We got up at dawn, ignored the yolky sun, loaded our navy-blue Austin with suitcases and then drove straight to the coast, stopping only on the verge of Sarajevo, so I could pee. I sang communist songs the entire journey: songs about mournful mothers looking through graves for their dead sons; songs about the revolution, steaming and steely, like a locomotive; songs about striking miners burying their dead comrades. By the time we got to the coast, I had almost lost my voice.

Alphonse Kauders is the creator of The Forestry Bibliography, 1900–1948, published by the Engineers and Technicians Association, in Zagreb, 1949. This is a special bibliography related to forestry. The material is classified into seventy-three groups and encompasses 8,800 articles and theses. Bibliographical units are not numbered. The creator of The Forestry Bibliography was the first to catalog the entire forest matter in a single piece of work. The work has been viewed as influential.

Alphonse Kauders had a dog by the name of Rex, whose whelp, in the course of time, he gave to Josip B. Tito.

Alphonse Kauders had a mysterious prostate illness and, in the course of time, he said: “Strange are the ways of urine.”

Alphonse Kauders said to Rosa Luxemburg: “Let me penetrate a little bit, just a bit, I’ll be careful.”

Alphonse Kauders said: “And what if I am still here.”

Alphonse Kauders was the only son of his father, a teacher. He was locked up in a lunatic asylum, having attempted to molest seven seven-year-old girls at the same time. Father, a teacher.

Alphonse Kauders said to Dr. Joseph Goebbels: “Writing is a useless endeavor. It is as though we sign every molecule of gas, say, of air, which — as we all know — cannot be seen. Yet, signed gas, or air, is easier to inhale.”

Dr. Joseph Goebbels said: “Well, listen, that differs from a gas to a gas.”

Alphonse Kauders was the owner of the revolver used to assassinate King Alexander.

One of Alphonse Kauders’s seven wives had a tumor as big as a three-year-old child.

Alphonse Kauders said: “People are so ugly that they should be liberated from the obligation to have photos in their identity cards. Or, at least, in their Party cards.”

Alphonse Kauders desired, passionately, to create a bibliography of pornographic literature. He held in his head 3,700 pornographic books. Plus magazines.

Richard Sorge, talking about the winds of Alphonse Kauders, said: “They sounded like sobs, sheer heartrending sorrow, which, resembling waves, emerged from the depths of one’s soul, and, then, broke down, someplace high, high above.”

Alphonse Kauders, in the course of time, had to crawl on all fours for seven days, for his penis had been stung by seventy-seven bees.

Alphonse Kauders owned complete lists of highly promiscuous women in Moscow, Berlin, Marseilles, Belgrade, and Munich.

Alphonse Kauders was a Virgin in his horoscope. And in his horoscope only.

Alphonse Kauders never, never wore or carried a watch.

There are records suggesting that the five-year-old Alphonse Kauders amazed his mother by making “systematic order” in the house pantry.

Alphonse Kauders said to Adolf Hitler, in Munich, as they were guzzling down their seventh mug of beer: “God, mine is always hard when it is needed. And it is always needed.”

Alphonse Kauders:

a) hated forests

b) loved to watch fires

These proclivities were happily united in his notorious obsession with forest fires, which he would watch, with great pleasure, whenever he had a chance.

Josip B. Tito, talking about the winds of Alphonse Kauders, said: “They sounded like all the sirens of Moscow on May 1, the International Labor Day.”

Alphonse Kauders impregnated Eva Braun, and she, in the course of time, delivered a child. But after Adolf Hitler began establishing new order and discipline and seducing Eva Braun, she, intoxicated by the Führer’s virility, sent the child to a concentration camp, forcing herself to believe it was only for the summer.

Alphonse Kauders hated horses. Oh, how Alphonse Kauders hated horses.

Alphonse Kauders, in the course of time, truly believed that man created himself in the process of history.

Alphonse Kauders stood behind Gavrilo Princip, whispering — as urine was streaming down Gavrilo’s thigh, as Gavrilo’s sweating hand, holding a weighty revolver, was trembling in his pocket — Alphonse Kauders whispered: “Shoot, brother, what kind of a Serb are you?”

Alphonse Kauders described his relationship with Rex: “We, living in fear, hate each other.”

There are records that Alphonse Kauders spent some years in a juvenile delinquents’ home, having set seven forest fires in a single week.

Alphonse Kauders said: “I hate people, almost as much as horses, because there are always too many of them around, and because they kill bees, and because they fart and stink, and because they always come up with something, and it is the worst when they come up with irksome revolutions.”

Alphonse Kauders wrote to Richard Sorge: “I cannot speak. Things around me do not speak. Still, dead, like rocks in a stream, they do not move, they have no meaning, they are just barely present. I stare at them, I beg them to tell me something, anything, to make me name them. I beg them to exist — they only buzz in the darkness, like a radio without a program, like an empty city, they want to say nothing. Nothing. I cannot stand the pressure of silence, even sounds are motionless. I cannot speak, words mean nothing to me. At times, my Rex knows more than I do. Much more. God bless him, he is silent.”

Alphonse Kauders knew by heart the first fifty pages of the Berlin phone book.

Alphonse Kauders was the first to tell Joseph V. Stalin: “No!”

Stalin asked him: “Do you have a watch, Comrade Kauders?” and Alphonse Kauders said: “No!”

Alphonse Kauders, in the course of time, told the following: “In our party, there are two main factions: the Maniacs and the Killers. The Maniacs are losing their minds, the Killers are killing. Naturally, in neither of these two factions is there any women. Women are gathered in the faction called the Women. Chiefly, they serve as an excuse for bloody fights between the Maniacs and the Killers. The Maniacs are the better soccer team, but the Killers can do wonders with knives, like nobody else in this modern world of ours.”

Alphonse Kauders had gonorrhea seven times and syphilis only once.

Alphonse Kauders does not exist in the Encyclopedia of the USSR. Then again, he does not exist in the Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia.

Alphonse Kauders said: “I am myself, everything else is stories.”

Dr. Joseph Goebbels, talking about the winds of Alphonse Kauders, said: “They were akin to the wail of an everlastingly solitary siren, sorrow in the purest of forms.”

One of the seven wives of Alphonse Kauders had a short leg. Then again, the other leg was long. The arms were, more or less, of the same length.

In the Archives of the USSR, there is a manuscript which is believed to have originated from Alphonse Kauders:

“1) shoot under the tongue (?);

2) symbolism (?); death on the ground (?); in the forest (??); by an anthill (?); by a beehive;

3) take only one bullet;

4) the sentence: I shall be reborn if this bullet fails, and I hope it won’t;

5) lie down, so all the blood flows into the head;

6) burn all manuscripts => possibility of someone thinking they were worth something;

7) invent some love (?);

8) the sentence: I blame nobody, especially not Her (?);

9) tidy up the room;

10) write to Stalin: Koba, why did you need my death?

11) take a bottle of water with me;

12) avoid talking until the certain date.”

One of Alphonse Kauders’s seven best men was Richard Sorge.

Alphonse Kauders regularly subscribed to all the pornographic magazines of Europe.

Alphonse Kauders removed his own appendix in Siberia, and he probably would have died, had he not been transferred to the camp hospital at the very last moment. And that was only because he had informed on a bandit in the bed next to his for secretly praying at night.

Alphonse Kauders said to Eva Braun: “Money isn’t everything. There is some gold too.”

Alphonse Kauders was a fanatic beekeeper. In the course of his life, he led fierce and merciless battles against parasitic lice that ruthlessly exploit bees, and are known as “varoa.”

Alphonse Kauders said: “The most beautiful fire (not being a forest one) I have ever seen, was when the Reichstag was ablaze.”

The very idea of creating Alphonse Kauders occurred for the first time to his (future) mother. She said to the (future) father of Alphonse Kauders: “Let’s make passionate love and create Alphonse Kauders.”

Father said: “All right. But let’s watch some, you know, pictures.”

Alphonse Kauders was a member of seven libraries, of seven apicultural societies, of seven communist parties and of a national-socialist one.

Alphonse Kauders told the following: “In elementary school, I attracted attention by stuffing my fist into my mouth. Girls from other classes would rush in droves to see me stuff my fist into my mouth. My father, a teacher, glowed with a bliss, seeing all those girls swarming around me. Once, a girl that I wished to make love to approached me. And I was so excited that I tried to shove both of my fists into my mouth. I sacrificed my two front teeth for my passion. Ever since I have been noticed for my insanity. This strange event probably determined the course of my life. Ever since I haven’t talked.”

On one copy of The Forestry Bibliography, 1900–1948, kept in Zagreb, there is the following handwritten remark: “Since the day I was born, I have been waiting for the Judgment Day. And the Judgment Day is never coming. And, as I live, it is becoming all too clear to me. I was born after the Judgment Day.”

Alphonse Kauders told the following: “When Rex and I had a fight, and that happened almost every day, he would stray and would be gone for days. And he would tell me nothing. Except once. He said: ‘The stray-dog shelter is full of spies.’ “

On the eve of World War II, in Berlin, Alphonse Kauders said to Ivo Andric: “A firm system still exists only in the minds of madmen. In other people’s minds, there’s nothing but chaos, as well as around them. Perhaps art is one of the last pockets of resistance to chaos. And then again, maybe it isn’t. Who the hell cares?”

On the eve of World War I, Alphonse Kauders said to Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s pregnant wife: “Let me penetrate a little bit, just a little, I’ll be careful.”

On one of Alphonse Kauders’s seven tombs, it is written: “I have vanished and I have appeared. Now, I am here. I shall disappear and I shall return. And then, again, I shall be here. Everything is so simple. All one needs is courage.”

Alphonse Kauders wrote to one of his seven wives letters “full of filthy details and sick pornographic fantasies.” Stalin forbade such letters to be sent by Soviet mail, because “among those who open and read letters there are many tame, timid family people.” So then Alphonse Kauders sent his letters through reliable couriers.

Alphonse Kauders said: “I–I am not a human being. I–I am Alphonse Kauders.”

Alphonse Kauders said to Richard Sorge: “I doubt there exists an emptiness greater than that of empty streets. Therefore, it is better to have some tanks or bodies on the streets, if nothing else is possible. Because Anything is better than Nothing.”

Alphonse Kauders, in the course of time, put a revolver on Gavrilo Princip’s temple, for he had burned a bee with his cigarette.

Alphonse Kauders, in the course of time, said to Stalin: “Koba, if you shoot Bukharin ever again, we shall have an argument.” And Bukharin was shot only once.

Alphonse Kauders said to Eva Braun — in bed, after seven mutual, consecutive orgasms, four of which had gone into the annals — Alphonse Kauders said to Eva Braun: “One should find a way of forbidding people to talk, especially to talk to each other. People should be forbidden to wear watches. Anything should be done with people.”

It is widely believed that the little-known pornographic work Seven Sweet Little Girls, signed by pseudonym, was written by Alphonse Kauders.

Alphonse Kauders told, in the course of time, about the first days of the Revolution: “We killed all mad horses. We set empty houses on fire. We saw soldiers weeping. Crowds gushed out of prisons. Everybody was scared. And we had nothing but a bad feeling.”

Albeit Alphonse Kauders hated folk from the depths of his soul, almost as much as he hated horses (Good God, how Alphonse Kauders hated horses!), he was the creator of a folk proverb: “Never a bee from a mare.”

Joseph V. Stalin, talking about the winds of Alphonse Kauders, said: “Many a time, in the course of our Central Committee sessions, Comrade Kauders would, well, cut a wind, and a few moments later, all comrades would be helplessly crying. Including myself, as well.”

Alphonse Kauders owned the revolver used to murder Lola, a twelve-year-old prostitute from Marseilles.

Ivo Andric, talking about Alphonse Kauders, said: “His in-sides were removed by a secret operation. All that remained was a sheath of skin, within which he safely dreamt of a bibliography of pornographic literature.”

Alphonse Kauders spent the night between April 5 and April 6, 1941, on the slopes of Avala, waiting to see Belgrade in flames.

Alphonse Kauders killed his dog Rex with gas after Rex had tried to slaughter him in his sleep because Alphonse Kauders had set mousetraps all over their place to take revenge on Rex for having pissed on his new, pristine uniform.

Alphonse Kauders, in the course of time, was engaged in painting. The only painting that has been preserved, oil on canvas, is called The Class Roots of Tattooing and is kept in the National Museum in Helsinki.

Alphonse Kauders said to Josip B. Tito: “A few days, or years, hell, ago, I noticed that a tree under the window in one of my seven rooms had grown some ten goddamn meters. There aren’t many people who notice trees growing at all. And those who do are likely to be lumberjacks.”

Gavrilo Princip, talking about the winds of Alphonse Kauders, said: “They sounded like this: Pffffffuuummmiiuujmmsghhhss.”

Alphonse Kauders had two legal sons and two legal daughters. The rest were illegal. One son was shot as a war criminal in Madona, Lithuania; the other was a distinguished member of the Australian national cricket team. One daughter was an interpreter at the Yalta conference; the other discovered, in the Amazon rain forests, a hitherto unknown species of an insect resembling the bee, labeled eventually Virgo Kauders.

Alphonse Kauders said: “Literature has nothing human in itself. Nor in myself.”

Alphonse Kauders never finished work on the bibliography of pornographic literature.

