Love and Obstacles (7 page)

Around the corner, they were standing with a man, all in denim, his large shovel-shaped hand comfortingly on their shoulders as they pointed at me, speaking to him with angry alacrity. He smiled and called me over, and for an insane instant I thought they were inviting me to party with them, but then he started unambiguously sprinting toward me. I took off at the speed of fear toward the hotel; I charged down the main street, splashing through puddles. Lighter than a cork, I danced forth on the waves. I did not dare turn to see where my pursuer was, but I heard his big feet hitting the ground steadily behind me. Those feet would hit me just as well if he got hold of me. Oh, the horror of your body’s not living up to the intensity of your fear—no matter how fast I wanted to run, my feet moved slowly, slipping a couple of times. I had visions of his pointed shoes breaking through my skin and skull and ribs. He abandoned the pursuit eventually, but I kept running.

Hotel Evropa emerged before me on a wholly unfamiliar street. Soaked to the bones, I savagely pushed and pulled the entrance door, until Franc, dreadfully hateful in the middle of his twenty-four-hour shift, unlocked it for me. I crept past him, focusing on each of my steps so as not to appear drunk. I pressed the elevator button and waited patiently, while my center of gravity rode the surf of my inebriation. I would have waited all night, for I did not want to exhibit my wobblibility, let alone ascend the eternal stairs to the fifth floor, but Franc barked at me that the elevator was already there—indeed, the door was wide open. I stepped into a sweat-tinged cloud of perfume and went up inhaling like a firefighter taking in oxygen.

The key would not enter the lock, no matter how hard I tried to push it in. Everything was wrong: I kicked the door with my knee, and then with my foot, and then again and again. Need I say it hurt? Need I say that the pain made everything much worse? Need I say that I was terrified out of my wits when I heard the lock turning and the door opened and there stood Elizabeth, loosely wrapped in a peignoir, pulling its flaps together to cover her uncoverable breasts. Her skin glowed of slumber, her tresses ruffled, she smelled of dreams. “How can I help you?” is what she probably said. I probably said nothing or just groaned. Her husband was snoring so loudly that I thought he was faking it, the pitiful coward. She looked straight into my eyes; at the bottom of her eyes there was love, the only antidote to this vile despair. I wanted to hold her hand with rings like bejeweled palaces, I wanted to kiss her, I wanted her to leave her stertorous husband, deflower me, and cultivate me in the garden of my youth. All I needed to spark a conflagration of our heated bodies was the right move, the right word. So I said:

“Pill?”

“Excuse me?” she said.

I excavated the pill from my change pocket and offered it to her on the palm of my hand—it was tiny in the cut-out piece of packaging. She looked at it, baffled, then turned around as if to check whether her unwitting husband was still asleep.

“What is it, honey?” the husband cried. I quickly put the pill back in my pocket, as the husband was coming to the door. Elizabeth could see that I was mindful, that I was a considerate gentleman, young though I was. She flashed a barely perceptible smile and I understood we were in it together now, so when the husband came to the door, his pajamas baseball-patterned, his hair disheveled, I said, as innocently as I could, “Maybe you have pill? For head?” I pointed at my head, lest there be any confusion whose head we were talking about.

“No, I am sorry,” Elizabeth said, and started closing the door, as I kept saying, “Maybe aspirin? One aspirin? Aspirin . . .”

She shut the door and locked it twice. Clearly, I had not said the right word; I was very drunk and had not considered this outcome. I thought that we had connected, that the electricity had started flowing between our trembling bodies. Swaying before the cruelly and unnecessarily closed door, I raised my hand to knock and clarify to Elizabeth that, yes, I was in love with her, and that, no, I didn’t mind that she was married. I didn’t do it; the door was closed as closed can be. I heard them murmuring conspiratorially, like a husband and wife, and I recognized that love was on the other side, and I had no access to it.

But the beauty of youth is that reality never quells desire, so when I unlocked my door I left it open, in case Elizabeth wanted to put her dull husband to sleep and then tiptoe over to my frolicsome den. Every now and then I peeped out, hoping to see her door slowly coming ajar, to see her lustfully scurrying over to me. Thus I was peering out when Franc strode out of the elevator, stopped at Elizabeth’s door, gingerly knocked, as my jealous heart sank, and when she opened it, exchanged whispers with her. She pointed at me—for the last delusional moment I thought she had called him up to ask about me—and there I stood in the crack, grinning like a happy dog.

