The Lazarus Project

by Aleksandar Hemon

  Miller got a bottle of Johnnie Walker, and they drank and enjoyed some lap dancing, until Miller started hollering and bragging to other men (a Canadian major, a French colonel, an American spy) that he had just interviewed Karadžić. He was a true reporter, exclusives gave him hard-ons, and the major and the colonel and the American drank to it, and the girls drank to it, and Rora drank to it, with a pebble of disgust in his throat. When it came to doing business with the girls, Rora couldn’t do it. He went up with a good-looking Moldovan girl who styled herself after Madonna, complete with the scarves, the belts, and the hoop earrings. She called herself Francesca and was drugged enough to appear genuinely interested, but he just couldn’t do it. She passed out on the bed; he sat in the chair, smoking and waiting for Miller to be done. He took some pictures of her; her lips were ajar and one of her incisors was poking her lower lip; she sniffed and rubbed her nose with the back of her hand; her wheeze was on the verge of a snore. How did she end up here? Rora thought. She had family somewhere, a mother or a brother. Everybody comes from somewhere.

  THE YAWNFUL WEIGHT on my shoulders; the literal pain in my neck; the silence after Rora’s story; the sense of liberating futility—I carried all that down the dusty streets of Chernivtsi. We were heading for the Jewish Center but allowed ourselves to be sidetracked by an abundant outdoor market: Rora took a photo of a stall with a large heap of crimson cherries, and of a woman with a cabbage leaf on her head in lieu of a sun hat, and of a lamb carcass hacked to pieces with a cleaver. We walked by a schoolyard where there were rows of children exercising to the commands of an instructor in a Communist-red tracksuit, raising their arms up to the sky, then bending to touch their toes. The instructor blew his whistle, and the throng of kids sorted themselves into columns of pairs and started running in circles. We walked by the Viennese Café, where the businessman occupied the same exact position, still barking into his cell phone, as though he had not left since the day before. A fetching young lady, severely miniskirted, sat opposite him, speaking into her cell phone, conducting her business, whatever it was.

  Let me tell you a joke, Rora said. Mujo is a refugee in Germany, has no job, but has a lot of time, so he goes to a Turkish bath. The bath is full of German businessmen with towels around their waists, huffing and puffing, but every once in a while a cell phone rings and they pull their phone out from under the towel and say, Bitte? Mujo seems to be the only one without a cell phone, so he goes to the bathroom and stuffs toilet paper up his butt. He walks back out, a long trail of toilet paper behind him. So a German says, You have some paper, Herr, sticking out behind you. Oh, Mujo says, it looks like I have received a fax.

  IT TOOK US a while to find the Jewish Center. Perhaps understandably, there were no signs pointing toward it, tucked in the far corner of a leafy square facing the theater. Nobody was answering when I rang the doorbell of the Center. My lazy heart fluttered with joy, for I was aspiring to a prosaic day at the Viennese Café, hopefully ogling the white-thighed maiden in the businessman’s utopian orbit.

  But as we were leaving the premises, a man with a pear-shaped torso clad in an unflattering horizontally striped shirt asked us in Russian what it was that we wanted and instead of telling him the truth (idling, coffee, ogling) I told him we wanted to speak with someone from the Center. The man extended his hand to me, but said nothing and unlocked the door.

  “So what language would you like to speak?” he asked me once we were inside.

  “What do you have?” I asked him, in Ukrainian.

  “Russian, Romanian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, German, and a little bit of Hebrew,” he said.

  The office was boxy and dusty, vacant bookshelves lining the walls. The man’s name was Chaim Gruzenberg; he set up two chairs facing each other and I sat across from him. He smelled vaguely of sardines. I hereby admit that it might have been an olfactory hallucination.

  “How come you speak so many languages?”

  “When I was growing up, there were all kinds of people here. No more. Now everybody is independent, or gone.”

  At the desk in the far corner a man was writing vigorously; the tip of his pencil kept breaking, he kept sharpening it, volutes of gray hair quivering over his forehead. With occasional help from my Ukranian dictionary, I spoke to Chaim about the murder of Lazarus, about my project, about Lazarus’s journey to America in 1907, about his escape to Czernowitz after the pogrom and his time in a refugee camp here.

