Love and Obstacles Read online

  It was in Murska Sobota that I truly confronted the ineluctable sadness of hotel rooms: a psyche with a notepad nobody had ever used to write; the bed cover with infernally purple flowers; a black-and-white picture of a soulless seaside resort; a garbage basket lined with crumpled paper tissues suggesting a messy quickie. The window looked over a concrete garage roof, in the middle of which was a vast puddle, shimmering like a desert-lake mirage. There was no way I was going to spend a night alone in this cave of sorrow. I needed to find places with a high density of youth, where comely Slovenian girls stood in clusters, steadily rejecting the clumsy advances of Slovenian boys, conserving their maidenhead for a pill-carrying Sarajevo boy, his body a treasure to squander.

  The main street appeared to have been recently depopulated; only an occasional empty bus drove by, the lights in it dimmed. There were no cafés or bars or young people I could scout, only the windows of closed stores: stiffened mannequins, their arms opened in an obscure gesture of welcome; towers of concentric pots looming over families of pans; single shoes lined up closely on a rack, so different in sizes and shapes that each one of them seemed to represent a missing person. And there was the store I was to visit the next day to purchase for my family an entry into an abundant future. In the window, a humongous freezer chest glowed as if in a heavenly commercial.

  I decided to explore the side streets and found nothing but a slumbering row of houses, the nightmarish murmur of television sets passing through a thousand quiet windows. Here and there, the sky was stained with stars. A neon sign in the distance announced the name of a bar called Bar, and there I went.

  There was nobody in Bar except for a bearded, frog-faced man, whose chin was about to touch the brim of his beer stein, and a cloud of smoke hanging thick as a ghost. Without lifting his head, the man looked at me intently, as though he had been expecting me to arrive with a message of some sort. Message I had none, so I sat as far away from him as possible, close to the bar attended by nobody I could see. I lit a cigarette, determined to wait for female beauty to walk in.

  The man lit up a cigarette too; he exhaled as though letting his soul out. I began thinking up a poem in which the main character walked into a bar as empty as this one, smoked and drank alone, thinking up wisecracks, and then, when he wanted to order another beer, discovered that the bartender was dead, slumped in a chair behind the bar, his left hand reaching for a stein of still-foaming beer. I had left my notebook in the hotel, so I could not write the poem down, but I kept thinking about it, kept coming up with rhymes, kept drinking my beer, kept not looking at the man. Most human lives perish without other people’s ever noticing, and I recognized that it could happen to me too, tonight. They would find an uncomfortable corpse with a stack of cash and a mysterious pill and they would ask themselves: Where were we when he needed us? Why didn’t we deflower him before he perished?

  The man stood up and tottered toward me. The shoulders of his jacket almost reached his elbows, as though he had shrunk abruptly; a purple tie grew out of his shirt; he wore a little hat with a mangy feather stuck in its ribbon. He sat right across from me, mumbling a greeting. In the center of plum-colored circles his eyelids moved slowly, as though he was deciding each time whether to open his eyes at all. I turned back toward the bar, pretending to be looking for a bartender. The man grumbled and gibbered, pointing toward the bar, and I nodded understandingly. The sounds gradually attained the shape of complete sentences, punctuated by an occasional snort or a hand slamming the table. I could not figure out whether he was pissed or glad about my presence in his lair.

  A waitress planted two large, foaming steins between us. She put a hand on my shoulder warmly, asking apparently if I was okay. She was voluminous, her face seemed upholstered, her biceps doughy; she smelled of cakes and cookies. The drunk raised his stein and held it in front of me for a cin-cin until I complied. We drank and wiped foam off our lips with the back of our hands. He sighed in approval; I exhaled; we drank in silence and smoked.

  More beer came. The man decided to open up to me: he leaned forward and back, he waved his hands in unintelligible derision, he pointed his finger in various directions, and then he started crying, tears streaming down his cheeks webbed with capillaries.

  “Everything is okay,” I said. “Everything will be fine.” But he just shook his head, as there seemed to be no hope or relief. The waitress came over, unloaded more beer, and wiped his face with her dishrag; she appeared to be used to cleaning his tear-crusted cheeks. The man’s tie was wet with tears; the beer parlor was dark and empty; I was drunk, muttering occasionally: “Everything will be fine.” The waitress listlessly wiped glasses behind the bar; time passed in silence. What will become of the world when you leave? Rimbaud wrote. No matter what happens, no trace of now will remain. Then I started crying too.

