The Question of Bruno

BLIND JOZEF PRONEK DEAD SOULS

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.

Pronek hated his neck, because it always got stiff and became a knot of thick sinews. He would keep pressing them, which would just produce more and more pain, while the sinews would wiggle under his fingers, as hard as steel cables. If he ever were to be decapitated, he thought, the executioner would be in danger, for the ax would probably bounce back and split the poor fellow’s head like a watermelon. They would have to soak his neck in acid for a week or so, in order to soften the steely sinews, and then cut off his head.

Pronek and his umbrous co-passengers descended upon Washington, and he had to turn his whole body to look through the window at the feeble capital lights, “like moribund embers under the ashes of a cloudy night” (this was Pronek’s thought at the moment, and we must concede it is rather nice). The flight attendant sneaked from somewhere behind Pronek’s back and startled him, shoving his face in the crevice between the fat man’s chest and the seat in front of him, and asking: “Can I get you another beer, sir?” Pronek turned his whole body — the sinews resisting painfully — like a hand puppet, toward the attendant and allowed him to provide more helpful service. The attendant seemed to be paid per smile and had the tan of an impeccably baked chicken.

Pronek was pushed into the airport building by the piston of his fellow pilgrims, as described before.

First the gigantic tip of a nipple on a stick started flashing and hooting, then the empty carousel started revolving. Bulky bags and square suitcases began dropping out from behind the black curtain, then went — wooo! — down the slide into the immutability of the carousel’s revolution. Pronek’s faceless co-passengers swarmed around the carousel, as if they were bacteria at the bottom of a stomach, and the food to be digested was just being sent from the oral department. Pronek’s bag was lost. He stared at the empty carousel, which revolved meaninglessly until it stopped to shine in conspicuous silence. Pronek had only a handbag packed with books and duty-free shop catalogs, plus a piece of three-day-old bourek, designed by his mother to sustain him on the trip, which was now — we can be sure of that — breeding all kinds of belligerent Balkan microorganisms.

Behind a frail, black, and long ribbon, there stood a man with Pronek’s name (misspelled as “Pronak”), followed by a question mark. The man held it out just above his pelvis, with the lower edge cutting gently into the palms of his hands, so Pronek thought that his name had been taken away from him and given to this man, who was obviously an honest, hardworking, disciplined individual. The man shook Pronek’s flaccid hand hesitantly, as if afraid that the sign might be taken away from him.

The man welcomed Pronek and asked about the trip with fake — but clearly polite — interest. “It was like Marlow’s journey to see Kurtz,” Pronek said. “Wow!” said the man, doubtless unaware of what Pronek was talking about — for which he shouldn’t be blamed. The man had dark, short hair, retreating in disarray from his forehead, with ashen smudges behind his ears. He kindly helped Pronek inquire about the luggage, but to no avail.

Outside, it was snowing relentlessly, as if the ireful God was tearing up down pillows in the heavens. The man drove through the blindingly white maze of the blizzard. He pointed at objects and buildings, which kept popping out of tumultuous snow like jacks-in-the-box: a gigantic toothpick, lit from below, as if kneeling worshippers were pointing flashlights at its pinnacle; a series of buildings that Pronek decided to describe in future conversations with whomever was interested in his U.S. impressions as built in a neo-Nazi, neo-classical, neo-fluffy style (which is not entirely justified, we believe).

“And this is the White House,” the man said, exultantly.

“I always wandered,” Pronek said, incorrectly. “Why it is called White House? Do you have to be white to live there?”

The man did not find it amusing, so he said: “No, it is because it is made of white marble.”

Pronek’s neck was stiffer than ever, at this point practically petrified, so he turned his whole body toward the man and put his left hand on the head-recliner behind the man’s nape, which shamelessly sported tufts of unruly hair. The man glanced at Pronek’s hand, as if afraid that it might choke him.

“Did they use slaves to build it?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t believe so.”

The man’s name was Simon.

They drove in silence, as the storm was subsiding. By the time they got to the hotel, leafy snowflakes were butterflying, taking a break after a hard day’s work. Simon complimented Pronek’s English, and — having established a bond, presumably — informed him that the Redskins had won. “I barely know rules,” Pronek retorted. “It’s a great game,” Simon said, and then invited him to his home in Falls Orchard, Virginia, to meet his wife, Gretchen, and their four daughters. Pronek readily accepted the invitation, although he knew very well that he would never see Simon again.

The hotel was a Quality Inn.

Pronek would remember — to this day — the room at the Quality Inn with eerie clarity: there was a large double bed in a green cape staring at the ceiling with its pillow eyes; a dark TV facing the bed patiently, like a dog waiting for a treat; an ascetic chair, opening its wooden arms in invitation to a bland desk; an umbrellaed lamp, casting its light shyly on the writing surface; a heavy, matronly, peach-colored curtain, behind which there was a large window with a generous vista of an endless wall. The bathroom was immaculately clean, with towels layered upon each other, resembling a snow cube. Pronek kept flushing the scintillating toilet, watching with amazement (he had an entirely different concept of the toilet bowl than we do) how the water at the bottom was enthusiastically slurped in, only to rise, with liquid cocksureness, back to the original level. There were two rubber footprints stuck to the bottom of the bathtub and a handlebar sticking out of the wall. So Pronek cautiously let the water run, stepped onto the rubber footprints, which matched his feet exactly, and grasped the handlebar, but nothing happened.

We cannot be entirely sure what it was that he expected to happen.

He washed his pale-blue underwear and the exhausted collar of his rather unseemly flannel shirt, and then stretched them across the chair. He thrust himself upon the bed, which routinely creaked, and lay naked, trying unsuccessfully to calculate the time difference between Washington and Sarajevo (six hours), until he fell asleep.

He woke up and didn’t know where he was or who he was, but then he saw his underwear spreading its pale-blue wings across the chair, providing clear evidence of his existence prior to that moment. He got up, liberated the window from the curtain’s oppression, and saw that it was daytime, because some confused light clambered down the wall, and waited outside the window to be let in and scurry to the dark corners. He was delighted with the whole poetic-morning setup, until he found out that his underwear was still moist.

He did not hear the maid because he was drying his pants with a hair dryer, which he discovered in the holster, like a concealed revolver, by the mirror. She boldly walked in and saw him clutching his underwear with his left hand and pressing the hair dryer’s muzzle into its face, as if torturing it to confess. We should point out that he was butt-naked and was brandishing a regular morning erection. Pronek and the maid — a slim young woman with a paper tiara on her head — were locked together in a moment of helpless embarrassment, and then Pronek slowly closed the door. He sat on the toilet seat, thinking about the loss of his suitcases, which must have been freezing somewhere up in the heavens, stacked up, with all the other completely foreign and unfamiliar suitcases, in a cavernous underbelly of a plane, heading away, away from him. When he finally put on his broken-down shorts and mustered up enough audacity to face the maid, she was gone. His bed was all straightened up, and there was a piece of red heart-shaped candy on the pillow. Pronek imagined having a passionate affair with the maid, who really was a daughter of a New York billionaire, trying to lead an independent, dignified life and get on with her painting career. He could see himself moving back to New York with her; he would live in a shabby, but homey, apartment in Greenwich Village and support her, making love to her in saxophone slow motion, kissing her graceful hands and dainty cheeks stained with vivid colors.

Simon waited for him at the reception desk, except that he was not Simon, but someone else who looked like Simon, save for the thick glasses and a torus of fat resting on his hips and pelvis. He serenely informed Pronek that he hoped Pronek had slept well, and that Pronek’s luggage had been found in Pensacola, Florida. They drove past the same monuments and buildings, in front of which there were insectile machines, plowing away lumps of snow. They (Pronek and Simon no. 2) stopped in front of a large mansion hiding behind a marble-white set of pillars, akin to Gargantuan prison bars. On the lawn, covered with whipped-creamy snow, there was a sign with an eagle spreading its awesome wings, frowning away from the house, as if pissed off at the inhabitants. They walked into a large hall and there was a uniformed guard under a colorful picture of the uncomfortably smirking George Bush.

“Hi, George!” said Pronek’s escort.

“Hi, Doc!” said the guard, who stood with his legs spread, and his hands wedged authoritatively in his armpits. Doc disappeared into the office maze behind George’s back. George ordered Pronek to wait in the hall, whose walls were covered with paintings of stuck-up men, their cheeks slightly turgid, as if their oral caverns were full of smoke they didn’t dare exhale. The same pissed eagle, Pronek noticed, was stretched flatly across the floor, and the ceiling was so high that “the eye struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles,” to quote one of our great writers. The sign propped on a scrawny wooden stand said: “No Concealed Weapons.” It was cold, so Pronek sat in an armchair, with his hands deep in his pockets, under the gaze of a man with puckered lips and eyebrows in the shape of a distant seagull. Pronek played with marbles, which still lay in transoceanic hiatus at the bottom of his coat pockets, revolving them around each other. Then — to our surprise — a man sped out from behind George’s back with his right hand extended in front of him, and a genuinely counterfeit smile. As Pronek was pulling his hand out, he said: “Welcome!” and the marbles, finally freed from lint chains, leapt out of the pocket and began bouncing away from each other, cackling in their sudden liberty. He could still hear the echoes of the runaway marbles from distant corners, when the man asked Pronek: “So, how do you like our capital?”

“I don’t know,” Pronek said sheepishly. “I just arrived.”

“You’ll love it!” the man exclaimed. “It’s great.”

In New Orleans, Pronek stood in line, hoping to buy a real American hot dog, behind a man who had a gigantic black cowboy hat, tight denim pants, and a leather belt pockmarked with silver bolts. As the man walked away biting into his elaborate hot dog, mustard spurting out of the corners of his mouth, the excited vendor kept looking after him: “Whoa, man! Do you know who that is? Do you know who that is? That’s Garth Brooks!” The vendor had a baseball hat that was labeled “Saints” and his face had the delicate texture of a ripe pomegranate. “Who is Garth Brooks?” Pronek innocently asked. “Whoa, man! Who is Garth Brooks!? You don’t know who Garth Brooks is? Whoa! He’s the fuckin’ greatest. You gotta be kiddin’ me!” Then he addressed (to put it mildly) the next person in line, a young woman in white cowboy boots with little bells on the sides, whose blond hair was all thrust back, as if she had ridden a motorcycle helmetless for a couple of hours. “That’s Garth Brooks?” She shrieked and turned to the person behind her — and a chain reaction occurred, which propelled Pronek out of the circle of exultant exclamations. They all looked longingly after Garth Brooks, who was trying to wipe mustard off his black suede boots, but was spreading it all over instead.

Garth Brooks, of course, is one of our finest country musicians.

In Columbus, Ohio, Pronek had dinner at the house of a blue-eyed poet who once won the John Wesley Gluppson Prize, as he was proudly informed by the host’s wife. The poet and his wife, both well into their healthy sixties, were kind enough to invite a group of their valued, intellectually distinguished, friends. There was a professor of history, bow-tied, his face frosted with a sagely beard, in a tweed jacket with suede elbow patches, who was an expert on early American history, he said, in particular the Founding Fathers. “Are there Founding Mothers?” Pronek asked whimsically, but was immediately rewarded with a forgiving collective smile. There was a lawyer who once sold a script about injustice, which was never produced, but could have been directed “by Stanley Kramer himself.” There was a young mousy woman with droopy eyes who had just come out of a painful, bitter divorce, and was normally a painter deeply interested in Native American spirituality. And let us not forget Pronek, the uncomfortable tourist.

