Love and Obstacles

The Conductor

In the 1989 Anthology of Contemporary Bosnian Poetry, Muhamed D. was represented with four poems. My copy of the anthology disappeared during the war, and I cannot recall the titles, but I do remember the subjects: one of them was about all the minarets of Sarajevo lighting up simultaneously at sunset on a Ramadan day; another was about the deaf Beethoven conducting his Ninth Symphony, unaware of the audience’s ovations until the contralto touched his shoulder and turned him around. I was in my early twenties when the book came out, and compulsively writing poetry every day. I bought the anthology to see where I would fit into the pleiad of Bosnian poets. I thought that Muhamed D.’s poems were silly and fake; his use of Beethoven struck me as pretentious, and his mysticism as alien to my own rock ’n’ roll affectations. But in one of the few reviews the anthology received, the critic raved, in syntax tortured on the rack of platitudes, about the range of Muhamed D.’s poetic skills and the courage he had shown in shedding the primitive Bosnian tradition for more modern forms. “Not only is Muhamed D. the greatest living Bosnian poet,” the reviewer said, “he is the only one who is truly alive.”

I had not managed to get any of my poetry published — nor would I ever manage — but I considered myself a far better, more soulful poet than Muhamed D. I had written about a thousand poems in less than two years, and occasionally I shored those fragments into a book manuscript that I sent to various contests. I can confess, now that I’ve long since stopped writing poetry, that I never really understood what I wrote. I didn’t know what my poems were about, but I believed in them. I liked their titles (“Peter Pan and the Lesbians,” “Love and Obstacles,” et cetera), and I felt that they attained a realm of human innocence and experience that was unknowable, even by me. I delayed showing them to anyone else; I was waiting for readers to evolve, I suppose, to the point where they could grasp the vast spaces of my ego.

I met Muhamed D. for the first time in 1991, at a café called Dom pisaca, or Writers’ Club, adjacent to the offices of the Bosnian Writers’ Association. He was short and stocky, suddenly balding in his mid-forties, his expression frozen in an ugly permanent frown. I shook his hand limply, barely concealing my contempt. He spoke with the clear, provincial inflections of Travnik, his hometown, and was misclad in a dun shirt, brown pants, and an inflammable-green tie. I was a cool-dressed city boy, all denim and T-shirts, born and bred in the purest concrete, skipping vowels and slurring my consonants in a way that cannot even be imitated by anyone who did not grow up inhaling Sarajevo smog. He offered me a seat at his table, and I joined him, along with several of the other anthology veterans, who all wore the suffering faces of the sublime, as though they were forever imprisoned in the lofty dominion of poetry.

For some demented reason, Muhamed D. introduced me to them as a philharmonic orchestra conductor. My objections were drowned out as the other poets started howling the “Ode to Joy” while making conducting gestures, and I was instantly nicknamed “Dirigent”—Conductor — thereby becoming safely and permanently marked as a nonpoet. I stopped trying to correct the mistake as soon as I realized that it didn’t matter: it was my role to be only an audience for their drunken, anthological greatness.

Muhamed D. sat at the head of the Table, governing confidently as they babbled, ranted, sang heartbreaking songs, and went about their bohemian business, guzzling ambrosial beer. I occupied the corner chair, witnessing and waiting, dreaming up put-downs that I would never utter, building up my arrogance while craving their acceptance. Later that night, Muhamed D. demanded that I explain musical notation. “How do you read those dots and flags?” he asked. “And what do you really do with the stick?” Although I had no idea, I tried to come up with some reasonable explanations, if only to expose his ignorance, but he just shook his head in discouragement. Almost every night I spent at the Table, there was a point where I failed to enlighten the poets as to how music was written, thereby confirming their initial assumption that I was a lousy conductor, but a funny guy. I wondered how Muhamed D. could write a poem about Beethoven while being entirely oblivious of the way the damn notation system worked.

