The Question of Bruno

by Aleksandar Hemon

  One day, I fretfully unscrewed the plywood from the back of the radio and saw the heated, dusty lamps, still, positioned according to some unfathomable logic, like chess pieces. I stared at the entrails of the radio, inhaling warm sneezeful dust, and I didn’t know how it all worked. There were entangled colored sinews connecting the lamps: some lamps had inside a thin glaring wire, like a trapeze, and some of them were dark, as if whoever was in there was sleeping.

  My best and only friend’s nickname was Vampire, because he had long and conspicuous eyeteeth, and when I was seven his mother died. She was a tiny, skinny woman who did little but smoke and gossip. Then she abruptly shrank and then she died. “Cancer!” they told me. After the funeral, I had to go to their apartment, they said, just briefly, to pay my respects. I walked into a boxy room full of whimpering adults in black. Someone shoved a glass full of warm, but colorful—flaming orange and red—liquid into my hands. Everyone seemed to have a burnt-to-the-filter cigarette between their blistery fingers. They reeked of sleeplessness, misery, and warm, stale beer. Men were unshaven, with black sleeves rolled wearily halfway up their forearms. Women wore black sweat-soaked scarves around their sallow faces, dabbing tears and sweat-pearls above their lips with the scarves’ corners. They scurried around, mindfully serving people who would reluctantly enter the room, as if stepping into thick, retarding mud. The clock on the wall, with an immobile pendulum, showed 12:02, and the hands were palsied—the second-hand had stopped between five and ten. The mourners told me the clock was stopped at the exact moment of her death and that it would never run again, as long as they live. I sat there, uncomfortable, with burning armpits, for some time, listening to them morosely retelling stories about her life: how she made the best potato soup ever; how she wanted to listen to the weather forecast the Monday she died, and that week was to be sunny and delightful; how she fell asleep on a streetcar and went around the city with it for hours, finally getting off at the wrong stop, not knowing where she ended up. Then I downed my turbid drink and left, sheepishly saying: “Goodbye,” to everyone, which no one really noticed, except for a young woman who carried a plateful of chicken thighs, and who, in passing, pinched my ruddy cheek with her greasy fingers.

  The playground was in the center of the park, square, surrounded by the bushes, and in the middle—a square within a square—there was a sandbox. There were also a slide and a merry-go-round, a couple of swings and seesaws, and six benches at the edges, all rusty and shabby, positioned randomly, like mountains. The playground used to be covered with fine gravel, which was thinning out now, and one could see patches of black dust with glass shards, here, and there, glittering meekly like lit, distant windows. The sandbox used to contain fine beach sand, but most of it was gone and the sandbox was full of gravel and black dust, just like everything else. We would run around, Vampire and I, chasing each other, or playing soccer, or simply fighting, and there would be a fog of dust around us, sticking to our sweaty skin and tongues. Our throats would be dry and scratchy and we would clear them, producing a harsh, choking sound, and then spit. The spit would hit the ground and roll in the dust, like a gelatin marble, and then it would stop, as if exhausted, and sag, drying into nothingness, coated with dust. Sometimes, we would ignore the seesaw, slide, and swings and climb a large lime tree at the edge of the park. We would clamber to the top and then look at the other children as though they were at the bottom of the sea and we were in a boat, fishing.

  The cinema was called Arena and I didn’t know what that word meant. It was freshly built, so it was clean and all the colors were strong—or is it that I just remember it clearly and that these days no color is sharp or bright. In any case, I can easily picture the spring-green doors, with strawberry-red handles and locks, and the breathing, cold, attractive, crepuscular darkness gaping behind. In the display box, on the left of the doors, there was the poster of the film being shown, usually rather old. I’m able—with some effort—to remember the poster for Imitation of Life. There was the story of the movie: “When a young actress (Lana Turner) meets a young photographer (John Gavin) she cannot know that he will be the love of her life. But when she chooses her career over her love for him she cannot know, alas, that she’s making the greatest mistake of her life, etc.” Alongside the story, there were retouched, cumbersomely sumptuous, colored stills: Lana Turner on the beach, her eyes sky-blue, her hair golden, her teeth snow white, her skin virgin pink, and behind her a painted crowd, thousands of blissful bland Americans, none of them discernible from the mass; Lana Turner facing John Gavin, who is holding her shoulders, as if trying to lift her off the field of silky verdure and save her from sinking into it.

