Nowhere Man Read online

  And there he was, reading in heavily accented English, not looking up.

  “When they were children, they were known for being good at climbing trees, where they would—hid—hide from other kids and watch them play. ‘It was strange,’ Will Senson, a childhood friend, says. ‘You would look up and there would be four eyes—star—staring at you from above.’ ”

  “Thank you, Joseph!” the teacher said.

  Pronek looked up straight at me. I didn’t know if he could recognize me—I had changed a lot, having gone through a long and debilitating illness—but he was staring at me. I looked away, my heart thundering inside. How did he get here? Was he in Sarajevo under siege? Or was he besieging it? I hadn’t talked to him in years, if ever. He leaned back in his chair, but my gaze was avoiding his. What should I say to him? What was his story? What was his life like?

  “This is morbid,” Robin whispered to Marcus.

  “Saturnine indeed,” Marcus said, and got up to leave, so I obediently stood up. As I was leaving the classroom, I glanced one more time at Pronek and he looked straight back at me, perhaps—and perhaps not—recognizing me. He still seemed angry.

  We went back to the office. I said: “I would really like to work here.”

  “We could use you here,” Robin said.

  “We will call you by the end of the week,” Marcus said.

  Outside, dark umbrellas were weighing down on people. The wind side of tree trunks was soaked; the lee-side branches shivered in anticipation of cold rain, wagging their twiggy ends at me as if saying, no, no, I wouldn’t do that. But I did, I walked through the rain—it was cold. I passed a dingy building: A cat was perched in the window of an apartment, watching me somberly, in complete control.

  And I remembered cornering a mouse—this had happened a long time ago—in the hall of my building, after it had made the mistake of leaving its tunnels. I tried to grab it by its tail, as it trembled in fearful rage. With the tips of my fingers I managed to grasp its tail—a rubbery tentacle—and lift it off the ground. I remembered Pronek being there, watching me, hating me for what I was doing. The mouse twitched in my hand, desperate, and I giggled, enjoying my power—there must have been some girls around too—until the mouse somehow swung itself upward and bit my palm, two little needles piercing my skin. Pronek was watching me with a smirk, as if he knew all along what would happen. I screamed and let the mouse go, and it scurried away, happy to be alive. I was gripping my right hand, trying to prevent the pain from spreading.

  “You find my dog,” a dark-skinned woman asked me. She accosted me in front of my building, as if she’d been waiting for me. “I losed my dog.”

  “No, I am sorry,” I said.

  “You sure? Little dog.”

  “I am sure.”

  She went on down the street, looking between and under the cars and into the narrow spaces between buildings, yelling, “Lucky Boy!” all along. I could hear the storm rumbling away.

  I walked into my apartment, the floors creaked me a welcome, and I suddenly felt a tide of warm giddiness overwhelming me, dewing my neck. I sat down on the floor, where the futon used to be, in my jacket, with a frightening premonition that most of the things in this world would go on existing whether I lived or died. There was a hole in the world, and I fit right into it; if I perished, the hole would just close, like a scar healing. I should have told Pronek who I was, I needed him to know. “Lucky Boy!” I heard the woman shouting. “Where are you? Where you go?”

  2

  Yesterday

  SARAJEVO, SEPTEMBER 10, 1967–

  JANUARY 24, 1992

  Jozef Pronek was born in the Sarajevo maternity hospital, on September 10, 1967, after thirty-seven hours of excruciating labor, the culmination of which was his mother’s oath, as Jozef’s little head was stuck between her legs halfway into the world, that she would strangle him with her own hands if he didn’t come out immediately. His mother regretted her threat the moment she saw his crumpled face, dominated by a screaming mouth, like an Expressionist painting. In her delirium she found it extraordinarily beautiful.

