Are you worried?
About what? he said.
About Rambo.
No, he said.
About anything?
Everything will sort itself out.
By the time we arrived at the bus station, my hand was shades of indigo and swollen, as though it belonged to a corpse. Rora would not let me take a cab from the bus station to the hotel. Instead, he insisted I walk with him to the City Hospital, where his sister was working, but a few painful minutes away. Rora insisted strenuously that Azra must look at my hand—perhaps he was feeling that the whole Seryozha affair was somehow his fault—while I, deranged by steady pain, kept saying everything would be all right. I could not forget the sweet sounds of Seryozha’s face cracking; my pain was well worth it.
Rora carried my bag, as I cradled my broken hand. Walking with him down a Sarajevo street named after a dead poet was a wholly uncanny experience. Everything was as I remembered it, yet entirely different; I felt like a ghost. People passed by without glancing at me; I was fully unexceptional and insignificant, if not perfectly invisible. I recalled my previous life, the life in which I had ridden a bike down this very street, and where the kids on their way to school pelted me with rocks; the life in which I had written some politically charged obscenities on the school wall; the life in which I had effortlessly stolen candy from a store minded by a blind old man who had stubbornly denied his blindness to himself and to others. Nobody seemed to remember me. Home is where somebody notices your absence.
We walked past the hospital security guard watching a Latin American soap opera, went up the staircase (the elevator was out of order) teeming with patients smoking in washed-out pajamas, and found Azra’s office at the end of a long, tunnel-like corridor. Rora walked in without knocking and I followed him in, closing the door behind me with my foot, like a proper thug.
I always wanted to watch Mary operate, to see her deft hands saw open a skull, cut through bone and brains. I fantasized about witnessing her absolute absorption, her hands up to their wrists in somebody else’s mind, her quiet power exuding through her blood-stained surgical gown. But she never allowed me into the operating room. It was against the rules, and she had a hard time violating any rules. She did let me ask a lot of questions about her surgeries, but her answers were reluctant, vague, amnesic. There were whole worlds of her I had no access to, and she would never allow me to imagine them.
I did get to see her office every now and then, mostly unexpected, ever tormented by the fantastic possibility of a handsome anesthesiologist frolicking with her between surgeries. Once, I came by to get the house keys, as I had misplaced mine after a drink too many, and I brought along a sappy rose. She did not approve of me showing up drunk in her office; she put the rose on her desk and did not look at it. I violated the cleanliness of her sovereignty; I disturbed the order she had established. She avoided eye contact and kept herself busy with rearranging stuff on her desk around the rose. While she was on the phone, I impertinently browsed through the cabinet drawers. I opened one and there was nothing in it except a box—a single sealed box—of ampoules, positioned exactly at its center. The drawer was neither empty nor disorderly: it was full of what it was supposed to be full of. Now I understand that was the seat of her soul. She did not like me looking into it, so I closed it.
There were heaps of things and papers on Azra’s desk; her glasses lay supine on top of one of the piles. On the wall, a faded prewar poster warned of the comparatively silly dangers of not washing your fruit and vegetables. Next to it there was a small mirror, which surprisingly did not seem out of place. On the window-sill there was a rotund cactus the size of a clementine. Under the desk, a pair of low-heel shoes, one of them on its side, like a slumberous dog. Azra wore white hospital slippers; her feet were long and narrow, her heels small, her ankles frail. She raised herself on her toes to kiss Rora’s cheek; he pressed her temple on his chin and squeezed her shoulders. I offered her my left hand for shaking and the awkwardness of the contact established momentary intimacy. The seat of her soul was in her deep, sea-green eyes. Somehow, she reminded me of Olga Averbuch.
Olga and Lazarus sat outside Mr. Mandelbaum’s store, the day before his bar mitzvah. He was licking a candy stick seriously and strenuously, as if disposing of it quickly were the first task of his manhood. He was unable to be still, swung his feet and fidgeted, loaded with life and spirit. People walked by and greeted them: Mr. Abramowitz and Mr. Runic and the Golder girl. He smiled at her, she averted her gaze; Olga saw it could be a beginning of a courtship. A bright day it was, everybody seemed to be enjoying the fact they were alive. Even the ugly Israel Shalistal bid them good day.
