Nowhere Man Read online

  It was in the summer after the fifth grade that a small reconnaissance unit of pubertal hormones—the avant-garde of a great army—entered the unconquered Pronek territory. He was spending a couple of seaside-vacation weeks with his parents in Gradac. He absorbed sun on the beach, swam in the deep waters, hoping to encounter some dolphins. He had noticed before that there were girls who didn’t have to wear a swimsuit top and that there were girls who did, but for the first time that summer he realized that there was a fundamental difference between them, so much so that he got a slap on the back of his head for staring at a girl in a pink swimsuit, her nipples swollen.

  In the evenings, when pines gave off bounteous resin smells, when the breeze off the cooling sea brought forth tickling saltiness, when warm bodies exuded coconut-milky sun-lotion scent, there was a dance for kids at the hotel. The first evening, Pronek spotted a long-legged girl with her hair bleached by the sun, clearly playing for the top-wearers. She was dancing with her father, a burly man in a white undershirt, his belly bulging forward, Pronek circled around her like a hawk, until she noticed him and smiled at him, whereupon he circled some more, as hormone reinforcements kept arriving at the front. The second evening, the circles narrowed. He stopped in front of her, his head still spinning, and asked her to dance. His attitude aimed to suggest that he wanted to dance only because there was absolutely nothing else to do. They clumsily danced, like infatuated zombies, avoiding bodily contact, yet craving it. By the end of the first week, they were spending time on the beach together. Her name was Suzana, and she was from Belgrade. At the beach they had to perform a complicated glance dance, eschewing looking at each other’s interesting areas. Midway through the second week, they could not hold themselves back: their lips stiffly touched, their teeth clacking. They were sitting right at the water line, tiny waves crawling between their toes, Pronek’s arm over her shoulder, like a dead fish. The sun was setting, providing a tacky orange spill that often appears on postcards and can still bring tears to Pronek’s eyes. By the end of the second week, as his departure was looming on the glum horizon, Pronek licked her ear, as his hand was resting on her belly button, paralyzed in the nether area between the two fantastic possibilities. He, then, proposed, determined to spend the rest of his life with her. She needed to ask her father, an army colonel with a frighteningly hairy chest. He forbade her to see Pronek ever again, an order she bravely defied: they met for the last time in the bushes behind the hotel. They squatted, whispering the vows of love. With her head on his shoulder, her tears trickling into his armpit, Pronek susurrously sang “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean,” trying hard not to keel over onto a used condom someone left behind, his throat tight with sorrow.

  By the time he got back home in Sarajevo, the Pronek territory had been fully conquered. Mirza informed him in an audibly deeper voice that he was considering shaving his legs, as they were far too hairy. Shortly after the new school year started, Pronek received a letter from Suzana, barely mentioning their eternal love and containing a picture of her “friend,” a lanky pimplehead in a Sex Pistols T-shirt with the fine name of Tadija.

  The hard part in writing a narrative of someone’s life is choosing from the abundance of details and microevents, all of them equally significant, or equally insignificant. If one elects to include only the important events: the births, the deaths, the loves, the humiliations, the uprisings, the ends and the beginnings, one denies the real substance of life: the ephemera, the nethermoments, much too small to be recorded (the train pulling into the station where there is nobody; a spider sliding down an invisible rope and landing on the floor just in time to be stepped on; a pigeon looking straight into your eyes; a tender hiccup of the person standing in front of you in line for bread; an unintelligible word muttered by a one-night stand, sleeping naked and nameless next to you). But you cannot simply list all the moments when the world tickles your senses, only to seep away between your fingers and eyelashes, leaving you alone to tell the story of your life to an audience interested only in the fireworks of universal experiences, the roller coaster rides of sympathy and judgment.