  We were perched in the crown of the lime tree, enjoying our elevated invisibility—we could see girls on the swings and an old man dozing off on the bench while trying to read. A rivulet of saliva would occasionally trickle down his chin, he would wake up with a sudden grunt and look around in a slight panic, as if embarrassed by his dream, or afraid that everything might have disappeared while he was asleep.

  A dog trotted into the park and stopped by the sandbox. It looked at the swinging girls and then it looked at the old man. We clambered hastily down the tree and rushed toward the dog. It scurried away, retreating a bit, stopped and looked at us. His pinkish-brown tongue hung out of his mouth, like a dead squirrel. He looked as if a dun rug was thrown over his scaffold-skeleton. He had a straight cicatrice line on his hind thigh, as though he had been lashed with a belt or a chain. There were beige patches of skin on his neck and ass, and his tail was cut off. But he stared at us and would not go away, rearranging his gaze every time we moved toward him.

  In the summer, I would sit on the balcony facing west, the tips of the top branches of a maple tree fluttering and obscuring children playing in the park. I could only hear their voices and see them intermittently running between branches. They would use terrible, vile words and I felt guilty for eavesdropping, but I couldn’t stop. Feeble cloudlets of cigarette smoke would rise, like sighs, from the balcony below and would mingle with the scent of blooming lime trees, warm concrete and dust, stirred up by children in the park. I’d sit there and watch everything throb with being, and listen to the hodgepodge of noises. Often, I would see an old man, wearing an aging pair of sandals and a straw hat, walking higgledy-piggledy across the street, throwing his arms around, shoulders leaping, as if he were exploding in a series of unstoppable hiccups, twitching his head back, and forth, making one step forward, and then one step back. It would take him a long time to get from the corner of our street to the entrance of his building. I would see his face, flashes of cramps and helpless grins, as if he was perpetually surprised by pain—I knew he couldn’t help it—always on the verge of falling down. I would watch him and his long hobbling journey home, and I wondered why that was happening to him and not to me. Years later, I would learn he had a debilitating disease that breaks down old people, but he was long gone by then, having left just a memory of his stubborn straw hat, which would never fall off his quaking head. I would only sometimes see his wife—an obese, tired woman—walking a black poodle, which would stop now and then, oblivious to the limp leash, and, after some retching, cough out a clot of brownish sludge.

  The whole school was going to the cinema and, while we were impatiently waiting to cross the street, a lean girl with long, pony-tailed and dark hair, much older than any of us, ran across the street and, after a deafening squeal, was hit by a polished red Volkswagen. She went up like a bouncing ball, levitated for a blink of our flabbergasted eyes, and then she went down, with a whump. There was a moment of silence and then a boy in a navy-blue jacket started screaming. We were rushed away and, a little later, walking two by two, holding each other’s trembling hands, sang a song our teacher ordered us to sing: “With Comrade Tito, the people’s fearless son, not even hell will stop us …” In the cinema, we saw Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and I could hear the boy sobbing the whole time.

  On o
ur way back, everything was normal at the street crossing—the girl and the car were gone. Except, close to the pavement, among balls of dirt and black motor-oil puddles, there was a sneaker, bright blue, with the sole face up and a piece of pinkish chewing-gum stuck to the heel. When I was returning home from school, it was raining. The sneaker was still there, and a rainbowy rivulet, descending from one of the oil puddles, went cautiously around it.

  So we ran, Vampire and I, to our respective homes and brought back the needed nourishment: boiled eggs, chicken heads, a bottle of milk and, also, one of the beaten enameled pots that Vampire’s mother (he said) used to use to make potato soup. We watched the dog lapping up milk, while he raised his languid gaze every once in a while and looked at us, as though trying to recognize us. But he never would and he would just delve back into the milky pot. Vampire wanted to name him Tito, but I thought we could get arrested for that, so we named him Sorge, after a spy I had read about and wanted to be like.

