The Question of Bruno (13 page)

“You’re almost a man now,” she said. “And that is a man’s privilege.”

She made me sit under a shriveled apple tree. Small, wizened apples—not unlike my brain at the moment—hung like earrings from crooked, exhausted branches. My mother sat down by my side and put her arm around me. I wanted to put my head into her lap, but she said: “No, you’ll just get dizzier.”

We could hear the Hemons-Hemuns hollering against the music, which from a distance sounded discordant. We could still hear the trucks and I vaguely realized that they had been passing by all day. “I wish these trucks would stop,” I said.

“They probably won’t for a while,” my mother said. Her hands smelled of coffee and vanilla sugar. She told me about the time her father gave their only horse away.

“It was in forty-three or forty-four, a young man came running out of the corn. Mother and Father knew him, he was lanky and had blue eyes, a Muslim from a nearby village. He said that the Chetniks had killed his whole family, that he escaped by leaping through a window and now they were after him. He had a bruise on his cheek, as if someone had kissed him with plum-lips. He asked my father for the horse so he could get away and join the partisans. Father glanced at my mother, she said nothing, but he knew and he went to get the horse, cursing all along: ‘Fuck this world and the bloody sun and this country when everyone needs my horse.’ The young man, his name was Zaim, kissed both of my father’s cheeks and promised he would return the horse once the evil had blown over. So he rode off, waving at us. But then the Chetniks came riding their horses, like cowboys. ‘Where is he?’ they yelled. ‘Where’s the circumcised dog?’ And my father says: ‘What’s the trouble, brothers?’ They all have beards and rifles and knives, they shout: ‘Did you see the Turkish bastard?’ Father says: ‘I don’t know who you’re talking about.’ ‘You’re lying!’ they yell. ‘You’re a traitor!’ Then they beat him with rifle butts, they throw him on the ground and kick him with their boots. ‘What’s wrong with you, motherfucker, you’re one of us! Where’s the Turk? Who’s he to you?’ I thought they would slit our throats, no problem. My brother was in the partisans, but we spread the word that he was in Srem, working.”

“You’ve never told me this,” I said.

She continued: “They kept beating him until he was bleeding and unconscious. My mother wept and begged them to spare him. Then one of them, beardless, came to me and said: ‘There’s a little Serbian girl who is going to tell us where the Turk is.’ Oh, I couldn’t say a word, and then I saw my
mother’s eyes, frightened, and her hands squeezing the strength out of each other. I told them I didn’t see anyone and that I would tell them if I did. So they left, and the beardless one told us that he would personally judge us if he found out we were lying. That was our only horse, you know, all we had.”

I resisted falling asleep, trying to keep my eyes open, but then I succumbed, leaning on my mother’s shoulder, even in my dreams aware of the possibility of disgorging myself. I slept for hours, thinking in my troublesome sleep that I was leaning on my mother, but then I woke up, with my cheek on a molehill, sprawled on the ground which was covered with rotting apples. I went back to the yard and all the Hemuns were gone, as if I had dreamt them; and everyone else, scattered around, was cleaning up, storing away the food or taking the tent and the stage apart. I need not have been there to know what happened at the end. It could all be seen on the tape, which we occasionally watch when I visit my parents in Schaumburg, Illinois. We rewind and fast-forward, to get to the moment we most want to cherish. We freeze the frame to remember a name, we fill in the gaps, caused by unwarranted cuts and blanks due to a ten-dollar conversion in a Pakistani store on Devon. Frequently, there’s a little tide of fractious dots rising from the bottom of a trembling picture, always trying to reach the center. Finally, the last image is of my mother, just about to say something—something irreverent about “the Hemon propaganda,” perhaps. That is all too clear from her clever eyes and the lingering, undeveloped grin. She never says it, forever on the verge of saying something. She can never remember what she was going to say, and the screen suddenly turns blindingly blue, and we turn it off and rewind the tape to the beginning.

FOR
Z
RINKA

S
uppose there is a Point A and a Point B and that, if you want to get from point A to point B, you have to pass through an open space clearly visible to a skillful sniper. You have to run from Point A to Point B and the faster you run, the more likely you are to reach Point B alive. The space between Point A and Point B is littered with things that sprinting citizens dropped along the way. A black leather wallet, probably empty. A purse, agape like a mouth. A white plastic water vessel, with a bullet hole in its center. A green-red-brown shawl ornamented with snowflakes, dirty. A wet loaf of bread, with busy ants crawling all over it, as if building a pyramid. A videocassette, dismembered, several of its pieces still connected with a dark writhing tape. On days when snipers are particularly rabid, there are scattered bodies as well. Some of them may still be alive and twitching toward the distant cover, leaving a bloody trail behind, like snails. People seldom try to help them, for everybody knows that the snipers are just waiting for that. Sometimes a sniper mercifully finishes off the crawling person. Sometimes the snipers play with the body, shooting off his or her knees, feet, or elbows. They seem to have made a bet how far he or she is going to get before bleeding away.

