Acclaim for Aleksandar Hemon’s
THE QUESTION OF BRUNO
“Like Conrad’s, Hemon’s prose often makes the most of emphatically discordant notes: an initially incongruous word becomes a perfect choice.”
—The New Yorker
“By turns terrifying, gently comic and brutally satiric, these are stunning stories that compel the reader to view a world rendered—by repression and war and displacement—abruptly alien and un familiar.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“The man is a maestro, a conjurer, a channeler of universes…. As vivid a prose as you will find anywhere this year, and as heartbreaking.”
—Esquire
“Like fellow immigrant Nabakov, Sarajevan Alek sandar Hemon writes powerfully in his adopted language.”
—Vanity Fair
“The book’s language is rich, complex, sharply intelligent and frequently funny—a pleasant surprise for readers of new fiction.”
—Time Out New York
“A dazzling collection…. In Hemon’s stories, comedy and cruelty always run close together.”
—Salon
“A wonderful collection … the book is undoubtedly beguiling.”
—The Guardian
“Hemon is an original voice, and he has an imagination and talent all his own.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“A fascinating collective self-portrait, a kind of ‘Hemoniad.’”
—Newsday
“Weirdly droll and heartbreaking, this debut volume deftly anatomizes a world gone wrong.”
—Newsweek
Aleksandar Hemon
THE QUESTION OF BRUNO
Aleksandar Hemon was born in Sarajevo in 1964. He moved to Chicago in 1992 with only a basic command of English. He began writing in English in 1995. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and The Best American Short Stories 1999, among other publications, and will appear in the forthcoming The Best American Short Stories 2000. He continues to live in Chicago with his wife, Lisa Stodder, a Chicago native.
FOR SARAJEVO
FOR MY WIFE
CONTENTS
ISLANDS
THE LIFE AND WORK OF ALPHONSE KAUDERS
THE SORGE SPY RING
THE ACCORDION
EXCHANGE OF PLEASANT WORDS
A COIN
BLIND JOZEF PRONEK & DEAD SOULS
IMITATION OF LIFE
ISLANDS
1
We got up at dawn, ignored the yolky sun, loaded our navy-blue Austin with suitcases and then drove straight to the coast, stopping only on the verge of Sarajevo, so I could pee. I sang communist songs the entire journey: songs about mournful mothers looking through graves for their dead sons; songs about the revolution, steaming and steely, like a locomotive; songs about striking miners burying their dead comrades. By the time we got to the coast, I had almost lost my voice.
2
We waited for the ship on a long stone pier, which burnt the soles of my feet, as soon as I took off my sandals. The air was sweltering, saturated with sea-ozone, exhaustion, and the smell of coconut sunscreen, coming from the German tourists, already red and shellacked, lined up for a photo at the end of the pier. We saw the thin stocking of smoke on the horizon-thread, then the ship itself, getting bigger, slightly slanted sideways, like a child’s drawing. I had on a round straw hat with all the seven dwarves painted on it. It threw a short, dappled shadow over my face. I had to raise my head to look at the grown-ups. Otherwise, I would look at their gnarled knees, the spreading sweat stains on their shirts and sagging wrinkles of fat on their thighs. One of the Germans, an old, bony man, got down on his knees and puked over the pier edge. The vomit hit the surface and then dispersed in different directions, like children running away to hide from the seeker. Under the wave-throbbing, ochre and maroon, island of vomit, a school of aluminum fish gathered and nibbled it peevishly.
3
The ship was decrepit, with pealing steel stairs and thin leaves of rust that could cut your fingers on the handrails. The staircase wound upward like a twisted towel. “Welcome,” said an unshaven man in a T-shirt picturing a boat with a smoke-snake, wobbling on the waves, and, above it, the sun with a U-smile and an umlaut of eyes. We sat on the upper deck and the ship leapt over humble waves, panting and belching. We passed a line of little islands, resembling car wrecks by the road, and I would ask my parents: “Is this Mljet?” and they would say: “No.” From behind one of the petrified islands, shaven by a wildfire, a gust of waylaying wind attacked us, snatched the straw hat off my head and tossed it into the sea. I watched the hat teetering away, my hair pressed against my skull, like a helmet, and I understood that I would never, ever see it again. I wished to go back in time and hold on to my hat before the surreptitious whirlwind hit me in the face. The ship sped away from the hat and the hat was transformed into a beige stain on the snot-green sea. I began crying and sobbed myself to sleep. When I woke up the ship was docked and the island was Mljet.
4
Uncle Julius impressed a stern, moist kiss on my cheek—the corner of his mouth touched the corner of my mouth, leaving a dot of spit above my lip. But his lips were soft, like slugs, as if there was nothing behind to support them. As we walked away from the pier, he told us that he forgot his teeth at home, and then, so as to prove that he was telling us the truth, he grinned at me, showing me his pink gums with cinnabar scars. He reeked of pine cologne, but a whiff redolent of rot and decay escaped his insides and penetrated the fragrant cloud. I hid my face in my mother’s skirt. I heard his snorting chuckle. “Can we please go back home!” I cried.