The book was auburn, with black slanted letters on the spine reading “Spies of WWII,” and, impressed onto the front cover, black letters, tiny trenches, with golden brims, reading: The Greatest Spies of World War Two. The book was big and weighty. I’d put it on my knees, but then its weight would spread my legs and the book would close itself and slip to the floor. And I’d lie on my belly and rest my head on the scaffold of my hands and read. When my elbows would begin to ache, I’d recline my cheek on the thicker half of the book, incline the other half, feeling the sticky moisture connecting my cheek and a spy’s face, secrets of WWII just inches away from my absorbing pupils.

There were lots of black-and-white pictures: a five-man column — surrounded by soldiers pointing rifles — with their hands on the napes of their necks; when I would narrow my eyes, they’d look like black-and-white butterflies; the head of a chubby member of the Rote Kappelle,¹, with an asymmetrical face: nose slightly on the left side, right eye hardly opened and seemingly asleep, mouth kept shut with effort, as if there was a spring of blood behind the feeble lips — I just knew from his face that his hands (swollen wrists, bloody, burning trenches under the cuffs) were handcuffed; a picture of General Montgomery standing, arms akimbo, turned sideways, looking at the upper-left corner of the page, with the timeless beret parallel with his gaze: General Montgomery’s doppelganger, just the head, looking at me with odd pensiveness, as if painfully aware that he could never be General Montgomery; a row of blindfolded people in white in front of the ready firing squad and a smiling officer, his right arm raised, pointing at the upper-right corner of the picture. And, near the end, there was Sorge—”at the outset of his mission in Japan”²—framed by a door behind his back, standing legs apart (left foot NW, right foot NE) in a dark trenchcoat, one hand pocketed, the other somewhat clenched, holding a purse or a camera case; and his head: fiendish ears, large and ill-shaped; lips shut tight, as if his teeth were biting the inside of his lower lip; the wide base triangle of his nose, its top angle connected, by two deep furrows, with two dark dots in the corners of his mouth; lightless twin-holes, at the bottom of which were his eyes; and the black-inked helmet of hair.

The picture was obviously retouched: Sorge’s anxiety was burdened with someone else’s curtained body. One could see the sharp cut at the verge of his collar, where his head, guillotined in a shadowy laboratory, was attached to a headless trenchcoat — plus an inexplicable excess of neck-flesh on the left side³. But I believed that Sorge was in that trenchcoat. I believed that he was about to enter the door-apparition behind his back. I believed in the totality of that picture, I believed in the apparent, and I trusted books. I was ten.

In the winter of 1975, I began to conceive the idea that my father⁴ was a spy. He had been pursuing a degree at the Leningrad Energy Institute and had often been away, going to Leningrad or Moscow⁵ or Siberia or wherever far away. At the 1975 New Year’s Eve my father was in the middle of a blizzard, immobilized at the Moscow airport; my mother⁶ was staring through the window, watching snowflakes parachuting on Sarajevo; and I was patrolling our home, vaguely missing my father, anxious to accost Grandpa Frosty (in Socialist Yugoslavia, Santa Claus became Grandpa Frosty and used to arrive on New Year’s Eve) at the very moment of his arrival and force him to exchange a plain fountain pen and fluffy sweater (both of which he had sent in advance) for some spy devices. A poisonous fountain pen;⁷ a disguise kit⁸ (with a fake mustache and contact lenses that could change the color of my eyes); a matchbox containing a micro-camera; and a cyanide ampoule, were on the list of my desires. Tired of patrolling and longing, I asked my mother what she would think if I became a spy and she said she wouldn’t mind too much, but she would be afraid for me, just as she was afraid for my father and said she would be lonely and sad if I’d change my identity and forget about her and she said she wanted me to be better than my father, not to be somewhere else all the time. That night, falling asleep by the plastic tree, on guard for Grandpa Frosty, I was imagining my father being somewhere else, in a black trenchcoat, stealthily walking down a dark hall, stopping in front of a door, looking down the tunnel-like hall behind him, unlocking the door with something in his hand, entering the room (my dreamy gaze passing, like a camera, through the wall, following him), finding the desk drawer in the darkness, turning on the desk lamp, turning it away from the window, breaking the lock of the top drawer, taking the matchbox out of his pocket, taking the file out, photographing the documents ⁹ (with blurred headings) with the matchbox (whose snapping I attempted to reproduce: “sllt sllt”). But wait, I hear footsteps, heavy thumping, I turn off the light, the footsteps open the door, cut the darkness with the flashlight, like a sword. I’m afraid that he (she?) could smell my fear, my heart is as loud as a tank engine, the door is closed and everything is fine, but I do not dare to be relieved. I uncurtain myself and continue photographing and then I hear a woman sobbing and there is another door and I open the door and a torrent of light rushes in, and a Japanese woman¹⁰ says, with a sorrowful smile: “You must go to bed now. Go undress yourself.”

From his journeys to the Soviet Union, my father would bring me dull Soviet toys which all had a sour, oily smell: gray toy car (Volga) that was sticky when touched and produced a hideous high-pitch whining sound when (seldom) driven; dun plastic train station, meant for my long abandoned train; military olive-green gun that ejected little (vomit-orange) plastic balls, instantly banned and then consequently disposed of by my mother; plethora of books about the victorious Red Army,¹¹ which I couldn’t read since they were in Russian, but I liked the pictures (plain peasant faces, scared stiff of the Army photographer’s camera) of the heroes who neutralized a German machine gun by throwing themselves at the barrel or jumped into a terrified German trench, with a cluster of hand grenades attached to their chests. But at the beginning of 1975, after a few cold nights at the airport, he brought me something beyond words: a portable telegraphic system. It was in a gray (naturally) box with a thin booklet, which had a smiling black-and-white boy with gigantic earphones on his head (but no earphones in the box). My father unpacked it: two buzzer-keys and a coil of shining copper wire. Then he put one key in our dining room and the other one in the bedroom (buzz-buzzbuzz-buzz) and the electric current (he said) carrying a Morse-encoded message¹² went over the bedroom floor, passed my father’s curled socks (he’d take off his socks first thing when he got back home), went through the kitchen, speedily crawling by my mother’s feet (going to the bathroom to vomit again), then diving under the carpet (lest someone, most likely, I, stumble over and fall onto the glass-top table to be “cut in pieces”) of the dining room and then reached the key (buzz-buzzbuzz-buzz) in front of the amazed me. I could not decode the message, so I could not reply, which made me eager to learn Morse code. My father knew Morse code very well (which fueled my suspicions) so he decided to train me. He’d tap messages at the dinner table (my mother digging a crater in the mashed potatoes and rolling her eyes) and I’d try to decode them, forgetting to chew and swallow, the mashed potatoes becoming liquid in my mouth. He’d tap “hurry up” at the bathroom door, where I was getting carried away over a book. I was getting better, I even sent him a couple of simple messages (“want dog”), but my father sustained his teaching patience only for a week or two, then he was busy, then he was off to the Soviet Union again. I continued practicing Morse code for a while, but then I abandoned practicing because it was boring to send messages into a void. Several times I played a whole spy game: I’d sneak into my parents’ bedroom (my mother innocuously watching The Sound of Music), photograph the stuff in the top drawer, the unlocked one, of my father’s desk (mainly bills) with a matchbox (a real matchbox), then I would crawl out of the bedroom, behind the back of my unsuspecting dozing mother, and go to my secret shelter under the glass-top table, and send haplessly coded messages back to the bedroom, imagining that they meant something, picturing someone at the other end of the copper wire. It was all over when I shattered the glass top, almost beheading myself while practicing seeing (seeing clearly, I should say) in the dark — a skill necessary, I believed, for any spy, let alone a great one. My mother terminated the telegraph line and I was left to send messages by telepathy (a brief and only partly successful attempt). When my father came back from the Soviet Union in April, he brought me a too-light, atrociously deformed, pigskin soccer ball.

When my mother went to the hospital to give birth to my little sister Hanna (July 4, 1975–January 31, 1985), my father was away, again. This time he was in Baku, the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan (whence, in August, he brought me four tin oil-drill towers and a box of little pipes that would have formed a pipeline, had they ever been connected). I was left home alone for lengthy periods of time and was watched over constantly, I believed, by Comrade Tito himself. It was because Branko Vukelic had told me that one shouldn’t use Tito’s name in vain, for Comrade Tito had TV monitors at his palace in Belgrade, at which he could see every single resident of Yugoslavia, at any given moment of their lives.¹³ “Now,” Branko Vukelic said, “if you use Tito’s name to swear and then you lie, or if you use Tito’s name to curse, he can see you. And if he sees you, he may decide to die and punish us all.” I was very careful thereafter not to swear, lest I be guilty of Comrade Tito’s (or someone else’s, for that matter) death. It was soothing to know, however, that I was being monitored, when I was all by myself, that if someone came to abduct me (the police or the devil himself) it would have been seen and I would have been doubtless retrieved from the sneaky villains. It also meant that I had to wash my hands after using the bathroom, couldn’t pick my nose and stick the snot to the underside of the chair, nor could I belch like a hog. I tried to locate the cameras that must have been transmitting images from our home to Tito’s residence. While Mother and Father were away, I looked into vases; I looked behind the pictures on the wall, breaking the one with them in Vienna, on their honeymoon (for which I was ruthlessly beaten when my mother came back from the hospital); I looked into lamps and light switches; I looked everywhere and the only place I could figure out as a camera location was the TV set (model Futura). It was a perfectly logical location, for, from the position of the TV, almost every nook of our home was visible — in fact, everything in the apartment except Mother and Father’s bedroom. When I wanted to be alone, I’d go to their bedroom and lie in their bed, smelling the ethereal residues of their absent bodies, watching their wedding picture on the opposite wall (they’re smiling, with a circular lamp behind them acting the moon), still suspecting that there was Tito’s camera behind their happiness.

At the time of my poor sister’s birth, I was still obsessively entertaining the idea that my father was a spy, but I hadn’t been able to find any tangible evidence. My suspicions had swollen because of my father’s long phone conferences in Russian with somebody who had never been identified; because of the letters (in colorful envelopes embellished with eventful stamps) coming from Moscow, Vladivostok,¹⁴ Stockholm, New York; because of his mysterious smiles, when he would be watching the news, as if he knew more than the bland announcers; because of his comments about the politicians: “He won’t last long,” or “He’s dead all right”; because of his secluding himself behind the bedroom door and never letting anyone see what he was doing there.

When Tito went to Cuba (a TV image of Tito and Castro hugging, smiles stowed with false teeth: Tito in his white, elaborate field-marshal uniform, Castro in his olive-gray sergeant’s uniform plus the immortal curly beard) I reckoned that I wasn’t going to be watched or, even if I was, it would be done by some of his lower officials who wouldn’t dwell over me as caringly as Tito himself would. Thus I decided to venture into going through my father’s drawers, closets, suits, and suitcases, all conveniently located in the bedroom, out of the reach of Tito’s men. I even unplugged the already turned-off TV and put a thick (Turkmenistan) blanket over it. I took down, carefully, the wedding picture and rolled down the shades. First I went through (two) suitcases, finding (two) hotel brochures: the Lux¹⁵ in Moscow and a Holiday Inn in Vienna, with pictures of reception desks, desolate rooms, and swimming pools. The Lux Hotel brochure had a smiling Russian beauty (silky braids, rose cheeks, big eyes, etc.) on the front page. The Holiday Inn brochure had a picture of a spacious hall, with an immense lantern, dissolved into glittering crystal tears, hanging from the top of the picture. I went through the inside suitcase pockets, finding business cards (in various languages, in sundry alphabets); finding unintelligible notes on napkins and exhausted railway tickets; finding a lighter (a miniature camera? No!) and a pack of Soviet cigarettes (Sputnik, with an ostentatious picture of an ascending spaceship on the box); finding mysterious rubber objects (condoms, I was to find out, a couple of years later).

Now I want the reader to assume the role of the camera, to move the objective toward me and peek over my shoulder, following my gaze. I want the camera to focus on the objects that I am about to uncover. I want the thrill of discovery to be rendered with the exactness of the detail. I want this to be documented. Turn on the light. Roll.

The left closet. First the underwear. You have to look under the neatly built pyramid of undershirts. Nothing. Under the panties. A book, with pictures: Figurae Veneris — A Love Manual. ¹⁶ Men and women, naked, assuming acrobatic positions, hairy crotches. Never mind. Towels. Nothing. Bedspreads. A cloth-covered notebook, with Mother’s name written on it, with a lock, no key. Hell. Leave it as if nothing happened. Now the drawer. Sheets of paper, documents, sorted into three separate, puzzling, stacks. First stack: floor plans of a house,¹⁷ plus charts with numbers summoned at the bottom of the last page: 1,782, twice underlined. Second stack: diplomas and resumes. Flip through: “… worked to develop more efficient ways of transmitting energy … particularly interested in international nets … Sincerely.” Third stack: four files. First file: receipts. Second file: paid bills. Third file: a diploma: “… is hereby confirmed to have graduated at the University of Sarajevo and to have attained the title of Engineer and Energy Transmission Manager.” Fourth file: pictures from the wedding. Mother holding the wedding wreath. Father touching her above the left elbow, as if pushing her to step across the edges of the picture. Mother laughing, with her chin up. Father is about to spread his arms in a gesture of asking. Mother and Father in the center of the picture, a man and a woman stepping into the picture from opposite sides, with symmetrical grins. Father hugging the woman whose back is turned toward the camera (zoom). A twinkle of sweat on Father’s forehead. Mother hugging the woman (zoom). Tears reaching the nostrils. On each picture a globe lamp behind them: dazzling, fake, immobile moon. Cut.

