The Lazarus Project

by Aleksandar Hemon

  The Fitzes carry her to the side door opening into the alley, where they unbutton her dress and allow her to breathe the cold air. The detectives smoke, while Miller monitors Olga’s feelings, as well as her chest. “That must’ve been a big surprise for you, girlie,” Fitzpatrick says. They hear the booms of the photographer’s flash inside.

  THE MARCH 3 morning edition of the Chicago Tribune is led by William P. Miller’s story. The terrible deed of yesterday morning, he writes, was planned and carried out to death by a dreamlike Jewish boy whose mind was distorted with the inflammatory ideas of remedying social conditions and so-called injustices, promulgated by Emma Goldman and other leaders of “liberal thought” in America. The condition of his mind is further revealed by the fact that last week Lazarus Averbuch planned to commit suicide with another young Jew, one who is identified only as the “curly-haired man” and is thought by police to have helped in the murder attempt upon Chief Shippy. Assistant Chief Schuettler declined to name the suspect, but from sources intimate with the investigation, the TRIBUNE has learned that his name is Isador Maron.

  Indeed, the police cast a wide net in their hunt for the curly-haired man.

  Bruno Schultz, a bartender at the H. Schnell Saloon, 222 Lincoln Avenue, identifies the assassin as a man who had visited the saloon on a number of occasions in the past three weeks, several times accompanied by a curly-haired man.

  Several men of Russian Jewish type—at least one of them curly-haired—visited the Von Lengerke & Antoine sporting goods store, 277 Wabash Avenue, last Saturday afternoon. They wanted to buy revolvers, Von Lengerke tells the police. But being of apparent anarchistic type and demeanor, no encouragement was given to them, and they left the store in a rage.

  Another curly-haired suspect was arrested at 573 12th Street, a couple of blocks away from Averbuch’s home. The suspect gave the name of Edward Kaplan. Neighbors said he had been at home all day and had acted in a particularly nervous way, seemingly expecting something. The arrest was made after a detective overheard the message given to Kaplan over a crossed telephone wire. (“The jig is up,” someone said. “Get out of town.”)

  Joseph Freedman, despite being rather bald, was arrested on a Halsted streetcar for anarchist talk, at the request of several patriotic passengers. A policeman happened to be on the same car and managed to stop the crowd from indulging their rage with a lynching of the suspect.

  Harry Goldstein was arrested in the ghetto on information furnished by the White Hand Society, an organization of patriotic Americans formed to combat anarchism. G. G. Revisano, a lawyer representing the Society, submitted to Assistant Chief Schuettler a long list of sundry Chicago anarchists, compiled by the Society.

  Anton Stadlwelser (scant blond hair) was arrested at home. The detectives seized a loaded revolver, $136, a silver watch, forty two-cent stamps, twenty one-cent stamps, a stuffed parrot, a small jar with a lizard preserved in liquid, a Confederate one-hundred-dollar bill, four Colombian 1902 half-dollars. Stadlwelser was unable to explain how he came into possession of such items and is to be detained indefinitely on various suspicions.

  The conspicuously curly-haired Isador Maron is sought by the Fitzes. He is said to have been prowling about the Averbuch house, possibly oblivious to the tragic end of his fellow anarchist. Out of Isaac Lubel the detectives beat another confession; yes, Isaac coughs it out along with clots of blood, he has seen Maron knocking on Olga Averbuch’s door, but not in the past couple of days. The Fitzes talk to the Maxwell Street peddlers, to the whores and thieves, to the agitators and ranters; they spread the word among their ghetto informants that Maron is not only a dangerous anarchist but a homosexual as well, and worth at least thirty dollars to them. They visit Olga at her workplace—she is a seamstress in Goldblatt’s sweatshop and cannot afford to miss a day’s work— and tell her, so everyone can hear, that if Maron comes by she must instantly inform them. “And this before any necking or fucking,” Fitzpatrick says. After they leave, Mr. Goldblatt calls Olga over to his office, gives her some money, and suggests that she stay at home for a while, at least until the affair blows over. Things, he says, will get better.

