The Question of Bruno (11 page)

Thus it was definitely established by the family that our tree was rooted in glorious Brittany, which clearly distinguished us from other Ukrainians—a people of priests and peasants—let alone Bosnian Ukrainians. Once Alexandre Hemon was officially admitted to the family, the interest for things Gallic surged (and no one much cared for the nuanced differences between the Bretons and the French). My father would unblinkingly and determinedly sit through an entire French movie—French movies used to bore him out of his mind—and then would claim some sort of genetic understanding of the intricate relations between characters in, say,
À Bout de Souffle.
He went so far as to claim that my cousin Vlado was the spitting image of Jean-Paul Belmondo, which consequently made Vlado (a handsome blond young man) begin referring to himself as “Belmondo.” “Belmondo is hungry,” he would announce to his mother upon returning from work in a leather factory.

Further developments in the Hemon family-name history were propelled—I’m proud to say—by my literary exploits. In
the course of attaining my useless comparative literature degree at the University of Sarajevo, I read
The Iliad
and found a lightning reference to “Hemon the Mighty.” Then I read
Antigone
, where I discovered that Antigone’s suicidal fiancé was named Hemon—Hemon pronounced as Haemon, just like our family name. In the agon with Creon, Hemon at first looks like a suck-up:

But then they get into a real argument, and Hemon tells Creon off: “No city is a property of a single man,” and “You’d rule a desert beautifully alone,” and “If you weren’t a father, I should call you mad.”

My father dutifully copied the one page from
The Iliad
that, toward the bottom, had “Hemon the Mighty” and the handful of pages in
Antigone
where the unfortunate Hemon agonizes with the cocky Creon. He highlighted every sighting of the Hemon name with a blindingly yellow marker. He kept showing the copies to his co-workers, poor creatures with generic Slavic surnames, which—at best!—might have signified a minor character in a socialist-realist novel, someone, say, whose life is saved by the fearless main character, or who simply and insignificantly dies. My father didn’t bother to read
Antigone
, never mind tens of thousands of lines of
The Iliad
, and I failed to mention to him that “Hemon the Mighty” is absolutely irrelevant in the great epic and that Antigone’s illustrious fiancé committed not-so-illustrious suicide by hanging himself.

The following semester, I found a Hemon in
The Aeneid
, where he makes a fleeting appearance as a chief of a savage tribe. Sure enough, my father added the promptly highlighted photocopy to his Hemon archive. Finally, in
Gargantua and Pantagruel
, I stumbled upon “Hemon and his four sons” involved in an outrageous Rabelaisan orgy. The Rabelais reference, however, provided the missing link with the French chapter of the family history, which now could be swiftly reconstructed all the way back to 2000
B.C.

There is, unfortunately, a shadow stretching over this respectable history, a trace of murky, Biblical past that no one dared to follow but which the designated, though inept, historian feels obliged to mention: My cousin Aleksandra still remembers the timor and terror she felt when, in church, she heard the priest utter—clearly and loudly—our name. The priest, she says, described a man who stood in the murderous crowd under the cross on which Our Savior was expiring in incomprehensible pain, his eyes (the man’s, of course) bulging with evil, bloodthirsty saliva running down his inhuman chin, laughing away Our Savior’s suffering. “What kind of man is he?” thundered the priest. “What kind of man could laugh at the Lamb’s slaughter?
Hemon
was his name, and we know that his seed was winnowed and scattered all over this doomed earth, eternally miserable, alone and deprived of God’s love.” Stricken with horror (she was nine), she retched and ran out, while her father, my uncle Roman, who was not paying attention, kept saying “Amen!”

Later investigations found no Hemons in the Bible, although it is entirely unclear who the researcher was and how exactly the research was conducted. The official explanation, accepted by the entire family, was that the priest was performing an act of vicious revenge, probably because my Aunt
Amalija called him “a pig in the vestment” while the wrong ears were listening, or because my father married a communist.