The middle closet. Roll. First, the shelf above the suits. Boxes of slides, almost all of them from the USSR, the rest from vacations on the Adriatic coast. Random picks: the cracked Tsar’s Knoll and my father minute by its side; Father between two guards in front of the Lenin Mausoleum: Father sending a smile toward the camera, the two identical guards behind his back, eternally erecting their left legs, with skillfully expressionless faces and the slender rifles pointing toward the respective upper corners of the picture. Mother, Father in bathing suits and myself in a baby suit in the front, and Grandpa¹⁸ and Grandma behind us (Grandma wearing a black scarf and a buttoned-up black dress), on a pebbly beach, with three towels, like welcome rugs, at our feet. Look at this: Father’s camera (Laika) and a cylindrical plastic box containing a telescopic lens. A bottle of Valium¹⁹ (“Keep out of reach of children”). A stack of blank sheets. A box of envelopes. An address book. A: Aliluyev, Alexander, rue de Victorie 101, Paris; B: Bulgakov, Sergei, Andreyevski Uzhvis 45, Kiev; V: Vadimovich, Vladimir, P. O. Box 6165, Geneva. A glass, with the Sputnik (leaving the diminishing planet behind) painted on it, full of pens and unsharpened, virgin pencils. A black-and-green Pelikan fountain pen. A heap of hotel brochures: the Luxembourg Hotel, Paris — a smiling chef over a stove, with unidentifiable blots ostensibly sizzling in the pan; the Tripoli Hotel, Tripoli — a hall with dismal sofas summoned around a forlorn table, as vacuous as if every form of life was terminated by the flashbulb. A pocket notebook (zoom) with pairs of English and Serbo-Croatian words: birth—rodjenje; blind—slijep; work—rad; arrest—hapsiti; son—sin; mother—majka; money—novae; death—smrt. The right closet. Let’s go through his suits. Blue suit: nothing. Blue suit two: nothing. Black suit: nothing in outer pockets, a personal thermometer in the inside pocket. Gray suit: the Party²⁰ member ship card, a key, a piece of paper, with a local phone number (zoom) with an “S” above it, a pack of matches (Aeroflot), a plastic spoon, a red-white-blue marble. White suit: nothing in the outer pockets, nothing in the inside pockets. Except the little pocket down here. It’s a tiny plastic cylinder, like a bottle of pills, with a gray lid, you have to press the lid down, there’s a film inside (could I have more light, please), unrolling: snapshots (negatives) of papers, one after the other, thirty-four of them, last two shots are of a river dam, it seems, and there is a miniature figure (zoom, damn it), no — can’t see. What’s on the papers? They look like documents (headings blurred), they seem to be in Russian. Would you turn off that camera and leave the room please; I need some privacy, I have just obtained proof that my father is a spy.²¹

Besides greasy toys (for me) and large cans of pickled fish (for my mother) my father brought stories from the USSR: about his travels down the Volga River, passing by towns, one after the other, made of cubicles, factory smokestacks, and an enormous Lenin statue (making a step forward, pointing toward the future); about the greatest dam in the world, on the Yenisey River — watching the boiling river at the foot of the dam was “like watching the Red Sea splitting”; about the Turkmenistan people who rode purebred horses as if they’d grown out of them; about thousands of miles of taiga, where prehistoric creatures lived and where you’d never be found if you were lost; about places so cold that your blood would just stop flowing if you stopped moving; about places where vodka was so cheap that nobody drank water. Many stories featured Professor Venykov — my father always referred to him as Professor Venykov, as if that was his christened name. The stories of Venykov were stories of placidity: about long conversations by the always warm samovar, with affordable caviar and pickled pike liver; about walks down the Nevski Prospekt, while Russian children played hockey on the frozen Neva; about Venykov reminiscing about his childhood: cherry orchards around Kiev, swimming in the Dnieper, fighting, at the age of nineteen, as a partisan in the last war;²² about his beautiful wife and two girls who were solving complicated mathematical problems when not playing piano-cello duets; about chess games²³ in the community sauna. My father claimed that Venykov’s home was his home in the Soviet Union.

In the late summer of 1976, upon a fabricated invitation from the Sarajevo Micronet Research Institute (which my father obtained through his connections), Professor Venykov came to visit us. He arrived at five o’clock in the morning, having driven nonstop for sixteen hours, from Budapest to Sarajevo (only a sip of vodka, once in a while, to keep him awake). He avoided ringing the bell and cautiously knocked at our door, not quite being there. Father and Mother hesitantly left the bed (Mother taking Hanna in her arms), exchanging timorous glances, not being able to step out of their respective dreams. My father looked through the peephole (“Professor Venykov!”), opened the door and snatched him inside, looking down the hall before closing the door. They exchanged exclamations for a while (Father: “Professor Venykov!” Venykov: “Ay, moy Pyotr! Moy Pyotr!”) then my father pointed toward my mother and me, making a motion with his hands as if opening the door behind which we were hidden (“Molodyets, Pyotr! Molodyets!”). Venykov had a pear-shaped body on the top of which there was a bald head (with a wart, like a miniature knob, on his forehead). His eyes were tired — red cracks were rushing toward turquoise irises. Behind the smell-screen of sweat, onion, and vodka, I could still discern the oily odor of my toys.

Venykov had a bath and shaved, but wore the same shirt as before (a white shirt with a pear-pattern, including leaves on the stalks). We had breakfast — Venykov enthusiastically ate away a heap of bananas (Mother informing me, by a weighty glance, that bananas are not to be touched, except by Venykov), entirely ignoring the boiled eggs and sausage. “It’s hard to come across bananas in Leningrad,” my father translated Venykov’s bananapeeling remark. After the breakfast, Venykov opened one of his (two) suitcases and pulled out, one by one, a throng of rotund matyoshky (we already had dozens on a remote shelf). Then he put a bottle (Stolichnaya), wrapped in a sheet of Literaturnaya Gazeta, in my father’s hands. As my father was peeling the bottle, Venykov was dismantling matyoshky, echoing each other, all facing different directions, as if blind. “Nuh!” Venykov said, touching the head of the largest matyoshka. “Nuh!”

That night we all watched Brigadoon on TV (Venykov mumbling, “Duraky!”) Despite my father’s protests, he went to sleep in his car — a Volga resembling a gigantic black cockroach, parked in front of our apartment building.

“Why doesn’t he sleep here?” I asked.

“He feels uncomfortable in a foreign country,” Father said. “He’s afraid of being treated as someone other than himself.”

I had been more or less convinced that my father was a spy, and I somehow learned to live with it. I could still catch a shadow passing over his face — a shadow of something that he had been doing and nobody was supposed to know about. He was still making phone calls in Russian, and the film multiplied. Venykov delivered to him an envelope, and he locked it in the lower drawer of his desk. The conversations they had in Russian, behind the bedroom door, or walking ahead of my mother and me, never sounded like conversations — rather like lectures or briefings. I couldn’t, however, make myself believe that Venykov was a spy — not once I saw him peeling a banana (his gaze following the descent of the peel) or devouring a baklava, or humming with Julie Andrews and making his hand dance in rhythm, while watching The Sound of Music. I figured that he could be a benign cover or just a naïve courier.²⁴

The Venykov weeks passed uneventfully: he was playing chess with my father (Mother: “What’s the score?” Father: “One thirty-one — one twenty-seven.”); visiting the mountains around Sarajevo; buying cheap Italian jeans from smugglers for his girls (a smuggler to his accomplice: “Get me size thirty for Brezhnev! ); going to movies²⁵ (You Only Live Twice, From Russia with Love, True Stories VI); talking to my father behind the closed doors. We’d watch his Volga, before going to sleep, seeing flashes of flesh as he was putting on his crimson pajamas. Near the end of the third week, at the end of the day that included a movie (Arabian Nights), a dinner (Bosnian cuisine), and plenty of delectable Turkish coffee, Venykov agreed to sleep in my room. Lying between my parents (my sister in her crib), I could hear the hum of Venykov’s snoring, occasionally interrupted by the smacking of his lips. Mother: “He’s not going to stay forever, is he?” Father: “He’s got to go back. His wife and children are there.” Me: “Why can’t they come here?” Father: “They just can’t.”

The following day, Venykov packed up before any of us got up (although my sister bawled pitilessly, alarming us, I suppose), had a quick breakfast with us, then kissed my forehead, shook his index finger with my sister, hugged my mother and father (slapping his back dramatically), turned on the cockroach-car, and drove back to Leningrad. “He’s home,” announced my father two days later, after a brief phone conversation. In my room, Venykov left the scent of his newly purchased aftershave (Pitralon) and a crumpled brown sock under my bed.

In October 1977, my father was arrested.²⁶ There were no screeching cars in the middle of the night, no marble-faced men in leather coats, no terrified, shivering neighbors too scared to look through the peephole, no breaking doors — not even loud fist-banging at the door. They simply called him on the phone. He hung up and said to my mother: “They want me about some traffic violation. It must be a misunderstanding. I’ll be back shortly.” He put tennis shoes (Puma) on his bare feet and was gone. He did not come back home that sleepless night or the day after. My mother was tirelessly making frantic phone calls, none of which lasted more than one or two minutes, for nobody wanted to talk to her. Her dread was increasing, and she was trying to repress it (soundlessly sobbing), while Hanna moaned all the time (refusing to eat her liquid foods). My entertaining the idea that Father was a spy had never been much more than a way to embellish my vacant childhood, but with Father’s arrest, it suddenly became palpable. My spine tingled with the pride in the ability to sense his spyness, while, at the same time, I was scared, beginning to realize that we were up against something beyond my feeble comprehension. My limbs became weightier and larger, my motion beyond my control. I constantly felt an urge to hide under the bed or in the closet, but all I could do was watch my mother swing (with ululating Hanna in her arms) back and forth, like a metronome.

Four days after my father’s vanishing, Slobodan came. He rang the bell patiently, while my mother was alternately looking through the peephole and at me, deliberating whether to open the door. “I’m a friend,” Slobodan announced. My mother opened the door, but kept it chained. “Madam,” he said and showed her the inside of his wallet. “I’m Inspector²⁷ Slobodan.” “State security,” my mother mumbled. “No need to behave like a hysterical woman,” he said. “I’m here to help.” Mother unchained the door and let him in. He went straight to the dining room, without taking his shoes off, sat down and wiped his thick glasses and vast forehead with a handkerchief, while Mother and I watched him benumbed.

“I want you to know, madam, that we know everything.²⁸ We have watched, we have listened, we know,” he said. “And I also want you to know that we have no hard feelings about you. We presume that you knew nothing of your husband’s activities. Had you known, you would have informed us, am I right? Feel free to interrupt me. I just feel that that pretty mouth of yours wants to start clattering. Cute children, madam. Are they yours? Just joking — they look exactly like you. What’s the little girl’s name? She’ll be an attractive woman, I’ll tell you. Feel free to interrupt me. You shouldn’t feel that way about me, madam. I’m a nice person. I love this country, you know, I think that we have something here, something like no other place in the world and I can tell you that there are plenty of people who think that way. We don’t want this country, what our fathers bled for, to be defiled — it belongs to us and we want to keep it. And if you don’t like it — well, you’re welcome to leave and go somewhere else, to America²⁹ or wherever the hell you want. Don’t you agree with me? Tell me, don’t you think the same way?”

My mother said: “Comrade Slobodan, I want you to leave this very moment!”

“I’ll be glad to do so, but not before I take care of several wee things. I need a nice photograph of your husband, for the papers. No? Well, I’ll take the liberty of looking for this and that. You may watch — lest I be tempted to take something for myself.”

My mother retched several times, then put Hanna into the crib and hurried to the bathroom. I heard her vomiting, as if coughing.

“Women, always vomiting. Stay away from women, little boy, that’s my advice. So, tell me about your father. Do you like your daddy? I suppose you do. When I was a boy, I always had a place where I would hide precious little things, you know, marbles, and ticklish pictures and stuff. Do you have a place like that? Does your father have a place like that? Would you show me?

My mother walked back in.

“I was just asking your boy, madam, what does he want to be in his life: What do you want to be, young man?”

“A journalist,” I said.

“Smart, very smart. You’re going to get very far, my boy. Madam, if you’d show me where your husband keeps his private stuff, I’d be thankful beyond words. No? Well, then I’ll just look around, if you don’t mind.”

He got up and paced around the dining room, pulled out a couple of books from the shelf, flipped through them detachedly, and put them back. He turned toward us, smiled, said: “Pardon me,” and slipped into the bedroom.

Mother and I heard noises coming from the bedroom: thumping of suitcases, a screech of a drawer, a snap of a locked drawer, din of sundry things being thrown on the floor. Mother held my hand, squeezing it — her hand, moist and faint. Slobodan walked out with a suitcase, shoving something into his pocket. He produced a little box (with a painted bee landing on a flower) out of his hand and said: “Condoms, my boy. Had your father had this on, you would have rotted, stuck in a sewage pipe, years ago.” My mother plucked the box out of his hand and said: “Get out!”

