Love and Obstacles (16 page)

My father found a job in a Hamilton steel mill, filling wagons with scrap metal. The mill was hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and when he worked night shifts, he would sometimes fall asleep waiting for a green light at the wheel of a used, decrepit Lincoln Town Car. He’d say that his Lincoln brought him home while he was sleeping, like a faithful horse. He hated the job, but had no choice.

One day, surveying the ads in the papers, pursuing a perfect garage sale, he found an ad selling honey. He called the number and told the man outright that he had no money to buy the honey, but that he would love to see his bees. Because there is such a thing as beekeepers’ solidarity, the man invited him over. He was a Hungarian, a retired carpenter. He let my father help him with the bees, gave him old copies of
Canadian Beekeeping,
which my father tried to read with insufficient help from my mother’s dictionary. After a while, the Hungarian gave him a swarm and an old hive to start his own apiary. He admonished my father for refusing to wear beekeeping overalls and hat, even gloves, but my father contended that stings were good for all kinds of pain. I still can’t figure out what language they might have been speaking to each other, but it almost certainly wasn’t English.

My father has twenty-three beehives now and collects a few hundred pounds of honey a year, which he cannot sell. “Canadians don’t appreciate honey,” he says. “They don’t understand it.” He wants me to help him expand into the American market, but I assure him that Americans understand honey even less than Canadians do.

He has recently decided to write another true book. He already has the title:
The Well.
There was a well near their home when he was a boy. Everybody went there to get water.
The Well
would be a story about people from the village and their cattle, their intersecting destinies. Sometimes there were “interesting incidents.” Once, he remembers, somebody’s mule escaped and came to the well, sensing water. But its head was tied to its leg—that’s how people forced the mules to graze. The mule got away, found water, but then was unable to drink. It lingered around the well, furiously banging its head against the trough, dying of thirst, the water inches away. And it brayed, in horrible pain.
It brayed all day,
my father says.
All day and all of the night.

W
hen I was in grammar school, I most loved the weeks when I was the
redar,
the one in charge of cleaning the chalkboard. My job was to keep the sponge wet and to wipe the chalkboard when the teacher demanded it. I took pleasure in erasing everything, in the smell of moistened chalk and the dryness of my hands afterward, and I loved leaving the classroom to wash the sponge in the bathroom. The hallway would be silent and empty, redolent of clean children and floor wax. I relished the squeaking of my shoes, the echoes in the void; I walked to the bathroom slowly, adjusting my steps to produce a screechy rhythm. There was something exhilarating about being free and alone in that vacant space while the rest of the kids were interned in the classrooms, to be released only at the break. I would wash the sponge without urgency, then walk back extending every step to delay my return to class. Now and then, I would stop by the door of a classroom and eavesdrop on what was going on inside. I would hear the murmur of the compliant children and the steady, solemn voice of the teacher. What gladdened me was that nobody knew I was out there unbound, listening. They could not see me, but I could hear everything; they were inside, and I was outside.

“Why was that so exciting?” Alma asked, and looked at the little digital camera screen, as though to check whether I was still there.

“I don’t know. I felt free,” I said. “There, but not there.”

 

 

She’d said she was a great admirer of my work and, as a fellow Bosnian, she’d felt that in my books I was speaking directly to her. She’d spoken directly to me via my website and at first I ignored her message, but then she sent me another one threatening with her disappointment. Ever reluctant to disappoint people, I responded. Her name was Alma B.; she was a film student at NYU and a Bosnian, therefore interested in questions of “identity”; she wanted to make films about “the Bosnian experience.” Which brought her to the real reason for contacting me: for her final project, she wanted to make a film about me, to tell the story of my life and displacement, the loss and the transformation, my complicated identifications.

All of my identities are at your disposal, I cleverly wrote back.

