Aleksandar Hemon: Love and Obstacles

From the InterContinental, we drove to Spinelli’s place through the haze of my exhilaration and the local humidity, past the American embassy, an eight-story building surrounded by a tall wall. Bored guards smoked behind the iron-grille gate. On the top of the embassy was a nest of sky-begging antennas. I imagined a life of espionage and danger; I imagined letters I would send to Azra from behind enemy lines; they would be signed with a false name, but she would recognize my handwriting: When you get this letter, my dear, I will be far beyond the reach of your love.

“This is where I defend freedom so I can pursue happiness,” Spinelli said. “One day I’ll take you there, Blunderpuss.”

As we climbed the stairs of our building, I walked by the apartment where my family should have been having dinner, but it felt as though they were not there, as though our place were empty. It could have been frightening, the absence, but I was too excited to care.

Straight from the doorstep, Spinelli went to his magneto-phone and turned it on. The reels started revolving slowly, indifferently. “Ladies and gentlemen, ‘Immigrant Song,’ ” he hollered, and then howled along with the music:

“AaaaAaaaAaaaaaaAaaa Aaaa . . .”

I put my hands on my ears to exaggerate my suffering, and Natalie laughed. Still screaming, Spinelli rummaged through the debris on his coffee table until he found what I instantly identified as a joint. He interrupted his howl to light it up, suck it in briskly, and pass it on to Natalie. I was innocent in the way of drugs, but when Natalie, holding her breath so that her eyes were bulging and, somehow, bluer for that, when Natalie offered it to me, I took it and inhaled as much as I could. Naturally, I coughed it all out immediately, saliva and phlegm erupting toward her and Spinelli. Her laughter was snorty, pushing her cheek apples up, dilating her nostrils—she had to lie down and hold her tummy. A chenille of snot hung from my nose, nearly reaching my chin. “If you can’t stand the heat, Blunderpuss,” Spinelli whinnied, “stay out of the oven.” Well, I was enjoying the oven, and once the cough subsided, I sipped the smoke out of the joint and kept it in my lungs, resisting the devilish scratching in my throat, waiting for the high to arrive.

Spinelli sat at his drum set and grabbed the sticks. He listened intently to a different song now, waiting, only to hit the timpani hard, playing along with the music, biting his lips to express passion.

“The greatest goddamn bridge in the history of rock ’n’ roll,” he said. He attacked the timpani again, even though the song moved on, and he kept doing it. I recognized the beat: it was what had frightened us the first night.

“What’s the name of that song?” I asked.

“ ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ ” Spinelli said.

“It sounds so African.”

“That ain’t African. That’s Bonzo, white as they come.”

Natalie took the joint from my hand; her fingers were soft and cold, her touch eerily gentle. I leaned back and stared at the fan revolving frenziedly, as if a helicopter were buried upside down in the ceiling. Spinelli stopped drumming to get a hissy puff.

“See,” he said, exhaling, “you’re just an innocent kid, Blunderpuss. When I was your age I did things I wouldn’t do now, but I did them then so I don’t have to do them now.”

He was rewinding the tape, pressing the Stop and Play buttons alternately, trying to find the beginning. The tape squealed and yelped until he pinpointed the moment of silence before “Stairway to Heaven.”

“There’s so much you don’t know, son. Do you know what you don’t know?”

“No, I don’t.”

“You have no idea how much you don’t know. Before you know anything, you have to know what you don’t know.”

“I know.”

“The fuck you do.”

“Leave him alone,” Natalie said, dreamily.

“Shut up, Monkeypie.” He took another puff, spat on the minuscule butt, and flicked it toward the ashtray on the coffee table, missing by a yard. Then he asked me:

“Why are you here?”

“Here? In Kinshasa?”

“Forget Kinshasa, Blunderpuss. Why are you here on this goddamn planet? Do you know?”

“No,” I had to admit. “I don’t.”

Natalie sighed, suggesting she knew where it was all heading.

“Exactly,” Spinelli said, and smashed a cymbal with the sticks. “That’s exactly your problem.”

“Are you okay, sweetheart?” Natalie asked me, extending her hand to touch me, but she couldn’t reach me and I couldn’t move.

“Yeah, sure,” I said.

“Listen to him: ‘Yeah, sure,’ ” Spinelli said. “He sounds like an American.”

“Let him be.”

But “Stairway to Heaven” was picking up, the drums kicking in. “That’s the way.” Spinelli leapt in excitement. “There is always a tunnel at the end of the light.”

By this time he was leaning over me, blocking the view of the ceiling fan.

“Steve,” Natalie said without conviction. “Leave him alone.”

“He is alone,” Spinelli said. “We live as we dream. Fucking alone.”

“That’s Conrad,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“That’s Joseph Conrad.”

“No, no, no, no, never, sir. That ain’t no Joe Conrad. That’s the truth.”

He played the “Stairway to Heaven” bridge over my head, closing his eyes, curling his lower lip. Natalie leaned away from me, slipped her hand between her cheek and a pillow and closed her eyes, producing a celestial smile. He dropped next to me, his back to Natalie’s stomach.

“There’s a tribe here,” he went on, his voice lowered, “that believes that the first man and woman slid down from the skies on a rope. God let them down on a rope, they untied themselves and the boss pulled the rope up. And that’s exactly what happened, my friend. We were dropped down here and we wanna go back up, but there’s no rope. So here you are, Blunderpuss, and the rope is gone.”

He spread his arms to point at our surroundings: the coffee table with a pile of formerly glossy National Geographics , on top of which was Natalie’s camera; an overflowing ashtray and a bottle of J&B; ebony sculptures of stolid elephants and twiggy warriors, one of them draped in his T-shirt.

“But we can at least try to get up as high as possible,” he said, and excavated a tinfoil nugget from his pocket, unwrapped it with delectation, and showed me a lump of olive-green paste at its heart. “That’s why God gave us Afghanistan.”

The day I smoked pot for the first time was also the day I smoked hashish for the first time. Spinelli chipped slivers off the lump, then stuffed it down the narrow asshole of a clay pipe, murmuring: “Yessiree, Bob!” to himself. This time I had no trouble inhaling and releasing the smoke impressively slowly.

“I’m here,” Natalie said, and I passed the pipe to her. She smoked on her back, her eyes still closed. The smoke crawled out of her mouth, as though she were not breathing at all.

“See, I was much like you when I was a kid. I looked for hours at the map of South America, and Africa, and Australia. I thought: There the fuck I go,” Spinelli said.

He stared at me for an endless moment, as though he were looking at the map again. His eyes were dim; I had a hard time keeping my eyes open.

“And here I am. Because I believe in something. Everybody’s gotta believe in something. You gotta know your way.”

He leaned back into Natalie, who sneezed like a cat but remained impassive. My head and stomach were completely empty. I tried to inhale some air to fill the vacuum inside me, but it didn’t work. I was gasping, rapidly deflating, and it sounded like a giggle—I heard myself as someone else.