The Book of My Lives (6 page)

In no time letters started pouring in to the Sarajevo press, coming from concerned citizens, some of whom were doubtless part-time employees of State Security. Many unanimously demanded that the names of the people involved in organizing a Nazi meeting in Sarajevo be released to the angry public, so that the cancerous outgrowth on the body of socialism could be dealt with immediately and mercilessly. Due to pressure by the obedient public, the names of the “Nazi Nineteen” were happily announced in January 1987: there was a TV and radio-broadcast roll call, and the list was published in the papers the next day, for those who missed it the night before. Citizens started organizing spontaneous meetings, which produced a slew of demands for severe punishment; university students had spontaneous meetings, some recalling the decadent performances at Club Volens-Nolens, concluding with whither-our-youth questions and demands for severe punishment as answers to those questions; Liberation War veterans had spontaneous meetings, whereby they expressed their firm belief that work had no value in our families, and they also demanded severe punishment. My neighbors turned their heads away, passing me by; my fellow students boycotted an English-language class because I attended it, while the teacher quietly wept in the corner. Friends were banned by their parents from seeing us. The whole thing felt to me like reading a novel in which one of the characters—a feckless nihilistic prick—had my name. His life and my life intersected, indeed dramatically overlapped. At some point I started doubting the truth of my being. What if my reality was someone else’s fiction? What if, I thought, I was the only one not seeing what the world was really like? What if I was the dead end of my own perception? What if I was just plain stupid?

Isidora, whose apartment was searched, all her papers taken by State Security, fled with her family to Belgrade and never came back. A few of us who stayed pooled our realities together. Goga had her appendix taken out, and was in the hospital, where nurses scoffed at her, and Gu
š
a, Veba, and I became closer than ever. We attended the spontaneous meetings, all in the vain hope that somehow our presence there would provide some sense of reality, that we could explain that it was all a bad performance/joke gone wrong, or that, in the end, it was nobody’s business what we did at a private party. Various patriots and believers in socialist values at those meetings replayed the same good cop, bad cop games. At a Communist Party meeting I crashed at my college, as I had never been and would never be a Party member, a guy named Tihomir (the name could be translated as Quietpeace) was the bad cop. He kept yelling at me “You spat at my grandfather’s bones!” and kept moaning in disbelief whenever I suggested that this was all just ridiculous, while the Party secretary, a nice young woman, kept unsuccessfully trying to placate him.

The Party, however, was now watching how we behaved. Or so I was told by a man who came to our home, sent by the County Committee of the Party, to check up on us. “Be careful,” he said in an avuncular voice, “they are watching you very closely,” whereupon I understood Kafka in a flash. (Only a few years later, the same man would come to our house to buy some honey from my father, who was dealing it out of our home. The man wouldn’t talk about the events regarding the birthday party, except for saying “Such were the times.” He would tell me that his ten-year-old daughter wanted to be a writer, and would show me a poem that she wrote, which he proudly carried in his wallet. The poem would look to me like a first draft of a suicide note, as the first line read: “I do not want to live, as nobody loves me.” He would tell me that she was too shy to show him her poems—she would drop them, as if accidentally, so he could find them. I remember him walking away burdened with buckets of Hemon’s honey. I hope his daughter is still alive.)

Eventually, the scandal noise fizzled out. On the one hand, a lot of people realized that the level of the hullabaloo was inversely proportional to the true significance of the whole thing. We were scapegoated, as the Bosnian Communists wanted to show that they would nip in the bud any attempt by young people to question the sacredness of socialist values. On the other hand, larger, far more serious scandals were to beset the hapless Communist regime. Within a few months, the government was unable to quell rumors about the collapse of the state company Agrokomerc, whose head was good friends with Central Committee big shots and created his mini-empire on nonexistent bonds, or the socialist version thereof. And there were people who were being arrested and publicly castigated for thinking and saying things that seriously questioned the undemocratic Communist rule and the pseudoreligious cult of Tito. Unlike ourselves, those people knew what they were talking about: they had developed ideas, they spoke from defined intellectual and political positions, their principles were a category different from confused late-adolescent feelings. Only later would I understand that we were our own stray dogs with flashlights, and then animal control arrived, and the only thing anyone would remember was the dog shit left behind.