  Thus I am forced to describe the significant events occurring after Pronek’s first love disaster: he locked himself up in his room and refused to come out for three days, his mother leaving food in front of the door, only to find it untouched; he announced his decision to abolish his accordion studies; he got drunk with Mirza on the cheap stuff (with labels brandishing drunken sailors and knights with javelins) from his father’s booze chest; he got caught masturbating at his desk, instead of studying Nature and Society; he demanded in no uncertain terms that he be granted funds for acquiring a guitar, which was initially declined mainly because of his brash manner, but then approved with the hope that he would stop being such an ass; he woke up in the middle of the night overwhelmed with sourceless anger, then roamed the apartment, hoping to startle his parents out of their tranquil dreams.

  Nevertheless, let us zoom in on an insignificant moment: he walked down Štrosmajerova and stopped in front of the music store and saw a Beatles songbook. Let us face the store window with him. Let us be aware that an old man with a crooked hand that trembled on his walking stick stood next to him. Let us turn toward the cathedral and see the street rising to meet its stairs. Let us hear the cathedral’s bells. Let us believe that Ringo winked at him from the songbook cover. If we have done all this, there is the final step: let us foresee the future in which Pronek is surrounded with girls who all shake their heads following the magic rhythm of his guitar, their tresses quivering—let us be rewarded with a pleasant tingle of an intense epiphany.

  From thereon in, Pronek embarked on a secret project of getting the songbook—weeks of pilfering his mother’s wallet for change, or searching through his father’s pockets, finding an occasional banknote, and sometimes a condom, all the while managing to keep his operation covert.

  The day he acquired the songbook belongs to the category of significant events: I need not describe all the adolescent emotional excess, but I do need to mention that he rushed to his friend Mirza’s, protecting his acquisition as if it were a sacred manuscript. They feverishly flipped through it—Pronek tried to sing a song or two, the logic of music clear to him (despite misreading a few notes) like a bright winter day, when you can see the snowy mountain peaks around Sarajevo and feel that life has no limits.

  In Mirza’s parents’ living room—a picture on the wall of a rosy-cheeked boy with a teardrop twinkling below his innocent eye, an array of crystal glasses in the cupboard tinkling as Pronek and Mirza moved around the room—it was decided that they would have a band that would play the songs from the Beatles songbook. Pronek was to be John, Mirza was to be Paul, and they needed a George and a Ringo. Then they began searching for the name—The Beatles, obviously, was already taken—so they came up with Gospoda (translating as Gentlemen); KGB (would not do well in the West); FBI (short for Fucking Boys International, would not do well in the East); Los Bosancheros. Finally, they settled for the simple translation of The Beatles—Bube. By the end of the week, they already had designed their future album covers (the two of them, plus George and Ringo, sinking in a boat; an aerial picture of Sarajevo, with four stars sparkling in four different parts of town: Čengi´c Vila, Baš Čaršija, Koševo, Bistrik).

  As soon as Mirza got his guitar, they found George: their classmate Branko, who took violin classes, and was shy and sensitive and could read music. Pronek and Mirza recruited Faik, their English classmate, who was an owner of a tambourine with little rattly cymbals and who, more importantly, looked like Ringo: meaty nose, droopy mouth, and rogue demeanor. Bube rehearsed mainly in Mirza’s living room, to the audience of the tear-boy and rejoicing jingling glasses, playing “She Loves You (Yeah Yeah Yeah),” “Girl,” “Nowhere Man,” “Help!”

  They had their first performance in their music class, the audience exchanging glances and giggling. The disgusted music teacher, a decrepit man with hair in his ears, considered
it all jungle music. Yet, you could tell they were seen differently after the gig—Bube had done something none of their classmates dared do, a few catastrophic blunders due to sweaty palms notwithstanding.

  After the success of their first show—which triumphantly ended with tepid applause—they were ready to play at a school dance, where eighth-grade girls would be in the audience, in abundance, deep enough into puberty to create a shapely landscape. The show was scheduled for May 4, 1980. But May 4, of course, was the day Comrade Tito died: the news showed wailing soccer players and hysterical mothers and people standing frozen on the street as if their batteries had abruptly drained. When Bube arrived in the school gym where the show was to take place, there was already a Tito picture under the basket, framed by a morose black ribbon. They stood with their guitars and their radios, meant to be the amplifiers, watching the school janitor—a stocky, mean man—taping I POSLIJE TITA TITO, letter by letter, on the wall. Pronek was afraid that they might be conspicuous in their eagerness to perform, so they furtively left the gym and stood in an empty entrance hall, mad at Tito and his selfish mortality. Recollecting, in whispers, this moment several days later, they all agreed they should have produced some tears, and they unpatriotically hadn’t.

