The Question of Bruno

by Aleksandar Hemon

  “Why doesn’t he sleep here?” I asked.

  “He feels uncomfortable in a foreign country,” Father said. “He’s afraid of being treated as someone other than himself.”

  I had been more or less convinced that my father was a spy, and I somehow learned to live with it. I could still catch a shadow passing over his face—a shadow of something that he had been doing and nobody was supposed to know about. He was still making phone calls in Russian, and the film multiplied. Venykov delivered to him an envelope, and he locked it in the lower drawer of his desk. The conversations they had in Russian, behind the bedroom door, or walking ahead of my mother and me, never sounded like conversations—rather like lectures or briefings. I couldn’t, however, make myself believe that Venykov was a spy—not once I saw him peeling a banana (his gaze following the descent of the peel) or devouring a baklava, or humming with Julie Andrews and making his hand dance in rhythm, while watching The Sound of Music. I figured that he could be a benign cover or just a naïve courier.24

  The Venykov weeks passed uneventfully: he was playing chess with my father (Mother: “What’s the score?” Father: “One thirty-one—one twenty-seven.”); visiting the mountains around Sarajevo; buying cheap Italian jeans from smugglers for his girls (a smuggler to his accomplice: “Get me size thirty for Brezhnev! ); going to movies25 (You Only Live Twice, From Russia with Love, True Stories VI); talking to my father behind the closed doors. We’d watch his Volga, before going to sleep, seeing flashes of flesh as he was putting on his crimson pajamas. Near the end of the third week, at the end of the day that included a movie (Arabian Nights), a dinner (Bosnian cuisine), and plenty of delectable Turkish coffee, Venykov agreed to sleep in my room. Lying between my parents (my sister in her crib), I could hear the hum of Venykov’s snoring, occasionally interrupted by the smacking of his lips. Mother: “He’s not going to stay forever, is he?” Father: “He’s got to go back. His wife and children are there.” Me: “Why can’t they come here?” Father: “They just can’t.”

  The following day, Venykov packed up before any of us got up (although my sister bawled pitilessly, alarming us, I suppose), had a quick breakfast with us, then kissed my forehead, shook his index finger with my sister, hugged my mother and father (slapping his back dramatically), turned on the cockroach-car, and drove back to Leningrad. “He’s home,” announced my father two days later, after a brief phone conversation. In my room, Venykov left the scent of his newly purchased aftershave (Pitralon) and a crumpled brown sock under my bed.

  In October 1977, my father was arrested.26 There were no screeching cars in the middle of the night, no marble-faced men in leather coats, no terrified, shivering neighbors too scared to look through the peephole, no breaking doors—not even loud fist-banging at the door. They simply called him on the phone. He hung up and said to my mother: “They want me about some traffic violation. It must be a misunderstanding. I’ll be back shortly.” He put tennis shoes (Puma) on his bare feet and was gone. He did not come back home that sleepless night or the day after. My mother was tirelessly making frantic phone calls, none of which lasted more than one or two minutes, for nobody wanted to talk to her. Her dread was increasing, and she was trying to repress it (soundlessly sobbing), while Hanna moaned all the time (refusing to eat her liquid foods). My entertaining the idea that Father was a spy had never been much more than a way to embellish my vacant childhood, but with Father’s arrest, it suddenly became palpable. My spine tingled with the pride in the ability to sense his spyness, while, at the same time, I was scared, beginning to realize that we were up against something beyond my feeble comprehension. My limbs became weightier and larger, my motion beyond my control. I constantly felt an urge to hide under the bed or in the closet, but all I could do was watch my mother swing (with ululating Hanna in her arms) back and forth, like a metronome.

  Four days after my father’s vanishing, Slobodan came. He rang the bell patiently, while my mother was alternately looking through the peephole and at me, deliberating whether to open the door. “I’m a friend,” Slobodan announced. My mother opened the door, but kept it chained. “Madam,” he said and showed her the inside of his wallet. “I’m Inspector27 Slobodan.” “State security,” my mother mumbled. “No need to behave like a hysterical woman,” he said. “I’m here to help.” Mother unchained the door and let him in. He went straight to the dining room, without taking his shoes off, sat down and wiped his thick glasses and vast forehead with a handkerchief, while Mother and I watched him benumbed.

