Love and Obstacles (19 page)

“And that’s it,” I told Alma. “That’s the end of the story. Now we can take a break.”

“That’s great. I could probably use that,” she said, not sounding convinced. “But could you speak a little more in your chewing-gum American? Can you still do it? I’d like to have you speak American and Bosnian in the film. Could you do that for me?”

“Sure,” I said.
“Floxon thay formtion. Camman, dey flai prectacion. Gnow aut sol, lone. Yeah, sure.”

T
he uniformed
jaran
did not acknowledge that I spoke in Bosnian to him. Silently, he checked my invitation, then compared the picture in my American passport with my mopey local face, and it appeared to have matched reasonably well. His head resembled an armchair—the deep-set forehead, the handlebar-like ears, the jutted jaw-seat—and I could not stop staring at it. He handed me back my passport with the invitation tucked inside and said, with his furniture-head accent: “Good evening to you.”

The American ambassador’s house was a huge ugly new thing, famously built high up in the hills by a Bosnian tycoon before he abruptly decided he needed even more space and, without spending a day in it, rented it to His American Excellency. There was still some work to be done—the narrow concrete path zigzagged meaninglessly through a veritable mud field; the bottom left corner of the frontage was unpainted, so it looked like a recently scarredover wound. Farther up the hill, one could see a yellow lace threading the fringes of the woods, marking a wilderness thick with mines.

Inside, however, all was asparkle. The walls were dazzling white, the stairs squeaked with untroddenness; on the first landing was a stand with a large bronze eagle, its wings frozen mid-flap over a hapless, writhing snake. At the top of the stairs, in a spiffy suit, if a size too big, stood Jonah, the cultural attaché, whom I had once misaddressed as Johnny and kept misaddressing since, pretending it was a joke. “Johnny-boy,” I said, “how goes it?” He shook my hand wholeheartedly, claiming he was extremely happy to see me. And maybe he was, who am I to say.

I snatched a glass of beer and a flute of champagne from a tray-carrying mope whose Bosnianness was unquestionably signified by a crest of hair looming over his forehead.
“Šta ima?”
I said.
“Evo,”
he said.
“Radim.”
I downed the beer and washed it down with champagne before I entered the already crowded mingle room. I tracked down another tray-holder, who despite a mustached leathery face looked vaguely familiar, like someone who may have bullied me in high school.
“Šta ima?”
I asked.
“Evo,”
he said.
“Ništa.”

Ambidextrously armed with more beer and champagne, I assumed a corner position from which I could, cougarlike, monitor the gathering. I spotted the minister of culture, resembling a bald, mangy panda, despite the fact that all the fingers on both of his hands were individually bandaged—he held his champagne flute between his palms like a votive candle. There were various Bosnian TV personalities, sporting their Italian spectacles and the telegenic abundance of unnecessary frowns and smirks. The writers were recognizable by the incoherence bubbling up on their stained-tie surfaces. A throng of Armani-clad businessmen swarmed around the pretty, young interpreters, while the large head of a famous retired basketball player hovered over them like a full moon. I spotted the ambassador—stout, prim, Republican, with a small, puckered-asshole mouth—talking to someone who must have been Macalister. The possible Macalister was in a purple velvet jacket over a Hawaiian shirt; his denim pants were worn out and bulging at the knees, as though he spent his days kneeling; he wore open-toe Birkenstocks with white socks; everything on him looked hand-me-down. He was in his fifties but had a head of Bakelite-black hair, so unyielding it seemed it had been mounted on his head decades before and had not changed its form since. Without expressing any identifiable emotion, he was listening to the ambassador, who was rocking back on his heels, pursing his lips, slowly passing out a thought. Macalister was drinking water; his glass slanted slightly in his hand so the water edge repeatedly touched the brim only to retreat, in the exact rhythm of the ambassador’s rocking. I was already tipsy enough to be able to accost Macalister as soon as the ambassador left him alone. I finished my beer and champagne and was considering pursuit of a tray for the purpose of refueling, when the ambassador bellowed: “May I have your attention, please!” and the din quieted down, and the tray mopes stopped moving, and the crowd around the ambassador and Macalister spread away a bit.