Franc charged over and pushed my door open, before I could lock it. With a flashing swing of his hand from his hip up to my face, he slapped me. My cheek burned, my eyes filled with fiery tears. I retreated toward the bed, until I stumbled and fell on the floor. Franc kicked me and kept kicking me: his shoes were pointed, and I felt the point sinking into my flesh, my buttocks and thighs, then hitting against my ribs and coccyx. I shrimped up and covered my face and head.

There was too much pain at that moment, my body numb and squandered; Franc’s exertions and kicks were hysterical, therefore funny; the floor stank of machine oil. He didn’t kick me in the face, as he could have done. He didn’t spit on me, but on the floor next to me. He didn’t yell at me, just snarled and growled, because the rapid fire of kicks was not easy on him; when he stopped, he was panting. Leaving, he calmly told me that if he were to hear a peepest peep from me, he would beat me to a pulp and pull me by my ears out onto the street, let the police have fun with me all night long. He was a good, if unpleasant, man, Franc was. He even slowly, carefully, closed the door.

I lay in the darkness, unable to move, until I fell asleep. The neon lights in the hall hummed; the elevator thudded going up, coming down. I dreamt of war, of might and right, of utterly unforeseeable logic. I woke up wishing I were home: there would have been the smell of French toast and my father’s aftershave and the banana shampoo my sister liked to use. There would have been the weather forecast on the radio (my parents liked to know the future), my sister pouting because she couldn’t listen to her music show. I would have walked in and derisively submitted myself to my mother’s kiss. Breakfast would have been ready.

I stood up—the pain beginning to set in—and unpacked my mother’s chicken-and-pepper sandwich; it was stale, the pepper mushy and bitter. I turned on the lights, found my notebook, and after biting into the sandwich and staring at the blank page for a long time, wrote a poem that I titled “Love and Obstacles,” the first lines:
There are walls between the world and me, / and I have to walk through them.

The following morning I woke up to find my body encrusted in dull, bruisey pain. I went to the store and delivered the money to Stanko. He had a scrubbing-wire beard, veins and sinews bulging on his hands as he counted and recounted the money. I was short a few dinars and told him that I had been robbed on the train; two brazen criminals had emptied my pockets, but had failed to find the rest of the money in my bag. Stanko stared at me until he believed me, then shook his head, appalled by the world that stole from its children. He made a note on the form before him, then showed me where to sign. He shook my hand earnestly and heartily, apparently congratulating me. When he offered me a cigarette, I took it and asked for another one. We smoked examining the freezer chest. Stanko seemed proud of it, as though he himself had created it. It was impressive: enormous, blazing white, and coffinlike in its emptiness; it smelled of clean, subzero death. It should come to us in two or three weeks, he said, and if it didn’t, we should call him.

I slept on the bus and I slept on the night train, waking up only when my stomach started growling, when my body stiffened and started hurting again. I had no money to buy food, so I kept reliving the chicken-and-pepper sandwich and its beautiful smell. Dawn was descending upon earth; my compartment was freezing cold. I saw a horse grazing alone in a field, inexplicably wrapped in nylon; a copse of trees like toothpick tombstones; clouds on the horizon filled by an eternity of tears. When I arrived home, begrimed with having been away, breakfast was waiting.

The same day, Mother washed the denim pants I had worn in Murska Sobota, with the pill in the change pocket disintegrating—nothing was left except a nugget of foil and plastic. The freezer chest arrived after seventeen days. We filled it to the brim: veal and pork, lamb and beef, chicken and peppers. When the war began in the spring of 1992, and electricity in the city of Sarajevo was cut, everything in the freezer chest thawed, rotted in less than a week, and then finally perished.

I
n the 1989
Anthology of Contemporary Bosnian Poetry,
Muhamed D. was represented with four poems. My copy of the anthology disappeared during the war, and I cannot recall the titles, but I do remember the subjects: one of them was about all the minarets of Sarajevo lighting up simultaneously at sunset on a Ramadan day; another was about the deaf Beethoven conducting his Ninth Symphony, unaware of the audience’s ovations until the contralto touched his shoulder and turned him around. I was in my early twenties when the book came out, and compulsively writing poetry every day. I bought the anthology to see where I would fit into the pleiad of Bosnian poets. I thought that Muhamed D.’s poems were silly and fake; his use of Beethoven struck me as pretentious, and his mysticism as alien to my own rock ’n’ roll affectations. But in one of the few reviews the anthology received, the critic raved, in syntax tortured on the rack of platitudes, about the range of Muhamed D.’s poetic skills and the courage he had shown in shedding the primitive Bosnian tradition for more modern forms. “Not only is Muhamed D. the greatest living Bosnian poet,” the reviewer said, “he is the only one who is truly alive.”

