The Question of Bruno (18 page)

“Hi!” Pronek said.

“How’re you doin’?” the man said.

“Good.”

“Good.”

Silence.

“Who are you?” the man asked.

“I am Andrea’s friend.”

“I guess,” he said. “I’m Carwin.” He was fashionably unshaven and had unruly hair, which, to us, signified cynical rebelliousness. He wore an unbuttoned flannel shirt and a T-shirt underneath, with a picture of a crucified, blond angel.

“Are you Russian?” he asked.

Pronek’s bare feet were cold, so he put his left sole on his right calf, and stood there like a Masai warrior, with a used condom instead of a spear.

“No, I’m from Sarajevo, Bosnia,” Pronek said. “But we met in Ukraine.”

“Well, it’s nice to meet you,” he said. “I hope I’ll never see your fucking face again.” Then he hollered toward Andrea’s room: “Now you started bringing in fucking foreigners. American dick is not good enough for you, you fucking bitch!”

“Fuck you, you fucking Anglo asshole!” she yelled back.

It was then that Pronek finally slipped into the bathroom. The condom wouldn’t sink in the toilet bowl, so Pronek kept flushing it, but it would always come back up from the toilet throat, defiantly bobbing. A roll of toilet paper hid behind the toilet seat, like a frightened hedgehog. We can attest that Pronek felt profound helplessness at that moment. A jury of plastic bottles, bemused by the ablution he had to perform, was lined up on the shelf: Natural Care, Head & Shoulders, Happy,
Antarctica, Morning Mist, Mud Miracle (Swiss Formula), No More Tangles. He looked into the mirror and saw vermilion dots on his face and sallow teeth and a square Slavic head with a flat pate and a tuber-nose and greasy hair, sticking to his low forehead. “What am I doing here?” he asked himself (Patience, dear fellow, patience). But there was nothing that could be done, there was nothing more inevitable than taking a shower at that moment.

Perhaps it is important to know that Andrea was an artist, indeed a painter. She showed Pronek her most recent finished painting, a couple of years old, picturing her between a hog and a sow—all three of them stared at Pronek, framed, presumably, by a farm fence. The pigs were adamantly pink. The hog seemed to enjoy the situation and it had two dun marks on its front hams, while the sow had swollen teats. The painting was entitled
Home.
She informed Pronek, who could not decide whether he liked it or not, but said he liked it anyway, that she hadn’t painted anything after that. “There are things I need to understand about myself before I can share them with people,” she said.

She worked at the Art Institute, in the gift shop. In the mornings, she would suddenly erect her upper body in bed, the way maidens in horror movies wake up from torturous nightmares, just before the killer (who is always in the vicinity) leaps at them to slice them up. Then she would light a cigarette and look worried. Pronek could tell from the way she smoked that her life was an arduous task: her forehead would corrugate; she would slide her tongue between her gums and
the inside of her lips, as if answers to all questions were hiding in oral corners along with food bits; she would wedge her elbow into the palm of her left hand, and prompt her right hand with a cigarette, close to her mouth, nibbling on the filter, inhaling in small, intense gasps, and then exhaling with a burdened, low sigh at the end, like a full stop. She would scratch her spine with her left-hand thumb, and her shoulder blades would move toward each other under the taut skin, only to retreat back to their starting positions.

Pronek would hear the delicate scraping of her long nail against the skin, and, still steeped in his nightmare, he would worry about her birthmarks being ripped off her back.

He would watch her stealthily, not making a sound. When she turned toward him, he would pretend to sleep, keeping his eyes and mouth closed, lest she kiss him, for he was ashamed of his putrescent morning breath. She would trudge to the bathroom, and he would hear the relentless hum of the shower, intermingled with splashing, as if she were resisting a deluge. Then the hair dryer buzz, after which, he suspected, she took care of her hair and her armpits and her lips. By the time she would come back to their room (albeit Pronek would have never referred to it as “our room”) he was asleep, and not even the bustle of her picking through her wardrobe, and the rustle of her rolling stockings up her legs would make him open his eyes.

He would get up a couple of hours later and then follow her scent to the bathroom, where she would still be vaporously present, and the bathtub would still have the unfortunate vestiges of her hair, curled up here and there, waiting to be collected in the mass grave of the drain. Pronek would perform his morning toilet duties, trying to make his body presentable to America. There were three toothbrushes, two of which—Pronek’s and
Andrea’s—lay side by side, as if sunbathing together, while the third one was, incidentally, on the verge of the sink.

