Aleksandar Hemon - Love and Obstacles

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Stairway to Heaven

Everything

The Conductor

Good Living

Szmura’s Room

The Bees, Part 1

American Commando

The Noble Truths of Suffering

ALSO BY ALEKSANDAR HEMON

The Lazarus Project

Nowhere Man

The Question of Bruno

RIVERHEADBOOKS | A MEMBER OF PENGUIN GROUP (USA) INC. | NEW YORK | 2009

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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Copyright © 2009 by Aleksandar Hemon

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

The following stories first appeared, in different form, in The New Yorker :

“Stairway to Heaven,” “Everything,” “The Conductor,” “Good Living,”

“Szmura’s Room,” “The Bees, Part 1,” and “The Noble Truths of Suffering.”

The lines from Arthur Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat” and “Youth IV” are quoted

from Oliver Bernard’s translations, in Collected Poems (Penguin Classics, 1987).

The lines from Zbigniew Herbert’s “Report from the Besieged City” are quoted from

John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter’s translation, in Report from the Besieged City

and Other Poems (Ecco Press, 1985).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hemon, Aleksandar, date.

Love and obstacles : stories / by Aleksandar Hemon.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-03284-8

I. Title.

PS3608.E48L68 2009

2008050340

813’.6—dc22

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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For my parents

Stairway to Heaven

It was a perfect African night, straight out of Conrad: the air was pasty and still with humidity; the night smelled of burnt flesh and fecundity; the darkness outside was spacious and uncarvable. I felt malarial, though it was probably just travel fatigue. I envisioned millions of millipedes gathering on the ceiling over my bed, not to mention a fleet of bats flapping ravenously in the trees under my window. The most troubling was the ceaseless roll of drums: the sonorous, ponderous thudding hovering around me. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer, I could not tell.

I was sixteen, of the age when fear aroused inspiration, so I turned on the light, dug up a brand-new moleskin journal from my suitcase—the drums still summoning the vast forces of darkness—and wrote on the first page

Kinshasa 7.7.1983 only to hear my parents’ bedroom door violently open, Tata cursing and stomping away. I leapt out of bed—Sestra, startled, started whimpering—and ran after Tata, who had already flipped on the lights in the living room. I bumped into Mama cradling her worrisome bosom in her arms. All the lights were on now; a gang of moths fluttered hopelessly inside a light fixture; there were cries and screams; cymbals crashed all around us. It was terrifying.

“Spinelli,” Tata exclaimed against the noise. “What a dick.”

Tata slept in flannel pajamas far more appropriate for an Alpine ski resort than for Africa—air-conditioning allegedly hurt his kidneys. But before he left the apartment, he also put on a pith helmet, lest his bald dome be exposed to draft. When he furiously vanished into the drumming murk of the stairway, Sestra, now crying, pressed her face against Mama’s side; I stood in my underwear, my feet cold on the bare floor, a pen still in hand. The possibility of his not returning flickered in the darkness; it did not cross my mind to go after him; Mama did not try to stop him. The stairway light went on, and we heard a plangent chime. The drums were still rolling; another plaintive ding-dong fit snugly into the beat. Tata abandoned the bell and started pounding at the door, shouting in his stunted English:

“Spinelli, you are very crazy. Stop noise. We are sleep. It is four in the morning.”

Our apartment was on the sixth floor; there must have been scores of people living in the building, but it appeared to have been abandoned in a hurry. The moment the stairway light went off again, the drumming stopped, the show was over. The door opened, and a nasal American voice said: “I’m sorry, man. I absolutely apologize.”

By the time I went back to bed, it was dawning already. In the trees outside, a nation of birds replaced the blood-sucking bats and was now atwitter in a paroxysm of meaningless life. Sleeping and dreaming were beyond me now, nor could I write. Smoking on the balcony, I waited for everything to make sense until it couldn’t. Down on the street a scarcely clad man squatted by a cardboard box with cigarettes lined up on it. There was nobody else on the street. It seemed that he was guarding the cigarettes from some invisible peril.

In the early eighties, Tata was absent, working in Zaire as a minor Yugoslav diplomat in charge of communications (whatever that meant). Meanwhile, in Sarajevo, I responded to the infelicity of adolescence and the looming iniquity of adulthood by retreating into books; Sestra was twelve, oblivious of the ache sprouting inside me; Mama was midlife miserable and lonely, which I could not see at the time, my nose stuck in a book. I read compulsively, only occasionally reaching the surface of common reality to take in a fetid breath of other people’s existence. I would read all night, all day, instead of doing my homework; in school, I would read a book hidden under the desk, a felony frequently punished by a junta of class bullies. It was only in the imaginary space of literature that I felt comfortable and safe—no absent father, no depressed mother, no bullies making me lick the book pages until my tongue was black with ink.