In any case, few thought that we carried the mortifying burden of the ancient sin on our shoulders, or that we would have a family reunion in hell. “We have always been honest, hard-working people,” my father announced to the priest who replaced the hostile one (who had moved to Canada), pointing his finger toward the ceiling, beyond which, presumably, there was the supreme judge and avenger. The priest amicably nodded and accepted a bottle of home-made slivovitz and a jar of first-class honey, with which the potentially eternal dispute between the Hemons and God (regarding his Son) was settled, it seemed then, satisfactorily for both parties.

I have had doubts, however, along with some of my younger cousins and a very close relative. I have had doubts and fears that indeed we could have committed the terrible sin of sniggering at someone else’s suffering. Perhaps that’s why we emigrated, again, in the 1990s, from Bosnia to the United States. Perhaps this is the punishment: we have to live these half-lives of people who cannot forget what they used to be and who are afraid of being addressed in a foreign language, not being able any longer to utter anything truly meaningful. I have seen my parents, mute, in an elevator, in Schaumburg, Illinois, staring at their uncomfortable toes, stowed in foreign shoes, as a breezy English-speaking neighbor entered the elevator and attempted to commence a conversation about the un kind Midwestern weather. My father kept pressing the buttons 11 and 18 (where the verbose American was heading), as if they were supposed to terminate the fucking multilingual world and take us all back to the time before the Tower of Babel was unwisely built and history began to unwind in the
wrong, inhuman direction. My mother occasionally grinned painfully at the confounded neighbor, as the elevator rose arduously, through the molasses of silence, to the eleventh floor.

Inspired by the success of the Sarajevo Olympiad and the newly established ancient family history, the family council, headed righteously by my father, decided to have an epic get-together, which was to be held only once, and was to be recorded as the Hemoniad. The minutes from that family council meeting (taken by me) can scarcely convey the excitement and joyous awareness of the event’s future importance. Allow me to step out of my worn-out historian’s shoes and become a witness for an instant: I can attest that there was a moment of comprehensive silence—a fly was heard buzzing stubbornly against the window pane; fire was cracking in the stove; someone’s bowels disrespectfully grumbled—a moment when everyone looked into the future marked by the Hemoniad, the event that would make even our Homeric cousins envious. Even Grandfather, in one of his precious lucid moments, seemed to recognize everyone and did not ask “Where am I?” as he normally did. The magic was dispelled when the milk pot boiled over, and a swarm of aunts flew toward the stove to repair the damage.

Thus it was decided that the Hemoniad was to be held in June 1991, at my grandparents’ estate, which was falling apart because of my grandfather’s dotage, but was, nevertheless, “the place where our roots still hold the land together, fighting cadaverous worms.” It was also decided that the Hemons
should reach out to the Hemuns, the family branch that grew out of the tree trunk of Uncle Ilyko, my grandfather’s brother.

This is their history: Uncle Ilyko went from Bosnia to Ukraine to fight for Ukrainian independence in 1917. After the humiliating defeat, in 1921, he walked to the newly formed border between Romania and Yugoslavia, where they arrested him and put him on the train back to Kiev. He jumped off the train somewhere in Bukovina, and then roamed, as the first snow of the year, ominously abundant, was smothering the earth. He almost froze to death, but was found and saved by a young war widow, who nursed him out of glacial darkness all winter, asking for nothing from him but to warm her cold feet and dilute her loneliness. In the spring, he got up from the shaky bed, took from her trembling hands a bundle with knit socks, a brick of cheese, and a daguerreotype of her. He kissed her tearful cheeks, including a hirsute wart, and walked, only at night, back to the Romanian-Yugoslav border. Sometime in the spring of 1922, he swam across the Danube, whose murky, cold waters dissolved the daguerreotype.

Well, we never liked him. He was a violent, impetuous man. The day Ilyko returned home—where everyone thought he had long been dead—he got into a fight with Grandfather, because my grandfather had married the girl Ilyko had had a crush on. Infuriated, he went to Indjija, Serbia, married a native, and let a drunk clerk change his name to Hemun, which became the original sin of the Hemun branch. Indeed, the Hemuns avoided contact with the descendants of my grandparents, barely spoke Ukrainian, sang no Ukrainian songs, danced no Ukrainian dances, and thought of themselves as Serbs. The Hemuns, then, were to be saved from “the weed of otherness,” and come back to the forest of flesh and bone growing out of the ancient Hemon roots. When they told
Grandfather that the Hemuns were to come back to their historic home, he—God bless him—asked: “And who are they?”