    Sarajevo is a catless city. It is so because people couldn’t feed them, or couldn’t take them along when they were fleeing, or their owners were killed. Hence the dogs that couldn’t be fed or taken along hunt them down and devour them. One can often see, among the rubble on the streets, underneath
burnt cars, or stuck in sewers, cat carcasses, or cat heads with a death grin, eye-teeth like miniature daggers. Sometimes one can see two or more dogs fighting over a cat, tearing apart a screaming loaf of fur and flesh.

    
Aida’s letters are scarce and sudden, escaping the siege via UN convoys, foreign reporters, or refugee transports. I imagine them in a sack, in the back of a UN truck, driven by a Pakistani or Ukrainian soldier oblivious to everything but the muddy road before him and the gaze of the bearded thugs by the road, their index fingers conspicuously close to the trigger; or a letter in a reporter’s bag carelessly thrown over a tattooed shoulder, sharing the bottom of the bag with a Walkman, notebooks, condoms, bread and pot crumbs, and a wallet crammed with family pictures. I imagine letters in a post office in Zagreb or Split, Amsterdam or London, in the midst of a pile of letters sent to people I know nothing about by the people who care about them. Sometimes it takes dismal months for her letters to reach me and when I open my mailbox—a long tunnel dead-ending with a dark square—and find Aida’s letter, I shiver with dread. What terrifies me is that, as I rip the exhausted envelope, she may be dead. She may have vanished, may have already become a ghost, a nothing—a fictitious character, so to speak—and I’m reading her letter as if she were alive, her voice ringing in my brain, her visions projected before my eyes, her hand shaping curved letters. I fear to communicate with a creature of my memory, with a dead person. I dread the fact that life is always slower than death and I have been chosen, despite my weakness, against my will, to witness the discrepancy.

    In September, Aunt Fatima passed away. She had had asthma for a long time, but in September she just asphyxiated in our apartment. They were pouring shells for weeks on end, and even when they didn’t there was an eager sniper. He killed
our neighbor who hadn’t even left the building. He just peeked out of the door, cautiously ajar, and the bullet hit him in the forehead and he just dropped down dead. Anyway, Aunt Fatima ran out of her asthma medicine, and she couldn’t go out. The windows had been shattered long ago. She was always cold, breathing in cold air saturated with floating dust and hovering particles of rubble. She simply suffocated, producing that inhaling, sucking sound, and nothing was being inhaled. We couldn’t bury her, or even take her out, because they kept shelling and sniping as if there was no tomorrow.

    Kevin is an American, from Chicago. He’s a cameraman. He’s been around, he says. He’s been in Afghanistan and Lebanon and the Persian Gulf and Africa with his camera. He’s tall, his arms are little hills of muscles. His eyes are greenish, like dried turf. He has two parallel silver earrings in his left ear. His hair is short. He’s balding and has a peninsula of grayish hair crawling down his forehead. He’s lean. When you look closely, you can see purple ruptured blood vessels where his nose meets his face. It’s from cocaine. He did it a lot in Lebanon. It was cheap and he broke down. He couldn’t stand it any longer. An Arab child shot at him with what he took to be a toy gun. There is a scar-furrow on his thigh. He was new, he broke down, he did cocaine. Now he’s fine, he says. I like him because he tells stories. All of those people do, all those reporters and cameramen and all those who have been around. But they’re all clichés, as if they watched too many movies about foreign correspondents and war reporters. Kevin’s stories are different. All those others always tell stories about other journalists. A British drunk, a German ex-Nazi, a French sissy, an American whore, are stock characters. They never tell stories about the local people, because the natives are news, they’re what’s to be reported.
Kevin told me stories from Afghanistan, about lying in a high mountain ambush with bearded rebels. And about terrified Russian convoys crawling up a dire mountain road, knowing they’re being watched. About a Russian soldier being cut in pieces alive, producing unreal shrieks, until a merciful
mullah
shot him in the head. He filmed it, even though he knew they would take the tape away from him. Even if they didn’t, it would have never been broadcast.