  “I want you to know, madam, that we know everything.28 We have watched, we have listened, we know,” he said. “And I also want you to know that we have no hard feelings about you. We presume that you knew nothing of your husband’s activities. Had you known, you would have informed us, am I right? Feel free to interrupt me. I just feel that that pretty mouth of yours wants to start clattering. Cute children, madam. Are they yours? Just joking—they look exactly like you. What’s the little girl’s name? She’ll be an attractive woman, I’ll tell you. Feel free to interrupt me. You shouldn’t feel that way about me, madam. I’m a nice person. I love this country, you know, I think that we have something here, something like no other place in the world and I can tell you that there are plenty of people who think that way. We don’t want this country, what our fathers bled for, to be defiled—it belongs to us and we want to keep it. And if you don’t like it—well, you’re welcome to leave and go somewhere else, to America29 or wherever the hell you want. Don’t you agree with me? Tell me, don’t you think the same way?”

  My mother said: “Comrade Slobodan, I want you to leave this very moment!”

  “I’ll be glad to do so, but not before I take care of several wee things. I need a nice photograph of your husband, for the papers. No? Well, I’ll take the liberty of looking for this and that. You may watch—lest I be tempted to take something for myself.”

  My mother retched several times, then put Hanna into the crib and hurried to the bathroom. I heard her vomiting, as if coughing.

  “Women, always vomiting. Stay away from women, little boy, that’s my advice. So, tell me about your father. Do you like your daddy? I suppose you do. When I was a boy, I always had a place where I would hide precious little things, you know, marbles, and ticklish pictures and stuff. Do you have a place like that? Does your father have a place like that? Would you show me?

  My mother walked back in.

  “I was just asking your boy, madam, what does he want to be in his life: What do you want to be, young man?”

  “A journalist,” I said.

  “Smart, very smart. You’re going to get very far, my boy. Madam, if you’d show me where your husband keeps his private stuff, I’d be thankful beyond words. No? Well, then I’ll just look around, if you don’t mind.”

  He got up and paced around the dining room, pulled out a couple of books from the shelf, flipped through them detachedly, and put them back. He turned toward us, smiled, said: “Pardon me,” and slipped into the bedroom.

  Mother and I heard noises coming from the bedroom: thumping of suitcases, a screech of a drawer, a snap of a locked drawer, din of sundry things being thrown on the floor. Mother held my hand, squeezing it—her hand, moist and faint. Slobodan walked out with a suitcase, shoving something into his pocket. He produced a little box (with a painted bee landing on a flower) out of his hand and said: “Condoms, my boy. Had your father had this on, you would have rotted, stuck in a sewage pipe, years ago.” My mother plucked the box out of his hand and said: “Get out!”

  “If you wish to talk to me, feel free to call me. My boss always says that love has political limits.30 Please, call me.” He wrote the phone number on the wall by the front door: 71–782, then opened the door and walked out. Before my mother closed the door, he shouted in the echoing hall: “We should get together sometime, now that you’re alone.”

  Mother reluctantly opened the bedroom door: an open suitcase; a pile of suits (hanger-hooks looking
like bowed swan heads); the Sputnik glass shattered, pens and pencils scattered around, like corpses. On the bed, there were two symmetrical foot-shaped dents, and mounted ripples on the bedspread around them.

  After a month or so, Hanna and I went with our mother to visit Father in jail. The visiting room looked like a decrepit hotel hall, with stained and torn sofas and armchairs sorted into separate throngs. Father came followed by a guard31 in a wan blue uniform (the rim of his cap touching the top of his eyebrows). Mother immediately burst into tears and hugged Father. He sat down between Hanna (“Tata! Tata!”) and me, putting his arms around us (thin, bloody wristlets). The tip of his left eyetooth was broken and under his left ear, at the root of the jaw, there was a huge bruise, as if a shadow of the ear.

  “I’ve done nothing wrong,” he said.

  “Shut your fucking mouth!” roared the guard.

  “Did they torture32 you?” Mother asked.

  “A slap or two.”

  “Shut your fucking mouth!”

  “How’s your school?” Father asked me.

  “Fine.”