“If you wish to talk to me, feel free to call me. My boss always says that love has political limits.³⁰ Please, call me.” He wrote the phone number on the wall by the front door: 71–782, then opened the door and walked out. Before my mother closed the door, he shouted in the echoing hall: “We should get together sometime, now that you’re alone.”

Mother reluctantly opened the bedroom door: an open suitcase; a pile of suits (hanger-hooks looking like bowed swan heads); the Sputnik glass shattered, pens and pencils scattered around, like corpses. On the bed, there were two symmetrical foot-shaped dents, and mounted ripples on the bedspread around them.

After a month or so, Hanna and I went with our mother to visit Father in jail. The visiting room looked like a decrepit hotel hall, with stained and torn sofas and armchairs sorted into separate throngs. Father came followed by a guard³¹ in a wan blue uniform (the rim of his cap touching the top of his eyebrows). Mother immediately burst into tears and hugged Father. He sat down between Hanna (“Tata! Tata!”) and me, putting his arms around us (thin, bloody wristlets). The tip of his left eyetooth was broken and under his left ear, at the root of the jaw, there was a huge bruise, as if a shadow of the ear.

“I’ve done nothing wrong,” he said.

“Shut your fucking mouth!” roared the guard.

“Did they torture³² you?” Mother asked.

“A slap or two.”

“Shut your fucking mouth!”

“How’s your school?” Father asked me.

“Fine.”

“He got the best grade in the class³³ on the history test.”

“Good,” he said. “Good.”

“What do they want from you?” Mother asked. “They’re interrogating me. They want me to sign a statement.”³⁴

“Shut your big fucking mouth! This is the last time I’m telling you.”

Father was sentenced, after a brief (closed to the public) trial, to three years of hard labor and was shipped off to the Zenica prison on January 7, 1978. There was footage shown on TV of my father (and four obscure men) in the courtroom handcuffed, as the voice-over spoke about “disseminating foreign propaganda,” about “the internal enemy who never sleeps,” about “Tito and his vision,” about “protecting what our fathers bled for.”

“We have seen it before,” the voice said. “And we’ll see it again: dissembling intellectuals, spreading dissent like a lethal germ. But this is what we have to tell them: stay away from the clear stream of our progress or we’ll crush you like snails!”³⁵

The years of Father’s imprisonment passed uneventfully: my sister was growing, learning to speak, learning to be sad; my mother became reticent; and I was going through all those adolescent things: the deepening of the voice, rebelling, reading (The Stranger, The Trial, The Metamorphosis); falling in love (a Nina, until her father forbade her seeing me). But I participated in all this half-heartedly, as if it were all happening to someone else and I was watching it with languid amazement. No one was visiting us and we were going nowhere. Only Slobodan would call once in a while (“Your father is locked behind walls with desperate men, my boy, and your mother needs all the support she can get”). Once a month, we’d go to see Father. We’d sit on the bench in the prison yard, even in the winter, exchanging petty information about our walled-off lives, too aware of the gaze of the remote guards and the sharpshooter in the watchtower. In the spring of 1979, Mother and Father sat on the bench, for two hours, mainly mute, while I was catching stray butterflies for Hanna, and morose prisoners, staring at each other’s napes, revolved around a guard (chanting: “Left-right! Left-right!”). When we came back home (after a two-hour ride in a bus full of drunken, vomiting soldiers) Mother burst into tears while unbuttoning her (black) shirt, sat on the chair and wept for hours, ignoring my repeated questions, pushing me away.

In September 1979, I wrote my first poem,³⁶ in less than an hour, as if hallucinating. The poem was entitled “The Loneliest Man in the World.” It was about Sorge and it was more vicarious self-pitying than anything else. I’m translating it (in fact, only the first of ten tedious stanzas) from memory, for I annihilated the notebook (with other, much less memorable, poems) at the peak of the campaign of self-loathing and destruction³⁷ (which also included shaving every single hair on my body) in my late teens:

Tokyo is breathing and I am not,

The horses are trotting stolidly and the coach is bobbing steadily, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s eyelids are listlessly sliding down his corneas. The weighty eyelids are about to reach the bottom, but then the horse on the left raises its tail — embarrassingly similar to the tussock on the Archduke’s resplendent helmet — and the Archduke can see the horse’s anus slowly opening, like a camera aperture.

The coach is passing between two tentacles of an ostensibly exultant throng: they wave little flags and cheer in some monkey language (“Would it be called Bosnian?” wonders the Archduke). Children with filthy faces and putrid, cracked teeth run up and down between the legs of the crowd. The Archduke recognizes the secret police, with their impeccable mustaches, with stern, black hats that look clearly grotesque among blood-red fezzes — much like topsy-turvy flower pots with short tassels — and women with little curtains over their faces. The secret police stand stiff, throwing skillful side glances, waiting for the opportunity to show off their alertness. The left horse is dropping turds, like dark, deflated tennis balls. The shallow, obscure river behind the back of the Archduke’s foreign, cunning denizens is reeking of rotten sauerkraut. In the coach ahead, the Archduke can see only the top of General Potiorek’s ceremonial helmet: the elaborate tussock is fluttering annoyingly. He decides to get rid of Potiorek as soon as he assumes the throne.

The Archduke looks at the Archduchess and sees her face in a cramp of disgust. “It would be very unseemly if she started vomiting again in front of all these people,” he thinks. He touches her (cool) hand, carefully trying to convey his manly concern, but she turns to him with the unchanged sickened face and the Archduke quickly recoils.

The coach rolls between two cordons of smirking people waving ridiculous, tiny flags, and vapid, marble-faced secret policemen. The Archduke then sees a man with an accordion stretched over his chest. The man is smiling, sincerely, it appears — he may even be delighted. He doesn’t seem to be playing the accordion, just holding it. The Archduke’s gaze breaks through the crowd and he can now see the man’s strong arms and the accordion belts squeezing the man’s strong forearms. He can see the beige-and-black keyboard and he can see that one of the keys is missing; he can see the dark rectangle in place of the missing key. The coach passes the man and the Archduke thinks he can sense the man’s gaze on his back. He’s tempted to turn around, but that would obviously be unseemly. The Archduke wonders about these strange people, about this man who doesn’t seem to possess any hatred toward him and the Empire (not yet, at least) and he begins to wonder what happened to that key. Can you play a song without that key? How would Liebestod sound with one of the notes never being played? Maybe that man never played that key; maybe he’ll never play that note in his entire life. “Strange people,” thinks the Archduke. He decides to tell the Archduchess about the man with the accordion, perhaps it could cheer her up.

“There’s a man with an accordion,” announces the Archduke into the Archduchess’s ear. The Archduchess winces, as though he’s delirious.

“What? What are you talking about?”

He leans toward her: “There’s a man …”

But then he sees a pistol and a straight, tense arm behind it and a young, scrawny man at the end of the arm, with a thin mustache and fiery eyes. He sees the pistol retching and bursts of light at the pistol’s mouth. He feels something pushing him against the seat and then it punches him in his belly and all the sounds have disappeared.

Besides the quick-swelling, incomprehensible fear that he can do nothing about and tries to ignore, all he can think of is an evening at Mayerling: the Archduchess played Liebestod on the piano, much too slowly, while he sat in the armchair by the fireplace, feeling the heat on the left side of his back. He wasn’t listening to the Archduchess, he was struggling not to doze off, and then he had a rapid thought — which he immediately suppressed — oh my God, how vernacular and ungraceful was the Archduchess’s beauty and how unbearably vapid and stupid Liebestod really was.

He wants to tell her he’s painfully sorry, now, but the Archduchess, her face frozen in repulsion, the Archduchess is already dead.

What year was it? We have chosen to believe it was 1811. Therefore: In the fall of 1811, Alexandre Hemon got up from his slothful bed in Quimper, Brittany; sold, unbeknownst to his widowed mother, their only horse — a perennially exhausted nag — for thirty silver coins; and joined, after some adventurous drifting, Napoleon’s army on its way to Russia, heading for yet another glorious victory. He was, we believe, twenty-one at the time. We imagine him marching through Prussia, still stunned by the greatness of the world; crossing the Nieman river in June 1812, the river washing down a gossamer coat of dust and cooling off his sore, blistering feet. Then we can see him charging at the ferocious Russians at Smolensk. At Borodino, he leads the infantry attack armed with a sabre; he single-handedly captures a battery of begging-for-mercy Russians. (“No, Lev, that was not a victory!” my father might exclaim when narrating this particular stretch of the family history.) We watch with him the flames of Moscow scalding the sky’s belly. But there’s no joy any longer in his extinguished heart: the victories don’t seem to be so wholesome anymore, and his sore feet have changed state — now they’re frozen solid. Then comes the humiliating, murderous retreat. The officers are nowhere in sight, the soldier next to you just soundlessly drops in the snow like an icicle, then never gets up, and the Russians keep mauling the mutilated body of the great army. He stumbles and falls through the snow-laden steppe and when he raises his head he’s in the midst of a thick forest.

We know very well that the route of Napoleon’s army’s retreat went through what is today Belorussia and there’s no plausible explanation for Alexandre ending up in the western Ukraine, near Lvov. Certain factions in the family suggested that higher forces had had a hand in the miraculous (mis)placement of Alexandre. My father — who deems himself to be the foremost authority on the family history and one of its main narrators — dismisses the implausibility with a derisive frown, providing as evidence a map of Ukraine, dating from 1932, on which Smolensk (for example) is just inches away from Lvov.

Be that as it may, Alexandre went astray from the straight road of defeat and found himself, unconscious, in the midst of a pitch-dark forest. He had drifted to the edge of the eternal black hole, when someone pulled him out of it, tugging his benumbed leg. There’s hardly any doubt that that was the great-great-grandmother Marija. Alexandre opened his eyes and saw the angelic smile of a seventeen-year-old girl trying to take off his decrepit, yet still precious, boots. Let me confess that a blasphemous thought has occurred to me: the angelic smile might have been missing a considerable number of teeth, due to the then-common winter scurvy. She, naturally, decided to take him home, unloading the firewood and mounting him on the tired nag (somehow, that was the epoch of tired nags). Her parents, surprised and scared, could not resist her determination, so she made him a bed near the hearth and then nursed him out of his glacial numbness, patiently rubbing his limbs to get the blood started. (Uncle Teodor sometimes likes to add a touch of gangrene at this point.) She fed him honey and lard, and spoke to him mellifluously. Yes, she rekindled his heart and they did get married. Yes, they’re considered to be the Adam and Eve of the Hemon universe.

My mother, who proudly descends from a sturdy stock of Bosnian peasantry, considered all this to be the typical “Hemon propaganda.” And she may well have been right, I’m afraid to say. For we have no well-established facts from which the unquestionable existence of Alexandre Hemon would necessarily follow. There is, however, some circumstantial evidence:

a) At the time of the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, my sister held in her hand a credit card in the name of a certain Lucien Hemon. Lucien was the rifle manager for the French biathlon team. He told my sister, not hesitating to flirt with her, that Hemon was a rather common family name in Brittany and suggested, after she had managed to tell him the highlights of the family history, that a Napoleonic soldier could have well carried it over to Ukraine. That was the germ from which Alexandre sprung, and the previously dominant theory that “Hemon” was a Ukrainian variation on “demon” was indefinitely suspended.

b) In 1990, a busload of excited Bosnian Ukrainians went to Ukraine in order to perform a set of old songs and dances, long forgotten in the oppressed ex-homeland. While they were staying in a waterless hotel in Lvov, the Hemons decided to venture into the village (Ostaloveschy) that my great-grandfather’s family had left to move to Bosnia. I should point out that there was a widespread belief in the family that we had no kin in Ukraine. As they snooped around the depressed village, mainly populated by bored-to-senility elderly folks, they aroused plenty of suspicion among the villagers, who must have believed that the KGB was onto them again. In antique Ukrainian, just for the hell of it, they questioned toothless men leaning on their canes and fences about Hemons in the village, until one of them pointed peevishly at the house across the dirt road. The man in the house told them that, yes, he was a Hemon, but had no knowledge of any kin in Bosnia. He outright told them that he was no fool and that he knew they worked for the police. They tried to dissuade him from throwing them out, pointing out that police agents and spies do not move around in such large and compact groups — there were fourteen of them, all vaguely resembling one another and scaring the wits out of their poor distant cousin. Next day, the man (his name was, not surprisingly, Ivan) visited them in their dismal hotel, considerately bringing a bottle of water as a gift. They told him, trying to outshout each other, about the exodus to Bosnia, about the family beekeeping, about the legendary Alexandre Hemon. Yes, he told them, he might have heard about a Frenchman being related to the family a long time ago.

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:

My father, I am yours. You keep me straight

Suppose there is a Point A and a Point B and that, if you want to get from point A to point B, you have to pass through an open space clearly visible to a skillful sniper. You have to run from Point A to Point B and the faster you run, the more likely you are to reach Point B alive. The space between Point A and Point B is littered with things that sprinting citizens dropped along the way. A black leather wallet, probably empty. A purse, agape like a mouth. A white plastic water vessel, with a bullet hole in its center. A green-red-brown shawl ornamented with snowflakes, dirty. A wet loaf of bread, with busy ants crawling all over it, as if building a pyramid. A videocassette, dismembered, several of its pieces still connected with a dark writhing tape. On days when snipers are particularly rabid, there are scattered bodies as well. Some of them may still be alive and twitching toward the distant cover, leaving a bloody trail behind, like snails. People seldom try to help them, for everybody knows that the snipers are just waiting for that. Sometimes a sniper mercifully finishes off the crawling person. Sometimes the snipers play with the body, shooting off his or her knees, feet, or elbows. They seem to have made a bet how far he or she is going to get before bleeding away.