  Once in a while, I’d sneak into the cinema, when the bored usher wasn’t watching. Or I’d ask an adult to claim me as his (or her) child and take me in without paying the ticket. I sat in the front row, next to a complete stranger, feeling safe in the darkness, my head tilted back. Before the show, there’d be a smiling woman on the screen, always the same one, with sparkling eyes and a beehive hairdo, looking and pointing at us, asking us not to smoke, so we never did. The screen was vast and concave, as if preparing to envelop us. The close-ups were gigantic: once I realized in horror that I could fit into Clint Eastwood’s mouth, like a cigar. I could see the texture of the image overlapping with the texture of the screen. Right above my head there was a long, floating whirlpool of dust inside the fat, barely conical beam of light. The newly sprayed hay-fragrant air freshener struggled to overwhelm the sweat, cheap aftershave, and perfume brought from the outside. The chilling darkness of the cinema would glide over my skin, making me intensely aware of the boundary between the world and me. Sometimes I’d be so cold I shivered, but it was impossible to leave. I’d sit in my seat, freezing, about to pee in my pants, my thighs glued to the seat-skin, until the very end of the credits, reading all those unpronounceable names piously and wondering who were those people. Why were their names important? What did they do? Where were they? Were they alive?

  Vampire managed to convince me that the mistletoe berries growing on the lime tree were not only delicious, but also capable of making me immortal and endowing me with incomprehensible power. After I had eaten several berries and then began retching, Vampire, in a moment of malicious inspiration, ran to my door, rang the bell, and told my father what I had done, omitting his role in the incident. When I got home, my father told me, with grave sincerity, that the mistletoe berries were deadly poisonous and that I should expect to be dead within a day. What could I do?—I trusted him. I burst into moribund tears, for I’d been promised to be taken to see Battle of Neretva the coming Saturday. I asked my father to spend my last hours with me. He lay on the bed, and I pulled down the shades, turned off the TV, deleting the quiz show he had been watching. I lay by his side, my head on his vast chest, I could hear his sonorous heartbeat, like a clock. I inhaled the scent of his Pitralon aftershave and waited to die, staring patiently into the darkness. I could hear an excited radio voice, coming from someone else’s apartment, whinnying in delight, for someone, somewhere, had scored a long-awaited goal.

  In the building across the street, on the first floor, there lived an old woman named Emilija. Her face was being dragged down her skull like a glacier, wrinkles echoing one another, and the skin on her thin, fragile arms hung down, like dough. I thought she must have been beautiful when she was young. She always had formerly white gloves on her hands and a colorless scarf wrapped around her head, like a turban, but that was only because she believed that her neighbors wanted to overwhelm and suffocate her with dust, which they somehow kept blowing through her walls. The blinds on her windows were perennially closed and, at night, I’d see a flimsy shadow, projected on the blinds by a single source of feeble light. I’d see a silhouette throwing up her long puppet arms and pointing and shaking a finger at something or somebody beyond the screen window. Sometimes, she’d abruptly open her window and shout in a piercing, exhausted voice: “You want me to go away, but I shall not! Not ever! Go to hell! You want me to suffocate! Let me tell you! I can’t die! I’ll never die just to spite you! Go to hell!” Once, in the middle of the night, she threw out a bottle of milk, shrieking: “Poison! Poison!” The bottle shattered on the pavement and the milk puddle, awkwardly shaped, like a sea on a map, scintillated back at the street lights.

  We built Sorge a house out of a sturdy cardboard box. We put cushy towels on the cardboard floor and even an embroidered pillow, which Vampire stole from his home, while his father was away drinking. Sorge would follow us everywhere. He’d sit in front of the cinema exit doors, as we exalted over the adventures of Shaft or Agent X. He’d doze under one of the park benches, as we oscillated on the swings. When it was time to go home, we’d have to keep him busy, if we wanted to sneak out on him, with bones and eggs. He was stinky and filthy and was populated by a colony of fleas, so, one day, after a sudden rain had washed him, I stole some money from my mother’s wallet and bought a can of bug spray—with a picture of a cockroach writhing in unspeakable horror under the triangular shadow spreading from the picture of the bug-spray can. So we sprayed Sorge. Vampire held him around the neck, as though hugging him, and Sorge stood patiently, stamping his hind legs a little, like a horse being groomed. I sprayed him all over, particularly the patches. When Vampire let him go, Sorge dutifully licked his face and sauntered away and then lay down under the slide.

