Love and Obstacles Read online

  Bill canceled his classes and set out to translate Dedo’s poems. It was like entering the eye of a storm every day. In one poem, Bill said, a bee lands on a sniper’s hand, and he waits for the bee to sting him. In another one, Dedo sees an orange for the first time since the siege began, and he is not sure what is inside it—whether oranges have changed during his time away from the world; when he finally peels it, the smell inhales him. In another, Dedo is running down Sniper Alley and a woman is telling him that his shoe is untied, and with a perfect clarity of purpose, with the ultimate respect for death, he stoops to tie it, and the shooting ceases, for even the killers appreciate an orderly world. “I could not believe,” Bill said, “that such things could come out of that pandemonium.”

  At the end of the third week Dedo gave a reading. With a mug of Jack at hand he barked and hissed his verses at the audience, waving a shaky finger. After he had read, Bill came out and read the translations slowly and serenely in his deep Viking voice. But the audience was confused by Dedo’s hostility. They clapped politely. Afterward, faculty and students came up to him to ask about Bosnia and invite him to luncheons. He visibly loathed them. He livened up only when he realized that he had a chance to lay one of the graduate students who was willing to open her mind to “other cultures.” He was gone the next week, straight back to the siege, sick of America after less than a month.

  In the years after the war, only the occasional rumor reached me: Dedo had survived a massive heart attack; he’d made a deal with his physician that he would stop drinking but go on smoking; he’d released a book based on conversations with his young niece during the siege. And then—this made the news all over Bosnia—he’d married an American lawyer, who was working in Bosnia collecting war-crime evidence. The newspapers cooed over the international romance: he had wooed her by singing and writing poetry; she had taken him to mass grave sites. A picture from their wedding showed her to be a foot taller than he, a handsome woman in her forties with a long face and short hair. He consequently produced a volume of poems, titled The Anatomy of My Love, featuring many parts of her remarkably healthy body. There were poems about her instep and her heel, her armpit and her breasts, the small of her back and the size of her eyes, the knobs on her knees and the ridges on her spine. Her name was Rachel. I heard that they had moved to the United States—following her body, he had ended up in Madison, Wisconsin.

  But I do not want to give the impression that I thought about him a lot or even often. The way you never forget a song from your childhood, the way you hear it in your mind’s ear every once in a while—that’s how I remembered him. He was well outside my life, a past horizon visible only when the sky of the present was particularly clear.

  As it was on the cloudless morning of September 11, 2001, when I was on a plane to D.C. The flight attendant was virginally blond. The man sitting next to me had a ring of biblical proportions on his pinkie. The woman on my right was immensely pregnant, squeezed into a tight red dress. I, of course, had no idea what was going on—the plane simply landed in Detroit and we disembarked. The Twin Towers were going down simultaneously on every screen at the unreal airport; maintenance personnel wept, leaning on their brooms; teenage girls screamed into their cell phones; forlorn pilots sat at closed gates. I wandered around the airport, recalling the lines from Dedo’s poem: Alive, I will be, when everybody’s dead. / But there will be no joy in that, for all those / undone by death need to pass / through me to reach hell.

  While America settled into its mold of patriotic vulgarity, I began to despair, for everything reminded me of Bosnia in 1991. The War on Terror took me to the verge of writing poetry again, but I knew better. Nevertheless, I kept having imaginary arguments with Dedo, alternately explaining to him why I had to write and why I should not write poetry, while he tried to either talk me out of writing or convince me that it was my duty. Then, last winter, I was invited to read in Madison and hesitantly accepted. Dedo was the reason for both the hesitation and the acceptance, for I was told that he would be one of the other readers.

  So there I was, entering the large university auditorium. I recognized Dedo in the crowd by his conspicuous shortness, his bald dome reflecting the stage lights. He was changed: he’d lost weight; everything on him, from his limbs to his clothes, seemed older and more worn; he wiped his hands on his corduroy pants, nervously glancing up at the people around him. He was clearly dying to smoke, and I could tell that he was not drunk enough to enjoy the spotlight. He was so familiar to me, so related to everything I used to know in Sarajevo: the view from my window; the bell of the dawn streetcar; the smell of smog in February; the shape that the lips assume when people pronounce their soft Slavic consonants.

