The Question of Bruno (19 page)

Next morning he woke up ill, with his forehead and the nape of his neck throbbing. Andrea was gone, he heard the TV, but he couldn’t get up, so he closed his eyes and plummeted to the bottom of slumber. He kept coming in and out of listless dreams about Sarajevo, in which (for example) he would try to draw the map of the city in English, but couldn’t do it, because he couldn’t draw in English. Or he would be walking down his street (passersby carrying pointed black umbrellas, looking at
him askance) and it would impossibly intersect with the wrong street, so he couldn’t find the right direction.

The banal symbolism of these dreams notwithstanding, we should note that they suggest the situation of being in a maze.

Andrea came back home after work, made some tea for Pronek, gave him a bowl of Wheaties floating in glistening milk, kissed his cold forehead (in between surges of fever) and then took off to a gallery opening. She didn’t come back that night, and Pronek kept sweating, until the sheets were so soaked, sticking to his febrile body, that he had to get up and rummage through her closets, looking for virgin sheets, only to find a notebook with a little lock, under a pyramid of towels. But Pronek was shivering and had no strength to read it, fearing that he might find out things he didn’t care to know. So he took a couple of towels and spread them, like magic carpets, on the naked mattress, and proceeded to perspire. He didn’t know how long he stayed in bed—intermittent kisses, tepid cups of tea, and waking up in a cold, moist bed all merged into one long repetitive action, like a busy signal. If we were to ask him now, he could probably remember the wind banging at the window, and infernal electronic voices shrieking “Touchdown! Hee hee hee … !” He would have a dim recollection of calling his parents: his father told him it would be unwise to come back to Sarajevo, while his mother told him that there already was less shooting than yesterday, and that they missed him.

Once he mustered up some energy, while the fever was recovering somewhere in his body, and found Carwin and a legion of his buddies gathered around the TV, which had a porn flick on. It took Pronek a while to recognize the gaping vagina—the slurping sound it was making confused him. But they weren’t watching it, they were deeply invested in throwing a hacky sack at the revolving ceiling fan, which would
slam the hacky sack against the wall every now and then. In celebration of the fan’s success, someone would say, “Shit!” and get to suck on the pot pipe, shaped as the Grim Reaper.

There was a guy named Chad, and he was a history student.

Chad stayed for the rest of the week, sleeping on the couch, because he had to play a season of Tecmo Bowl with Carwin: Carwin was the Cowboys, while Chad was the Redskins. Pronek spent that week between the bed and the kitchen table, sometimes trying to write letters, but all of his sentences would fall apart before reaching the paper. Andrea had disappeared. Carwin claimed that she went to DeKalb for a couple of weeks, because she needed a break. Occasionally, between virtual football games and porn flicks, Pronek got to watch
Headline News
and learn that paramilitary (“Pornomilitary” punned Chad) units were entering Bosnia from Serbia. Carwin and Chad watched images of men in fatigues and a woman talking about massacres of Muslims in the eastern parts of Bosnia.

“This is depressing,” Carwin said.

“What’s with you people,” Chad asked. “Can’t you chill out?”

“They just hate each other over there,” Carwin said.

“Are you going back?” Chad asked.

“I’m supposed to fly back in couple of weeks,” Pronek said.

“Why don’t you stay here?” Chad asked.

“What can I do?” Pronek said. “My family is there.”

“Man, I wish I’d never see my fuckin’ family again,” Car-win said and wedged his hand furiously into his pants.

“You should stay and get your family out and let those fuckers kill each other if they want,” Chad said. Chad had an uncanny ability to bend his legs so much that he would effortlessly sit in the lotus position, like an Indian sage, while playing
football, his thumbs pressing the buttons with incredible speed.

“I mean, fuck, war is good. If we didn’t have war, there would be way too many people, man. It’s like natural selection, like the free market. The best get on the top, the shit sinks. I don’t know much about you, Russkie, and I don’t like you, but if you got here you must be worth something. It’s like those immigrants, man, they were shit at home, they got here, they became fucking millionaires. That’s why we’re the toughest motherfucking country in the world. Because only the fittest survive here.”

Carwin was sucking on a McDonald’s straw, watching the news about the Bulls. “Man,” he said. “We’re gonna kick ass this year again.” Pronek crawled back into his (well, Andrea’s) room and lay there, while the dusk was setting in, until he could see twig shadows trembling on the wall.

Andrea came back from DeKalb the next morning, refreshed. “Boy,” she said. “I was tripping for days.” When she entered the room, Pronek was heading to the bathroom to look in the mirror, stepping over the red pasta-sauce sea on the floor. He had two weeks’ worth of minuscule growth on his face, which made his face look smudged with coal dust, and he was wearing her bathrobe, his shorts barely hanging on to his hips.

