Aleksandar Hemon - The Making of Zombie Wars

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The Making of Zombie Wars: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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The seriously, seriously funny roller-coaster ride of sex and violence that Aleksandar Hemon has long promised
Script idea #142: Aliens undercover as cabbies abduct the fiancée of the main character, who has to find a way to a remote planet to save her. Title: Love Trek.
Script idea #185: Teenager discovers his girlfriend's beloved grandfather was a guard in a Nazi death camp. The boy's grandparents are survivors, but he's tantalizingly close to achieving deflowerment, so when a Nazi hunter arrives in town in pursuit of Grandpa, he has to distract him long enough to get laid. A riotous Holocaust comedy. Title: The Righteous Love.
Script idea #196: Rock star high out of his mind freaks out during a show, runs offstage, and is lost in streets crowded with his hallucinations. The teenage fan who finds him keeps the rock star for himself for the night. Mishaps and adventures follow. This one could be a musical: Singin' in the Brain.
Josh Levin is an aspiring screenwriter teaching ESL classes in Chicago. His laptop is full of ideas, but the only one to really take root is Zombie Wars. When Josh comes home to discover his landlord, an unhinged army vet, rifling through his dirty laundry, he decides to move in with his girlfriend, Kimmy. It's domestic bliss for a moment, but Josh becomes entangled with a student, a Bosnian woman named Ana, whose husband is jealous and violent. Disaster ensues, and as Josh's choices move from silly to profoundly absurd, The Making of Zombie Wars takes on real consequence.

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Ana said something to the man, and he revolved to give her an angry look, responding with a word that, to Joshua, sounded gutturally ugly. The man did not look at Joshua once, waving the cleaver around as he was getting wound up about something. Ana stood between Joshua and the door, blocking off the retreat route, so he looked around the kitchen with feigned interest: a calendar from a butcher shop on the wall; a cuckoo clock with weights and an unmoving pendulum; the spice rack, spiceless. He nodded, as if to show his admiration for the simple, human ambition of the kitchen. The Levin syndrome: always seeing himself from someone else’s point of view, as if in a movie.

Finally, mercifully, Ana said: “This is Esko, my husband.”

“Pleasure to meet you, Esko,” Joshua said. “I’m Joshua.”

Esko moved the cleaver from his right to his left hand, as if considering shaking Joshua’s hand, still saying nothing. His jaw was wide and not only unshaven but layered with unshavenness; a big, blackish wart protruded from the depths of his hirsute cheek. Joshua understood at first glance that Esko disliked him.

“I’m Ana’s English teacher,” he said, unnecessarily.

“Good,” the man said and returned the cleaver to his right hand. A scene presented itself to Joshua: Esko grabbing his right hand, carelessly offered for a shake, then swinging the cleaver and slicing it off, the blood spraying the kitchen walls. Instead, Esko went back to dismembering the lamb, the splinters of meat flying about excitedly.

“My husband was born in boat,” she said.

“Oh really?” Joshua said. “That’s fascinating.”

“That’s what we say in Bosnia when somebody doesn’t know how to be nice.”

“That’s okay,” Joshua said. All of his utterances felt wrong, as if English suddenly were a language foreign to him. Esko placed the lamb’s head on the board, complete with its grotesquely googly eyes, and split it in two with one powerful blow. He picked up a piece of the brain with the cleaver and licked it off the blade. Born in an abattoir, more likely.

“It is not okay. He was not really born in boat. He is from good city family.”

She was upset, he realized.

“He is my second husband,” she said, which Joshua elected to understand as not my first choice . She was grinding her teeth, snorting instead of breathing. He had an urge to put his arms around her and squeeze her hard, just to see how strong she was. She made choices: she was strong. But there were no dimples in sight.

“I like your place,” Joshua said, helplessly.

“Go look around,” she said.