Azra touched my broken hand; her fingers were pleasantly cool. She slowly twisted it upward—for her eyes, I winced in pain—and slid her fingertips along the edge of my palm. She asked me to wiggle my fingers and I couldn’t. The morning sun was coddling the window, the mists were crawling up the slopes of Trebević. I could see Marin-dvor spreading toward the invisible river, and in an absurd flash I fully perceived it as the neighborhood I had been born and had grown up in. I was somewhere; I had finally landed in Sarajevo. Azra sandwiched my hand between hers; her palms were warm. I did not want her to let go.
It is broken, she said.
I know, I said. It’s been broken for a while.
She sent me two floors below for an X-ray. I got lost on the way; I entered a room with a family gathered around a man who was clearly on his deathbed, gazing up out of his pallor at their grim, shamelessly pink faces. I went all the way down and climbed all the way up again, past the same patients smoking newly lit cigarettes. I finally found the X-ray room, manned by a single skinny nurse with a loud radio playing wailful folk songs. She put out her cigarette, and brought out a stack of X-ray plates. She looked at my hand and said, with some delight, It is broken; she seemed to be excited by our common radiological prospects. Her hair was scraggly; she had no earrings, but there was a large hole in each of her earlobes; she kept licking her lips; her voice was hoarse from smoking and therefore affectionate. I put my hand on a plate and while I adjusted and placed it in different positions, she fired a cannonade of questions. I confessed everything under fire; I disclosed how I ended up in America, what my writerly life there was like; I told her about my trip with Rora, Dr. Azra Halilbašić’s brother, about my return to Sarajevo. I did not mention Mary. By the time she was done X-raying, she felt entirely entitled to give me advice. Stay here, she said. This is your home. You should marry one of our women. There is no life for you in America. This is where your heart is. They hate Muslims there. They don’t like anybody but themselves. I could not tell her I was not Muslim, but I appreciated her kind thought and promised I would seriously consider her proposition. The pictures will be up in the doctor’s office in half an hour, she said.
Once the X-rays were in, Azra showed me on the light box where my hand was broken: the zigzagging crack interrupted the steady whiteness of the bone; it was all rather abstract and elegant. That’s me, I thought, those fragile, bleached bones. Rora looked at the X-rays closely, as though he were another doctor, nodding as though he were seeing what he had expected to see. Perhaps he had told Azra how I broke it, for she asked me nothing. Still, I longed for an opportunity to describe my heroic punishment of a Moldovan pimp; I wanted to brandish my strength and self-righteousness, my vigilant manhood. Her perfume was Magie Noire; at the same time, the office smelled of troubling disinfectants, implying a lot of blood having been spilled in it. As she was putting on a splint and wrapping my hand with an armpit-smelling bandage, Rora photographed me flinching in discomfort; he seemed to have a penchant for taking pictures of me in embarrassing situations. I did not ask him to stop; being in the same picture with Azra somehow brought me close to her. She had a gold necklace, the lily pendant resting in the dimple below her throat. I imagined her standing tall in a purple velvet skirt, her hair held high by a pin.
Next time you want
to rough somebody up, she said wryly, use your elbow or your forehead. Maybe a table leg or a tire iron. Hands are fragile, very fragile, and you have only two. I was to come back once the swelling was down so she could put on a cast.
They saw me out to the hospital gate. I no longer had a home in Sarajevo—my parents had sold our apartment to finance their exile in America. Hence I had booked a room at the Hotel Sarajevo for my homecoming. I had planned to be on my own for a few days, I said, maybe just walk around and run into people, recollect our travels and travails in pill-induced tranquillity. Had this been a pilgrimage, this would have been the time to contemplate my life and my place in the big metaphysical picture. Good luck, they said. Rora and I set up a coffee-drinking date in a couple of days. Azra urged me to stay with them; it was wrong for me to come home to Sarajevo and stay at a lousy hotel. I said I would think about it and got into a cab. Call if you need anything, she said. We’ll talk, I said.
