Love and Obstacles (20 page)

The air outside was adrizzle. The ambassador’s house was way the fuck up the hill, and you had to go downhill to get anywhere. The flunkies were summoning cabs, but I wanted to air my head out, so downhill I went. The street was narrow, with no sidewalks, the upper floors of ancient houses leaning over the pavement. Across the valley, there was the caliginous Trebević; through a street-level window I saw a whole family sitting on a sofa, watching the weather forecast on TV—the sun stuck, like a coin, into a cloud floating over the map of Bosnia. I passed a peaceful police station and a freshly dead pigeon; a torn, faded poster on a condemned house announced a new CD by a bulbous half-naked singer, who, rumor had it, was fucking both the prime minister and the deputy prime minister. A tattered cat that looked like a leprechaun dog crossed my path. I turned the corner and saw, far ahead, Macalister and the redhead strolling toward the vanishing point, her hair brushing her shoulders as she turned to him to listen, his hand occasionally touching the small of her back to guide her around potholes and puddles.

I was giddy, scurrying up, thinking of funny things to say, my mind never quite reaching over to the other, funny side. I was giddy and drunk, slipping on the wet pavement and in need of company, and I trotted downhill after them, slipping, yet lucidly avoiding the holes and litter and a garbage container in which garbage quietly smoldered. Once I caught up with them, I just assumed their pace and walked along as straight as I could, saying nothing, which was somehow supposed to be funny too. Macalister uttered an unenthusiastic “Hey, you’re okay?” and the woman said,
“Dobro veče,”
with a hesitation in her voice that suggested that I was interrupting something delectable and delicate. I just kept walking, skidding and stumbling, but in control, I was in control, I was. I did not know where we were, but they seemed to be headed somewhere.

“Anyway,” Macalister said. “There is blowing of the air, but there is no wind that does the blowing.”

“What wind?” I said. “There’s no wind.”

“There is a path to walk on, there is walking being done, but there is no walker.”

“That is very beautiful,” the woman said, smiling. She exuded a nebula of mirth. All of her consonants were as soft as the underside of a kitten’s paw.

“There are deeds being done, but there is no doer,” Macalister went on.

“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked. The toes of his white socks were caked with filth now.

“Malo je on puk’o,”
I suggested to the woman.

“Nije, baš lijepo zbori,”
she said. “It is poetry.”

“It’s from a Buddhist text,” he said.

“It is beautiful,” the woman said.

“There is drizzle and there is shit to be rained on, but there is no sky,” I pronounced.

“That could work too,” Macalister said.

The drizzle made the city look begrimed. A couple of glistening umbrellas cascaded downhill toward the scarce traffic flow of Titova Street. At the low end of Dalmatinska, you would take a right, then walk straight for about ten minutes, past Veliki Park and the Alipašina mosque, past the fenced-off vacant lot where the old hospital used to be, and then you reached Marin Dvor, and across the street from the ruin that used to be the tobacco factory used to be the building where I was born.

“You’re okay, Macalister,” I said. “You’re a good guy. You’re not an asshole.”

“Why, thank you,” Macalister said. “I’m glad I’ve been vetted.”

We reached the bottom of Dalmatinska and stopped there. Had I not been there, Macalister would have suggested to the woman that they spend more time together, perhaps in his hotel room, perhaps attached at the groin. But I was there and I wasn’t leaving, and there was an awkward silence as they waited for me to at least step away so they could exchange poignant parting words. I snapped the silence and suggested that we all go out for a drink. Macalister looked straight into her eyes and said, “Yeah, let’s go out for a drink,” his gaze doubtless conveying that they could ditch me quickly and continue their discussion of Buddhism and groin attachment. But the woman said no, she had to go home, she was really tired, she had to go to work early, she’d love to but she was tired, no, sorry. She shook my hand limply and gave Macalister a hug, in the course of which she pressed her sizable chest against his. I did not even know her name. She went toward Marin Dvor.

“What’s her name?” I asked.

Macalister watched her wistfully as she ran to catch an approaching streetcar.

“Azra,” he said.

“Let’s have a drink,” I said. “You’ve got nothing else to do anyway, now that Azra’s gone.”