Sarajevo is a catless city. It is so because people couldn’t feed them, or couldn’t take them along when they were fleeing, or their owners were killed. Hence the dogs that couldn’t be fed or taken along hunt them down and devour them. One can often see, among the rubble on the streets, underneath burnt cars, or stuck in sewers, cat carcasses, or cat heads with a death grin, eye-teeth like miniature daggers. Sometimes one can see two or more dogs fighting over a cat, tearing apart a screaming loaf of fur and flesh.

Aida’s letters are scarce and sudden, escaping the siege via UN convoys, foreign reporters, or refugee transports. I imagine them in a sack, in the back of a UN truck, driven by a Pakistani or Ukrainian soldier oblivious to everything but the muddy road before him and the gaze of the bearded thugs by the road, their index fingers conspicuously close to the trigger; or a letter in a reporter’s bag carelessly thrown over a tattooed shoulder, sharing the bottom of the bag with a Walkman, notebooks, condoms, bread and pot crumbs, and a wallet crammed with family pictures. I imagine letters in a post office in Zagreb or Split, Amsterdam or London, in the midst of a pile of letters sent to people I know nothing about by the people who care about them. Sometimes it takes dismal months for her letters to reach me and when I open my mailbox — a long tunnel dead-ending with a dark square — and find Aida’s letter, I shiver with dread. What terrifies me is that, as I rip the exhausted envelope, she may be dead. She may have vanished, may have already become a ghost, a nothing — a fictitious character, so to speak — and I’m reading her letter as if she were alive, her voice ringing in my brain, her visions projected before my eyes, her hand shaping curved letters. I fear to communicate with a creature of my memory, with a dead person. I dread the fact that life is always slower than death and I have been chosen, despite my weakness, against my will, to witness the discrepancy.

In September, Aunt Fatima passed away. She had had asthma for a long time, but in September she just asphyxiated in our apartment. They were pouring shells for weeks on end, and even when they didn’t there was an eager sniper. He killed our neighbor who hadn’t even left the building. He just peeked out of the door, cautiously ajar, and the bullet hit him in the forehead and he just dropped down dead. Anyway, Aunt Fatima ran out of her asthma medicine, and she couldn’t go out. The windows had been shattered long ago. She was always cold, breathing in cold air saturated with floating dust and hovering particles of rubble. She simply suffocated, producing that inhaling, sucking sound, and nothing was being inhaled. We couldn’t bury her, or even take her out, because they kept shelling and sniping as if there was no tomorrow.

Kevin is an American, from Chicago. He’s a cameraman. He’s been around, he says. He’s been in Afghanistan and Lebanon and the Persian Gulf and Africa with his camera. He’s tall, his arms are little hills of muscles. His eyes are greenish, like dried turf. He has two parallel silver earrings in his left ear. His hair is short. He’s balding and has a peninsula of grayish hair crawling down his forehead. He’s lean. When you look closely, you can see purple ruptured blood vessels where his nose meets his face. It’s from cocaine. He did it a lot in Lebanon. It was cheap and he broke down. He couldn’t stand it any longer. An Arab child shot at him with what he took to be a toy gun. There is a scar-furrow on his thigh. He was new, he broke down, he did cocaine. Now he’s fine, he says. I like him because he tells stories. All of those people do, all those reporters and cameramen and all those who have been around. But they’re all clichés, as if they watched too many movies about foreign correspondents and war reporters. Kevin’s stories are different. All those others always tell stories about other journalists. A British drunk, a German ex-Nazi, a French sissy, an American whore, are stock characters. They never tell stories about the local people, because the natives are news, they’re what’s to be reported. Kevin told me stories from Afghanistan, about lying in a high mountain ambush with bearded rebels. And about terrified Russian convoys crawling up a dire mountain road, knowing they’re being watched. About a Russian soldier being cut in pieces alive, producing unreal shrieks, until a merciful mullah shot him in the head. He filmed it, even though he knew they would take the tape away from him. Even if they didn’t, it would have never been broadcast.

She sent me a black-and-white picture: she is standing on a pile of debris in the midst of the Library ruins. I could see holes that used to be windows, and pillars like scorched matches. The camera looks at her from underneath: she is tall and erect, as if on the top of a mountain; she is in a bulletproof vest, wearing it detachedly, as though it were a bathing suit.

I’ve got this job as a liaison for the pool of foreign TV companies. Besides helping them to get by in hell, to approach and bribe government officials and find good parties, I edit footage that crews shoot in and around the city. Then I send it via satellite to London, Amsterdam, Luxembourg, or wherever. I get two — three hours of footage every day. It’s mainly blood and gore and severed limbs. I cut it into fifteen — twenty minutes, which are then transmitted to the invisible people who edit it into one — two minutes of a news story, if there is one. At the beginning, I was trying to choose the most telling images, with as much blood and bowels, stumps and child corpses as possible. I was trying to induce some compassion or understanding or pain or whatever, although the one — two minutes that I would later recognize as having been cut by me would contain only mildly horrific images. I’ve changed my view. I stopped sifting horror after I saw footage of a dead woman being carried by four men. She was prone on their arms, as if on a hearse. As they were carrying her, her head was bent backward, hanging down. Her skull was cut open by a piece of shrapnel. There was a skull-sod with hair, hanging on a patch of skin. They put her in the back of a truck, with other heaped corpses. Her head was still open. I could see the brainless bloody cavity. Then one of the men closed the cavity, putting the sod back into its place, as if putting on a lid. He did it with a certain reluctant respect, as though he was covering her naked body, as though there was something indecent in seeing the inside of somebody’s head. I cut all that out and put it on a separate tape. From then on I was cutting out everything that was as horrid. I put it all on one tape, which I hoarded underneath my pillow made of clothes. There once was that corny idiotic movie Cinema Paradiso, where the projectionist kept all the kisses from films censored by a priest. Hence I christened the tape Cinema Inferno. I haven’t watched it entirely yet. Some day I will, paying particular attention to the cuts, to see how the montage of death attractions works.

I had a dream: a woman alone on the glowing screen, and a moat in front of it, and beyond the moat is a room, window-less, full of people. She is performing me, she is acting me out. I’m in the audience, sitting in a row at the end of my gaze, on the verge of darkness. She’s not doing it right. This is not how I felt, this is not my pain. I want to get up and scream, and tell her that she’s much too involved in myself. She’s even attaining my shapes, my face, my voice. I want to help her step out of me. But I can’t do anything. She’s a light mirage. I can’t get up, because I don’t know what exactly is wrong. And then I realize — it’s the language. I’m confined within the wrong language.

Purebred dogs can be seen running in packs or, seldom, alone. You can see German shepherds, Irish setters, Belgian collies, Border collies, rottweilers, poodles, chow chows, Dobermans, cocker spaniels, malamutes, Siberian huskies, everything. After years of siege, there are, naturally, many mongrels. Some of the breeding combinations would amaze, or terrify, a canine expert. In the winter, when every living creature is in the middle of starvation, dogs are more inclined to move in packs, often attacking with common strategy, like wolves. There have been occasions when an improbable mixture of dog races attacked a child or a feeble elderly person. A German shepherd would be going for the throat, a poodle would be tearing the flesh off the calves.

It is after I write her a letter with trite reminiscing that I begin wanting to tell her all about me — I have imaginary conversations with her, making real grimaces, gesturing with real hands. I think of all the things I could’ve told her or should’ve told her: how awkward and cumbersome I feel in English, sinking in syntax, my sentences flapping helplessly, like a drowning child’s arms; about Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion; about hoping for the arrival of spiders — the vicious cockroach-killers — into my living space; about the lack of relationship — or contact, rather — with women; about the friendless immigrant life; about the Headline News I keep watching, waiting for a glimpse of Sarajevo; about my western window, looking at corny sunsets and the distant O’Hare Airport, night airplanes landing like tired firebugs; about an involuntary memory I had about my father smashing a nest of infant mice with a shovel; about the fact that almost everything I wanted to tell her is not in the letter; about the sense of loss and the damp stamp-glue taste lingering on my tongue for hours after I drop the letter in the mailbox. I used to believe that words can convey and contain everything, but not anymore, not anymore.

I grew fond of Kevin because he never openly showed me his affection. He would just tell me stories. Even in a room full of people, I knew the stories were for me. I liked him because he was so detached. He said it was the “cameraman syndrome,” always being a gaze away from the world. We’re not in love, love is out of the question. Nobody’s in love in this godforsaken city. We just keep learning about each other. We just share stories, becoming a story along the way. And the story may end at any moment. When we make love, in the darkness — no electricity — it’s harsh and cruel, as if we were fighting, because we have to wrestle joy and flashes of love from our irked bodies. We never talk about his future departure. He has callused feet, from marching through the Afghanistan mountains.

After some grotesque obsequies, we put Aunt Fatima in my room. It soon became her room. None of us would go in there. When something was needed from her room — a scarf, a blanket, a photo — someone would say: “It’s in Fatima’s room,” which meant it was irretrievable. We kept hoping that we would be able to bury her, but a week passed and she was still there — my malodorous aunt.

On Tuesday I had a sensation (a hallucination?) of cockroaches scurrying up my shins — I may be losing my mind, because of the solitude and nothingness that constitute my life. I had the sensation at a rock show, while boys and girls shook their heads like rattles. I thought that the cockroaches were my home-grown cockroaches, that I brought them with me from my apartment, unknowingly. The next day I asked Art, my janitor, to help me and he gave me those roach motels in which roaches get lured by sweet syrup and then get stuck in glue. Let’s put it this way: Art provides room for abhorrent insects, Art terminates cockroaches.

I hate Kevin. He brought footage of yet another massacre: people crawling in their own blood, faceless skulls, limbs strewn, stuff like that. There was this woman, her arms were severed. You could see two frayed, blood-spurting stumps. She was raising the bloody mess of her ex-arms toward Kevin’s camera. Kevin had a close-up of her face, still in shock, not feeling any pain, not being armless yet. The close-up lasted for a good five minutes, like fucking Tarkovsky. I asked Kevin why he didn’t drop the goddamn camera and help the woman. He said there was nothing he could do. He’s a cameraman, he said, and that is what he does and how he helps people. I told him he shouldn’t have shot that close-up. He said he didn’t do it. It was his camera who did it, he just held it. I cut it out anyway. I put it on the Cinema Inferno tape. Nobody saw the footage but me. Kevin is so detached and so protected.

I sleep in a former TV studio, next to the editing room. It is windowless, of course, safe from shelling, unless they use concrete-piercing shells. Which they seldom do, for whatever reason. I suppose that even such a shell wouldn’t kill us immediately. It would just open a hole for more shells. I prefer to die immediately. The studio has a little stage where mindless folk singers used to perform their playback love pain. This is where we sleep, as if on a raft — on a stage soaked with false tears and real sweat. There are still several cameras in the studio, with their lenses turned to the floor, looking between their wheels, as if ashamed. The studio is immense and very dark. We light it with two strategically positioned candles. There is some electricity in the building, to be sure, produced by a coughing gasoline-run generator, but we need electricity to produce and broadcast images. We move around the studio as if blind, having a memory of the studio as the map in our heads. We never move cameras, lest we run into them and get hurt. But somehow they always get in our way, as if they’re moving silently behind our backs, like ghosts, recording us.

I’ve been sending letters for her through obscure Red Cross channels — it takes months for a Red Cross convoy to reach Sarajevo and even more for my letters to reach her. When they do, they’re already obsolete, they’re rendering someone other than myself, someone saner — a stranger not only to her but indeed to myself. When I’m writing those letters I have to accept my helplessness, I have to admit that someone else is writing them, using my body, my Pelikan fountain pen, my cramped right hand. Whatever I write, I feel it to be untrue, because it’ll be untrue in a day or two, if not in a moment or two. Whatever I say I am lying or will be lying. On the pages of the letter, the whiteness of the page stained with ink, a dismal present descends into a desolate past. That is why I tend to write her things that she already knows, tell her stories told wars ago. It is cowardly, I confess, but I’m just trying to create an illusion that our lives, however distant, may still be simultaneous.

The odor escaped Fatima’s room no matter what we tried to do. We stuffed the cracks between the door and the frame with rugs. We soaked the rugs and the door with vinegar and our useless perfumes (Obsession, Magie Noir). But the stench was always there — the sweet, dense, meaty scent of decay. In the midst of a rare and brief nocturnal lull in shelling, we decided to throw her out of the window, after my mother woke up screaming, having dreamt maggots coming out of her sister’s eye sockets.

Kevin and I, we get drunk over his stories, with bourbon that he keeps fetching from somewhere. He tells me then what he considers to be intimate things: about his long-time girlfriend, who was working as a real estate agent, having a dream of becoming a congresswoman. She was from a place called White Pigeon, Michigan, fifty miles south of Kalamazoo. While he was in the Gulf, she left him a message on his answering machine about leaving him because he was a “selfish dreamy idiot.” He tells me how he sees everything through a viewfinder. He has confidence in the camera objective. He feels natural with his camera, because “with the camera I see nothing alone.” There’s always another pair of eyes, he says.

