“There’s a man with an accordion,” announces the Archduke into the Archduchess’s ear. The Archduchess winces, as though he’s delirious.
“What? What are you talking about?”
He leans toward her: “There’s a man …”
But then he sees a pistol and a straight, tense arm behind it and a young, scrawny man at the end of the arm, with a thin mustache and fiery eyes. He sees the pistol retching and bursts of light at the pistol’s mouth. He feels something pushing him against the seat and then it punches him in his belly and all the sounds have disappeared.
Besides the quick-swelling, incomprehensible fear that he can do nothing about and tries to ignore, all he can think of is an evening at Mayerling: the Archduchess played Liebestod on the piano, much too slowly, while he sat in the armchair by the fireplace, feeling the heat on the left side of his back. He wasn’t listening to the Archduchess, he was struggling not to doze off, and then he had a rapid thought—which he immediately suppressed—oh my God, how vernacular and ungraceful was the Archduchess’s beauty and how unbearably vapid and stupid Liebestod really was.
He wants to tell her he’s painfully sorry, now, but the Archduchess, her face frozen in repulsion, the Archduchess is already dead.
2
Most of this story is a consequence of irresponsible imagination and shameless speculation. (A case in point: the Archduke died in a car, which took a wrong turn and then virtually parked in front of the assassin, whose pants were soaked with urine.) Parts of it, however, washed against my shores, having floated on a sea of history books, dotted with islands of black-and-white photographs. A considerable part reached me after it passed through tunnels and mazes of the family memories and legends. For the man with the accordion was none other than my great-grandfather, freshly arrived in Bosnia from Ukraine. He was in Sarajevo, for the first and only time in his life, to obtain papers for the promised piece of land—the bait that brought him to Bosnia—from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was a peasant and had never been in a big city. The fuss and giddiness that he encountered in the city blessed by the Archduke’s visit (and then cursed by his death) overwhelmed him, so much so that he spent nearly a fifth of his savings to buy the accordion from a Gypsy at the city market. By the time he got back to his new home, on a hill called Vucijak, the First World War was well on its way. He was recruited within a couple of weeks and went to Galicia to fight for the Empire, where he died of dysentery. The accordion outlived him by some fifty cacophonic years, losing a few more keys along the way. It met its demise with a discordant accordion sigh, after my blind uncle Teodor (a hand grenade had exploded in his hands when he was six) threw himself on the bed where the accordion helplessly lay. Uncle Teodor is now stuck in the Serb part of Bosnia. Most of my family is scattered across Canada. This story was written in Chicago (where I live) on the subway, after a long day of arduous work as a parking assistant, A.D. 1996.
EXCHANGE
OF
PLEASANT WORDS
1
What year was it? We have chosen to believe it was 1811. Therefore: In the fall of 1811, Alexandre Hemon got up from his slothful bed in Quimper, Brittany; sold, unbeknownst to his widowed mother, their only horse—a perennially exhausted nag—for thirty silver coins; and joined, after some adventurous drifting, Napoleon’s army on its way to Russia, heading for yet another glorious victory. He was, we believe, twenty-one at the time. We imagine him marching through Prussia, still stunned by the greatness of the world; crossing the Nieman river in June 1812, the river washing down a gossamer coat of dust and cooling off his sore, blistering feet. Then we can see him charging at the ferocious Russians at Smolensk. At Borodino, he leads the infantry attack armed with a sabre; he single-handedly captures a battery of begging-for-mercy Russians. (“No, Lev, that was not a victory!” my father might exclaim when narrating this particular stretch of the family history.) We watch with him the flames of Moscow scalding the sky’s belly. But there’s no joy any longer in his extinguished heart: the victories don’t seem to be so wholesome anymore, and his sore feet have changed state—now they’re frozen solid. Then comes the humiliating, murderous retreat. The officers are nowhere in sight, the soldier next to you just soundlessly drops in the snow like an icicle, then never gets up, and the Russians keep mauling the mutilated body of the great army. He stumbles and falls through the snow-laden steppe and when he raises his head he’s in the midst of a thick forest.