“It is my great pleasure and privilege,” the ambassador vociferated, rocking in a very slow rhythm, “to welcome Dick Macalister, our great writer and—based on the little time I have spent talking to him—an even greater guy.”

We all applauded obediently. Macalister was looking down at his empty glass. He moved it from hand to hand, then slipped it into his pocket.

Some weeks before, I had received an invitation from the United States ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina, His Excellency Eliot Auslander, to join him in honoring Richard Macalister, a Pulitzer Prize winner and acclaimed author. The invitation was sent to my Sarajevo address, only a week or so after I had arrived. I could not figure out how the embassy knew I was there, though I had a few elaborately paranoid ideas. It troubled me greatly that I was located as soon as I landed, for I came to Sarajevo for shelter. My plan was to stay at our family apartment for a few months and forget about a large number of things (my divorce, my breakdown, the War on Terror, everything) that had tormented me in Chicago. My parents were already in Sarajevo for their annual spring stay, and my sister was to join us upon her return from New Zealand; hence the escape to Sarajevo was beginning to feel like a depleted déjà vu of our previous life. We were exactly where we had been before the war, but everything was fantastically different—we were different; the neighbors were fewer and different; the hallway smell was different; and from our window we could see a ruin that used to be a kindergarten and now nobody cared to raze.

I wasn’t going to go to the reception; I had had enough of America and Americans to last me for another lousy lifetime. But my parents were very proud that the American ambassador was willing to welcome me at his residence. The invitation—the elaborate coat of arms, the elegant cursive, the volutes and whorls of His Excellency’s signature— recalled for them the golden years of my father’s diplomatic service and officially elevated me into the realm of respectable adults. Father offered to let me wear his suit to the reception; he claimed it still looked good, despite its being twenty or so years old and sporting a triangular iron burn on its lapel.

I kept resisting their implorations until I went to an Internet café to read up on Richard Macalister. I had heard of him, of course, but had never read any of his books, as I seldom read contemporary American fiction. With an emaciated teenager to my left liquidating scores of disposable video-game civilians and a cologne-reeking gentleman to my right listlessly browsing bestiality sites, I surfed through the life and work of Dick Macalister. To cut a long story short, he was born, he lived, he wrote books, he inflicted suffering and occasionally suffered himself. In
Fall,
his most recent memoir—“a heartbreaking, clenched-jaw confession”—he owned up to his wife-abusing, extended drinking binges, and spectacular breakdowns. In the novel
Depth Sickness,
a loan shark shot off his foot on a hunting trip, then redeemed in recollection his vacuous, vile life while waiting for help or death, both of which arrived at approximately the same time. “Macalister seems to have never heard of the dissociation of sensibilities,”
The New York Times
eulogized, “for his book is a host to a whole slew of them.” I skimmed the reviews of the short story collections (one of them was called
Suchness
) and spent time reading about
Nothing We Say,
“Macalister’s masterpiece,” the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The novel was about “a Vietnam vet who does everything to get out of war, but cannot get war out of himself.” Everybody was crazy about it. “It is hard not to be humbled by the honest brutality of Macalister’s tortured heroes,” one reviewer wrote. “These men speak little not because they have nothing to say but because the last remnants of decency in their dying hearts compel them to protect others from what they could say.” It all sounded pretty good to me, but nothing to write home about. I found a Macalister fan site, where there was a selection of passages from his works accompanied by pages upon pages of trivial exegesis. Some of the quotations were rather nice, and I wrote them down:

I liked that one.
The thick chitin of the world,
that was pretty good.

