Aleksandar Hemon - Nowhere Man

A cold hand on my forehead woke me up, and before I could see her face darkened and haloed by the background light, I recognized her smell: sweet sweat and coconut.

“Are you sleeping?”

“What do you think?”

“Have you heard?”

“Yup.”

“How can you sleep?”

“How can you not sleep?”

“Can I come into bed with you?”

“Sure.”

Vivian took off her sandals and her hairpins and weightlessly landed her body next to mine. She had on the flowery dress, which slid up to her thighs, and I could feel them against mine. She kissed my neck, and I curled her hair behind her ear. She put her hand on my stomach and then it edged toward my underwear.

Never mind the details: there was penetration, there was pain, and she was a virgin; there was guilt and avoiding each other’s eyes afterward, yet there were touches that implied the required postcoital closeness; there was sweat mixing. And there was embarrassment with the rich assortment of bodily imperfections: a solitary red pimple gestating on my chest; her asymmetrical, cross-eyed breasts; my nose hair; the charcoal-dust hair on the fringe of her cheek. We exchanged sussurous, empty words, not quite lies, but certainly not truthful, while my body tensed and tightened, eager to get out of her hold. I imagined describing the whole haphazard event to Will, Mike, and Basil and the salvos of laughter I would get, knowing all along that I could not do it. And I kept fretting that Jozef might come in, trying to think of things I could say to dispel the accusatory, questioning gaze, and the only thing I could think of — eminently useless — was: “We’re just friends.” God help me. It was much easier to succumb to sleep than to expect Jozef, and succumb I did, again.

Then the door of our room went down with a horrible crash and a bunch of KGB men with painted faces burst in, ripped us out of our beds, threw us on the floor. One of them stepped on my neck, pressing it with his boot viciously. The pain was intense, my neck stiffening up, but it was pleasurable and when they handcuffed us together, Jozef and me, I found myself wanting a second helping of that pain. They pushed us down the stairs and I twisted my ankle, but Jozef kept me from falling and breaking my neck. Then they ushered us with their rifle butts into a Black — very black — Maria. And when we entered it, I could not see anything, and I did not know whether it was because we were blindfolded or because the darkness was so thick that I could not see Jozef’s face, even if our breaths embraced together. But I could feel his bleeding wrist fidgeting on the other end of the handcuffs that tied us. Then we escaped from the Black Marenyka, when they stopped to pick up more arrestees — I recognized Mike and Vivian and wondered where Will might be — Jozef head-butted a guard and barged forward. We heard shouts and shots and the gallop of boots, but we were hidden by the darkness. I just followed Jozef and we ran and ran, but it was as if we were skidding along the surface of a placid sea. I simply let myself go, gliding over water, and then we hid in the forests of Ukraine. We dug a hole in the ground, and woke up sheathed with frost. We bit off chicken heads and drank the blood straight out of the necks. We hopped on a train, where Jozef strangled a policeman, while my handcuffed hand shook like a rattle in front of the dying policeman’s crooked eyes. We crossed borders and more borders, some of them were hedges, with watchtowers and sharpshooters strewn all over, waving at us, letting us through, so they could shoot us in the back. And they shot and I could feel their bullets going through me. Then we slept on a train car floor, like hobos, there was no one there, but as we slept, it filled with furniture and people sitting in armchairs and on sofas, and Jozef and I were sitting next to each other, and somehow our hips were handcuffed, and where the handcuff bit into my flesh there was a hole and I was leaking out, buckets of bile.

It was Will who walked in on us. It was morning again, we slept with our backs turned to each other, Vivian’s full frontal nudity facing the door.

“Jesus,” Will said, and Vivian covered herself. Jozef still was not in the room. Will brandished a tennis racket, as if it were a sword. He leaned over us — we could see our distorted little heads in his glasses — and said: “Meeting. In my room. In fifteen minutes.”

I may be this, and I may be that, but when I am told there is a meeting, I get up and attend the meeting.

“I need to go to my room,” Vivian said, pale and in need of a carrot or something.

“Okay.”