They asked Pronek, who alternately picked at a piece of soy steak and two limpid asparagus corpses, intermittently gulping red Chilean wine, the following questions:

What’s the difference between Bosnia and Yugoslavia?

Huge.

Do they have television?

Yes.

Do they have asparagus there?

Yes, but no one in their right mind eats it. (Chortle on the right, chuckle on the left.)

What language do people speak there?

It’s complicated.

Is the powder keg going to explode?

Yes.

Is he going to settle in the United States?

Probably not.

Has he ever heard of Stanley Kramer?

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

Finally, Pronek toppled over his high wine glass, and then watched in panic, yet catatonic, the red tide spreading westward, toward the woman who had just come out of a painful, bitter divorce. She yelped and said: “Blood! I had a vision of blood last night! Ah!” She pressed her temples and stared at the asparagus corpses heaped in the middle of the table. She kept pressing her temples, as if trying to squeeze her eyes out. Pronek saw her long black nails bending backward and was afraid that they might break. She began sobbing, and everyone looked at one another, except Pronek, who looked at his supine wine glass. They sat in confounded silence; she wept, her crystal earrings rattling as her head quaked. The John Wesley Gluppson Prize winner then poured a little wine in her glass and said: “There, there now. It’s a Chardonnay!” whereupon she looked at him, smiled, and began wiping her tears with the tips of her fingers, whose nails were (to Pronek’s relief) unbroken, with the same vigor with which she wept. Pronek said: “I am very sorry.”

While in Los Angeles, Pronek met John Milius, because he wrote the script for Pronek’s favorite movie, Apocalypse Now. His office was in the building that Selznick constructed to stand in for Tara in Gone With the Wind— just the front part, in fact, because the building was only one room deep. Besides John Milius, who sat at his vast desk suckling on a cigar as long as a walking stick, there was a man who introduced himself as Reg Buttler. He was abundantly mustached and had on a pale-denim shirt, across whose chest an embroidered line zigzagged, like an EKG-line. He shook Pronek’s hand, and, additionally, heartily slapped his shoulder. There was a signed copy of the Apocalypse Now script (“From John to Reg”) on the table in front of him. Pronek was allotted a large glass of bourbon and a giant cigar.

“Cuban,” John Milius said. “The only good thing that communism ever produced.” Reg Buttler lit Pronek’s cigar, which kept wiggling, too large to handle, between his feeble fingers.

Then Reg Buttler put his right ankle on his left knee, and pulled the leg violently toward his pelvis, apparently trying to break his own hip. The sharp tip of Reg’s elaborately engraved cowboy boot was directly pointed at John Milius, and Pronek thought that if he had a secret weapon in that boot — something that would eject poisonous pellets, for instance — he could kill John Milius in an instant.

“Do you people in Sarajevo like Sam Peckinpah?” Milius asked.

“We do,” Pronek said.

“No one made blood so beautiful as the old Sam did,” Milius said.

“I know,” Pronek said.

“I didn’t know you could watch American movies there,” Reg Buttler said.

“We could.”

“So what’s gonna happen there?” Milius asked.

“I don’t know,” Pronek said.

“Thousands of years of hatred,” Reg Buttler said and shook his head compassionately. “I can’t understand a damn thing.”

Pronek didn’t know what to say.

“Hell, I’ll call General Schwarzkopf to see what we can do there. Maybe we can go there and kick some ass,” Milius said.

“Like we kicked Saddam’s ass,” said Reg Buttler. “Damn, that was fuckin’ good. We kicked that bastard’s ass.”

“General Schwarzkopf told me,” John Milius said, “that the Marines were the best. Those boys are the best.”

Pronek inhaled too much cigar smoke, so he abruptly coughed and spurted bourbon on the Apocalypse Now script, while a rivulet of snot ran down to his chin.

“War brings out the best and the worst in people,” Milius said. “And only the fittest survive.”

Pronek took out his hanky and wiped his nose, his chin, and the Apocalypse Now, respectively. Reg looked determinedly to the right, then to the left, clearly mulling over a profound thought.

“Do you want to stay in this country?” Milius asked Pronek.

“You should,” Reg Buttler said. “It’s a damn good country.”

“I don’t know,” Pronek said.

“I’ll call General Schwarzkopf and see what we can do about it. Listen, if you have nothing to do tomorrow, we can go out to the shooting range and raise some hell.”

“I’m there with ya!” Reg Buttler said.

But Pronek had a meeting that he couldn’t miss (which we know was not true) so he politely declined. Before he left, he had a picture taken in front of the building that used to act as Tara. There he is — our foreign friend — teeny with the house in the background, sturdy pillars all lined up behind, like cousins in a family picture, lawns glaring green. He is standing a foot away from Reg and Milius. Milius’s hand is resting on Reg’s shoulder, the two of them like Scarlett O’Hara and her pop, except there is no fake, painted, blood-red sunset, against which they could appear to be shadows, as the music reaches an orgasmic pitch.

Before it began circling like a hawk, waiting to bury its claws into the runway, the plane hit some turbulence, so orange juice leapt out of the trembling plastic cup, looked around and gleefully landed on Pronek’s beige pants. Chicago under snow looked like a frosted computer-chip board seen from high above, and — while our foreigner was being lowered — moving vehicles became discernible, little bytes being exchanged between the chips. There was a person with two yellow sticks waving at the plane, as if mesmerizing a dragon. Unbuckling the seat belt, which echoed cavernously all around the plane, Pronek realized that the juice stain had attained the subtle hue of urine.

Andrea was waiting for him at the exit, and as his co-passengers elbowed their way into the molasses of the airport crowd, she offered him her right cheek and her upper body attached to it, while keeping her lower body a couple of feet away, as if a contact between their pelvises would ignite a ferocious intercourse. She told him she was so happy to see him and asked him about his trip. Pronek pointed at the urine-orange stain and joked that his bladder was so small that urine just had to fight its way out, until it could breath freely, the wretched refuse.

Did she laugh? Indeed she did not.

They stood on the moving walkway, gliding through a dark tunnel with sinuous neon lights crawling all over the ceiling, and a synthetic female voice warbling: “Do not leave your baggage unattended!”

Desperate to be charming, Pronek said: “If thing that takes you up is escalator, would this be levelator?”

“Yeah, right,” Andrea said.

And now, why not, a quick step back into their common past:

Pronek met Andrea in the summer of ’91, in Ukraine. They had a lot of fun, flirting and witnessing the August ‘91 putsch. They held hands in front of the Ukrainian parliament when it declared independence, while everywhere around them people ruddy with patriotic excitement waved blue-and-yellow flags and demanded freedom and stuff like that. She had a Brit for a boyfriend, who wore a pinkish headband at all times and kept looking for a rave all over Kiev, but never found one. We know that he worked as a cameraman for the BBC, and on the day independence was declared, he was — God bless his hollow heart — very busy. So they walked to the Dnieper and bought a Red Army officer’s hat for a couple of dollars, which she wore thereafter. They ate a frisbeesized pizza, with carrot-and-beets topping. They watched the Dnieper gently flowing, with the scattered, starry glitter of dead-fish bellies. Pronek investigated the inside of her thighs, never getting over the wall of the panty-line, while the tips of their tongues clumsily collided in midair. In a fit of inexplicable giddiness, Pronek susurrously sang a Frank Sinatra song into her ear: “Eye praktis ehvree dai to faind sum klehvr lains to sai, too maik da meenin cum tfruh …”

That was one of the songs that his blues band, Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls, well known and liked in Sarajevo, used to play, and, miraculously, she found it endearing.

But the next day she went with her camera-boyfriend to Kharkiv. Pronek went back to Sarajevo and wrote to her a series of, arguably, love letters, full of shades, ochre and auburn, of autumn leaves and reminiscing about the time (the total of some fifty-three hours) they had spent together. She wrote back that she sorely missed him and that she would like to see him again — a desire, Pronek feared, fueled by the unlikelihood of its fulfillment. They fabricated their past days together: in one of her letters they drank sweet wine, whereas in Kiev they had drunk infernal vodka all the time. He remembered her fragrance, although they were both perpetually stinky and sweaty in the city where water pressure was eternally low, so no one knelt under the faucet to wait for moribund droplets. They remembered, with painful intensity, dancing cheek to cheek — in reality (and reality is our business), they idiotically trotted to the rhythm of anachronistic German disco, while hirsute Ukrainian men swarmed around her, repeatedly trying to rub their perspiring bodies against hers. They failed to remember that Pronek could muster no puissance to repel them, while her boyfriend was having a coquettish conversation with the Canadian embassy undersecretary. Having forged a sufficient number of counterfeit memories, she suddenly invited him to Chicago, prompted, perhaps, by a news report about the war in Croatia and “tensions” in Bosnia. It was a gracious invitation — neither of them thought it could ever happen, but then Pronek got the invitation to visit the United States in the capacity of a freedom-loving writer, so he put Chicago in his itinerary.

Therefore, they were happy to be together again.

She looked different when he saw her at the airport: she was paler, her hair was shorter and darker, and she proudly wore a silver nose ring. Nevertheless, he was glad to be going down the highway with her, their car being sluiced with other cars toward the downtown gutter. The skyline looked flat against the blank sky, like the bottom of the Tetris screen, except there were no rectangles coming from above to fill the angular gaps.

Andrea drove through downtown, pointing at humongous, astringent buildings that admitted little light, and announcing their function. It all sounded like oversized gibberish to Pronek: the Board of Trade, the tallest building in the world, the biggest something, the busiest something else. Pronek rolled down the window — the cold pinched their ears instantly — and looked up. He could not see the end of those buildings. “This is how cockroach sees furniture in apartment,” Pronek said. “I’m sure,” Andrea said.

The few people that walked, bundled, down the streets were trying to retract their heads into their chests. They scuttled toward the warmth of building lobbies, while a chalky mist kept rushing past their shoes, in pursuit of a windless patch of pavement. Andrea and Pronek drove up Lake Shore Drive. Ice floes lingered in the harbor, as if hiding, shivering, from the waves that were clawing at thick layers of dun ice on the piers.

This is a rendition of Pronek’s coming to Chicago, in March 1992, on a flight from L.A., with an uncouth stain in his groin area, and love in his heart.

When Andrea unlocked the door (which had a sign saying: “Violators will be towed”) of her apartment, a pungent wave of smoke-and-French-fries stench washed off the walls of Pronek’s nostrils. “My roommate is a slob,” she said, as Pronek (and we with him) panned over the walls specked with ketchup (rather than blood, Pronek decided); a sofa with fluffy stuffing hatching out of its cushions; a stereo and a TV besieged by CDs and videos; a table buried under a wretched army of McDonald’s paper bags and cups viciously pierced by slim straws. There were smothered carcasses of cigarette packages and ashtrays brimming with butts and ashes. The window looked, dimly, at a generic brick wall. A porcine black cat (“Her name is Moskva,” Andrea said) glanced at Pronek, and then, having found nothing of interest in Pronek’s existence, continued staring out the window, at the wall.