We know very well that the route of Napoleon’s army’s retreat went through what is today Belorussia and there’s no plausible explanation for Alexandre ending up in the western Ukraine, near Lvov. Certain factions in the family suggested that higher forces had had a hand in the miraculous (mis)placement of Alexandre. My father—who deems himself to be the foremost authority on the family history and one of its main narrators—dismisses the implausibility with a derisive frown, providing as evidence a map of Ukraine, dating from 1932, on which Smolensk (for example) is just inches away from Lvov.
Be that as it may, Alexandre went astray from the straight road of defeat and found himself, unconscious, in the midst of a pitch-dark forest. He had drifted to the edge of the eternal black hole, when someone pulled him out of it, tugging his benumbed leg. There’s hardly any doubt that that was the great-great-grandmother Marija. Alexandre opened his eyes and saw the angelic smile of a seventeen-year-old girl trying to take off his decrepit, yet still precious, boots. Let me confess that a blasphemous thought has occurred to me: the angelic smile might have been missing a considerable number of teeth, due to the then-common winter scurvy. She, naturally, decided to take him home, unloading the firewood and mounting him on the tired nag (somehow, that was the epoch of tired nags). Her parents, surprised and scared, could not resist her determination, so she made him a bed near the hearth and then nursed him out of his glacial numbness, patiently rubbing his limbs to get the blood started. (Uncle Teodor sometimes likes to add a touch of gangrene at this point.) She fed him honey and lard, and spoke to him mellifluously. Yes, she rekindled his heart and they did get married. Yes, they’re considered to be the Adam and Eve of the Hemon universe.
My mother, who proudly descends from a sturdy stock of Bosnian peasantry, considered all this to be the typical “Hemon propaganda.” And she may well have been right, I’m afraid to say. For we have no well-established facts from which the unquestionable existence of Alexandre Hemon would necessarily follow. There is, however, some circumstantial evidence:
a) At the time of the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, my sister held in her hand a credit card in the name of a certain Lucien Hemon. Lucien was the rifle manager for the French biathlon team. He told my sister, not hesitating to flirt with her, that Hemon was a rather common family name in Brittany and suggested, after she had managed to tell him the highlights of the family history, that a Napoleonic soldier could have well carried it over to Ukraine. That was the germ from which Alexandre sprung, and the previously dominant theory that “Hemon” was a Ukrainian variation on “demon” was indefinitely suspended.
b) In 1990, a busload of excited Bosnian Ukrainians went to Ukraine in order to perform a set of old songs and dances, long forgotten in the oppressed ex-homeland. While they were staying in a waterless hotel in Lvov, the Hemons decided to venture into the village (Ostaloveschy) that my great-grandfather’s family had left to move to Bosnia. I should point out that there was a widespread belief in the family that we had no kin in Ukraine. As they snooped around the depressed village, mainly populated by bored-to-senility elderly folks, they aroused plenty of suspicion among the villagers, who must have believed that the KGB was onto them again. In antique Ukrainian, just for the hell of it, they questioned toothless men leaning on their canes and fences about Hemons in the village, until one of them pointed peevishly at the house across the dirt road. The man in the house told them that, yes, he was a Hemon, but had no knowledge of any kin in Bosnia. He outright told them that he was no fool and that he knew they w
orked for the police. They tried to dissuade him from throwing them out, pointing out that police agents and spies do not move around in such large and compact groups—there were fourteen of them, all vaguely resembling one another and scaring the wits out of their poor distant cousin. Next day, the man (his name was, not surprisingly, Ivan) visited them in their dismal hotel, considerately bringing a bottle of water as a gift. They told him, trying to outshout each other, about the exodus to Bosnia, about the family beekeeping, about the legendary Alexandre Hemon. Yes, he told them, he might have heard about a Frenchman being related to the family a long time ago.