  It was that very same Expressionist face that was exhibited to Jozef’s father, who was outside in the sunny hospital park littered with drunken fathers. Pronek Sr. labored to stand straight, propped up by his friend Duško, with whom he had celebrated his son’s arrival into this woeful world. In a moment of peculiar inspiration, seeing his wrinkled, furious face, Father compared him to the notorious Tshombe, the man who killed Patrice Lumumba. Duško, on the other hand, found the nascent Jozef to resemble Mahatma Gandhi, perhaps because of a sheet of gauze wrapped across his minikin chest. On little Jozef’s part, all he can remember (he still implausibly claims) from that day—the first in an as yet unconcluded sequence of days that constitute his life—was a frightening deluge of blazing light coming at him through the window pane, as if the first thing he ever saw were a nuclear explosion.

  Jozef’s infancy was typically uneventful: sucking, sleeping, shitting, diaper-changing, sleeping, sucking, burping, and so on. Out of the molten lava of his early experiences, a few awkward rocks formed: during an afternoon stroll along the Miljacka River a chestnut in its spiky armor fell directly into his lap; a neighbor’s dog thrust his head into the shade of the perambulator and licked Jozef’s face; during a diaper change, he peed in a perfect arc on an electric heater, discontinuing the stream just in time not to get electrocuted, the piss evaporating like an unfinished dream; a mouse, indigenous to the damp basement apartment his parents were renting, crawled into his crib and onto his stomach, whereupon Jozef put his hand around it and grasped the furry, warm body, throbbing with life and fear.

  As for Jozef’s toddlerhood, it was rather more eventful: his drunken uncle Dragan (who would, many years later, driving to the seaside through the Neretva canyon, give a left-turn signal and steer his car into the abyss) dangled him over the balcony fence: gravity stretched out his crooked little legs and strained his arms to the verge of shoulder dislocation. I must mention his first independent walking expedition, whereby Jozef escaped his mother’s attention, entered the elevator, and then toddled over to Hotel Bristol, armed with nothing but a pacifier. There he encountered a busload of Chinese table-tennis players, all competitors in the Table Tennis World Championship—one of them juggled Ping-Pong balls, mesmerizing Jozef and impeding his advance until the distraught arrival of his mother. I should also submit a picture of Jozef with the hairdo of a provincial basketball coach, tottering toward the camera with a hand extended, ever eager to go beyond the boundaries of his domain.

  Perhaps it was Jozef’s adventurous spirit proving to be a little too much for his parents that made them import Grandma Natalyka from the countryside. Grandma Natalyka arrived late one night in a dark dress, equipped with boxy suitcases. She kissed his parents without submitting to an urge to smile, then looked at Jozef with a serious face, as if assessing the amount of work necessary to mold this chunk of raw humanity into a decent person. Hence Jozef’s childhood is marked by Grandma Natalyka’s doting presence: she provided milky meals in the morning; she administered afternoon walks and supervised playground activities. She protected him from unmerited (and merited) pushes and punches. This might have prevented Jozef from developing lasting playground friendships—upon Grandma Natalyka’s merciless fillip or bloodcurdling shout, other kids, backed by much feebler forces (adolescent distant cousins; baby-sitters reading romances; simply nobody), kept their distance. There he is: digging a meaningless hole in the sandbox with a plastic shovel misshapen by his anger, while everybody else is gathered on the other end of the sandbox, filling up one another’s buckets with sand. And there is Grandma Natalyka, looming on the horizon like a battleship, furiously knitting another warm sweater for little Jozef.

  She strictly enforced afternoon naps, mitigating her strictness by scratching Jozef’s head until he fell asleep. After the nap, Jozef would have to endure a rehearsal of her knitted collections—he stood still for m
any long minutes, fully dressed in a wool sweater (stretching his arms out, as if he were sending a semaphore message, the sleeve-ends hanging over his fingers), wearing a pair of mittens and a hat with a cluster of silly pom-poms. He would desperately await his parents’ return from work, and then revel in their attention: he would employ his father’s gigantic foot as a hobbyhorse, while his father watched the news cross-legged; he would listen to his mother singing Bosnian songs while ironing, occasionally reaching piercing heights, which would make his father turn up the TV. Grandma Natalyka would retreat into her room and do the who-knows-what of elderly women.