A friend of mine asked me to help her identify some damaged buildings in Sarajevo; she sent me photographs hoping that I could recognize the buildings, but they were unidentifiable as far as I was concerned. They all looked the same: they all had shattered windows — black holes, as if their eyes had been gouged; there were rings of debris around them, as if ruins were being carved out of whole buildings; there were no people in the pictures. What was in the pictures were not buildings — let alone buildings I could’ve come in or out of: what was in the pictures was what was not in the pictures — the pictures recorded the very end of the process of disappearing, the nothingness itself.

People stand in line at Point A, waiting for their turn to run across. When it’s your turn, you cannot wait, you have to go, because the longer you wait, the readier the sniper is. Plus you don’t want to share the unspeakable fear of the waiting throng. The first time I ran from Point A to Point B, the fear was unspeakable indeed. Pain in your stomach, as if a big steel ball is grinding your bowels. Blood throbbing in your neck veins. Wet heat inside your eyeballs. Numbness of your limbs, increasing as you’re running. Sweat trickling down your cheeks, like a miniature avalanche of dread. You see no life unwinding before your eyes. All you see is one or two meters ahead of you and all the little things that you can trip over. You hear every tiny sound. Your feet brushing away dirt and rubble. Distant detonations. Cries of scared and wounded people. Whistling ricocheting bullets. The death rattle from the person behind you.

This is me in what’s left of the Library. If you could magnify this picture sufficiently you would see motes levitating around me — cold ashes of books. This picture was made on the day I got the bulletproof vest. It was one of the happiest days of my life, this life. A bulletproof vest significantly increases your (well, mine) chances of survival. The sniper has to shoot you in the head to kill you. Which is why I cut my hair so short, to make my head smaller. Sometimes I feel like a fucking Joan of Arc, except I have no army and no voices to guide me.

Mother and Father wrapped her up in a bedsheet, and then another one, and then another one, their faces distorted by the urge to vomit. I couldn’t watch when they actually pushed her over the windowsill, but I heard the thud. I thought, as if remembering a line from a movie: “Her life ended with a thud.”

Since April I have received no letters from Aida. From that time on I had to make up her letters, I had to write her letters for her, I had to imagine her, because that was the only way to break the siege and stay connected with her. I’m sure she’s alive, I’m sure that one of these days I’ll have a bundle of her consecutive letters stowed in my mailbox, I’m sure she’s writing them this very moment.

This war, my friend, is men’s business. The other day I heard a “joke”: “What is a woman?”—“The stuff around the pussy!” The men in the camouflage uniforms thought it was so hilarious that they kicked the floor with their rifle butts. I sensed that the joke was for me. We’re expected to remain silent, spread our legs, breed more warriors, and die with motherly dignity. I think what I fear the most is rape. When a sniper bullet hits you, your body and yourself die simultaneously. Provided, naturally, that you’re killed instantly; which you usually are, because they’re so fucking good. But I don’t want my body to be mutilated, mauled, violated. I don’t want to witness that. When I’m gone I’d like to take my body with me. Have you heard about the rape camps?

When I got this job, I moved to the TV building, going home only occasionally, to check if my parents were alive and well. I’d usually go on Sunday afternoons, after the morning transmission of Friday leftovers. But then I stopped doing that because I realized that my local sniper was waiting for me. Before I ran, everything was silent, and several people ran across the parking lot without being shot at. When I started crossing it, bullets buzzed around me like rabid bees. He watched me. He knew I was coming. He waited for me and then toyed with me. Now I go to see them at different times, using different routes, trying to appear differently each time in order to be unrecognizable to the sharpshooter, who could be one of my ex-boyfriends for all I know.

While my head was still on the pillow, my nightmare not completely erased by the sudden awakening, I opened my eyes and saw a cockroach running from the stove, over the gray kitchen-floor tiles, getting on the carpet, running a bit slower, as if on sand, going beneath the chair, coming diagonally across, going around my slippers, trying to reach the safe space underneath my futon. I watched it, it was running fast, never stopping, going straight without hesitation. What was it running from? What was running that little engine? Desire to live? Fear of death? The instinctual — perhaps, even, molecular — awareness of the gaze of the supreme sharpshooter? What a horrible world, I thought, when every living creature lives and dies in fear. I reached for my left slipper, but the cockroach was already underneath the futon.

Snipers often kill dogs, just for fun. Sometimes they have competitions in dog-shooting, but only when there aren’t any targetable people on the streets. Shooting a dog in the head gets you the most points, I suppose. One can often see a dog corpse with a shattered head, like a crushed tomato. When snipers shoot dogs, antisniping patrols refrain from confronting them, because of the constant danger of a rabies epidemic. When an unskilled, new, or careless sharpshooter only wounds a dog and the dog frantically ricochets around, bleeding, howling, biting anything that can ease the pain and fear, a member of the antisniping patrol might even shoot the dog, aiming, as always, at the head.

The other day I took Kevin to a tour of my favorite places in Sarajevo. He took his camera. What I like about Kevin is that you don’t have to explain everything to him. He just sees what you want him to see. What’s more, he doesn’t say that he understands. You just know. We both knew, for instance, that the places on our tour were between being a memory and being reduced to nothing but a pile of rubble. The camera was recording the process of disappearing. There is a truce in place these days, which always scares me a bit. Partly because silence is often more terrifying than the familiar relentless noise of shelling. Partly because I’m afraid that Kevin might get bored and leave. Which is why, I suppose, I took him on the tour. He followed me with his camera like a shadow. I showed him our school. I stood in the wrecked window of our classroom and he shot me waving to his objective. I stood on the corner from which Princip shot those historic shots. My little feet were fitting, as always, into the concrete shapes of his feet. I took him to the few bars we used to frequent. Some of them were closed — the owner dead or something — and some of them were full of black marketers and men in uniform, their rifles conspicuous on the bar-stand before them. I took him to the park, now treeless — desperate firewood demand — where I used to take boys and make them touch my breasts, while they were being too pusillanimous to go further. I told all that to the camera, and he circled around me, his knees bent, as if genuflecting. And then I told him, as I am telling the invisible you now, that I was pregnant.

Then we watched over it, the white pile that used to be my aunt, from the window that was hidden from snipers. We watched the bundle of decomposed flesh, as if we were on a wake, but a wake for something other than Aunt Fatima, and transcendentally important nonetheless. We would take turns, we would have shifts. Father even asked me, taking his shift, if everything was all right. I said: “No, nothing will ever be all right.” I’m terrified with the calmness, even if ostensible, with which I’m telling you this. I feel I might burst out into madness.

In the corners of my room, there are elaborate cobwebs, but I haven’t seen any spiders. It seems that the cobwebs have a purely symbolic function — they’re there to remind me that I am trapped and that, at any given moment, a tooth or a sting will inject poison into my body and then suck out my blood. The space I inhabit becomes me — the room speaks about me, as if the walls were pages of a book and I were a hero, a character, somebody.

So I had the morning shift. And right after it dawned, I saw a pack of dogs coming toward us. There was a rottweiler, a poodle, and several mongrels. They tore the sheets and I turned my head away, but I could not leave. The only thought I remember having was about skiing. I had a vision of myself coming down the slope, going very fast, and air slapping my cheeks, and the sound of the skis brushing snow away, like a speeded-up recording of waves. When I looked out again, I couldn’t look at the place where the corpse was. I looked around it, as if making a compromise. I saw the rottweiler, trotting away, with a hand in his jaw. I wish I’d had a camera so I wouldn’t have to remember. I’m sorry I had to tell you this.

My hair is all gray now. How is Chicago? Write, even if your letters can’t reach me.

With a lightning move of my hand superbly handling the knife, I split the cockroach in two: the front half continued running for an inch or two and then started frenetically revolving around the head; the back half just stood in place, as if surprised, oozing pallid slime.

I woke up bleeding, in a bed soaked with blood, by the Heathrow Airport, in an expensive bland hotel, having waited for Kevin for more than a week. Kevin, who didn’t even bother to call me. I tried to reach him in Amsterdam, Paris, Atlanta, New York, Cyprus, even Johannesburg, leaving messages and curses. But then I just wiped myself off and went back to Sarajevo, leaving a heap of bloody towels and bedsheets, an empty refreshment bar, a broken glass in the bathroom, and an unpaid bill, to Kevin’s name, with his Cyprus address. So here I am now, un-pregnant, as sanguine as ever, but never as sad.

I bought a Polaroid camera to explore my absence, to find out how space and things appear when I’m not exerting my presence on them. I took snapshots — glossy still moments with edges darker than the center, as if everything is fading away — I took snapshots of my apartment and the things in it: here’s my ceiling fan not revolving; here’s my empty chair; here’s my futon, looking like somebody’s just got up; here’s my vacuous bathroom; here’s a dried cockroach; here’s a glass, with still water not being drunk; here are my vacant shoes; here’s my TV not being watched; here’s a flash in the mirror; here’s nothing.

When you get to Point B, the adrenaline rush is so strong that you feel too alive. You see everything clearly, but you can’t comprehend anything. Your senses are so overloaded that you forget everything before you even register it. I’ve run from Point A to Point B hundreds of times and the feeling is always the same but I’ve never had it before. I suppose it is this high pressure of excitement that makes people bleed away so quickly. I saw deluges of blood coming out of svelte bodies. A woman holding on to her purse while her whole body is shaking with death rattle. I saw bloodstreams spouting out of surprised children, and they look at you as if they’d done something wrong — broken a vial of expensive perfume or something. But once you get to Point B everything is quickly gone, as if it never happened. You pick yourself up and walk back into your besieged life, happy to be. You move a wet curl from your forehead, inhale deeply, and put your hand in the pocket, where you may or may not find a worthless coin; a coin.

As soon as Pronek stepped out of the plane (an exhausted steward, crumpled and hoary, beamed an “Auf Wiedersehen” at him), he realized that he had left his red wool scarf in the luggage compartment, with a mustard stain from the Vienna airport café. He contemplated going back to fetch it, but the relentless piston of his fellow pilgrims pushed him through the mazy tunnel, until he saw a line of booths echoing one another, with uniformed officers lodged in them reading little passport books, as sundry passengers waited obediently behind a thick yellow line on the floor. There was a man holding a sign with Pronek’s name misspelled on it (Proniek), monitoring the throng winding between black ribbons, as if the man were choosing a person to attach the name to. Pronek walked up to him and said: “I am that person.” “Oh, you are,” the man said. “Welcome to the States.”

“Thank you,” Pronek said. “Thank you very much.”

The man led him past the passels of people clutching passports, pushing their tumescent handbags with their feet. “We don’t have to wait,” he said, nodding at Pronek for some reason, as if conveying a secret message. “You’re our guest.”

“Thank you!” Pronek said.

The man took him up to the booth filled to the glass-pane brim with a gigantic man. Had someone abruptly opened the door of his booth, his flesh would have oozed out slowly, Pronek thought, like runny dough.

“Hi, Wyatt!” said Pronek’s guide.

“Hi, Virgil!” said the dough man.

“He’s our guest!” said Virgil.

“How’re you doin’, buddy?” said the dough man. He was mustached, and suddenly Pronek realized that he resembled the fat detective with a loose tie and an unbuttoned shirt from an American TV show.

“I’m very well, sir, I thank you very much,” Pronek said.

“Wha’re you goin’ to do here, buddy?”

“I do not know right now, sir. Travel. I think they have program for me.”

“I’m sure they do,” he said, flipping through Pronek’s red Yugoslav passport, as if it were a gooey smut magazine. Then he grabbed a stamp and violently slammed it against a passport page and said: “You have a hell of a time, y’hear now, buddy.”

“I will, sir. Thank you very much.”

What we have just seen is Jozef Pronek entering the United States of America. It was January 26, 1992. Once he found himself on this side, he didn’t feel anything different. He knew full well, however, he couldn’t go back to retrieve his red scarf with the yellow mustard stamp.

Virgil began explaining to Pronek how to get on the plane to Washington, D.C., but Pronek wasn’t really listening, for Virgil’s spectacular head suddenly became visible to him. He saw the valley of baldness between the two tufts of hair, stretching away in horror from the emerging globe. The skin of Virgil’s face was inscribed with an intricate network of blood vessels, like river systems on a map, with two crimson deltas around his nostrils. Hair was peering out of his nose, swaying almost imperceptibly, as if a couple of centipedes were stuck in his nostrils, hopelessly moving their little legs. Pronek didn’t know what Virgil was saying, but still kept saying: “I know. I know.” Then Virgil generously shook Pronek’s hand and said: “We’re so happy to have you here.” What could Pronek say? He said: “Thank you.”

He exchanged money with a listless carbuncular teenager behind a thick glass pane, and obediently sat down at a bar that invited him with a glaring neon sign: “Have a drink with us.” He was reading dollar bills (“In God we trust”) when the waitress said: “They’re pretty green, ahn’t they? Wha’ canna gechou, honey?”

“Beer,” Pronek said.

“What kinda beer? This is not Russia, hun, we got all kindsa beer. We got Michelob, Milleh, Milleh Lite, Milleh Genuine Draft, Bud, Bud Light, Bud Ice. Wha’ever you want.”