Andrea pressed the “play” button on the stereo, and a Madonna song—“Material Girl,” we believe — made the cat slither off the sash and run to the kitchen, followed by Andrea and her foreign friend. “I hate fucking Madonna,” she said. “She’s a living sexist fantasy. My roommate is a fucking moron.” On the kitchen table, there was a mob of beer bottles with their labels ripped off, as if the stout bottles had been tortured and were now awaiting execution. The sink was overflowing with dishes, submerged in murky liquid. Every once in a while, a bubble would reach the surface, eventually bursting with a barely audible belch. There must have been, Pronek thought, a monstrous creature embedded in the sludge at the bottom of the sink.

“Who is your roommate?” Pronek asked.

“He’s my boyfriend,” Andrea said. “But we have separate bedrooms.”

“So, how long you have been together?”

“On and off, about ten years. But I hate the fucker, I think I wanna break up.”

“Does he know about me?”

“Oh, yeah. He sure as hell does. I told him you were coming. He doesn’t give a fuck. He knows everything.”

Well, we happen to know he didn’t.

She pushed aside the bottles and they helplessly clinked against each other, until they settled, thick as thieves, on the left side of the table. She pulled two chairs together and put two large cups of coffee at the liberated end of the table, whose surface, Pronek discovered, had prickly tobacco crumbles strewn and stuck to greasy film.

He wanted to touch her apple cheeks, and the shimmering gossamer on the nape of her neck, and the slope of her shoulders, and the little cavern under her breasts, which he had entered but once, in Kiev, and which was, once upon a time, delectably perspirant. He was mesmerized by her lips barely touching each other as she uttered her bs and ms, and her teeth flashed at him as she formed her fricatives. More than anything, it was the way she laughed: leaning slightly to the left and holding her tummy, as if protecting her viscera from spurting out, protruding the tip of her tongue — and finally producing a delightful chortle.

Pronek had fantasized about her, about her “unmediated body”—she did nothing to adorn herself. Her body was an instrument of investigation (this is, mind you, what Pronek thought), not an object to be packaged for men, so she could get them to like her. Pronek was sick of all the Sarajevo men and women who spent time performing little love rituals, designing themselves desirable. He wanted — he believed — true love and a true body with it. Andrea was his Statue of Liberty, a symbol of emotional freedom, a proof of the possibility that two people can be (Pronek’s italics) for each other, rather than perform love for each other. She could make, he imagined, all those Frank Sinatra songs, all those movies (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Brigadoon, Gigi) about the inevitable, unconquerable, transcendental love, she could make that come true.

Hence he carried his two boxy suitcases to her room: her minuscule underwear lounging everywhere; her brassieres hanging, like rabbit skins, from doorknobs; a bag full of shoes and stacks of books on the floor, like a little downtown; the bed with crumpled green covers, kneaded by her body.

That night, they made love.

But before they did, she unrolled a scroll of condoms, and Pronek had to wear one. “This is the nineties,” she said. “People can touch each other only if they wear rubber gloves.” So he awkwardly put on his one-fingered glove in front of the entertained Andrea. As they were grinding the sheets, and the bed enthusiastically creaked, and the cat, having jumped on the bed, brushed his face with her downy tail, Andrea kept asking: “Isn’t this good? Do you like this? Isn’t this great?” It was good — the room reeked of bodily fluids and skin friction and dust. They breathed into each other’s faces and let their abdomens adhere. Then their little sex unit fissioned, and she went to the bathroom — her silhouette against the kitchen light, Pronek realized, was gorgeous. He disrobed his penis and lay in bed, the condom hanging from his hand, and he thought about his life. We are in a privileged position to assume what his train of thought might have been freighted with: What is going to happen to me? he asked himself. The things back home will never be well. War in Bosnia was likely, if unimaginable. He imagined marrying Andrea and having a writer’s career, teaching at a woodsy university. He would wear a tweed jacket with suede patches on the elbows; he would become jug-eared and bespectacled and gray-bearded; he would have season tickets for the symphony; he would frown often, and chuckle at the New Yorker cartoons; they would have children who would go to Harvard. He envisioned Andrea and himself, old, yet still in love, their bones shabby, their hair gray, their voices weak, sitting by a fireplace, their backs warm, reading books of the Old Masters, and their lawn would be green and colorful, while carefree warblers would hop all over their modest property. Then a sudden, rapacious itch in his crotch derailed the American-dream train, and Andrea walked in, spreading the scent of a heavenly shampoo. He kissed her wet hair on his way to the bathroom, carrying a dangling condom before him, as if it were a dead rat.

And the moment before he was to step into the bathroom, its doors amicably opened, the steam speedily leaving it, a man walked into the apartment. For reasons inexplicable, Pronek didn’t slip into the bathroom (“Come in,” whispered the steam), but stood there, nude as a piglet, suddenly aware of the hairlessness of his chicken chest, and general grotesqueness of man’s frontal nudity, not to mention the gooey condom in his hand.

“Hi!” Pronek said.

“How’re you doin’?” the man said.

“Good.”

“Good.”

Silence.

“Who are you?” the man asked.

“I am Andrea’s friend.”

“I guess,” he said. “I’m Carwin.” He was fashionably unshaven and had unruly hair, which, to us, signified cynical rebelliousness. He wore an unbuttoned flannel shirt and a T-shirt underneath, with a picture of a crucified, blond angel.

“Are you Russian?” he asked.

Pronek’s bare feet were cold, so he put his left sole on his right calf, and stood there like a Masai warrior, with a used condom instead of a spear.

“No, I’m from Sarajevo, Bosnia,” Pronek said. “But we met in Ukraine.”

“Well, it’s nice to meet you,” he said. “I hope I’ll never see your fucking face again.” Then he hollered toward Andrea’s room: “Now you started bringing in fucking foreigners. American dick is not good enough for you, you fucking bitch!”

“Fuck you, you fucking Anglo asshole!” she yelled back.

It was then that Pronek finally slipped into the bathroom. The condom wouldn’t sink in the toilet bowl, so Pronek kept flushing it, but it would always come back up from the toilet throat, defiantly bobbing. A roll of toilet paper hid behind the toilet seat, like a frightened hedgehog. We can attest that Pronek felt profound helplessness at that moment. A jury of plastic bottles, bemused by the ablution he had to perform, was lined up on the shelf: Natural Care, Head & Shoulders, Happy, Antarctica, Morning Mist, Mud Miracle (Swiss Formula), No More Tangles. He looked into the mirror and saw vermilion dots on his face and sallow teeth and a square Slavic head with a flat pate and a tuber-nose and greasy hair, sticking to his low forehead. “What am I doing here?” he asked himself (Patience, dear fellow, patience). But there was nothing that could be done, there was nothing more inevitable than taking a shower at that moment.

Perhaps it is important to know that Andrea was an artist, indeed a painter. She showed Pronek her most recent finished painting, a couple of years old, picturing her between a hog and a sow — all three of them stared at Pronek, framed, presumably, by a farm fence. The pigs were adamantly pink. The hog seemed to enjoy the situation and it had two dun marks on its front hams, while the sow had swollen teats. The painting was entitled Home. She informed Pronek, who could not decide whether he liked it or not, but said he liked it anyway, that she hadn’t painted anything after that. “There are things I need to understand about myself before I can share them with people,” she said.

She worked at the Art Institute, in the gift shop. In the mornings, she would suddenly erect her upper body in bed, the way maidens in horror movies wake up from torturous nightmares, just before the killer (who is always in the vicinity) leaps at them to slice them up. Then she would light a cigarette and look worried. Pronek could tell from the way she smoked that her life was an arduous task: her forehead would corrugate; she would slide her tongue between her gums and the inside of her lips, as if answers to all questions were hiding in oral corners along with food bits; she would wedge her elbow into the palm of her left hand, and prompt her right hand with a cigarette, close to her mouth, nibbling on the filter, inhaling in small, intense gasps, and then exhaling with a burdened, low sigh at the end, like a full stop. She would scratch her spine with her left-hand thumb, and her shoulder blades would move toward each other under the taut skin, only to retreat back to their starting positions.

Pronek would hear the delicate scraping of her long nail against the skin, and, still steeped in his nightmare, he would worry about her birthmarks being ripped off her back.

He would watch her stealthily, not making a sound. When she turned toward him, he would pretend to sleep, keeping his eyes and mouth closed, lest she kiss him, for he was ashamed of his putrescent morning breath. She would trudge to the bathroom, and he would hear the relentless hum of the shower, intermingled with splashing, as if she were resisting a deluge. Then the hair dryer buzz, after which, he suspected, she took care of her hair and her armpits and her lips. By the time she would come back to their room (albeit Pronek would have never referred to it as “our room”) he was asleep, and not even the bustle of her picking through her wardrobe, and the rustle of her rolling stockings up her legs would make him open his eyes.

He would get up a couple of hours later and then follow her scent to the bathroom, where she would still be vaporously present, and the bathtub would still have the unfortunate vestiges of her hair, curled up here and there, waiting to be collected in the mass grave of the drain. Pronek would perform his morning toilet duties, trying to make his body presentable to America. There were three toothbrushes, two of which — Pronek’s and Andrea’s — lay side by side, as if sunbathing together, while the third one was, incidentally, on the verge of the sink.

It was the third one that Pronek dipped in the toilet water.

On some mornings, Pronek would salvage a plate, not yet engendering mold patches, from the dish-swamp, and eat some limp cheese (invariably mozzarella) and rancid crackers. Sometimes he would sip coffee from a cup that had lipstick scars on the opposite side of the brim, and kept staring at a blank page, only to write “Chicago, April 1992” in the upper-right-hand corner and then stare again, until he would finally abort the letter. He could never go beyond the place and the date, as if those were perfectly self-explanatory, and nothing else need have been said. He wanted to call his parents, but had no money to pay for it, and Andrea had said that he should ask Carwin, since he was “the phone man of the house.” Sometimes he would watch the news, showing barricades, and people running in panic, and white, innocent, armored vehicles parked in the middle of a Sarajevo street.

On the days he didn’t go to work as a Pier 1 store manager, Carwin would get up and lodge himself on the sofa, stick his hand into his flannel shorts, and watch the news with our foreigner. He would say: “Man, I don’t understand this shit. Can’t they just chill out, man. I mean, what’s the big fucking deal?” Pronek would say nothing, stroking the purring Moskva, and then he would get on the downtown train to meet Andrea for lunch.

He would walk down the Magnificent Mile, sweating in his dark coat, dotted with lint, reeking of traveling and the past. Often, he would be thinking about The Magnificent Seven and Seven Samurai and there was nothing magnificent about the mile: morgue-like buildings and lugubrious stores promising all kinds of purchasable joys. Whenever he found himself walking down the Magnificent Mile, he had a burning craving for a McDonald’s burger, which he normally hated and considered inedible, respectively.

Perhaps this could be Pronek’s contribution to the psychology of architecture.

He would stroll past people clutching their purses or briefcases, frowning at the wind. “Who are they?” he wondered. “Where do they live? What do they do?” Once he realized, schlepping through the goo and yuck of wet April snow, that he was utterly superfluous walking down the Magnificent Mile, that everything would be exactly the same if the space his body occupied at that moment were empty — people would walk with the same habitual resolve, clutching the same purses and briefcases, perhaps even infinitesimally happier, because there would be more walking space without his body. When he shared his thoughts with Andrea, she said, with a nasty giggle: “The land of the free, the home of the brave.”