He had lived on Carwin’s supply of Twinkies for two weeks.

That morning he woke up after a night of unsettling dreams, and saw his body as someone else’s body. His toes were miles away; his knees were two round dunes. He looked at his hands and they raised their heads to look back at him with hostility. He didn’t know what he was. But when Andrea walked in and looked at him, he suddenly recognized himself
as a foreigner—uncouth, unseemly, unpleasant body, with nowhere to go. He went to the bathroom, and shaved and washed, performing a ritual, as if celebrating his new identity.

Next day, they went to Andrea’s parents’ house for dinner.

They drove down Lake Shore Drive, the waves attacking the shore, while trees bent sideways, as if stretching their backs in an aerobic exercise. Andrea whistled and wheezed “Dear Prudence,” and after they listened to the newsbreak that talked about the imminent war in Bosnia, she said: “You should stay, you know.” “I know,” Pronek said. The street lights had glaring clarity, because of the frigid northern wind. They drove past the dark castles of the University of Chicago (“This is where they built the first nuke bomb,” she said) and entered a maze of identical red-brick buildings.

Andrea’s father vigorously shook Pronek’s hand and her mother said: “We’ve heard so much about you.” Then they presented him to an old woman, bent over a walker, holding its handles passionately, as if she were delivering a speech from a pulpit. “Nana,” Andrea’s mother said. “This is Andrea’s friend from Bosnia.”

“I never was in Boston,” Nana said.

“Bosnia, Nana, Bosnia. In Yugoslavia, near Czechoslovakia,” Andrea’s mother said, shook her head, and waved her hand as if pushing away a basketball, asking Pronek to forgive Nana. In a moment of confusion, Pronek took off his shoes. Andrea’s mother glanced at his feet, then locked her hand, pointing to the left, in front of her bosom and said: “Let’s move to the salon.”

They sat at a round table, under an illustrious lantern, with heavy pieces of crystal pending above their heads. Andrea’s father filled their glasses with wine. He stood over Pronek with the lean greenish bottle in his hand, waiting for
him to try the wine. Pronek sipped, and the glass chinked against his teeth, but then he said: “It’s good. Little sweet.”

“Well, it’s a Chardonnay,” Andrea’s father said, delighted.

Nana sat across the table from Pronek, smacking her lips and wiggling her jaw, and they could all hear the dentures steadily clacking. Her face looked like a map—valleys, furrows, wrinkles, cheekbones protruding like mountains. “I want wine,” she said. “Where’s my wine?” She kept moving her mouth, as if chewing the unchewable.

“It’s not good for you, Nana,” Andrea’s mother said. “You know that.”

“What kind of wine do you have back home?” Andrea’s father asked, slanting his head to the left to signal intense interest.

“I don’t know,” Pronek said. “Local kinds.”

“Hmm,” Andrea’s father said.

“Andrea told us you were a writer,” Andrea’s mother said. She had fenestral glasses, and a pearl choker, and her teeth were white and orderly, like an ivory keyboard. Andrea’s father wore a tweed jacket with elbow patches, his ears were flappy, and when he stood against the light, Pronek could see a pink penumbra around his earlobes.

“I was,” Pronek said.

“We like good writing,” Andrea’s mother said.

“Have you ever read Richard Ford?” Andrea’s father asked.

“Sensitive middle-class macho shit,” Andrea snapped and looked at Pronek, who simply said: “No.”

“Very well written,” Andrea’s father said and shook his head, as if rattling it. “Very well written.”

“And we like Kundera,” Andrea’s mother said. “He’s from Czechoslovakia, too.”

“Who’s in the kitchen?” Nana asked, pricking up her ears,
burdened by grayish clusters. She had twiggish arms from which crumpled skin hung like drying dough. She had a dim number tattooed between two veins on her right forearm.

“No one’s in the kitchen, Nana. We’re all here,” Andrea’s father said and googled his eyes at Pronek, asking for solidarity.

Andrea’s mother served a sequence of foods unknown to Pronek, with the taste and texture of minced cardboard (“This is wild rice,” she beamed at him nacreously), which he ate carefully, fearing a sudden accident, like chewing with his mouth open, or dropping a forkful of wild rice and salad “with maple-syrup-and-sunflower-seed dressing” into his lap. Pronek had a penetrating sense that his feet were about to begin exuding stench, so he covered his left-foot toes with his right foot, but then fretted that the hissing of sock friction might become too loud. He was convinced that he should move as little as possible, lest unnecessary motion release mischievous molecules of bodily odor.

