There were no windows in the room that used to be mine. Instead, there were nylon sheets, with UNHCR written on them, in blue, orderly letters, flapping and bloating in the wind.
I went out for a walk with my mother. My father didn’t like to go out anymore, except for work, because he always felt that someone was watching him. She showed me where Vera, their neighbor, was killed. As soon as Mother and Vera stepped out of the building, arm in arm, Vera was hit in the heart and swirled to the right, my mother showed me the pirouette, and she just dropped right here, still clutching her purse, and then she throttled, spewing blood. I didn’t know what to do, my mother said.
On the pavement, all over the city there were roses—the points of the shell impact. A tiny crate and a few straight lines, of uneven length, like sun rays on a child’s drawing.
There was a rose of the shell that massacred the bread line on Ferhadija. Amela, a friend’s daughter, died there. A piece of shrapnel entered through the back of her head and burst out through her face, taking it apart. Adil, her father, operated on her himself, putting her face together, so they could bury her properly.
There was graffiti on the wall by “Egypt”: “Samir loves D.” Who was D? Where would she be now?
I looked at Trebevic, a peaceful mountain now, dark and silent. My father pointed at it. The Chetniks could see us like the palm of their hand, he said. Right above the roof line, he showed me, was the front line, a thin gray thread in the green, barely discernible.
I thought I would never see you again, Veba said. He lost about thirty pounds. There was not much to eat, you know. Rice or nothing, he said. I had to climb up to the fifteenth floor to get to his apartment. The next door apartment was hollow, charred black, pigeons nesting and cooing. Veba spent the war in the Bosnian army, but now he wanted to go to Canada.
Veba said he worked with a guy who used to be a sharpshooter and was kind of famous for killing two girls on the other side with a single bullet. He was on the top of Hotel Bristol and they were playing somewhere across the river.
There was the intersection where I had the only car accident of my life, rear-ending a tractor. The streetlights were out, one of them was dangling like a shot-off limb, right above a scorched ambulance car.
My mother and I finally talked my father into taking a walk with us. Neighbors greeted us, and we greeted them, and sometimes we would stop and talk. And how is America? they’d ask. Fine, I’d say, hard work. We walked by the Miljacka, under the blooming crowns of chestnut trees. The river had been the front line, so the trees had not been cut for firewood. We walked to the apartment where I used to live. Some refugees from eastern Bosnia lived there. Nice people, my parents said, but very scared. They would let you in, probably, to look around, but they would be scared.
We stood across the street, looking at the UNHCR nylon. A shadow passed across the nylon screen, then another one. I could imagine them preparing a meager dinner, going over to the cupboard, taking out plates, setting them up on the table. Then taking out the utensils, dropping a fork on the floor, perhaps, then spitting on it and wiping it with a cuff. I could see them sweeping and washing the floors; washing the tub; scraping the filthy film in the sink; scrubbing the toilet bowl; vacuuming the carpets. I suddenly had a feeling that I had stepped out of my life and that I was watching myself, that the shadow behind the nylon was me.
I imagined standing in a water line, surrounded by plastic vessels, and then a shell comes soundlessly out of nowhere and hits the asphalt and the person in front of me is mowed down instantly. I can sense that something is wrong with my body and I look down and I am kneeling, my thighs are ripped apart, spouting blood. I topple over and bang my head against the pavement, but there is no pain, I am surprised. And right in the line of my rapidly fainting gaze there is the rose, still warm, filled up with the blood oozing out of my head. But I could never imagine the moment of death, I could never imagine vanishing, so my imagination stays fixed on the rose.
Mozartkugeln
“There is no way you can get in,” the Austrian officer said, tightening his pale lips to express the disapproval of Pronek’s attempt to enter Austria without a visa. The width of his mustache exactly matched the width of his mouth at that moment. Pronek stared into the officer’s greenish eyes, clutching his Bosnian passport in his extended hand. “But all I want is to take look at Vienna,” Pronek said. “I’ll be right back. I won’t stay. I am alien resident of United States.”
At that moment, Pronek understood that he was an oxymoron.