Pronek would wait for Andrea to get her lunch break, and he would roam the shop, browsing through postcards, trying on aprons adorned with Picasso or Monet pictures, reading books on African art. Once he located all the cameras in the store, disinterested little eyes gazing from distant upper corners, and tried to find a spot not covered by a camera, and found none. Sometimes he would just find an inconspicuous position in the store, hiding behind a curtain of posters, or pretending to be reading a book, and he would watch Andrea smiling at the customers, gracefully returning their credit cards, or handing a bagful of artful merchandise over the counter. Then she would get off and they would drift through the museum, never holding hands. They would hide in the American Furniture and Arts section, where they would venture into illicit, deliciously dangerous, touching, under the worried, worried gaze of George Washington; or under the conjugal gaze of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Hubbard — Daniel’s promontory chin reaching into the glorious revolutionary future; or the sovereignly chaste gaze of Abigail Cheseborough. Of course, most of these names meant nothing to Pronek, but they all looked devoutly uncomfortable. Pronek and Andrea would pussyfoot around a Lincoln staring at marble tiles under their feet, apparently pensive, in duck-beak boots and with a duck-beak beard, stepping forward, his hands locked on his leaderly butt. And there was a Lincoln welded to an uncomfortable brazen chair, worried all over again, wearing the same boots, except Pronek could see the big-toe lumps and imagine the sweaty, swollen feet and the ingrown toenails causing a lot of banal pain.

They would roam through the armor section, where metal man-sheaths suggested an eerie presence, as if the bodies that were meant to fill those armors were stored somewhere in the warehouse. They would follow a battalion of high school kids, predominantly blond and obese (“Cornfed,” Andrea would whisper), who were hee-hawing in front of naked-lady paintings, as their faces worked on the spring collection of pimples. They would start looking at paintings of the fourteenth century, and then move chronologically, with everyone else, counterclockwise. It seemed to Pronek that between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries the main human activities were suffering, torture, fear, and rape. “Did you have the sixteenth century in Sarajevo?” Andrea asked him once. “Yeah,” our friend said. “But it was different.” He would try to sound cultured and civilized — to play the role of a European, as it were — and make the most of his two-hour visit to the Louvre, which he had mainly spent lost in a nightmarish eighteenth-century wing. He would try to devote a reasonable portion of thinking to each painting, but would often find himself staring at the carved frames and blank walls around the painting, yawning like an excited monkey. In the room that contained some Rape of Lucrece he stared at Lucrece’s torn pearl necklace eternally in midair and thought about the incredible amount of yawning that could be witnessed in museums, mainly because of the lack of air circulation, as if breathing would impair understanding of Great Art.

A senior citizen in a glaring pink jacket stopped in front of the Rape and gasped.

Her favorite painting was humongous and completely black — black wrinkles, black smudges, black puckered paint, and Pronek liked it, but didn’t know why. They would gawk at it for a while and Andrea would say: “Who are we in the hands of an angry God?”

One day, Pronek and Andrea descended to the miniature rooms. “Begin to your left,” said the sign on the wall, and when they began to their right, an elderly lady, the Cerberus of the miniature rooms, with a puffy hairdo and thin lips, issued a warning with a fiery glance and a significant tightening of her lips, so they began to their left. There was a fair-haired brat darting around like a crazed colt, and occasionally peering behind the pane into the miniature rooms. Then he would start running around again and holler: “Awesome, baby! Awesome, baby!” The rooms were small, very small. Pronek had never seen anything like that. A “Pennsylvania 1760” room had minuscule armchairs and desks, and a minute fireplace, with tiny fake flames. There was a little carpet and wee windows, and, behind them, a garden illuminated by an invisible sun. Pronek was the only one looking into the “Pennsylvania 1760” room, so he was the only one to see a minikin figure, with long white hair, and an impish mini-grin, running across the miniature room. Pronek could hear the tapping, the barely audible, evanescent, echoes of the creature’s tiny steps, which then disappeared into the garden.

Doubtless, a hallucination.

The brat was revolving around a center invisible to anyone but him, still shrieking; “Awesome, baby!” but then he got much too dizzy and collapsed on the floor. He lay right below a “Virginia 1790” room, holding his blond watermelon in his hands, panting, still saying: “Awesome, baby!”

Andrea went with Pronek to check out his coat, and Pronek said: “How can you ever know that you’re getting right coat? Maybe everything you have is replaced by something else. I think, maybe they’re going through your pockets. They’re photographing what’s in there, making keys, and changing everything. So when you get out, everything is different, and your memories don’t look right, so you change them.” He put his coat on. “You know what I mean? I cannot ever know that this is my real, old coat, but I must wear it anyway, because there’s no other coat, and I must make memories about it.”

“You Eastern Europeans are pretty weird,” Andrea said.

When Pronek came back home (albeit it was Andrea’s home), Carwin leapt off the couch, in all likelihood interrupted while masturbating, and hurried to his room. Pronek changed the channel from The Dukes of Hazzard to CNN and saw a crowd of people in front of the parliament building in Sarajevo, cowering and hastening to find cover, or just roaming, confused by the sniper fire. There was a quick shot of a sneakered foot paired with a sneakerless foot, both twitching, and a rotund big toe protruding, while the rest of the body was obscured by a cluster of people trying to help, some of them crying and wiping their tears with bloody hands.

Then there was the national weather forecast, so Pronek got up and got himself a dirty glass of ginger ale.

Jozef Pronek decided to stay in the United States, possibly for the rest of his life, in the middle of a snowy night, as snowflakes were pressing their crystal faces against the window pane, after Carwin dropped a pot of rotting spaghetti on the floor and said: “Fuck!” He woke up, his heart pounding again (yes, it had pounded before), having dreamt of dogs tearing his body apart — a German shepherd going for his throat, a poodle for his calves. Through the door ajar, he could see Carwin trying to clean and spreading the red mush, as if painting, all over the floor. It looked like blood and brains to Pronek. He imagined himself lying on that floor, the insides of his head slowly leaking out, feeling no pain, just dizziness. Carwin, having pensively scratched his crotch, decided to abandon the cover-up, said: “Fuck!” once again to seal his uncompromising decision, and then stomped toward the couch to watch TV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This is depressing,” Carwin said.

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

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

“Are you going back?” Chad asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I never was in Boston,” Nana said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hmm,” Andrea’s father said.

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

“I was,” Pronek said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yugoslavia, Mom, Yugoslavia,” Andrea said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who are you?” she asked.

“I’m Andrea’s friend,” Pronek said.

“Good,” she said.

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

“That’s true,” Andrea’s mother said.

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

“No, Nana,” Pronek said. “I’m sorry.”

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

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

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

But then he saw a sign in the misty window of the ice cream parlor saying COME IN, so he decided to have some ice cream. He greeted the owner (in English), a Russian man who grew his mustache in proportion to the growth of his business.

At this particular moment, it was the thin mustache of a passionate toreador.

Pronek got a large scoop of rainbow sorbet, and began licking it with ardor immediately, careful to devote equal attention to each color, his tongue becoming multicolored in the process. He foolishly glanced at the corner drug dealer, who mad-dogged him for an intense moment. Pronek collected himself enough to look down at the tips of his shoes, which were habitually uncomfortable, while his tormented big toe occasionally wiggled in pain.

As the train was stopping, he licked away the rainbow and munched away the cone. A sliding door opened right before him (“Open Sesame,” he thought). He entered the car and the door closed behind him. “Twenty-two minutes to downtown,” said a sign. The car was empty, except for the man who talked to his hands. Pronek had seen him before: the man gibbering into his palms, his hands supine in his lap, every now and then poking the center of his left palm with his right index finger, pressing a magic button. The clatter and murmur of the speeding train made Pronek drowsy, so he closed his eyes. He heard the hum of his blood, and for reasons not known to us, a rather meaningless sequence of words reached the spawny surface of his mind: “Split my head like a watermelon.” He opened his eyes and saw the new passengers, just materialized around him, inconspicuously surrounding him. The man who talked to his palms was collecting every piece of paper he could find: he would slide under the seats to retrieve a leaflet saying: “Lord is with you”; he would empty McDonald’s bags on the floor, and then fold them up; he would stuff newspaper pages into his trench coat, covered with different shades of filth. Finally, he sat in front of Pronek and began peeling off a Guardian Angels sticker on the window, as if his job were to collect evidence of a vast crime. The man kept refrowning, waves of worries slamming against the inside of his forehead. Pronek watched his long yellow nails with a crescent of gray dirt clawing the sticker, then he panned to the man’s temple and saw (zoom) a louse crawling through the man’s ashen hair.

Split my head like a watermelon.

Downtown Chicago had streets named after deceased presidents, and Pronek thought that it was built as the presidents played monopoly in heaven (or hell, let us not be presumptuous), and then piled up buildings on their streets after a favorable roll of the dice. Pronek went eastward down Jackson to Michigan Avenue, and then walked north, until he found the Boudin French Sourdough Bakery.

A woman, labeled Dawn Wyman by a little steel name tag on her semitransparent shirt, was waiting for him. Her hair was puffed up, as if there was a steady stream of warm air coming out of her skull. Her eyelids were efficiently blue, echoing the hue of her skirt. She had eyeball-shaped earrings, whose quaking pupils glared at Pronek.

“Where are you from?” Dawn asked.

“Bosnia,” Pronek said.

“That’s in Russia, right?”

“It was in Yugoslavia.”

“Right. Well, tell me why you would like to work for us.”

A man with a white cowboy hat was sitting in the corner, under a picture of the first Boudin Bakery, established in San Francisco in the black-and-white times. He was excavating shit-brown spoonfuls of something from a round loaf of bread. Then he determinedly shoved the plastic spoon into his mouth.

“I like European touch here,” Pronek said.

“Right,” Dawn said and routinely smiled. There was a shade of lipstick on her white teeth. “We like to provide something different, something for the customer with sophisticated taste and international experience.”

“Right,” Pronek said.

“What do you think you can offer to the Boudin French Sourdough Bakery?”

The man in the cowboy hat dropped the spoon in the loaf, smacked his lips, then took off his big hat and wiped his melon, with a bulbous wart above the right eyebrow. He put his hat back on, stood up, pulled his pants to the middle of his belly, then emptied the tray into a garbage bin. The loaf slid into the black gaping orifice of the bin, and Pronek heard the whump.

“I can offer hard work and life experience. I am hard worker and I like to work with people. I used to be journalist and communicated very much,” he said.

“Right,” Dawn said, looking at the application, uninterested. “What do you expect your wage to be?”

“I don’t know. Ten dollars for hour.”

“We can offer you five, and maybe later you can work your way up. Here everyone has a fair chance.”

“Good,” Pronek said.

Thus Pronek became a member of the large Boudin French Sourdough family, and was consequently given the respectable and responsible duty of kitchen help.

He cut croissants open, spread Dijon mustard all over their insides (“Not too much,” Dawn would suggest in passing), and then pass them on to the sandwich person (“This is the sandwich person. This is the kitchen help,” Dawn introduced them to each other). He was taken off that job, after he nearly sliced off his left thumb and passed on a sequence of blood-soaked croissants to the sandwich person. He would cut tomatoes into thin slices (“Thinner,” Dawn would suggest in passing), and he would sprinkle cheese crumbles over a platoon of mini-pizzas. He would fill up styrofoam bowls with the reduced-sodium, fat-free Cajun gumbo soup, and pass them on to the soup person, until he dipped his incised thumb into a scorching jumbo gumbo (“Small bowl — large gumbo. Big bowl — jumbo gumbo,” Dawn succinctly explained the essence of the gumbo situation), whereupon he dropped the bowl on the floor, earning a couple of burns on his ankles. He would cut off the top of a sourdough loaf, and then disembowel it, throwing the soft yeast-smelling viscera into a garbage can, feeling dreadfully guilty for some reason, so he ate a lot of it the first day, and received gut-wrenching cramps as a punishment. Then he would fill up the hollow with reduced-fat chili.