Honestly, I would have punched me in the face, or at least hurled some hurtful insults my way, but not only did Macalister not do it, he did not express any hostility whatsoever and agreed to come along for a drink. It must have been his Buddhist thing or something.

We went toward Baščaršija—I pointed out to him the Eternal Fire, which was supposed to be burning for the antifascist liberators of Sarajevo, but happened to be out at the moment; then, farther down Ferhadija, we stopped at the site of the 1992 bread-line massacre, where there was a heap of wilted flowers; then passed Writers’ Park, where busts of important Bosnian authors were hidden behind stalls offering pirate DVDs. We passed the cathedral, then Egipat, which made the best ice cream in the world, then the Gazi Husrevbegova mosque and the fountain. I told him about the song that asserted that once you drank Baščaršija water you would never forget Sarajevo. We drank the water; he lapped it out of the palm of his small hand, the water splattering his white socks.

“I love your white socks, Macalister,” I said. “When you take them off, don’t throw them away. Give them to me. I’ll keep them as a relic, smell them for good luck whenever I write.”

“I never take them off,” he said. “That’s my only pair.”

For a moment, I considered the possibility that he was serious, for his delivery was deadpan, no crack signals in the air. It seemed he was looking out at me and the city from an interior space no other human had access to. I did not know exactly where we were going, but he did not complain or ask questions, as though it didn’t matter, because he would always be safe inside himself. I confess: I wanted him be in awe of Sarajevo, of me, of what we meant in the world; I wanted to break through to him, through his chitin.

But I was hungry and needed a drink or two, so instead of wandering all night, we ended up in a smoky basement restaurant whose owner, Faruk, was a war hero—there was a shoulder missile-launcher hanging high up on the brick wall, and pictures of uniformed men below it. I knew Faruk pretty well, for he had dated my sister many years before. He greeted us, spread apart the rope curtain leading into the dining room and took us to our table, next to a glass case with a shiny black gun and a holster.

“Ko ti je to?”
Faruk asked as we sat down.

“Pisac. Amerikanac. Dobio Pulitzera,”
I said.

“Pulitzer je dosta jak,”
Faruk said, and offered his hand to Macalister: “Congratulations.”

Macalister thanked him, but when Faruk walked away, he noted the preponderance of weapons.

“Weapons schmeapons,” I said. “The war is over. Don’t worry about it.”

A waiter, who looked like a twin brother of one of the tray mopes, came by, and I ordered a trainload of food—all varieties of overcooked meat and fried dough—and a bottle of wine, without asking Macalister what he would like. He was vegetarian and didn’t drink, he said impassively, merely stating a fact.

“So you’re a Buddhist or something?” I said. “You don’t step on ants and roaches, you don’t swallow midges and such?”

He smiled. I had known Macalister for only a few hours, but I already knew he did not get angry. How can you write a book—how can you write a single goddamn sentence—without getting angry? I wondered. How do you even wake up in the morning without getting angry? I get angry in my dreams, wake up furious. He merely shrugged at my questions. I drank more wine and then some more, and whatever coherence I may have regained on our walk was quickly gone. I showered him with questions: Did he serve in Vietnam? How much of his work was autobiographical? Was Cupper his alter ego? Was it over there that he had become a Buddhist? What was getting the Pulitzer like? Did he ever have a feeling that this was all shit—this: America, humankind, writing, everything? And what did he think of Sarajevo? Did he like it? Could he see how beautiful it had been before it became this cesspool of insignificant, drizzly suffering?

Macalister talked to me, angerlessly. Occasionally I had a hard time following him, not least because Faruk sent over another bottle, allegedly his best wine, and I kept swilling it. Macalister had been in Vietnam, he had experienced nothing ennobling there. He was not Buddhist, he was “Buddhistish.” And the Pulitzer made him vainglorious—“vainglorious” was the word he used—and now he was ashamed of it all a bit; any serious writer ought to be humiliated and humbled by fame. When he was young, like me, he said, he used to think that all the great writers knew something he didn’t. He thought that if he read their books they would teach him something, make him better; he thought he would acquire what they had: the wisdom, the truth, the whole-ness, the real shit. He was burning to write, he wanted to break through to that fancy knowledge, he was hungry for it. But now he knew that that hunger was vainglorious; now he knew that writers knew nothing, really; most of them were just faking it. He knew nothing. There was nothing to know, nothing on the other side. There was no walker, no path, just walking. This was it, whoever you were, wherever you were, whatever it was, and you had to make peace with that fact.