  “Ach,” Chaim said, “that was so long ago, a whole horrible century ago. So many things happened since then, so much to remember, and forget.”

  Rora was taking pictures of framed black-and-white photos on the walls, of the spines of the books on the shelf, of the front page of a brochure with a Star of David. He resembled a ghost in the counterlight. Chaim said he was not an expert in history, for history fed nobody. His job was to provide food and care for the elderly Jews in the town, those who had no family left; he was too busy finding ways to help them; people were getting older and sicker and more helpless. If I would like to help them, he could help me do that, he said.

  “Sure,” I said. Rora moved out of the counterlight; a swarm of motes whirled where he had just stood.

  “All of you foreigners come looking for your ancestors and roots,” Chaim said. “You are only interested in the dead. God will take care of the dead. We need to take care of the living.”

  I promised a donation for the living, but I could not relinquish the dead: I asked him if any of the elderly Jews perhaps remembered stories of the Kishinev refugees, stories their parents or grandparents bequeathed them; maybe some of them were descendants of the refugees who settled here.

  “Nobody stayed,” Chaim said. “And if they stayed they were quick to forget what happened in Kishinev.”

  “Perhaps someone remembers.”

  “They are old, sick people, dying slowly. Their lives are filling up with death, they remember nothing. Why would they want to bring in more death, from before they were born?”

  “How many clients do you have?”

  “They are not my clients. They are my family. I have known them since before I was born.”

  The gray-haired man at the desk was listening to us. Rora used the chance to photograph him, and the man peevishly waved him away. There was a framed poster on the wall, announcing something that happened on September 11, 1927.

  “I remember my grandmother telling me about the Jews coming from Kishinev. Some of them were rich. There was one named Mandelbaum,” Chaim said. “They came with carriages full of carpets and chandeliers. He brought a grand piano. He lost it all gambling, my grandmother said. His daughter married an actor.”

  “Did your grandmother remember a family named Averbuch?”

  “Half of the Jews in these parts were named Averbuch.”

  “Do you have any clients named Averbuch?”

  “They are not clients.”

  “I apologize.”

  “There is Roza Averbuch, but she is very old and sick, and she has lost all her marbles.”

  “Could I talk to her?”

  “Why do you want to talk to her? She doesn’t remember anything. She thinks I am her grandfather. She is afraid of strangers.”

  The writing man said something testy in Yiddish to Chaim, who responded in like manner; they were having an argument. The phone rang but they paid no attention whatsoever to it. Rora trained his Canon on Chaim and the writing man, who wagged a finger at Chaim and us and returned to sharpening his pencil, hiding his face from Rora’s lens. Chaim snorted and said to me:

  “There were many pogroms in Russia before the Shoah, and then there was the Shoah. This town was always full of refugees from Kishinev or some other place, escaping from the Russians and the Romanians and the Germans. Those who survived went elsewhere, few stayed. Not many people are left, and they are dying, too.”

  I capitulated; I didn’t really know what to ask. I convinced myself I didn’t really need any testimonies; I had pretty m
uch completed my research; I had sifted through all the books. Just being in this room, facing Chaim, seemed like an accomplishment. Besides, Rora was shooting a lot of pictures I could look at later on; we would study them together later. Perhaps it was time for some caffeinated contemplation. I pulled out my wallet and offered Chaim a wad of the Susie money, a hundred euros in all.

  “No, no, no,” he said. “That is plenty but not enough. That money can buy food for a week, but we need clothes and medicine too. I respect your good intentions. But I ask you to go to your synagogue, talk to your congregation, tell them we need help.”

  He went to the writing man’s desk, plucked the pencil out of his hand, ripped a piece of paper out of a notebook, and wrote down the address of the Center. It didn’t even cross his mind that I might not be Jewish. I couldn’t confess, of course, for that would have converted everything I talked about into deception.

  “Is he a Jew, too?” Chaim asked, nodding toward Rora, who was reloading film. He looked up at me and I knew he understood.

  “No,” I said.

  “He has Jewish hair,” Chaim said. “A handsome man.”