The first time he went to the safe-like Frigidaire to get a lettuce head, the doors closed slowly behind him and he found himself in the midst of an immutable gelid hum, feebly lit by a solitary bulb. He imagined freezing to death, being found frosted, his eyes wide open, minuscule icicles on his eyelashes, lying with his pate stuck in a crate of lettuce. He began pounding the door, yelping for help, but no one was out there, no one could hear him. He leaned his head against the door in moribund desperation, and his forehead stuck to the icy surface. He tried to peel it off, but it was painful and he was overwhelmed by fatalistic weakness.

So when Dawn opened the door, he stumbled out, his forehead pulled by the force of Dawn, and then stood before her with a scarlet mark across his forehead.

“What are you doing?” she asked, her plucked eyebrows rising into two symmetrical nail clips.

“I was closed there,” Pronek said.

“You can open the door from the inside, you just have to push it a little,” she said.

“Oh, I know,” Pronek said and hastened toward the safety of dish-washing duties.

From that point on in his food-service career, Pronek was firmly in charge of garbage disposal. He became an apprentice to a man named Hemon. Pronek didn’t know whether Hemon was the man’s first or the man’s last name, but he was from the Dominican Republic, and came to the United States to become a professional soccer player. Pronek inferred Hemon’s soccer dream, after he pointed at himself and kept repeating: “McMannaman,” and then made the motion of kicking a soccer ball. Hemon was tall and, Pronek thought, not particularly intelligent, although he would say nothing, since he spoke no English. They would empty abandoned trays with hollowed-out loaves, mauled croissants, desiccated bowls, into garbage bins; they would pull out loaded garbage bags, tie a knot around the bag’s throat and drag them like corpses (“Hurry,” Dawn would suggest in passing) to the garbage cart in a back nook of the kitchen. Pronek would push the cart with Hemon, who did it with habitual despondency, down the hall beyond the kitchen, through the mean swinging doors that would always slam their backs or heels, then wait for the elevator. There was a little camera above the door, glaring down at them. They would stare at the elevator door in silence, waiting for it to slide open. They would press the lowest button and stand by the garbage, separated by the cart, as if they were honorary guards saluting an important casket. They would go all the way to the bottom, sinking into the molasses of silence, and when the door would slide open, a billow of cold, putrescent air would slap their faces. They would push the cart into a low-ceilinged grotto with a humongous garbage container, often brimming over with the black garbage bags, in its center.

To their simple minds, this was the supreme garbage bin, to which they were compelled to offer daily oblations.

They would push the cart onto an altar-like lift, hook up the axle of the cart, then raise it to the edge of the container. One of them would push a red button that would make the altar flip over and empty out the cart. Often, the cart would just maliciously drop in, and they would have to enter the supreme garbage bin, which would groan with pleasure. They would have to lift the cart above their heads, up to their knees in rotting food, and midwife it out of the bin, as a mixture of mayo, Dijon mustard, vinegar, gumbo, and reduced-fat chili crawled down their forearms. They would wash the garbage remnants out of the cart, wash their hands (“Employees must wash their hands,” the sign over the sink said) never being able to wash thin lines of dirt out of the furrows of their palms.

At their lunch breaks, Pronek and Hemon would sit in bilingual silence, gawking at the people occupying Boudin tables: a man with a dragon spewing fire on his forearm and a patch over his eye, slurping jumbo gumbo, meticulously unshaven; a lone, slender, black woman reading Seven Spiritual Laws of Growth, having bitten off only the tip of her crescent croissant; an obese four-member family, with the same pumpkin heads, round girths and oblong calves, as if they belonged to a species that reproduced by fission; a gentleman in a austere navy-blue suit, with standard CEO gray hair and rimless glasses, reading a surfing magazine, while several leaves of romaine lettuce lay neatly stacked next to his styrofoam plate; two teenage boys sporting facial cobwebs and “Smashing Pumpkins” T-shirts, walled off by a parapet of shopping bags, rating breasts (referring to them as “doves”) available in the Boudin French Sourdough Bakery; a bespectacled, perspiring, bald, scrawny man talking to a virgin bag of potato chips (“Do you think I’m afraid of you? Well, you’re wrong!”), which Pronek afterward quickly and warily dumped into a bin.

“What kind of evolutional soup did these people’s lives emerge from?” Pronek wondered (not in quite so many words and in his native language). “How did they become who they are and not someone else?” He would (wrongly) assume that Hemon might understand him, because of the labor experience they had shared, and he would try to talk to him about the tortuous questions of the randomness of life and death, about how easy it was to become someone else, a complete stranger to oneself, once one lost control of “the river of life.” But Hemon did not understand a word of Pronek’s pondering — he would just wearily smile, point at himself with his thumb bent backward and say: “McMannaman!”

Pronek would ride the El back to his (well, Andrea’s) place, standing, with the pain in his legs as solid as steel rods, the car full of exhausted people, exuding sweaty fragrances, bunched together, like asparagus in the supermarket.

Andrea went to Ukraine (“I need some space,” she said to Pronek. “But you can stay here”), and the apartment was being renovated, since Andrea’s parents wanted to sell it. Carwin moved in with Chad, so there were only four Polish construction workers waiting for Pronek, stripping off walls, ripping out door posts, and digging up the floor tiles. There was a nylon path leading to Andrea’s room, weighed down with paint cans. Pronek had to go under the ladder, which kept changing its position every day, and then stumbled through the jungle of wet brushes, obscure tools, strewn crooked nails, and paint smudges to get to the room, which now looked like a monk’s cell: only the bed, a little tower of books, hollow suitcases, a TV, and a mound of filthy, moist clothes decaying in the corner. He would enter it as if it were a submarine that would take him to the placidity of the ocean bottom: nameless fish, flattened by the incomprehensible pressure of the great water, glimmering plankton and evanescent protozoa floating slowly by his window in absolute, mesmerizing silence. He would stay in the room until the workers were gone and then, disregarding the skinned walls and distended door cavities, he would heat up a can of tomato soup, sprinkle it with some oregano redolent of hay. The sink was empty now, all the plates and mold were gone, except for a single fork, which he used to empty a can of soggy tuna. He would slurp the soup in Andrea’s bed, the tuna waiting its turn, watching Headline News: Sarajevo was besieged, there was a severe lack of food, there were rumors of Serbian concentration camps, but he only watched the images to recognize the people in them. Once he thought he saw his father, running down Sniper’s Alley, but he couldn’t be sure, because the man hid his head behind a folded-up newspaper. The man’s gait looked familiar though: big strides, the man slightly bent forward, his right arm swaying like a pendulum.

He would then go to sleep. He stopped turning the light off after he had seen footage of Sarajevo at night, in complete, endless darkness, with bullets and rockets incising and illuminating the sky. His sleep would be well short of restful, marred by nightmares and an anxious bladder.

In the morning, the Polish workers would wake him up with their diligent chitter-chatter. When they began taking the ceiling down they exposed the rib-like beams, and Pronek would have a feeling of waking up inside a whale. The Poles would try to communicate with him, but he couldn’t understand them — even though all the words and sounds were disturbingly familiar, as if he were coming back, and very slowly at that, from an abyss of amnesia. He would sit in the kitchen sipping feculent coffee and gnawing on a sapless Twinkie, watching them busting the ceiling, dust coating their bushy eyebrows and basketball-shaped bellies. They held the hammers in their sturdy hands with wide thumbs and flat, broad nails, slamming the ceiling above them with ease.

Pronek imagined those hammers splitting his head like a watermelon.

Pronek got fired the day he saw a picture, framed with the red edges of the Time magazine front page, of a man in a Serbian concentration camp: the man stood behind three thin lines of barbed wire, skin tautly stretched across his rib cage, facial hair eating his face away. He was not looking at the camera and the reader behind it, Pronek thought, not knowing whether being in the picture would save him or kill him.

Pronek mumbled his way through the Boudin French Sourdough Bakery kitchen, to his locker, while a surge of heat kept pushing his eyeballs out. He put on his red Boudin apron and a little beret (“Don’t wear it like a baseball hat,” Dawn said in passing. “It’s a beret”) and went to empty the waiting trays.

He was listlessly piling up trays on the top of the bin, when a man in a grass-green shirt, with a golfer-shade swinging a golf club in its coronary area said: “Young man, would you please come here!” Pronek obediently walked to the man’s table and stood there, as vague hatred brewed in his muscles. The man had nicely combed blond hair, and Pronek could see the immaculate line disappearing into the pate. The man pointed at the croissant on his plate — there was a monstrous golden seal ring on his pinkie — and said: “I wanted romaine lettuce on my Turkey Dijon. Excuse me, but this is not romaine lettuce. This is iceberg lettuce. What do you have to say about that?”

Pronek was about to go and tell the sandwich person about the problem, but then, abruptly overwhelmed with a desire not to be there at the moment, said: “Nothing.”

“I’d like my Turkey Dijon with romaine lettuce please,” the man said.

“What’s difference?” Pronek said.

“Excuse me,” the man raised his voice, his double chin doubly corrugated in disbelief.

“Romaine lettuce, iceberg lettuce, what’s difference?” Pronek said, with a sudden vision of stuffing the lettuce leaf into the man’s mouth.

“May I talk to someone who can speak English, please?” the man said and pushed his tray away with resolve, as the croissant shuddered and slid to the edge of the plate. Pronek felt pain climbing up his calves, passing his pelvis, to settle in his stomach as a cramp. He wanted to say something, something clever that would smash the man, but could not think of any English words that could convey the magnitude of the absurdity, other than: “Romaine lettuce, iceberg lettuce, what’s difference?” He kept mumbling it to himself, like a magic word that would make him fly, and wobbled away in a vain hope that the man might just give it up.

But the man, naturally, did not give it up, for he demanded — and rightly so — full and responsible service for his hard-earned money.

Pronek kept cleaning the trays maniacally, filling up the bins with eviscerated bread-bowls, shriveled croissants, pizza edges, jagged watermelon slices, salad tidbits, slimy nonfat yogurt, jumbo-gumbo slough, filling up garbage bags, as if filling them up would stop the flow of time and stop Dawn from coming over to him with the man. As Dawn was walking toward him with the livid man in tow, Hemon looked at him askance, dragging a bag cadaver, as if trying to understand what might have possessed him to disobey. Pronek wanted to tell him, but Hemon, of course, would not have understood.

Thus, Pronek stood facing the man, as he ranted, pointing in the general direction of his croissant, while Dawn stood alternately looking at the tips of her blue shoes and glancing at Pronek, trying to place him as the main character of the man’s story. When the man stopped his recitation, and looked at Dawn expecting her to come to the verdict, Pronek whimpered: “Romaine, iceberg, all same.”

“I’m sorry,” Dawn said. “But we have to let you go.”

“I go,” Pronek said. “No problem. I go.”

In the spring of 1993, Pronek found out, after a series of complicated information transactions — which involved a Red Cross person in Sarajevo, a ham-radio operator, a cousin residing in France, and Zbisiek, one of the Polish construction workers, who picked up the phone — that his parents were on the list for a convoy that would soon leave the city.

