Love and Obstacles (13 page)

Pany Mayska’s radiation enveloped him before he had even knocked at her door. When she appeared, wearing slippers with pom-poms at the end of their curled tips, as if she were an aging princess from Baghdad, he told her about Szmura’s note. She pressed her hand against her chest and gasped, acknowledging the imminence of hurt and humiliation. But she believed that МИКОЛа had only done what he had to do, he meant well, and it was a very small room anyway. Bogdan wanted her dried lips against his cheek; he wanted her to hold his perspiring hand and comfort him, as his grandmother would have done, but she stood away. She offered to let him stay at the museum—there was an empty room in the back—until he figured something out. A cloud-let of boiled-dough smell wafted out of her apartment, and Bogdan had the tormented feeling that he was saying goodbye to her. She gasped understandingly again, and withdrew into the darkness of her home.

 

 

The door to Szmura’s room was as heavy as cast iron, as if it led to a dungeon. Bogdan entered, fully aware that once he was inside, there would be no turning back. He saw a disheveled bed, the scree of a comforter in the center, a head crater in the pillow. A full beaker of water stood by the bed, the bubbles pressing their little faces against its glass wall. A tie stretched across the chair seat, like a severed tendon. The digital clock hysterically flashed 12:00. A book (
Chicken Soup for the Baseball Fan’s Soul
) spread its wings on the floor. From under the bed, a pair of stolid twenty-pound dumbbells protruded just enough for Bogdan to stub his big toe. In the closet, suits were lined up, in a spectrum of colors from azure to navy; below the suits, Szmura’s shoes stood in an impeccably slanted row, like cars in a parking lot. The underwear occupied different shelves: boxers on the top, jockeys on the bottom, undershirts in the middle, all precisely aligned in stacks.

On the wall above Szmura’s desk hung a map of Florida, with an inset of the Keys. On the desk, there were piles of inscrutable papers; several scattered pencils (calling up the smell of school in Prnjavor: pencil shavings, the wet chalkboard sponge, girls’ freshly washed hair); a computer monitor in which Bogdan could see a curved reflection of himself; a cookie box containing baseball cards, fluorescent condoms, a pouch of pot. In the drawer, a black ball of socks; a grotesquely orange orange; a roll of twenty-dollar bills. Bogdan unrolled it and counted the money: twenty-three hundred dollars—he took eighty, then rolled it back up. There was a holstered .38 in another drawer, loaded and heavy. He unlocked it and pointed it at the window.
Bang. Bang.
He put the barrel in his mouth: it tasted metallic bitter and sweet.

A tongue of paper was hanging out of the fax machine, “Stock Alert!” and a confirmation from South Beach Heaven, “An Escort Service You Can Trust.” In the garbage can he found a drawing of a dog humping a smiley face with the inscription “Fuck Ya!” On the windowsill a rotten cactus perched over a pile of photos, almost all featuring Szmura with a multicolored cocktail in his hand, surrounded by a choir of sunny young men and women. At the bottom of the pile was a sallow photo of a boy sitting sideways on a luge, his wool-capped head deposited despondently on his knees, surrounded by flat whiteness. Bogdan recognized the soporific sadness of the boy, the feeling of being stuck outside in the cold when one wanted to be inside, at home and warm.

He was folding the photo to put it in his pocket when Szmura charged across the room, leaping over the bed, and blew Bogdan’s left eye right out of the socket with his first punch.

M
any years ago my sister and I went to see a movie with our parents. The movie was about a handsome lad on a treasure hunt in Africa, in the course of which he meets a beautiful young lady he seems to get along with. Mother passed out instantly—moving pictures regularly put her to sleep. Father snorted derisively a few times, whispering into my ear: “This is stupid.” He started turning to people around him, touching them as if to make them snap out of their dreams, imploring them: “People, don’t believe this! Comrades! This is not real!” The audience, deeply invested in the trials and tribulations of the hero, who was presently dangling topsy-turvy over a pit of ravenous crocodiles, did not respond well to my father’s prodding. An usher came by and tried, in vain, to silence him. My sister and I pretended to be focused on the screen, while our mother was woken by the ruckus only to find herself in the middle of an embarrassment. In the end, Father stormed out furiously, dragging my sister and me, Mother apologizing to the peevish audience in our wake. We took a departing look at the screen, as distant as a sunset: the hero and the disheveled (yet fair) damsel, deep in the jungle teeming with invisible villains, riding a pair of comically trotting mules.