She brought him a Bud (Light) and asked: “What’s your team in the Superbawl?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m a Buffalo girl. I’m just gonna die if the Bills lose again.”

“I hope they won’t,” he said.

“They better not,” she said. “Or I be real mad.”

All the TVs in the bar were on, but the images were distorted. The square heads of two toupeed men talking were winding upward like smoke, then they would straighten up, and Pronek could see them grinning at their microphones, as if they were delectable lollipops, then they would twist again. He thought, for a moment, that his eyes were not adjusted to the ways in which images were transmitted in this country. He remembered that dogs saw everything differently from people and that everything looked dim to them. Not to mention bats, which couldn’t even see a thing, but flew around, bumping into telephone poles, with something like a sonar in their heads, which meant that they understood only echoes.

This is the kind of profitless thought that Pronek frequently had.

Pronek saw an elderly couple sitting down under one of the TVs. The man had wrinkles emerging, like rays, from the corners of his eyes, and a Redskins hat. The woman had puffed-up hair, and she looked a lot like the Washington on the one-dollar bill. A sign behind their backs said “Smoking Section.” They sat silent; their gazes, perpendicular to each other, converged over the tin ashtray in the center of the table. The waitress (“I’m Grace,” she said. “How’s everything?”) brought them two Miller Lites, but they didn’t touch them. Instead, the man took a black book out of his worn-out canvas handbag and spread it between the two sweating bottles. Then they read it together, their heads nearly touching, the man’s left hand heaped upon the woman’s right hand, like a frog upon a frog making love. They started weeping, squeezing each other’s hands so hard that Pronek could see the woman’s finger tips reddening, while her pink nails seemed to be stretching out.

This was, for Pronek, the first in the series of what we normally call culture shocks.

He roved all over the airport, imagining that it had the shape of John Kennedy’s supine body, with his legs and arms outstretched, and leech-like airplanes sucking its toes and fingers. He imagined traveling through Kennedy’s digestive system, swimming in a bubbling river of acid, like bacteria, and ending up in his gurgling kidney-bathroom. He stepped out of the airport through one of JFK’s nostrils, in front of which there were cabs lined up like a thin mustache.

Finally, he joined the line of people trickling into the tunnel to the Washington, D.C., plane. “How are you today?” said a steward, not bothering to hear the answer. Pronek had a window seat, and a man who looked as if he had just been attached to an air compressor, like a balloon, sat next to him — the man was so fat that he occupied two seats and had to buckle his left thigh.

“Can’t believe I am missing the Super Bowl,” the man said and exhaled. “I went to every goddamn Redskins game this year and I had to miss the biggie. The fucking biggie. Are you a Redskins fan?”

“I’m afraid I don’t even know the rules of the game.”

“Ah, you’re a foreigner!” he triumphantly exclaimed and exhaled again. “What do you think of America? Isn’t it the greatest country on earth?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know yet. I just arrived.”

“It’s great. People are great. Freedom, all that. Best in the world.” He concluded the conversation with an authoritative head twitch, and opened a book entitled Seven Spiritual Laws of Growth. Pronek looked out at the aluminum sternness of the wing, his body twisted, his cheek against the seat texture, whose chaffing reminded him of his red scarf, and then he fell asleep, until the ascendance of his guts to his throat, as the plane was taking off, woke him up.

For a long time I used to go to bed early, but then my parents finally bought their first TV set. I remember full well crouching behind a gray armchair, in the corner of our living room, hiding from the images of a creature that had three legs, a long snakish neck, and a fist-like head, with a furious only single eye sending lethal rays down on terrified people and buildings. The buildings looked like weak, grotesque matchboxes, compared to the progressing monster blowing them, with its gaze, into flaming dust and smithereens. I hid behind the armchair, but — every once in a while — I’d dare to look at the TV across the room, the fake furry texture of the armchair rubbing my cheek, and the horrors on the screen would send me, with bellows, back behind the chair. I would lie down on my convulsing belly, trying to be as tiny as possible, the geometrical, colorful patterns on the carpet as close to me as the inside of my eyelids. I do not know what my parents did while I was writhing in fear, but I remember being alone — there was no one and nothing between me and the three-legged destroyer, apart from the armchair. It had awkward plywood armrests and stubborn, eternally creaking, springs. The movie being shown was, I’m inclined to believe, The War of the Worlds.

When I was sick, I would lie in the living room, because of the TV, and watch Sesame Street or Survival. There would be a little chair by my wrinkled bed, an ex-sofa, with an array of bottles, pillboxes, and lozenges, and a mountain of blown-through and crumpled paper napkins. My mother would pull down the green shades and I would sometimes disregard the TV and, benumbed by a persistent fever, do nothing but watch a sunbeam, which would manage to squeeze in between the two shades, move across the room, pointing, like a blind man’s cane, at things unawares.

And it would stumble upon a bad reproduction of an irrelevant Soviet painting, picturing a desolate autumn forest path. The beam would start on the left side of the painting and go over the stunned cluster of dun and gray birch trees, as if counting them, turning them ochre for a long moment. Then it would go over the assembly of souvenirs, brought by my father from Zaire, on the fake-ebony chest: an erect elephant tusk, pointing at a dark wooden mask with a mouth strained into a gaping grin; a baked-clay owl, enameled in carmine, orange and lemon-yellow colors, with bulging eyes that would follow me all over the room. I would fade in and out of languid, confusing dreams and the beam would move quickly, as if crossing a dangerous street, across the opposite wall. I would look up and, above my head, in the sunbeam, a stream of specks would flow upward, like air bubbles let go by a diver. Then it would go over the heavily laden bookshelf, over the stiff spines of my father’s Russian math books, unperturbed by their intricate titles, and it would finally stop at the right end, and, depending on the season, insist on a spine-torn Beekeeping Encyclopaedia or a never read, orderly lined-up, pristine Selected Works of Joseph Conrad. After that, the beam would cautiously retreat, toward the cleft between the shades, and then it would vanish. The room would fill up with, first, turquoise, then, maroon dusk. The night would set in and the things in the room would become immobile, obscure, silent, and I would lie, listening to the encroaching hum of darkness and my own wheezing slowly disappearing in it.

A thing not to be forgotten: a radio, model “Universal,” with a plywood shell that would reverberate and tremble when I’d turn up the volume to the last notch. The upper front part was covered with burlap-like cloth, behind which one could discern the circular shadows, like breasts under a shirt, of the two speakers. At the front bottom there was a narrow ledge with buttons — like an accordion keyboard, except there were only seven buttons. When the far left button was pressed, the light would go on behind the screen with the names of all the cities of the world: Abu Dhabi, Edinburgh, Cologne, Ankara, Baghdad, Warsaw, Barcelona, Dresden, Cairo, Athens, Copenhagen, Moscow, Vladivostok, Córdoba, Dacca, Dakar, Djibouti, Andorra, The Hague, etc. The right knob controlled the volume, the left knob made the red line between the light and the screen slide behind the city names. Sundry languages would turn into static cracking, bleating, and wailing, or a bass hum, and then back into a different language. I would stop the red line behind a city name — say, Munich — and then listen to the incomprehensible language. I would picture the people who were talking — only their heads, in fact, for I couldn’t imagine their bodies. I would imagine a round-faced, bearded man speaking in Moscow, smacking his lips after every successful sentence; a pale, blond woman warbling from Monaco; an angry, teeth-clenched man in Lagos. Sometimes I would try to guess what they were talking about. I could tell when they were reading the news, because of the flat dullness of their voices; when they were praying, because of the submerged pain in the sounds they were making; when they were reading poetry, because of the whining and undulating. But sometimes they would just speak and I knew nothing about what they were saying: were they talking about their own lives? about their children? about their history? were they telling stories? about what? These meaningless voices were somehow mesmerizing, like music, and I could imagine the space, the streets and buildings and rooms behind them. I could hear the curling, passionate streets of Rome: gurgling Vespas and people at the market arguing over the prices of tomatoes. I could hear the gray sternness of the Potsdam voice: cubic, symmetrical buildings with wide, spacious streets where people looked minuscule and stifled, and policemen stood at corners with leashed German shepherds. I could hear the clamor of the great city behind the Cairo voice: everybody on the streets, the voice passing through a narrow street full of haggard people in burlap robes, selling heaped fruit and strange pastry, and there’s a cage hanging over the door, nearly walled off by shelves burdened with fish, and in the cage there’s a dog, a small, anxious dog, with big flappy ears, and its curious eyes are burning with a red glow.

One day, I fretfully unscrewed the plywood from the back of the radio and saw the heated, dusty lamps, still, positioned according to some unfathomable logic, like chess pieces. I stared at the entrails of the radio, inhaling warm sneezeful dust, and I didn’t know how it all worked. There were entangled colored sinews connecting the lamps: some lamps had inside a thin glaring wire, like a trapeze, and some of them were dark, as if whoever was in there was sleeping.

My best and only friend’s nickname was Vampire, because he had long and conspicuous eyeteeth, and when I was seven his mother died. She was a tiny, skinny woman who did little but smoke and gossip. Then she abruptly shrank and then she died. “Cancer!” they told me. After the funeral, I had to go to their apartment, they said, just briefly, to pay my respects. I walked into a boxy room full of whimpering adults in black. Someone shoved a glass full of warm, but colorful — flaming orange and red — liquid into my hands. Everyone seemed to have a burnt-to-the-filter cigarette between their blistery fingers. They reeked of sleeplessness, misery, and warm, stale beer. Men were unshaven, with black sleeves rolled wearily halfway up their forearms. Women wore black sweat-soaked scarves around their sallow faces, dabbing tears and sweat-pearls above their lips with the scarves’ corners. They scurried around, mindfully serving people who would reluctantly enter the room, as if stepping into thick, retarding mud. The clock on the wall, with an immobile pendulum, showed 12:02, and the hands were palsied — the second-hand had stopped between five and ten. The mourners told me the clock was stopped at the exact moment of her death and that it would never run again, as long as they live. I sat there, uncomfortable, with burning armpits, for some time, listening to them morosely retelling stories about her life: how she made the best potato soup ever; how she wanted to listen to the weather forecast the Monday she died, and that week was to be sunny and delightful; how she fell asleep on a streetcar and went around the city with it for hours, finally getting off at the wrong stop, not knowing where she ended up. Then I downed my turbid drink and left, sheepishly saying: “Goodbye,” to everyone, which no one really noticed, except for a young woman who carried a plateful of chicken thighs, and who, in passing, pinched my ruddy cheek with her greasy fingers.

The playground was in the center of the park, square, surrounded by the bushes, and in the middle — a square within a square — there was a sandbox. There were also a slide and a merry-go-round, a couple of swings and seesaws, and six benches at the edges, all rusty and shabby, positioned randomly, like mountains. The playground used to be covered with fine gravel, which was thinning out now, and one could see patches of black dust with glass shards, here, and there, glittering meekly like lit, distant windows. The sandbox used to contain fine beach sand, but most of it was gone and the sandbox was full of gravel and black dust, just like everything else. We would run around, Vampire and I, chasing each other, or playing soccer, or simply fighting, and there would be a fog of dust around us, sticking to our sweaty skin and tongues. Our throats would be dry and scratchy and we would clear them, producing a harsh, choking sound, and then spit. The spit would hit the ground and roll in the dust, like a gelatin marble, and then it would stop, as if exhausted, and sag, drying into nothingness, coated with dust. Sometimes, we would ignore the seesaw, slide, and swings and climb a large lime tree at the edge of the park. We would clamber to the top and then look at the other children as though they were at the bottom of the sea and we were in a boat, fishing.

The cinema was called Arena and I didn’t know what that word meant. It was freshly built, so it was clean and all the colors were strong — or is it that I just remember it clearly and that these days no color is sharp or bright. In any case, I can easily picture the spring-green doors, with strawberry-red handles and locks, and the breathing, cold, attractive, crepuscular darkness gaping behind. In the display box, on the left of the doors, there was the poster of the film being shown, usually rather old. I’m able — with some effort — to remember the poster for Imitation of Life. There was the story of the movie: “When a young actress (Lana Turner) meets a young photographer (John Gavin) she cannot know that he will be the love of her life. But when she chooses her career over her love for him she cannot know, alas, that she’s making the greatest mistake of her life, etc.” Alongside the story, there were retouched, cumbersomely sumptuous, colored stills: Lana Turner on the beach, her eyes sky-blue, her hair golden, her teeth snow white, her skin virgin pink, and behind her a painted crowd, thousands of blissful bland Americans, none of them discernible from the mass; Lana Turner facing John Gavin, who is holding her shoulders, as if trying to lift her off the field of silky verdure and save her from sinking into it.

We were perched in the crown of the lime tree, enjoying our elevated invisibility — we could see girls on the swings and an old man dozing off on the bench while trying to read. A rivulet of saliva would occasionally trickle down his chin, he would wake up with a sudden grunt and look around in a slight panic, as if embarrassed by his dream, or afraid that everything might have disappeared while he was asleep.

