Love and Obstacles (21 page)

Macalister followed the direction with a benevolent smile, possibly bemused by my father’s histrionics. Our dining room was also a living room and a TV room, and Father seated Macalister in the chair at the dining table that faced the television set. He was given the seat that had always been contentious in my family, for the person sitting there could watch television while eating, but I don’t think Macalister recognized the honor bestowed upon him. CNN was on, but the sound was off. Our guest sat down, still appearing bemused, and tucked his feet under the chair, curling up his toes.

“Drink?” Father said.
“Viski? Loza?”

“No whiskey,” Macalister said. “What is
loza
?”

“
Loza
is special drink,” Father said. “Domestic.”

“It’s grappa,” I explained.

“No, thanks. Water is just fine.”

“Water. What water? Water is for animals,” Father said.

“I’m an alcoholic,” Macalister said. “I don’t drink alcohol.”

“One drink. For appetite,” Father said, opening the bottle of
loza
and pouring it into a shot glass. He put it in front of him. “It is medicine, good for you.”

“I’ll take that,” I said, and snatched it before Macalister’s benevolence evaporated; I needed it anyway.

My mother brought in a vast platter with cut-up smoked meat and sheep cheese perfectly arrayed, toothpicks sticking out like little flagpoles without flags. Then she returned to the kitchen to fetch another couple of plates lined with pieces of spinach pie and potato pie, the crust so crisp as to look positively chitinous.

“No meat,” Mother said. “Vegetation.”

“Vegetarian,” I corrected her.

“No meat,” she said.

“Thank you,” Macalister said.

“You have little meat,” Father said, swallowing a slice. “Not going to kill you.”

Then came a basket of fragrant bread and a deep bowl brimming with mixed vegetable salad.

“Wow,” Macalister said.

“That’s nowhere near the whole thing,” I said. “You’ll have to eat until you explode.”

On the soundless TV there were pictures from Baghdad—two men were carrying a torn-up corpse with a steak tartare-like mess instead of a face, the butt grazing the pavement. American soldiers up to their gills in bulletproof gear pointed their rifles at a ramshackle door. A clean-shaven, suntanned general stated something inaudible to us. From his seat, Father glanced sideways at the screen, still munching the meat. He turned toward Macalister, pointed his hand at his chest, and asked: “Do you like Bush?” Macalister looked at me—the same fucking bemused smile stuck on his face—to determine whether this was a joke. I shook my head: alas, it was not. I had not expected Macalister’s visit to turn into such a complete disaster so quickly.

“Tata, nemoj,”
I said.
“Pusti čovjeka.”

“I think Bush is a gaping asshole,” Macalister said, unfazed. “But I like America and I like democracy. People are entitled to their mistakes.”

“Stupid American people,” Father said, and put another slice of meat into his mouth.

Macalister laughed, for the first time since I’d met him. He slanted his head to the side and let out a deep, chesty growl of a laugh. In shame, I looked around the room, as though I had never seen it. The souvenirs from our African years: the fake-ebony figurines, the screechingly colorful wicker bowls, a carved elephant tusk, a malachite ashtray containing entangled paper clips and Mother’s amber pendants; a lace handiwork whose delicate patterns were violated by prewar coffee stains; the carpet with an angular-horse pattern; all these familiar things that had survived the war and displacement. I had grown up in this apartment, and now all of it seemed old, coarse, and anguished.

Father went on relentlessly with his interrogation: “You win Pulitzer Prize?”

“Yes, sir,” Macalister said. I admired him for putting up with it.

“You wrote good book,” Father said. “You hard worked.”

Macalister smiled and looked down at his hand. He was embarrassed, perfectly devoid of vainglory. He straightened his toes and then curved them even deeper inward.

“Tata, nemoj,”
I pleaded.

“Pulitzer Prize, big prize,” Father said. “Are you rich?”

Abruptly, it dawned on me what he was doing—he used to interrogate my girlfriends this way to ascertain whether they were good for me. When they called or stopped by, not heeding my desperate warnings, he would submit them to a brutal series of questions. What school did they go to? Where did their parents work? What was their grade point average? How many times a week did they plan to see me? I tried to forbid his doing that, I warned the girlfriends, even coached them in what they should say. He wanted to make sure that I was making the right decisions, that I was going in the right direction.

“No, I’m not rich. Not at all,” Macalister said. “But I manage.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why you are not rich?”

Macalister gave out another generous laugh, but before he could answer, Mother walked in carrying the final dish: a roasted leg of lamb and a crowd of potato halves drowning in fat.

“Mama!”
I cried,
“Pa rek’o sam ti da je vegetarijanac.”

“That’s okay,” Macalister said, as though he understood. “I’ll just have some potatoes.”

Mother grabbed his still-empty plate and put four large potatoes on it, followed by a few pieces of pie and some salad and bread, until the plate was heaping with food, all of it soaked in the fat that came with the potatoes. I was on the verge of tears; it seemed that insult upon insult was being launched at our guest; I even started regretting the previous night’s affronts, at least those I could remember. But Macalister did not object, or try to stop her—he succumbed to us, to who we were.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said.

I poured another shot of
loza
for myself, then went to the kitchen to get some beer.
“Dosta si pio,”
Mother said, but I ignored her.

My father cut the meat, then sloshed the thick, juicy slices in the fat before depositing them on our respective plates. “Meat is good,” he said to no one in particular. Macalister politely waited for everyone else to start eating, then began chipping away at the pile before him. The food on Father’s plate was neatly organized into taste units—the meat and potatoes on one side, the mixed salad on the other, the pie at the top. He proceeded to exterminate his food, morsel by morsel, not uttering a word, not setting down his fork and knife for a moment, staring down at his plate, only to look up at the TV screen now and then. We ate in silence, as though the meal were a job to be done, thoroughly and quickly.