My father developed his hatred of the unreal back when he was at university. One morning in his dorm room he emerged from his slumber with a clearly remembered nightmare. He immediately described it to his two roommates, the experience still disturbingly fresh in his mind. The dream involved danger, pain, and mystery, although there was also an encounter with a woman. His roommates were transfixed listening to him, while he led them down the steep, untrodden paths of his subconscious. But a moment before the face of the woman was to be revealed and the dream resolved, my father came to.

The following night, the nightmare resumed just where it had ended—the woman was beautiful and held my father’s head in her lap while he wept. Then he wandered and roamed in absurdly changing landscapes; he came across talking animals, including a dog from his childhood whom his father had killed with an ax blow to the head; there were more women, including his dead mother. Then he held a watermelon with the distorted face of someone he knew but could not recognize, and when it broke open, he found a letter addressed to him. He was just about to read it when he woke up.

My father’s roommates, who skipped their morning classes to hear the new developments in his troubling dreams, were sorely disappointed not to find out what was in the letter. In their afternoon classes, recounting Father’s nightmare to their fellow students, they kept speculating— titillated by the fact that it all meant something they could not grasp—what could have been in the letter, and whether the beautiful woman would ever return.

When my father woke up the following morning, the room was full of people sitting in silence, patiently waiting, their breathing slow and deep. Many eyes stared at him, as if trying to read the denouement from his face. Whatever dream my father might have had evaporated the instant his roommates asked him what was in the letter. Father did not dare disappoint them, so he opened the letter and made up the content—there was a woman who was kept in a dark dungeon by an evil man. Thence my father spun an epic narrative, obviously influenced by the archetypal picaresque stories he had read and the horror movies he had seen at the university cinema hall. Yet, even making it up, he didn’t know how to end his nightmare narrative. He reached the point of confronting the evil man, but could not think of what to say, so he insisted he had to hurry to his international relations class.

And so it went on: My father would wake up to face an audience simultaneously demanding the resolution and hating the prospect thereof. But he got entangled in all his subplots and minor narratives and kept evading the conclusion, hoping it would come to him eventually. His audiences dwindled, until one of his roommates (Raf, who was to become a manic-depressive flight controller) accused him of lying. It hurt my father, for he was an honest man, but he knew that he could not say that Raf was not right. He was trapped by his own imagination, my father; he slid down the slippery slope of unreality and could not crawl back up. That was when he learned his lesson, he said. That’s when he became committed to the real.

One day Father came back from work with a Super 8 camera, which he had borrowed from one of his coworkers (Božo A., who had a black belt in karate and a budding brain tumor—he died before my father could return the camera). The camera was smaller than I had imagined, possessing a kind of technological seriousness that suggested only important things could be recorded with it. He announced his desire to make a film that would not lie. When my mother asked what the movie would be about, he dismissed the question as immature. “The truth,” he said. “Obviously.”

Nevertheless, Father wrote the script for his film in a week, at the end of which he declared that it would be the story of his life. I was cast to play the young him, and my sister to play his sister (he didn’t say which one—he had five), and my mother would be his assistant. She instantly resigned from her assistant director position, as she wanted to spend her vacation reading, but the shooting was scheduled for the middle of June 1986, when we were supposed to go to the country to visit my grandparents—we would shoot, as they say, on location.