  I did not know how long it had all gone on, but when I left Bar, my sleeve was wet with tears and snot. I could recall the waitress wiping my face at least once with her rag stinking of rancid dishwater. I gave her what seemed to me a large chunk of the freezer-chest money and she locked the door behind me. The man stayed behind, his head carefully deposited on the clearing in the forest of steins—he probably lived there. And as I stepped out on the vacant streets of Murska Sobota, a wave of euphoria surged through me. This was experience: I had possibly lost my head and experienced a spontaneous outpouring of strong emotion; I had just drunk with a disgusting stranger, as Rimbaud surely did in Paris once upon a time; I had just said Fuck the fuck off to the responsible life my parents had in store for me; I had just spent time in the underworld of Murska Sobota and come out soaked with sweat and tears; I had a magic pill in my pocket. I needed somebody to love me tonight.

  I found myself in a park infused with the dung-and-straw smell of budding trees and fledgling grass. At the center was a copper-green statue of a partisan with a rifle pointed toward the obscure treetops. A man in a fur hat held a leash under a weak light, while his Irish setter ran in circles with an imaginary friend, stopping every so often to look up hopefully at the man. The fur hat was the same auburn color as the dog, and for a moment I thought the man was wearing a dead puppy on his head. Just beyond the reach of light, a couple was groping, their hands stuck deep into each other.

  I was giving up my hope of finding love, but across the empty street stood two young women, arm in arm, neatly clad in long coats. Their heels clacked as they crossed the street toward me; they giggled and chattered, their faces made up, their hair dewed with sourceless glimmer. One of them had a long narrow chin, the other had big dark eyes. They cut across the park at a brisk pace, avoiding the unlit edges. When they reached the brighter side of the street, I followed them, sticking to the dark side. They left the park and got on the main street, down which a cistern truck crawled, two men in tall rubber boots with snaky hoses in their hands washing the street. The asphalt glistened tarrishly, the women scuttering across the border between the wet and the dry. The strong stream from one of the hoses rushed toward my shoes and soaked them, so when I entered the dry territory, I left wet footprints behind.

  Abruptly the two women stopped in front of the appliance store and examined my freezer chest, stolid and lit up. The narrow-chinned woman turned and looked at me, and in panic, I faced a travel agency window and a faded, crude collage of various exotic African landscapes, all photographed from high above. The women went on walking, quickening their pace until it matched the beating of my heart. It was impossible to stop now, for we were bound in this absurd pursuit. They turned the corner and I ran after them, feeling we might be reaching our goal.

  Around the corner, they were standing with a man, all in denim, his large shovel-shaped hand comfortingly on their shoulders as they pointed at me, speaking to him with angry alacrity. He smiled and called me over, and for an insane instant I thought they were inviting me to party with them, but then he started unambiguously sprinting toward me. I took off at the speed of fear toward the hotel; I charged down
the main street, splashing through puddles. Lighter than a cork, I danced forth on the waves. I did not dare turn to see where my pursuer was, but I heard his big feet hitting the ground steadily behind me. Those feet would hit me just as well if he got hold of me. Oh, the horror of your body’s not living up to the intensity of your fear—no matter how fast I wanted to run, my feet moved slowly, slipping a couple of times. I had visions of his pointed shoes breaking through my skin and skull and ribs. He abandoned the pursuit eventually, but I kept running.

  Hotel Evropa emerged before me on a wholly unfamiliar street. Soaked to the bones, I savagely pushed and pulled the entrance door, until Franc, dreadfully hateful in the middle of his twenty-four-hour shift, unlocked it for me. I crept past him, focusing on each of my steps so as not to appear drunk. I pressed the elevator button and waited patiently, while my center of gravity rode the surf of my inebriation. I would have waited all night, for I did not want to exhibit my wobblibility, let alone ascend the eternal stairs to the fifth floor, but Franc barked at me that the elevator was already there—indeed, the door was wide open. I stepped into a sweat-tinged cloud of perfume and went up inhaling like a firefighter taking in oxygen.

