The Book of My Lives (3 page)

The best theoretical expostulation on the subject above is a Bosnian joke, which loses some of its punch in translation but retains an exceptional (and typical) clarity of thought:

Mujo left Bosnia and immigrated to the United States, to Chicago. He wrote regularly to Suljo, trying to convince him to visit him in America, but Suljo kept declining, reluctant to leave his friends and his
kafana
(a
kafana
is a coffee shop, bar, restaurant, or any other place where you can spend a lot of time doing nothing while consuming coffee or alcohol). After years of pressuring, Mujo finally convinces him to come. Suljo crosses the ocean and Mujo waits for him at the airport in a huge Cadillac.

“Whose car is this?” asks Suljo.

“It’s mine, of course,” Mujo says.

“That is a great car,” Suljo says. “You’ve done well for yourself.”

They get in the car and drive downtown and Mujo says: “See that building over there, a hundred floors high?”

“I see it,” Suljo says.

“Well, that’s my building.”

“Nice,” Suljo says.

“And see that bank on the ground floor?”

“I see it.”

“That’s my bank. When I need money I go there and just take as much as I want. And see the Rolls-Royce parked in front of it?”

“I see it.”

“That’s my Rolls-Royce. I have many banks and a Rolls-Royce parked in front of each of them.”

“Congratulations,” Suljo says. “That’s very nice.”

They drive out of the city to the suburbs, where houses have grand lawns and the streets are lined with old trees. Mujo points at a house, as big and white as a hospital.

“See that house? That’s my house,” Mujo says. “And see the pool, Olympic size, by the house? That’s my pool. I swim there every morning.”

There is a gorgeous, curvaceous woman sunbathing by the pool, and there are a boy and a girl happily swimming in it.

“See that woman? That’s my wife. And those beautiful children are my children.”

“Very nice,” Suljo says. “But who is that brawny, suntanned young man massaging your wife and kissing her neck?”

“Well,” Mujo says, “that’s me.”

5. WHO ARE THEY?

There is also a neoconservative approach to otherness: the others are fine and tolerable as long as they are not trying to join us illegally. If they are here already and legal at that, they will also need to adapt to our ways of life, the successful standards of which have long been established. The distance of the others from us is measured by their relation to our values, which are self-evident to us (but not to them). The others always remind us of who
we
truly are—we are not them and never will be, because we are naturally and culturally inclined toward the free market and democracy. Some of them want to be us—who wouldn’t?—and might even become us, if
they
are wise enough to listen to what
we
tell them. And many of them hate us, just for the hell of it.

George W. Bush, in a speech to the faculty and students of an Iowa college in January 2000, succinctly summed up the neoconservative philosophy of otherness in his own inimitably idiotic, yet remarkably precise, way: “When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world and you knew exactly who they were. It was us versus them and it was clear who them was. Today, we are not so sure who the they are, but we know they’re there.”

And then
the they
flew in on September 11, 2001, and now
they
are everywhere, including the White House, by way of a falsified birth certificate. Every once in a while
we
round them up, take them to Guantánamo Bay on secret flights or arrest them in raids and deport them or demand from them to declare unequivocally that
they
are not
them
. And whoever
they
may be,
we
need to win the war against them so that we can triumphantly be alone in the world.

6. WHAT ARE YOU?

Here is a story I like to tell. I read it in a Canadian newspaper, but I have told it so many times that it occasionally feels as though I made it up.

A Canadian professor of political science went to Bosnia during the war. He was born somewhere in the former Yugoslavia, but his parents emigrated to Canada when he was a child, which is to say that he had a recognizably South Slavic name. In Bosnia, equipped with a Canadian passport and a UNPROFOR pass, he went around with armed, blue-helmeted escorts, fully protected from the war so he could study it. With his Canadian passport and a UNPROFOR pass, he passed through many checkpoints. But then he was stopped at one, and the curiosity of the soldiers was tickled by the incongruity of a South Slavic name in a Canadian passport, so they asked him: “What are you?” His adrenaline was no doubt high, he must’ve been pretty terrified and confused, so he said: “I am a professor.” To the patriotic warriors at the checkpoint, his answer must’ve bespoken a childlike innocence, for they most certainly hadn’t asked him about his profession. They must have laughed, or told stories about him after they let him go. He must have seemed unreal to them.