  “Dedo,” I said. “Šta ima?”

  He turned to me in a snap, as if I had just woken him up, and he did not smile. He didn’t recognize me, of course. It was a painful moment, as the past was rendered both imaginary and false, as though I had never lived or loved. Even so, I introduced myself, told him how we used to drink together at the Writers’ Club; how he used to sing beautifully; how often I remembered those times. He still couldn’t recall me. I proceeded with flattery: I had read everything he’d ever written; I admired him, and as a fellow Bosnian, I was so proud of him—I had no doubt that a Nobel Prize was around the corner. He liked all that and nodded along, but I still did not exist in his memory. I told him, finally, that he used to think I was a conductor. “Dirigent!” he exclaimed, smiling at last, and here I emerged into the light. He embraced me, awkwardly pressing his cheek against my chest. Before I could tell him that I had never conducted and still was not conducting, we were called up to the stage. He had a rotten-fruit smell, as if his flesh had fermented; he went up the stairs with a stoop. Onstage, I poured him a glass of ice water, and instead of thanking me, he said, “You know, I wrote a poem about you.”

  I do not like reading in front of an audience, because I am conscious of my accent and I keep imagining some American listener collecting my mispronunciations, giggling at my muddled sentences. I read carefully, slowly, avoiding dialogue, and I always read the same passage. Often, I do it like a robot—I just read without even thinking about it, my lips moving but my mind elsewhere. So it was this time: I felt Dedo’s gaze on my back; I thought about his mistaken memories of me conducting a nonexistent orchestra; I wondered about the poem that he had written about me. It could not have been the poem with the spider-conductor, for surely he knew that I was not in Sarajevo during the siege. Who was I in his poem? Did I force the musicians to go beyond themselves, to produce sublime beauty on mistuned instruments? What were we playing? Beethoven’s Ninth? The Rite of Spring? Death and Transfiguration? I sure as hell was not conducting the Madison audience well. They applauded feebly, having all checked out after the first paragraph or so, and I feebly thanked them. “Super,” Dedo said when I crawled back into my seat, and I could not tell whether he was being generous or whether he just had no idea how bad it really was.

  Dedo was barely visible behind the lectern. Bending the microphone down like a horribly wilted flower, he announced that he was going to read a few poems translated into English by his “angel wife.” He started from a deep register; then his voice rose steadily until it boomed. His vowels were flat, no diphthongs audible; his consonants were hard, maximally consonanty; thes were duhs; no r’s were rolled. His accent was atrocious, and I was happy to discover that his English was far worse than mine. But the bastard scorched through his verses, unfettered by self-consciousness. He flung his arms like a real conductor; he pointed his finger at the audience and stamped his foot, leaning toward and away from the microphone, as two young black women in the first row followed the rhythm of his sway. Then he read as if to seduce them, whispering, slowly:

  Nobody is old anymore—dead or young, we are.

  The wrinkles straighten up, the feet no longer flat.

  Cowering behind garbage containers, flying away

  from the snipers, ever
ybody is a gorgeous body

  stepping over the corpses, knowing:

  We are never as beautiful as now.

  Later I bought him a series of drinks at a bar full of Badgers pennants and kids in college-sweatshirt uniforms, blaring TVs showing helmeted morons colliding head-on. We huddled in the corner, close to the toilets, and drank bourbon upon bourbon; we exchanged gossip about various people from Sarajevo: Sem was in D.C., Goran in Toronto; someone I knew but he could not remember was in New Zealand; someone I had never known was in South Africa. At a certain point he fell silent; I was the only one talking, and all the suppressed misery of living in America surged from me. Oh, how many times I had wished death to entire college football teams. It was impossible to meet a friend without arranging a fucking appointment weeks in advance, and there were no coffee gardens where you could sit and watch people walk by. I was sick of being asked where I was from, and I hated Bush and his Jesus freaks. With every particle of my being I hated the word “carbs” and the systematic extermination of joy from American life, et cetera.