“Who’s not here?” Nana asked. She would load her mouth and then chew patiently, looking at them with weary disinterest. Her hair was platinum white, but pink patches were clearly visible under the fluff, and her skull was right under the skin, it was right there, Pronek thought.

Then they had blackberry nonfat cheese cake with low-fat kiwi frozen yogurt and French hazelnut vanilla decaf coffee.

“So what’s going on in Czechoslovakia,” Andrea’s mother asked.

“Yugoslavia, Mom, Yugoslavia,” Andrea said.

“I read about it, I tried to understand it, but I simply can’t,” Andrea’s father said. “Thousands of years of hatred, I guess.”

“It’s a sad saga,” Andrea’s mother said. “It’s hard for us to understand, because we’re so safe here.”

“It’s mind-boggling,” Andrea’s father said.

“Where is Bruno? Is Bruno there in kitchen?” Nana hollered all of a sudden. “Bruno, come here.”

“Calm down, Nana. That’s not Bruno. Bruno’s gone,” Andrea’s mother said.

“Come here, Bruno!” Nana yelled toward the kitchen. “Eat with us! We have everything now!”

“Calm down, Nana. Or you’ll have to go to your room,” Andrea’s father said and turned to Pronek. “She can be rather obstreperous sometimes.” Pronek didn’t know what “obstreperous” meant, so he just said: “It’s okay. No problem.” Nana jiggled her jaw and calmed down. Andrea’s mother was scraping off the remnants of food, little piles of mush, onto a big plate.

“What you will do with it?” asked Nana. “Don’t throw it away, Bruno is hungry. Bruno!”

“We’re not going to throw it away,” Andrea’s mother said. “We’ll save it for Bruno.” Nana’s dentures clattered, rejoicing She had a quick slurp of coffee and then looked at Pronek.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“I’m Andrea’s friend,” Pronek said.

“Good,” she said.

While Pronek was putting on his shoes, revealing the dirt at their prows, Andrea’s father was holding his coat. “You should dry clean it,” he said. “I know,” Pronek said. Andrea’s mother pressed her cheek, soft and redolent of coconut, against Pronek’s, and kissed the air around his ear. “It was nice having you,” Andrea’s father said, shaking Pronek’s hand with habitual vigor. “I’m sure you’ll do fine if you stay here. This is the greatest country in the world, you just have to work hard.”

“That’s true,” Andrea’s mother said.

“Are you going to see Bruno?” Nana asked.

“No, Nana,” Pronek said. “I’m sorry.”

Pronek got up, put on his best clothes: a gray silk shirt, once upon a time smuggled from China by a family friend, with an amoeba-shaped grease blot in the left-nipple area, as if involuntary lactation had taken place; the well-known orange-stained beige pants; a tie with a Mickey Mouse pattern, lent and consequently tied by Carwin; a peach-colored jacket, also generously lent by Carwin, who hadn’t worn it for years, one size too small, hence rather tight in the shoulders, so Pronek, with his arms protruding, looked like a sad forklift. He put on his shoes, which had tufts of algae-like dirty lint, once upon a time fake fur, sticking out on the sides.

This is the attire in which Pronek entered the American labor market.

Pronek let Moskva out, then followed her down the stairs. He thought of dust speckles whirling in the sunbeams as puny angels, although they paid little attention to him. He stood behind the screen door, as if waiting for a cue to enter the stage, looking down the street: tree-crowns were all upset, swaying furiously; the wind was flipping their leaves, as if to show they were unmarked. A man with a rottweiler that looked like the man’s canine self—the same pelican chin, the same doleful trot—bagged a handful of shit and then carried it reverently like a piece of valuable evidence, following the investigative, sniffing dog. The two alcoholic sisters, with identical plum eye bags, were heading toward their morning refreshment, bickering about who was culpable for not replenishing the booze supplies, still holding hands. There was a white Cadillac jalopy
parked on the street, with the sign in the windshield saying: “Don’t tow it’s mine,” signed by “Jose.” The sky grumbled, as if someone were moving furniture in the universe above. He looked at the sky’s underbelly, at the clouds pressing the anxious trees, and enthusiastically frowned—it would rain again, he reckoned. He walked down Norwood, turned north on Broadway, facing the advancing traffic. He waited to cross Broadway at Granville—DON’T WALK the street light warned him. He imagined trying to run across the street and stumbling, a yellow cab trying to avoid his fallen body, but managing to run its front left wheel over his head, crushing it. He imagined the last thing he would see: the greasy underside of a car, layers of dirt covering the axle. He looked in our direction (although we are everywhere) before—WALK—crossing, and proceeded toward the El.