The meeting, ah, the meeting: Vivian and I, sitting on Will’s bed next to each other. Mike and Basil on the other bed, and Will amidst us — his family benevolently beaming at all of us. Andrea was not there, probably stretching in her bed next to Jozef. Will told us what he knew: there had been a coup; Gorbachev was in the Crimea, under house arrest; hard-line Communists and generals took over; there were arrests everywhere, people disappearing; street fighting in Leningrad, tanks on the streets, bloodshed; large army contingent movements from western Ukraine and Belorussia toward Kiev. He had received a call at Igor’s office from his father, who for some reason was in Munich. Will told us everything was good at home, and I may be misremembering a collective sigh of relief.

“We gotta get the hell out of here,” Basil said.

“We gotta wait,” Will said, “until we know what is going on. I think we are okay here.”

He ordered us not to leave the school and to let him know at any given time where we were. Throughout this performance, he had a somber frown and kept pushing up his glasses, mindfully allotting his glances in equal numbers to all of us. He instructed Vivian to inform Andrea about our meeting and its conclusions, and he told Mike and Basil that he needed to talk to them after the meeting — I seemed to be out of the loop, though I didn’t know what they were looping for.

Jozef was back in our room, radiant on his bed, not able to suppress his grin, his hand roaming under his shirt, as if marking the kiss traces, the tongue trails.

“It looks like you had some fun last night,” I said.

“Love is beautiful thing,” he said, pronouncing thing as ting.

“It is indeed,” I said, for a moment entertaining the thought of telling him about my ting.

“They demonstrate on Khreschatek,” he said. “Many people, all night. Police is everywhere. I go now, again. You want to go?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I have to talk to Will.”

“Why?”

“Well, because we had a meeting this morning.”

“Which meeting?”

“Meeting, you know. We organized ourselves. We have to know where every one of us is, in case of trouble.”

He put his left foot on his right knee, the sole facing me, and then went on picking on corns, peeling off dead skin, sliver by sliver, his toes watching it like five retarded hick brothers.

“You are like child. You must tell your parents where are you.”

“No, man. It’s just common sense.”

“When you don’t tell parents, you are bad boy. Bad boy,” he said, scowling at his heel.

“That’s stupid,” I groused. “I don’t have to prove anything to you, you know.”

“I know. I go now.”

“Who the hell do you think you are?” I said, and threw a pillow at the other pillow on my bed.

“I go now,” Jozef said. “You don’t want to go?”

I followed him. We walked: it was a long walk, through largely deserted streets, except for a sporadic pedestrian, ambling conspiratorially, or an ominous truck of soldiers, roaring by, under a roof of tree crowns touching one another above the street. We didn’t talk much; we heard birds chirruping and ruffling the leaves above our heads; the concrete was warm, and the light was soft, diffused by the humid air and the tree shade; fall was near. We walked by open windows exuding boiled-dough steam; by basement doors giving off damp coal-dust scent; by shuddering lacy curtains, behind which a shadow of an old woman’s face was recognizable for a moment. A cat crossed the street with her belly lowered, and her head ducked, and then stopped in the middle to look at us in affronted amazement. The sun twinkled from the tree crowns, for a whir of wind divided the leaves for an instant. But then we turned the corner and there was Khreshchatek: giant ore-brown men looming over austere concrete steps, too big to be human, their gaze directed at the horizon of rooftops, over our heads. There was a large crowd at the bottom of the stairs, with a speaker elevated above it, thundering into the squealing microphone something I could not understand. We saw a line of policemen standing a little below the giants’ feet, up on the stairs, solemnly lined up like a choir, their hands on their asses. And then another police line, behind the speaker, in the shadow of the trees. We joined the crowd — I followed Jozef, who moved closer to the speaker — and stood there, unsure what to do, other than applaud when everyone else did. The mustached guy standing next to me, with an unruly dandruffy lock poking his eyebrows, spoke to no one in particular about the police coming down and wiping the demonstrators out. I was taken aback, because he was the King of Midnight himself; even if I was not sure about his face, I recognized Antarctica. I don’t know if he recognized me, but he pointed at the trucks behind the backs of the umbrous policemen, deeper in the shadow.