Aleksandar Hemon - Nowhere Man

I sat next to Vivian, attracted by her scent of coconut sweat and her radiant skin — she gripped the handlebar on the seat in front of us and I could see her velvet veins bulging. I could also hear her breathing, her tresses’ ends dithering from her breath. Her bare legs brandished a bruise here and there, amid goose bumps. It terrified me to see how fragile she was. I believe that Vivian was aware of my gaze, for she looked straight ahead, only occasionally smiling, exposing her gums reluctantly.

But then Will threw his tennis body onto the seat in front of us, and said: “Roberta said we might get to see the president.”

“Wow,” Vivian said.

We arrived at the airport, at a back lot, with no one around, except a square-shouldered man in a dark suit, a cubical jaw, dark sunglasses, a gadget in his ear, his hands lethal weapons — exactly how I had imagined a presidential bodyguard. I get a kick out of meeting someone who is a cliché embodied. It produces a pleasant feeling of a world completed, of everything arranging itself without any of my involvement, yet not veering out of control. And a diminished Vivian was reflected in his sunglasses. He ushered us into a waiting room, told us to wait in a voice that sounded synthesized, and then vanished.

There we sat waiting.

We were killing time, choking every little minute with the muscly hands of mortifying ennui. There was absolutely nothing in the room: no pictures on the walls, no magazines, no paper or pencils, no crass inscriptions on the chairs, not even dead flies in the light bowls. I exchanged irrelevant information with Vivian: our favorite Dunkin’ Donut (same: Boston Kreme); our favorite TV show ( Hogan’s Heroes ); our favorite Beatles song (“Yesterday,” “Nowhere Man”); our favorite salad dressing (she had none, I couldn’t think of any). We agreed on almost everything, and that cheered Vivian up. But I must confess — and if you are out there somewhere, Vivian, reading this woeful narrative, find it in your heart to forgive me — I lied about everything agreeing with her only because that was much easier than professing the flimsy beliefs I had never firmly held, and it was nice to see her smiling.

We turned to silence, and time simmered until it evaporated. They took us back to the school, but they told us that the president would speak at Babi Yar that evening and that we might be needed again. ‘Tis the time’s plague, when madmen lead the blind.

The Babi Yar ravine was full of people, swarming against the green background of trees. They grew out of pits that once upon a time had been filled up with human flesh, which had on me a disturbing effect of feeling unjustly alive. President Bush walked on stage, in the long dumb strides of a man whose path had always been secure — around him a suite of tough motherfuckers bulging with concealed weapons and willingness to give their lives for the president. We were close to the stage, over which the monument loomed — I could not make out what it was: a cramped lump cast in black bronze. We — Will, Mike, Basil, and Vivian, and I — watched him appear before the Ukrainian crowd that followed his every move, like a dog watching a mouse, with detached amazement: it was now in front of them that he became real. His bland, beady eyes scanned the crowd for a loyal face — a habit from back home, where voters grew like weeds. He looked at his watch, said something to a man carrying a clipboard, all efficient and chunky. The man nodded, so the president approached the microphone. The microphone screeched, then the president’s voice cracked in the speakers. He touched the microphone head with his lips, receiving a jolt from it. He tried to adjust the unwieldy microphone, as if choking a snake, speaking all along. His voice then came from a tape recorder deep down inside him, plugged into the electric current of his soul. Nobody was translating.

“Abraham Lincoln once said: We cannot escape history. .” he said somberly, still wrangling the microphone. Under the stage, there were men in uniforms, squatting, leaning on their rifles. Their heads brushed against the wooden beams. They had striped sailor-shirts under the uniform, which meant they were from the KGB. They smoked and seemed absolutely oblivious to what was happening right above them.

“Today we stand at Babi Yar and wrestle with awful truth.” He pronounced Yar as Year. The men under the stage were laughing about something, one of them shaking his head in some kind of disbelief.

“And we make solemn vows,” the president went on, his voice getting deeper, the microphone making a wheeee sound. I spotted Jozef in the crowd, his face beaming out of the crowd’s grayness, standing close to the stage, with his hands in his pockets, Andrea next to him.

“We vow this sort of murder will never happen again.”

The KGB men under the stage simultaneously dropped their cigarettes and stepped on the butts, still squatting, as if they were dancing hopak.

“We vow never to let forces of bigotry and hatred assert themselves without opposition.”

I realized that President Bush reminded me of one Myron, who would eat earthworms for a quarter when we were kids: he would put a couple of earthworms between two pieces of bread and bite through. You could sometimes see their ends wiggling between the slices, while he chewed their heads. With his quarters he would buy some booze — Colt 45 or Cobra or something.

“And we vow that whenever our devotion to principle wanes the microphone suddenly went silent] when good men and women refuse to defend virtue [silence] each child shot [ wheeee. silence, wheeee ] none of me will ever forget. None of us will ever forget.”

The setting sun peeked through the treetops and blinded Bush, who squinted for a moment, a fiery patch on his face. Jozef whispered something into Andrea’s ear and she started giggling with her hand on her mouth. The people standing behind the president on the stage were uneasy. The men under the stage were on their backs now, looking up at the stage ceiling, their AK-47s laid next to them. Vivian silently moved next to me — the coconut aroma perished from her sweat. The chunky guy with the clipboard shook up the microphone, as if it all were a matter of its stubbornness, and then gave up.

“May God bless you all [. . . wheeeeeumph. . . . ] the memories of Babi Yar.”

And then Bush came off the stage and after a sequence of microevents that I cannot recall — you must imagine my shock — Jozef was standing in front of Bush, behind the moat of the bodyguards’ menacing presence, his face extraordinarily beautiful, as if an angelic beam of light were cast on his face. Jozef was looking at him with a grin combined with a frown — which I can recognize in retrospect as his recognition that the moment was marvelously absurd. Bush must’ve seen something else, perhaps his divine face, perhaps someone who would make his presidential self look better on a photo (and the cameras were snapping), someone who looked Slavic and exotic, yet intelligible — the whole evil empire contracted in one photogenic brow of woe. So he asked Jozef, looking at the fat man, expecting him to interpret:

“What is your name, young fellow?”

“Jozef Pronek,” Jozef answered, while the fat man was mouthing a translation of the question, spit burping in the corners of his lips.

“This place is holy ground. May God bless your country, son.”

“It is not my country,” Jozef said.

“Yes, it is,” Bush said, and patted Jozef on his shoulder. “You bet your life it is. It is as yours as you make it.”

“But I am from Bosnia. .”

“It’s all one big family, your country is. If there is misunderstanding, you oughtta work it out.” Bush nodded, heartily agreeing with himself. Jozef stood still, his body taut and his smile lingering on his face, bedazzled by the uncanniness.