An Asian man, with his shoeless feet propped up on his suitcase, leaning back on the seat, watched the interlocution with drab disinterest. Pronek looked at him as if he were to be a crown witness of supreme injustice, but the man just averted his eyes and looked at a wall-wide ad picturing the Alps, promising clean water, clear air, healthy heights, far from stinky alien crowds.
Pronek went up the escalator, with his handbag full of clean knitted socks and bourek, devised by his mother, and stopped to stare at the door, revolving counterclockwise, contemplating an attempt to get out, until he saw steel bars preventing that possibility.
“Passenger Katzelmacher, please report to the Information desk,” a willowy electronic voice from above said.
He went uphill, tired people stretching uncomfortably on blue seats along the wall. He saw a Bosnian family with recognizably flat, square heads. They were lumped together, probably convinced that separating for a moment would put them in danger of never seeing one another again. A mound of a man, his navel peering out, with a flat briefcase on his rotund belly, ascending and descending. An African child in a Liverpool jersey, bundled in his mother’s lap, looking out, his eyelids slowly sliding down, closing. A man reading Russian newspapers, his brown-socked feet parallel on top of his shoes. There was a tie store, with millions of pendant ties, with only slight variations in pattern and color, dementedly echoing one another. A group of Americans led by a woman clad in an American-flag dress, her wide butt star-spangled, strolled by with their hands full of duty-free shopping bags, laughing vociferously. He saw one of the Americans, a tall, blond man, dropping his Redskins hat, not noticing and walking away, and Pronek felt a twang of glee. He imagined spending his life here in the transit zone of the Vienna airport, pickpocketing for a living, robbing Americans blind every time a planeload of American optimism and resolve was delivered. He wandered into a store populated with Mozarts staring at him askance from the box-tops. All of them had their lips tightened into a narrow line and seemed to be worried about something.
Pronek bought a box of Mozartkugeln, though he could think of no one to give it to.
“Passenger Katzelmacher, please approach the Information desk.”
Pronek approached a camera store. There was a little screen in the window and he recognized himself on the screen. He looked up and saw a tiny camera above the entrance, like a motionless, black hummingbird. He waved at himself, and he waved back at himself. Two veiled women walked into the store and began examining a Polaroid camera. He decided not to enter the store and went to the Johann Strauss Café. He crossed his legs and watched the departure billboard, and all of a sudden a tsunami of changes went through it, and Moscow was carried from the top, on the crest of a rapid wave, to the middle, where it settled down right above Bangkok. A waiter, balancing a weighty tray on three fingers, flitted by, and then began unloading plates, putting them in front of a man in a black shirt unbuttoned to his navel, and silver cross dangling between his nipples. The waiter finally put down a humongous mug of beer, and the man guzzled down half of it, before the waiter stepped away. Then he wiped the froth from his upper lip and looked straight into Pronek’s eyes.
Pronek asked for a glass of mineral water, cold.
There were people sitting in a circle, with their backs to a marble pile from which water patiently oozed. A man with a black wide-brimmed hat frowned, smoking and dropping the ashes into the palm of his left hand. A man in a tweed jacket wi
th suede elbow patches and a gray, academic beard, flipped through a Penthouse with a woman named Grace breasting on the cover. A stream of people poured through one of the rectangular metal detectors, as if they had materialized all of a sudden, beamed down from a distant planet. They all spoke a language Pronek could not locate, occasionally clapping hands in front of each other’s faces. A woman pushed a cart with a little girl on its prow, like an admiral.
“Passenger Pronek, please report to gate number one.”
Pronek left the carefully counted Austrian coins at the table, drank the mineral water to the bottom and sauntered over to the duty-free shop. Johnny Walker, Winston, Jack Daniels, Milde Sorte, Jim Beam, Captain Morgan, Rothmans, Smirnoff, Davidoff, Coco Chanel, Jean Paul Gaultier, Absolut. Pronek walked out and looked at the departure billboard: Moscow was at the bottom, about to be gone, and he had three more hours before the flight. He did not want to fly to Chicago. He imagined walking from Vienna to the Atlantic Ocean, and then hopping on a slow trans-Atlantic steamer. It would take a month to get across the ocean, and he would be on the sea, land and borders nowhere to be found. Then he would see the Statue of Liberty and walk slowly to Chicago, stopping wherever he wished, talking to people, telling them stories about far-off lands, where people ate honey and pickles, where no one put ice in the water, where pigeons nested in pantries.
