The Lazarus Project

by Aleksandar Hemon

  “Okay, but is he a member of an anarchist organization?”

  “Anarchist, no anarchist. Everybody is little bit anarchist here, everybody talk a lot—no justice, no freedom, nothing, they say all time. You gonna hear. But killer, no. We live, you live. Everybody must live.”

  “Yes, of course. What else have you heard?”

  “Emma Goldman will come tomorrow. There’s going to be meetings, there’s going to be some crazy people come with her, there’s going to be maybe riots. Emma Goldman don’t come here for shopping. There’s friends of Red Queen in Chicago. There’s people angry. There’s people angry at police.”

  The fat little man shakes his head, then nods again. The flame in the nearby lamp flickers, and Miller suddenly notices that the fat little man has a thin mustache over his lip. “Friend here must take you to one meeting tonight, so you see what is what.” He slaps the fat little man on the back as though offering him to Miller.

  Miller takes a well-folded dollar bill out of his inside pocket and puts it on the table. Guzik looks at it with a worrisome frown, as though he has never seen anything like that, then lays his hand over it. The fat little man nods and stands up—he is but a couple of inches taller standing.

  “Anything else?” Miller asks.

  “Maybe,” Guzik says. Miller gets another dollar out of his pocket and sets it down on the table next to the other one.

  “How about now?” Miller says.

  “There’s people who do business with students of medicine. Students must study. If they want to study they need dead people. Dead people are expensive. But there are free dead people in cemetery. Your friend Averbuch is dead people.”

  “That’s a good story,” Miller says. “But I just came back from his burial.”

  “People like good story,” Guzik says. “Maybe you look for your dead friend later. Maybe he is gone away.”

  “I appreciate good stories myself,” Miller says. “One more thing. What do you know about Olga?

  “What Olga?”

  “Olga Averbuch.”

  “What Olga Averbuch? Olga Averbuch is nothing. But I ask.”

  “Thanks.” Miller gets up to go. “When is the next game?”

  “Monday,” Guzik says. “Maybe you have good luck this time. Or maybe you learn gamble is bad for you.”

  “I’ll see you Monday,” Miller says.

  ALL OVER TOWN, anarchists hold secret meetings, where they further stoke the fire of violent discontent in hope it will consume peace and decency in our city. The TRIBUNE reporter was secretly present at one of those intemperate summits last night. In a back room of a common Jewish ghetto tenement, speeches were delivered in myriad accents that could envenom the blood of any honorable citizen. The speakers thundered against various phantom injustices and exchanged distorted views on “the few who possess everything and the many who possess nothing.” Various assassins who had taken the lives of distinguished presidents and noble kings were praised. The actions of young Averbuch, whose attempt on Chief Shippy’s life is universally endorsed in anarchist circles, were justified by the perceived “misery and degradation, economic exploitation, governmental suppression, lawful brutality, judicial murder, etc.”

  Cold though the room may be, there is a lot of passion in the air. The stove in the corner is out; the speaker’s breath spouts out of his mouth like gun smoke. The room is barren, apart from the crowd: scrawny, mustached, consumptive, damp-clothed, enraged men, reeking of vinegar and revolution. There are even several women, wearing prissy hats and graceful glasses, yet looking masculine and hairy. The fat little man gets up to applaud along and vociferate agreement with every speaker—“Bravo!” he shouts, as though he were at the opera. Indeed, it would not be surprising if everyone in the room suddenly broke out in song. Where were these people when young Averbuch was being dumped in the ground? William P. Miller’s spine tingles with the pleasure of bearing exclusive witness to Lazarus’s interment; these men know nothing about his death, nor his life. No matter what happens, no matter who lives or dies, they always see the same thing; their anger coats everything in the same black color, and they like to yodel about it.

  Each speaker enumerates the usual collection of complaints; now and then the name of Emma Goldman emerges from the babel. Occasionally, Miller dozes off, but is woken up every time by the fresh zeal of the new speaker. The man clamoring presently has put his hat on the cold stove; he raises his hands up toward the ceiling, so the sleeves slide down and Miller can see the dainty, weak wrists—this man knows nothing of manual labor. He declaims in good English; his sentences contain articles; unlike the typical anarchist degenerate, he is rather articulate.

