Love and Obstacles (11 page)

Bogdan had been delivered to Chicago through some lamentably narrow refugee channel—a Uke priest knew a Uke priest who knew about a cheap room at Szmura’s. The size of a closet, the room was in the apartment that Szmura rented from his ex-girlfriend’s grandmother, who blissfully chose to ignore the fact that Szmura had permanently and irreversibly dumped the apple of her eye shortly after banging her.

As small as the room was, it echoed with emptiness. Bogdan parked his suitcases flat in the windowless corner; took a sheet and a blanket out of the unroped one and spread them under the murky window—unequipped with mattress or duvet, this was where he would sleep. The room resembled an installation in a vacuous art gallery, the reflection of the ceiling bulb on the wood floor intended to signify the false surface of existence, the felled suitcases embodying the transitory nature of life—or more specifically, the life of the subject, shrimped up in the corner against a bare, mispainted wall. Naturally, it was all very funny. During another poker game at Szmura’s (which I missed), everyone filed into Bogdan’s chamber and found the installation uproariously amusing: they guffawed to the verge of retching and fell to the existential floor, while Bogdan sat in his corner, perplexed by all the wisecracks about his artsyfartsiness.

He did eventually get an official tour of the apartment—an introduction to the Szmura world and its impenetrable mysteries. In the living room, with a sweeping movement of his hand, Szmura offered his furniture to Bogdan’s eye: the claret velvet armchair facing a pseudo-Oriental coffee table, all Chinese curves and Japanese angles; the crimson sofa, with its wide U shape and stern, flat armrests—for some reason, Szmura referred to it as “the Puerto Rican.” Bogdan was allowed to peruse the Puerto Rican when Szmura was absent, he was told; otherwise the armchair was available. Then Bogdan had to inspect the collection of objects on the mantelpiece, which consisted of an upright bullet-casing that Szmura’s venerable father had brought back from Vietnam; a glass ashtray full of foreign coins (mainly kopecks and zloty); a bottle of Grolsch beer (“Be very careful,” Szmura said, “ ’cause this bottle is from Florida”); and a figurine of a cow, complete with a swollen udder, that was left unmentioned. Bogdan also glanced out the window, although it looked over the same alley as did the window in his room. There was nothing to see, of course, except a garage door inching downward like a stage curtain, and a few fallen deciduous leaves slipping inside before it closed.

In the bathroom, Bogdan was shown the hooks that Szmura used to hang his upper-body (navy blue) and lower-body (azure) towels and his carmine silk robe with a fire-breathing dragon on the back—Bogdan was assigned the fourth hook. He was also told that he must make a habit of lifting the toilet seat, should he put it down for the big dookie, and that he must never shave or piss in the shower. Finally, Szmura pushed a little jar into his face, its bottom lined with yellowish mites—this was where Szmura collected the wormy stuff from his nose pores.

In the kitchen, Bogdan was warned that the mug inscribed MИКОЛА, its chipped brim adorned with a traditional Ukrainian pattern, was never to be touched. The fridge contained a bowl of intensely red vine tomatoes (“They make the blood strong”), along with Szmura’s black dress shoes on a tray; a plate of rotting shrimp; and a jar of Vaseline, which Bogdan could not fail to conclude was deployed for some form of self-abuse. He and Szmura did not dwell long over the contents of the pantry. Suffice it to mention a large number of Shake ’n Bake boxes stacked on the bottom shelf, and an impressive collection of soup cans lined up in alphabetical order on the top two shelves: Shelf No. 1, from Asparagus to Minestrone; Shelf No. 2, from Mushroom to Zucchini. The soup was not for Bogdan, Szmura declared. Were he ever to open a can, he would have to replenish the collection the very same day. Concluding the tour, Szmura flung open the door of his own bedroom, and exposed briefly a darkness into which the light cut a lambent rhomboid. Bogdan was never to enter this room, not even if invited. “Think of it,” Szmura said, “as a minefield.”

Szmura, however, would often freely enter Bogdan’s room, opening the door violently. He would launch into monolithic monologues welcoming Bogdan to this great country, which had been built by immigrants, including Szmura’s own grandparents, who’d had to work hard to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and now had a condo in Orlando—which was great because it meant that there was an opportunity for everybody in this country, even a fuckface. D.P. like Bogdan. Bogdan could tell that Szmura enjoyed these speeches; he would stroke the hair coppice on his forearms as he spoke, as if petting himself.