But the poets liked me, and I hoped that some of the pretty literature students who frequently served as their muses would like me too. I particularly fancied three of them: Aida, Selma, and Ljilja, all of whom pronounced soft consonants while pouting their moist lips, emitting energy that caused instant erections. I kept trying to get at least one of them away from the Table, so that I could impress her with a recitation of “Love and Obstacles.” Not infrequently, I got sufficiently inebriated to find myself loudly singing a sevdalinka, sending significant glances toward the three muses, and emulating conducting moves for their enjoyment, while a brain-freezing vision of laying all three of them simultaneously twinkled on my horizon. But it never worked out: I couldn’t sing, my conducting was ludicrous, I never recited any of my poems, I wasn’t even published, and instead I had to listen to Muhamed D. singing his sevdalinka with a trembling voice that opened the worlds of permanent dusk, where sorrow reigned and the mere sight of a woman’s neck caused maddening bouts of desire. The eyes of the literature muses would fill with tears, and he could pick whichever volunteer he chose to amuse him for the rest of the night. I’d totter home alone, composing a poem that would show them all that Muhamed D. had nothing on me, that would make Aida, Selma, and Ljilja regret never having let me touch them. I celebrated and sang myself on empty Sarajevo streets, and by the time I had unlocked the door and sneaked into my bed without waking up my poetry-free parents, I would have a masterpiece, so formidable and memorable that I would not bother to write it down. The next morning, I would wake up with my skin oozing a sticky alcoholic sweat and the sappy masterpiece gone forever from my mind. Then I would embark upon a furious series of un-rhymed, anarchic poems, ridiculing Muhamed D. and the Table and the muses in impenetrably coded words, envisioning the devoted scholar who, one day, after decades of exploring my notes and papers, would decode the lines and recognize how tragically misunderstood and unappreciated I was. After writing all day, I’d head off to the Writers’ Club and start the whole process again.

One night, Muhamed D. recited a new poem called “Sarajevo,” which had two boys (wisely chewing gum, / swallowing peppermint words) walking the streets with a soccer ball (They throw the ball through the snow, across Mis Irbina Street / as if lobbing a hand grenade across Lethe). They accidentally drop the ball into the Miljacka, and the ball floats until it is caught in a whirlpool. They try to retrieve it with a device I had used once upon a time on my own lost ball: a crate is strung on a rope that stretches from bank to bank, and boys on either bank hold the ends of the rope, manipulating it until the ball is caught. Muhamed D. watches them from a bridge:

Whichever way I go, now, I’ll reach the other shore.

Old, I no longer know what they know: how to regain

what is meant to be lost. On the river surface

snowflake after snowflake perishes.

He began his recitation in a susurrous voice, riding a tide of iambic throttles and weighted caesuras up to thunderous orgasmic heights, from where he returned to a whisper and then ceased altogether, his head bowed, his eyes closed. He seemed to have fallen asleep. The Table was silent, the muses entranced. So I said, “Fuck, that’s old. What are you now — a hundred?” Uncomfortable with the silence, doubtless as jealous as I was, the rest of the Table burst out laughing, slapping their knees. I sensed the solidarity in mocking Muhamed, and for the first time I thought I would be remembered for something other than conducting — I would be remembered for having made Muhamed old. He smiled at me benevolently, already forgiving. But that very night, everybody at the Table started calling him “Dedo”—Old Man.

This took place just before the war, in the relatively rosy times when we were euphoric with the imminence of disaster — we drank and laughed and experimented with poetic forms into the late hours. We tried to keep the war away from the Table, but now and then a budding Serbian patriot would start ranting about the suppression of his people’s culture, whereupon Dedo, with his newly acquired elder status, would indeed suppress him with a sequence of carefully arranged insults and curses. Inevitably, the nationalist would declare Dedo an Islamofascist and storm off, never to return, while we, the fools, laughed uproariously. We knew — but we didn’t want to know — what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.

Around that time I found a way to come to the United States for a little while. In the weeks before I left, I roamed the city, haunting the territories of my past: here was a place where I had once stumbled and broken both of my index fingers; I was sitting on this bench when I first wedged my hand into Azra’s tight brassiere; there was the kiosk where I had bought my first pack of cigarettes (Chesterfields); that was the fence that had torn a scar into my thigh as I was jumping it; in that library I had checked out a copy of The Dwarf from a Forgotten Country for the first time; on this bridge Dedo had stood, watching the boys recover the ball, and one of those boys could have been me.

