The Question of Bruno

by Aleksandar Hemon

  From his journeys to the Soviet Union, my father would bring me dull Soviet toys which all had a sour, oily smell: gray toy car (Volga) that was sticky when touched and produced a hideous high-pitch whining sound when (seldom) driven; dun plastic train station, meant for my long abandoned train; military olive-green gun that ejected little (vomit-orange) plastic balls, instantly banned and then consequently disposed of by my mother; plethora of books about the victorious Red Army,11 which I couldn’t read since they were in Russian, but I liked the pictures (plain peasant faces, scared stiff of the Army photographer’s camera) of the heroes who neutralized a German machine gun by throwing themselves at the barrel or jumped into a terrified German trench, with a cluster of hand grenades attached to their chests. But at the beginning of 1975, after a few cold nights at the airport, he brought me something beyond words: a portable telegraphic system. It was in a gray (naturally) box with a thin booklet, which had a smiling black-and-white boy with gigantic earphones on his head (but no earphones in the box). My father unpacked it: two buzzer-keys and a coil of shining copper wire. Then he put one key in our dining room and the other one in the bedroom (buzz-buzzbuzz-buzz) and the electric current (he said) carrying a Morse-encoded message12 went over the bedroom floor, passed my father’s curled socks (he’d take off his socks first thing when he got back home), went through the kitchen, speedily crawling by my mother’s feet (going to the bathroom to vomit again), then diving under the carpet (lest someone, most likely, I, stumble over and fall onto the glass-top table to be “cut in pieces”) of the dining room and then reached the key (buzz-buzzbuzz-buzz) in front of the amazed me. I could not decode the message, so I could not reply, which made me eager to learn Morse code. My father knew Morse code very well (which fueled my suspicions) so he decided to train me. He’d tap messages at the dinner table (my mother digging a crater in the mashed potatoes and rolling her eyes) and I’d try to decode them, forgetting to chew and swallow, the mashed potatoes becoming liquid in my mouth. He’d tap “hurry up” at the bathroom door, where I was getting carried away over a book. I was getting better, I even sent him a couple of simple messages (“want dog”), but my father sustained his teaching patience only for a week or two, then he was busy, then he was off to the Soviet Union again. I continued practicing Morse code for a while, but then I abandoned practicing because it was boring to send messages into a void. Several times I played a whole spy game: I’d sneak into my parents’ bedroom (my mother innocuously watching The Sound of Music), photograph the stuff in the top drawer, the unlocked one, of my father’s desk (mainly bills) with a matchbox (a real matchbox), then I would crawl out of the bedroom, behind the back of my unsuspecting dozing mother, and go to my secret shelter under the glass-top table, and send haplessly coded messages back to the bedroom, imagining that they meant something, picturing someone at the other end of the copper wire. It was all over when I shattered the glass top, almost beheading myself while practicing seeing (seeing clearly, I should say) in the dark—a skill necessary, I believed, for any spy, let alone a great one. My mother terminated the telegraph line and I was left to send messages by telepathy (a brief and only partly successful attempt). When my father came back from the Soviet Union in April, he brought me a too-light, atrociously deformed, pigskin soccer ball.

  When my mother went to the hospital to give birth to my little sister Hanna (July 4, 1975–January 31, 1985), my father was away, again. This time he was in Baku, the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan (whence, in August, he brought me four tin oil-drill towers and a box of little pipes that would have formed a pipeline, had they ever been connected). I was left home alone for lengthy periods of time and was watched over constantly, I believed, by Comrade Tito himself. It was because Branko Vukelic had told me that one shouldn’t use Tito’s name in vain, for Comrade Tito had TV monitors at his palace in Belgrade, at which he could see every single resident of Yugoslavia, at any given moment of their lives.13 “Now,” Branko Vukelic said, “if you use Tito’s name to swear and then you lie, or if you use Tito’s name to curse, he can see you. And if he sees you, he may decide to die and punish us all.” I was very careful thereafter not to swear, lest I be guilty of Comrade Tito’s (or someone else’s, for that matter) death. It was soothing to know, however, that I was being monitored, when I was all by myself, that if someone came to abduct me (the police or the devil himself) it would have been seen and I would have been doubtless retrieved from the sneaky villains. It also meant that I had to wash my hands after using the bathroom, couldn’t pick my nose and stick the snot to the underside of the chair, nor could I belch like a hog. I tried to locate the cameras that must have been transmitting images from our home to Tito’s residence. While Mother and Father were away, I looked into vases; I looked behind the pictures on the wall, breaking the one with them in Vienna, on their honeymoon (for which I was ruthlessly beaten when my mother came back from the hospital); I looked into lamps and light switches; I looked everywhere and the only place I could figure out as a camera location was the TV set (model Futura). It was a perfectly logical location, for, from the position of the TV, almost every nook of our home was visible—in fact, everything in the apartment except Mother and Father’s bedroom. When I wanted to be alone, I’d go to their bedroom and lie in their bed, smelling the ethereal residues of their absent bodies, watching their wedding picture on the opposite wall (they’re smiling, with a circular lamp behind them acting the moon), still suspecting that there was Tito’s camera behind their happiness.