It was the third one that Pronek dipped in the toilet water.

On some mornings, Pronek would salvage a plate, not yet engendering mold patches, from the dish-swamp, and eat some limp cheese (invariably mozzarella) and rancid crackers. Sometimes he would sip coffee from a cup that had lipstick scars on the opposite side of the brim, and kept staring at a blank page, only to write “Chicago, April 1992” in the upper-right-hand corner and then stare again, until he would finally abort the letter. He could never go beyond the place and the date, as if those were perfectly self-explanatory, and nothing else need have been said. He wanted to call his parents, but had no money to pay for it, and Andrea had said that he should ask Carwin, since he was “the phone man of the house.” Sometimes he would watch the news, showing barricades, and people running in panic, and white, innocent, armored vehicles parked in the middle of a Sarajevo street.

On the days he didn’t go to work as a Pier 1 store manager, Carwin would get up and lodge himself on the sofa, stick his hand into his flannel shorts, and watch the news with our foreigner. He would say: “Man, I don’t understand this shit. Can’t they just chill out, man. I mean, what’s the big fucking deal?” Pronek would say nothing, stroking the purring Moskva, and then he would get on the downtown train to meet Andrea for lunch.

He would walk down the Magnificent Mile, sweating in his dark coat, dotted with lint, reeking of traveling and the past. Often, he would be thinking about
The Magnificent Seven
and
Seven Samurai
and there was nothing magnificent about the mile: morgue-like buildings and lugubrious stores promising
all kinds of purchasable joys. Whenever he found himself walking down the Magnificent Mile, he had a burning craving for a McDonald’s burger, which he normally hated and considered inedible, respectively.

Perhaps this could be Pronek’s contribution to the psychology of architecture.

He would stroll past people clutching their purses or briefcases, frowning at the wind. “Who are they?” he wondered. “Where do they live? What do they do?” Once he realized, schlepping through the goo and yuck of wet April snow, that he was utterly superfluous walking down the Magnificent Mile, that everything would be exactly the same if the space his body occupied at that moment were empty—people would walk with the same habitual resolve, clutching the same purses and briefcases, perhaps even infinitesimally happier, because there would be more walking space without his body. When he shared his thoughts with Andrea, she said, with a nasty giggle: “The land of the free, the home of the brave.”

Pronek would wait for Andrea to get her lunch break, and he would roam the shop, browsing through postcards, trying on aprons adorned with Picasso or Monet pictures, reading books on African art. Once he located all the cameras in the store, disinterested little eyes gazing from distant upper corners, and tried to find a spot not covered by a camera, and found none. Sometimes he would just find an inconspicuous position in the store, hiding behind a curtain of posters, or pretending to be reading a book, and he would watch Andrea smiling at the customers, gracefully returning their credit cards, or handing a bagful of artful merchandise over the counter. Then she would get off and they would drift through the museum, never holding hands. They would hide in the American Furniture and Arts section, where they would venture
into illicit, deliciously dangerous, touching, under the worried, worried gaze of George Washington; or under the conjugal gaze of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Hubbard—Daniel’s promontory chin reaching into the glorious revolutionary future; or the sovereignly chaste gaze of Abigail Cheseborough. Of course, most of these names meant nothing to Pronek, but they all looked devoutly uncomfortable. Pronek and Andrea would pussyfoot around a Lincoln staring at marble tiles under their feet, apparently pensive, in duck-beak boots and with a duck-beak beard, stepping forward, his hands locked on his leaderly butt. And there was a Lincoln welded to an uncomfortable brazen chair, worried all over again, wearing the same boots, except Pronek could see the big-toe lumps and imagine the sweaty, swollen feet and the ingrown toenails causing a lot of banal pain.