  “For years,” the man rattles his hands above his head, “for years they have been maintaining the illusion that no social question exists in this country, that our republic has no place for the struggle of poor and rich. The voices of the deep, the cries of human misery and distress are silenced by the formula saying ‘we are all free and equal in this country.’ The empty cant of political liberty has been made to serve those in ruthless power. Those who dare to object to the farce of political freedom, those who resist the social and economic slavery are branded criminals.”

  Miller leans over to the fat little man, who is fluttering on the tip of his toes, extending his little arms to applaud, and asks: “Who’s this?”

  “That is Ben Reitman,” the fat little man squeals. “Great man. Emma Goldman’s man.”

  Miller squeezes the fat little man’s shoulder. He feels an impulse to touch his egg-shaped head, his oval torso, the round heat that he exudes—he is so indelibly present, this little man. Miller wonders where Guzik found him.

  “Our brother Averbuch has fallen victim to the secret kings of the republic,” Reitman goes on, “to the gendarmes and sheriffs of the possessing class. Pure in aspiration and motive, the personality of Lazarus Averbuch towers above our stifling social existence. Purer, indeed, than his executioners and the lying press will ever acknowledge. They have left nothing undone to make him appear a low, vile creature, since it is necessary to lull this nation into the belief that only the basest of men could be guilty of discontent. And Brother Averbuch is more than merely innocent—he is a martyr.”

  If someone walked in just now and told Reitman that Lazarus Averbuch was in fact outside, alive and well and happy, he would not care, thinks William P. Miller. He would just go on talking about his martyrdom, for a dead Lazarus is much more valuable and useful for this fiery pageant. Nobody in this room misses him. Nobody misses him anywhere.

  “And how many martyrs do we need before we understand that we must respond armed with our righteous wrath? The kings of the republic are summoning their baneful forces, writing new laws that would turn masses of people, millions of human beings, into criminals. We know that laws ought to be obeyed only if they come out of people’s sense of justice, not because the state needs them to preserve its power. Laws devised for the depravity of power are as worthless as the paper they are printed on.”

  Miller gets up, pats the tiny fatso on the back as he frantically claps his finlike hands, and bids him good-bye. Ben Reitman, the high priest of anarchy, made his words and deeds plain for all to see last night. The vileness of his violent plans was palpable in these fiery proclamations. Of these things I like to write, William P. Miller thinks. The calenture that is the result of feverish degeneracy burned in his mind as he envisioned a future holocaust in which he wished us all to perish. Of these things I write, and I am fairly good at it.

  I paid Andriy and wished him good luck on his way back, and thus he completed his purpose and exited this narrative. He had dropped us off at a hotel that called itself Business Center Bukovina. Its façade was freshly painted bright beige and implausible raspberry. The stairs leading to the entrance were red-carpeted, but the carpet was filthy; at its low end there lay a mangy dog who raised his head and sniffed the air when we passed but did not move—it appeared blind.

/>   Our room was on the fifth floor and we climbed the stairs, hauling our luggage. On each floor there sat a baba, an older, chubby woman in blue cleaning-personnel overalls, glaring at us as we passed. The last one stopped us with a grunt and called us over to her desk. On a sofa behind her, three scantily clad women sat with their legs identically crossed, flashing their miniskirted thighs. They were looking at us unblinkingly, assiduously, as though about to utter a prophecy, and then the one in the middle, lippy and large-eyed, winked and said: “Hi!” Somehow she recognized us as Americans, as we recognized them as prostitutes. We signed something for the baba and she handed each of us a slim roll of pink toilet paper, apparently rewarding us for overcoming all the obstacles and successfully reaching the fifth floor.

  The room smelled of my grandfather’s death—a malodorous concoction of urine, vermin, and mental decomposition. When I turned on the lights a host of cockroaches scurried radially from the center of the room, marked by a stain on the carpet. The blankets on the beds were greasy, the sheets blemished and wrinkled. There was a small TV in the upper-left corner; the walls were much too white, as though blood splatter had been whitewashed with quicklime. Rora opened the window, which overlooked nothing but a gigantic garbage container brimming with glass bottles—its sparkling fullness gave me a momentary pleasure. I always like to see a full garbage container, because I relish the thought of emptying it, the complete unburdening implicit in it.