  She returned at bedtime to deliver stories. He was squeezed between a cold wall and her warm body, his head in her armpit bay exuding the scent of cinnamon and sauerkraut brine. She narrated a cycle of stories featuring a gallery of animals that all lived in the far-off land of her childhood. There was a brave ewe, who attacked trespassers and thieves and passersby. There was a dog who thought of the kids as sheep until he got so old that he had to be killed with an ax blow to the head. There was a swarm of bees that her grandfather made hang from his pate like hair to the kids’ delight. There was even a dolphin that came in one day with a carny. It was supposed to jump through hoops, but instead lay sunk and puffing at the bottom of a hole full of cold, muddy water the kids (paid in candy currency) brought in buckets from the local well. Before landing on the soft cushion of sleep, he speculated about the dolphin’s fate: he imagined a savior buying it from the carny; he imagined the dolphin running away with the help of other carny animals; he imagined a numinous boy with resurrective powers. But the salvation never came in time—the dolphin suffocated, despite all the imaginative effort he put into it. Often Jozef would slip into a dream that did not care about the dolphin but carried along according to its own cruel, selfish logic—Grandma Natalyka or his parents were dying, he could do nothing to stop it, and he would wake up weeping. Grandma would be asleep, the steady hum of her snoring increasing. He would watch her dream-frown, feeling the rumble of her slumber, the slight vibrations of her upper lip and nostrils as she exhaled.

  I can safely say that Jozef’s conscious life fully began the day he looked at the sleeping Grandma Natalyka and her face was much too tranquil: no snoring, no nose-hair shudder. Her body warmth slowly vanished, as Jozef lay facing the wall, trying to convince himself that if he went to sleep and woke up a little later, she would be back in the kitchen, banging the pots. But he couldn’t fall asleep, constantly tickled by the thought of death sharing the bed with him. He looked at her again, and her eyes were only half closed; he could see the glassy corneas. It seemed that she was looking at him through the slits from somewhere far away, and he could not think of any reason why she wouldn’t come back. Everything in the room was perfectly still, as if it all went away with Grandma and only left its shapes behind.

  Thus death entered Pronek’s life. He watched his mother sob and his father cry, and a procession of black-clad people, towing unnaturally quiet children through their apartment, as if through a train station. He felt guilty for not being able to produce a respectable amount of tears. In a moment of inspiration, which was to provide a sentimental delight to his family for years to come, Pronek cut an onion in half and applied the halves to his eyes, producing more tears than necessary and a couple of hours of complete blindness.

  Pronek’s early boyhood was spent shedding the stigma of cuteness signified by the pom-poms and frills, by his round cheeks and girlish curls. Wearing a Grandma-produced sweater, Pronek crawled under steam trains lounging in the train station near his home and pulled plugs that made the steam go shshhshhs and produce fluffy clouds. He fought as a foot soldier in a street war against the kids from the Tito building (it had a huge Tito picture on its top), under the command of the boy who called himself Zagor Te Nay, after a comic book character. Jozef talked his friends into eating some wild fruit that looked like grapes, but were possibly poisonous and tasted bitter and disgusting, thereby experiencing early the bliss of leadership. He won the game that consisted of collecting points for lifting miniskirts of the young women walking down the street. He stuck nails into electric outlets and threw rocks on streetcars. No one would have thought of Pronek as a cute six-year-old when he spat at his father and told him to fuck off, after Pronek Sr. demanded from him an apology for calling his mother a bleating sheep. Pronek Sr. sentenced Pronek to twenty-five lashes, the execution scheduled for the time between the evening cartoons and the news. It was furthermore judged that school, beginning that fall, would still allow enough time for mischief, and Pronek was enrolled in English and accordion lessons the next day.

  In the tiny workshop of his mind, Pronek can assemble a model of the English classroom in the Pioneer Center Blagoje Parovi´c. The room is dark green, because of the heavy green curtains filtering the sunlight beating at the windows. There is a map of England, with London like a wound in its side, ruptured blood vessels stretching toward Scotland and Liverpool. There is a poster with two cartoon men (their heads square, their eyes dots, their noses sharp angles) shaking hands, and saying: “How do you do? My name is ———.” The green coating makes the teacher look like a corpse, with her sagging cheek apples and thin, tight lips. (Mirza, who is to become his best friend, is reading comic books under the desk. Pronek can see Mandrake hypnotizing two goons with guns: they stand petrified with glassy eyes.) The teacher raises her hand with its mauve claws and they all start singing: “Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket, save it for a rainy day.”

