “We vow this sort of murder will never happen again.”

  The KGB men under the stage simultaneously dropped their cigarettes and stepped on the butts, still squatting, as if they were dancing hopak.

  “We vow never to let forces of bigotry and hatred assert themselves without opposition.�
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  I realized that President Bush reminded me of one Myron, who would eat earthworms for a quarter when we were kids: he would put a couple of earthworms between two pieces of bread and bite through. You could sometimes see their ends wiggling between the slices, while he chewed their heads. With his quarters he would buy some booze—Colt 45 or Cobra or something.

  “And we vow that whenever our devotion to principle wanes [the microphone suddenly went silent] when good men and women refuse to defend virtue [silence] each child shot [wheeee, silence, wheeee] none of me will ever forget. None of us will ever forget.”

  The setting sun peeked through the treetops and blinded Bush, who squinted for a moment, a fiery patch on his face. Jozef whispered something into Andrea’s ear and she started giggling, with her hand on her mouth. The people standing behind the president on the stage were uneasy. The men under the stage were on their backs now, looking up at the stage ceiling, their AK-47s laid next to them. Vivian silently moved next to me—the coconut aroma perished from her sweat. The chunky guy with the clipboard shook up the microphone, as if it all were a matter of its stubbornness, and then gave up.

  “May God bless you all [. . . . . wheeeeeumph . . . . . . .] the memories of Babi Yar.”

  And then Bush came off the stage and after a sequence of microevents that I cannot recall—you must imagine my shock—Jozef was standing in front of Bush, behind the moat of the bodyguards’ menacing presence, his face extraordinarily beautiful, as if an angelic beam of light were cast on his face. Jozef was looking at him with a grin combined with a frown—which I can recognize in retrospect as his recognition that the moment was marvelously absurd. Bush must’ve seen something else, perhaps his divine face, perhaps someone who would make his presidential self look better on a photo (and the cameras were snapping), someone who looked Slavic and exotic, yet intelligible—the whole evil empire contracted in one photogenic brow of woe. So he asked Jozef, looking at the fat man, expecting him to interpret: