Nowhere Man

by Aleksandar Hemon

  “What is your name, young fellow?”

  “Jozef Pronek,” Jozef answered, while the fat man was mouthing a translation of the question, spit burping in the corners of his lips.

  “This place is holy ground. May God bless your country, son.”

  “It is not my country,” Jozef said.

  “Yes, it is,” Bush said, and patted Jozef on his shoulder. “You bet your life it is. It is as yours as you make it.”

  “But I am from Bosnia . . .”

  “It’s all one big family, your country is. If there is misunderstanding, you oughtta work it out.” Bush nodded, heartily agreeing with himself. Jozef stood still, his body taut and his smile lingering on his face, bedazzled by the uncanniness.

  I knew then that I was in love with Jozef. I wanted Bush to embrace him, to press his cheek against Jozef, to appreciate him, maybe kiss him. I wanted to be Bush at that moment and face Jozef armed with desire. But Bush took off, his body exuding his content with his ability to connect with everyone. Would I were a rock—I stood there trembling with throbs of want, watching Jozef, with the sun behind his back. I replay this scene like a tape, rewinding it, slowing it down, trying to pin down the moment when our comradeship slipped into desire—the transition is evanescent, like the moment when the sun’s rays change their angle, the light becomes a hairbreadth softer, and the world slides with nary a blink from summer into fall.

  “Isn’t that your roommate?” Will asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

  Jozef saw me then, waved at me, and shrugged, as if it all were an accident, rather than destiny. Oh, smite flat the thick rotundity of the world so we may never be apart.

  Naturally, I stayed away from Jozef thereafter. That same night, I succumbed to Vivian’s persistent, quiet presence, invited her to my room—as Jozef was off carousing somewhere—where we made out in my bed. She pressed her lips against mine and sucked them, I let my hands wander across her ribs and breasts, and tried to push my tongue into her mouth. It was a cumbersome protocoitus: I kept banging my knees against the steel edges of the bed, she—my slim Ophelia—kept slipping between the bed and the wall. In the end, we never managed to get to the penetration point, though there was some heavy, nervous petting. Need I say that I was distracted by Jozef’s absent presence, that I could smell his clothes, and that, as I was trying to approach the lovemaking process from a different angle, my leg slipped off the bed and I stepped on his shoe? The part that I enjoyed, however, was the talk after our hapless semi-intercourse had been abandoned, under the pretense of everything being too soon. We were facing each other, inhaling each other’s breath, whispering about the times when we were kids, when joys were simple and bountiful. She told me, her hand softly on my hip, how she had been so little as a kid that she could hang on a kitchen cabinet door and swing herself, back and forth. I remembered how my brother would swing me between his legs, then swing me somehow above his head and put me on his back. I did not want to fuck Vivian, I just wanted to hold her and talk to her. Even as she talked, I kept imagining Jozef in his bed, in his shorts, absentmindedly curling the hair around his nipples. Ah, get thee to a nunnery!

  I spent a lot of time with Vivian henceforth: we were, for all intents and purposes, having a relationship. We would go to classes together, and sit next to each other—Jozef way above, behind my back, beyond my gaze. We would ask each other: “What do you wanna do tonight?” and respond: “I don’t know, what do you wanna do?” It was always the same thing; we would go for a walk, then to the Armenian restaurant, then to Vivian’s room—her roommate, one Jennifer from Winnipeg, was sleeping with Vladek somewhere else—where we made out a little, inching toward the ever remote penetration (Vivian was not ready yet, still afraid of the pain, though she was not, she said, a virgin), then exchange our memories. We had progressed to high adolescence, when I had taken up drugs, and she had taken up vegetables. Sometimes, she would decide to stay in her room and read about Ukrainian history, or translate some lousy Ukrainian poem, and I would play tennis with Will. He would easily crush me, generously suggesting exercises that would improve my regrettable footwork. Or we would play doubles: Will and me versus Mike and Basil. Will demanded an elaborate high-five after every win, though I never had anything to do with it. Then we would play poker, drinking infernal vodka. Will seemed to know everything about the current baseball season and we discussed it enveloped in the air of elite expertise, conscious that nobody in that damn country knew or cared about it. They also liked to talk about women: they wanted to know about Vivian’s fucking habits (I could tell them little), while they seemed to possess information about Andrea (Mike claimed she liked to suck uncircumcised dick) and Jennifer of Winnipeg (she paid Vladek per fuck) and Father Petrol (who was caught jacking off in the bathroom). I was disgusted, of course, but on the other hand, their idiotic discourse was familiar and comfortable—it was my summer camp all over again.