I had not managed to get any of my poetry published—nor would I ever manage—but I considered myself a far better, more soulful poet than Muhamed D. I had written about a thousand poems in less than two years, and occasionally I shored those fragments into a book manuscript that I sent to various contests. I can confess, now that I’ve long since stopped writing poetry, that I never really understood what I wrote. I didn’t know what my poems were about, but I believed in them. I liked their titles (“Peter Pan and the Lesbians,” “Love and Obstacles,” et cetera), and I felt that they attained a realm of human innocence and experience that was unknowable, even by me. I delayed showing them to anyone else; I was waiting for readers to evolve, I suppose, to the point where they could grasp the vast spaces of my ego.

I met Muhamed D. for the first time in 1991, at a café called Dom pisaca, or Writers’ Club, adjacent to the offices of the Bosnian Writers’ Association. He was short and stocky, suddenly balding in his mid-forties, his expression frozen in an ugly permanent frown. I shook his hand limply, barely concealing my contempt. He spoke with the clear, provincial inflections of Travnik, his hometown, and was misclad in a dun shirt, brown pants, and an inflammable-green tie. I was a cool-dressed city boy, all denim and T-shirts, born and bred in the purest concrete, skipping vowels and slurring my consonants in a way that cannot even be imitated by anyone who did not grow up inhaling Sarajevo smog. He offered me a seat at his table, and I joined him, along with several of the other anthology veterans, who all wore the suffering faces of the sublime, as though they were forever imprisoned in the lofty dominion of poetry.

For some demented reason, Muhamed D. introduced me to them as a philharmonic orchestra conductor. My objections were drowned out as the other poets started howling the “Ode to Joy” while making conducting gestures, and I was instantly nicknamed “Dirigent”—Conductor—thereby becoming safely and permanently marked as a nonpoet. I stopped trying to correct the mistake as soon as I realized that it didn’t matter: it was my role to be only an audience for their drunken, anthological greatness.

Muhamed D. sat at the head of the Table, governing confidently as they babbled, ranted, sang heartbreaking songs, and went about their bohemian business, guzzling ambrosial beer. I occupied the corner chair, witnessing and waiting, dreaming up put-downs that I would never utter, building up my arrogance while craving their acceptance. Later that night, Muhamed D. demanded that I explain musical notation. “How do you read those dots and flags?” he asked. “And what do you really do with the stick?” Although I had no idea, I tried to come up with some reasonable explanations, if only to expose his ignorance, but he just shook his head in discouragement. Almost every night I spent at the Table, there was a point where I failed to enlighten the poets as to how music was written, thereby confirming their initial assumption that I was a lousy conductor, but a funny guy. I wondered how Muhamed D. could write a poem about Beethoven while being entirely oblivious of the way the damn notation system worked.

But the poets liked me, and I hoped that some of the pretty literature students who frequently served as their muses would like me too. I particularly fancied three of them: Aida, Selma, and Ljilja, all of whom pronounced soft consonants while pouting their moist lips, emitting energy that caused instant erections. I kept trying to get at least one of them away from the Table, so that I could impress her with a recitation of “Love and Obstacles.” Not infrequently, I got sufficiently inebriated to find myself loudly singing a
sevdalinka,
sending significant glances toward the three muses, and emulating conducting moves for their enjoyment, while a brain-freezing vision of laying all three of them simultaneously twinkled on my horizon. But it never worked out: I couldn’t sing, my conducting was ludicrous, I never recited any of my poems, I wasn’t even published, and instead I had to listen to Muhamed D. singing his
sevdalinka
with a trembling voice that opened the worlds of permanent dusk, where sorrow reigned and the mere sight of a woman’s neck caused maddening bouts of desire. The eyes of the literature muses would fill with tears, and he could pick whichever volunteer he chose to amuse him for the rest of the night. I’d totter home alone, composing a poem that would show them all that Muhamed D. had nothing on me, that would make Aida, Selma, and Ljilja regret never having let me touch them. I celebrated and sang myself on empty Sarajevo streets, and by the time I had unlocked the door and sneaked into my bed without waking up my poetry-free parents, I would have a masterpiece, so formidable and memorable that I would not bother to write it down. The next morning, I would wake up with my skin oozing a sticky alcoholic sweat and the sappy masterpiece gone forever from my mind. Then I would embark upon a furious series of un-rhymed, anarchic poems, ridiculing Muhamed D. and the Table and the muses in impenetrably coded words, envisioning the devoted scholar who, one day, after decades of exploring my notes and papers, would decode the lines and recognize how tragically misunderstood and unappreciated I was. After writing all day, I’d head off to the Writers’ Club and start the whole process again.