Aleksandar Hemon - Love and Obstacles

And while Alma was glancing at the camera, I realized that pretty soon, my mother and my father would die and that, even though it had been long since they had protected me from anything, I would be left alone and exposed to the world, devoid of home and love, left alone to confront all the people full of pain and anger. I thought of the day way back in grammar school when I had gone to wet the chalkboard sponge, and in the empty hallway there stood my parents, looking for a teacher’s room. Usually, only one of them would come for a conference with a teacher, but this time, they were together; I seem to remember them holding hands. They looked big in comparison with all the little lockers, the children’s shoes lined up; they grinned when they saw me, proud of me clutching a sponge, performing duties. I felt that the three of us were together; we were inside, and everyone else—the kids in the classrooms, the teachers—was outside. They kissed me; I went back to my classroom; they went to wait for the teacher.

“And that’s it,” I told Alma. “That’s the end of the story. Now we can take a break.”

“That’s great. I could probably use that,” she said, not sounding convinced. “But could you speak a little more in your chewing-gum American? Can you still do it? I’d like to have you speak American and Bosnian in the film. Could you do that for me?”

“Sure,” I said. “Floxon thay formtion. Camman, dey flai prectacion. Gnow aut sol, lone. Yeah, sure.”

The Noble Truths of Suffering

The uniformed jaran did not acknowledge that I spoke in Bosnian to him. Silently, he checked my invitation, then compared the picture in my American passport with my mopey local face, and it appeared to have matched reasonably well. His head resembled an armchair—the deep-set forehead, the handlebar-like ears, the jutted jaw-seat—and I could not stop staring at it. He handed me back my passport with the invitation tucked inside and said, with his furniture-head accent: “Good evening to you.”

The American ambassador’s house was a huge ugly new thing, famously built high up in the hills by a Bosnian tycoon before he abruptly decided he needed even more space and, without spending a day in it, rented it to His American Excellency. There was still some work to be done—the narrow concrete path zigzagged meaninglessly through a veritable mud field; the bottom left corner of the frontage was unpainted, so it looked like a recently scarredover wound. Farther up the hill, one could see a yellow lace threading the fringes of the woods, marking a wilderness thick with mines.

Inside, however, all was asparkle. The walls were dazzling white, the stairs squeaked with untroddenness; on the first landing was a stand with a large bronze eagle, its wings frozen mid-flap over a hapless, writhing snake. At the top of the stairs, in a spiffy suit, if a size too big, stood Jonah, the cultural attaché, whom I had once misaddressed as Johnny and kept misaddressing since, pretending it was a joke. “Johnny-boy,” I said, “how goes it?” He shook my hand wholeheartedly, claiming he was extremely happy to see me. And maybe he was, who am I to say.

I snatched a glass of beer and a flute of champagne from a tray-carrying mope whose Bosnianness was unquestionably signified by a crest of hair looming over his forehead. “Šta ima?” I said. “Evo,” he said. “Radim.” I downed the beer and washed it down with champagne before I entered the already crowded mingle room. I tracked down another tray-holder, who despite a mustached leathery face looked vaguely familiar, like someone who may have bullied me in high school. “Šta ima?” I asked. “Evo,” he said. “Ništa.”

Ambidextrously armed with more beer and champagne, I assumed a corner position from which I could, cougarlike, monitor the gathering. I spotted the minister of culture, resembling a bald, mangy panda, despite the fact that all the fingers on both of his hands were individually bandaged—he held his champagne flute between his palms like a votive candle. There were various Bosnian TV personalities, sporting their Italian spectacles and the telegenic abundance of unnecessary frowns and smirks. The writers were recognizable by the incoherence bubbling up on their stained-tie surfaces. A throng of Armani-clad businessmen swarmed around the pretty, young interpreters, while the large head of a famous retired basketball player hovered over them like a full moon. I spotted the ambassador—stout, prim, Republican, with a small, puckered-asshole mouth—talking to someone who must have been Macalister. The possible Macalister was in a purple velvet jacket over a Hawaiian shirt; his denim pants were worn out and bulging at the knees, as though he spent his days kneeling; he wore open-toe Birkenstocks with white socks; everything on him looked hand-me-down. He was in his fifties but had a head of Bakelite-black hair, so unyielding it seemed it had been mounted on his head decades before and had not changed its form since. Without expressing any identifiable emotion, he was listening to the ambassador, who was rocking back on his heels, pursing his lips, slowly passing out a thought. Macalister was drinking water; his glass slanted slightly in his hand so the water edge repeatedly touched the brim only to retreat, in the exact rhythm of the ambassador’s rocking. I was already tipsy enough to be able to accost Macalister as soon as the ambassador left him alone. I finished my beer and champagne and was considering pursuit of a tray for the purpose of refueling, when the ambassador bellowed: “May I have your attention, please!” and the din quieted down, and the tray mopes stopped moving, and the crowd around the ambassador and Macalister spread away a bit.

“It is my great pleasure and privilege,” the ambassador vociferated, rocking in a very slow rhythm, “to welcome Dick Macalister, our great writer and—based on the little time I have spent talking to him—an even greater guy.”

We all applauded obediently. Macalister was looking down at his empty glass. He moved it from hand to hand, then slipped it into his pocket.

Some weeks before, I had received an invitation from the United States ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina, His Excellency Eliot Auslander, to join him in honoring Richard Macalister, a Pulitzer Prize winner and acclaimed author. The invitation was sent to my Sarajevo address, only a week or so after I had arrived. I could not figure out how the embassy knew I was there, though I had a few elaborately paranoid ideas. It troubled me greatly that I was located as soon as I landed, for I came to Sarajevo for shelter. My plan was to stay at our family apartment for a few months and forget about a large number of things (my divorce, my breakdown, the War on Terror, everything) that had tormented me in Chicago. My parents were already in Sarajevo for their annual spring stay, and my sister was to join us upon her return from New Zealand; hence the escape to Sarajevo was beginning to feel like a depleted déjà vu of our previous life. We were exactly where we had been before the war, but everything was fantastically different—we were different; the neighbors were fewer and different; the hallway smell was different; and from our window we could see a ruin that used to be a kindergarten and now nobody cared to raze.

I wasn’t going to go to the reception; I had had enough of America and Americans to last me for another lousy lifetime. But my parents were very proud that the American ambassador was willing to welcome me at his residence. The invitation—the elaborate coat of arms, the elegant cursive, the volutes and whorls of His Excellency’s signature— recalled for them the golden years of my father’s diplomatic service and officially elevated me into the realm of respectable adults. Father offered to let me wear his suit to the reception; he claimed it still looked good, despite its being twenty or so years old and sporting a triangular iron burn on its lapel.