  Lazarus’s head was shaved for lice on Ellis Island, his eyes checked for trachoma. The guards bayed at him, prodded him with their batons. The first English word he learned was water because a woman in a white apron filled up his tin cup with water out of a barrel. On the boat from Trieste, he had slept next to an old Sicilian who kept gabbing unintelligibly to him, pointing at his hair. Even in his sleep, Lazarus clutched the money in his pocket, the money Mother gave him, all of her savings. Just before he left Czernowitz, he had received a letter from Mother telling him Papa had died of apoplexy, he just fell off the chair and was gone. He did not know if Olga had received the news. He envisioned Isador, who had left Czernowitz a month before, at the Chicago train station, waiting for him with Olga. He wondered if there was something going on between her and Isador. He was not there to watch over his sister, so Isador could pour sweet poison into her ear. Or perhaps she met someone else; maybe she would wait for him with her new man, maybe even a real American goy. He worried if he would be able to recognize her. There are a lot of Jews in Chicago, she wrote. I do some sewing for Mr. Eichgreen’s wife. He promised me a job for you.

  AFTER THE JEWISH CENTER and a contemplative cup of coffee at the Viennese Café, we—ever the dutiful researchers—decided to visit the Museum of Regional History, right up the street from the café. We wandered through the musty museum, ambling, solemnly as though in the wake of a coffin. Each room we entered was guarded by a menaceful baba, her ankles swollen.

  The first and the biggest baba was in the World War Two room and frowned at us when we stepped in, as though we disturbed her meditation. All around the room there were portraits of the Soviet heroes of the region who died for the freedom of the motherland. Volodya Nezhniy, for example, hurled himself fearlessly at a German machine gun with a cluster of hand grenades attached to his chest. There were red-starred helmets and shell casings and the stretched red flags of various Red Army units. There was a retouched photo of mass executions: a line of people kneeling on the edge of a ditch, their heads bowed to receive the bullets.

  In the next room, the baba flashed a very brief, but far from inviting, smile. One glass case was full of locally produced screws and metal thingamajigs; another featured single shoes, varying in size, implying a mob of one-shoed people hobbling around like zombies.

  The baba in the third room stood by a wooden relief featuring Mr. Christ dragging his toy cross and a devout entourage shedding wooden tears. There were various Virgin icons, craftily carved crosses, and ornately painted Easter eggs.

  Out of the redemption and resurrection room, into the orientation room: on the wall there was a shirt and a picture of Juri Omeltchenko, the silver medalist at the Finland 2000 World Orienteering Championship. In the picture, Juri was doggedly orienting himself amidst the trees, his determined face and blond hair dappled with the leaf shadows. Here was another fellow human who dedicated his life to not being lost.

  Next room: walls plastered with posters and record covers of the children of the region who achieved the local equivalent of stardom. They had pompadoured heads and spectacular sideburns and rouged cheeks; they had names, too: Volodymir Ivasyuk, Nazariy Yeremchuk, Sofia Rotary. A gramophone with a record was on a pedestal, the baba standing honor guard next to it. We dutifully examined it and were about to move on when she sternly stopped us in our tracks. She played the record for us; we listened, eschewing eye contact. A mellifluous voice struggled against the cracking, singing, from what I could understand, about going to the well with a hole in her bucket; it seemed she never brought any water home, but she still kept doing it—it rather seemed like a metaphysically demoralizing situation. The baba pointed to one of the record covers: the singer’s name was Maryusa Flak; she wore a woeful bandana; her mouth was heart-shaped.

  All around the next room were head shots of uniformed young men who had served and died in Afghanistan. The region was proud of them for having served their country, a sign said, and they would never be forgotten. Residual trinkets of their lives were laid out in glass cases: here was Andriy’s report card (he was a good student); here were Ivan’s wool socks and a letter from his mother (“Be brave and work hard and know that your sister and I think of you all the time”); a belt was stretched out like a dead snake, the rim of the penultimate hole thoroughly worn out; a tiny, tinny medal with a frayed red ribbon, and a single leather glove that used to belong to an Oleksandr. Rora took a couple of pictures, whereupon the baba darted over to prevent his photographing.