Finally, I selected, reluctantly, some of my poems to show to Dedo. I met him at the Table early one afternoon, before everyone else arrived. I gave him the poems, and he read them, while I smoked and watched slush splash against the windows, then slide slowly down.

“You should stick to conducting,” he said finally, and lit his cigarette. His eyebrows looked like hirsute little comets. The clarity of his gaze was what hurt me. These poems were told in the voice of postmodern Old Testament prophets, they were the cries of tormented individuals whose very souls were being depleted by the plague of relentless modernity. Was it possible, my poems asked, to maintain the reality of a person’s self in this cruelly unreal world? The very inadequacy of poetry was a testimony to the disintegration of humanity, et cetera. But of course, I explained none of that. I stared at him with watery eyes, pleading for compassion, while he berated my sloppy prosody and the cold selfcenteredness that was exactly the opposite of soul. “A poet is one with everything,” he said. “You are everywhere, so you are never alone.” Everywhere, my ass — the water dried in my eyes, and with an air of triumphant rationalism I tore my poetry out of his hands and left him in the dust of his neo-Romantic ontology. But outside — outside I dumped those prophetic poems, the founding documents of my life, into a gaping garbage container. I never went back to the Table, I never wrote poetry again, and a few days later I left Sarajevo for good.

My story is boring: I was not in Sarajevo when the war began; I felt helplessness and guilt as I watched the destruction of my hometown on TV; I lived in America. Dedo, of course, stayed for the siege — if you are the greatest living Bosnian poet, if you write a poem called “Sarajevo,” then it is your duty to stay. I contemplated going back to Sarajevo early in the war, but realized that I was not and never would be needed there. So I struggled to make a living, while Dedo struggled to stay alive. For a long time, I didn’t hear anything about him, and to tell the truth, I didn’t really investigate — I had many other people to worry about, starting with myself. But news of him reached me occasionally: he signed some petitions; for one reason or another, he wrote an open letter to the pope; to an audience of annoyed Western diplomats he recited Herbert’s “Report from the Besieged City” (Too old to carry arms and fight like the others—/ they graciously gave me the inferior role of chronicler). Once I heard that he had been killed; a hasty paper even published an obituary. But it turned out that he had only been wounded — he had come back from the other side of Lethe with a bullet in his thigh — and he wrote a poem about it. The paper that published the obituary published the poem too. Predictably, it was called “Resurrection.” In it, he walks the city as a ghost, after the siege, but nobody remembers him, and he says to them:

Can’t you recall me? I am the one

Who carried upstairs your bloodied canisters,

Who slipped his slimy hand under the widow’s skirt.

Who wailed the songs of sorrow,

Who kept himself alive when fools were willing to die.

Then he meets himself after the siege, older than old, and says to himself, alluding to Dante, I did not know death hath undone so much. It was a soul-rending poem, and I found myself hating him for it: he had written it practically on his deathbed, with no apparent effort, as his thigh wound throbbed with pus. I tried to translate it, but neither my Bosnian nor my English was good enough.

And he kept writing like a maniac, as though his resurrected life was to be entirely given over to poetry. Poems, mimeographed on coarse paper, bound in a frail booklet, were sent to me by long-unheard-from friends, carrying the smell (and microorganisms) of the many hands that had touched them on their way out of besieged Sarajevo. There were, naturally, images of death and destruction: dogs tearing at one another’s throats; a boy rolling the body of a sniper-shot man up the street, much like Sisyphus; a surgeon putting together his wife’s face after it has been blown apart by shrapnel, a piece of her cheek missing, the exact spot where he liked to plant his good-night kiss; clusters of amputated limbs burning in a hospital oven, the poet facing the toy hell. But there were also poems that were different, and I cannot quite define the difference: A boy kicks a soccer ball up so that it lands on the nape of his neck, and he balances it there; a young woman inhales cigarette smoke and holds it in as she smiles, everything stopping at that moment: No tracing bullets lighting up the sky, / no pain in my riven thigh / no sounds; a foreign conductor hangs on a rope, like a deft spider, over his orchestra playing the Eroica in a burnt-out building. I must confess that I believed for a moment that I was the conductor, that I was part of Dedo’s world, that something of me remained in Sarajevo.

