Nowhere Man

by Aleksandar Hemon

  I am little sad. Yesterday I remembered when I saw horse near Koševo and I think about it all the time. I don’t know, I must tell you some things. This horse was walking on street, free, and five minutes ago there was granading, everywhere dust and pieces of glass. I was guarding hospital and horse was standing in front of the big window that didn’t break and he was looking himself, like in the mirror. He turned to one side, he turned to another side and he was thinking, Look how beautiful I am. He was turning and he was liking himself. Then the shell rocked and explosion broke the window and horse run away. He was beautiful, big eyes, pretty face, he was white and high, with black tail. He ran away like those horses in American films.

  I never used gun in this war. I was working in the hospital helping people dying. Sometimes I would go to the line and they give me the gun, but I never used the gun. I was waiting in the dark, and you look in the dark and you know Chetniks are there and maybe they are watching you. One time I was with my friend Jasmin (you don’t know him) and we are talking and I see red full stop on his forehead and one secund later his head explodes like pomegrante. That second when I see it but I cannot say nothing, because the death is very fast, that second is the worst second of my life. I was on Žuč, also. I don’t know if you know where is Žuč, but many people died there. I saw many bad things. It is hard to sleep. I saw bad things on our side. One time, I talked to one man who was our sniper and his position was on Hotel Bristol. And everyday he watched this soldier meet his woman. She would come from home and he would come from his position and they kiss and hold hands. Then she goes home and he goes back to his unit. This sniper man said that he thinks it is nice, you know, this love, so he watches them everyday. He can kill them, but it is nice, love. The woman was pretty. But one day she comes and stands little far away and he can see the soldier standing at normal place and she tells him with her hand to come to her, and he says no and then she calls him and then he comes to her. And the sniper man kills him. He tells me, if woman can tell him what he must do, he cannot live, so he killed him. And you know what is worst, I thought it is funny, we laughed like crazy. We were little crazy then, Chetniks killed us all the time. You didn’t see nothing until you see when grenade hits line for water. People have to wait, because that is only water they can have, and they know Chetniks are watching and then the grenade rocks and you see brains and stomach and spine, children, women, all dead, small pieces of meat.

  But I talk too much. See I don’t know what about can I talk. War is everything to me. I want to talk about something different, but I didn’t see no movies, no music, no books. No, I read one book, from our childhood: Heroes of Pavlo’s Street. You know that book, about boys who build the fortress and they fight other boys. When I went on Treskavica I brought the book with me. You don’t know Treskavica. We grew up in Sarajevo, we are children of asphalt. You cannot imagine Treskavica. That mountain is so wild, it is nothing: stones and cliffs and canyons and holes and three million years old. Human foot did not go there for hundred years. Last battle of the war was on Treskavica, I don’t know if you know that. Bosses were in Dayton, talking like friends and we had to go and fight for that desert. And you know what I did. I had to carry wounded and dead. Us six, we had to carry one stretcher and change, with one wounded man. Sometimes this wounded man has no legs, just bleeding and they give him morphine. But we have to carry him six hours over the stones and the cliffs and over canyons and if we slip we fall into abyss. After two hours morphine stops to help and his pain is back and he is throwing himself around like little pig and he is hitting us with his hands in the head, like we are gulity for his pain. Sometimes he dies, and we like that, because we don’t have to hurry. We sit down and smoke and somebody has some alcohol. But wounded man has his friend or brother following us and he says, If he dies I kill you and he makes us run, we have to run down the hill so steep and so high you get vertigo. We run six hours, we think we will die. Treskavica is very far away from everything. Sometimes we run for six hours to take this man to the hospital and he died after five minutes and we didn’t know. It was crazy. I saw a horse kill himself on Treskavica. We carried this man which had to hold his stomach with hand so it doesn’t fall out. He was screaming all the time, and we must run. But we ran by one unite, they had camp nearby the edge of one cliff—you look down, and it is just one big deep hole in the earth. This man died finally, so we stop to have little water and we are sitting there, we cannot breath. It is so high there is not air. We see their horse, who carried their munition, very skinny and hungry and sad. The horse goes slowly to the edge, we think he wants some grass there. Some soldiers yell, Come back! But he walks slowly and then he stops on the edge. We watch him three meters away. He turns around, looks at us directly in our eyes, like person, big, wet eyes and then just jumps—hop! He just jumps and we can hear remote echo of his body hitting stones. I never saw anything so much sad.