But, of course, they would never let him out of the Vienna airport, and he had to get to work on Monday.
“Do not leave your baggage unattended!” the voice warbled.
Pronek roamed back to the Johann Strauss Café and saw the man with the silver cross, guzzling down another mug. On the plate in front of him there were two identical, parallel, crescent bratwurst, along with two symmetrical puddles of ketchup and gall-yellow mustard. He felt ravenous hunger. He sat down, summoned the waiter, and ordered the bratwurst. There were violins pinned to the wall, above the Mozart-full shelf, like wingless butterflies. A gray-haired man was squeezing by between the tables, his arms and face splattered with shingles. Pronek realized that the man in the black shirt had a ripening boil on his neck—a fiery red bulb protruding right above the collar. Pronek called the waiter, labeled Johann, and informed him that he had changed his mind and he didn’t want the bratwurst. The waiter glared at him, curling up his upper lip, his apple cheeks fidgeting, and then coughed a little, perilously close to retching, saying nothing. He pulled out his pen, glaring around, and his little order-taking pad, and scratched Pronek away.
“Passenger Pronek, please report immediately to gate number one,” the willowy voice said, with a tinge of anger in it this time. Pronek finally recognized that it was his name that was being called and ceased peeling the Mozartfoil, the Mozartglobe already peering out suggesting pleasures, but he questioned the reliability of his perception, and discarded the call as another instance of aural hallucination.
“Passenger Pronek, please report immediately to gate number one!”
Now this time Pronek could not deny it. He looked around and noticed everyone staring at him with expectation. He bit into the Mozartball, picked up his hand baggage, and commenced walking cautiously toward gate number one.
We could see his reluctance, his clumsy, indecisive gait, and his crumpled, stained shorts, and his green ten-year-old corrugated polyester shirt. He walked toward the gray rectangle of the metal detector warily, as if aware that once through the gate there would be no way back.
He munched the other half of the Mozartkugeln and rolled the foil into a little ball. He stopped and looked around, as if waiting for a signal, or the audience applauding. Then he looked toward us, but he couldn’t see us behind the gate. We were waiting, knowing that he had nowhere else to go. But he showed no desire to get over there. He made a couple of wobbly steps and then stopped, unwrapped another Mozartglobe, bit into it, and just stood before the gate, chewing and smiling at us, as if he knew we were there.
IMITATION OF LIFE
For a long time I used to go to bed early, but then my parents finally bought their first TV set. I remember full well crouching behind a gray armchair, in the corner of our living room, hiding from the images of a creature that had three legs, a long snakish neck, and a fist-like head, with a furious only single eye sending lethal rays down on terrified people and buildings. The buildings looked like weak, grotesque matchboxes, compared to the progressing monster blowing them, with its gaze, into flaming dust and smithereens. I hid behind the armchair, but—every once in a while—I’d dare to look at the TV across the room, the fake furry texture of the armchair rubbing my cheek, and the horrors on the screen would send me, with bellows, back behind the chair. I would lie down on my convulsing belly, trying to be as tiny as possible, the geometrical, colorful patterns on the carpet as close to me as the inside of my eyelids. I do not know what my parents did while I was writhing in fear, but I remember being alone—there was no one and nothing between me and the three-legged destroyer, apart from the armchair. It had awkward plywood armrests and stubborn, eternally creaking, springs. The movie being shown was, I’m inclined to believe, The War of the Worlds.
When I was sick, I would lie in the living room, because of the TV, and watch Sesame Street or Survival. There would be a little chair by my wrinkled bed, an ex-sofa, with an array of bottles, pillboxes, and lozenges, and a mountain of blown-through and crumpled paper napkins. My mother would pull down the green shades and I would sometimes disregard the TV and, benumbed by a persistent fever, do nothing but watch a sunbeam, which would manage to squeeze in between the two shades, move across the room, pointing, like a blind man’s cane, at things unawares.