Still, living displaces false sentiments. I had to go on with my American life, keeping Dedo out of it, busying myself with local survival, getting jobs, getting into graduate school, getting laid. Every once in a while I unleashed the power of his words upon a sensitive American woman. The first one was Cheryl, the idle wife of a Barrington lawyer, whom I met at a Bosnian benefit dinner that she was kind enough to organize. At least one Bosnian was required to benefit from her benefit dinner, so she tracked me down through a friend, an expert in disability studies with whom I had read a paper at a regional MLA conference. Cheryl was generous beyond the dinner; before she went back to Barrington, I took her to my tiny studio — a monument to the struggles of immigration, with its sagging mattress, rotting shower curtain, and insomniac drummer next door. I recited Dedo’s poems to her, pretending they were my own. She particularly liked the one about the man walking, during a lull in shelling, with his rooster on a leash, a soul fastened to a dying animal. Then I removed the permed tresses from her forehead so that I could kiss it and slowly undressed her. Cheryl writhed in my embrace, kissed me with clammy passion, hoisted her hips, and moaned with pleasure, as though the intensity of her orgasm would directly succor the Bosnian resistance. I could not help thinking, in the end, that she was fucking Dedo, for it was his words that had seduced her. But I took what was given and then rolled off into the darkness of my actual life.

After the charitable Cheryl, I was somewhat ashamed and for a while I could not stand to look at Dedo’s poetry. I finished graduate school; I sold my stories; I was an author now. And somewhere along the way the war ended. On my book tour, I traveled around the country, reading to minuscule audiences, talking about Bosnia to a mixture of international relations and South Slavic languages students, simplifying the incomprehensible, and fretting all along that an enraged reader would stand up and expose me as a fraud, as someone who had no talent — and therefore no right — to talk about the suffering of others. It never happened: I was Bosnian, I looked and conducted myself like a Bosnian, and everyone was content to think that I was in constant, uninterrupted communication with the tormented soul of my homeland.

At one of those readings, I met Bill T., a professor of Slavic languages. He seemed to speak all of them, Bosnian included, and he was translating Dedo’s latest book. With his red face, long, curly beard, and squat, sinewy body, Bill looked like a Viking. His ferocity was frightening, so I immediately flattered him by saying how immeasurably important it was to have Dedo’s poetry translated into English. We went out drinking, and Bill T. drank like a true Viking too, while detailing the saga of his adventures in Slavic lands: a month with shepherds in the mountains of Macedonia; a year of teaching English in Siberia; his interviews with Solidarnosz veterans; the Slovenian carnival songs he had recorded. He had also spent some years, just for the hell of it, in Guatemala, Honduras, and Marrakech. The man had been everywhere, had done everything, and the drunker I got, the greater he was, and the more of nothing I had to say.

This was in Iowa City, I believe. I woke up the next morning on Bill T.’s sofa. My pants were laid out on the coffee table. Along the walls were dusty stacks of books. In the light fixture above me I could see the silhouettes of dead flies. A ruddy-faced boy with a gossamer mustache sat on the floor next to the sofa and watched me with enormous eyes.

“What are you doing here?” the boy asked calmly.

“I don’t really know,” I said, and sat up, exposing my naked thighs. “Where is Bill?”

“He stepped out.”

“Where is your mom?”

“She’s busy at the moment.”

“What is your name?”

“Ethan.”

“Nice to meet you, Ethan.”

“Likewise,” Ethan said. Then he grabbed my pants and threw them at me.

It was while I was slouching down the linden-lined street, where people nodded at me from sunny porches and able-bodied squirrels raced up and down the trees — it was then that the story Bill had told me the night before about Dedo fully hit me and I had to sit down on the curb to deal with it.