  The English classes were bearable in comparison with the accordion classes. The accordion torment was conducted by a music teacher with a thick, brushy mustache, who clearly hated his students. They sat with the heavy accordions in their laps, stretching the beasts across their narrow chests, repeating the simple melodies (“Little Gypsy Girl Steps into the Water”) over and over again, melodies that Pronek carried home in his head, resulting in dreams with Grandma Natalyka playing the accordion up to her ankles in icy water.

  The first day in school sums up well Pronek’s early educational experiences: droves of girls with nicely combed hair shimmering under sunlight; the pleasant contrast between their navy blue school uniforms and virginally white stockings; mobs of boys, tripping each other, causing sprained wrists and severe elbow injuries; a spitting contest, won by one Amir, who could spit between his teeth, like a snake; Mirza reading comic books under the desk (Prince Valiant); a gentle boy, with longish, dark hair, sniveling in the front row, while his mother poked her head into the classroom, speaking to him sotto voce. The teacher, an auntly woman who spoke with stern inflections and wrote with the fountain-pen point upside down, touched the boy’s head with her gnarled hand, but it helped little—he kept bawling, a little puddle of tears forming on the desk in front of him.

  The first day they learned that Nature was everything that surrounded them; that Tito was president; that the most important thing in our society was preserving brotherhood and unity; and that our planet was in the Solar System, which was in the Milky Way, which was in the Universe, which was everywhere, much like Nature. The knowledge imparted was significant only in its eminent uselessness: when his parents asked him what he had learned that day in school he said: “Nothing”—the word that he was to use throughout his schooling to describe his progress.

  The only thing that distinguished Pronek in school was that he never, ever volunteered to do anything: no question was worthy of a voluntary answer; no task was challenging enough for him to step out of his daydreaming. In parent-teacher conferences, the teacher told Pronek’s parents that he had potential, delivering her verdict with a grimace of mild disgust, as if potential were an odorous skin condition.

  Through the fifth grade they learned more about Nature, though Society entered the picture in the fourth grade (Pronek liked Society more than Nature); they read books about freedom-loving forest animals (“The Squirrel’s Little House”) and lonesome dwarves (“The Dwarf from a Fors
aken Land”). Nor was their physical development neglected: they climbed ropes, and rolled medicine balls in circles like disoriented dung beetles. On state holidays, they celebrated Tito’s birthday and other important dates from the proud history of socialist struggle and self-management. The school choir sang appropriate songs about miners striking and dying for freedom, about the revolution akin to a steely locomotive.

  Pronek liked singing, but he preferred the songs they learned in the English classes at the Pioneer Center: “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean”; “Yellow Submarine”; “Everybody Loves Somebody (Sometimes).” He would sing at the top of his lungs at home, to the dismay of his parents, too tired to tolerate Pronek’s roaming up and down the scales. Besides, they did not understand English, which was why they were suspicious regarding the real content of those foreign songs: drugs? prostitution? masturbation? Those songs were so much unlike the songs the elder Proneks liked to sing: the quiet Bosnian songs, sung in the spirit of calm realization that life would pass like spring bloom and that there was nothing but infinite darkness in the end. They demanded to know what in the world was Jozef singing about. At first he refused to divulge the real content of the songs, but then started to make it up, enjoying his power over his ignorant parents. Thus “Yellow Submarine” was about a balloon that wanted to be free; “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean” was about a little squirrel that was run over by a big, bad truck, but was then resurrected and lived in Grandma’s pantry; and “Everybody Loves Somebody (Sometimes)” was about a burglar who stole from rich old people and gave to poor kids. “Nice,” said the parents, as the idea of social justice appealed to them. Still, his father, a police inspector, maintained his suspicion and decided to find and enlist a colleague who could speak English enough to decode the lyrics—a failed attempt as none of his colleagues spoke any foreign languages.