  At the time of my poor sister’s birth, I was still obsessively entertaining the idea that my father was a spy, but I hadn’t been able to find any tangible evidence. My suspicions had swollen because of my father’s long phone conferences in Russian with somebody who had never been identified; because of the letters (in colorful envelopes embellished with eventful stamps) coming from Moscow, Vladivostok,14 Stockholm, New York; because of his mysterious smiles, when he would be watching the news, as if he knew more than the bland announcers; because of his comments about the politicians: “He won’t last long,” or “He’s dead all right”; because of his secluding himself behind the bedroom door and never letting anyone see what he was doing there.

  When Tito went to Cuba (a TV image of Tito and Castro hugging, smiles stowed with false teeth: Tito in his white, elaborate field-marshal uniform, Castro in his olive-gray sergeant’s uniform plus the immortal curly beard) I reckoned that I wasn’t going to be watched or, even if I was, it would be done by some of his lower officials who wouldn’t dwell over me as caringly as Tito himself would. Thus I decided to venture into going through my father’s drawers, closets, suits, and suitcases, all conveniently located in the bedroom, out of the reach of Tito’s men. I even unplugged the already turned-off TV and put a thick (Turkmenistan) blanket over it. I took down, carefully, the wedding picture and rolled down the shades. First I went through (two) suitcases, finding (two) hotel brochures: the Lux15 in Moscow and a Holiday Inn in Vienna, with pictures of reception desks, desolate rooms, and swimming pools. The Lux Hotel brochure had a smiling Russian beauty (silky braids, rose cheeks, big eyes, etc.) on the front page. The Holiday Inn brochure had a picture of a spacious hall, with an immense lantern, dissolved into glittering crystal tears, hanging from the top of the picture. I went through the inside suitcase pockets, finding business cards (in various languages, in sundry alphabets); finding unintelligible notes on napkins and exhausted railway tickets; finding a lighter (a miniature camera? No!) and a pack of Soviet cigarettes (Sputnik, with an ostentatious picture of an ascending spaceship on the box); finding mysterious rubber objects (condoms, I was to find out, a couple of years later).

  Now I want the reader to assume the role of the camera, to move the objective toward me and peek over my shoulder, following my gaze. I want the camera to focus on the objects that I am about to uncover. I want the thrill of discovery to be rendered with the exactness of the detail. I want this to be documented. Turn on the light. Roll.<
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  The left closet. First the underwear. You have to look under the neatly built pyramid of undershirts. Nothing. Under the panties. A book, with pictures: Figurae Veneris—A Love Manual. 16 Men and women, naked, assuming acrobatic positions, hairy crotches. Never mind. Towels. Nothing. Bedspreads. A cloth-covered notebook, with Mother’s name written on it, with a lock, no key. Hell. Leave it as if nothing happened. Now the drawer. Sheets of paper, documents, sorted into three separate, puzzling, stacks. First stack: floor plans of a house,17 plus charts with numbers summoned at the bottom of the last page: 1,782, twice underlined. Second stack: diplomas and resumes. Flip through: “… worked to develop more efficient ways of transmitting energy … particularly interested in international nets … Sincerely.” Third stack: four files. First file: receipts. Second file: paid bills. Third file: a diploma: “… is hereby confirmed to have graduated at the University of Sarajevo and to have attained the title of Engineer and Energy Transmission Manager.” Fourth file: pictures from the wedding. Mother holding the wedding wreath. Father touching her above the left elbow, as if pushing her to step across the edges of the picture. Mother laughing, with her chin up. Father is about to spread his arms in a gesture of asking. Mother and Father in the center of the picture, a man and a woman stepping into the picture from opposite sides, with symmetrical grins. Father hugging the woman whose back is turned toward the camera (zoom). A twinkle of sweat on Father’s forehead. Mother hugging the woman (zoom). Tears reaching the nostrils. On each picture a globe lamp behind them: dazzling, fake, immobile moon. Cut.