  I am sorry I talk too much. We in Sarajevo have nobody to talk, just each other, nobody wants to listen to these stories. I cannot talk more. You talk now. I am waiting for your letter. You must write me. Send me one book, I can read little English language, maybe one detective novel, maybe something about children. See I’m little crazy. Write me.

  Yours.

  Mirza

  P.S. Happy New Year!

  5

  The Deep Sleep

  CHICAGO, SEPTEMBER 1/

  OCTOBER 15, 1995

  The slumbering guard, about to slide off his chair, had his fingers on the holstered revolver. Pronek passed him by, pushed the grill door aside, and stepped into the elevator. The elevator was rife with a woman’s fragrant absence: peachy, skinny, dense. Pronek imagined the woman who might have exuded that scent, and she was worth a stare. She was tall and rangy and strong-looking; her hair was black and wiry and parted in the middle; she had black eyes and a sulky droop to her lips. She took a cigarette out of her purse, which was heavier than it needed to be, turned to him and said, expecting a friendly lighter: “I’ve been searching for someone, and now I know who.”

  Pronek’s eyes narrowed as he looked at the space where the woman would have stood, and he saw himself through her eyes: tall, formerly lanky, so his relaxed movements did not match his fat-padded trunk; his head almost shaved, marred by a few pale patches (he cut his own hair); a gray sweatshirt that read ILLINOIS across his chest; worn-out jeans with a few pomegranate-juice splotches; and boots that had an army look, save for the crack in his left sole—September rains had already soaked his left sock. As he stepped out of the elevator, a whiff of the fragrant cloud followed him out. He stood in the empty hall: on the left and on the right, there were rows of doors standing at attention in the walls. Above a door on the right was a lit exit sign. Pronek made an effort to remember the position—in case he was too much in a hurry to wait for an elevator. He was looking for office number 909 and decided to go right. The colorless carpet muffled his careful steps. The elbow-shaped hall reeked of bathroom ammonia and sweet cigars, and the fragrant whiff dissipated in it. Pronek tried to open the bathroom door—green, sturdy, with a silhouette of a man—but it was locked. When he pushed the door with his shoulder, it rattled: he could break it open without too much force. He figured that there would be fire stairs behind a milky bathroom window, and that the alley would lead to Michigan Avenue, where he could safely disappear in the street mass.

  All of a sudden, Pronek became aware of a sound that had been in his ears for a while but not quite reaching his brain: it was a smothered, popping sound—first one, then two—with a click at the end. Much like the sound of a gun with a silencer. Pronek’s muscles tensed and his heart started thumping like a jungle drum—he was convinced that the hall was echoing his accelerating pulse. He felt his eyebrows dewing, thick loaves of pain forming in his calves. He tiptoed past the doors: 902 (Sternwood Steel Export); 904 (Marlowe Van Buren Software); 906 (Bernard Ohls Legal Services); 908 (empty); 910 (Riordan & Florian Dental Office)—the popping, along wi
th the murky light, came from behind the dim glass of 910. Pronek imagined bodies lined up on the floor facedown, some of them already dead, with their blood and hair on the wall, their brains bubbling on the carpet. They were shivering, waiting for a quiet man with a marble-gray face to pop them in their napes, knowing they would end up in unmarked graves. They reacted to the surprising bullet with a spasm, then death relaxation, then their blood placidly soaking the carpet. There was another pop. There had been at least six of them, and Pronek reckoned that the killer must be running out of bullets. It was risky, it was none of his business, so he twisted the door handle and peeked in.