They would roam through the armor section, where metal man-sheaths suggested an eerie presence, as if the bodies that were meant to fill those armors were stored somewhere in the warehouse. They would follow a battalion of high school kids, predominantly blond and obese (“Cornfed,” Andrea would whisper), who were hee-hawing in front of naked-lady paintings, as their faces worked on the spring collection of pimples. They would start looking at paintings of the fourteenth century, and then move chronologically, with everyone else, counterclockwise. It seemed to Pronek that between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries the main human activities were suffering, torture, fear, and rape. “Did you have the sixteenth century in Sarajevo?” Andrea asked him once. “Yeah,” our friend said. “But it was different.” He would try to sound cultured and civilized—to play the role of a European, as it were—and make the most of his two-hour visit to the Louvre, which he had mainly spent lost in a nightmarish eighteenth-century
wing. He would try to devote a reasonable portion of thinking to each painting, but would often find himself staring at the carved frames and blank walls around the painting, yawning like an excited monkey. In the room that contained some
Rape of Lucrece
he stared at Lucrece’s torn pearl necklace eternally in midair and thought about the incredible amount of yawning that could be witnessed in museums, mainly because of the lack of air circulation, as if breathing would impair understanding of Great Art.

A senior citizen in a glaring pink jacket stopped in front of the
Rape
and gasped.

Her favorite painting was humongous and completely black—black wrinkles, black smudges, black puckered paint, and Pronek liked it, but didn’t know why. They would gawk at it for a while and Andrea would say: “Who are we in the hands of an angry God?”

One day, Pronek and Andrea descended to the miniature rooms. “Begin to your left,” said the sign on the wall, and when they began to their right, an elderly lady, the Cerberus of the miniature rooms, with a puffy hairdo and thin lips, issued a warning with a fiery glance and a significant tightening of her lips, so they began to their left. There was a fair-haired brat darting around like a crazed colt, and occasionally peering behind the pane into the miniature rooms. Then he would start running around again and holler: “Awesome, baby! Awesome, baby!” The rooms were small, very small. Pronek had never seen anything like that. A “Pennsylvania 1760” room had minuscule armchairs and desks, and a minute fireplace, with tiny fake flames. There was a little carpet and wee windows, and, behind them, a garden illuminated by an invisible sun. Pronek was the only one looking into
the “Pennsylvania 1760” room, so he was the only one to see a minikin figure, with long white hair, and an impish mini-grin, running across the miniature room. Pronek could hear the tapping, the barely audible, evanescent, echoes of the creature’s tiny steps, which then disappeared into the garden.

Doubtless, a hallucination.

The brat was revolving around a center invisible to anyone but him, still shrieking; “Awesome, baby!” but then he got much too dizzy and collapsed on the floor. He lay right below a “Virginia 1790” room, holding his blond watermelon in his hands, panting, still saying: “Awesome, baby!”

Andrea went with Pronek to check out his coat, and Pronek said: “How can you ever know that you’re getting right coat? Maybe everything you have is replaced by something else. I think, maybe they’re going through your pockets. They’re photographing what’s in there, making keys, and changing everything. So when you get out, everything is different, and your memories don’t look right, so you change them.” He put his coat on. “You know what I mean? I cannot ever know that this is my real, old coat, but I must wear it anyway, because there’s no other coat, and I must make memories about it.”

“You Eastern Europeans are pretty weird,” Andrea said.

When Pronek came back home (albeit it was Andrea’s home), Carwin leapt off the couch, in all likelihood interrupted while masturbating, and hurried to his room. Pronek changed the channel from
The Dukes of Hazzard
to CNN and saw a crowd of people in front of the parliament building in Sarajevo, cowering and hastening to find cover, or just roaming, confused by the sniper fire. There was a quick shot of a sneakered foot paired with a sneakerless foot, both twitching,
and a rotund big toe protruding, while the rest of the body was obscured by a cluster of people trying to help, some of them crying and wiping their tears with bloody hands.

Then there was the national weather forecast, so Pronek got up and got himself a dirty glass of ginger ale.

Jozef Pronek decided to stay in the United States, possibly for the rest of his life, in the middle of a snowy night, as snowflakes were pressing their crystal faces against the window pane, after Carwin dropped a pot of rotting spaghetti on the floor and said: “Fuck!” He woke up, his heart pounding again (yes, it had pounded before), having dreamt of dogs tearing his body apart—a German shepherd going for his throat, a poodle for his calves. Through the door ajar, he could see Carwin trying to clean and spreading the red mush, as if painting, all over the floor. It looked like blood and brains to Pronek. He imagined himself lying on that floor, the insides of his head slowly leaking out, feeling no pain, just dizziness. Carwin, having pensively scratched his crotch, decided to abandon the cover-up, said: “Fuck!” once again to seal his uncompromising decision, and then stomped toward the couch to watch TV.