  I would go back to my room, feeling guilty, as if I had betrayed not only Vivian, but Jozef as well. He would sometimes be awake when I came in drunk, and we would engage in small talk. He told me about his little adventures in Kiev: in the post office, a man had whispered to him about the Stalin days, when people used to disappear, but you could buy sausage in stores; he had had some kvass and it was so horrible that he was happy he had tried it, because he could now tell everyone about it; Andrea had bought a Red Army officer’s hat from a guy, who was also selling night-vision goggles—he was thinking about getting the goggles tomorrow. It was all laughter and amiability, but I felt as if we had broken up and were only friends now, desire banished from our land, even if it had never settled there.

  Wide awake, I would stare at the ceiling camera, wishing I could get my paws on those tapes and watch Jozef waking up in the morning, his skin soft, with crease imprints, the fossils of slumber, on his bare shoulders; or see him making out with Andrea. I would close my eyes, and my mind would wander with my hand across his chest, down his abdomen. I would stop it on the underwear border, forcing myself to think about Vivian—you have to understand that I had never been attracted to a man before. It frightened me, and it was hard sometimes to discern between fear and arousal: the darkness throbbed around me, in harmony with my heart.

  Occasionally, I would feel a compulsion to confess to Vivian: to tell her that being with her was only out of need for something safe and familiar; to tell her that I could not stop—and God knew I tried—thinking about my foreign roommate, even as she touched me and breathed into my face. But instead of confessing, I lectured her about my thesis and the homosocial relations in King Lear; and how the collapse of Lear’s society was rendered by the emasculation in it; and how Lear’s being alone with Cordelia before she dies was when he went beyond his masculinity, entering a different identity. I babbled and babbled, understanding along the way that I understood very little. Incredibly, she found it interesting: she swore in faith ’twas passing strange, ’twas wondrous pitiful. But what she actually said, I shall not recall before the next lifetime.

  Jozef, naturally, suspected nothing: he cheerfully walked around half naked, was convinced that our new distance was due to our respective new girlfriends. I assumed this fake voice of male solidarity—the voice, I suspected, often heard in army barracks and trenches before nightly masturbation sessions—as we shared petty treasures, trinkets glittering only to easily arousable men: a vivid description of Vivian’s nipples; a joke about Andrea’s orgasmic yelps; the standard fantasies about having more than one woman in bed, and so on.

  I remember the time when my father had been fired from his work as a security guard, spending a lot of time at home, mainly drinking, telling disconnected Bandera-times stories, and ripping cabinet doors off. But occasionally, he would be in a somber mood, slouching on the sofa in the dark living room, blinds rolled down, watching a daytime talk show with the sound off. I was sixteen or so, prone to avoiding my father’s proximity as much as I could, but he seemed so helpl
ess and aching at the time that I would just join him and watch TV in complete silence. I could never muster the audacity to prompt him to talk, and he never wanted to talk. We could hear Mother trudging through the apartment, but she was as shut off as the talk show. Once, as some shoddy porn stars were being interviewed, my father said, slowly, as if he had been thinking about it for a while, that he had some porn tapes and that we could watch them together sometime. I retched—I swear to God—it was so unthinkable to me. So I said: “No, are you fucking crazy?” and stormed out of the room. Yet, despite the nausea I still feel, that seemed to be the last time my father had wanted to give me anything and I had declined it. Men have died—worms have eaten them—but not for love.