  She walks home through the frigid drizzle, her bones light with hunger and the sense that everything is turned inside out; her legs hurt. Why was Lazarus at Shippy’s house? Isador took him to those anarchist meetings, but she thought it was all just angry talk— young men like angry talk. He could not have become part of some crazy conspiracy. He was always prone to fantasies, always with one foot in some other world, but he would never do anything about it; he was a dreamer. She did not listen to him when he told her about his ideas, thoughts, fears, stories he was planning to write; she was always too tired. He had no anger, no violence in him. He would never hurt anybody. She used to go look for him in the evenings. She would shout his name, until he hollered back from the woods or the back alley, wherever he was waiting for her to come and get him—he did not see well at dusk. He was a child when she left him behind, he wasted his boyhood in a refugee camp in Czernowitz, he landed in Chicago as a young man. How did she miss it all? When was it that she’d lost him? How did he become who he was? Who was he?

  DESPITE ALL the encouraging success, we have yet to learn about the evil among us that needs to be exterminated, Assistant Chief Schuettler confides in William P. Miller. It is almost impossible, Assistant Chief says, to pick up a man and determine whether or not he is an anarchist. We know, however, that such men are generally half-crazy individuals of foreign descent and of considerable degeneracy. We must follow them and learn their habits from the moment they reach this country so as to preempt their atrocities.

  There are, however, a few setbacks: the mysterious numbers 21- 21-21-63 turn out to be a receipt for the purchase of three dozen eggs, twenty-one cents each, issued by South Water Street Commission House. The five sentences that Assistant Chief believed to have been coded instructions are an exercise from an English-language class at the Maxwell Street Settlement House. Indeed, Mr. Brik, a teacher there, describes Lazarus Averbuch as a faithful and persevering student of a very good character. The informers infiltrating various anarchist, socialist, and unpatriotic societies provide little on Averbuch or Maron: though they were spotted absorbing detrimental and degenerate ideas at various lectures and readings, they paid no dues, were not outspoken enough to be conspicuous, had no confirmable connections with the fanatics that run those conspiratorial packs. It is clear that their failed plot had well-hidden, deeper-than-usual, possibly worldwide roots.

  Assistant Chief Schuettler is tireless, for the very notion of freedom is at stake. He immerses himself, with the help of a translator, in Averbuch’s papers. He discovers that the manuscripts—pages and pages of passionate, clearly troubled, handwriting—contain a bloody tale, written in the first person, of domestic tragedy in Kishinev. The story begins by describing the married life of the narrator. Poor though they may be, the newlyweds are happy: flowers are blooming on the windowsills, warm kasha is on the table; they partake in frivolous fun at the county fair, go for evening walks by the river, its surface occasionally broken by a hungry carp. But the sky falls down when he returns home one day and finds his beautiful wife in bed with a wealthy young doctor. As they beg him for mercy, the husband shoots his wife and the doctor dead. On the run from the law, he crosses borders, moves from country to country under false names, until he boards a ship to America—and the manuscript ends before he reaches these shores. To Assistant Chief’s mind, the narrative has all the earmarks of a confession of a double crime committed in Russia, exhibiting Averbuch’s cunning, murderous proclivities and foreshadowing a life of anarchism and crime in Chicago.

  The letters are mostly from his mother, whose handwriting is terse and flattened, the blank space between lines carrying immense weight. I look at the pictures of you, my son, and remember how good-natured you were as a boy. Don’t despair, she writes, but be brave and work hard. Know that we think of Olga and you, ceaselessly. Mot
her’s letters are rife with indications that Lazarus had spoken about America in bitter tones. He seems to have found the circumstances in Chicago almost as bad as in Russia, his hopes betrayed. His disappointment and murderous anger, Assistant Chief observes, are almost palpable.

  HE SENDS the Fitzes to fetch Olga Averbuch once again. William P. Miller bears witness to Assistant Chief Schuettler prodding Olga about the men under arrest as they are paraded in front of her. She sobs without pause, occasionally forced by Assistant Chief’s yell to look up; he does not let her use her handkerchief to wipe her tears; she is not allowed to fix her uncoiling hair. She does not recognize anyone, but upon firm questioning by Fitzgerald, Fitzpatrick holding her hands behind her back to bend and push her forward, she does concede that Stadlwelser looks familiar. He is taken away, professing in vain his innocence.

