The Question of Bruno (15 page)

    So I had the morning shift. And right after it dawned, I saw a pack of dogs coming toward us. There was a rottweiler, a poodle, and several mongrels. They tore the sheets and I turned my head away, but I could not leave. The only thought I remember having was about skiing. I had a vision of myself coming down the slope, going very fast, and air slapping my cheeks, and the sound of the skis brushing snow away, like a speeded-up recording of waves. When I looked out again, I couldn’t look at the place where the corpse was. I looked around it, as if making a compromise. I saw the rottweiler, trotting away, with a hand in his jaw. I wish I’d had a camera so I wouldn’t have to remember. I’m sorry I had to tell you this.

    My hair is all gray now. How is Chicago? Write, even if your letters can’t reach me.

    
With a lightning move of my hand superbly handling the knife, I split the cockroach in two: the front half continued running for an inch or two and then started frenetically revolving around the head; the back half just stood in place, as if surprised, oozing pallid slime.

    I woke up bleeding, in a bed soaked with blood, by the Heathrow Airport, in an expensive bland hotel, having waited for Kevin for more than a week. Kevin, who didn’t even bother to call me. I tried to reach him in Amsterdam, Paris, Atlanta, New York, Cyprus, even Johannesburg, leaving messages and curses. But then I just wiped myself off and went back to Sarajevo,
leaving a heap of bloody towels and bedsheets, an empty refreshment bar, a broken glass in the bathroom, and an unpaid bill, to Kevin’s name, with his Cyprus address. So here I am now, un-pregnant, as sanguine as ever, but never as sad.

    
I bought a Polaroid camera to explore my absence, to find out how space and things appear when I’m not exerting my presence on them. I took snapshots—glossy still moments with edges darker than the center, as if everything is fading away—I took snapshots of my apartment and the things in it: here’s my ceiling fan not revolving; here’s my empty chair; here’s my futon, looking like somebody’s just got up; here’s my vacuous bathroom; here’s a dried cockroach; here’s a glass, with still water not being drunk; here are my vacant shoes; here’s my TV not being watched; here’s a flash in the mirror; here’s nothing.

    When you get to Point B, the adrenaline rush is so strong that you feel
too
alive. You see everything clearly, but you can’t comprehend anything. Your senses are so overloaded that you forget everything before you even register it. I’ve run from Point A to Point B hundreds of times and the feeling is always the same but I’ve never had it before. I suppose it is this high pressure of excitement that makes people bleed away so quickly. I saw deluges of blood coming out of svelte bodies. A woman holding on to her purse while her whole body is shaking with death rattle. I saw bloodstreams spouting out of surprised children, and they look at you as if they’d done something wrong—broken a vial of expensive perfume or something. But once you get to Point B everything is quickly gone, as if it never happened. You pick yourself up and walk back into your besieged life, happy to be. You move a wet curl from your forehead, inhale deeply, and put your hand in the pocket, where you may or may not find a worthless coin; a coin.

FOR
S
EMEZDIN
M
EHMEDINOVIC

As soon as Pronek stepped out of the plane (an exhausted steward, crumpled and hoary, beamed an “Auf Wiedersehen” at him), he realized that he had left his red wool scarf in the luggage compartment, with a mustard stain from the Vienna airport café. He contemplated going back to fetch it, but the relentless piston of his fellow pilgrims pushed him through the mazy tunnel, until he saw a line of booths echoing one another, with uniformed officers lodged in them reading little passport books, as sundry passengers waited obediently behind a thick yellow line on the floor. There was a man holding a sign with Pronek’s name misspelled on it (Proniek), monitoring the throng winding between black ribbons, as if the man were choosing a person to attach the name to. Pronek walked up to him and said: “I am that person.” “Oh, you are,” the man said. “Welcome to the States.”

“Thank you,” Pronek said. “Thank you very much.”

The man led him past the passels of people clutching passports, pushing their tumescent handbags with their feet. “We don’t have to wait,” he said, nodding at Pronek for some reason, as if conveying a secret message. “You’re our guest.”

“Thank you!” Pronek said.