For years afterward, I’d run into people who were still convinced that the birthday party was a fascist meeting, and they were as ready as ever to send us to the gallows. Understandably, I didn’t always volunteer information about my involvement. Once, up in the wilderness of a mountain near Sarajevo, while called up in the army reserve, I shared the warmth of a campfire with drunken reservists who all thought that the birthday-party people should have been at least severely beaten. And I wholeheartedly agreed—indeed I claimed, perversely, that they should’ve been strung up, and got all excited about it. Such people, I said, should be tortured at length, and my distant-cousins-in-arms nodded in bloodthirsty agreement. I became someone else at that moment. I inhabited my enemy for a short time, and it felt both frightening and liberating. Let’s drink to that, the reservists said, and we did.

The doubts about the reality of the whole thing kept nagging at me for a long time. It didn’t help matters that Isidora, now in Belgrade, did eventually become a downright, unabashed fascist. Belgrade in the nineties was fertile ground for the most virulent fascism, and she was at home there. She had public performances that celebrated the rich tradition of Serbian fascism. She dated a guy who would become a leader of a group of Serbian volunteers, cutthroats, and rapists known as the White Eagles, operating in Croatia and Bosnia at the time of the war. Later, she would write a memoir entitled
The Fiancée of a War Criminal
. Our friendship had long ceased, but I could not help questioning what had happened—maybe the fascist party had been concocted by her fascist part, obscure to me. Maybe I hadn’t seen, blinded by the endless possibilities of Irrelevant Poetry, what she had seen; maybe I had been a pawn in her chess musical. Maybe my life had been like one of those Virgin Marys that show up in the frozen-food section of a supermarket in New Mexico or some such place—visible only to believers, ludicrous to everyone else.

3. THE LIFE AND WORK OF ALPHONSE KAUDERS

In 1987, in the wake of the birthday-party fiasco, I started working at a Sarajevo radio station, on a program geared toward younger urban people. It was called
Omladinski program
(The Youth Program), and everyone there was very young indeed, with very little or no radio experience. I failed the first, spring audition as the noise from the party still echoed in the radio studios, but was accepted in the fall, despite my mumbling, distinctly unradiophonic voice. The program was given some expression leeway by the radio heads, as the times were politically changing, but also because as young nobodies we could still take a fall if need be. I reported on cultural affairs, occasionally writing invectives against government idiocy and general stupidity, then reading them on the air. Soon I moved on to producing haughty film and book reviews in a voice of unquestionable (and unfounded) expertise.

All along, I was writing very short fiction. At some point I demanded and was given three or four minutes a week, which I used to air my stories on my friends Zoka and Neven’s (now in Brno and London, respectively) pretty popular show. The time slot was called “Sasha Hemon Tells You True and Untrue Stories” (SHTYTUS). Some of the fiction embarrassed my family—already thoroughly embarrassed by the whole birthday-party debacle—because I had a series of stories about my cousin, a Ukrainian, in which he, for example, somehow lost all his limbs and lived a miserable life, until he got a job in a circus, where, night in, night out, elephants rolled him around the ring like a ball.