  “He got the best grade in the class33 on the history test.”

  “Good,” he said. “Good.”

  “What do they want from you?” Mother asked. “They’re interrogating me. They want me to sign a statement.”34

  “Shut your big fucking mouth! This is the last time I’m telling you.”

  Father was sentenced, after a brief (closed to the public) trial, to three years of hard labor and was shipped off to the Zenica prison on January 7, 1978. There was footage shown on TV of my father (and four obscure men) in the courtroom handcuffed, as the voice-over spoke about “disseminating foreign propaganda,” about “the internal enemy who never sleeps,” about “Tito and his vision,” about “protecting what our fathers bled for.”

  “We have seen it before,” the voice said. “And we’ll see it again: dissembling intellectuals, spreading dissent like a lethal germ. But this is what we have to tell them: stay away from the clear stream of our progress or we’ll crush you like snails!”35

  The years of Father’s imprisonment passed uneventfully: my sister was growing, learning to speak, learning to be sad; my mother became reticent; and I was going through all those adolescent things: the deepening of the voice, rebelling, reading (The Stranger, The Trial, The Metamorphosis); falling in love (a Nina, until her father forbade her seeing me). But I participated in all this half-heartedly, as if it were all happening to someone else and I was watching it with languid amazement. No one was visiting us and we were going nowhere. Only Slobodan would call once in a while (“Your father is locked behind walls with desperate men, my boy, and your mother needs all the support she can get”). Once a month, we’d go to see Father. We’d sit on the bench in the prison yard, even in the winter, exchanging petty information about our walled-off lives, too aware of the gaze of the remote guards and the sharpshooter in the watchtower. In the spring of 1979, Mother and Father sat on the bench, for two hours, mainly mute, while I was catching stray butterflies for Hanna, and morose prisoners, staring at each other’s napes, revolved around a guard (chanting: “Left-right! Left-right!”). When we came back home (after a two-hour ride in a bus full of drunken, vomiting soldiers) Mother burst into tears while unbuttoning her (black) shirt, sat on the chair and wept for hours, ignoring my repeated questions, pushing me away.

  In September 1979, I wrote my first poem,36 in less than an hour, as if hallucinating. The poem was entitled “The Loneliest Man in the World.” It was about Sorge and it was more vicarious self-pitying than anything else. I’m translating it (in fact, only the first of ten tedious stanzas) from memory, for I annihilated the notebook (with other, much less memorable, poems) at the peak of the campaign of self-loathing and destruction37 (which also included shaving every single hair on my body) in my late teens:

  Tokyo is breathing and I am not,

  The curtain of rain glued to my face.

  I don’t live a life, I live a plot,

  Having two selves in one place etc.

  I wanted to show it to my father, next time we went to visit him, but he was ill and he only wanted to know about the Afghanistan events38 (political prisoners could not watch the news). This time we met him in a miasmic room, with a small window looking at the women’s prison. He was escorted by a guard, whom he nicknamed “Barabas,” and who would help him get up or walk (“You can put me back on the cross now, Barabas”). The prison uniform was dangling from his now scrawny shoulders. “I shrank,” he said.

  In January 1980, Father was released from prison, diagnosed with brain cancer, curled into an old man, with most of his teeth missing. He could wear my clothes, and the wedding ring was sliding down his finger—he took it off. We rearranged our place and put the TV in the bedroom, Father taking hold of the remote for the rest of his life. He’d watch TV (mainly the news) all day, sucking a banana, occasionally passing out and then waking up from listless dreams. On his good days, he’d be drinking strong-scented tea39 and tell us stories about his USSR journeys: about Ukrainian weddings, everybody dancing kolomiyka like there was no tomorrow; about nuclear submarines that could stay for days under water (crews going blind); about riding camels in Kazakhstan; about wheat fields spreading as far as you could see and beyond. Every day, he was getting smaller and smaller, as if flesh was being squeezed out of him like toothpaste.