A dog trotted into the park and stopped by the sandbox. It looked at the swinging girls and then it looked at the old man. We clambered hastily down the tree and rushed toward the dog. It scurried away, retreating a bit, stopped and looked at us. His pinkish-brown tongue hung out of his mouth, like a dead squirrel. He looked as if a dun rug was thrown over his scaffold-skeleton. He had a straight cicatrice line on his hind thigh, as though he had been lashed with a belt or a chain. There were beige patches of skin on his neck and ass, and his tail was cut off. But he stared at us and would not go away, rearranging his gaze every time we moved toward him.

In the summer, I would sit on the balcony facing west, the tips of the top branches of a maple tree fluttering and obscuring children playing in the park. I could only hear their voices and see them intermittently running between branches. They would use terrible, vile words and I felt guilty for eavesdropping, but I couldn’t stop. Feeble cloudlets of cigarette smoke would rise, like sighs, from the balcony below and would mingle with the scent of blooming lime trees, warm concrete and dust, stirred up by children in the park. I’d sit there and watch everything throb with being, and listen to the hodgepodge of noises. Often, I would see an old man, wearing an aging pair of sandals and a straw hat, walking higgledy-piggledy across the street, throwing his arms around, shoulders leaping, as if he were exploding in a series of unstoppable hiccups, twitching his head back, and forth, making one step forward, and then one step back. It would take him a long time to get from the corner of our street to the entrance of his building. I would see his face, flashes of cramps and helpless grins, as if he was perpetually surprised by pain — I knew he couldn’t help it — always on the verge of falling down. I would watch him and his long hobbling journey home, and I wondered why that was happening to him and not to me. Years later, I would learn he had a debilitating disease that breaks down old people, but he was long gone by then, having left just a memory of his stubborn straw hat, which would never fall off his quaking head. I would only sometimes see his wife — an obese, tired woman — walking a black poodle, which would stop now and then, oblivious to the limp leash, and, after some retching, cough out a clot of brownish sludge.

The whole school was going to the cinema and, while we were impatiently waiting to cross the street, a lean girl with long, pony-tailed and dark hair, much older than any of us, ran across the street and, after a deafening squeal, was hit by a polished red Volkswagen. She went up like a bouncing ball, levitated for a blink of our flabbergasted eyes, and then she went down, with a whump. There was a moment of silence and then a boy in a navy-blue jacket started screaming. We were rushed away and, a little later, walking two by two, holding each other’s trembling hands, sang a song our teacher ordered us to sing: “With Comrade Tito, the people’s fearless son, not even hell will stop us …” In the cinema, we saw Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and I could hear the boy sobbing the whole time.

On our way back, everything was normal at the street crossing — the girl and the car were gone. Except, close to the pavement, among balls of dirt and black motor-oil puddles, there was a sneaker, bright blue, with the sole face up and a piece of pinkish chewing-gum stuck to the heel. When I was returning home from school, it was raining. The sneaker was still there, and a rainbowy rivulet, descending from one of the oil puddles, went cautiously around it.

So we ran, Vampire and I, to our respective homes and brought back the needed nourishment: boiled eggs, chicken heads, a bottle of milk and, also, one of the beaten enameled pots that Vampire’s mother (he said) used to use to make potato soup. We watched the dog lapping up milk, while he raised his languid gaze every once in a while and looked at us, as though trying to recognize us. But he never would and he would just delve back into the milky pot. Vampire wanted to name him Tito, but I thought we could get arrested for that, so we named him Sorge, after a spy I had read about and wanted to be like.

Once in a while, I’d sneak into the cinema, when the bored usher wasn’t watching. Or I’d ask an adult to claim me as his (or her) child and take me in without paying the ticket. I sat in the front row, next to a complete stranger, feeling safe in the darkness, my head tilted back. Before the show, there’d be a smiling woman on the screen, always the same one, with sparkling eyes and a beehive hairdo, looking and pointing at us, asking us not to smoke, so we never did. The screen was vast and concave, as if preparing to envelop us. The close-ups were gigantic: once I realized in horror that I could fit into Clint Eastwood’s mouth, like a cigar. I could see the texture of the image overlapping with the texture of the screen. Right above my head there was a long, floating whirlpool of dust inside the fat, barely conical beam of light. The newly sprayed hay-fragrant air freshener struggled to overwhelm the sweat, cheap aftershave, and perfume brought from the outside. The chilling darkness of the cinema would glide over my skin, making me intensely aware of the boundary between the world and me. Sometimes I’d be so cold I shivered, but it was impossible to leave. I’d sit in my seat, freezing, about to pee in my pants, my thighs glued to the seat-skin, until the very end of the credits, reading all those unpronounceable names piously and wondering who were those people. Why were their names important? What did they do? Where were they? Were they alive?

Vampire managed to convince me that the mistletoe berries growing on the lime tree were not only delicious, but also capable of making me immortal and endowing me with incomprehensible power. After I had eaten several berries and then began retching, Vampire, in a moment of malicious inspiration, ran to my door, rang the bell, and told my father what I had done, omitting his role in the incident. When I got home, my father told me, with grave sincerity, that the mistletoe berries were deadly poisonous and that I should expect to be dead within a day. What could I do? — I trusted him. I burst into moribund tears, for I’d been promised to be taken to see Battle of Neretva the coming Saturday. I asked my father to spend my last hours with me. He lay on the bed, and I pulled down the shades, turned off the TV, deleting the quiz show he had been watching. I lay by his side, my head on his vast chest, I could hear his sonorous heartbeat, like a clock. I inhaled the scent of his Pitralon aftershave and waited to die, staring patiently into the darkness. I could hear an excited radio voice, coming from someone else’s apartment, whinnying in delight, for someone, somewhere, had scored a long-awaited goal.

In the building across the street, on the first floor, there lived an old woman named Emilija. Her face was being dragged down her skull like a glacier, wrinkles echoing one another, and the skin on her thin, fragile arms hung down, like dough. I thought she must have been beautiful when she was young. She always had formerly white gloves on her hands and a colorless scarf wrapped around her head, like a turban, but that was only because she believed that her neighbors wanted to overwhelm and suffocate her with dust, which they somehow kept blowing through her walls. The blinds on her windows were perennially closed and, at night, I’d see a flimsy shadow, projected on the blinds by a single source of feeble light. I’d see a silhouette throwing up her long puppet arms and pointing and shaking a finger at something or somebody beyond the screen window. Sometimes, she’d abruptly open her window and shout in a piercing, exhausted voice: “You want me to go away, but I shall not! Not ever! Go to hell! You want me to suffocate! Let me tell you! I can’t die! I’ll never die just to spite you! Go to hell!” Once, in the middle of the night, she threw out a bottle of milk, shrieking: “Poison! Poison!” The bottle shattered on the pavement and the milk puddle, awkwardly shaped, like a sea on a map, scintillated back at the street lights.

We built Sorge a house out of a sturdy cardboard box. We put cushy towels on the cardboard floor and even an embroidered pillow, which Vampire stole from his home, while his father was away drinking. Sorge would follow us everywhere. He’d sit in front of the cinema exit doors, as we exalted over the adventures of Shaft or Agent X. He’d doze under one of the park benches, as we oscillated on the swings. When it was time to go home, we’d have to keep him busy, if we wanted to sneak out on him, with bones and eggs. He was stinky and filthy and was populated by a colony of fleas, so, one day, after a sudden rain had washed him, I stole some money from my mother’s wallet and bought a can of bug spray — with a picture of a cockroach writhing in unspeakable horror under the triangular shadow spreading from the picture of the bug-spray can. So we sprayed Sorge. Vampire held him around the neck, as though hugging him, and Sorge stood patiently, stamping his hind legs a little, like a horse being groomed. I sprayed him all over, particularly the patches. When Vampire let him go, Sorge dutifully licked his face and sauntered away and then lay down under the slide.

And then the nonsmoking lady would reappear, with the same unperturbable smile, and I would exit the cinema with a stream of people trickling into the blazing day. I was blinded every time. I’d close my eyes and stellar spots would glide across the inside of my eyelids. Everything was deafening: bleating car horns, the fractious rumble of the traffic, the clamor and shouts of children playing soccer, radios turned on everywhere. I’d open my eyes and the world would be back: square, concrete, gray, and cacophonic, far from the mesmerizing tranquillity of the screen and darkness. I’d wish to have not seen the movie, so I could see it again and go through the same unforgettable deluge of sensations, but I’d immediately know I couldn’t — for time always went only forward, as in films. I’d know I could never go back and prevent losing a precious moment, and a warm wave of painful sorrow would keep spreading through my body, until it would moisten and blur my gaze.

We found Sorge in his house petrified, lying sideways, his legs stretched out stiff, his jaw taut in a horrible grin, gums pale, eyes wide and lackluster in terrified surprise. We tried to push him and wake him up with a wooden stick, but the stick quickly broke. We dug a shallow hole behind the slide and buried him there. We put the potato-soup pot on the grave, lest we forget his gravesite, but the next day the pot was nowhere to be found.

My father was gone when I woke up, and I thought I had died. I didn’t know if I was still the same person or someone else, so I didn’t dare move. I tried to hear or sense my pulsating heart, but everything was mute. There was a diligent beam of light coming through an obscure hole in the shades and I saw busy motes of dust levitating in midair. I heard someone shouting: “And you can go fuck yourself!” and a remote slamming of a door. The radio was still on, but the ecstatic voice was not there, just shrill gibberish. It was dark and cool, I was hungry and I had to pee. I looked at the clock on the wall, dimly gleaming, but I couldn’t see the hands moving. I got up, doubtful, opened the door and found myself facing a torrent of light, in the midst of which my father was listlessly watching the quiz show. “Welcome back!” he said.

When I finished the first grade with mild success, my parents bought me a watch as a reward. It was circular, with large slender numbers rounded up and a convex glass above them. The second-hand moved in tiny jerks and I could never catch the moves of the bigger hands, although I would stare intently. I looked at the watch often, fascinated with the immutable tenacity with which the needly hand vaulted over the stolid numbers. I would touch my pulse and look at the watch and the steady synchronicity of the two rhythms soothed me. I had to wind my watch every night before going to bed, I was told, lest it stop while I was asleep.

After a night of unsettling dreams, I woke up and saw two Nazi flags through my window: red, with white circles, like eyes, and swastika-pupils, flapping on the train station. They taught us that the enemy never slept and I thought that it had all come back. I ran toward the train station, bumping into a woman — her hands full of bags loaded with lean green onions and chubby peppers — who didn’t seem to be disturbed in the least by the flags. There was a field of injured German soldiers, lying on the rail tracks, with bandaged heads, arms, and legs, with stains, here and there, of crimson blood. Some of them were standing up, smoking and laughing. One prostrate soldier, with a large blot of blood on his chest, leapt from the stretcher and ran, chortling, toward a group of soldiers sitting in a freight train car with a red cross painted on it, their booted feet dangling cheerfully. I elbowed my way through the forest of legs belonging to the throng of calm civilians, and got to the front row. There were two German officers walking down the train station corridor and then opening a door and entering the building. Above their heads, there were hanged rugged men and women, revolving on thick ropes. One of them smiled at me, revolved once, winked, went through another revolution, and smiled again, shrugging his shoulders. The two German officers again walked down the corridor decisively, with black-steel machine guns, firmly grasped, pendant around their necks. They opened the door and got in. Then they got out, went back to the end of the corridor, turned back, waited for a moment, and walked back, determined, their mouths tight shut, uniforms neat, black glistening boots sternly brushing away dust and pebbles. They opened the door and got in. Then I saw the camera, moving sideways in front of the crowd, toward me, on narrow, thin rails. When the officers opened the door the camera would stop and then go back to the end of the rails and wait for the officers. The crowd stood there, with its hands in its pockets, soundless and motionless, just a throng of eyes following the officers, hypnotized. Then the officers stopped walking down the corridor, lit, with relief, their cigarettes and sat at the threshold of the door. The crowd was dispersed and the camera taken off the tripod and moved elsewhere. They took down the hanged man above my head, he twisted his head, first left, then right, stretched his arms, as if imitating an ascending airplane, and then dissolved into the mass.

Operation Bruno would not have been possible without the support and patience of my wife, Lisa Stodder, the toughest editor around and an important intelligence source, who was able to handle all my shifting identities with grace.

Agent Nicole Aragi, the head of the New York network, and Sean McDonald have been instrumental in completing the New York part of the Operation.

The Chicago operatives Reg Gibbons and Stuart Dybek generously put their trust in me. The Chicago part of the Operation would have been impossible without the murky character of Edwin Rozic (known in some circles as Eddie the Neck) and the Herman Lavoyer Special Soccer Unit. Particular thanks to George Jurynec and the Ukie boys for providing a safe house in times of adversity.

The Sarajevo operatives, scattered around the world on their dangerous missions, have unconditionally believed in the success of Operation Bruno, putting their well-being and sanity on the line. My being would be impossible — let alone Bruno — without Gusa and Veba. The group of Sarajevo operatives trained in Omladinski Program and Dani, particularly Zrinka, Pedja, Zoka, Senad, Herr Wagner, Drug Tito, and Gazda Boro Kontic (the man behind it all), have performed miracles of misinformation and propaganda. The wisdom of Semezdin Mehmedinovic has provided moral and mental guidance for a young literary-field operative.

Finally, the nomadic Hemon tribe protected me in times of adversity, as my parents, Peter and Andja, and my sister Kristina (still fighting international criminals), provided honey, pierogy, and love, which sustained me during Operation Bruno.