  Do you know the joke, Rora said, where little Mujo asks his mother where children come from, and she says: Well, I put a little bit of sugar under the carpet before I went to sleep and the following morning I found you there. Little Mujo puts a little bit of sugar under the carpet before he goes to sleep. The following morning he finds a cockroach and says: You motherfucker, if you weren’t my brother, I’d smash you flat.

  I knew the joke; it used to be funny. I stretched on the bed; Rora got hold of the TV remote: a herd of bicyclists climbing a hill; a man in a gray suit with an eternal wheat field behind him, reporting on the harvest prospects; Madonna slithering up the shimmering body of a female dancer, making two steps forward, one step back; an Orthodox Darth Vader, wailing in Church Slavonic; Wolf Blitzer worrying about something imminent and irrelevant with the usual dorky earnestness; a beating heart inside an open, bloody-pink rib cage; a suited man delivering a speech to a crowd, rattling his hands above his head; a wench in the back of a limousine spreading her thighs to be licked by another wench; the bicyclists falling into a bundle of bikes and legs. Here I was in a brothel in Bukovina, very far away from my life.

  Lazarus had spent time in Chernivtsi—Czernowitz it was back then—the first place he and I now shared, apart from Chicago. No accounts of his life talk about his refugee years; Czernowitz was but a stop between Kishinev and Chicago. This was his nowhere, yet it was what he would remember. Here he lived at a barrack with other pogrom survivors who escaped from Kishinev to the safety of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. With the survivors he spoke Yiddish and Russian, German with the Austro-Hungarian soldiers guarding the camp. Some of those soldiers must have been Bosnian, he must have marveled at their fezzes, their wide faces and bright eyes. This was how I imagined it. He practiced Hebrew with the Zionists who gathered inside the belly of a bunk bed at the far end of the barrack; he met Isador at a Zionist meeting, then again at a Bund lecture—both of them signed a petition neither of them fully understood. With Isador he slipped through the fence and went to the casinos and the brothels abounding in the border town. The empire sent its soldiers and officers for a rewarding stay in Czernowitz, a town notorious for its licentiousness, before they were assigned to the sterner parts. The border euphoria; the elation of nobody ever being at home; the freedom of no attachments possible; the smugglers, the refugees, the gamblers, the conspirators, and the whores; the illegal crossings and the drunken fights at the beer hall—it was the Sodom of the empire. Here Lazarus lost his first money gambling; here he was flagellated in his dreams by the Kishinev pogromchiks; here he was deflowered; here he first felt adrift in a foreign land; here he learned that humanity is wicked and endless. Later, in Chicago, he and Isador remembered Czernowitz with some fondness and nostalgia; it was the last place where Lazarus was able to imagine the exciting details of a better future: the place where he would live with Olga, the books he was going to read, the job he was going to get, the women he was going to meet. And in Chicago, before falling asleep in the cold Washburn Avenue room, he recalled the tall, handsome Austrian officers tottering drunk and ludicrous, and the harlots that would let go of their arms adorned with sparkling cuff links to pinch his cheeks; he remembered the taste of the cotton candy sold on the Promenade. He frequently had dreams in which his family and friends were all together, all in one place, and that place was always Czernowitz.

  Often, before I went to sleep, I remembered—or I should say I tried not to forget. Before I passed out, I recollected particular moments in slumberous tranquillity; I replayed conversations; I reflected upon smells and colors; I remembered myself as I used to be, twenty years before, or earlier that day. The ritual was my nightly prayer, a contemplation of my presence in the world.

  It often got out of hand: possible stories sprouted from the recalled instants and images. Take the afternoon in Lviv when I stepped out of the bathroom after a long and torturous time in the trickling shower to find Rora napping, so peacefully invested in his dream that he looked like somebody I did not know. When, fading to sleep that night, I reflected upon his face, I envisioned a story in which I woke up and found him dead in a hotel room we were sharing. I had to call the reception desk and deal with all the logistics of removing his body from the room, from the world. I had to call his sister and break the heartbreaking news, and so I went through his stuff, only to discover that he had a forged Austrian passport with a different name and a plane ticket to Vienna for the next morning. When I called the only phone number I found among his belongings, nobody picked up the phone.