  Next we walked through a hallway with glass cabinets full of insects neatly pinned in rows. One of the rows featured progressively bigger cockroaches. For all I knew, they might have all been collected in our hotel. The first one was small and looked like a baby roach, whereas the last one was thumb-sized, so large that one could easily imagine her having mothered all of her row mates.

  How come, I asked Rora, how come you have not talked to your sister since we’ve been on the road?

  Who says I haven’t?

  Have you?

  I have. Yes.

  How come you never mentioned it?

  There are so many things I don’t mention, you could write a book about them.

  How come you never talk about your sister?

  My sister has not had a happy life. Talking about it helps nobody.

  What happened to your parents? Did they die in a car accident?

  They were in a bus that tumbled into the canyon of the Neretva. Will you stop asking questions now?

  How old were you?

  Six.

  Do you remember them?

  Of course I remember them.

  What were they like.

  They were like all other parents. My mother liked to feed us. My father liked to take pictures. Can you stop asking questions now?

  The last room contained allegedly eighteenth-century stuff: hosts of wooden spoons and bowls, cracked; rings and chains and daggers and obscure tools for extinct kinds of labor, resembling torture instruments; a tapestry picturing a secluded meadow at sunset, the darkness arriving over the trees; and, in the corner, a case with stuffed birds. The centerpiece of the installation was an eagle with a rabbit in his talons, spreading his wings over the oblivious ducks and nameless birds, his eyes eternally marble-glassy. Were these creatures stuffed in the eighteenth century? Or did some idle provincial philosopher working as a custodian of regional memory seek to suggest that death was undatable, that it was always the same thing, regardless of the century?

  I suppose this is no Louvre, I said.

  I bet the old ladies are part of the collection, Rora said. They’ll embalm them when they die.

  ACROSS THE STREET from the stale disreality of the Museum of Regional History was an Internet café called Chicago. We entered it without thinking, as though going home: there were pictures of the Sears Tower and Wrigley Field an
d the Buckingham Fountain, and there was a glum attendant whom I addressed in English, which he chose not to understand or respond to. Rora and I took seats at our respective computers and did not look at each other. I would have liked to have seen who Rora was writing to but was too busy with a long e-mail to Mary, at the end of which I wrote:

  Very much thinking of you. The hotel we are staying in is a whorehouse, apparently. Rora is taking a lot of pictures. How is your dead?

  George, her dead, had had his prostate taken out and was currently wearing diapers. Once, I had found him weeping into the open fridge; the tears on his face were emblazed by the fridge light. He shook his head, as if to shake off excess moisture and woe, and took out a salami, snarling: “Do you eat crap like this in your country?” While waiting to die, he invested all his impressive energy in being angry at life, and he no longer regularly talked to Mr. Christ, the light of God extinguished in him by hormonal therapy. I often caught myself hating his retired-businessman gray hair, his popish-ness, his insistence on my gratefulness to American greatness, and his constant, stupid questions about my country, questions like: “Do they have opera in your country?” or “Your country is west of what?” My country was this remote, mythical place for him, a remnant of the world from before America, a land of obsolescence whose people could arrive at humanity only in the United States, and belatedly. He feigned concern for the heartening immigrant experiences related in my columns, largely because he wanted to assess how long my journey had been from being a half-ghost in my country to being an attempt at an American, the unfortunate husband of his unlucky daughter. I occasionally amused Mary with mock answers to George’s imaginary questions. “In my country,” I’d say, she giggling already, “candy is the chief currency.” Or: “Airflow is illegal in my country.”

  Mary would sometimes confess to me how she had always felt deprived of his love, how sickening to all of them his Catholic sternness had been, how she had always longed for his unconditional kindness. She never said it, but I knew that she resented him for his condescension and insistence on my foreignness. He believed she had married me because she couldn’t marry an American; she desperately wanted him to see that I had succeeded at being American, that the humanizing process had been completed, my extended unemployment notwithstanding. Yet I could recognize George in her: she was prone to self-righteousness; she snapped at me for no obvious reason, for she held a deep, hurtful grudge she repeatedly refused to talk about; after bad fights she took on grueling extra shifts, as though to expiate her sins. I hated the George in her.