The Book of My Lives

THE KAUDERS CASE

I became friends with Isidora when I was in college, at the University of Sarajevo, in 1985. We had both transferred to General Literature: she from Philosophy, I from Engineering. We met in the back of our Marxism class. The Marxism professor had his hair dyed hell-black, and had spent time in mental institutions. He liked to pontificate about man’s position in the universe: man was like an ant holding on to a straw in a biblical flood, he said, and we were too young to even begin to comprehend how dire our metaphysical situation was. Isidora and I bonded over tear-inducing boredom.

Isidora’s father was a well-known chess author, good friends with many a famous grandmaster, including Fischer, Korchnoi, and Tal. He reported from world-championship matches and wrote a large number of books about chess; the most famous one was for beginners: the Chess Textbook (Šahovska čitanka), essential for every chess-loving household, including ours. Sometimes when I visited Isidora, she would be helping her father with correcting the proofs. It was a tedious job of reading back transcripts of chess games to each other (Ke4 Rd5; c8=Q b7; et cetera), so they would occasionally sing the games, as if performing in a chess musical. Isidora was a licensed chess monitor, and she traveled the world with her father, attending tournaments. She would come back with stories about all the strange people she had met, as chess attracts all kinds of characters. Once in London, she told me, she’d met a Russian immigrant named Vladimir, who claimed that Kandinsky had merely been a Red Army officer running a workshop of anonymous artists and then appropriating their paintings as his own. True or not, the story implied that the world was a terribly interesting place, where there was more than met the eye even in Kandinsky.

We were bored in Sarajevo; it was hard not to be. We had ideas and plans and hopes so big, we thought, they could change the small-city staleness, and ultimately the world. We always undertook unfinishable projects and never finished them: once we started translating from English a book on the Bauhaus, but quit after the first paragraph; then a book on Hieronymus Bosch, but never reached the second page — our English was not very good at all, and we had neither good dictionaries nor much patience. We read about and discussed the artists of Russian Futurism and Constructivism, and we were attracted to the revolutionary possibilities of art. Isidora was constantly thinking up performances in which, for instance, we would show up somewhere at the crack of dawn with a hundred loaves of bread, and make crosses out of them. It had something to do with the dawn of the new era and Khlebnikov, the poet, as the root of his name, hleb, was the common word for bread in many Slavic languages. We never did it, of course — just showing up at dawn was a sufficient obstacle. On the steps of the People’s Theater in Sarajevo, she staged a performance based on The Mountain Wreath, the classic Serbian epic poem, featuring a few of her friends (though I didn’t take part) who were less worried about the subversive messages of the performance than about the possibility of the random passersby heckling them in that particularly menacing Sarajevan way.

Eventually, we found a way to act upon some of our revolutionary fantasies within a socialist youth institution, which gave us a space, ensured that we had no interest in getting paid, and made clear that we were not to overstep the borders of decent public behavior and respect for the values of socialist self-management. A few more friends joined us (Guša, living in London now; Goga — Philadelphia; Bucko — Sarajevo). We adorned the space with slogans hand-painted on bedsheets sewn together: “The fifth dimension is being created!” was one of them, straight from a Russian Futurist manifesto. There was an anarchy sign and a peace sign (a concession to the socialist-youth people) and Kasimir Malevich crosses, although we had to repaint some of them, because, in the blurry eyes of the socialist-youth hippies, they alluded to religion. This thing of ours was called Club Volens-Nolens, a ludicrously pretentious name.

We hated pretentiousness; it was a form of self-hatred. Planning the opening night, we had fierce discussions over whether to invite the Sarajevo cultural elite, the idle people who attended all the openings, and whose cultureness was largely conveyed by wearing cheap Italian clothes bought in Trieste or from the shady guys on the streets pushing contraband. One idea was to invite them, but to have barbed wire all over the place, so their Italian clothes would be subversively ripped. Even better, we could do the whole opening in complete darkness, except for a few stray dogs with flashlights attached to their heads. It would be fabulous, we agreed, if the dogs started biting the guests. But we realized that the socialist hippies would never go for that, as they had to invite some socialist elite to the opening in order to justify the whole project. We settled for inviting a few local thugs along with the elite, hoping that fights might break out, bloodying an upturned nose or two.