Dedo had come to Iowa City, Bill said, to be in the International Writing Program for twelve weeks. Bill had arranged it all, and volunteered to put Dedo up in the room above his garage. Dedo arrived with a small duffel bag, emaciated and exhausted, with the English he picked up while translating Yeats and a half-gallon of Jack Daniel’s he picked up in a duty-free shop. The first week, he locked himself in above the garage and drank without pause. Every day, Bill knocked on the door, imploring him to come out, to meet the dean and the faculty, to mingle. Dedo refused to open the door and eventually stopped responding altogether. Finally, Bill broke the door down, and the room was an unreal mess: Dedo had not slept in the bed at all, and it was inexplicably wet; there were monstrous, bloody footprints everywhere, because Dedo had apparently broken the Jack Daniel’s bottle, then walked all over it. A box of cookies had been torn open and the cookies were crushed but not eaten. In the trash can were dozens of Podravka liver pâté cans, cleaned out and then filled with cigarette butts. Dedo was sleeping on the floor in the corner farthest from the window, facing the wall.

They subjected him to repeated cold showers; they cleaned him up and aired out the room; they practically force-fed him. For another week he wouldn’t stick his nose out of the room. And then, Bill said, he began writing. He did not sleep for a week, delivering poems first thing in the morning, demanding translations by the afternoon. “American poets used to be like that,” Bill said wistfully. “Now all they do is teach and complain and fuck their students on the sly.”

Bill canceled his classes and set out to translate Dedo’s poems. It was like entering the eye of a storm every day. In one poem, Bill said, a bee lands on a sniper’s hand, and he waits for the bee to sting him. In another one, Dedo sees an orange for the first time since the siege began, and he is not sure what is inside it — whether oranges have changed during his time away from the world; when he finally peels it, the smell inhales him. In another, Dedo is running down Sniper Alley and a woman is telling him that his shoe is untied, and with a perfect clarity of purpose, with the ultimate respect for death, he stoops to tie it, and the shooting ceases, for even the killers appreciate an orderly world. “I could not believe,” Bill said, “that such things could come out of that pandemonium.”

At the end of the third week Dedo gave a reading. With a mug of Jack at hand he barked and hissed his verses at the audience, waving a shaky finger. After he had read, Bill came out and read the translations slowly and serenely in his deep Viking voice. But the audience was confused by Dedo’s hostility. They clapped politely. Afterward, faculty and students came up to him to ask about Bosnia and invite him to luncheons. He visibly loathed them. He livened up only when he realized that he had a chance to lay one of the graduate students who was willing to open her mind to “other cultures.” He was gone the next week, straight back to the siege, sick of America after less than a month.

In the years after the war, only the occasional rumor reached me: Dedo had survived a massive heart attack; he’d made a deal with his physician that he would stop drinking but go on smoking; he’d released a book based on conversations with his young niece during the siege. And then — this made the news all over Bosnia — he’d married an American lawyer, who was working in Bosnia collecting war-crime evidence. The newspapers cooed over the international romance: he had wooed her by singing and writing poetry; she had taken him to mass grave sites. A picture from their wedding showed her to be a foot taller than he, a handsome woman in her forties with a long face and short hair. He consequently produced a volume of poems, titled The Anatomy of My Love, featuring many parts of her remarkably healthy body. There were poems about her instep and her heel, her armpit and her breasts, the small of her back and the size of her eyes, the knobs on her knees and the ridges on her spine. Her name was Rachel. I heard that they had moved to the United States — following her body, he had ended up in Madison, Wisconsin.

But I do not want to give the impression that I thought about him a lot or even often. The way you never forget a song from your childhood, the way you hear it in your mind’s ear every once in a while — that’s how I remembered him. He was well outside my life, a past horizon visible only when the sky of the present was particularly clear.

As it was on the cloudless morning of September 11, 2001, when I was on a plane to D.C. The flight attendant was virginally blond. The man sitting next to me had a ring of biblical proportions on his pinkie. The woman on my right was immensely pregnant, squeezed into a tight red dress. I, of course, had no idea what was going on — the plane simply landed in Detroit and we disembarked. The Twin Towers were going down simultaneously on every screen at the unreal airport; maintenance personnel wept, leaning on their brooms; teenage girls screamed into their cell phones; forlorn pilots sat at closed gates. I wandered around the airport, recalling the lines from Dedo’s poem: Alive, I will be, when everybody’s dead. / But there will be no joy in that, for all those / undone by death need to pass / through me to reach hell.