  Bube never played at Pronek and Mirza’s school, to the relief of the principal, who was uncomfortable with their English songs, clearly inappropriate at the time of the great loss. But Bube got over their loss, distracted by the completion of their elementary education. They received their school diplomas in a subdued ceremony (the country still mourning its leader’s untimely demise) that nonetheless provided an opportunity to have a last glance at all the girls budding in their pioneer uniforms.

  They spent the summer of 1980 practicing more Beatles songs. Faults, however, already started occurring. Ringo tossed his tambourine on the floor and declared that he was bored playing only the Beatles songs—he had received a Clash album from his cousin in Munich and wore Vibrators and Buzzcocks buttons on his (deliberately) torn shirt. He started hitting his tambourine much harder than necessary (which was echoed by the furious neighbors, sometimes producing interesting syncopation) and snickered derisively as Pronek sang “Yesterday” with what seemed to be a genuine feeling. The final blow came when Pronek brought in his own song. Heavily blushing, his vocal chords constricted to a squeal he attempted to conceal as sensual whisper, gently strumming his mistuned guitar, Pronek sang: “If you know her name, tell her I love her . . . If you know her name, tell her I’ll never forget her . . .” Midway through the song, devoted to Pronek’s as yet unmet eternal love, Ringo started gagging. Pronek stopped, blood rushing to his ears, with a momentary vision of breaking his guitar against Ringo’s fucking face. This is stupid, Ringo said. First, why did it have to be in English—it was not their language. Second, who is this you? And if he didn’t know her name, did he know her? And did you know her? Is there anybody who knows her name? Ringo unleashed a deluge of scholastic and rhetorical questions, as the rest of them witnessed Pronek’s eternal love disintegrate into plain nonsense. Bube never recovered. Ringo changed his nickname to Sid and became the drummer for a punk band named Depresija. Shortly after Ringo’s departure, George informed them that his brief existence in this world as George came to an end, because his violin teacher ordered him to drop the guitar as it was ruining his touch.

  Pronek himself had a period of severe self-doubt after John Lennon was killed. On a December night, he spent a few hours staring out the window at the snow swirling under a light pole. He imagined himself mortally wounded, hastening toward death in a speeding ambulance, trying to say something appropriate for such a grave moment: “Take care of my world.” Or: “There must be something behind this wall.” He imagined a song that would include those words, and started shuffling lines and rhymes, but it occurred to him that if his was a life in a parallel netheruniverse, if he and Bube echoed the life of John and the Beatles, then he might die soon too. The dark night and the lonely light posts with snowflakes sparkling under their sorrowful gaze, it all scared him in its endless sadness. He escaped his room and joined his parents, watching Sherlock Holmes. He sat in silence, while they wondered, half panicking, what it was that made him spend time with them voluntarily.

  Pronek and Mirza mourned John Lennon and the band for a couple of weeks, then discovered that Mirza’s parents hid a stack of magazines with naked women in the couch. They spent a few weeks studying their anatomy and reading readers’ letters, which all involved randy random encounters in the darkness of movie theaters or on desolate beaches haunted by arousable German housewives. No wonder then that Pronek spent the summer vacation pressing his desire against the hot sand, acquiring sunburns on his back, as foreign women strolled on their way to fornication through the field of his blurry vision.

  It might strike the reader that the life of this hero is not particularly exceptional, for many a boy indulged in fantasies in which the readiness of unknown women to make passionate, yet educational, love to a gangly youngster was directly proportionate to the impossibility of such a scenario ever occurring. What young man or woman did not vacillate between the conviction that no one in their right mind would touch this body and the insight into one’s own implausible, youthful beauty? Is there anybody who doesn’t remember the first shy moments of caressing someone else, the moments when all the idiotic pornographic fantasies perish in the face of a person who has a voice and a smell and a particular imperfection—say, a birthmark shaped as a crescent moon—visible only as your lips slide down her neck, as you feel the growl of pleasure in her body? The reader must remember, before judging the commonness of such recollections, that they gain in value when that person is dead (as is the owner of the crescent moon, killed by a shell in 1993). Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared, and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend.