The cabbie—who had no front teeth apart from a pair of incisor goalposts—demanded that I buckle up, but I didn’t bother. He openly detested me and kept insisting and insulting me (he didn’t want to have the blood of an asshole on his hands), until I defiantly buckled up just before we stopped in front of Hotel Sarajevo. I handed my American passport to the receptionist but spoke to him in Bosnian. He said, Welcome home, sir. Breakfast is served between seven and ten.
The following morning, I stared at the ceiling for a while; I immersed myself in the newspaper reports on petty crime and moronic celebrities over coffee; I went for a stroll. I relished the Sarajevo pavements under my feet, the asphalt felt softer than on any other street in the world. I walked up to Jekovac to behold the city spreading out of the valley toward the caliginous mass of the Igman mountain. I gorged on myriad sweet pastry all over Baš Čaršija. I quaffed the cold water from the fountain in front of Gazihusrevbegova Mosque. I greeted acquaintances, saluted random fellow strollers. Nobody asked me where I was from nor expressed their admiration for my exotic accent and alien culture. I reposed on the benches by the Miljacka, watching soccer balls bobbing desperately in its whirlpools. I ran into Aida, and she said, I haven’t seen you for a while, where have you been? and I teared up and hugged her. We had dated in high school; I hadn’t seen her for twenty years or so.
Later on that day, I called Mary halfheartedly and was fully relieved when I could not reach her. When I finally did, she told me that George had been taken to the hospital; it seems the cancer had spread to his stomach and brain. It did not look good. I offered her my strength and asserted I would always be there for her. But in saying that, it occurred to me that I would in fact never be there for her, that I would always be here, where my heart was.
Mary could hold a cockroach in her hand, but was spooked by sparrows. Mary loved broccoli and bloody steaks and carrots, but she disliked ice cream and chocolate. Her favorite books were Sense and Sensibility and To Kill a Mockingbird. When she listened to music, she would sometimes tap her fingers on her knee, but denied it vehemently if I pointed it out to her. She was prone to wearing commodious frumpy clothes, but had an impeccable, fetishistic taste in shoes. Orchids and green onions made her sneeze. Thick eyebrows turned her on. She put two spoons of sugar in her tea, one in her coffee. She preferred bourbon to wine. She could never remember the name of her all-time favorite film. (It was All That Heaven Allows.) She had no interest in sports, except for figure skating and boxing—George used to take her to boxing matches. Her frequent karaoke choice was “Hungry Like the Wolf.” Her most cherished memory was of a vacation in Florida when she learned to swim: she was nine; her stomach on George’s palm, she splashed around haphazardly until she realized he had taken her into the deep and released her. When she was a girl she wanted to become, respectively, a ballerina, an explorer, a vet, a shoe designer, a congresswoman. After her grandmother died, she wept for months and gouged out the eyes of all of her dolls. She lost her virginity at the age of twenty, while in med school; he went on to be the chief anesthesiologist at the Columbia University Medical Center. Buried somewhere in my luggage was a photo of her mincing onions in the kitchen, donning her water-lilies apron, tears running down her cheeks: she wiped them with her forearm, smiling sunnily, a machete-sized knife in her hand. When she was eleven, her puppy dog died and she wanted it stuffed, but George had a sage conversation with her, explaining that the doggie’s soul was now elsewhere, that the body without the soul was empty, that it was natural that flesh should rot and turn to dust. She was like everybody else because there was nobody like her.
A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER, Rora was sitting in the sunny garden café down the street from the cathedral, sipping his morning coffee, plodding through the sludge of local news, flirting with scantily dressed young women by way of taking their photos, basking in being home again, waiting for me, when a buff young man with a barbed-wire tattoo wreathing around his right biceps and stud earrings in both of his ears (so he was described by the few witnesses before they forgot what they had seen)—when a buff young man squeezed his buff ass between flimsy plastic chairs and frail tables to step up to Rora and empty his gun, seven bullets in gratuitous succession, to empty his gun into Rora, who was absurdly trying to stand up. Whereupon Rora collapsed, and the young man grabbed Rora’s camera and calmly walked away, as the café disintegrated into panicked particles. By the time I belatedly arrived, everybody had cleared out, Rora was alone, bleeding out a venous ocean amidst the strewn chairs and tables, amidst the purses and sandals and burning cigarettes left behind in retreat. Somebody’s cell phone kept cynically blaring its “Staying Alive” ring tone.