  Olga is allowed to sit down. Assistant Chief lowers his voice and tells her, with his hand on her shoulder, his fingers just slightly pressing into her flesh, that he knows the letters from Mother Averbuch are veiled messages, that he has found traces of invisible ink between the lines.

  “Lazarus is good boy,” Olga says feebly.

  “We know everything,” Schuettler whispers in her ear, his breath spreading down her neck, as she cringes. “You cannot hide anything from us.”

  He lets silence and the uncertainty it implies work on her for a long moment, whereupon he demands in measured, determined utterances that she confess her brother killed his wife and a doctor in Kishinev, that he escaped from the law to America.

  “But Lazarus is nineteen years,” Olga cries. “He is never been married. He is never been with girl.”

  Schuettler circles around her like a hawk, pitilessly repeating his questions, as she keeps retorting: “Lazarus is good boy,” until she slides off the chair to the floor and lies there, lifeless. William P. Miller bends over her, touches her pulse, then brushes off a tentacle of loose hair from her face so as to look at it more closely. She is beautiful in her own Semitic way.

  BEFORE HE DISMISSES HER, Assistant Chief informs Olga that, given the likelihood of further anarchist attacks, the authorities believe her brother had best be inconspicuously disposed of in a potter’s field. Olga listens to him in grievous disbelief; she begs him to allow her to bury her brother according to Jewish custom, but Schuettler tells her, his hand heavy on her knee, that forty Jewish undertakers have already refused to handle the body and no rabbi is willing to conduct the service for a murderer. “You lie,” she cries. “Is not true.” This is not the time, he tells her in a forgiving, avuncular voice, to doubt the benevolence of the authorities, nor is it the time to think about oneself. She ought to atone for her brother’s crime by making a sacrifice for her coreligionists, who will surely benefit from the absence of fuss. And the people of Chicago will most certainly appreciate her commitment to law and order.

  “Think of others, of their disrupted lives,” he says. “Imagine how they might feel. This is the time for sacrifice.”

  It was never in my nature to take a straight path anywhere: our first stop would be Lviv, Ukraine. Lazarus had almost certainly never been there, but my paternal grandfather was born in Krotkiy, a nearby village; I remembered the stories about his childhood visits to Lviv and I wanted to spend several days in the city. Then we would hire a driver to take us south to Chernivtsi, where Lazarus had spent time in a refugee camp after the pogrom. On our way there, I thought we could stop by Krotkiy. The Susie grant required no specific itinerary or activity report; I could do whatever I wanted, as long as I eventually showed them something for it. As far as Rora was concerned, it was all the same to him, we could go anyplace, do anything, we could just keep going forever. I began to wish again I could be him.

  On the flight from Chicago to Frankfurt, we monitored a herd of visibly virginal young women, part of a Christian group on its way to missionary work and guilt-inflicting deflowerment somewhere in the East. They sang songs of Jesus and eternal life; they clapped hands and hugged each other frequently—Rora ogled them; I habitually hated them. There were also American soldiers, presumably on their way to Iraq via a base in Germany: crew cuts, trimmed mustaches, manly eyebrows, thick necks. They were checking out the virgins, relishing their last hours before returning to a life of manual self-abuse, trigger-happiness, and a possible limb-by-limb entry into eternity. Rora took a picture of a row of soldiers sleeping with their blankets over their heads. They looked like ghosts to me, like hostages to Rora.

  When the virgins succumbed to slumber and the uncovered soldiers took to beer drinking, Rora told me, in a droning whisper, how he joined Rambo’s unit. Back then Rora believed in a Bosnia in which everybody lived together; he loved Sarajevo and wanted to defend it from the Chetniks. He could have escaped to Milan or Stockholm or wherever; instead he volunteered for Rambo’s unit— there was no Bosnian Army at the beginning of the war, so those who had guns got together to protect their homestead. He knew Rambo and Beno from Čaršija. But before they confronted the Chetnik aggressors and bled in the battle, Rambo and Beno helped themselves to the goodies available in the city, where law and order had evaporated overnight. Rambo called it requisition, but it was pillaging and pilfering. I may sometimes be a thief, Rora said, but I am honest: I do not rob neighbors. He told me about the early days of the war, about all the intrigues and assassinations and a few poignant stories about the people we both knew: Aida was shot by a Chetnik sniper; Lazo was taken away to Kazani by Caco to have his throat slit; Mirsad had his brain taken out by a piece of shrapnel . . . But, to my eternal shame, despite my compassionate attempts to keep my eyes open, despite, even, pinching myself under the blanket to stay awake—I fell asleep. I was subsequently simultaneously both inside and outside the dream in which the soldiers and the virgins were shopping naked at Piggly-Wiggly, singing Jesus nursery rhymes; then there were Aida and Lazo and Mirsad and some other obscure people, singing in English: “Hoydee-ho, haydee-hi, all we want is not to die.”