  A large man in a yellow helmet was pressing his orange staple gun against the far wall. He sensed Pronek and turned around slowly. His skin was pale and he needed a shave. He had dirty overalls and a green shirt underneath, with tiny golf balls instead of buttons. He stood firmly facing Pronek, his jaw tense, as if expecting a punch, his staple gun pointing to the floor. “Can I help you with something?” he said, frowning under his helmet. Pronek could see his eyebrows almost encountering each other above his nose. “Sorry,” Pronek said. “I look for the office 909.”

  Office 909 had a sign that read GREAT LAKES EYE and a black-and-white eye with long, upward-curling eyelashes. Pronek hesitated for a moment before knocking at the door—his fingers levitated, angled, in front of the eye. Pronek knocked, using three of his knuckles, the glass shook perilously, then he opened the door and entered an empty waiting room. There was another door, closed, and there were magazines strewn on the few chairs, even on the musty floor, as if someone had searched through them all. The waiting room was lit by a thin-necked lamp in the corner, leaning slightly as if about to snap. There was an underdeveloped cobweb without a spider in the upper left corner. A picture of an elaborate ocean sunset—as if somebody lit a match under the water—hung on the opposite wall. ACAPULCO, it said in the lower right corner, WHERE YOU WANT TO DREAM. Pronek stood in front of the picture, imagining himself playing the guitar on a beach in Acapulco, tears welling up in his eyes.

  The door opened and a man and a woman came out. They were laughing convivially with someone who remained invisible. The man—tall and black—put on a fedora with a little bluish feather, which went perfectly with his dapper navy blue suit, snug on his wide shoulders, and his alligator boots with little explosions on his toes. The woman was pale and slim, with blond boyish hair and a pointy chin. She had a tight, muscular body, like a long-distance runner, and a beautiful lean neck. She kept the tip of her finger on her chin as she listened to the man inside, who said: “What you wanna do is get some pictures.” Pronek imagined touching gently the back of her neck, below the little tail of hair on her nape, and he imagined the tingle that would make her shudder. “You bet,” the woman said, stepping out of the waiting room, barely glancing at Pronek. “You got yourself a client, Owen,” the dapper man said, following the woman, and a head sprung out of the door, eyes bulging to detect Pronek. “Gee, a client,” the head said, and the couple giggled as they closed the door. “Why don’t you come in.”

  Pronek followed the man inside, closing the croaking door behind him. The room was bright, its windows looking at Grant Park and the dun lake beyond it, waves gliding toward the shore. There was a sofa with a disintegrating lily pattern and a coffee table with a chess board on it. Pronek landed in the sofa and the fissures between the cushions widened and gaped at Pronek’s thighs.

  “My name is Taylor Owen,” the man said.

  “I am Pronek,” Pronek said. “Jozef Pronek.”

  “Good to meet you, Joe,” Owen said.

  Owen had sweat shadows under his armpits and a hump on his back, as if there were a pillow under his beige shirt. His tie was watermelon red, tightly knotted under his Adam’s apple, which flexed sprightly like a Ping-Pong ball as he spoke. He was bald, with a little island of useless hair above his forehead and a couple of grayish tufts fluffing over his ears. He sat behind a narrow desk piled with papers, the back of his head touching the wall as he leaned in his chair.

  “I called. I talked to somebody,” Pronek said, “about the job. I thought you need the detective.”

  “The detective?” Owen chortled. “Lemme guess: you seen a few detective movies, right? The Bogart kind of stuff?”

  “No,” Pronek said. “Well, yes. But I know it is not like that.”

  Owen stared at him for a long instant, as if deciding what to do with him, then asked: “Where you from?”

  “Bosnia.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “It was in Yugoslavia.”

  “Ah!” Owen said, relieved. “It’s a good place not to be there right now.”

  “No,” Pronek said.

  “You a war veteran?”

  “No. I came here just before the war.”

  “You have a blue card?”

  “What?”

  “You have any security experience?”

  “No.”

  “See, son, we don’t have detectives around here no more. Detectives are long gone. We used to be private investigators, but that’s over too. We’re operatives now. See what I mean?”

  “Yeah,” Pronek said. There was a black-and-gray pigeon on the windowsill, huddled in the corner, as if freezing.