While America settled into its mold of patriotic vulgarity, I began to despair, for everything reminded me of Bosnia in 1991. The War on Terror took me to the verge of writing poetry again, but I knew better. Nevertheless, I kept having imaginary arguments with Dedo, alternately explaining to him why I had to write and why I should not write poetry, while he tried to either talk me out of writing or convince me that it was my duty. Then, last winter, I was invited to read in Madison and hesitantly accepted. Dedo was the reason for both the hesitation and the acceptance, for I was told that he would be one of the other readers.

So there I was, entering the large university auditorium. I recognized Dedo in the crowd by his conspicuous shortness, his bald dome reflecting the stage lights. He was changed: he’d lost weight; everything on him, from his limbs to his clothes, seemed older and more worn; he wiped his hands on his corduroy pants, nervously glancing up at the people around him. He was clearly dying to smoke, and I could tell that he was not drunk enough to enjoy the spotlight. He was so familiar to me, so related to everything I used to know in Sarajevo: the view from my window; the bell of the dawn streetcar; the smell of smog in February; the shape that the lips assume when people pronounce their soft Slavic consonants.

“Dedo,” I said. “Šta ima?”

He turned to me in a snap, as if I had just woken him up, and he did not smile. He didn’t recognize me, of course. It was a painful moment, as the past was rendered both imaginary and false, as though I had never lived or loved. Even so, I introduced myself, told him how we used to drink together at the Writers’ Club; how he used to sing beautifully; how often I remembered those times. He still couldn’t recall me. I proceeded with flattery: I had read everything he’d ever written; I admired him, and as a fellow Bosnian, I was so proud of him — I had no doubt that a Nobel Prize was around the corner. He liked all that and nodded along, but I still did not exist in his memory. I told him, finally, that he used to think I was a conductor. “Dirigent!” he exclaimed, smiling at last, and here I emerged into the light. He embraced me, awkwardly pressing his cheek against my chest. Before I could tell him that I had never conducted and still was not conducting, we were called up to the stage. He had a rotten-fruit smell, as if his flesh had fermented; he went up the stairs with a stoop. Onstage, I poured him a glass of ice water, and instead of thanking me, he said, “You know, I wrote a poem about you.”

I do not like reading in front of an audience, because I am conscious of my accent and I keep imagining some American listener collecting my mispronunciations, giggling at my muddled sentences. I read carefully, slowly, avoiding dialogue, and I always read the same passage. Often, I do it like a robot — I just read without even thinking about it, my lips moving but my mind elsewhere. So it was this time: I felt Dedo’s gaze on my back; I thought about his mistaken memories of me conducting a nonexistent orchestra; I wondered about the poem that he had written about me. It could not have been the poem with the spider-conductor, for surely he knew that I was not in Sarajevo during the siege. Who was I in his poem? Did I force the musicians to go beyond themselves, to produce sublime beauty on mistuned instruments? What were we playing? Beethoven’s Ninth? The Rite of Spring? Death and Transfiguration? I sure as hell was not conducting the Madison audience well. They applauded feebly, having all checked out after the first paragraph or so, and I feebly thanked them. “Super,” Dedo said when I crawled back into my seat, and I could not tell whether he was being generous or whether he just had no idea how bad it really was.

Dedo was barely visible behind the lectern. Bending the microphone down like a horribly wilted flower, he announced that he was going to read a few poems translated into English by his “angel wife.” He started from a deep register; then his voice rose steadily until it boomed. His vowels were flat, no diphthongs audible; his consonants were hard, maximally consonanty; thes were duhs; no r’s were rolled. His accent was atrocious, and I was happy to discover that his English was far worse than mine. But the bastard scorched through his verses, unfettered by self-consciousness. He flung his arms like a real conductor; he pointed his finger at the audience and stamped his foot, leaning toward and away from the microphone, as two young black women in the first row followed the rhythm of his sway. Then he read as if to seduce them, whispering, slowly:

Nobody is old anymore — dead or young, we are.

