Aleksandar Hemon - Love and Obstacles

“No meat,” Mother said. “Vegetation.”

“Vegetarian,” I corrected her.

“No meat,” she said.

“Thank you,” Macalister said.

“You have little meat,” Father said, swallowing a slice. “Not going to kill you.”

Then came a basket of fragrant bread and a deep bowl brimming with mixed vegetable salad.

“Wow,” Macalister said.

“That’s nowhere near the whole thing,” I said. “You’ll have to eat until you explode.”

On the soundless TV there were pictures from Baghdad—two men were carrying a torn-up corpse with a steak tartare-like mess instead of a face, the butt grazing the pavement. American soldiers up to their gills in bulletproof gear pointed their rifles at a ramshackle door. A clean-shaven, suntanned general stated something inaudible to us. From his seat, Father glanced sideways at the screen, still munching the meat. He turned toward Macalister, pointed his hand at his chest, and asked: “Do you like Bush?” Macalister looked at me—the same fucking bemused smile stuck on his face—to determine whether this was a joke. I shook my head: alas, it was not. I had not expected Macalister’s visit to turn into such a complete disaster so quickly.

“Tata, nemoj,” I said. “Pusti čovjeka.”

“I think Bush is a gaping asshole,” Macalister said, unfazed. “But I like America and I like democracy. People are entitled to their mistakes.”

“Stupid American people,” Father said, and put another slice of meat into his mouth.

Macalister laughed, for the first time since I’d met him. He slanted his head to the side and let out a deep, chesty growl of a laugh. In shame, I looked around the room, as though I had never seen it. The souvenirs from our African years: the fake-ebony figurines, the screechingly colorful wicker bowls, a carved elephant tusk, a malachite ashtray containing entangled paper clips and Mother’s amber pendants; a lace handiwork whose delicate patterns were violated by prewar coffee stains; the carpet with an angular-horse pattern; all these familiar things that had survived the war and displacement. I had grown up in this apartment, and now all of it seemed old, coarse, and anguished.

Father went on relentlessly with his interrogation: “You win Pulitzer Prize?”

“Yes, sir,” Macalister said. I admired him for putting up with it.

“You wrote good book,” Father said. “You hard worked.”

Macalister smiled and looked down at his hand. He was embarrassed, perfectly devoid of vainglory. He straightened his toes and then curved them even deeper inward.

“Tata, nemoj,” I pleaded.

“Pulitzer Prize, big prize,” Father said. “Are you rich?”

Abruptly, it dawned on me what he was doing—he used to interrogate my girlfriends this way to ascertain whether they were good for me. When they called or stopped by, not heeding my desperate warnings, he would submit them to a brutal series of questions. What school did they go to? Where did their parents work? What was their grade point average? How many times a week did they plan to see me? I tried to forbid his doing that, I warned the girlfriends, even coached them in what they should say. He wanted to make sure that I was making the right decisions, that I was going in the right direction.

“No, I’m not rich. Not at all,” Macalister said. “But I manage.”

“Why?”

“Tata!”

“Why what?”

“Why you are not rich?”

Macalister gave out another generous laugh, but before he could answer, Mother walked in carrying the final dish: a roasted leg of lamb and a crowd of potato halves drowning in fat.

“Mama!” I cried, “Pa rek’o sam ti da je vegetarijanac.”

“Nemoj da vičeš. On može krompira.”

“That’s okay,” Macalister said, as though he understood. “I’ll just have some potatoes.”

Mother grabbed his still-empty plate and put four large potatoes on it, followed by a few pieces of pie and some salad and bread, until the plate was heaping with food, all of it soaked in the fat that came with the potatoes. I was on the verge of tears; it seemed that insult upon insult was being launched at our guest; I even started regretting the previous night’s affronts, at least those I could remember. But Macalister did not object, or try to stop her—he succumbed to us, to who we were.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said.

I poured another shot of loza for myself, then went to the kitchen to get some beer. “Dosta si pio,” Mother said, but I ignored her.

My father cut the meat, then sloshed the thick, juicy slices in the fat before depositing them on our respective plates. “Meat is good,” he said to no one in particular. Macalister politely waited for everyone else to start eating, then began chipping away at the pile before him. The food on Father’s plate was neatly organized into taste units—the meat and potatoes on one side, the mixed salad on the other, the pie at the top. He proceeded to exterminate his food, morsel by morsel, not uttering a word, not setting down his fork and knife for a moment, staring down at his plate, only to look up at the TV screen now and then. We ate in silence, as though the meal were a job to be done, thoroughly and quickly.

Macalister held his fork in his right hand, the knife unused, chewing slowly. I was mortified imagining what this—this meal, this apartment, this family—looked like to him, what he made of our small, crowded existence, of our unsophisticated dishes designed for ever hungry people, of the loss that flickered in everything we did or didn’t do. With all the cheap African crap and all the faded pictures and all the random remnants of our prewar reincarnation, this home was the museum of our lives, and it was no Louvre, let me tell you. I was fretting over his judgment, expecting condescension at best, contempt at worst. I was ready to hate him. He munched his allotment slowly, restoring his benevolent half-smile after every morsel.

He liked the coffee, he loved the banana cake; he washed down each forkful with a sip from his demitasse; he actually grunted with pleasure. “I am so full I will never eat again,” he said. “You’re an excellent cook, ma’am. Thank you very much.”

“It is good food, natural, no American food, no cheese-burger,” Mother said.

“I will ask you question,” Father said. “You must tell truth.”

“Don’t answer,” I said. “You don’t have to answer.” Macalister must have thought I was joking, for he said:

“Shoot.”

“My son is writer, you are writer. You are good, you win Pulitzer.”

I knew exactly what was coming.

“Tell me, is he good? Be objective,” Father said, pronouncing the word “obyective.”

“Nemoj, tata,” I begged, but he was unrelenting. Mother was looking at Macalister with expectation. I poured myself another drink.

“It takes a while to become a good writer,” Macalister said. “I think he’s well on his way.”

“He always like to read,” Mother said.

“Everything else, lazy,” Father said. “But always read books.”

“When he was young man, he always wrote poesy. Sometimes I find his poems, and I cry,” Mother said.

“I’m sure he was talented,” Macalister said. Perhaps Macalister had in fact read something I wrote. Perhaps it was that I was drunk, for I was holding back tears.

“Do you have children?” Mother asked him.

“No,” Macalister said. “Actually, yes. He lives with his mother in Hawaii. I am not a good father.”

“It is not easy,” my father said. “Always worry.”

“No,” Macalister said. “I would never say it’s easy.”

Mother reached across the table for my hand, tugged it to her lips, and kissed it warmly.