To be at all comprehensible as a unit of humanity to the ethnically brave men at the checkpoint he had to have a defined—indeed a self-evident—ethnic identification; the professor’s ethnicity was the only relevant piece of information about him. What he knew or didn’t know in the field of political science and pedagogy was hysterically irrelevant in that part of the world carved up by various, simultaneous systems of ethnic otherness—which, as a matter of fact, makes it not all that different from any other part of the world. The professor had to define himself in relation to some “other” but he couldn’t think of any otherness at that moment.

To be a professor again he had to return to Canada, where he may have run into my parents, for whom he would have been a perfect specimen of one of them.

7. WHAT AM I?

My sister returned to Sarajevo after the war and worked there equipped with a Canadian passport. Because of the nature of her work as a political analyst, she encountered a lot of foreign and domestic politicians and officials. Brandishing a somewhat ethnically confusing name, speaking both Bosnian and English, she was hard to identify and was often asked, by both the locals and foreigners: “What are you?” Kristina is tough and cheeky (having survived an assassination attempt early in her life) so she would immediately ask back: “And why do you ask?” They asked, of course, because they needed to know what her ethnicity was so they could know what she was thinking, so they could determine which ethnic group she was truly representing, what her real agenda was. To them, she was irrelevant as a person, even more so as a woman, while her education or ability to think for herself could never overcome or transcend her ethnically defined modes of thought. She was hopelessly entangled in her roots, as it were.

The question was, obviously, deeply racist, so some of the culturally sensitive foreigners would initially be embarrassed by her counterquestion, but after some hesitation they would press on, while the locals would just press on without hesitation—my sister’s knowledge, her very existence was unknowable until she ethnically declared herself. Finally, she would say: “I’m Bosnian,” which is not an ethnicity, but one of her two citizenships—a deeply unsatisfying answer to the international bureaucrats of Bosnia, bravely manning government desks and expensive restaurants.

Instructed by my sister’s experiences, when asked “What are you?” I am often tempted to answer proudly: “I’m a writer.” Yet I seldom do, because it is not only pretentiously silly but also inaccurate—I feel I am a writer only at the time of writing. So I say I am complicated. I’d also like to add that I am nothing if not an entanglement of unanswerable questions, a cluster of others.

I’d like to say it might be too early to tell.

SOUND AND VISION

My father spent a couple of years in Zaire in the early eighties, constructing Kinshasa’s electric grid, while Mother, Kristina, and I stayed at home in Sarajevo. In the summer of 1982, he came back home to take us to Zaire for a six-week vacation whose highlight would be a safari. I was seventeen, Kristina four years younger. We’d never been abroad, so we spent sleepless nights imagining everything we would experience that summer. The days, however, I spent watching the soccer World Cup, as I’d vetoed the possibility of going anywhere before the tournament was over. Once Yugoslavia was, as usual, eliminated early and embarrassingly, I became heavily invested in the Italian team. A couple of days before we left, I cheered for Italy in the World Cup finals, in which they beautifully beat Germany 3–1.

The World Cup over, we were on our way to Africa. The first stop was Italy, as we were supposed to catch an Air Zaire flight to Kinshasa at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport. At the airport we discovered that the flight had been canceled without explanation and until further notice. Father handled it all: he argued with the Air Zaire representatives; he retrieved our suitcases; he showed our passports to the Italian border-control officer. We were to wait for our flight at a hotel in a nearby town, to which we took a crowded shuttle.