  The key would not enter the lock, no matter how hard I tried to push it in. Everything was wrong: I kicked the door with my knee, and then with my foot, and then again and again. Need I say it hurt? Need I say that the pain made everything much worse? Need I say that I was terrified out of my wits when I heard the lock turning and the door opened and there stood Elizabeth, loosely wrapped in a peignoir, pulling its flaps together to cover her uncoverable breasts. Her skin glowed of slumber, her tresses ruffled, she smelled of dreams. “How can I help you?” is what she probably said. I probably said nothing or just groaned. Her husband was snoring so loudly that I thought he was faking it, the pitiful coward. She looked straight into my eyes; at the bottom of her eyes there was love, the only antidote to this vile despair. I wanted to hold her hand with rings like bejeweled palaces, I wanted to kiss her, I wanted her to leave her stertorous husband, deflower me, and cultivate me in the garden of my youth. All I needed to spark a conflagration of our heated bodies was the right move, the right word. So I said:

  “Pill?”

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  I excavated the pill from my change pocket and offered it to her on the palm of my hand—it was tiny in the cut-out piece of packaging. She looked at it, baffled, then turned around as if to check whether her unwitting husband was still asleep.

  “What is it, honey?” the husband cried. I quickly put the pill back in my pocket, as the husband was coming to the door. Elizabeth could see that I was mindful, that I was a considerate gentleman, young though I was. She flashed a barely perceptible smile and I understood we were in it together now, so when the husband came to the door, his pajamas baseball-patterned, his hair disheveled, I said, as innocently as I could, “Maybe you have pill? For head?” I pointed at my head, lest there be any confusion whose head we were talking about.

  “No, I am sorry,” Elizabeth said, and started closing the door, as I kept saying, “Maybe aspirin? One aspirin? Aspirin . . .”

  She shut the door and locked it twice. Clearly, I had not said the right word; I was very drunk and had not considered this outcome. I thought that we had connected, that the electricity had started flowing between our trembling bodies. Swaying before the cruelly and unnecessarily closed door, I raised my hand to knock and clarify to Elizabeth that, yes, I was in love with her, and that, no, I didn’t mind that she was married. I didn’t do it; the door was closed as closed can be. I heard them murmuring conspiratorially, like a husband and wife, and I recognized that love was on the other side, and I had no access to it.

  But the beauty of youth is that reality never quells desire, so when I unlocked my door I left it open, in case Elizabeth wanted to put her dull husband to sleep and then tiptoe over to my frolicsome den. Every now and then I peeped out, hoping to see her door slowly coming ajar, to see her lustfully scurrying over to me. Thus I was peering out when Franc strode out of the elevator, stopped at Elizabeth’s door, gingerly knocked, as my jealous heart sank, and when she opened it, exchanged whispers with her. She pointed at me—for the last delusional moment I thought she had called him up to ask about me—and there I stood in the crack, grinning like a happy dog.

  Franc charged over and pushed my door open, before I could lock it. With a flashing swing of his hand from his hip up to my face, he slapped me. My cheek burned, my eyes filled with fiery tears. I retreated toward the bed, until I stumbled and fell on the floor. Franc kicked me and kept kicking me: his shoes were pointed, and I felt the point sinking into my flesh, my buttocks and thighs, then hitting against my ribs and coccyx. I shrimped up and covered my face and head.

  There was too much pain at that moment, my body numb and squandered; Franc’s exertions and kicks were hysterical, therefore funny; the floor stank of machine oil. He didn’t kick me in the face, as he could have done. He didn’t spit on me, but on the floor next to me. He didn’t yell at me, just snarled and growled, because the rapid fire of kicks was not easy on him; when he stopped, he was panting. Leaving, he calmly told me that if he were to hear a peepest peep from me, he would beat me to a pulp and pull me by my ears out onto the street, let the police have fun with me all night long. He was a good, if unpleasant, man, Franc was. He even slowly, carefully, closed the door.