“This?” I asked. “What is ‘this’?”

“This. Everything.”

“Fuck me.”

He talked more and more as I was sinking into oblivion, slurring the few words of concession and agreement and fascination I could utter. I would not remember most of the things he talked about, but as drunk as I was, it was clear to me that his sudden, sincere verbosity was due to his sense that our encounter—our writerly one-night stand—was a fleeting one. He even helped me totter up the stairs as we were leaving the restaurant, and flagged a cab for me. But I would not get into it, no sir, before he believed me that I would read all of his books, all of them, all that he had written, hack magazine jobs, blurbs, everything, and when he finally believed, I wanted him to swear that he would come over to my place, have lunch at my home with me and my parents, because he was family now, one of us, he was an honorary Sarajevan, and I made him write down our phone number and promise that he would call, tomorrow, first thing in the morning. I would have made him promise some other things, but the street cleaners were approaching with their blasting hoses and the cabdriver honked impatiently and I had to go, and off I went, drunk and high on bonding with one of the greatest writers of our embarrassing shit-ass time. By the time I arrived home, I didn’t think I would ever see him again.

 

 

But he called, ladies and gentlemen of prestigious literary prize committees; to his eternal credit he kept his promise and called the very next morning, as I was staring at the ceiling, my eyeballs bobbling on a hangover scum pond. It was not even ten o’clock, for Buddha’s sake, yet Mother walked into my room, bent over the floor mattress to enter my painful field of vision and give me the handset without a word. When he said, “It’s Dick,” I frankly did not know what he was talking about. “Dick Macalister,” he said; it took me a moment to remember who he was. Furthermore, it felt as though I had returned to America and the whole Sarajevo escape was but a limp dream, and in short, I was afraid.

“So at what time should I come over?” he asked.

“Come over where?”

“Come over for lunch.”

Let me skip all the uhms and ahms and all the words I fumbled as I struggled to reassemble my thinking apparatus, until I finally and arbitrarily selected the three-o’clock hour as our lunchtime. There was no negotiation. Richard Macalister was coming to eat my mother’s food; he offered no explanation or reason; he did not sound excessively warm or excited. I did not think that anything that had happened the night before could lead to any friendship, substantial or otherwise—the most I could ever hope for was a future tepid blurb from him. I had no idea what it was that he might want from us. But I spelled out our address for him so he could give it to a cabbie, warned him against paying more than ten convertible marks, and told him that the building was right behind the kindergarten ruin. I hung up the phone; Dick Macalister was coming.

In my pajamas I stood exposed to the glare of my parents’ morning judgment (they did not like it when I drank) and, with the aid of a handful of aspirin, informed them that Richard Macalister, an august American author, a winner of a Pulitzer Prize, an abstemious vegetarian, and a serious candidate for a full-time Buddhist, was coming over for lunch at three o’clock. After a moment of silent discombobulation, my mother reminded me that our regular lunchtime was one-thirty. But when I shrugged to indicate helplessness, she sighed and went on to inspect the supplies in the fridge and the freezer chest. Presently she started issuing deployment orders: my father was to go to the produce market with a list, right now; I was to brush my teeth and, before any coffee or breakfast, hurry to the supermarket to buy bread, kefir, or whatever it was that vegetarians drank, and also vacuum cleaner bags; she was going to start preparing pie dough. By the time she was clearing the table where she would spread the dough and thin it out with a rolling pin, my headache and apprehension had gone away. Let the American come with all his might, we were going to be ready for him.

 

 

Macalister arrived wearing the same clothes he had worn the night before—the velvet jacket, the Hawaiian shirt—in combination with a pair of snakeskin boots. My parents made him take the boots off. He did not complain or try to get out of it, even as I unsuccessfully attempted to arrange a dispensation for him. “It is normal custom,” Father said. “Bosnian custom.” Sitting on a low, shaky stool, Macalister grappled with his boots, bending his ankles to the point of fracture. Finally, he exposed his blazingly white tube socks and lined up his boots against the wall, like a good soldier. Our apartment was small, socialist size, but Father pointed the way to him as though the dining room were at the far horizon and they needed to get there before the night set in.