5
We walked up a dilapidated, sinuous road exuding heat. Uncle Julius’s sandals clattered in a tranquilizing rhythm and I felt sleepy. There was a dense verdureless thicket alongside the road. Uncle Julius told us that there used to be so many poisonous snakes on Mljet that people used to walk in tall rubber boots all the time, even at home, and snakebites were as common as mosquito bites. Everybody used to know how to slice off the bitten piece of flesh in a split second, before the venom could spread. Snakes killed chickens and dogs. Once, he said, a snake was attracted by the scent of milk, so it curled up on a sleeping baby. And then someone heard of the mongoose, how it kills snakes with joy, and they sent a man to Africa and he brought a brood of mongooses and they let them loose on the island. There were so many snakes that it was like a paradise for them. You could walk for miles and hear nothing but the hissing of snakes and the shrieks of mongooses and the bustle and rustle in the thicket. But then the mongooses killed all the snakes and bred so much that the island became too small for them. Chickens started disappearing, cats also. There were rumors of rabid mongooses and some even talked about monster mongooses that were the result of paradisiacal inbreeding. Now they were trying to figure out how to get rid of mongooses. So that’s how it is, he said, it’s all one pest after another, like revolutions. Life is nothing if not a succession of evils, he said, and then stopped and took a pebble out of his left sandal. He showed the puny, gray pebble to us, as if holding irrefutable evidence that he was right.
6
He opened the gate and we walked through a small, orderly garden with stout tomato stalks like sentries alongside the path. His wife (he pointed her out to us) stood in the courtyard, her face like a loaf of bread with a small tubby potato in the middle, arms akimbo, her calves full of bruises and blood vessels on the verge of bursting, ankles swollen. She was barefoot, her big toes were crooked, taking a sudden turn, as if backing away in disgust from each other. She enveloped my head with her palms, twisted my head upward and then put her mouth over my mouth, leaving a thick layer of warm saliva, which I hastily w
iped off with my shoulder. Aunt Lyudmila was her name.
7
I clambered, dragging a bag full of plastic beach toys, after my sprightly parents, up a concrete staircase on the side of the house, with sharp stair edges and pots of unconcerned flowers, like servants with candles, on the banister side.
8
The room was fragrant with lavender, mosquito-spray poison, and clean, freshly ironed bed sheets. There was an aerial picture of a winding island (Mljet, it said in the lower right corner) and a picture of Comrade Tito, smiling, black-and-white, on the opposite wall. Below the window, the floor was dotted with mosquitoes—with a large green-glittering fly or a bee, here and there—still stricken by the surprise. When I moved toward them, the whisp caused by my motion made them ripple away from me, as if retreating, wary of another surprise.
9
I lay on the bed, listening to the billowing-curtain flaps, looking at the picture of Mljet. There were two oblong lakes, touching each other, at the top end of the picture-island, and on one of those lakes there was another island.
10
I woke up and the night was rife with the cicada hum, perpetual as if it were the hum of the island engine. They were all sitting outside, around the table underneath the shroud of vine twisting up the lattice. There was a long-necked carafe, full of black wine, in the center of the table, like an axis. Uncle Julius was talking and they all laughed. He would bulge his eyes, lean forward; he would thrust his fist forward, then open it and the hand would have the index-finger pointed at the space between my mother and his wife; and then the hand would retract back into the fist, but the finger would reappear, tapping its tip against the table, as if telegraphing a message. He would, then, stop talking and withdraw back into the starting position, and he would just watch them as they laughed.
11
Uncle Julius spoke: “We brought beekeeping to Bosnia. Before the Ukrainians came, the natives kept their bees in mud-and-straw hives and when they wanted the honey they would just kill them all with sulfur. My grandfather had fifty beehives three years after coming to Bosnia. Before he died, he was sick for a long time. And the day he died, he asked to be taken to the bees and they took him there. He sat by the hives for hours, and wept and wept, and wept out a sea of tears, and then they put him back into his bed and an hour later he died.”
“What did he die of?” Aunt Lyudmila asked.
“Dysentery. People used to die of that all the time. They’d just shit themselves to death.”
12
I went down the stairs and announced my thirst. Aunt Lyudmila walked over to the dark corner on my right-hand side—suddenly the light was ablaze—and there was a concrete box with a large wooden lid. She took off the lid and grabbed a tin cup and shoved her arm into the square. I went to the water tank (for that’s what it really was) and peeked over. I saw a white slug on the opposite wall. I could not tell whether it was moving upward or it was just frozen by our sudden presence. The dew on its back twinkled, and it looked like a severed tongue. I glanced at Aunt Lyudmila, but she didn’t seem to have noticed anything. She offered me the cup, but I shook my head and refused to drink the water which, besides, seemed turbid.
So they brought me a slice of cold watermelon and I drowsily masticated it. “Look at yourself,” Uncle Julius said. “You don’t want to drink the water! What would you do if you were so thirsty that you were nearly crazy and having one thought only: water, water! and there’s no water. How old are you?”