Around that time, I wrote the story “The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders.” It was evident to me that it would be hard to publish, as it made fun of Tito, contained a lot of lofty farts and low sex, and involved the characters of Hitler and Goebbels and such. Moreover, most of the literary magazines in Yugoslavia were at that time busily uncovering this or that national heritage, rediscovering writers whose poetry and prose could have easily fit in any anthology of irrelevant literature, but who would later be extremely busy warmongering. So I broke up the story into seven installments, each of which could fit into the three minutes of “SHTYTUS,” and then wrote an introductory note for each of them—all insisting in the voice of unimpeachable expertise that I was a historian and that Alphonse Kauders was a historical figure and the subject of my extensive research. One of the introductory notes welcomed me upon my return from the archives of the USSR, where I had dug up revealing documents about Kauders. Another informed the listeners that I had just come back from Italy, where I was a guest at the convention of the Transnational Pornographic Party, whose platform was based on the teachings of the great Alphonse Kauders. Another one quoted letters from nonexistent listeners who praised me for exhibiting the courage necessary for a historian, and proposed that I be appointed head of the radio station. Most of the time, I felt that nobody knew what I was doing, as nobody listened to “SHTYTUS,” apart from my friends who generously gave me the airtime and the listeners who had no opportunity to change the station, as the whole thing was just too short. (One of the installments was twenty-seven seconds long, shorter than the jingle for “SHTYTUS.”) I didn’t mind, as I wasn’t all that eager to upset either the good cop or the bad cop.

After all seven installments were broadcast, I recorded the whole thing continuously, reading it with my mumble-voice (which is still fondly remembered by my friends as one of the worst to have ever graced the airwaves of Bosnia), providing some audio effects: Hitler’s and Stalin’s speeches, the chanting of obedient masses, Communist fighting songs, “Lili Marleen,” the pernicious sound effects for the twentieth century. We broadcast the whole thing straight through, for twenty-some minutes with no breaks—a form of radio suicide—on Zoka and Neven’s show, whereupon I was introduced as their guest in the studio, still pretending that I was a historian. I instructed my friends not to laugh under any circumstances (I’m afraid it’s a very funny story). They read the listeners’ letters, all of which were written by me, a few imitating the angry diction and spirit I had become familiar with after the infamous party. One letter demanded that I and people like me be strung up for defiling sacred memories. Another demanded more respect for horses (as Alphonse Kauders hated horses), because horses taught us the values of hard work. Another objected to the representation of Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of the Austro-Hungarian archduke, and asserted that Princip
absolutely did not
pee his pants while waiting at a Sarajevo street corner to shoot the heir to the imperial throne.

Then we opened the phone lines to the listeners. I’d thought (a) that nobody really listened to the Kauders series and (b) that those who did found it stupid and (c) that those who would believe it was true consisted of potheads, simpletons, and demented senior citizens, for whom the lines between history, fantasy, and radio programs were hopelessly blurred. Hence I was not prepared for questions or challenges nor was I intent on any further manipulation of false and dubious facts. The phones, however, were on fire, for an hour or so, live on air. The vast majority of people bought my Kauders story, and then offered many a tricky question or observation. A physician called and claimed that one cannot take out one’s own appendix, as I claimed Kauders had done. A man called and said that he had in his hand the
Encyclopedia of Forestry
—where Kauders was supposed to have been featured extensively—and there was no trace of him in it. I came up with plausible answers, never laughing for a moment, inhabiting the historian character completely, fearing all the while that my cover might be blown, fretting—as I suspect actors do—at the possibility of the audience seeing the real, phony me behind the mask because my performance was completely transparent. I did manage to dismiss the fear of the good cop or the bad cop (probably the bad cop) calling in and ordering me to instantly come down to State Security headquarters again.

But the weirdest fear of all was that somebody might call in and say: “You liar! You know nothing about Kauders! I know far more than you do—and here is the true story!” Kauders became real at that moment—he was my Virgin appearing in the soundproof studio glass, behind which there was an indifferent sound engineer and a few people sparkling with the electricity of transgressive excitement. It was an exhilarating moment, when fantasy ruptured reality and overran it, much akin to the moment when the body rose from Dr. Frankenstein’s surgical table and started choking him.

For months, even years, people would stop me and ask: “Did he really exist?” To some of them I said yes, to some of them I said no. But the fact of the matter is that there is no way of really knowing, as Kauders did exist for a flickering moment, like those subatomic particles in the nuclear accelerator in Switzerland, but not long enough for his existence to be physically recorded. The moment of his existence was too short for me to determine whether he was a mirage, a consequence of reaching the critical mass of collective delusion. Perhaps he had appeared to me just to let me understand that I’d been irreversibly irradiated by his malevolent aura.