Alas, it was not to happen. No dogs, no bites, no fights — the opening was attended by a lot of people, who all looked good and behaved nicely. Thereafter we had programs every Friday. One Friday, there was a panel discussion on alcoholism and literature with all the panelists drunk, and the moderator the drunkest of all. For another Friday program, two comic-book artists came from Serbia to speak about their art and show their work in an exhibit. One of them got terribly drunk and stage-frightened, so he locked himself in the bathroom, refusing to come out. The audience waited while we begged him to open the stall. Eventually, he collected himself, left the security of the bathroom, and got on the stage, from which he hollered at the audience: “People! What is wrong with you? Do not be fooled by this. This is bullshit!” We loved it. Then there was the time when we showed a film called Rani radovi (The Early Works), suppressed in Yugoslavia because it belonged to the film movement from the sixties known as the Black Wave, which painted a not-so-rosy picture of socialism. It had never been shown in Sarajevo and we all wanted to see it, so we found a copy, rented a projector, and brought in the director from Belgrade, who was flattered by the invitation from a band of fawning young enthusiasts. The film was heavily influenced by Godard: young people walked around junkyards discussing comic books and revolution, and then made out with mannequins, those immortal symbols of consumerist alienation. The projectionist, conditioned by the soft demands of soft porn, switched the reels and showed them out of order. Nobody noticed except the director, who was tipsy and excited that his film was being shown at all. We organized a performance of John Cage’s music, the first (and possibly the only) one ever in Sarajevo: we played records with a composition performed by twelve simultaneously screeching radios, and the infamous “4:33”—a stretch of silence on the record which was supposed to provide the time for the audience to create its own inadvertent, incidental music. The audience, however, consisting by this time mainly of the idle elite, didn’t notice that “4:33” was playing at all, didn’t give a diddly fuck about the music it was itself producing, and was, instead, getting happily drunk. Then the performer, who had traveled to Sarajevo forgoing a family vacation at the peril of divorce, stepped in front of the microphone. The few audience members who glanced at the stage saw a hairy man eating an orange and a banana in front of the microphone, performing, unbeknown to almost everyone present, the John Cage composition appropriately titled “An Orange and a Banana.”

It was irritating not to be irritating to the elite, so even on the nights when we just spun records, the goal was to inflict pain: Guša, the DJ, played Frank Zappa, Yoko Ono screaming in dissonance, and Einstürzende Neubauten, the fine German musicians who liked to use chain saws and power drills to produce music. The elite was undeterred, though it shrank in numbers — we wanted them to be there so as to experience severe mental pain. This concept did not fly too well with the socialist hippies.

The demise of Club Volens-Nolens (which means “willy-nilly” in Latin) was due to what is usually called “internal differences”—some of us thought we had made too many compromises: the slide down the slippery slope of bourgeois mediocrity (the socialist version) had clearly begun when we gave up the stray dogs with flashlights. Before we called it all off, we contemplated having stray dogs, this time rabid, for the closing night. But Club Volens-Nolens went out with a whimper, rather than a mad bark.

After the demise, we sank back into general ennui. I busily wrote self-pitying poetry, eventually accumulating about one thousand dreadful poems, the subject of which flip-flopped between boredom and meaninglessness, with a dash of hallucinatory images of death and suicide. Like many young people raised in the comforts of socialism, I was a nihilist and living with my parents. I even started thinking up an Anthology of Irrelevant Poetry, sensing that it was my only hope of ever getting anthologized. Isidora was willing to do it, but nothing came of it, although there was a world of irrelevant poetry everywhere around us. There was nothing to do, and we were quickly running out of ways to do it.

Isidora’s twentieth birthday was coming up, and she — ever disinclined to do it the normal way — did not want it to have the canapés-booze-somebody-fucking-in-the-bathroom format. She thought that it should have the form of an art performance. She couldn’t decide whether it should be modeled on a “Fourrieristic orgy” (the idea I favored) or a Nazi cocktail reception, the template for which could be found in the patriotically proper movies of socialist Yugoslavia: the Germans, all haughty, decadent bastards in impeccable uniforms, throwing a lavish party, in 1943 or so, while local whores and “domestic traitors” lick their tall, shining boots, except for a young Communist spy who has managed to infiltrate the inner circle and who will make them pay in the end. For some unfortunate reason, the orgy lost out to the Nazi party.