Macalister held his fork in his right hand, the knife unused, chewing slowly. I was mortified imagining what this—this meal, this apartment, this family—looked like to him, what he made of our small, crowded existence, of our unsophisticated dishes designed for ever hungry people, of the loss that flickered in everything we did or didn’t do. With all the cheap African crap and all the faded pictures and all the random remnants of our prewar reincarnation, this home was the museum of our lives, and it was no Louvre, let me tell you. I was fretting over his judgment, expecting condescension at best, contempt at worst. I was ready to hate him. He munched his allotment slowly, restoring his benevolent half-smile after every morsel.

 

 

He liked the coffee, he loved the banana cake; he washed down each forkful with a sip from his demitasse; he actually grunted with pleasure. “I am so full I will never eat again,” he said. “You’re an excellent cook, ma’am. Thank you very much.”

“It is good food, natural, no American food, no cheese-burger,” Mother said.

“I will ask you question,” Father said. “You must tell truth.”

“Don’t answer,” I said. “You don’t have to answer.” Macalister must have thought I was joking, for he said:

“Shoot.”

“My son is writer, you are writer. You are good, you win Pulitzer.”

I knew exactly what was coming.

“Tell me, is he good? Be objective,” Father said, pronouncing the word “obyective.”

“Nemoj, tata,”
I begged, but he was unrelenting. Mother was looking at Macalister with expectation. I poured myself another drink.

“It takes a while to become a good writer,” Macalister said. “I think he’s well on his way.”

“He always like to read,” Mother said.

“Everything else, lazy,” Father said. “But always read books.”

“When he was young man, he always wrote poesy. Sometimes I find his poems, and I cry,” Mother said.

“I’m sure he was talented,” Macalister said. Perhaps Macalister had in fact read something I wrote. Perhaps it was that I was drunk, for I was holding back tears.

“Do you have children?” Mother asked him.

“No,” Macalister said. “Actually, yes. He lives with his mother in Hawaii. I am not a good father.”

“It is not easy,” my father said. “Always worry.”

“No,” Macalister said. “I would never say it’s easy.”

Mother reached across the table for my hand, tugged it to her lips, and kissed it warmly.

At which point I stood up and left the room.

 

 

He had drunk water from Baščaršija, but he had no trouble forgetting Sarajevo. Not even a postcard did he ever send us; once he was gone from our lives, he was gone for good. For a while, every time we talked on the phone Father asked me if I had spoken with my friend Macalister, and I never had, whereupon Father would suggest it would be good for me to stay friends with him. Invariably, I had to explain that we had never been and never would be friends. “Americans are cold,” Mother diagnosed the predicament.

I did go to see him when he came to Chicago to read at the library. I sat in a back row, far from the stage, well beyond the reach of his gaze. He wore the same Birkenstocks and white socks, but the shirt was no longer Hawaiian. It was flannel now, and there were blotches of gray in his Bakelite hair. Time does nothing but hand you down shabbier and older things.

He read from
Nothing We Say,
a passage in which Cupper flipped out in a mall, tore a public phone off the wall, and then beat a security guard well beyond unconscious with the handset, until he found himself surrounded by the police aiming guns at him:

Macalister lowered his voice to make it more hoarse and smoky; he kept lowering it as the violence increased. Somebody gasped; the woman next to me leaned forward and put her bejeweled hand on her mouth in a delicate gesture of horror. I didn’t, of course, wait in line so he could sign my book; I didn’t have
Nothing We Say
with me. But I watched him as he looked up at his enthralled readers, pressing his book against their chests like a found child, leaning over the table so they could be closer to him. He smiled at them steadfastly, unflinchingly—nothing they said or did could unmoor him. I was convinced I had receded into worldly irrelevance for him; I had no access to the Buddhistish realms in which he operated with his cold metaphysical disinterest.

But I followed his work avidly; you could say I became dedicated. I read and reread
Nothing We Say
and all of his old books; on his website I signed up for updates on his readings and publications; I collected magazines that published his interviews. I felt I had some intimate knowledge of him, and I wanted to see how he turned what I knew into words. I was hoping to detect traces of us in his writing, as though that would confirm our evanescent presence in the world, much as the existence of subatomic phenomena is proven by the short-lived presence of hypothetical particles.

Finally, not so long ago, his latest novel,
The Noble Truths of Suffering,
came out. From the first page, I liked Tiny Walker, the typically Macalisterian main character: an ex-Marine who would have been a hero of the battle of Fallujah, had he not been dishonorably discharged for not corroborating the official story of the rape and murder of a twelve-year-old Iraqi girl and her entire family,
an unfortunate instance of miscommunication with local civilians.
Tiny returns home to Chicago (of all places!) and spends time visiting his old haunts on the North Side, trying vainly to drink himself
into stupor, out of turpitude.
He has nothing to say to the people he used to know, he breaks shot glasses against their low foreheads.
The city barked at him and he snarled back.
High out of his mind, he has a vision of a snake invasion and torches his studio and everything he owns in it, which is not much. A flashback that turns into a nightmare suggests that he was the one who slit the girl’s throat. Lamia Hassan was her name. She speaks to him in unintelligibly accented English.

He wakes up on a bus to Janesville, Wisconsin. Only upon arrival does he realize that he is there to visit the family of Sergeant Briggs, a psychopath bastard whose idea it was to rape Lamia. He finds the house, knocks on the door, but there is nobody, only a TV with a kids’ show on:
Soundlessly, facing the drawing of the sun on the wall, the children sang.