  “No Bogey around here, son. I been in this business for a good long time. Started in the sixties, worked in the seventies. Still work. Know what I mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I worked when Papa Daley was running the Machine . . .”

  The phone rang behind the parapet of papers, startling Pronek. Owen snatched the receiver out of its bed and said: “Yup.” He turned away from Pronek toward the window, but looked over the shivering pigeon, out to the lake. It was a sunny day, cold and blustery still. The wind gasped abruptly, then pushed the windowpane with a thump, overriding the grumbling hum of Michigan Avenue. Above Owen’s hump there was a picture of an army of bulls chasing a throng of men with red scarves down a narrow street. Some of the men were being trampled by bulls who didn’t seem to notice them.

  “You can kiss that sonovabitch good-bye,” Owen said, throwing his feet up on the corner of his desk and rocking in his chair. “You’re kidding me. Shampoo? You gotta be kidding me.”

  On the desk, there was a pile of letters ripped open, apparently with little patience, and a couple of thick black files. Owen scratched the hair island, the size of a quarter, with his pinkie, beginning to rock faster. The pigeon barely had its eyes open, but then it turned its head back and looked straight at Pronek, smirking. Pronek crossed his legs and tightened his butt muscles, repressing a flatulence.

  “I know what you up against. It sure is tough. Join the rest of the fucking world.” He listened for a moment. “Skip the wisecracks, darling, all right?”

  The pigeon was bloated, as if there were a little balloon under the feathers. What if the pigeon was a surveillance device, Pronek thought, a dummy pigeon with a tiny camera in its head, pretending to be sick, watching them.

  “All right, I’ll see you after the fight tonight. Love ya too,” Owen said, and hung up. He swung back on his chair toward Pronek, sighed and said: “My wife is a boxing judge. Can you believe that? A boxing judge. She sits by the rink, watching two guys pummel each other, counting punches. Hell, people think I’m making that up when I tell them.”

  “It’s normal,” Pronek said, not knowing what to say.

  Owen opened a drawer in his desk, the drawer resisting with a bloodcurdling screech, and produced a bottle of Wild Turkey. He poured a generous gulp in a cup that had CHICAGO BULLS written around it, shaking his head as if already regretting his decision. He slurped from the cup and his face cramped, as if he had swallowed urine, then it settled down, a little redder now. He looked at Pronek, trying to see through him.

  “So you wanna be an operative?”

  “I would like to be,” Pronek said.

  “We don’t solve big cases here. Rich women don’t make passes at us. We
don’t tell off big bosses, and we don’t wake up in a ditch with a cracked head. We just earn our daily bread doing divorces, checking backgrounds, chasing down deadbeat dads, know what I mean? It’s all work, no adventure, pays the rent. Got it?”

  “Yeah,” Pronek said.

  “Do you know where the Board of Education is?”

  “In the downtown,” Pronek said.

  “Do you know where Pullman is?”

  “No.”

  “Way south. Do you know where the Six Corners is?”

  “No.”

  “Irving Park and . . . Oh, fuck it! Do you have a car?”

  “No. But I want to buy the car.” Pronek started fidgeting in his chair. A drop of sweat rolled down from his left armpit.

  “Do you have a camera?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know how to tail.”

  “Tale?” Pronek asked, perplexed. “You mean, tell the tale?”

  Owen formed a pyramid with his hands and put its tip under his nose, then pushed his nose up a little, so the bridge of his nose wrinkled. He glared at Pronek, as if affronted by his sheer presence, curling his lips inward, until his mouth was just a straight line. Pronek wanted to tell him that he could learn, that he was really smart, that he used to be a journalist, talked to people—he could make himself over to be an operative. But it was too late: Owen was blinking in slow motion, gathering strength to finish the interview off. He dismantled the pyramid, unfurled his lips and said:

  “Listen, son, I like you. I admire people like you, that’s what this country is all about: the wretched refuse coming and becoming American. My mother’s family was like that, all the way from Poland. But I ain’t gonna give you a job just ’cause I like you. Gotta pay my rent too, know what I mean? Tell you what I’ll do: give me your phone and I’ll call you if something comes up, okay?”