The wrinkles straighten up, the feet no longer flat.

Cowering behind garbage containers, flying away

from the snipers, everybody is a gorgeous body

stepping over the corpses, knowing:

We are never as beautiful as now.

Later I bought him a series of drinks at a bar full of Badgers pennants and kids in college-sweatshirt uniforms, blaring TVs showing helmeted morons colliding head-on. We huddled in the corner, close to the toilets, and drank bourbon upon bourbon; we exchanged gossip about various people from Sarajevo: Sem was in D.C., Goran in Toronto; someone I knew but he could not remember was in New Zealand; someone I had never known was in South Africa. At a certain point he fell silent; I was the only one talking, and all the suppressed misery of living in America surged from me. Oh, how many times I had wished death to entire college football teams. It was impossible to meet a friend without arranging a fucking appointment weeks in advance, and there were no coffee gardens where you could sit and watch people walk by. I was sick of being asked where I was from, and I hated Bush and his Jesus freaks. With every particle of my being I hated the word “carbs” and the systematic extermination of joy from American life, et cetera.

I don’t know whether he heard me at all. His head hung low and he could have been asleep, until he looked up and noticed a young woman with long blond hair passing on her way to the toilet. He kept his gaze on her backpack, then on the toilet door, as if waiting for her.

“Cute,” I said.

“She is crying,” Dedo said.

We went to another bar, drank more, and left after midnight. Drunk out of my mind, I slipped and sat in a snow pile. We laughed, choking, at the round stain that made it seem as if I had soiled my pants. The air was scented with burnt burgers and patchouli. My butt was cold. Dedo was drunk too, but he walked better than I, skillfully avoiding tumbles. I do not know why I agreed to go home with him to meet his wife. We wobbled down quiet streets, where the trees were lined up as if dancing a quadrille. He made me sing, and so I sang: Put putuje Latif-aga / Sa jaranom Sulejmanom. We passed a house as big as a castle; a Volvo stickered with someone else’s thought; Christmas lights and plastic angels eerily aglow. “How the fuck did we get here?” I asked him. “Everywhere is here,” he said. Suddenly he pulled a cell phone out of his pocket, as if by magic — he belonged to a time before cell phones. He was calling home to tell Rachel that we were coming, he said, so that she could get some food ready for us. Rachel did not answer, so he kept redialing.

We stumbled up the porch, past a dwarf figure and a snow-covered rocking chair. Before Dedo could find his keys, Rachel opened the door. She was a burly woman, with austere hair and eventful earrings, her chin tucked into her underchin. She glared at us, and I have to say I was scared. As Dedo crossed the threshold, he professed his love to her with an accent so horrible that I thought for an instant he was kidding. The house smelled of chemical lavender; a drawing of a large-eyed mule hung on the wall. Rachel kept saying nothing, her cheeks puckering with obvious fury. I was willing now to give my life for friendship — I might have abandoned him in Sarajevo, but now we were facing Rachel together.

“This is my friend, Dirigent,” he said, propping himself up on his toes to land a hapless kiss on her taut lips. “He is conductor.” I made ridiculous conducting moves, as if to prove that I could still do it. She didn’t even look at me; her eyes were pinned on Dedo.

“You’re drunk,” she said. “Again.”

“Because I love you,” he said. I nodded.

“Excuse us,” she said, and pulled him deeper into the house, while I stood in the hallway deliberating over whether to take my shoes off. A little ball of dust moved down the hall, away from the door, like a scared dog. I recalled Dedo’s poem about the shoes he had bought the day before the siege started, which he would never wear, for they get dirty on the streets filthy with death. Every day he polished his new shoes with what could be his last breath, hoping for blisters.

He emerged from the house depths and said, “Daj pomozi”—Help me.

“Get the hell out, you drunken pig,” Rachel snarled in his wake. “And take your stupid friend with you.”

I decided not to remove my shoes and, stupidly, said, “It’s O.K.”

“It is not O.K.!” Rachel shouted. “It has never been O.K. It will never be O.K.”

“You must be nice to him,” Dedo screamed at her. “You must respect.”

“It’s O.K,” I said.