He was gone before I got to him. The rubbernecked waitstaff lined up against the wall to smoke simultaneously; passersby slowed down to gawk. I wished I had held him in my arms as he expired; I would have liked to have heard his last words, to have said something uncomforting and senseless to him. I merely leaned over him to look: his nose was blasted away, he had brains in his curls, there were no eyes to be seen, the ocean of blood expanding well beyond my shoes. His camera was not there; he was not there; I was there.
So then the police came. Before I was even asked, I eagerly informed the young assistant inspector, who wore a Kappa sweatshirt and sported an elaborate facial-hair contour in lieu of a beard, that Rora’s sister, Azra Halilbašić, worked at the City Hospital, that they should notify her immediately. And who are you? he asked me. A friend. Where do you live? Hotel Sarajevo. What is your name? Vladimir Brik. Vladimir what? Brik. What kind of a name is that? It’s complicated, I said. When he finally asked me if I had seen anything, I told him I had seen nothing.
It turned out that the waitstaff had also seen nothing; the young women returning to retrieve their fake-brand-name purses had seen nothing; the buff young men who came back for their cigarettes and cell phones had seen nothing; the few who had at first seen something eventually saw nothing. I repeated it all to the Dnevni Avaz reporter, a woman so young and dazed that she might as well have been a teenager on a school assignment. She noted down my name and wrote ništa (nothing) next to it. The assistant inspector came back to tell me, as in a bad detective novel, not to leave the city. Where would I go? I said. Nobody seemed particularly upset by the murder, as though Rora had been a victim of a car accident. Who do you think did it? I asked the assistant inspector. He actually chuckled. Did you do it? he asked. No, I said. Of course not. Why do you care, then? he asked.
LOYALLY AND DUTIFULLY I went to the funeral the next day; Azra was the only woman among the small, silent crowd of men. I looked for the killer in the crowd, perhaps even Rambo himself. There were a few men with their heads shaved and faces sufficiently weathered to suggest criminality, but their eyes bespoke genuine sadness. On the far edge of the crowd, I recognized the assistant inspector, still in his tracksuit. Nobody gave a speech, there was no pomp; squatting over the grave, men mumbled the prayers with their hands upturned, then touched their faces with their palms; the dug-up dirt had dried in the sun and
kept tumbling down into the hole. I did not know what to do exactly, so I watched Azra, did what she did. I folded my hands over my groin, remained standing when the men squatted; I dropped a clod of earth on the coffin after she did. Fortunately, she did not wail or faint; her expression stayed firm, except for the trembling chin. It was quickly over; nobody indulged in bogus ruminations upon mortality, ashes, and eternity. I approached Azra to express my condolences, and she looked through me as though she didn’t recognize me. Perhaps she didn’t; she had seen me but once, before her reality was forever transformed.
I returned to my hotel room, stuffed myself with sleeping pills, and called Mary. I incoherently told her about the murder and the funeral and then sobbed into the earpiece, while she maintained her silence at the other end. Finally, she had a surgery to perform and quietly hung up, but I went on weeping, until I wiped off my tears and tried to write a letter with my unbroken left hand. I wanted to tell her so many things, but I could write nothing.
There is no good way to say this, Mary, I wanted to write to her. Rora was killed in cold blood, I have broken my hand. Otherwise, I’m fine and think of you a lot. I cannot remember what my life used to be, how I got to this point. I don’t know where everything disappeared. I think I might stay in Sarajevo for a while, use up the Susie money, until my hand heals, until I sort myself out. I am sorry about George. I hope he gets better soon. I’ll be fine and think of you a lot. Why did you leave me in these woods?
The Lazarus Project Page 24