Thus it was definitely established by the family that our tree was rooted in glorious Brittany, which clearly distinguished us from other Ukrainians—a people of priests and peasants—let alone Bosnian Ukrainians. Once Alexandre Hemon was officially admitted to the family, the interest for things Gallic surged (and no one much cared for the nuanced differences between the Bretons and the French). My father would unblinkingly and determinedly sit through an entire French movie—French movies used to bore him out of his mind—and then would claim some sort of genetic understanding of the intricate relations between characters in, say, À Bout de Souffle. He went so far as to claim that my cousin Vlado was the spitting image of Jean-Paul Belmondo, which consequently made Vlado (a handsome blond young man) begin referring to himself as “Belmondo.” “Belmondo is hungry,” he would announce to his mother upon returning from work in a leather factory.
Further developments in the Hemon family-name history were propelled—I’m proud to say—by my literary exploits. In the course of attaining my useless comparative literature degree at the University of Sarajevo, I read The Iliad and found a lightning reference to “Hemon the Mighty.” Then I read Antigone, where I discovered that Antigone’s suicidal fiancé was named Hemon—Hemon pronounced as Haemon, just like our family name. In the agon with Creon, Hemon at first looks like a suck-up:
My father, I am yours. You keep me straight
with your good judgment, which I shall ever follow.
Nor shall a marriage count for more with me
than your kind leading.
But then they get into a real argument, and Hemon tells Creon off: “No city is a property of a single man,” and “You’d rule a desert beautifully alone,” and “If you weren’t a father, I should call you mad.”
My father dutifully copied the one page from The Iliad that, toward the bottom, had “Hemon the Mighty” and the handful of pages in Antigone where the unfortunate Hemon agonizes with the cocky Creon. He highlighted every sighting of the Hemon name with a blindingly yellow marker. He kept showing the copies to his co-workers, poor creatures with generic Slavic surnames, which—at best!—might have signified a minor character in a socialist-realist novel, someone, say, whose life is saved by the fearless main character, or who simply and insignificantly dies. My father didn’t bother to read Antigone, never mind tens of thousands of lines of The Iliad, and I failed to mention to him that “Hemon the Mighty” is absolutely irrelevant in the great epic and that Antigone’s illustrious fiancé committed not-so-illustrious suicide by hanging himself.
The following semester, I found a Hemon in The Aeneid, where he makes a fleeting appearance as a chief of a savage tribe. Sure enough, my father added the promptly highlighted photocopy to his Hemon archive. Finally, in Gargantua and Pantagruel, I stumbled upon “Hemon and his four sons” involved in an outrageous Rabelaisan orgy. The Rabelais reference, however, provided the missing link with the French chapter of the family history, which now could be swiftly reconstructed all the way back to 2000 B.C.
There is, unfortunately, a shadow stretching over this respectable history, a trace of murky, Biblical past that no one dared to follow but which the designated, though inept, historian feels obliged to mention: My cousin Aleksandra still remembers the timor and terror she felt when, in church, she heard the priest utter—clearly and loudly—our name. The priest, she says, described a man who stood in the murderous crowd under the cross on which Our Savior was expiring in incomprehensible pain, his eyes (the man’s, of course) bulging with evil, bloodthirsty saliva running down his inhuman chin, laughing away Our Savior’s suffering. “What kind of man is he?” thundered the priest. “What kind of man could laugh at the Lamb’s slaughter? Hemon was his name, and we know that his seed was winnowed and scattered all over this doomed earth, eternally miserable, alone and deprived of God’s love.” Stricken with horror (she was nine), she retched and ran out, while her father, my uncle Roman, who was not paying attention, kept saying “Amen!”
Later investigations found no Hemons in the Bible, although it is entirely unclear who the researcher was and how exactly the research was conducted. The official explanation, accepted by the entire family, was that the priest was performing an act of vicious revenge, probably because my Aunt Amalija called him “a pig in the vestment” while the wrong ears were listening, or because my father married a communist.
In any case, few thought that we carried the mortifying burden of the ancient sin on our shoulders, or that we would have a family reunion in hell. “We have always been honest, hard-working people,” my father announced to the priest who replaced the hostile one (who had moved to Canada), pointing his finger toward the ceiling, beyond which, presumably, there was the supreme judge and avenger. The priest amicably nodded and accepted a bottle of home-made slivovitz and a jar of first-class honey, with which the potentially eternal dispute between the Hemons and God (regarding his Son) was settled, it seemed then, satisfactorily for both parties.