“Not O.K. Never O.K. This is my friend.” Dedo stabbed himself with his stubby finger. “Do you know me? Do you know who am I? I am biggest Bosnian poet alive.”

“He is the greatest,” I said.

“You’re a fucking midget, is what you are!” She leaned into him, and I could see his pointed-finger hand unfolding and swinging for a slap.

“Come on, midget,” Rachel bellowed. “Hit me. Yeah, sure. Hit me. Let’s have Officer Johnson for coffee and cookies again.”

Detergentlike snow had already covered our footprints. We stood outside on the street, Dedo fixated on the closed door, as though his gaze could burn through it, cursing in the most beautiful Bosnian and listing all her sins against him: her bastard son, her puritanism, her president, her decaf coffee. Panting, he bent over and grabbed a handful of snow, shaped it into a frail snowball, and threw it at the house. It disintegrated into a little blizzard and sprinkled the dwarf’s face. He was about to make another wretched snowball when I spotted a pair of headlights creeping down the street. It looked like a police vehicle, and I did not want to risk coffee and cookies with Officer Johnson, so I started running.

Dedo caught up to me around the corner, and we staggered down an alley in an unknown direction: the alley was deserted except for a sofa with a stuffed giraffe leaning on it. There were weak tire-mark gullies and fresh traces of what appeared to be a three-legged dog. We saw a woman in the kitchen window of one of the nearby houses. She was circling around something we could not see, a glass full of red wine in her hand. The snow was ankle-deep; we watched her, mesmerized: a long, shiny braid stretched down her back. The three-legged dog must have vanished, for the prints just stopped in the middle of the alley. We could go neither forward nor back, so we sat down right there. I felt the intense pleasure of giving up, the expansive freedom of utter defeat. Whichever way I go, now, I’ll reach the other shore. Dedo was humming a Bosnian song I didn’t recognize, snowflakes melting on his lips. It was clear to me that we could freeze to death in a Madison back alley — it would be a famous way to die. I wanted to ask Dedo about the poem he had written about me, but he said, “This is like Sarajevo in ’ninety-three.” Perhaps because of what he had said, or perhaps because I thought I saw Officer Johnson’s car passing the alley, I got up and helped him to his feet.

In the cab, it was only a question of time before someone vomited. The Arab cabbie despised us, but Dedo tried to tell him that he was a fellow Muslim. Madison was deserted.

“You are my brother,” Dedo said, and squeezed my hand. “I wrote a poem about you.”

I tried to kiss his cheek, as the cabbie glared at us in the rearview mirror, but awkwardly managed only to leave some saliva on his forehead.

“I wrote a good poem about you,” Dedo said again, and I asked him to tell it to me.

He dropped his chin to his chest. He seemed to have passed out, so I shook him, and like a talking doll, he said, “He whips butterflies with his baton. . ” But then we arrived at my hotel. Dedo kept reciting as I paid for the cab, and I didn’t catch another word.

I dragged him to the elevator, his knees buckling, the snow thawing on his coat, releasing a closet-and-naphthalene smell. I could not tell whether he was still reciting or simply mumbling and cursing. I dropped him to the floor in the elevator and he fell asleep. He sat there in a pile, while I was unlocking the door to my room, and the elevator closed its doors and took him away. The thought of his being discovered in the elevator, drooling and gibbering, gave me a momentary pleasure. But I pressed the call button, and the elevator carrying Dedo obediently came back. We are never as beautiful as now.

The crushing sadness of hotel rooms; the gelid lights and clean notepads; the blank walls and particles of someone else’s erased life: I rolled him into this as if into hell. I hoisted him onto the bed, took off his shoes and socks. His toes were frostbitten, his heels brandished a pair of blisters. I peeled off his coat and pants, and he was shivering, his skin goose-bumped, his navel hidden in a hair tuft. I wrapped the bed-covers around him and threw a blanket on top. Then I lay down next to him, smelling his sweat and infected gums. He grunted and murmured, until his face calmed, the eyelids smoothing into slumber, the brows unfurrowing. A deep sigh, as when dusk falls, settled in his body. He was a beautiful human being.

And then on Tuesday, last Tuesday, he died.