Szmura’s manner of door-opening was closely linked to his fantasies of becoming an FBI agent: he was an intern at a law office and watched
COPS
regularly, all in preparation for the FBI entrance exam, which he would take as soon as he graduated from the University of Illinois law school. Bogdan was made privy to Szmura’s FBI fantasies after he unwisely agreed to a demonstration of a submission technique. He found himself on the floor, with Szmura’s knee pressing against his jugular, his elbow and shoulder about to pop. “I could kill you, if I wanted to,” Szmura said matter-of-factly before he let him go.

Szmura was also a note-leaver: every morning, Bogdan would find on the kitchen table a note in a taut, wiry handwriting that corresponded somehow to the essence of Szmura—the letter T was like his body: straight, slim, angular. The notes occasionally welcomed him again (
Feel at home
), but more often they were directives (
Wash the damn dishes
) or announcements (
Rent due Tuesday
). There were some that stretched themselves thin between nonsense and poetry (
The fireplace is not real
). When Szmura, abruptly and inexplicably, started writing them down in verse form, Bogdan began collecting them. One day, from the desert covering the ruins of Chicago, a rusty box full of faded patches of paper will be excavated, and some good archaeologist will discover the soul of a perished civilization in these abstruse verses:

Predictably, Bogdan often retreated to his hollow room, lying in the dark, palpating the wall, as if looking for an escape tunnel. Szmura would sometimes bring home a woman—he had an unmistakable taste for the meretricious kind—and Bogdan would listen to their coital exchanges, which always seemed rehearsed, as though they were auditioning for a porn flick: she would implore Szmura to put his big dick inside her, and he would say, Oh yeah, so that’s what you want, bitch, and she would say, Yeah, gimme your big dick, and he would say, Oh yeah, so that’s what you want, bitch, and so it would go, until they approached the climax, when she would squeal in frequencies peculiar to the sound of a wet finger rubbing against glass, while Szmura would embark upon a volley of
fucks
: fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. He occasionally encouraged his sticky companions to knock on Bogdan’s door and volunteer some secondhand erotic kindness. Only one of them actually did: wearing nothing but roller skates, a buxom part-time Wicker Park waitress purred kittenishly and scratched on his door. Unable to comprehend what was going on, frightened by the screeching of the roller skates on the floor, Bogdan didn’t stir. The following morning, Szmura left a note saying,
It was a hit and run
/
Bo
/
That’s all it was.

I do not know what Bogdan made of Szmura, or how aware he was of his insanity. Perhaps he was misled (as I had been) by his occasionally human impulses: he bequeathed his Shake ’n Bake collection to the Uke church, to be distributed to newly arrived immigrants; he was known to leave a tip even if the waitress was not fuckable; and one time he left a note saying
, If a bird flies in, let her out.
Most misleading of all, I think, was the polite good-boy manner that Szmura employed when discoursing with Pany Mayska, his landlady.

The day after Bogdan moved in, Szmura took him across the hall and knocked at Pany Mayska’s door, a nosegay of fragrant lilies in hand. They heard the slow shuffle of her feet, and Szmura said, “Now, be nice here. No talking out of your ass.” He scowled and rescowled, raising his upper lip and distending his nostrils—a grimace that Bogdan would one day learn to recognize as threatening. Pany Mayska was puny, her face powdered and centered around a small rouged mouth, her hair sparse, exposing the white streaks of her skull. She wore a pointy bra that might have been alluring half a century before, but now served as a scaffold for her cavernous chest. Szmura greeted her in Ukrainian, kissed her on the cheek, while she grabbed his lilyless hand and did not let him withdraw it, pulling him in. Her fingers were like claws, withered and twisted. Her apartment reeked of pee and pierogi, of cleanliness and ironed bedsheets. The smell traveled quickly through Bogdan’s synapses until it reached the room where his grandmother had died: Ukrainian handiwork of the same geometric pattern multiplied on the tablecloth and the cushions; obsolete church calendars scattered around; a pensive etching of the poet Taras Shevchenko, glowering over his scrubby mustache; icons of bent-neck Virgins with chunky toddlers at their bosoms.

Szmura asked after Pany Mayska’s health; she said it was fine—both of them all hearty smiles. Szmura might have slapped her on the back, had it not been for her frailty. And how was Victor, her grandson? Oh, he was fine, uncovering ancient Slavic grave sites near Kharkiv. He’d be home by Christmas. And how was Oksana? Ah, she still didn’t have a boyfriend. “МИКОЛa, I would have liked so much to have you as my grandson-in-law.” “ПaНИ МaЙСКa, I am too young to get married,” Szmura said. At this, she sighed pensively, as if Mike Szmura were the unfulfilled love of her own youth, her vanished dream.

