Aleksandar Hemon - Love and Obstacles

I kept resisting their implorations until I went to an Internet café to read up on Richard Macalister. I had heard of him, of course, but had never read any of his books, as I seldom read contemporary American fiction. With an emaciated teenager to my left liquidating scores of disposable video-game civilians and a cologne-reeking gentleman to my right listlessly browsing bestiality sites, I surfed through the life and work of Dick Macalister. To cut a long story short, he was born, he lived, he wrote books, he inflicted suffering and occasionally suffered himself. In Fall, his most recent memoir—“a heartbreaking, clenched-jaw confession”—he owned up to his wife-abusing, extended drinking binges, and spectacular breakdowns. In the novel Depth Sickness, a loan shark shot off his foot on a hunting trip, then redeemed in recollection his vacuous, vile life while waiting for help or death, both of which arrived at approximately the same time. “Macalister seems to have never heard of the dissociation of sensibilities,” The New York Times eulogized, “for his book is a host to a whole slew of them.” I skimmed the reviews of the short story collections (one of them was called Suchness ) and spent time reading about Nothing We Say, “Macalister’s masterpiece,” the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The novel was about “a Vietnam vet who does everything to get out of war, but cannot get war out of himself.” Everybody was crazy about it. “It is hard not to be humbled by the honest brutality of Macalister’s tortured heroes,” one reviewer wrote. “These men speak little not because they have nothing to say but because the last remnants of decency in their dying hearts compel them to protect others from what they could say.” It all sounded pretty good to me, but nothing to write home about. I found a Macalister fan site, where there was a selection of passages from his works accompanied by pages upon pages of trivial exegesis. Some of the quotations were rather nice, and I wrote them down:

Before Nam, Cupper was burdened with the pointless enthusiasm of youth.

The best remedy for the stormy sky is a curtain, he said.

On the other side of the vast, milky windowpane there sauntered a crew of basketball players, their shadows like a caravan passing along the horizon.

Cupper had originally set out to save the world, but now he knew it was not worth it.

One of these days the thick chitin of the world will break open, and shit and sorrow will pour out and drown us all. Nothing we say can stop that.

I liked that one. The thick chitin of the world, that was pretty good.

We all eagerly drank to Macalister’s health and success, whereupon he was beset by a swarm of the quickest suck-ups. I stepped out to the balcony, where all the smokers were forced to congregate. I pretended I was looking for someone, stretching my neck, squinting, but whoever I was looking for did not seem to be there. Down in the valley were dotted-light streets and illuminated, rocketlike minarets; at the far fringe of the night, toward Mojmilo hill, the pitch at the Željo soccer stadium was heartbreakingly green. Nothing was moving down below, as though the city were sunk at the bottom of a sea.

When I went back in, Macalister was talking to a woman with long auburn hair, her fingers lasciviously curved around a champagne flute. The woman was Bosnian, identifiable by her meaty carmine lips and a cluster of darkened-silver necklaces and a ruby pendant struggling to sink into her bosom, and the way she touched his forearm when she spoke to him; for all I knew, I could have had a hopeless crush on her in high school. She somehow managed to smile and laugh at the same time, her brilliant teeth an annotation to her laughter, her hair merrily flitting around. Macalister was burning to fuck her—I could tell from the way he leaned into her, his snout nearly touching her hair, sniffing her. It was jealousy, to be perfectly honest, that made me overcome my stage fright the moment the laughing woman was distracted by an embassy flunky. As she turned away from Macalister, I barged right in and wedged myself between the two of them.

“So what brings you to Sarajevo?” I asked. He was shorter than I; I could smell his hairiness, a furry, feral smell. His water glass was in his hand again, still empty.

“I go places,” he said, “because there are places to go.”

He had the sharp-edged nose of an ascetic. Every now and then the muscles at the root of his jaw tightened. He kept glancing at the woman behind me, who was laughing yet again.

“I’m on a State Department tour,” he added, thereby ruining the purity of his witticism. “And on assignment for a magazine.”

“So how do you like Sarajevo?”

“Haven’t seen much of it yet, but it reminds me of Beirut.”

But what about the Gazi Husrevbegova fountain, whose water tastes like no other in the world? What about all the minarets lighting up simultaneously at sunset on a Ramadan day? And the snow falling slowly, each flake coming down patiently, separately, as if abseiling down an obscure silky thread? What about the morning clatter of wooden shutters in Baščaršija, when all the old stores are opening at the same time and the streets smell of thick-foamed coffee? The chitin of the world is still hardening here, buddy.

I get emotional when inebriated. I said none of the above, however. Instead, I said:

“I’ve never been in Beirut.”

Macalister glanced at the woman behind my back, flashing a helpless smile. The woman laughed liltingly, the glasses chinked; as always, the good life was elsewhere.

“I could show you some things in Sarajevo, things no tourist could see.”

“Sure,” Macalister said without conviction. I introduced myself and proceeded to deliver the usual, well-rehearsed story of displacement and writing in English, nudging him toward declaring whether he had read me or not. He nodded and smiled. He was not as committed to our conversation as I was.

“You may have read my story ‘Love and Obstacles,’ ” I said. “It was in The New Yorker not so long ago.”

“Oh yeah, ‘Love and Obstacles.’ Great story,” he said. “Will you excuse me?”

And so he left me for the red-haired woman. I guzzled the champagne and the beer, then grabbed the only glass left on a fleeting tray—it was watered-down whiskey, but it would do. The woman’s hair was dyed anyway.

I kept relieving the tray-carriers of their loads. I talked to the basketball player, looking up at him until my neck hurt, inquiring unremittingly about the shot he had missed a couple of decades earlier, the shot that deprived his team of the national title and, I believed, commenced the general decline of Sarajevo. I cornered the minister of culture in order to find out what had happened to his fingers—his wife’s dress had caught fire in the kitchen and he had had to strip it off her. I giggled. She had ended up with second-degree burns, he said. At some point, I tracked down my friend Johnny to impart to him that you can’t work for the U.S. government unless you are a certified asshole, to which he grinned and said, “I could get you a job tomorrow,” which I thought was not unfunny. Before I exited, I bade good-bye to Eliot Auslander by slapping him on the back and startling him, and then turned that fucking eagle to face the wall, the unfortunate consequence of which was that the snake was now hopelessly cornered. Best of luck, little reptile.

The air outside was adrizzle. The ambassador’s house was way the fuck up the hill, and you had to go downhill to get anywhere. The flunkies were summoning cabs, but I wanted to air my head out, so downhill I went. The street was narrow, with no sidewalks, the upper floors of ancient houses leaning over the pavement. Across the valley, there was the caliginous Trebević; through a street-level window I saw a whole family sitting on a sofa, watching the weather forecast on TV—the sun stuck, like a coin, into a cloud floating over the map of Bosnia. I passed a peaceful police station and a freshly dead pigeon; a torn, faded poster on a condemned house announced a new CD by a bulbous half-naked singer, who, rumor had it, was fucking both the prime minister and the deputy prime minister. A tattered cat that looked like a leprechaun dog crossed my path. I turned the corner and saw, far ahead, Macalister and the redhead strolling toward the vanishing point, her hair brushing her shoulders as she turned to him to listen, his hand occasionally touching the small of her back to guide her around potholes and puddles.