    
She sent me a black-and-white picture: she is standing on a pile of debris in the midst of the Library ruins. I could see holes that used to be windows, and pillars like scorched matches. The camera looks at her from underneath: she is tall and erect, as if on the top of a mountain; she is in a bulletproof vest, wearing it detachedly, as though it were a bathing suit.

    I’ve got this job as a liaison for the pool of foreign TV companies. Besides helping them to get by in hell, to approach and bribe government officials and find good parties, I edit footage that crews shoot in and around the city. Then I send it via satellite to London, Amsterdam, Luxembourg, or wherever. I get two–three hours of footage every day. It’s mainly blood and gore and severed limbs. I cut it into fifteen–twenty minutes, which are then transmitted to the invisible people who edit it into one–two minutes of a news story, if there is one. At the beginning, I was trying to choose the most telling images, with as much blood and bowels, stumps and child corpses as possible. I was trying to induce some compassion or understanding or pain or whatever, although the one–two minutes that I would later recognize as having been cut by me would contain only mildly horrific images. I’ve changed my view. I stopped sifting horror after I saw footage of a dead woman being carried
by four men. She was prone on their arms, as if on a hearse. As they were carrying her, her head was bent backward, hanging down. Her skull was cut open by a piece of shrapnel. There was a skull-sod with hair, hanging on a patch of skin. They put her in the back of a truck, with other heaped corpses. Her head was still open. I could see the brainless bloody cavity. Then one of the men closed the cavity, putting the sod back into its place, as if putting on a lid. He did it with a certain reluctant respect, as though he was covering her naked body, as though there was something indecent in seeing the inside of somebody’s head. I cut all that out and put it on a separate tape. From then on I was cutting out everything that was as horrid. I put it all on one tape, which I hoarded underneath my pillow made of clothes. There once was that corny idiotic movie
Cinema Paradiso
, where the projectionist kept all the kisses from films censored by a priest. Hence I christened the tape
Cinema Inferno.
I haven’t watched it entirely yet. Some day I will, paying particular attention to the cuts, to see how the montage of death attractions works.

    I had a dream: a woman alone on the glowing screen, and a moat in front of it, and beyond the moat is a room, window-less, full of people. She is performing me, she is acting me out. I’m in the audience, sitting in a row at the end of my gaze, on the verge of darkness. She’s not doing it right. This is not how I felt, this is not my pain. I want to get up and scream, and tell her that she’s much too involved in myself. She’s even attaining my shapes, my face, my voice. I want to help her step out of me. But I can’t do anything. She’s a light mirage. I can’t get up, because I don’t know what exactly is wrong. And then I realize—it’s the language. I’m confined within the wrong language.

    Purebred dogs can be seen running in packs or, seldom, alone. You can see German shepherds, Irish setters, Belgian collies, Border collies, rottweilers, poodles, chow chows, Dobermans, cocker spaniels, malamutes, Siberian huskies, everything. After years of siege, there are, naturally, many mongrels. Some of the breeding combinations would amaze, or terrify, a canine expert. In the winter, when every living creature is in the middle of starvation, dogs are more inclined to move in packs, often attacking with common strategy, like wolves. There have been occasions when an improbable mixture of dog races attacked a child or a feeble elderly person. A German shepherd would be going for the throat, a poodle would be tearing the flesh off the calves.

    
It is after I write her a letter with trite reminiscing that I begin wanting to tell her all about me—I have imaginary conversations with her, making real grimaces, gesturing with real hands. I think of all the things I could’ve told her or should’ve told her: how awkward and cumbersome I feel in English, sinking in syntax, my sentences flapping helplessly, like a drowning child’s arms; about Bach’s
St. Matthew’s Passion;
about hoping for the arrival of spiders—the vicious cockroach-killers—into my living space; about the lack of relationship—or contact, rather—with women; about the friendless immigrant life; about the
Headline News
I keep watching, waiting for a glimpse of Sarajevo; about my western window, looking at corny sunsets and the distant O’Hare Airport, night airplanes landing like tired firebugs; about an involuntary memory I had about my father smashing a nest of infant mice with a shovel; about the fact that almost everything I wanted to tell her is not in the letter; about the sense of loss and the damp stamp-glue taste lingering on my tongue for hours after I drop the letter in the mailbox. I used to believe that words can convey and contain everything, but not anymore, not anymore.