Aleksandar Hemon - Love and Obstacles

Macalister talked to me, angerlessly. Occasionally I had a hard time following him, not least because Faruk sent over another bottle, allegedly his best wine, and I kept swilling it. Macalister had been in Vietnam, he had experienced nothing ennobling there. He was not Buddhist, he was “Buddhistish.” And the Pulitzer made him vainglorious—“vainglorious” was the word he used—and now he was ashamed of it all a bit; any serious writer ought to be humiliated and humbled by fame. When he was young, like me, he said, he used to think that all the great writers knew something he didn’t. He thought that if he read their books they would teach him something, make him better; he thought he would acquire what they had: the wisdom, the truth, the whole-ness, the real shit. He was burning to write, he wanted to break through to that fancy knowledge, he was hungry for it. But now he knew that that hunger was vainglorious; now he knew that writers knew nothing, really; most of them were just faking it. He knew nothing. There was nothing to know, nothing on the other side. There was no walker, no path, just walking. This was it, whoever you were, wherever you were, whatever it was, and you had to make peace with that fact.

“This?” I asked. “What is ‘this’?”

“This. Everything.”

“Fuck me.”

He talked more and more as I was sinking into oblivion, slurring the few words of concession and agreement and fascination I could utter. I would not remember most of the things he talked about, but as drunk as I was, it was clear to me that his sudden, sincere verbosity was due to his sense that our encounter—our writerly one-night stand—was a fleeting one. He even helped me totter up the stairs as we were leaving the restaurant, and flagged a cab for me. But I would not get into it, no sir, before he believed me that I would read all of his books, all of them, all that he had written, hack magazine jobs, blurbs, everything, and when he finally believed, I wanted him to swear that he would come over to my place, have lunch at my home with me and my parents, because he was family now, one of us, he was an honorary Sarajevan, and I made him write down our phone number and promise that he would call, tomorrow, first thing in the morning. I would have made him promise some other things, but the street cleaners were approaching with their blasting hoses and the cabdriver honked impatiently and I had to go, and off I went, drunk and high on bonding with one of the greatest writers of our embarrassing shit-ass time. By the time I arrived home, I didn’t think I would ever see him again.

But he called, ladies and gentlemen of prestigious literary prize committees; to his eternal credit he kept his promise and called the very next morning, as I was staring at the ceiling, my eyeballs bobbling on a hangover scum pond. It was not even ten o’clock, for Buddha’s sake, yet Mother walked into my room, bent over the floor mattress to enter my painful field of vision and give me the handset without a word. When he said, “It’s Dick,” I frankly did not know what he was talking about. “Dick Macalister,” he said; it took me a moment to remember who he was. Furthermore, it felt as though I had returned to America and the whole Sarajevo escape was but a limp dream, and in short, I was afraid.

“So at what time should I come over?” he asked.

“Come over where?”

“Come over for lunch.”

Let me skip all the uhms and ahms and all the words I fumbled as I struggled to reassemble my thinking apparatus, until I finally and arbitrarily selected the three-o’clock hour as our lunchtime. There was no negotiation. Richard Macalister was coming to eat my mother’s food; he offered no explanation or reason; he did not sound excessively warm or excited. I did not think that anything that had happened the night before could lead to any friendship, substantial or otherwise—the most I could ever hope for was a future tepid blurb from him. I had no idea what it was that he might want from us. But I spelled out our address for him so he could give it to a cabbie, warned him against paying more than ten convertible marks, and told him that the building was right behind the kindergarten ruin. I hung up the phone; Dick Macalister was coming.

In my pajamas I stood exposed to the glare of my parents’ morning judgment (they did not like it when I drank) and, with the aid of a handful of aspirin, informed them that Richard Macalister, an august American author, a winner of a Pulitzer Prize, an abstemious vegetarian, and a serious candidate for a full-time Buddhist, was coming over for lunch at three o’clock. After a moment of silent discombobulation, my mother reminded me that our regular lunchtime was one-thirty. But when I shrugged to indicate helplessness, she sighed and went on to inspect the supplies in the fridge and the freezer chest. Presently she started issuing deployment orders: my father was to go to the produce market with a list, right now; I was to brush my teeth and, before any coffee or breakfast, hurry to the supermarket to buy bread, kefir, or whatever it was that vegetarians drank, and also vacuum cleaner bags; she was going to start preparing pie dough. By the time she was clearing the table where she would spread the dough and thin it out with a rolling pin, my headache and apprehension had gone away. Let the American come with all his might, we were going to be ready for him.

Macalister arrived wearing the same clothes he had worn the night before—the velvet jacket, the Hawaiian shirt—in combination with a pair of snakeskin boots. My parents made him take the boots off. He did not complain or try to get out of it, even as I unsuccessfully attempted to arrange a dispensation for him. “It is normal custom,” Father said. “Bosnian custom.” Sitting on a low, shaky stool, Macalister grappled with his boots, bending his ankles to the point of fracture. Finally, he exposed his blazingly white tube socks and lined up his boots against the wall, like a good soldier. Our apartment was small, socialist size, but Father pointed the way to him as though the dining room were at the far horizon and they needed to get there before the night set in.

Macalister followed the direction with a benevolent smile, possibly bemused by my father’s histrionics. Our dining room was also a living room and a TV room, and Father seated Macalister in the chair at the dining table that faced the television set. He was given the seat that had always been contentious in my family, for the person sitting there could watch television while eating, but I don’t think Macalister recognized the honor bestowed upon him. CNN was on, but the sound was off. Our guest sat down, still appearing bemused, and tucked his feet under the chair, curling up his toes.

“Drink?” Father said. “Viski? Loza?”

“No whiskey,” Macalister said. “What is loza ?”

“ Loza is special drink,” Father said. “Domestic.”

“It’s grappa,” I explained.

“No, thanks. Water is just fine.”

“Water. What water? Water is for animals,” Father said.

“I’m an alcoholic,” Macalister said. “I don’t drink alcohol.”

“One drink. For appetite,” Father said, opening the bottle of loza and pouring it into a shot glass. He put it in front of him. “It is medicine, good for you.”

“I’ll take that,” I said, and snatched it before Macalister’s benevolence evaporated; I needed it anyway.

My mother brought in a vast platter with cut-up smoked meat and sheep cheese perfectly arrayed, toothpicks sticking out like little flagpoles without flags. Then she returned to the kitchen to fetch another couple of plates lined with pieces of spinach pie and potato pie, the crust so crisp as to look positively chitinous.