  The days after Babi Yar were days of torment. I spent a lot of time with people who ultimately made me feel frightfully lonely. More and more often, I roamed the streets of Kiev alone, collecting random particles of someone else’s life: a throng of wizened carnations, sold by a decrepit baba; a woman tottering under the weight of bag clusters in her hands; a naked mannequin in the dust-infested window of an empty store; a boy waiting with his father in front of a kvass kiosk, pale, a chenille of greenish snot stretching over his lips to his chin; the gnarly bars on the post office windows, eaten by rust; the ashtray brimming with cigarettes, lipstick moons on their ochre filters, in front of a post office teller named Oksana, who provided me with a phone line to Chicago.

  My mother picked up the phone. I could hear the echo of my voice, and she was confused by the delay, so our words kept running into one another:

  “Mom, how are . . .”

  “Victor, how . . .”

  “. . . you?”

  “. . . are you?”

  “I’m good, . . .”

  “Are you . . .”

  “. . . Mom.”

  “. . . okay?”

  “How . . .”

  “Is everything . . .”

  “. . . is Dad?”

  “. . . okay?”

  “Everything . . .”

  “He . . .”

  “. . . is okay.”

  “. . . is okay.”

  “Great.”

  “He is only . . .”

  “Is he . . .”

  “. . . a little weak.”

  “. . . okay?”

  “Hello?”

  “Okay?”

  He was sick, I understood in spite of the echoes. High blood pressure, my mother said. He wasn’t eating, couldn’t digest food, my mother didn’t say why, and I knew he wouldn’t see the doctor, claiming he was fine, meaning he was tough. But I didn’t want it clarified, I wanted to pretend that it was all so distant, many echoes away, because I could not deal with it. I finished the conversation with love that was to be shared by my mother with my father, an unlikely event. This was mid-August 1991.

  I went down the stairs, still hung over, vaguely afraid of breaking my ankle and tumbling down the stairs only to have my neck snapped. As I was sinking into the hall, I saw Natalyka, the cleaning woman who would often walk into our room and admonish us for the mess; I saw Natalyka sitting despondently, watching TV, her head on the blubber-padded shoulder of another cleaning woman. Her log-thick legs were crossed at her swollen ankles. She kept her hands in the pockets of her formerly blue jacket, as if despair were a marble in her pocket. No one had ever watched TV in the hall, let alone this early—it was breakfast time. There was a crowd of people, whose faces had wandered through my hazy stay in this building, whose faces were now richly made up with dread and desolation.

  August 21, 1991, will always have Natalyka’s sorrowful face.

  I sidled up behind the crowd and peeked at the TV, the way I join onlookers calmly watching an accident aftermath. A Brezhnev clone with a bass voice read a proclamation, sitting uncomfortably in the midst of a horrendous purple-velvet set, his tie breaking over his belly. It took me awhile to shake off my daze and parse what he was saying. The people around me shuffled their feet as if rattling their shackles. They murmured and sighed: somebody, I understood, took over the power, declared martial law, because of anarchy and disorder.

  “Gorbachev is out,” Will said, suddenly standing next to me. “There’s been a coup.”

  “Oh, fuck!” I said.

  “Exactly,” Will said.

  I must mention this: abruptly and against my will, as it were, I was close to Will—abruptly, he was someone I could trust. But I felt a cramping urge to locate Jozef and break the news to him, to produce wonder in his heart and excite him. So I flew upstairs, not caring about my ankles or my neck, followed by an echo of Natalyka’s tormented gasp. I burst into the room without knocking, and Jozef was naked. I could not help noticing—and I was too excited to try—a hair vine crawling up from his sooty crotch to his navel, and curls spiraling around his nipples.

  “There’s been a coup!” I nearly hollered.

  “What?”

  “There’s been a coup!” I hollered.

  “What is coup?” It was rather annoying, his ignorant calm, his boxers sliding up his alabaster thighs.