Kristina and I were impatient to see what all the brouhaha over being abroad was about. What we saw during the shuttle ride was not all that impressive: nondescript buildings flying Italian flags; shop windows sporting pictures of the national soccer team, the Azzurri. Ever a great wrangler of silver linings, Father promised us that we would go to Rome, which was half an hour away by train, as soon as we had settled in at the hotel. He was our leader in this foreign world: he spoke in stern and bad English to the airport staff; he located the shuttle and got us on board; he exchanged money and dispensed it from his little manpurse with the confidence of a man used to international currencies. Kristina and I proudly bore witness to his negotiating two rooms for the Hemon family. He was conspicuously tall in his azure shirt, winking at us, entirely comfortable with all the worldly matters at hand.

But then, suddenly, dark fields of sweat appeared on his shirt, and he started frantically pacing the lobby. His manpurse was gone. He ran outside to see if he’d left it in the shuttle, but the shuttle, too, was gone. In garbled English, he yelled at the receptionist. He randomly interrogated guests and service staff who happened to enter the lobby. His shirt was now covered with sweat; he reeked of an imminent heart attack. Mother, who had previously idled in the lobby flipping a Rubik’s cube, tried to calm him down. We still had the passports, she said; it was only our cash that had been stolen. (Coming from the promised land of socialism, we had no credit cards.)
Several thousand American dollars
, Kristina and I realized in horror.
All of our vacation money
.

Thus we found ourselves penniless in an obscure Italian town, unable to go to Rome for a day trip, let alone to Africa for a safari. The possibility of our simply giving up on being abroad and returning to Sarajevo was real and devastating. The hotel looked at a long wall, over which ugly, thirsty trees peeked at the displaced tourists. Father was on the hotel phone making calls, informing his co-workers in Zaire that we were stuck without money somewhere in Italy, hoping they could help him get the hell out of it, or find a way back to Sarajevo, or on to Zaire. In the process, he found out that the Kinshasa flight had been canceled because a Zairean army general had kicked the bucket and the dictator Mobutu had requisitioned all three Air Zaire intercontinental aircraft to fly his large entourage to the funeral.

The next day, Father was still obsessively analyzing every moment of the unfortunate trip from the airport to the reception desk, retracing his every step to determine at which point the clever thief struck, which would help identify him. Running out of clean shirts, he eventually came to the conclusion that the theft had taken place at the reception desk and reconstructed the full sequence of events: Father had put his manpurse down on the counter while filling out the forms, and, when he turned to wink at us, the receptionist had slipped it under the desk. Consequently, Father installed himself in the lobby, intently monitoring the receptionist—a handsome, innocent-looking young man—and waiting for him to make a revealing mistake.

Kristina and I had nothing to do. We listened to our Walkman, shareable because it had two outlets for earphones. We tried to watch television in our room, but even the movies were dubbed in Italian (although that afforded us a precious sight of John Wayne walking into a saloon full of bad guys and saying: “
Buon giorno!
”). We wandered around the nameless town, excited, in spite of everything, to be experiencing the world: there was the vague smell of the Mediterranean, as if the town were on the sea; the lush variety of design in the pasta store around the corner; the intense redness of the tomatoes and the din of bartering at the local market; shops packed with the things that socialist teenagers coveted (rock music, denim clothing, gelato); taverns full of loud men watching replays of the World Cup games and reliving the triumph. (I wanted to watch the finals all over again, to see Marco Tardelli screaming in celebration after scoring the second goal, but Kristina objected.) When everything shut down for the noon siesta, we trailed a group of suntanned young people, assuming that their final destination was fun, until we ended up on an entirely unanticipated beach. It turned out the town was called Ostia and that it was, in fact, on the coast.

Returning from our expedition, eager to deliver the good news, Kristina and I found Father sweating like a hysterical hog and glaring at the receptionist from a far corner of the lobby—a veritable self-appointed hotel detective. Even after a couple of shifts on the watch, he’d failed to catch the suspect in another act of stealing or to collect any evidence against him. From where we stood, his aura of leadership was sadly diminished. When we announced that we’d discovered salt water, Mother finally abandoned her Rubik’s cube and took charge.