  I lay in the darkness, unable to move, until I fell asleep. The neon lights in the hall hummed; the elevator thudded going up, coming down. I dreamt of war, of might and right, of utterly unforeseeable logic. I woke up wishing I were home: there would have been the smell of French toast and my father’s aftershave and the banana shampoo my sister liked to use. There would have been the weather forecast on the radio (my parents liked to know the future), my sister pouting because she couldn’t listen to her music show. I would have walked in and derisively submitted myself to my mother’s kiss. Breakfast would have been ready.

  I stood up—the pain beginning to set in—and unpacked my mother’s chicken-and-pepper sandwich; it was stale, the pepper mushy and bitter. I turned on the lights, found my notebook, and after biting into the sandwich and staring at the blank page for a long time, wrote a poem that I titled “Love and Obstacles,” the first lines: There are walls between the world and me, / and I have to walk through them.

  The following morning I woke up to find my body encrusted in dull, bruisey pain. I went to the store and delivered the money to Stanko. He had a scrubbing-wire beard, veins and sinews bulging on his hands as he counted and recounted the money. I was short a few dinars and told him that I had been robbed on the train; two brazen criminals had emptied my pockets, but had failed to find the rest of the money in my bag. Stanko stared at me until he believed me, then shook his head, appalled by the world that stole from its children. He made a note on the form before him, then showed me where to sign. He shook my hand earnestly and heartily, apparently congratulating me. When he offered me a cigarette, I took it and asked for another one. We smoked examining the freezer chest. Stanko seemed proud of it, as though he himself had created it. It was impressive: enormous, blazing white, and coffinlike in its emptiness; it smelled of clean, subzero death. It should come to us in two or three weeks, he said, and if it didn’t, we should call him.

  I slept on the bus and I slept on the night train, waking up only when my stomach started growling, when my body stiffened and started hurting again. I had no money to buy food, so I kept reliving the chicken-and-pepper sandwich and its beautiful smell. Dawn was descending upon earth; my compartment was freezing cold. I saw a horse grazing alone in a field, inexplicably wrapped in nylon; a copse of trees like toothpick tombstones; clouds on the horizon filled by an eternity of tears. When I arrived home, begrimed with having been away, breakfast was waiting.

  The same day, Mother washed the denim pants I had worn in Murska Sobota, with the pill in the change pocket disintegrating—nothing was
left except a nugget of foil and plastic. The freezer chest arrived after seventeen days. We filled it to the brim: veal and pork, lamb and beef, chicken and peppers. When the war began in the spring of 1992, and electricity in the city of Sarajevo was cut, everything in the freezer chest thawed, rotted in less than a week, and then finally perished.

  The Conductor

  In the 1989 Anthology of Contemporary Bosnian Poetry, Muhamed D. was represented with four poems. My copy of the anthology disappeared during the war, and I cannot recall the titles, but I do remember the subjects: one of them was about all the minarets of Sarajevo lighting up simultaneously at sunset on a Ramadan day; another was about the deaf Beethoven conducting his Ninth Symphony, unaware of the audience’s ovations until the contralto touched his shoulder and turned him around. I was in my early twenties when the book came out, and compulsively writing poetry every day. I bought the anthology to see where I would fit into the pleiad of Bosnian poets. I thought that Muhamed D.’s poems were silly and fake; his use of Beethoven struck me as pretentious, and his mysticism as alien to my own rock ’n’ roll affectations. But in one of the few reviews the anthology received, the critic raved, in syntax tortured on the rack of platitudes, about the range of Muhamed D.’s poetic skills and the courage he had shown in shedding the primitive Bosnian tradition for more modern forms. “Not only is Muhamed D. the greatest living Bosnian poet,” the reviewer said, “he is the only one who is truly alive.”

  I had not managed to get any of my poetry published—nor would I ever manage—but I considered myself a far better, more soulful poet than Muhamed D. I had written about a thousand poems in less than two years, and occasionally I shored those fragments into a book manuscript that I sent to various contests. I can confess, now that I’ve long since stopped writing poetry, that I never really understood what I wrote. I didn’t know what my poems were about, but I believed in them. I liked their titles (“Peter Pan and the Lesbians,” “Love and Obstacles,” et cetera), and I felt that they attained a realm of human innocence and experience that was unknowable, even by me. I delayed showing them to anyone else; I was waiting for readers to evolve, I suppose, to the point where they could grasp the vast spaces of my ego.