We went on corresponding, and she asked me many thorny questions. It usually took me days to answer them, in long, repetitive e-mails, rambling about anything that came to my mind: my family history and the war crimes of the Bush regime; my thoughts on rock ’n’ roll and quantum physics; my theory of soccer and poetry; the epistemology of Conrad and Rimbaud and myself. I told her the stories of my life, embellishing here, flatly making things up there, for I frankly wanted to help her write a good script and get the funding for her project. I even meekly nudged her toward a short film in which I could play myself in various situations from my life—one of those brainy postmodern setups everybody likes so well because it has something to do with identity—but she gently rejected the idea. I flirted with her too, for, as everybody knows, the job of the writer is to seduce his readers. For some reason I kept all of our exchanges.

When her project proposal was finally approved, I suggested that she fly to Chicago to meet me, but she thought she ought to start from the beginning, find out more about me and talk to my parents first. So she drove up to Hamilton, Ontario, on a weekend. My parents took her to be a friend of mine and therefore another one of their children; on arrival she had to promise that she would stay overnight. Mother dug deep into her repertoire of cakes and pies, for she knew you could not fool a real Bosnian with bad Canadian food; Father summoned our kin, including a cousin with an accordion, to sing a selection of songs and drink to her health and the health of her family, then to her health again. And she videotaped the whole thing: their drunken singing, my father telling her about the film he had once directed, my mother telling her about my troubled adolescence—it must have been a catastrophe, I thought when I heard about it. It was not hard to imagine my intoxicated family seriously undermining the image of the noble, worldly misfit who found his salvation in writing, the image I had so carefully and publicly established. They told Alma everything, things I was amazed they could recall at all: they told her about the time I had been caught stealing hubcaps; about our young, pretty neighbor taking me by the ear to my parents so I could admit I had leapt at her from the darkness and grabbed one of her rather large breasts; about my suffering from a crew of bullies, whose meanness eventually compelled one of my classmates (Predrag was his name, I believe) to blow his brains out. And to me it wasn’t even about the damage to my image, it was that if those stories should have ever been told, I was the only one who was supposed to do that—I was the only professional storyteller in the family.

I tried to find out from my parents how Alma had reacted to their divulgations—for I did not want to disappoint her before I even met her—but they assured me there was nothing to worry about. Even when telling potentially compromising stories they rendered me lovingly and likably; my parents were (and still are) conventional and reasonable, always willing to dismiss any kind of alarmingly refractory behavior as “a phase.” And they did also convey their warm memories of our quaint summer vacations by the sea, and how they had let me swim in the deep waters, confident that I would come back to the shallows the moment I heard their whistle. (I remember the damn whistle: black, smelling of spit, with a baffling chickpea inside.) Alma later showed me the footage of them tearing up while recollecting our winter vacations, our mountain cabin, to which I went alone in the summer, they told her, to devour fat books and write stories and poems.

My parents liked Alma quite a bit. She was a true Bosnian girl, they thought: respectful of the elderly, kindhearted and polite, still unspoiled by America. “She can talk to anybody and everybody,” my mother said. “She doesn’t think she’s special.” They practically offered to adopt her; indeed, ever worried about my procreation, they suggested not so abashedly that we could be a good match. When I called them after Alma’s visit, they both got on the phone to laud her.

“She came to America alone. She had an aunt in New York,” my mother said. “She was only thirteen when she arrived. She is very smart.”

“Where you throw her, there she lands,” my father said. “But she didn’t have an aunt in New York, she had an older brother. And she was sixteen when she arrived.”

“No, no, she said her brother was killed by a sniper in Sarajevo. And her father had a heart attack in the war, and her mother died of cancer right after the war,” my mother said, and sighed. “Your father never pays any attention.”

“I pay attention,” my father said, irritated. “Her mother was killed by a sniper, and her father died after the war.”

“Listen to him. He never listens to me, or anybody else. That’s what I’ve had to deal with my whole life: I send him to buy detergent, he comes back with three cartons of milk, and we already have a fridge full of milk. What am I to do with all that milk?” my mother said. “I wish I had been shot by a sniper.”