I have had doubts, however, along with some of my younger cousins and a very close relative. I have had doubts and fears that indeed we could have committed the terrible sin of sniggering at someone else’s suffering. Perhaps that’s why we emigrated, again, in the 1990s, from Bosnia to the United States. Perhaps this is the punishment: we have to live these half-lives of people who cannot forget what they used to be and who are afraid of being addressed in a foreign language, not being able any longer to utter anything truly meaningful. I have seen my parents, mute, in an elevator, in Schaumburg, Illinois, staring at their uncomfortable toes, stowed in foreign shoes, as a breezy English-speaking neighbor entered the elevator and attempted to commence a conversation about the un kind Midwestern weather. My father kept pressing the buttons 11 and 18 (where the verbose American was heading), as if they were supposed to terminate the fucking multilingual world and take us all back to the time before the Tower of Babel was unwisely built and history began to unwind in the wrong, inhuman direction. My mother occasionally grinned painfully at the confounded neighbor, as the elevator rose arduously, through the molasses of silence, to the eleventh floor.
2
Inspired by the success of the Sarajevo Olympiad and the newly established ancient family history, the family council, headed righteously by my father, decided to have an epic get-together, which was to be held only once, and was to be recorded as the Hemoniad. The minutes from that family council meeting (taken by me) can scarcely convey the excitement and joyous awareness of the event’s future importance. Allow me to step out of my worn-out historian’s shoes and become a witness for an instant: I can attest that there was a moment of comprehensive silence—a fly was heard buzzing stubbornly against the window pane; fire was cracking in the stove; someone’s bowels disrespectfully grumbled—a moment when everyone looked into the future marked by the Hemoniad, the event that would make even our Homeric cousins envious. Even Grandfather, in one of his precious lucid moments, seemed to recognize everyone and did not ask “Where am I?” as he normally did. The magic was dispelled when the milk pot boiled over, and a swarm of aunts flew toward the stove to repair the damage.
Thus it was decided that the Hemoniad was to be held in June 1991, at my grandparents’ estate, which was falling apart because of my grandfather’s dotage, but was, nevertheless, “the place where our roots still hold the land together, fighting cadaverous worms.” I
t was also decided that the Hemons should reach out to the Hemuns, the family branch that grew out of the tree trunk of Uncle Ilyko, my grandfather’s brother.
This is their history: Uncle Ilyko went from Bosnia to Ukraine to fight for Ukrainian independence in 1917. After the humiliating defeat, in 1921, he walked to the newly formed border between Romania and Yugoslavia, where they arrested him and put him on the train back to Kiev. He jumped off the train somewhere in Bukovina, and then roamed, as the first snow of the year, ominously abundant, was smothering the earth. He almost froze to death, but was found and saved by a young war widow, who nursed him out of glacial darkness all winter, asking for nothing from him but to warm her cold feet and dilute her loneliness. In the spring, he got up from the shaky bed, took from her trembling hands a bundle with knit socks, a brick of cheese, and a daguerreotype of her. He kissed her tearful cheeks, including a hirsute wart, and walked, only at night, back to the Romanian-Yugoslav border. Sometime in the spring of 1922, he swam across the Danube, whose murky, cold waters dissolved the daguerreotype.
Well, we never liked him. He was a violent, impetuous man. The day Ilyko returned home—where everyone thought he had long been dead—he got into a fight with Grandfather, because my grandfather had married the girl Ilyko had had a crush on. Infuriated, he went to Indjija, Serbia, married a native, and let a drunk clerk change his name to Hemun, which became the original sin of the Hemun branch. Indeed, the Hemuns avoided contact with the descendants of my grandparents, barely spoke Ukrainian, sang no Ukrainian songs, danced no Ukrainian dances, and thought of themselves as Serbs. The Hemuns, then, were to be saved from “the weed of otherness,” and come back to the forest of flesh and bone growing out of the ancient Hemon roots. When they told Grandfather that the Hemuns were to come back to their historic home, he—God bless him—asked: “And who are they?”
The Question of Bruno Page 8