My father refused to show us the script, uninterested in the fact that the actors normally get to see scripts: he wanted life itself to be our inspiration, for, he reminded us, this film was to be
real.
Nevertheless, during our regular inspection of his desk (my sister and I went through our parents’ documents and personal things to keep apprised of their development), we found the script. I’m able to reproduce it pretty accurately, since my sister and I read it to each other a few times, with a mixture of awe and hilarity. Here it is:

1.
I am born.

2.
I walk.

3.
I watch over cows.

4.
I leave home to go to school.

5.
I come back home. Everybody’s happy.

6.
I leave home to go to university.

7.
I’m in class. I study at night.

8.
I go out for a stroll. I see a pretty girl.

9.
My parents meet the pretty girl.

10.
I marry the pretty girl.

11.
I work.

12.
I have a son.

13.
I’m happy.

14.
I keep bees.

15.
I have a daughter.

16.
I’m happy.

17.
I work.

18.
We are by the seaside, then in the mountains.

19.
We are happy.

20.
My children kiss me.

21.
I kiss them.

22.
My wife kisses me.

23.
I kiss her.

24.
I work.

25.
The End

The first scene we were supposed to shoot (and the only one that was ever shot) was Scene 4. The location was the slope of the hill on top of which my grandparents’ house was perched. I, in the role of my father at the age of sixteen, was supposed to walk away from the camera with a bundle hanging from a stick on my shoulder, whistling a plaintive melody. I was to turn around and look past the camera, as if looking at the home I was leaving—and then I would wave, bidding farewell. My father would pan to my grandparents’ house, though, strictly speaking, that house was not the home he’d left.

The first take failed because I didn’t wave with enough emotion. My hand, my father said, looked like a limp plucked chicken. He needed more emotion from me—I was leaving my home never to return.

The second take was interrupted as my father decided to zoom in on a bee that just happened to land on a flower nearby.

My two aunts suddenly appeared in the third take, as my father was panning from my poignant good-bye to the house. They stood grinning, paralyzed by the lens for a moment, then casually waved at the camera.

Each time, I had to walk uphill to my starting position, so I could walk away downhill in the next take. My legs hurt, I was thirsty and hungry, and I could not help questioning my father’s directorial wisdom: Why wasn’t he/I taking a bus? Didn’t he/I need more stuff than what could fit in a bundle? Didn’t he/I need some food for the road?

During the fifth take, the camera ran out of film.

The sixth take was almost perfect: I walked away from home, my shoulders slouching with sorrow, my pace aptly hesitant, the bundle dangling poignantly from the convincingly crooked stick. I turned around, completely in character, and looked at the home and life I was about to leave for good: the house was white with a red roof; the sun was setting behind it. Tears welled up in my eyes as I waved at the loving past, before heading toward an unknowable future, my hand like a metronome counting the beats of the saddest adagio. Then I heard a bee buzzing right around the nape of my neck. My metronome hand switched to allegro as I flaunted it around my head trying to defend myself. The bee would not go away, revving furiously its little engine, and the sting was imminent. I dropped the stick and started running, first uphill, toward the camera, then downhill, until my heels were kicking my butt, my arms flailing, all semblance of rhythm abandoned. The bee pursued me relentlessly and unflinchingly, and I was more terrified by its determination than the forthcoming pain: it would not quit even as I was hollering, throwing in the air all the arms I could muster, lunging at incredible speed, a manic mass of discordant movements. And the more I ran, the farther I was from any help and comfort. It was in the moment before I tripped and tumbled head over heels that I realized the bee was entangled in my hair—the attempt to escape was meaningless. I felt the sting as I was rolling downhill, toward the bottom I would never reach. I was stopped by a thornbush, where the sting became indistinguishable from many a thorn.

Need I say that my father kept filming it all? There I am, verily flapping my arms, as if trying to take off, a clueless Icarus leaping downhill farther from the skies, while a cow watches me, masticating with a sublime absence of interest, suggesting that God and his innocent creatures would never give a flying fuck about the fall of man. Then I tumble and hit the bush of thorns, and my father, with a cold presence of his directorial mind, my father fades me out.