Naturally, when Alma came to Chicago to interview me, I didn’t dare ask her to sort out who in her family died of cancer and who was shot by a sniper. But she evinced the kind of serenity earned through suffering, therefore unattainable by—perhaps even invisible to—those who had not experienced severe loss and pain; I understood why my parents liked her. I watched her as she was mounting her digital camera on a tripod in my office: the short, ascetic hair and the deft, determined hands; the large, heart-shaped head dominated by grand, dramatically dark eyes; the delicate frown of focus. Her body bespoke a hardened core, an irreversibly petrified toughness, the scar tissue of the soul, but I could still see the little Alma in her, the way she used to be as a grammar school girl: wearing a white shirt and a blue skirt, white stockings and red shoes, her long hair shimmering, meticulously combed by her mother. “Okay, let’s go,” she said when she was ready, and I had no choice but to begin.

I introduced myself to the camera, told it where I was born, described the part of Sarajevo by the old train station where I grew up. I am so old, I said by way of a joke, I can remember steam trains. We used to crawl under the trains resting in the station, then pull a plug and let the steam out; I burned my shins that way at least once. There was also a movie theater nearby, Kino Arena, and we would go to the movies all the time. My childhood was wonderfully socialist and there was no movie-rating shit, so we could watch whatever we wanted: spaghetti westerns, kung fu movies, German soft porn, communist war epics, all kinds of American trash—I grew up on a steady diet of sex and violence, I said, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with me, is there?

Abruptly and indelicately, she asked me about the phase when I had impersonated an American commando, pretending to be speaking English all the time. My parents told her that I had had a rifle I would not part with; they had described how I had imagined and executed combat operations in my room, sometimes in the middle of the night, waking my little sister, who would in turn wake them with her screams.

“Do you remember that?” she asked. “Can you tell me a little bit about you imagining yourself as an American?”

Amazed once again that my parents could remember that particular phase, I could not fathom the point of recollecting that story. One builds one’s life on consistency; one invests it with the belief, however unsupported by reality, that one has always been what one is now, that even in one’s distant past one could recognize the seed from which this doomed flower has bloomed. Now I could not understand the devout thoroughness of my childhood obsessions, the myriad origins of my overactive imagination—I could not quite summon who I used to be. The camera, I am sure, duly recorded my fidgeting, the shadow passing over my face, the titillating doubt and vulnerability. But once you get in front of the inquiring lens, it is hard to look away; once you start inventing and soliloquizing, it is terribly hard to quit.

Yes, when I was ten or so, I wanted to be an American commando, I admitted, but you have to understand the larger context.

I spent most of my childhood fighting various wars. An early one was inspired by the TV series
Quentin Dedward
: we divided ourselves in two groups and had sword fights with sticks. Since young Quentin was fighting his enemies over a fair damsel, and we had no interest in girls as such, let alone fair damsels, it was over in a week, as soon as our sticks started breaking. Then there was an ongoing war in which we were the partisans fighting the Germans. This one was, of course, inspired by the narrative and the films of the Yugoslav liberation as accomplished by Tito and our heroic people. For the Liberation War, we used the sticks as guns. We set up ambushes in the bushes; we threw rocks as hand grenades in suicidal charges at German bunkers; we attacked the innocently passing streetcars, which were in fact enemy convoys delivering the necessary fuel and supplies to the desperate Army Group D. The trouble with this war was that we didn’t have a real enemy: none of us wanted to be a German, because nobody ever wanted to be evil. We shot at nobody, we threw rocks into thin air, the streetcar attacks were too risky to do too often, particularly since a conductor caught my friend Vampir and slapped him bloody. War is an entirely different thing when you can’t enjoy your wicked enemy’s dying a horrible, prolonged, painful death.

Then there was a war over the control of the playground that was misfortunately situated between two architecturally identical buildings; our gang lived in one, the other gang in the other. The playground had swings and a slide, a merry-go-round and a sandbox, and was framed by bushes in which we liked to store stolen things and hide when hiding was required—the bushes were our
loga,
our base. The Playground War had a remarkable intensity, with many battles fought; there would be dozens of kids in each army, crowding the playground, using sticks as cudgels to their pain-inflicting maximum. I recalled for Alma raising high my grandfather’s walking stick to crash it through a cardboard shield that another kid put up as his pitifully feeble protection. We lost the final battle and the rights to the playground when the enemy army received reinforcements from two eighth-graders on their way to school: they swung their book-heavy bags with murderous delight and mowed us mightily as we retreated in disarray.