He slipped past her out into the hallway, but there was little to look at. He could hear Ana speaking to Esko with restrained fury, riddled with hard Eastern European consonants. Obediently, he opened the first door and it was the bathroom: towels, mirror, moldy dampness. He opened another one and it was their bedroom. The bed was unruly, as if sex had just been had in it; chairs covered with clothes; the smell of married bodies. A tower of books stood to one side, on top of which was Let’s Go, America! 5 . On the closet door handle, there were her bras, bundled like scalps. As a kid, Joshua had thoroughly searched his parents’ bedroom whenever they’d gone away: he’d frisked his father’s inside suit pockets, finding condoms; he’d looked through his mother’s dresser drawer, dug through her bras and underwear; he’d gone through their documents: bills, bank statements, letters to lawyers. He’d kept tabs on them; he’d found out unmentionable things. He’d known well before Rachel that Bernie had been fucking Constance on the sly. He closed the door.

“It’s crazy messy,” Ana said, right behind him. There was only one more door to open: a handwritten sign on it said “Welcome to Hell!”

“Room of Alma. My daughter,” Ana said, but she didn’t open the door for him, and he didn’t insist. What could’ve been in there? Script Idea #62: A secret door in a teenager’s closet leads to an alternate universe, where she is the heiress to a powerful empire, her life endangered by her evil stepfather .

* * *

Ana placed him at the head of the table, so that everyone now regarded him with expectation, as if he were supposed to conduct a workshop, or affirm his authority by delivering a salutation of some sort. No authority, however, was affirmed except for Ana’s, as she went around the table introducing all of her guests. Their names consisted entirely of unpronounceable sounds, therefore incomprehensible and impossible to remember. When she got to Bega, he said something that made her laugh.

“We go way back,” Bega said in English and winked. The woman sitting next to Bega was Ana’s boss, it turned out, and she was Russian. She had coal-black hair and biblically dark eyes, which made her appear very young. Joshua hadn’t even known Ana worked but he refrained from inquiring. Everyone at the table was now quiet, still waiting for Joshua to say something, and he couldn’t think of a single word to utter. Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.

In the meantime, Ana packed a plate and set it down before him. “Little bit of everything,” she said. When Esko walked in with a pile of lamb on a platter, she picked a boneless piece for Joshua and dropped it on his plate, to which everyone responded with an appreciative “oooh.”

“What do you want to drink?” Bega asked. “There is everything.”

“I like wine,” Joshua said, before he saw what was on the table. There was little doubt he looked like a snob.

And thus he drank some overoxidized wine and it was vile, but people talked at him and he could not fend off their foreign blather without alcohol, and he drank a lot of it, oxidation be damned. Ana was seated next to him, their thighs rubbing. It seemed that she was looking for ways to touch him surreptitiously, and mind he did not. She refilled his glass with the dreadful wine, while she sipped Johnnie Walker. Esko came in occasionally to bring more food or another bottle of booze, but he pretty much spent the evening in the kitchen. There was a cloud over his head, and everyone quieted down whenever he came by. “He doesn’t like parties,” Ana told Joshua by way of explanation. “Because he doesn’t like people.”

“Earth is populated with reasons not to like people.”

“He is wild man.”

“I think I ran into your daughter on my way in,” Joshua said, mainly to change the subject.

“Yes, Alma. I am worry about her,” Ana said. “Drugs, sex, crazy people. I don’t know her friends, where is she going. I think we maybe must go back to Sarajevo.”

“She’ll be fine,” Joshua said. “Teenagers have a lot of energy.”

“Energy is not good for mother,” Ana said. “Mother gets tired.”

Joshua arranged an empathetic face to signal he understood. The arrangement required raised eyebrows and lips rolled in; he could feel his forehead muscles straining. The easiest thing would be just to hug her or hold her hand. Kimmy liked to snuggle up and put her head on the side of his chest to listen to his heartbeat; he often worried she could smell his armpit.

“You are too young to get tired.”

She laughed: “How old you think I am?”

“Thirty,” Joshua ventured. Thirty-five or thirty-seven, really, maybe even forty, but he knew better than to say it.

She pressed her hands against her cheeks and said: “I can kiss you for that.”

Bega was ranting forcefully about something in Bosnian, occasionally sitting up to loom over the table, while everyone except Ana’s boss and the Ponomarenkos convulsed in laughter. Joshua’s plate defeated him with its demanding foreignness — apart from lamb, bread, and tomatoes, he did not know what any of those things were. Some were yummy, some bitter, all confusing in their combination of unfamiliar tastes.

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