The man took him up to the booth filled to the glass-pane brim with a gigantic man. Had someone abruptly opened the door of his booth, his flesh would have oozed out slowly, Pronek thought, like runny dough.

“Hi, Wyatt!” said Pronek’s guide.

“Hi, Virgil!” said the dough man.

“He’s our guest!” said Virgil.

“How’re you doin’, buddy?” said the dough man. He was mustached, and suddenly Pronek realized that he resembled the fat detective with a loose tie and an unbuttoned shirt from an American TV show.

“I’m very well, sir, I thank you very much,” Pronek said.

“Wha’re you goin’ to do here, buddy?”

“I do not know right now, sir. Travel. I think they have program for me.”

“I’m sure they do,” he said, flipping through Pronek’s red Yugoslav passport, as if it were a gooey smut magazine. Then he grabbed a stamp and violently slammed it against a passport page and said: “You have a hell of a time, y’hear now, buddy.”

“I will, sir. Thank you very much.”

What we have just seen is Jozef Pronek entering the United States of America. It was January 26, 1992. Once he found himself on this side, he didn’t feel anything different. He knew full well, however, he couldn’t go back to retrieve his red scarf with the yellow mustard stamp.

Virgil began explaining to Pronek how to get on the plane to Washington, D.C., but Pronek wasn’t really listening, for Virgil’s spectacular head suddenly became visible to him. He saw the valley of baldness between the two tufts of hair, stretching away in horror from the emerging globe. The skin of Virgil’s face was inscribed with an intricate network of blood vessels, like river systems on a map, with two crimson deltas around his nostrils. Hair was peering out of his nose, swaying almost imperceptibly, as if a couple of centipedes were stuck in his nostrils, hopelessly moving their little legs. Pronek didn’t know what Virgil was saying, but still kept saying: “I know. I know.” Then Virgil generously shook Pronek’s
hand and said: “We’re so happy to have you here.” What could Pronek say? He said: “Thank you.”

He exchanged money with a listless carbuncular teenager behind a thick glass pane, and obediently sat down at a bar that invited him with a glaring neon sign: “Have a drink with us.” He was reading dollar bills (“In God we trust”) when the waitress said: “They’re pretty green, ahn’t they? Wha’ canna gechou, honey?”

“Beer,” Pronek said.

“What kinda beer? This is not Russia, hun, we got all kindsa beer. We got Michelob, Milleh, Milleh Lite, Milleh Genuine Draft, Bud, Bud Light, Bud Ice. Wha’ever you want.”

She brought him a Bud (Light) and asked: “What’s your team in the Superbawl?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m a Buffalo girl. I’m just gonna die if the Bills lose again.”

“I hope they won’t,” he said.

“They better not,” she said. “Or I be real mad.”

All the TVs in the bar were on, but the images were distorted. The square heads of two toupeed men talking were winding upward like smoke, then they would straighten up, and Pronek could see them grinning at their microphones, as if they were delectable lollipops, then they would twist again. He thought, for a moment, that his eyes were not adjusted to the ways in which images were transmitted in this country. He remembered that dogs saw everything differently from people and that everything looked dim to them. Not to mention bats, which couldn’t even see a thing, but flew around, bumping into telephone poles, with something like a sonar in their heads, which meant that they understood only echoes.

This is the kind of profitless thought that Pronek frequently had.

Pronek saw an elderly couple sitting down under one of the TVs. The man had wrinkles emerging, like rays, from the corners of his eyes, and a Redskins hat. The woman had puffed-up hair, and she looked a lot like the Washington on the one-dollar bill. A sign behind their backs said “Smoking Section.” They sat silent; their gazes, perpendicular to each other, converged over the tin ashtray in the center of the table. The waitress (“I’m Grace,” she said. “How’s everything?”) brought them two Miller Lites, but they didn’t touch them. Instead, the man took a black book out of his worn-out canvas handbag and spread it between the two sweating bottles. Then they read it together, their heads nearly touching, the man’s left hand heaped upon the woman’s right hand, like a frog upon a frog making love. They started weeping, squeezing each other’s hands so hard that Pronek could see the woman’s finger tips reddening, while her pink nails seemed to be stretching out.