  Many of those stories turned unnoticeably into a dream, whereby the narrative went completely haywire and I became but a confused character within it, unable to escape the plot. I could only snap out of it, and if I did, I instantly lost the dream, its reality vanishing the moment I woke up. Occasionally, a violently involuntary memory of a dream emerged in my mind, like a corpse released from the bottom of the lake. Once, with perfect sensory clarity, I recalled the weight of the schoolbag on my shoulder in which I carried, like a puppy, the war criminal Radovan Karadžić.

  Part of the recollection ritual was admitting the defeat, recognizing that I could never remember everything. I had no choice but to remember just minuscule fragments, well aware that in no future would I be able to reconstruct the whole out of them. My dreams were but a means of forgetting, they were the branches tied to the galloping horses of our days, the emptying of the garbage so that tomorrow—assuming there would be a tomorrow—could be filled up with new life. You die, you forget, you wake up new. And if I cared about God, I would be tempted to think that remembering was sinful. For what else could it be, what could remembering all those gorgeous moments when this world was fully present at your fingertips be but a beautiful sin? The sour grains of Oak Street sand on my tongue; Lake Michigan changing with each leavened cloud passing over the moon from inky blue to piceous and back; the smell of Mary stored forever in the curve of her neck.

  Did the biblical Lazarus dream, locked in the clayey cave? Did he remember his life in death—all of it, every moment? Did he remember the mornings with his sisters, waking up with a sunbeam moving across his face like a smile, the warm goat milk and boiled eggs for breakfast? And once he was resurrected, did he remember being dead, or did he just enter another dream of another life by way of Marseilles? Did he have to disremember his previous life and start from scratch, like an immigrant?

  I woke up after the nap, the dream, naturally, vanishing without a trace. So we went for a stroll, Rora and I. Rora liked the light of the setting
sun; I liked watching Rora take pictures. The streets were cooling, the buildings darkening, the windows as yet unlit, and so we roamed. Within half an hour, we stumbled upon another Viennese Café, conceptually identical to the one in Lviv: the same coffee list, the same pastry selection, the same frail waitresses in black dresses and white aprons. We installed ourselves out in the garden and ordered our coffee with the nonchalance of Viennese Café veterans.

  There used to be a Viennese Café in Sarajevo, too, inside the hotel called Europa—the red velvet chairs, the Secession adornments on the ceiling; waiters wearing bow ties, their thin mustaches neatly trimmed. It was a kind of place where the elders of the old Sarajevo families met every day, for decades. The waitstaff knew their usual orders and addressed them with reverence. You would have taken only your steady girlfriend there for a slice of Sacher torte, coffee, and schnapps; or she might have taken you to present you to her parents, who were regulars there, to prove she was not of peasant roots but of a family who used to own whole blocks of the city in the days of the empire. The café was destroyed, along with the Europa, early in the war, a couple of direct rocket hits, and I mourned it from afar.

  Rora’s dedo—grandfather—was a Viennese Café regular. Having coffee there every morning was his nostalgic ritual, for he had been a student in Vienna before World War One. He had been supposed to study architecture, but instead enjoyed the life away from Bosnia, the remote province of the empire, where the papers carried reports on Viennese opera galas and provincial kapellmeisters fashioned themselves after Mahler, but where many women were still veiled and everyone in the family strived to marry you off to a bucktoothed distant cousin you had been avoiding since you learned to walk. In Vienna, women found Rora’s dedo attractively exotic with his soft-consonant accent and his claret fez. Licentious art students, eager to learn about his fairy-tale homeland, sat in his lap and played like kittens with his fez tassel and his curls, while he wrote falsely nostalgic letters home, complaining about the life in Vienna, which confused him and scared him, so much so that he had miscalculated the money he needed for surviving in the wilderness of the imperial metropolis. Please, send more or I’ll die, far from everything I love. He’d sign off and buy schnapps for the art student and her friends. He would have stayed in Vienna forever, Rora said, if he didn’t impregnate one of those art students and have to beat it. He returned to Sarajevo unwillingly; he sulked and drank for a while, until he married and took over the family business, just in time for the Great War. He was devastated when the empire disintegrated; it was as though he had lost his father. So he was a regular visitor at the Viennese Café for decades afterwards; the staff addressed him as Herr Halilbašić. He was prone to dropping German words in the middle of his sentences— schnapps, Schweinerei, mein Gott—even during his late years, which he spent studying the Qu’ran and praying five times a day. He could never get over the demise of the empire. It was his first love, his dedo would always say.