  Years later, displaced in Chicago, Pronek often wondered whether there really had been a Karen, who arrived in a Trabant from East Germany and lived in a first-floor apartment, whether her long and silky pigtails fluttered, like birds on a leash, around her head as she jumped rope; or if he really had seen a dead man, bobbing facedown in the shallow Miljacka, a chunk of flesh missing from his neck; or if he had ever seen his father’s single tear, rolling from under his sunglasses, exactly replicating the tear of the boy in Mirza’s parents’ living room, his father telling him the story about his high-school girlfriend who fell off her bike and died of a brain hemorrhage; or if he really had ever cut off buttons from old shirts, and assembled them on the floor so as to replicate the constellations he found in the atlas of the sky.

  But let us turn off the time machine and not rush toward the inescapable future. Let us wipe the misty windshield of memory and look at him standing dazed in front of the beehive-like building of Prva gimnazija. In one of those tedious, serious conversations about his life, forced upon him by his mother and father, Pronek had professed his desire to be a music teacher, a toy idea thrown to his worried parents while he was attending to his real plans, which mainly consisted of not being separated from Mirza. Future music teachers (and Mirza) were going to Prva gimnazija, which claimed to have a cultural slant, and this aura of culture attracted sophisticated, urban girls, all wearing skimpy skirts and demeanors of experienced boredom. In no time at all did his guitar playing and his repertoire of Beatles songs come in handy—the cultural girls all spoke English and had crushes on foreign rock stars. Soon the Pronek-Mirza tandem was a staple at every party—the girls to boys ratio happily five to one—where they played “Yesterday” and “Hey, You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” and “Michelle” to an audience of teary-eyed, soft-skinned schoolmates. They expanded their repertoire to include domestic songs (Sevdalinke and corny hits from the elementary days), appropriate for the later hours of more thorough inebriation, songs that could be played only by gently strumming the strings, as someone’s warm temple was pressing against the tired arm. At even later hours, they covered fo
r each other—one of them would be steadily producing the romantic, candlelight atmosphere, while the other poured sweet poison into a beautiful ear, murmuring that tonight, “Yesterday” was just for her.

  They could not have cared less about the cultural body of knowledge they were supposed to absorb. Mirza and Pronek were expelled from a literature class in which the teacher—a young, enthused man, who surely had stacks of poetry hidden away under his bed—tried to make them see that life was a fish in The Old Man and the Sea. They were thrown out of the philosophy class because they started sniggering, after the teacher told them about the philosopher who had a stunning revelation and exclaimed: “What is is!” They learned more songs for the late party hours, going deeper into the feeling that Bosnians call sevdah—a feeling of pleasant soul pain, when you are at peace with your woeful life, which allows you to enjoy this very moment with abandon.

  And there were moments. Sarajevo in the eighties was a beautiful place to be young—I know because I was young then. I remember linden trees blooming as if they were never to bloom again, producing a smell I can feel in my nostrils now. The boys were handsome, the girls beautiful, the sports teams successful, the bands good, the streets felt as soft as a Persian carpet, and the Winter Olympics made everyone feel that we were at the center of the world. I remember the smell of apartment-building basements where I was making out with my date, the eye of the light switch glaring at us from the darkness. Then the light would go on—a neighbor coming down the stairs—and we would pull apart. I also remember that a thug nicknamed Nikson sold me a brick and smacked me around in front of my girlfriend. I remember that my apartment was broken into and that there were two footprints on my parents’ bed. I remember the hateful moments in crowded, smoky bars, when I could not stand to look again at the faces I had known since birth. I remember the guy in the hospital bed next to mine whose thighs and ass were all cut up after a toilet bowl fell apart under him. But I choose not to think of those as important, my memories irrevocably coated in linden syrup.