The birthday party took place on December 13, 1986. The young men donned black shirts and had oil in their hair. The young women wore dresses that reasonably approximated gowns, except for my teenage sister, who was cast as a young Communist girl, so she wore a girly Communist dress. The party was supposed to be taking place sometime in the early forties, right after the beginning of the German occupation. The narrative featured all the implicit decadence seen in the movies, and then some pseudonihilistic whimsy. There were mayo swastikas on the canapés; there was a sign on the wall saying “In Cock We Trust”; there was a ritual burning of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo in the toilet; my sister was detained as a young Communist in one of the rooms, designated as a makeshift prison; Guša and I fought over a bullwhip; Veba (who lives in Montreal now) and I sang pretty, sad Communist songs about fallen strikers, which we liked to do at every party; I drank vodka out of a cup and wore tall boots, as I was cast as a Ukrainian collaborator. In the kitchen (you can always find me in the kitchen at parties) we discussed the abolishment of the Tito cult and the related state rituals, still running strong. We entertained the idea of organizing demonstrations: I would be looking forward, I said, to smashing some store windows, as some of them were ugly and I liked glass shards. There were people at the party and in the kitchen whom I didn’t know, and they listened very carefully. The morning after, I woke up with a sense of shame that always goes with getting too drunk, usually remedied by a lot of citric acid and sleep. Yet the sense of shame wouldn’t go away for a while. Indeed, it is still around.

The following week I was cordially invited over the phone to visit the State Security offices — a kind of invitation you cannot decline. They interrogated me for thirteen hours straight, in the course of which I discovered that all the other people who attended the party had visited or were going to visit the warm State Security offices. Let me not bore you with the details — let’s just say that the good cop, bad cop routine is a transcultural cliché, that both of the cops knew everything (the kitchen listeners listened well), and that they had a big, very big problem with the Nazi cocktail reception framework. Naïvely, I assumed that if I explained to them that it was really just a performance, a bad joke at worst, and if I elided the kitchen demonstration fantasies, they would just slap our wrists, tell our parents to whup our asses, and let us go home, to our comfy nihilistic quarters. The “good” cop solicited my opinion on the rise of fascism among the youth of Yugoslavia. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I strenuously objected to such tendencies. He didn’t seem too convinced. As I was sick with flu, I frequently went to the bathroom — no keys on the inside, bars on the window — while the good cop was waiting outside, lest I cut my wrist or bang my head on the toilet bowl. I looked at myself in the mirror (which I could have broken to slit my throat) and thought: “Look at this dim, pimply face, the woozy eyes — who can possibly think I am dangerous, let alone a Nazi?” They let us all go, eventually, our wrists swollen from slapping. My mother was out of town visiting family, my father was in Ethiopia (“We send him to Ethiopia,” the bad cop said to me, “and this is how you thank us?”), and I refrained from informing them that I had been detained by State Security, thinking it would all just go away.

But away it did not go. A few weeks later, the Sarajevo correspondent of the Belgrade daily Politika—which was on its way to becoming the hysterical nationalist voice of the Slobodan Milošević regime — received an anonymous letter describing a birthday party at the residence of a prominent Sarajevo family, where Nazi symbols were exhibited and values belonging to the darkest recesses of history were extolled in violation of everything our society held sacred. Rumors started spreading around Sarajevo, the world capital of gossip, speculating about who might have been at the party and at whose home it had taken place. The Bosnian Communist authorities, often jitterbugging to the tunes from Belgrade, confidentially briefed their members at closed Party meetings, one of which was attended by my mother, where, without naming anybody, they described what happened at the party, with many details made available by the good services of State Security. She nearly had a heart attack when she recalled my wearing the borrowed tall boots on the way to the party (the concept of which I had not bothered to explain to her), thus realizing that both of her children were there. She came back home shaken, and I offered a full confession, worrying all along that she might simply collapse. My mother’s hair became all gray early and I am afraid much of it was due to my adventures.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t know where Herr Kauders might be now. Perhaps he is pulling the strings of fact and fiction, of untruth and truth, somehow making me write stories that I foolishly believe I imagine and invent. Perhaps one of these days I am going to get a letter signed A.K. (as he liked to sign his letters), telling me that the whole fucking charade is over, that the time of reckoning has come.