  Having slept on the flight from Frankfurt to Lviv as well, I truly woke up only once we were in Lviv, outside the airport, when the side mirror of a passing truck knocked me in the head because I stood too close to the curb. Good morning, Mr. Writer! said Ukraine. Rora touched my cheek and turned my head slightly to assess the damage and then shook his head. It was unclear to me at the time whether he was concerned about my injury or was savoring my clumsy stupidity.

  We took a cab from the airport to the grandly misnamed Grand Hotel; I had negotiated the price of the ride in my obsolescent, grandparental Ukrainian with a little dictionary at hand. The car was an old Volga, reeking of diesel and the U.S.S.R. We progressed and then regressed through the city; it seemed that we took the same streets a few times—there could not have been three casinos with the identical neon signs in Lviv. The driver’s head was cubical, vines of hair creeping up his neck; there was a gray swirl around his bald spot, not unlike a satellite picture of a hurricane. I wished Rora would photograph it, but there was not enough light. He had decided, without consulting me, not to bring a flash on this trip. The flash is for weddings and funerals, he said. What needs to be photographed will be photographed.

  IN 1991, the summer before I left Sarajevo, I had a place in Kovači, up the hill from Baš Čaršija. Everybody was waiting for the war to come, and almost every night I was startled out of sleep by a violent noise, by heavy rattling and revving. I would sit up, convinced that Serbian tanks were advancing upon us, my heart pounding, my first thought, Here it is. Once or twice, I hid under the bed. It was usually just a truck going downhill, much like everything else at the time. For the rest of the night, I would toss, as if on a barbecue grill, parsing night noises, imagining in detail all the possible and probable catastrophes.

  Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever. Mary once turned on the dishwasher in the middle of the night—sometimes she would do things around the house after coming home late from the hospital. Something in the machine rattled and
screeched, and I was halfway down the stairs before Mary caught up with me and led me back to bed. I put my head on her bosom; I could hear her heart beating, steadily, calmly, against the dishwashing cacophony; she scratched my head gently until I passed out again.

  What startled me in the Grand Hotel room in Lviv was a streetcar clanging by in concert with a passing bus. All fears are memories of other fears, so my first thought was, again, Here it is. But the streetcar passed, and the room was silent, the silence mucous. I had faded watching the ember-letters Rora wrote in the dark with his cigarette, but now he was absent. I turned on the TV and flipped through channels: images of breast-bloated women and serious-balding men; commercials that brought us happiness in the form of a detergent that made bloodstains disappear; shrill voices going through a Babel repertoire—everything was familiar and incomprehensible. I stopped flipping when I heard Madonna sing “Material Girl.” At our wedding Mary and I had danced to that song, played by a mistuned, morbidly enthusiastic band. The singer on TV was a matronly woman in a curtainlike, glittery dress, awkwardly swinging her thick hips between chairs and tables, while a toreador-mustached man, all tension and sinews of an erect penis, twisted and pressed luridly against her sides. It was clear that the couple was Ukrainian, the way it is clear that it is morning in the morning. And a frightening possibility of a parallel universe presented itself to me—a universe in which there was a Ukrainian Madonna, with exactly the same voice, and exactly the same me listening to her, recalling my wedding night, while everything else was entirely, horribly, different. I watched, mesmerized, the ontological warp flickering in my face, and only with great effort did I manage to continue for another round of channel flipping. I finally realized I was watching a karaoke show when I saw Madame Madonskaya and Monsieur Penischuk talking in Ukrainian to a puffy-haired sap who apparently revered them as stars. There’s an accomplishment for you— becoming a karaoke star. I could be a karaoke star.