Bogdan sat and listened with a general grin that suggested that he was interested but not prying. Pany Mayska stood up with creaking difficulty and reached for a bowl on the immaculate counter. When she put the bowl down on the table, it was full of crescent cookies. “And who are you?” she asked, pushing the bowl toward Bogdan. He gently jerked his head to express his willingness to taste a cookie, and then he told her who he was, with fatigued detachment, as if retelling the plot of a tedious Eastern European movie.

Szmura had told him that Pany Mayska used to work as a radiologist, taking X-rays of smokers’ scorched lungs and the smashed hips of adventurous seniors. She was so fucking irradiated, Szmura said, that she glowed in the dark, bones coiling in her body, everything inside her rotting splendidly. Perhaps it was due to her radioactivity that Bogdan could always sense her before she knocked at their door. He would sometimes reach the door before she had even opened hers. Through the peephole, he could see her wobble over with a plateful of pierogi. She knew that Szmura was at work during the day, but she would always ask about МИКОЛа. She never agreed to come in, but she stood at the door and made him tell her, all over again, what he had told her the first time: He was a Ukrainian from Bosnia, from a small town called Prnjavor; he used to own a photo shop; he had been forced to fight for the Serbs in the war; he had escaped with nothing but the clothes he wore; and now he worked at a Jewel supermarket, packing bags until he could find something better. After Bogdan had delivered his last line, she’d hand him the plate, covered with a flimsy serviette, and displaying the same Ukrainian pattern that dominated the rest of her habitat. Then she’d deliver her own lines in the following sequence:

a.
It was terrible what was going on in Bosnia; it reminded her of the Great Famine, when millions of Ukrainians died; she prayed that it would end soon.

b.
Bogdan should just think about all the places where Ukrainians could be found: we were everywhere from Bosnia to the jungles of Africa.

c.
Ukrainians were very visual people, people who liked pictures; take Disney, for example, who was one of us, a
ДИСНИ
—he got his many ideas, his artistic inspirations, from Ukrainian national culture, from our love of Nature.

As rehearsed, Bogdan would extend his face into a serious smile and tighten his stomach muscles to suppress any laughter at the idea that Donald Duck was part of his heritage, that Goofy was Ukrainian. He grew to like Pany Mayska and her cookies and pierogi; he learned to bask in the glow of her radiation.

Since she had retired, she volunteered at the Museum of Ukrainian Culture and History, a funest three-story building right across the parking lot from the Jewel where Bogdan worked. Once I saw him wandering over there in a green apron and a cap that would have been fashionable in Eastern Europe decades earlier. (I was pretty sure it was he; I hadn’t met him yet, but the tired gait, more than anything else, gave him away.) Pany Mayska opened the door and waived the two-dollar entrance fee with an understanding nod. Bogdan stepped into a room suffused with a green darkness, its light dammed by heavy curtains.

She looked even smaller and more radiant in the sepulchral murk. Bogdan followed her, feigning interest, past painted wooden eggs and sallow bobbin lace, his chest reverberating with sorrow. It all made him think of the shabby armoire in his grandparents’ bedroom, which he had dug through as a child in search of the creased photos from their childhood. Pany Mayska ascended the stairs to a room that told, she said, the story of our people. The room was curtainless, with dust particles floating all around as the sunlight blazed outside. She pointed at a glass case under the window: a cracked bread trough; an eagle-shaped medal coated with psoriatic rust; a letter whose cursive was melting into bluish waves. Bogdan wondered whether the letter had been brought over from the old country or never sent back there from this one. Then they walked along the walls, studying photos of ghastly, famine-wasted peasants lined up for the camera, as if for execution, and portraits of stiff black-and-white men who had come over a long time ago, their eyes bulging as their tightly knotted ties cut off their airflow. Pany Mayska stopped in front of a picture of a pin-headed man with a thick mustache and round thin-rimmed glasses—that was her husband, she said, with a quiver in her voice. And then they went downstairs, to the small kitchen, where Bogdan accepted a glass of diluted raspberry concentrate, a bagful of almost expired TV dinners that she just happened to have lying around, and a report on how she had once caught Oksana and Szmura kissing, and they were only twelve years old.