  On May 4, Comrade Tito died. He had been ailing for a long time and they had had to amputate his leg. We were, for days, repeatedly shown footage of (monopedic) Comrade Tito smiling, surrounded by glowing doctors (happier than anyone that he was alive), a wrinkleless sheet covering his retained leg. Sirens began wailing at 15:04. I looked through the window and saw everything still: people stood motionless on the street, cars were paralyzed, as if someone had stopped the film in the projector. On the black TV screen white letters emitted: “Comrade Tito has passed away”—no voice-over, no images shown. Sirens stopped wailing. I looked at the street and everybody and everything was gone, as if the ground had gaped open and swallowed it all.40 I suppose this is Judgment Day,” my father said and turned off the TV. “I suppose this is the end of it all.”

  1 It seems that the Rote Kapelle network initially sent the information that German forces were going to attack the Soviet Union. Since the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was considered to be valid and the source of the information was unclear, Moscow virtually ignored it. But when Sorge sent the confirmation from Tokyo, the information was passed on to the great Stalin himself. He, however, disregarded it and decided to trust Hitler and the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. Sorge’s report from Tokyo on German intentions was filed under the heading “Doubtful and Misleading Information.”

  2 Sorge flew from Berlin to Yokohama on Junker’s first commercial flight from Germany to Japan, with brief stops in New York and Vancouver. Besides the flight log of Flight 1995, kept in the Museum of German Aviation in Frankfurt, there are no records of this historical endeavor. There is no list of passengers, but it is almost certain that the flight was almost full. It seems that the passengers were cosmopolitan, and that the flight was tumultuous (“Winds over the Pacific were just horrid!”); that something was wrong with the heating system, so the passengers were freezing even with miraculously retrieved fur hats and leather gloves; that no one else slept on the flight; that the food was edible, but for some reason there was no water so they all drank champagne (courtesy of Junker); that the plane almost went down in the middle of the night, somewhere over the Pacific; that first men, then women, disgorged themselves all over the aircraft and the vomit froze on the floor; that Sorge briefly befriended a certain Mary Kinzie, an American poetess, which did not go unnoticed by New York gossip-scribes. On September 9, 1933, in the early afternoon, Sorge and his shadowy copassengers arrived at the Yokohama airport, reeking of vomit, emptied of champagne and lobster, with particles of undigested food thawing on the soles of their shoes. Some of them were proud of German air-industry
and reliability, some of them were happy to be alive.

  3 In the early sixties, in the de-Stalinized Soviet Union, the campaign of Sorge’s glorification was set on course and a number of books that contained Sorge’s pictures and previously unrevealed documents from Soviet archives were published. Most of the books were embellished (if not embroidered) with, so to speak, fictitious additions. At the same time, a street in Moscow and a tanker were named after Sorge. In the spring of 1965, the Soviet authorities issued a postage stamp, at the value of 4 kopecks, in his honor. The commemorative stamp showed Sorge full face on a scarlet background together with a reproduction of the medal of the Hero of the Soviet Union.

  4 Father: Wilhelm Richard Sorge, a German engineer, a stout man with a nipple-like wart on the nape of his neck and cloudy eyebrows. Working on the Azerbaijan oil fields, when he fell in passionate love with Sorge’s mother. Sorge was conceived and born in Baku.

  5 Sorge went to Moscow (from Tokyo, via New York, ostensibly visiting Wiesbaden), for the last time, in 1935. In New York, he encountered, for the last time, Mary Kinzie. In her memoirs, entitled The History of Nothingness, Ms. Kinzie depicts Sorge: “When I saw him in 1935 he had become a violent man, a volcanic drinker. Little was left of the charm of the romantic idealist, of the cosmopolitan writer whom I had fallen for on Junker’s flight. Nevertheless, he was still extraordinarily good-looking: his cold blue eyes, surrounded by circular darkness, had retained his capacity for vicious self-mockery. He said: ‘My personality is split between a man who hates himself and a man whom I hate.’ His hair was still potently black, but his cheekbones and sullen mouth were tired” (p. 101).

  In Moscow, Sorge visited Yekaterina Maximovna, whom he was believed to have married in 1933, and who died in Siberia in 1943, in a women’s camp, her throat cut by a sharp piece of ice in the hand of a jealous working-unit leader. Sorge was looking forward to meeting General Berzin, but General Berzin was gone and was replaced by General Semyon Petrovich Uritsky, who was arrested and shot as a Japanese spy in November of 1937.