“When?” Pronek asked Zbisiek, whose blue eyes, framed by ruptured blood vessels, were moist with Slavic compassion.

“He didn’t said it,” Zbisiek said.

It was then that Pronek began fearing for his parents’ lives, because — and this might sound strange to us — he realized that if they were killed they would not be able to get on the bus and leave the city, and, consequently, he would never see them again. He realized all of a sudden that people in Sarajevo were dying all the time, and that meant that whatever they wanted or needed to do next they wouldn’t be able to do if they died: get up and walk in the dark, cold apartment; pee and then wash the dead toilet with a canful of water, previously used for washing their bodies; light a cigarette while hiding in the darkest corner, lest the patient sniper see the glimmer; sit down; cower; burst into tears; stand in a bread line, waiting for the soundless shell to land and kill. Before that, Pronek would feel for the people in Sarajevo he would see on TV, and the suffering was immense and well rendered. They had seemed capable of coming to the end of suffering, just like all the other suffering people, but death meant even the end of suffering. So he would watch CNN footage of people with familiar faces crawling in their own blood, begging the unflinching camera for help; people twitching and throttling as their stumps spurted blood; people who were trying to help them dropping like an imploded building, shot by a sniper; and he would know that was the end of their lives — that they would never touch a doorknob; never have their toes hurting in uncomfortable shoes; never flush a toilet; wear a condom; eat lettuce; suffer. Pronek realized that he had never known what death was and that he was never entirely present in his own life, because he thought — without really thinking — that it would last forever. He never thought enough of other people — his parents, for instance — because he never thought that they might die.

He looked up the word in the dictionary: “Death—the complete and irreversible cessation of life in an organism or part of an organism.”

He remembered how his mother used to whine about unfolding his sticky, soggy socks before dropping them in the washing machine, and it hurt to know that if she never got on the convoy, he would never be able to tell her he was sorry now.

He began devouring Snickers and Babe Ruths and Cheerios and Doritos and burritos and everything he could put into his mouth, as if it were his ultimate morsel, so he gained thirty flabby pounds.

So long, handsome youth.

He worked as a busboy in a Mexican restaurant, until he dropped a pitcher of sky-blue margaritas into the lap of the local cop weighing some three hundred pounds.

He panicked, walking down the street, upon realizing that he didn’t know the names of the trees (maple, chestnut, lime, oak, etc.) and flowers (marigold, petunia, lily, iris, etc.) and cars (Toyota, Nissan, Cadillac, Infiniti, etc.), and they all appeared as blank spots, like pages out of a photo album from which all the pictures had been ripped out. He forced himself to divert his hollow gaze from the streets he didn’t comprehend, and walked looking before his feet: concrete cracks, flat cigarette butts, broken twigs, petrified footprints. He wished he were blind.

He enjoyed a series of interminable sinus infections, which produced a host of splitting headaches and stuffed his ears with thick earwax, whereby all the sounds around him were transformed into a continuous shushing hum, while he himself started mumbling. He couldn’t understand anything people were saying to him, as he murmured incomprehensibly back at them. Accordingly, he started mumbling to himself, giggling, grimacing, and growling in response to his own inaudible discourse.

He had an interview for the position of a busboy in a Vietnamese restaurant, while the interviewer — a puny bespectacled man, armed with a cellular phone sheathed on his hip — looked at him, vexed.

He slept surrounded by paint cans, in the midst of a noxious mist. He would have to take the ladder out so he could lay the mattress down (the bed was gone), since the Poles had begun taking his room apart. The Poles clearly thought he had lost his mind, and one day gave him thirty-three dollars they had collected among themselves. Pronek muttered a thank-you in some super-Slavic language.

He stopped killing cockroaches, after he came back from an aimless walk and found the roach motel packed. He picked it up, yesterday’s dried-up roaches hanging from the ceiling, and today’s roach, stuck in sweet-smelling glue, turned its antennas toward him, greeting him. “Honey,” Pronek said. “I’m home.”

He began hating the blithe meaninglessness of baseball.

He worked as a parking assistant in the vicinity of Wrigley Field, waving at cars on ball-game days, in order to mesmerize them into parking. He quit the job upon a painful epiphany of his absurdity, as he revolved his arm like a windmill.

He began thinking of himself as someone else — a cartoon character, a dog, a detective, a madman — and began fantasizing about abandoning his body altogether and becoming nothing, switching it off like the TV.

He couldn’t watch movies in which people were killed and blown away with ease, because he began reconstructing the process of creating the blood-spurting effects and the movies became transparent.

He began hating Bill Clinton — spitting at the TV screen every time he was on — because he was able to produce a twinkle in his eye whenever he appeared before cameras.

He attempted to earn his crust of bread as a bilingual water-filter and health-inducing-cookware salesmen, which folded up after his supervisor-to-be — an ex-football player in a double-breasted suit and a goatee framing his fat, optimistic snout — told him that if he wasn’t “gonna smile more and with more heart,” there was “no buck in this business” for him.

He stopped desiring women, and began masturbating detachedly, not even fantasizing. Afterward he would spend hours in the shower, wanting to wash the filth off his skin, until he thought of water shortages in Sarajevo.

He began hating himself, because he was selfish, whatever he happened to be doing, just by being alive.

He stank all the time — even the inside of his nostrils stank — and people went around him on the street, and avoided sitting by him on the EL.

He answered a job ad, and listened to a voice saying, before he could say a thing: “Do you wanna make money?” “Well, it depends …” he responded, and the voice said: “This ain’t no job for sissies,” and hung up.

He began fantasizing about punching rock stars in their big fucking mouths, because they complained all the fucking time about being fucking unhappy.

We wish he had approached us then, we would have helped him.

He realized that his previous life was completely beyond anyone’s reach and that he could entirely reinvent it, create a legend, like a spy.

He had dreams involving his parents: his father would sacrifice a rook in a chess game, and Pronek would beg him not to do so, for it would lead to a checkmate; his mother would take books off the shelves, rip the pages with pictures and then burn them in an iron stove, because she was cold all the time.

He interviewed for a job as a bike messenger, which was going marvelously, until he was informed that he needed his own bike and helmet.

He realized that he was invisible, and he desired being watched — he imagined a camera that would always follow him everywhere and record all the inconsequential and infinitesimal actions of his life.

He briefly worked the graveyard shift at White Castle, stealing the small burgers and taking them home to eat them cold, his pockets reeking of rotting processed meat and dissolving minced onion.

In the fall of 1993, Andrea’s father came, struggling his way through the Polish debris, and solemnly informed Pronek that he would have to move out, for the apartment was successfully sold to a distinguished realtor, and they had to finish it as soon as possible — the Poles were to work day and night. Pronek saw the quartet of Poles shrugging their shoulders benevolently behind Andrea’s father’s back, and, numb with despair, announced that he was presently jobless, albeit looking for work. Whereupon Andrea’s father offered to help him find employment in his wife’s house-cleaning agency, known as “Home Clean Home.”

Oh, what a lucky break for our immigrant.

Pronek took part in a delightful interview with Andrea’s mother. “I know you’re a hard worker,” she said. “It is people like you who built this great country for us.” She patted him on the back with the tips of her fingers and sent him off to the agency supervisor, a man labeled Stephen Rhee by the name tag on his heart. He was an ex-Marine, he grimly informed Pronek, and there was no screwing around with him. He had a crew cut, an immaculately ironed short-sleeve shirt, a bushy mole on his cheek, which looked like a tiny bullet wound from afar, and a tattooed eagle holding a rifle on his forearm. He tended to have a toothpick in his mouth at all times, and when Pronek told him that he used to be a writer, Rhee informed him that Jack Kerouac was the greatest writer of all time. “Dust is our mortal enemy, vacuum cleaners are our M16,” he announced to Pronek, while showing him his locker, reeking of someone else’s sweat. Before sending the crews out in the morning, he would install his fists on his hips and give a speech:

“I got four words for you: cleanliness, loyalty, shiny surfaces, privacy. We have to leave the house clean, ’cause this is a cleaning service, darn it. We work like a team, okay — if this guy leaves the bathroom filthy, then the work of that gal in the kitchen is all screwed up. Whatever is supposed to be shiny in that house must make you freakin’ blind. And — get this into your empty heads — we are entering the temples of other people’s lives. Don’t you even begin to think about touching anything that does not need to be cleaned. There must be no traces of your being there, other than absolute cleanliness.”

Yep, they cleaned in Hinsdale, Orland Park, Deerfield, Highland Park, Glencoe, Schaumburg, Oak Park, Wilmette, Winnetka, Forest Park, Lake Forest, Park Forest, Kildeer, Lake Bluff, all over Chicagoland.

Once they even went for a big job in Normal.

Being a novice, Pronek became a bathroom cleaner, “the shit boy.” He would enter the bathroom and scan it first. He would look behind a shower curtain: the wall tiles smudged with soap and skin-froth; curled hair at the bottom of the bathtub, like earthworms who didn’t make it to the soft ground; the shower looming over the tub like a buzzard head; caged shampoos, hanging on the shower’s thin neck. The toilet gaping, the seat lifted and the bowl specked with urine droplets; pubic hairs stuck to its side, as if climbing up; a crumpled and soiled piece of toilet paper behind. The mirror dotted with toothpaste foam, sprinkled from someone’s mouth last night; toothpaste tubes writhing below the mirror, with a thumbprint in the middle; liquid-soap bottles, like limbless flamingoes, with the nozzles sticking out; stolid bottles of beauty: moisturizers, replenishing creams, aftershaves, conditioners.

Upon inspection, Pronek would clean, slowly and mercilessly effacing all remnants and traces of bodies. He grew to like doing it, because he would stop thinking about himself and everyone else, focusing on hairs and stains, enjoying their steady, inevitable disappearing. The whole world would be reduced to a pimple-pus speck on the mirror, which he would swiftly wipe off. Everything in the bathroom would attain mind-absorbing magnitude, and he would become smaller and smaller, until he would completely abandon all thoughts of himself and everything outside that bathroom and become a transcendental cleaning force. Having finished cleaning, he would feel purified, as if his self changed profoundly while being away from him.

In that manner, he became a true professional. His wage rose from $6 per hour to $6.50 per hour, and Rhee allowed him to go occasionally on “solo missions”—cleaning Lincoln Park or Gold Coast condos alone.

Oh boy, did he like that: entering the apartment and the owner’s scent — perfume, shower gel, shampoo, deodorant — still lingering; furniture summoned around the TV, with a couple of proud dressers backed against the wall; maps of the world, ochre (which meant old), with dragons dipping in the corners; Ansel Adams’s photos of vapid gray desert valleys; small colorful carpets stretching on the floors like lazy, content cats; a tall CD rack, the Sears Tower of the condo; a staunch bookshelf with books standing straight like soldiers at attention: Independence Day; Seven Spiritual Laws of Growth; What’s Inside — A User’s Guide to the Soul; The Client; The Heart of Darkness; Eating in Tuscany; Investing Today; Mind for Dummies; Theodore Roosevelt: A Life; The Alienist, etc.; flower pots hanging from the ceiling like miniature gardens of Babylon; an array of family pictures on the piano gazing slightly upward, like afternoon sunflowers; a bowl full of trinkets: pennies, marbles, matchboxes, business cards, condoms, paper clips; a wine rack with black bottles, like a hearse; a sign on the wall saying “No Parking — Tow Zone”; a softball trophy, with a golden figure on a tiny pedestal throwing a golden marble (“Grace Cup ‘92”); the computer and its black screen closely monitoring his every move.