And it would stumble upon a bad reproduction of an irrelevant Soviet painting, picturing a desolate autumn forest path. The beam would start on the left side of the painting and go over the stunned cluster of dun and gray birch trees, as if counting them, turning them ochre for a long moment. Then it would go over the assembly of souvenirs, brought by my father from Zaire, on the fake-ebony chest: an erect elephant tusk, pointing at a dark wooden mask with a mouth strained into a gaping grin; a baked-clay owl, enameled in carmine, orange and lemon-yellow colors, with bulging eyes that would follow me all over the room. I would fade in and out of languid, confusing dreams and the beam would move quickly, as if crossing a dangerous street, across the opposite wall. I would look up and, above my head, in the sunbeam, a stream of specks would flow upward, like air bubbles let go by a diver. Then it would go over the heavily laden bookshelf, over the stiff spines of my father’s Russian math books, unperturbed by their intricate titles, and it would finally stop at the right end, and, depending on the season, insist on a spine-torn Beekeeping Encyclopaedia or a never read, orderly lined-up, pristine Selected Works of Joseph Conrad. After that, the beam would cautiously retreat, toward the cleft between the shades, and then it would vanish. The room would fill up with, first, turquoise, then, maroon dusk. The night would set in and the things in the room would become immobile, obscure, silent, and I would lie, listening to the encroaching hum of darkness and my own wheezing slowly disappearing in it.
A thing not to be forgotten: a radio, model “Universal,” with a plywood shell that would reverberate and tremble when I’d turn up the volume to the last notch. The upper front part was covered with burlap-like cloth, behind which one could discern the circular shadows, like breasts under a shirt, of the two speakers. At the front bottom there was a narrow ledge with buttons—like an accordion keyboard, except there were only seven buttons. When the far left button was pressed, the light would go on behind the screen with the names of all the cities of the world: Abu Dhabi, Edinburgh, Cologne, Ankara, Baghdad, Warsaw, Barcelona, Dresden, Cairo, Athens, Copenhagen, Moscow, Vladivostok, Córdoba, Dacca, Dakar, Djibouti, Andorra, The Hague, etc. The right knob controlled the volume, the left knob made the red line between the light and the screen slide behind the city names. Sundry languages would turn into static cracking, bleating, and wailing, or a bass hum, and then back into a diff
erent language. I would stop the red line behind a city name—say, Munich—and then listen to the incomprehensible language. I would picture the people who were talking—only their heads, in fact, for I couldn’t imagine their bodies. I would imagine a round-faced, bearded man speaking in Moscow, smacking his lips after every successful sentence; a pale, blond woman warbling from Monaco; an angry, teeth-clenched man in Lagos. Sometimes I would try to guess what they were talking about. I could tell when they were reading the news, because of the flat dullness of their voices; when they were praying, because of the submerged pain in the sounds they were making; when they were reading poetry, because of the whining and undulating. But sometimes they would just speak and I knew nothing about what they were saying: were they talking about their own lives? about their children? about their history? were they telling stories? about what? These meaningless voices were somehow mesmerizing, like music, and I could imagine the space, the streets and buildings and rooms behind them. I could hear the curling, passionate streets of Rome: gurgling Vespas and people at the market arguing over the prices of tomatoes. I could hear the gray sternness of the Potsdam voice: cubic, symmetrical buildings with wide, spacious streets where people looked minuscule and stifled, and policemen stood at corners with leashed German shepherds. I could hear the clamor of the great city behind the Cairo voice: everybody on the streets, the voice passing through a narrow street full of haggard people in burlap robes, selling heaped fruit and strange pastry, and there’s a cage hanging over the door, nearly walled off by shelves burdened with fish, and in the cage there’s a dog, a small, anxious dog, with big flappy ears, and its curious eyes are burning with a red glow.
The Question of Bruno Page 18