“Nine,” my mother said.
13
Uncle Julius told us that when he was in the Arkhangelsk camp, Stalin and his parliament devised a law that said if you were repeatedly late for school or missed several days with no excuse, you would get six months to three years in a camp. So, suddenly, in 1943, the camp was full of children, only a little bit older than I was—twelve, fifteen years old. They didn’t know what to do in the camp, so the criminals took the nicest-looking to their quarters and fed them and, you know (no, I didn’t), abused them. So they were there. They died like flies, because it was cold, and they lost their warm clothing, they didn’t know how to preserve or protect the scarce food and water they were allotted. Only the ones that had protectors were able to survive. And there was a boy named Vanyka: gaunt, about twelve, blond, blue eyes. He survived by filching food from the weaker ones, by lending himself to different protectors and bribing guards. Once—I think he drank some vodka with the criminals—he started shouting: “Thank you, Vozhd, for my happy childhood!” At the top of his lungs: “Thank you, Stalin, for my happy childhood!” And they beat him with gun butts and took him away.
14
“Don’t torture the boy with these stories. He won’t be able to sleep ever again.”
“No, let him hear, he should know.”
15
Then they sent Uncle Julius to a different camp, and then to another one, and he didn’t even know how much time or how many camps he passed through, and he found himself in Siberia. One spring, his job was to dig big graves in the thawing ground, take the dead to the grave on a large cart, and then stuff them into the grave. Fifty per grave was the prescribed amount. Sometimes he had to stamp on the top of the grave-load to get more space and meet the plan. He had big, big boots. One day they told him that there was a dead man in solitary confinement, so he pushed his cart there and put the corpse on the cart, and as he was pushing, the corpse moaned: “Let me die! Let me die!” I was so scared I almost died, I fell down and he kept moaning: “Let me die! I don’t want to live!” So I pushed the cart behind the barrack and I leaned over him. He was emaciated and had no teeth and one of his ears was missing, but he had blue, blue eyes. It was Vanyka! He looked much older, oh my God! So I gave him a piece of bread that I had saved and told him that I remembered him and this is what he told me.
16
They took him away and mauled him for days and did all sorts of things to him. Then they moved him to another camp and he had problems there all the time, because he would speak out again, despite his better judgment. He knew how to steal from the weaker and there were still men who liked him. He won acclaim when he killed a marked person, some Jew, after losing a card game. He killed more. He did bad, bad things and learned how to survive, but he could never keep his snout shut. So they sent him to the island where they kept the worst of the worst. The nearest guard was on the shore fifty kilometers away. They let the inmates rob and kill each other like mad dogs. Once a month the guards would come in, leave the food and count the corpses and graves and go back to their barracks by the sea. So one day Vanyka and two others killed some other inmates, took their food and clothes and set out on foot toward the shore. It was a very, very cold winter—pines would crack like matches every day—so they thought they could walk over the frozen strait, if they avoided the guards. But they got lost and ran out of food and Vanyka and one of the other two agreed by exchanging glances to kill the third one. And they did and they ate his flesh, and they walked and walked and walked. Then Vanyka killed the other one and ate him. But the guards with dogs tracked him down and caught him and he ended up in solitary confinement here and he didn’t know how long he had been there. All he wanted was to die and he’d smash his head against the walls and he’d try to choke himself with his tongue. He refused to eat, but they’d force him, if only to make him live longer and suffer more. “Let me die!” he cried and cried.
17
Uncle Julius fell reticent and no one dared to say anything. But I asked: “So what happened to him?”
“He was killed,” he said, making a motion with his hand, as if thrusting me aside, out of his sight.
18
I woke up and didn’t know where I was or who I was, but then I saw the photo of Mljet and I recognized it. I got up, out of my nonbeing, and stepped into the inchoate day. It was pur-blindingly bright, but I could hear the din of the distant beach: bashful whisper of waves, echoes of sourceless music, warbling of boat motors, shrieks of ch
ildren, syncopated splashing of oars. Bees levitated over the staircase flowers and I passed them cautiously. There was breakfast on the table in the netlike shadow of the vines: a plate with smoldering soggy eggs, a cup with a stream of steam rushing upward, and seven slices of bread, on a mirroring steel tray, leaning on each other like fallen dominoes. There was no one around, apart from shadows stretching on the courtyard stone pavement. I sat down and stirred my white coffee. There was a dead bee in the whirl and it kept revolving on its back, slower and slower, until it came to a reluctant stop.
19
After breakfast, we would go down a dirt path resembling a long burrow in the shrub. I’d carry my blue-and-white Nivea inflatable ball and sometimes I would inadvertently drop it and it would bounce ahead of us, in slow motion. I’d hear a bustle in the thicket—a snake, perhaps. But then there would be more bustling and I’d imagine a mongoose killing the snake, the whole bloody battle, the writhing snake entangled with the mongoose trying to bite off its head, just the way I saw it on TV, on Survival. I’d wait for my parents, for I didn’t know what sort of feeling a fierce mongoose would have toward a curious boy—would it, perhaps, want to bite his head off?
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