  “A coup, a violent takeover of power.”

  “Take over from where?”

  “You know, a fucking revolution.” What was wrong with him? He couldn’t understand the basic information, let alone assuage my fears. What was I doing here?

  “Revolution?” Jozef said, his eyebrows raised, the sun of comprehension rising from behind the dark mountain of his dimness. “Where is revolution? Who is organizing revolution?”

  “God damn it, a putsch. Gorbachev’s out.” That was going to be my last attempt. He had no chest hair, and his navel had a birthmark satellite, shaped as a mouse.

  “Putsch,” he finally understood. “Maybe they want to arrest us.”

  Now, I have to confess that I hadn’t thought of that—why would anyone want to arrest me?

  “Trouble, trouble,” he said.

  I needed to talk to Will, so I left Jozef behind to wallow in his fake wisdom, muttering something in his weird language, and I ran downstairs. Down in the hall, there was no one but Natalyka, sitting in the same place, but no shoulder to support her, her hands dead in her lap, like hairless bloated hamsters, her round little body aweary of this great world. She was watching the Red Army choir, handsome men endowed with mandibular strength, thundering a victorious song.

  I ran to the cafeteria, where there was a hopeful line of second-helpers, led by the indomitable Vladek, as if nothing had happened, but there was no Will. I ran to his room, leaping across stairs, rapidly running out of breath, and I found him there, with his ear pressed against his transistor radio.

  “What’s the news?” I asked in a series of pants that must have suggested frenzy.

  “Haven’t found any news yet,” Will said. “I’m trying to find the Voice of America.”

  I had never been in Will’s room—his clothes were neatly stacked in the closet, and he had tubular boxes full of fluorescent-green tennis balls positioned unrandomly around his room like little watchtowers. He had a family picture on the nightstand: there were five of them, Will in the center, flanked by his sisters, Mom and Dad standing behind them. They were sublimely beautiful, blond and suburbanly, all resembling one another as if they were a variation on the same person, a family procreated by fission rather than fucking.

  “What are we going to do, Will?”

  “Well, they can’t arrest us. And even if they arrest us, they will exchange us. We don’t leave anyone behind.”

  “I never thought of it that way.”

  “I mean if the American embassy knows we are here, they are going to get someone to get us. They might send a bunch of marines or something. We take care of our people, right?”

  “Do they know we are here?” I imagined a herd of robust marines storming into the building, the sergeant bellowing: “Move! Move!” shooting to pieces whoever unwisely stood in their way, crawling along the walls, exchanging mysterious finger signs, patriotic paint smudged all over the
ir endearingly familiar faces.

  “I don’t know,” Will said. “I hope they do. I want to go home.”

  “But what are we going to do until they come?”

  “We’re gonna stay put. Get your stuff ready in case we have to leave soon. I’m gonna talk to other people. We oughtta have a meeting.”

  I ran back to my room, but Jozef was not there. All that running: maybe I didn’t run at all, but now as I remember it, it all seem speeded up, with plenty of huffing and puffing and urgency. And I was tired and the running (if indeed there was any) seemed pointless. The bed beckoned me and I stretched on it, pulling the blanket over my head. Here is a confession: When the future is uncertain, when there are many events in the womb of time about to be delivered, I take a nap. I roll down the shades and creep under a blanket and cover my head, and I try to imagine a safe, warm place—a tip from my therapist. Usually, it is my tent. We are on a camping trip in Wisconsin, somewhere near a shimmering lake. The sides of the tent are throbbing slightly. I can hear the crickets on the fragrant pines, and I can hear my mother humming an Irish song. The shadows of the pine’s branches are quivering above my head, and I can hear the splashing of the struggling fish my dad is pulling out of the lake.

  A cold hand on my forehead woke me up, and before I could see her face darkened and haloed by the background light, I recognized her smell: sweet sweat and coconut.

  “Are you sleeping?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Have you heard?”

  “Yup.”

  “How can you sleep?”

  “How can you not sleep?”