 

 

We all eagerly drank to Macalister’s health and success, whereupon he was beset by a swarm of the quickest suck-ups. I stepped out to the balcony, where all the smokers were forced to congregate. I pretended I was looking for someone, stretching my neck, squinting, but whoever I was looking for did not seem to be there. Down in the valley were dotted-light streets and illuminated, rocketlike minarets; at the far fringe of the night, toward Mojmilo hill, the pitch at the Željo soccer stadium was heartbreakingly green. Nothing was moving down below, as though the city were sunk at the bottom of a sea.

When I went back in, Macalister was talking to a woman with long auburn hair, her fingers lasciviously curved around a champagne flute. The woman was Bosnian, identifiable by her meaty carmine lips and a cluster of darkened-silver necklaces and a ruby pendant struggling to sink into her bosom, and the way she touched his forearm when she spoke to him; for all I knew, I could have had a hopeless crush on her in high school. She somehow managed to smile and laugh at the same time, her brilliant teeth an annotation to her laughter, her hair merrily flitting around. Macalister was burning to fuck her—I could tell from the way he leaned into her, his snout nearly touching her hair, sniffing her. It was jealousy, to be perfectly honest, that made me overcome my stage fright the moment the laughing woman was distracted by an embassy flunky. As she turned away from Macalister, I barged right in and wedged myself between the two of them.

“So what brings you to Sarajevo?” I asked. He was shorter than I; I could smell his hairiness, a furry, feral smell. His water glass was in his hand again, still empty.

“I go places,” he said, “because there are places to go.”

He had the sharp-edged nose of an ascetic. Every now and then the muscles at the root of his jaw tightened. He kept glancing at the woman behind me, who was laughing yet again.

“I’m on a State Department tour,” he added, thereby ruining the purity of his witticism. “And on assignment for a magazine.”

“So how do you like Sarajevo?”

“Haven’t seen much of it yet, but it reminds me of Beirut.”

But what about the Gazi Husrevbegova fountain, whose water tastes like no other in the world? What about all the minarets lighting up simultaneously at sunset on a Ramadan day? And the snow falling slowly, each flake coming down patiently, separately, as if abseiling down an obscure silky thread? What about the morning clatter of wooden shutters in Baščaršija, when all the old stores are opening at the same time and the streets smell of thick-foamed coffee? The chitin of the world is still hardening here, buddy.

I get emotional when inebriated. I said none of the above, however. Instead, I said:

“I’ve never been in Beirut.”

Macalister glanced at the woman behind my back, flashing a helpless smile. The woman laughed liltingly, the glasses chinked; as always, the good life was elsewhere.

“I could show you some things in Sarajevo, things no tourist could see.”

“Sure,” Macalister said without conviction. I introduced myself and proceeded to deliver the usual, well-rehearsed story of displacement and writing in English, nudging him toward declaring whether he had read me or not. He nodded and smiled. He was not as committed to our conversation as I was.

“You may have read my story ‘Love and Obstacles,’ ” I said. “It was in
The New Yorker
not so long ago.”

“Oh yeah, ‘Love and Obstacles.’ Great story,” he said. “Will you excuse me?”

And so he left me for the red-haired woman. I guzzled the champagne and the beer, then grabbed the only glass left on a fleeting tray—it was watered-down whiskey, but it would do. The woman’s hair was dyed anyway.

 

 

I kept relieving the tray-carriers of their loads. I talked to the basketball player, looking up at him until my neck hurt, inquiring unremittingly about the shot he had missed a couple of decades earlier, the shot that deprived his team of the national title and, I believed, commenced the general decline of Sarajevo. I cornered the minister of culture in order to find out what had happened to his fingers—his wife’s dress had caught fire in the kitchen and he had had to strip it off her. I giggled. She had ended up with second-degree burns, he said. At some point, I tracked down my friend Johnny to impart to him that you can’t work for the U.S. government unless you are a certified asshole, to which he grinned and said, “I could get you a job tomorrow,” which I thought was not unfunny. Before I exited, I bade good-bye to Eliot Auslander by slapping him on the back and startling him, and then turned that fucking eagle to face the wall, the unfortunate consequence of which was that the snake was now hopelessly cornered. Best of luck, little reptile.