  I don’t know whether he heard me at all. His head hung low and he could have been asleep, until he looked up and noticed a young woman with long blond hair passing on her way to the toilet. He kept his gaze on her backpack, then on the toilet door, as if waiting for her.

  “Cute,” I said.

  “She is crying,” Dedo said.

  We went to another bar, drank more, and left after midnight. Drunk out of my mind, I slipped and sat in a snow pile. We laughed, choking, at the round stain that made it seem as if I had soiled my pants. The air was scented with burnt burgers and patchouli. My butt was cold. Dedo was drunk too, but he walked better than I, skillfully avoiding tumbles. I do not know why I agreed to go home with him to meet his wife. We wobbled down quiet streets, where the trees were lined up as if dancing a quadrille. He made me sing, and so I sang: Put putuje Latif-aga / Sa jaranom Sulejmanom. We passed a house as big as a castle; a Volvo stickered with someone else’s thought; Christmas lights and plastic angels eerily aglow. “How the fuck did we get here?” I asked him. “Everywhere is here,” he said. Suddenly he pulled a cell phone out of his pocket, as if by magic—he belonged to a time before cell phones. He was calling home to tell Rachel that we were coming, he said, so that she could get some food ready for us. Rachel did not answer, so he kept redialing.

  We stumbled up the porch, past a dwarf figure and a snow-covered rocking chair. Before Dedo could find his keys, Rachel opened the door. She was a burly woman, with austere hair and eventful earrings, her chin tucked into her underchin. She glared at us, and I have to say I was scared. As Dedo crossed the threshold, he professed his love to her with an accent so horrible that I thought for an instant he was kidding. The house smelled of chemical lavender; a drawing of a large-eyed mule hung on the wall. Rachel kept saying nothing, her cheeks puckering with obvious fury. I was willing now to give my life for friendship—I might have abandoned him in Sarajevo, but now we were facing Rachel together.

  “This is my friend, Dirigent,” he said, propping himself up on his toes to land a hapless kiss on her taut lips. “He is conductor.” I made ridiculous conducting moves, as if to prove that I could still do it. She didn’t even look at me; her eyes were pinned on Dedo.

  “You’re drunk,” she said. “Again.”

  “Because I love you,” he said. I nodded.

  “Excuse us,” she said, and pulled him deeper into the house, while I stood in the hallway deliberating over whether to take my shoes off. A little ball of dust moved down the hall, away from the door, like a scared dog. I recalled Dedo’s poem about the shoes he had bought the day before the siege started, which he would never wear, for they get dirty on the streets filthy with death. Every day he polished his new shoes with what could be his last breath, hoping for blisters.

  He emerged from the house depths and said, “Daj pomozi”—Help me.

  “Get the hell out, you drunken pig,” Rachel snarled in his wake. “And take your stupid friend with you.”

  I decided not to remove my shoes and, stupidly, said, “It’s O.K.”

  “It is not O.K.!” Rachel shouted. “It has never been O.K. It will never be O.K.”

  “You must be nice to him,” Dedo screamed at her. “You must respect.”

  “It’s O.K,” I said.

  “Not O.K. Never O.K. This is my friend.” Dedo stabbed himself with his stubby finger. “Do you know me? Do you know who am I? I am biggest Bosnian poet alive.”

  “He is the greatest,” I said.

  “You’re a fucking midget, is what you are!” She leaned into him, and I could see his pointed-finger hand unfolding and swinging for a slap.

  “Come on, midget,” Rachel bellowed. “Hit me. Yeah, sure. Hit me. Let’s have Officer Johnson for coffee and cookies again.”

  Detergentlike snow had already covered our footprints. We stood outside on the street, Dedo fixated on the closed door, as though his gaze could burn through it, cursing in the most beautiful Bosnian and listing all her sins against him: her bastard son, her puritanism, her president, her decaf coffee. Panting, he bent over and grabbed a handful of snow, shaped it into a frail snowball, and threw it at the house. It disintegrated into a little blizzard and sprinkled the dwarf’s face. He was about to make another wretched snowball when I spotted a pair of headlights creeping down the street. It looked like a police vehicle, and I did not want to risk coffee and cookies with Officer Johnson, so I started running.