  The middle closet. Roll. First, the shelf above the suits. Boxes of slides, almost all of them from the USSR, the rest from vacations on the Adriatic coast. Random picks: the cracked Tsar’s Knoll and my father minute by its side; Father between two guards in front of the Lenin Mausoleum: Father sending a smile toward the camera, the two identical guards behind his back, eternally erecting their left legs, with skillfully expressionless faces and the slender rifles pointing toward the respective upper corners of the picture. Mother, Father in bathing suits and myself in a baby suit in the front, and Grandpa18 and Grandma behind us (Grandma wearing a black scarf and a buttoned-up black dress), on a pebbly beach, with three towels, like welcome rugs, at our feet. Look at this: Father’s camera (Laika) and a cylindrical plastic box containing a telescopic lens. A bottle of Valium19 (“Keep out of reach of children”). A stack of blank sheets. A box of envelopes. An address book. A: Aliluyev, Alexander, rue de Victorie 101, Paris; B: Bulgakov, Sergei, Andreyevski Uzhvis 45, Kiev; V: Vadimovich, Vladimir, P. O. Box 6165, Geneva. A glass, with the Sputnik (leaving the diminishing planet behind) painted on it, full of pens and unsharpened, virgin pencils. A black-and-green Pelikan fountain pen. A heap of hotel brochures: the Luxembourg Hotel, Paris—a smiling chef over a stove, with unidentifiable blots ostensibly sizzling in the pan; the Tripoli Hotel, Tripoli—a hall with dismal sofas summoned around a forlorn table, as vacuous as if every form of life was terminated by the flashbulb. A pocket notebook (zoom) with pairs of English and Serbo-Croatian words: birth—rodjenje; blind—slijep; work—rad; arrest—hapsiti; son—sin; mother—majka; money—novae; death—smrt. The right closet. Let’s go through his suits. Blue suit: nothing. Blue suit two: nothing. Black suit: nothing in outer pockets, a personal thermometer in the inside pocket. Gray suit: the Party20 member ship card, a key, a piece of paper, with a local phone number (zoom) with an “S” above it, a pack of matches (Aeroflot), a plastic spoon, a red-white-blue marble. White suit: nothing in the outer pockets, nothing in the inside pockets. Except the little pocket down here. It’s a tiny plastic cylinder, like a bottle of pills, with a gray lid, you have to press the lid down, there’s a film inside (could I have more light, please), unrolling: snapshots (negatives) of papers, one after the other, thirty-four of them, last two shots are of a river dam, it seems, and there is a miniature figure (zoom, damn it), no—can’t see. What’s on the papers? They look like documents (headings blurred), they seem to be in Russian. Would you turn off that camera and leave the room please; I need some privacy, I have just obtained proof that my father is a spy.21

  Besides greasy toys (for me) and large cans of pickled fish (for my mother) my father brought stories from the USSR: about his travels down the Volga River, passing by towns, one after the other, made of cubicles, factory smokestacks, and an enormous Lenin statue (making a step forward, pointing toward the future); about the greatest dam in the world, on the Yenisey River—watching the boiling river at the foot of the dam was “like watching the Red Sea splitting”; about the Turkmenistan people who rode purebred horses as if they’d grown out of them; about thousands of miles of taiga, where prehistoric creatures lived and where you’d never be found if you were lost; about places so cold that your blood would just stop flowing if you stopped moving; about places where vodka was so cheap that nobody drank water. Many stories featured Professor Venykov—my father always referred to him as Professor Venykov, as if that was his christened name. The stories of Venykov were stories of placidity: about long conversations by the always warm samovar, with affordable caviar and pickled pike liver; about walks down the Nevski Prospekt, while Russian children played hockey on the frozen Neva; about Venykov reminiscing about his childhood: cherry orchards around Kiev, swimming in the Dnieper, fighting, at the age of nineteen, as a partisan in the last war;22 about his beautiful wife and two girls who were solving complicated mathematical problems when not playing piano-cello duets; about chess games23 in the community sauna. My father claimed that Venykov’s home was his home in the Soviet Union.

  In the late summer of 1976, upon a fabricated invitation from the Sarajevo Micronet Research Institute (which my father obtained through his connections), Professor Venykov came to visit us. He arrived at five o’clock in the morning, having driven nonstop for sixteen hours, from Budapest to Sarajevo (only a sip of vodka, once in a while, to keep him awake). He avoided ringing the bell and cautiously knocked at our door, not quite being there. Father and Mother hesitantly left the bed (Mother taking Hanna in her arms), exchanging timorous glances, not being able to step out of their respective dreams. My father looked through the peephole (“Professor Venykov!”), opened the door and snatched him inside, looking down the hall before closing the door. They exchanged exclamations for a while (Father: “Professor Venykov!” Venykov: “Ay, moy Pyotr! Moy Pyotr!”) then my father pointed toward my mother and me, making a motion with his hands as if opening the door behind which we were hidden (“Molodyets, Pyotr! Molodyets!”). Venykov had a pear-shaped body on the top of which there was a bald head (with a wart, like a miniature knob, on his forehead). His eyes were tired—red cracks were rushing toward turquoise irises. Behind the smell-screen of sweat, onion, and vodka, I could still discern the oily odor of my toys.

  Venykov had a bath and shaved, but wore the same shirt as before (a white shirt with a pear-pattern, including leaves on the stalks). We had breakfast—Venykov enthusiastically ate away a heap of bananas (Mother informing me, by a weighty glance, that bananas are not to be touched, except by Venykov), entirely ignoring the boiled eggs and sausage. “It’s hard to come across bananas in Leningrad,” my father translated Venykov’s bananapeeling remark. After the breakfast, Venykov opened one of his (two) suitcases and pulled out, one by one, a throng of rotund matyoshky (we already had dozens on a remote shelf). Then he put a bottle (Stolichnaya), wrapped in a sheet of Literaturnaya Gazeta, in my father’s hands. As my father was peeling the bottle, Venykov was dismantling matyoshky, echoing each other, all facing different directions, as if blind. “Nuh!” Venykov said, touching the head of the largest matyoshka. “Nuh!”

  That night we all watched Brigadoon on TV (Venykov mumbling, “Duraky!”) Despite my father’s protests, he went to sleep in his car—a Volga resembling a gigantic black cockroach, parked in front of our apartment building.