Sometimes, Pronek would sit in a comfortable armchair, and try to imagine his life in this condo: he would walk in through that door, still checking the mail — stacks of letters from his friends, from all parts of the world — take off his shoes and wiggle his toes. He would go to that tall, handsome bottle of scotch and pour himself a generous drink, sip, and let the warmth slowly coat his bowels; he would check the messages (“Hi! Ahmm … this is Grace, returning your call… Ahm … I’ll be real busy next week, but I think I can squeeze you in next Friday … Ummm … I kinda like Italian food, I guess …”). He would go, still sipping his drink, to the closet, slide the mirror, and hang up the navy-blue jacket, shirts, and suits hiding coyly behind each other’s backs, still happy to see him. And in the morning he would turn on the radio (“Inbound Dan Ryan pretty packed … Outbound Kennedy moving smoothly …”). He would fry a couple of eggs in the Teflon pan, while brushing his teeth, spitting the foam into his kitchen sink. He would have parties on weekends, invite his friends, and then, afterward, after the last drunken guest had left, he would make love to Grace — a voluptuous blonde from White Pigeon, Michigan — on the sofa (because they were too horny to make it to the bedroom), watched by a chorus of martini glasses, some of them violated by a cigarette butt. Sometimes, when truly blue, he would dim the lights, open a bottle of Chardonnay, play some blues (I’d Rather Go Blind Than See You Walk Away from Me), and get slowly drunk, until he passed out.

Having cleaned the condo, he would then go back to his apartment — a hollow, furnitureless studio, looking at the El tracks, which he had recently rented for $285—lie on the floor mattress, watch the ceiling fan revolving above like a gigantic demented dragonfly. Pronek understood that to maintain the sameness of every day the fan had to keep revolving; he had to leave for work at the same time, and come back with the same train; his lunch always had to be the same baloney with Wonder bread. As long as every day was as any other day, his parents would be alive, still waiting to get on the convoy.

As we’re charting the foreign territory of Pronek’s mind — expanding westward, as it were — we must not omit the marshes of involuntary memories he mired in for a while.

The first one overwhelmed him abruptly, as he was gorging himself on farmer cheese mixed with sour cream, with green onions and rye bread. As soon as the medley of tastes — the cool milkiness of farmer cheese, the pungent, sneezeful greenness of green onions, the sweetness of bread crumbs scratching his tongue — reached the palate, a shudder ran through him. A billow of warm sorrow invaded his senses, a feeling isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. He took the second morsel, chewed it sluggishly and — as the mulch slid down his throat — a memory raised slowly, like leavening dough: a summer afternoon, late July, in Sarajevo, on their balcony, looking westward at the sun setting behind the squareness of the building with big, red letters on it reading: “Long live Tito”; he was reading a comic book (“Tarzan vs. Interpol”), dropping moist chunks on the pages (Tarzan fighting a villain on the Eiffel Tower); his father reading obituaries in the back of the paper, sighing pensively, paper rustling; his mother watering flowers, their turquoise trumpets twinkling around the edges in the counterlight, niggled by bees; a bunch of his loud friends (Vampire, Cober, Deba, Armin) shouting from the park under the balcony: “Pronek, come down, bring the ball out. Let’s play cowboys and Indians!”; the sun crawling behind the “Long live Tito” building, and all the shades on the balcony disappearing from the concrete exuding warmth, until the night blanket covered everything.

Thus began a period of some twelve months in which Pronek was perpetually dazed, for the involuntary-memory sensations were no longer routine perceptions, but rather an unpleasant burden, which forced him to wallow dolefully in his previous life.

He would enter an apartment to be cleaned, and walk into a cloud of fragrance (Magie Noir) left by an absent woman, and he would instantly recall burying his face in Zu’s hair, the tickling silkiness on his cheeks; he would clean the bathtub and the chlorine stench of the cleaning potion would bring back cleaning squat toilets in the army, his hands burning afterward, the steel ball of nostalgia grinding his bowels; the smell of burned grease in the kitchen, as he was scrubbing the stove, followed him through Bascarsija, where kebab shops spewed barbecue smoke, and the uneven stone pavement under his feet made him wobble; the dust aroused by the vacuum reminded him of Saturday mornings, the cleaning time in their home, when his mother would make him crawl under the bed to reach the clusters of dust backed up against the wall — he would lie there, enjoying seclusion, his cheek stuck to the cold parquet, until his mother’s stodgy feet appeared by the bed; a sun-smudge quavering on the wall above the piano was the same one as the one on the inside of the tent wall, as he drowsed tranquilized by the heat, the tent full of the cheap coconut smell of sunscreen; pencil shavings in the basket by the desk had the same pungent, wooden smell as the color pencils he shared with Mirza, his best friend in elementary school, bringing back the September scent of waxed floors and wet chalk boards and clean children’s clothes; an array of books on the desk — three of them spread like pinned butterflies, pressing against the desk surface, their spines sticking out, as if they were doing push-ups — was on his desk once upon a time.

His head became bigger and heavier; his spine was slowly curling into a question mark; and he walked — when he walked at all — bent forward, his gaze fastened to his toes, like a dummy slowly deflating.

But while we were up to our waists in Pronek’s stream of consciousness, dear reader, fly-fishing for the psyche, the world did not stop revolving, the clock did not stop ticking. For three years have inconspicuously passed, and we’re sprouting back into the spring of 1996. In the meantime, Pronek’s parents never got on the convoy; Pronek’s father was wounded by a sniper; the TV screen became saturated, oversaturated, under-saturated, and then the exactly-opposite-of-saturated with images from Bosnia: several more broadcast massacres in the city; the mauling and massacre of Srebrenica; some more Western muscle flashing; friends shot by snipers or killed by shrapnel; rape camps; starvation stories; burning villages; Karadzic, Mladic, Milosevic shaking hands with someone; the end of the siege of Sarajevo and the war; talking to his parents once a month or so. Pronek went through all this in an aching daze, never — we’re proud to say — underperforming at his work. In fact, he became a single-condo specialist, developing a healthy herd of steady customers, who never saw him but regularly left tips for him under the fruit bowl, or on the coffee table. Now he was able to save up some money and rent a one-bedroom apartment in West Rogers Park. The apartment had slanted floors; door posts askew; hissing, hysterical silver radiators; an ancient, pink, four-legged bathtub; and an army of medium-sized cockroaches, clearly comfortable, if not excited, to have him in the apartment. We’re able to submit a telling image from the first night he spent alone in the apartment: Pronek on the floor, sandwiched between two thin, gentle blankets, the floor pleasurably hard; he’s looking across the room, the freshly polished floor glistening, like the lake on a moonlit bonanza night; in the opposite corners, miles away, in the dimness of otherness, his two suitcases, like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza — the thin, tall suitcase full of books and papers, and the fat one bulging with dirty clothes and a couple of soggy towels.

In the morning, he would wake up in pain, and proud of it. He would sit on the only chair and eat cereal and milk out of a leaking wooden bowl between his knees (he hadn’t had enough to buy a table), and watch a morning sunbeam coyly entering his apartment, like a curious squirrel. Oh, the nippy mornings of the 1996 spring. The warm winds peeled off the snow cover, but there were still decaying snow patches around, like spit-foam. As he was riding somnolent buses down Devon on his way to the El that would take him to work, his past nightmares transmogrified into the haze of the morning present. He watched the street gliding by, looking for signs that he was awake and, indeed, alive: a revolving breasted bust in the wedding-dress store window; Beanie Babies piled up in Noah’s Ark; women in saris walking down Mozart Street; World Shoes; East-West Appliances; Universal Distributors; a man in a white shirt installing a bucketful of roses in front of his flower shop; Cosmos Press; Garden of Eden Cocktail Bar; leaflets taped to light posts, signposts, mailboxes reading “Pray for wisdom for Mike”; Miracle Medical Center; Acme Vacuum; a tailor-on-duty sign held by a tailor dummy. Every morning was like the first morning, because Pronek would forget the morning at the end of the working day.

One morning in April, Pronek saw, through the mizzly curtain, the tailor dummy waving at him. He decided to go to Sarajevo, because he realized it was all right, because the incredible thing was that every place had a name, and everybody and everything in that place had a name, and you could never be nowhere, because there was something everywhere. The only way, Pronek thought, to be nowhere was not to be at all.

How is this related to his decision, we cannot fathom.

In any case, he saved up a little more money, bought a plane ticket, and flew to Sarajevo, via Vienna, in May. Presently, we will give him his voice back and let him talk for himself. Ideally, of course, he would speak in his native language, but, unfortunately, that is not possible. Here are, then, his authentic, fresh, and realistic experiences:

As the plane was descending, I saw ochre patches, like scars, in the greenness of the mountains.

The houses along the runway were bullet-ridden, and as the plane was touching down, I felt as if I were inside of a bullet speeding toward the target.

I gave my passport to the man behind the glass pane. He looked at the passport, then he looked at me, then he looked at the passport. Be-hind his back, there was a young man in a dusk-blue suit and a tie as thin as a wicker. He had a cellular phone, and glanced around, monitoring the arriving passengers. Then he leaned over the uniformed man’s shoulder, glanced at my passport, then at me. He was a spook.

Dobrinja, across from the airport, looked like it was marauded by a world of ravenous termites. It looked built of holes and about to crumble. There was yellow tape stretching everywhere, reading “Mines.”

The cab driver did not turn on the taxi meter and I suggested he should do it. He said, with a gorgeous mumbling Sarajevo accent, What are you worried about? You’ll pay. But how will I know the amount, I asked. You’ll know, you’ll know, he said. We argued, until he pulled over, turned toward me, unbuttoned his shirt to show me a scar near his navel and said, Listen, I didn’t spend four years in the trenches, defending this city, to turn on the taxi meter now, all right? All right.

Building after building pockmarked with bullet holes, gouged out windows and lives that used to go on in those apartments, piles of rubble, burnt cars, burnt buses, burnt kiosks, burnt streetcars. This is the movie theater where I saw Apocalypse Now for the first time, burnt.

As soon as I stepped out of the cab, I saw Aida. I hadn’t seen her for years. When we were kids, she drew a heart on her forearm and inscribed my name on it, with a ballpoint pen. I was happy to see her, I hugged her. She was married, she had a son, born in the middle of the siege. I was so happy to see her. How is life? I said. How is your mother? Her mother used to make heavenly baklava. Her mother was killed, she said, by a sniper, at the beginning. She saw it, because her mother ran ahead of her across a sniper-watched street, she was struck and killed instantly.

My mother and my father were waiting in front of our apartment building. My father embraced me, and we stayed locked, saying nothing. Then my mother embraced me, and she wept and wept.

A bullet had hit my father in the left cheek and then had simply gone out the other side. He had two scars on his cheeks, like two symmetrical warts, and he lisped now. He said, Had I had my mouth shut, I would’ve been dead. The Kalashnikov bullet is very light, he explained, but has a high velocity so when it gets inside the body and hits the bone, it doesn’t stop, it ricochets around, tearing everything apart. See, he said, if the bullet hit my teeth before it went out, it would have bounced around all over my head, shredding my brains, until my head was all mushy inside, like a watermelon.