This was, for Pronek, the first in the series of what we normally call culture shocks.

He roved all over the airport, imagining that it had the shape of John Kennedy’s supine body, with his legs and arms outstretched, and leech-like airplanes sucking its toes and fingers. He imagined traveling through Kennedy’s digestive system, swimming in a bubbling river of acid, like bacteria, and ending up in his gurgling kidney-bathroom. He stepped out of the airport through one of JFK’s nostrils, in front of which there were cabs lined up like a thin mustache.

Finally, he joined the line of people trickling into the tunnel to the Washington, D.C., plane. “How are you today?” said a steward, not bothering to hear the answer. Pronek had a window seat, and a man who looked as if he had just been attached to an air compressor, like a balloon, sat next to him—
the man was so fat that he occupied two seats and had to buckle his left thigh.

“Can’t believe I am missing the Super Bowl,” the man said and exhaled. “I went to every goddamn Redskins game this year and I had to miss the biggie. The fucking biggie. Are you a Redskins fan?”

“I’m afraid I don’t even know the rules of the game.”

“Ah, you’re a foreigner!” he triumphantly exclaimed and exhaled again. “What do you think of America? Isn’t it the greatest country on earth?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know yet. I just arrived.”

“It’s great. People are great. Freedom, all that. Best in the world.” He concluded the conversation with an authoritative head twitch, and opened a book entitled
Seven Spiritual Laws of Growth.
Pronek looked out at the aluminum sternness of the wing, his body twisted, his cheek against the seat texture, whose chaffing reminded him of his red scarf, and then he fell asleep, until the ascendance of his guts to his throat, as the plane was taking off, woke him up.

Pronek hated his neck, because it always got stiff and became a knot of thick sinews. He would keep pressing them, which would just produce more and more pain, while the sinews would wiggle under his fingers, as hard as steel cables. If he ever were to be decapitated, he thought, the executioner would be in danger, for the ax would probably bounce back and split the poor fellow’s head like a watermelon. They would have to soak his neck in acid for a week or so, in order to soften the steely sinews, and then cut off his head.

Pronek and his umbrous co-passengers descended upon Washington, and he had to turn his whole body to look through the window at the feeble capital lights, “like moribund embers under the ashes of a cloudy night” (this was Pronek’s thought at the moment, and we must concede it is rather nice). The flight attendant sneaked from somewhere behind Pronek’s back and startled him, shoving his face in the crevice between the fat man’s chest and the seat in front of him, and asking: “Can I get you another beer, sir?” Pronek turned his whole body—the sinews resisting painfully—like a hand puppet, toward the attendant and allowed him to provide more helpful service. The attendant seemed to be paid per smile and had the tan of an impeccably baked chicken.

Pronek was pushed into the airport building by the piston of his fellow pilgrims, as described before.

First the gigantic tip of a nipple on a stick started flashing and hooting, then the empty carousel started revolving. Bulky bags and square suitcases began dropping out from behind the black curtain, then went—wooo!—down the slide into the immutability of the carousel’s revolution. Pronek’s faceless co-passengers swarmed around the carousel, as if they were bacteria at the bottom of a stomach, and the food to be digested was just being sent from the oral department. Pronek’s bag was lost. He stared at the empty carousel, which revolved meaninglessly until it stopped to shine in conspicuous silence. Pronek had only a handbag packed with books and duty-free shop catalogs, plus a piece of three-day-old bourek, designed by his mother to sustain him on the trip, which was now—we can be sure of that—breeding all kinds of belligerent Balkan microorganisms.

Behind a frail, black, and long ribbon, there stood a man with Pronek’s name (misspelled as “Pronak”), followed by a
question mark. The man held it out just above his pelvis, with the lower edge cutting gently into the palms of his hands, so Pronek thought that his name had been taken away from him and given to this man, who was obviously an honest, hardworking, disciplined individual. The man shook Pronek’s flaccid hand hesitantly, as if afraid that the sign might be taken away from him.