In the weeks after the family council meeting, the invitation was forged in the Olympic minds of Uncle Teodor and my father. Uncle Teodor made suggestions, and my father rejected them as he typed. Let me submit an image: Uncle Teodor running different formulations by my father: “… the branch that was unjustly severed … the branch that fell off and broke the tree’s heart… the branch that shriveled, detached from its roots …” My father’s index fingers leaping up and down the typing keyboard, like virgins dancing for gods—Father occasionally using a virgin to pick his nose, and saying: “No … no … no … no …” As with all the great documents of history, the Hemoniad invitation went through many drafts and finally attained the form of exceptional grace and power. It clearly stated the purpose (“… to reattach the most formidable branch to its just place …”); the place (“… the Hemon family estate, where thousands of years of history are told by bees and birds and chickens …”); the logistics (“… we shall feast on spit-roast piglets and mixed salad, and if you need cakes and pastry, you are advised to make them yourselves …”); the structure (“… spare time will be spent in the house, in the courtyard, in the backyard, in the field, in the orchard, in the apiary, in the garden, in the cowshed, by the creek, in the forest, in conversation and exchange of pleasant words …”). The invitation was gladly received by many, and responses from all corners of the family began pouring in. The participation of many Hemuns was heralded by a phone call from the oldest Hemun, Andrija, and a tide of elation advanced through the family. Oh, those days when planning a piglet slaughter over the phone had mythological proportions; when old stories were excavated from the basements of memory,
and then polished and embellished; when sleepless, warm nights were wasted in trying to make sleeping arrangements, until Uncle Teodor suggested the hay under the cowshed roof, where “the youth” could sleep; when my mother kept rolling her eyes, suspicious of any mass meeting of people of the same ethnicity; when aunts independently met to organize the cake-and-pastry production, lest we have a surfeit of
balabushki.

I’m afraid this sentence was inescapable: the day of the Hemoniad arrived. A huge tent had been put up, above a long table. The stage for “the orchestra” had been built under the walnut tree in the center of the courtyard. Uncle Teodor, they say, was up at dawn, sitting on the porch and rehearsing the stories for the last time. I woke up (here we have a personal memory) to the incessant warbling of birds nesting under the roof. When I descended the stairs, I saw a pair of dancing headless chickens, trying to run away from something (but couldn’t because it was everywhere) their wings arrhythmically flapping, blood spurting out of their necks in decreasing streams. We had breakfast, sitting around the big table, passing panfuls of fried chicken livers and hearts, and platefuls of sliced tomatoes and pickles. “This,” said Uncle Teodor, “is the greatest day of my life.”

The Hemuns arrived all at once, with a fleet of shining new cars, like a colonizing army. They were uniformly overweight and spoke with a northern-Serbian drawl, which implied a life of affluent leisure. Nonetheless, everyone hugged each other, cheeks were smacked with kisses, hands were shaken ardently, and backs were slapped to the point of bruising. Uncle Teodor hollered: “Welcome, Hemuns!” and then proceeded from Hemun to Hemun, offering them his stump. He would turn his ear to each of them, asking: “And who are you?” and then memorized their voices.

The day went on in an atmosphere of general merriment and pleasant conversing. We have images, recorded on video, of the crowd in the tent, milling in a perpetual attempt to get closer to each other, like atoms forced to form a molecule, as everyone merged into one big body, with moist armpits and indestructible vocal chords. The band played all day, on and off, led by my cousin Ivan, who kept winking, over his heavily breathing accordion, at every woman under forty not directly related to him. When the band played old Ukrainian songs, the Hemuns sat grinning, confounded and embarrassed, for they could not understand a word. But everyone danced in whatever way they could, waltzing clumsily, their hands adhering to their partner’s bobbing sides and sweaty palms; or, their stage-fright temporarily cured by an infusion of a helpful beverage (beer was my choice of the courage-helper), they would dance
kolomiyka
, spinning at different speeds, from neck-breaking to mere circular trotting.