I went through my parents’ apartment, touching everything: the clean, striped tablecloth; the radio, with seven ivory-colored buttons and a Donald Duck sticker; the grinning African masks; the carpets with intricate, yet familiar, geometric patterns, full of gashes, from under which the parquet was gone, burnt in the rusty iron stove in the corner; the demitasse, the coffee grinder, the spoons; Father’s suits, damp, with shrapnel slashes; the black doorknobs, the cuckoo clock, now defunct; the crystal vase, the complete works of Joseph Conrad, half of which were gone, burned in the stove; the dripping faucets; the pictures, black-and-white and color. There’s the three of us on the beach in Makarska, my mother on the left with a scarf and dark sunglasses, my father on the right with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, me in the middle, sitting on a confounded, sad donkey with a sombrero on its head.

There were no windows in the room that used to be mine. Instead, there were nylon sheets, with UNHCR written on them, in blue, orderly letters, flapping and bloating in the wind.

I went out for a walk with my mother. My father didn’t like to go out anymore, except for work, because he always felt that someone was watching him. She showed me where Vera, their neighbor, was killed. As soon as Mother and Vera stepped out of the building, arm in arm, Vera was hit in the heart and swirled to the right, my mother showed me the pirouette, and she just dropped right here, still clutching her purse, and then she throttled, spewing blood. I didn’t know what to do, my mother said.

On the pavement, all over the city there were roses — the points of the shell impact. A tiny crate and a few straight lines, of uneven length, like sun rays on a child’s drawing.

There was a rose of the shell that massacred the bread line on Ferhadija. Amela, a friend’s daughter, died there. A piece of shrapnel entered through the back of her head and burst out through her face, taking it apart. Adil, her father, operated on her himself, putting her face together, so they could bury her properly.

There was graffiti on the wall by “Egypt”: “Samir loves D.” Who was D? Where would she be now?

I looked at Trebevic, a peaceful mountain now, dark and silent. My father pointed at it. The Chetniks could see us like the palm of their hand, he said. Right above the roof line, he showed me, was the front line, a thin gray thread in the green, barely discernible.

I thought I would never see you again, Veba said. He lost about thirty pounds. There was not much to eat, you know. Rice or nothing, he said. I had to climb up to the fifteenth floor to get to his apartment. The next door apartment was hollow, charred black, pigeons nesting and cooing. Veba spent the war in the Bosnian army, but now he wanted to go to Canada.

Veba said he worked with a guy who used to be a sharpshooter and was kind of famous for killing two girls on the other side with a single bullet. He was on the top of Hotel Bristol and they were playing somewhere across the river.

There was the intersection where I had the only car accident of my life, rear-ending a tractor. The streetlights were out, one of them was dangling like a shot-off limb, right above a scorched ambulance car.

My mother and I finally talked my father into taking a walk with us. Neighbors greeted us, and we greeted them, and sometimes we would stop and talk. And how is America? they’d ask. Fine, I’d say, hard work. We walked by the Miljacka, under the blooming crowns of chestnut trees. The river had been the front line, so the trees had not been cut for firewood. We walked to the apartment where I used to live. Some refugees from eastern Bosnia lived there. Nice people, my parents said, but very scared. They would let you in, probably, to look around, but they would be scared.

We stood across the street, looking at the UNHCR nylon. A shadow passed across the nylon screen, then another one. I could imagine them preparing a meager dinner, going over to the cupboard, taking out plates, setting them up on the table. Then taking out the utensils, dropping a fork on the floor, perhaps, then spitting on it and wiping it with a cuff. I could see them sweeping and washing the floors; washing the tub; scraping the filthy film in the sink; scrubbing the toilet bowl; vacuuming the carpets. I suddenly had a feeling that I had stepped out of my life and that I was watching myself, that the shadow behind the nylon was me.

I imagined standing in a water line, surrounded by plastic vessels, and then a shell comes soundlessly out of nowhere and hits the asphalt and the person in front of me is mowed down instantly. I can sense that something is wrong with my body and I look down and I am kneeling, my thighs are ripped apart, spouting blood. I topple over and bang my head against the pavement, but there is no pain, I am surprised. And right in the line of my rapidly fainting gaze there is the rose, still warm, filled up with the blood oozing out of my head. But I could never imagine the moment of death, I could never imagine vanishing, so my imagination stays fixed on the rose.

“There is no way you can get in,” the Austrian officer said, tightening his pale lips to express the disapproval of Pronek’s attempt to enter Austria without a visa. The width of his mustache exactly matched the width of his mouth at that moment. Pronek stared into the officer’s greenish eyes, clutching his Bosnian passport in his extended hand. “But all I want is to take look at Vienna,” Pronek said. “I’ll be right back. I won’t stay. I am alien resident of United States.”

At that moment, Pronek understood that he was an oxymoron.

An Asian man, with his shoeless feet propped up on his suitcase, leaning back on the seat, watched the interlocution with drab disinterest. Pronek looked at him as if he were to be a crown witness of supreme injustice, but the man just averted his eyes and looked at a wall-wide ad picturing the Alps, promising clean water, clear air, healthy heights, far from stinky alien crowds.

Pronek went up the escalator, with his handbag full of clean knitted socks and bourek, devised by his mother, and stopped to stare at the door, revolving counterclockwise, contemplating an attempt to get out, until he saw steel bars preventing that possibility.

“Passenger Katzelmacher, please report to the Information desk,” a willowy electronic voice from above said.

He went uphill, tired people stretching uncomfortably on blue seats along the wall. He saw a Bosnian family with recognizably flat, square heads. They were lumped together, probably convinced that separating for a moment would put them in danger of never seeing one another again. A mound of a man, his navel peering out, with a flat briefcase on his rotund belly, ascending and descending. An African child in a Liverpool jersey, bundled in his mother’s lap, looking out, his eyelids slowly sliding down, closing. A man reading Russian newspapers, his brown-socked feet parallel on top of his shoes. There was a tie store, with millions of pendant ties, with only slight variations in pattern and color, dementedly echoing one another. A group of Americans led by a woman clad in an American-flag dress, her wide butt star-spangled, strolled by with their hands full of duty-free shopping bags, laughing vociferously. He saw one of the Americans, a tall, blond man, dropping his Redskins hat, not noticing and walking away, and Pronek felt a twang of glee. He imagined spending his life here in the transit zone of the Vienna airport, pickpocketing for a living, robbing Americans blind every time a planeload of American optimism and resolve was delivered. He wandered into a store populated with Mozarts staring at him askance from the box-tops. All of them had their lips tightened into a narrow line and seemed to be worried about something.

Pronek bought a box of Mozartkugeln, though he could think of no one to give it to.

“Passenger Katzelmacher, please approach the Information desk.”

Pronek approached a camera store. There was a little screen in the window and he recognized himself on the screen. He looked up and saw a tiny camera above the entrance, like a motionless, black hummingbird. He waved at himself, and he waved back at himself. Two veiled women walked into the store and began examining a Polaroid camera. He decided not to enter the store and went to the Johann Strauss Café. He crossed his legs and watched the departure billboard, and all of a sudden a tsunami of changes went through it, and Moscow was carried from the top, on the crest of a rapid wave, to the middle, where it settled down right above Bangkok. A waiter, balancing a weighty tray on three fingers, flitted by, and then began unloading plates, putting them in front of a man in a black shirt unbuttoned to his navel, and silver cross dangling between his nipples. The waiter finally put down a humongous mug of beer, and the man guzzled down half of it, before the waiter stepped away. Then he wiped the froth from his upper lip and looked straight into Pronek’s eyes.

Pronek asked for a glass of mineral water, cold.

There were people sitting in a circle, with their backs to a marble pile from which water patiently oozed. A man with a black wide-brimmed hat frowned, smoking and dropping the ashes into the palm of his left hand. A man in a tweed jacket with suede elbow patches and a gray, academic beard, flipped through a Penthouse with a woman named Grace breasting on the cover. A stream of people poured through one of the rectangular metal detectors, as if they had materialized all of a sudden, beamed down from a distant planet. They all spoke a language Pronek could not locate, occasionally clapping hands in front of each other’s faces. A woman pushed a cart with a little girl on its prow, like an admiral.

“Passenger Pronek, please report to gate number one.”

Pronek left the carefully counted Austrian coins at the table, drank the mineral water to the bottom and sauntered over to the duty-free shop. Johnny Walker, Winston, Jack Daniels, Milde Sorte, Jim Beam, Captain Morgan, Rothmans, Smirnoff, Davidoff, Coco Chanel, Jean Paul Gaultier, Absolut. Pronek walked out and looked at the departure billboard: Moscow was at the bottom, about to be gone, and he had three more hours before the flight. He did not want to fly to Chicago. He imagined walking from Vienna to the Atlantic Ocean, and then hopping on a slow trans-Atlantic steamer. It would take a month to get across the ocean, and he would be on the sea, land and borders nowhere to be found. Then he would see the Statue of Liberty and walk slowly to Chicago, stopping wherever he wished, talking to people, telling them stories about far-off lands, where people ate honey and pickles, where no one put ice in the water, where pigeons nested in pantries.

But, of course, they would never let him out of the Vienna airport, and he had to get to work on Monday.

“Do not leave your baggage unattended!” the voice warbled.

Pronek roamed back to the Johann Strauss Café and saw the man with the silver cross, guzzling down another mug. On the plate in front of him there were two identical, parallel, crescent bratwurst, along with two symmetrical puddles of ketchup and gall-yellow mustard. He felt ravenous hunger. He sat down, summoned the waiter, and ordered the bratwurst. There were violins pinned to the wall, above the Mozart-full shelf, like wingless butterflies. A gray-haired man was squeezing by between the tables, his arms and face splattered with shingles. Pronek realized that the man in the black shirt had a ripening boil on his neck — a fiery red bulb protruding right above the collar. Pronek called the waiter, labeled Johann, and informed him that he had changed his mind and he didn’t want the bratwurst. The waiter glared at him, curling up his upper lip, his apple cheeks fidgeting, and then coughed a little, perilously close to retching, saying nothing. He pulled out his pen, glaring around, and his little order-taking pad, and scratched Pronek away.

“Passenger Pronek, please report immediately to gate number one,” the willowy voice said, with a tinge of anger in it this time. Pronek finally recognized that it was his name that was being called and ceased peeling the Mozartfoil, the Mozartglobe already peering out suggesting pleasures, but he questioned the reliability of his perception, and discarded the call as another instance of aural hallucination.

“Passenger Pronek, please report immediately to gate number one!”

Now this time Pronek could not deny it. He looked around and noticed everyone staring at him with expectation. He bit into the Mozartball, picked up his hand baggage, and commenced walking cautiously toward gate number one.

We could see his reluctance, his clumsy, indecisive gait, and his crumpled, stained shorts, and his green ten-year-old corrugated polyester shirt. He walked toward the gray rectangle of the metal detector warily, as if aware that once through the gate there would be no way back.

He munched the other half of the Mozartkugeln and rolled the foil into a little ball. He stopped and looked around, as if waiting for a signal, or the audience applauding. Then he looked toward us, but he couldn’t see us behind the gate. We were waiting, knowing that he had nowhere else to go. But he showed no desire to get over there. He made a couple of wobbly steps and then stopped, unwrapped another Mozartglobe, bit into it, and just stood before the gate, chewing and smiling at us, as if he knew we were there.