  And then the nonsmoking lady would reappear, with the same unperturbable smile, and I would exit the cinema with a stream of people trickling into the blazing day. I was blinded every time. I’d close my eyes and stellar spots would glide across the inside of my eyelids. Everything was deafening: bleating car horns, the fractious rumble of the traffic, the clamor and shouts of children playing soccer, radios turned on everywhere. I’d open my eyes and the world would be back: square, concrete, gray, and cacophonic, far from the mesmerizing tranquillity of the screen and darkness. I’d wish to have not seen the movie, so I could see it again and go through the same unforgettable deluge of sensations, but I’d immediately know I couldn’t—for time always went only forward, as in films. I’d know I could never go back and prevent losing a precious moment, and a warm wave of painful sorrow would keep spreading through my body, until it would moisten and blur my gaze.

  We found Sorge in his house petrified, lying sideways, his legs stretched out stiff, his jaw taut in a horrible grin, gums pale, eyes wide and lackluster in terrified surprise. We tried to push him and wake him up with a wooden stick, but the stick quickly broke. We dug a shallow hole behind the slide and buried him there. We put the potato-soup pot on the grave, lest we forget his gravesite, but the next day the pot was nowhere to be found.

  My father was gone when I woke up, and I thought I had died. I didn’t know if I was still the same person or someone else, so I didn’t dare move. I tried to hear or sense my pulsating heart, but everything was mute. There was a diligent beam of light coming through an obscure hole in the shades and I saw busy motes of dust levitating in midair. I heard someone shouting: “And you can go fuck yourself!” and a remote slamming of a door. The radio was still on, but the ecstatic voice was not there, just shrill gibberish. It was dark and cool, I was hungry and I had to pee. I looked at the clock on the wall, dimly gleaming, but I couldn’t see the hands moving. I got up, doubtful, opened the door and found myself facing a torrent of light, in the midst of which my father was listlessly watching the quiz show. “Welcome back!” he said.

  When I finished the first grade with mild success, my parents bought me a watch as a reward. It was circular, with large slender numbers rounded up and a convex glass above them. The second-hand moved in tiny jerks and I coul
d never catch the moves of the bigger hands, although I would stare intently. I looked at the watch often, fascinated with the immutable tenacity with which the needly hand vaulted over the stolid numbers. I would touch my pulse and look at the watch and the steady synchronicity of the two rhythms soothed me. I had to wind my watch every night before going to bed, I was told, lest it stop while I was asleep.

  After a night of unsettling dreams, I woke up and saw two Nazi flags through my window: red, with white circles, like eyes, and swastika-pupils, flapping on the train station. They taught us that the enemy never slept and I thought that it had all come back. I ran toward the train station, bumping into a woman—her hands full of bags loaded with lean green onions and chubby peppers—who didn’t seem to be disturbed in the least by the flags. There was a field of injured German soldiers, lying on the rail tracks, with bandaged heads, arms, and legs, with stains, here and there, of crimson blood. Some of them were standing up, smoking and laughing. One prostrate soldier, with a large blot of blood on his chest, leapt from the stretcher and ran, chortling, toward a group of soldiers sitting in a freight train car with a red cross painted on it, their booted feet dangling cheerfully. I elbowed my way through the forest of legs belonging to the throng of calm civilians, and got to the front row. There were two German officers walking down the train station corridor and then opening a door and entering the building. Above their heads, there were hanged rugged men and women, revolving on thick ropes. One of them smiled at me, revolved once, winked, went through another revolution, and smiled again, shrugging his shoulders. The two German officers again walked down the corridor decisively, with black-steel machine guns, firmly grasped, pendant around their necks. They opened the door and got in. Then they got out, went back to the end of the corridor, turned back, waited for a moment, and walked back, determined, their mouths tight shut, uniforms neat, black glistening boots sternly brushing away dust and pebbles. They opened the door and got in. Then I saw the camera, moving sideways in front of the crowd, toward me, on narrow, thin rails. When the officers opened the door the camera would stop and then go back to the end of the rails and wait for the officers. The crowd stood there, with its hands in its pockets, soundless and motionless, just a throng of eyes following the officers, hypnotized. Then the officers stopped walking down the corridor, lit, with relief, their cigarettes and sat at the threshold of the door. The crowd was dispersed and the camera taken off the tripod and moved elsewhere. They took down the hanged man above my head, he twisted his head, first left, then right, stretched his arms, as if imitating an ascending airplane, and then dissolved into the mass.