  Dedo caught up to me around the corner, and we staggered down an alley in an unknown direction: the alley was deserted except for a sofa with a stuffed giraffe leaning on it. There were weak tire-mark gullies and fresh traces of what appeared to be a three-legged dog. We saw a woman in the kitchen window of one of the nearby houses. She was circling around something we could not see, a glass full of red wine in her hand. The snow was ankle-deep; we watched her, mesmerized: a long, shiny braid stretched down her back. The three-legged dog must have vanished, for the prints just stopped in the middle of the alley. We could go neither forward nor back, so we sat down right there. I felt the intense pleasure of giving up, the expansive freedom of utter defeat. Whichever way I go, now, I’ll reach the other shore. Dedo was humming a Bosnian song I didn’t recognize, snowflakes melting on his lips. It was clear to me that we could freeze to death in a Madison back alley—it would be a famous way to die. I wanted to ask Dedo about the poem he had written about me, but he said, “This is like Sarajevo in ’ninety-three.” Perhaps because of what he had said, or perhaps because I thought I saw Officer Johnson’s car passing the alley, I got up and helped him to his feet.

  In the cab, it was only a question of time before someone vomited. The Arab cabbie despised us, but Dedo tried to tell him that he was a fellow Muslim. Madison was deserted.

  “You are my brother,” Dedo said, and squeezed my hand. “I wrote a poem about you.”

  I tried to kiss his cheek, as the cabbie glared at us in the rearview mirror, but awkwardly managed only to leave some saliva on his forehead.

  “I wrote a good poem about you,” Dedo said again, and I asked him to tell it to me.

  He dropped his chin to his chest. He seemed to have passed out, so I shook him, and like a talking doll, he said, “He whips butterflies with his baton. . . .” But then we arrived at my hotel. Dedo kept reciting as I paid for the cab, and I didn’t catch another word.

  I dragged him to the elevator, his knees buckling, the snow thawing on his coat, releasing a closet-and-naphthalene smell. I could not tell whether he was still reciting or simply mumbling and cursing. I dropped him to the floor in the elevator and he fell asleep. He sat there in a pile, while I was unlocking the door to my room, and the elevator closed its doors and took him away. The thought of his being discovered in the elevator, drooling and gibbering, gave me a momentary pleasure. But I pressed the call button, and the elevator carrying Dedo obediently came back. We are never as beautiful as now.

  T
he crushing sadness of hotel rooms; the gelid lights and clean notepads; the blank walls and particles of someone else’s erased life: I rolled him into this as if into hell. I hoisted him onto the bed, took off his shoes and socks. His toes were frostbitten, his heels brandished a pair of blisters. I peeled off his coat and pants, and he was shivering, his skin goose-bumped, his navel hidden in a hair tuft. I wrapped the bed-covers around him and threw a blanket on top. Then I lay down next to him, smelling his sweat and infected gums. He grunted and murmured, until his face calmed, the eyelids smoothing into slumber, the brows unfurrowing. A deep sigh, as when dusk falls, settled in his body. He was a beautiful human being.

  And then on Tuesday, last Tuesday, he died.

  Good Living

  Back in the days of the war in Bosnia, I was surviving in Chicago by selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. My employers thought that my Bosnian accent, clearly manufactured in the nether area of “other cultures,” was quirky, and therefore stimulant to the shopping instincts of suburban Americans. I was desperate at the time, what with the war and displacement, so I shamelessly exploited any smidgen of pity I could detect in lonely housewives and grumpy retirees whose doors I knocked at. Many of them were excited by my very presence at their doorstep, as I was living evidence of the American dream: here I was, overcoming adverse circumstances in a new country, much like the forebears of the future subscriber, presently signing the check and wistfully relating the saga of the ancestral transition to America.

  But I had much too much of a dramatic foreign accent for the prime subscription-selling turf of the North Shore suburbs, where people, quaintly smothered by the serenity of wealth, regularly read Numismatic News and bought a lifetime subscription to Life Extension. Instead, I was deployed in the working-class suburbs, bordering with steel-mill complexes and landfills, and populated with people who, unlike the denizens of the North Shore, did not think that I coveted what they had, because they did not exactly want it themselves.