Hemon - The Question of Bruno

Acclaim for Aleksandar Hemons

T HE Q UESTION OF B RUNO

Like Conrads, Hemons prose often makes the most of emphatically discordant notes: an initially incongruous word becomes a perfect choice.

The New Yorker

By turns terrifying, gently comic and brutally satiric, these are stunning stories that compel the reader to view a world renderedby repression and war and displacementabruptly alien and un familiar.

San Francisco Chronicle

The man is a maestro, a conjurer, a channeler of universes. As vivid a prose as you will find anywhere this year, and as heartbreaking.

Esquire

Like fellow immigrant Nabakov, Sarajevan Alek sandar Hemon writes powerfully in his adopted language.

Vanity Fair

The books language is rich, complex, sharply intelligent and frequently funnya pleasant surprise for readers of new fiction.

Time Out New York

A dazzling collection. In Hemons stories, comedy and cruelty always run close together.

Salon

A wonderful collection the book is undoubtedly beguiling.

The Guardian

Hemon is an original voice, and he has an imagination and talent all his own.

Entertainment Weekly

A fascinating collective self-portrait, a kind of Hemoniad.

Newsday

Weirdly droll and heartbreaking, this debut volume deftly anatomizes a world gone wrong.

Newsweek

Aleksandar Hemon

T HE Q UESTION OF B RUNO

Aleksandar Hemon was born in Sarajevo in 1964. He moved to Chicago in 1992 with only a basic command of English. He began writing in English in 1995. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and The Best American Short Stories 1999, among other publications, and will appear in the forthcoming The Best American Short Stories 2000. He continues to live in Chicago with his wife, Lisa Stodder, a Chicago native.

FOR S ARAJEVO

FOR MY WIFE

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

We waited for the ship on a long stone pier, which burnt the soles of my feet, as soon as I took off my sandals. The air was sweltering, saturated with sea-ozone, exhaustion, and the smell of coconut sunscreen, coming from the German tourists, already red and shellacked, lined up for a photo at the end of the pier. We saw the thin stocking of smoke on the horizon-thread, then the ship itself, getting bigger, slightly slanted sideways, like a childs drawing. I had on a round straw hat with all the seven dwarves painted on it. It threw a short, dappled shadow over my face. I had to raise my head to look at the grown-ups. Otherwise, I would look at their gnarled knees, the spreading sweat stains on their shirts and sagging wrinkles of fat on their thighs. One of the Germans, an old, bony man, got down on his knees and puked over the pier edge. The vomit hit the surface and then dispersed in different directions, like children running away to hide from the seeker. Under the wave-throbbing, ochre and maroon, island of vomit, a school of aluminum fish gathered and nibbled it peevishly.

The ship was decrepit, with pealing steel stairs and thin leaves of rust that could cut your fingers on the handrails. The staircase wound upward like a twisted towel. Welcome, said an unshaven man in a T-shirt picturing a boat with a smoke-snake, wobbling on the waves, and, above it, the sun with a U-smile and an umlaut of eyes. We sat on the upper deck and the ship leapt over humble waves, panting and belching. We passed a line of little islands, resembling car wrecks by the road, and I would ask my parents: Is this Mljet? and they would say: No. From behind one of the petrified islands, shaven by a wildfire, a gust of waylaying wind attacked us, snatched the straw hat off my head and tossed it into the sea. I watched the hat teetering away, my hair pressed against my skull, like a helmet, and I understood that I would never, ever see it again. I wished to go back in time and hold on to my hat before the surreptitious whirlwind hit me in the face. The ship sped away from the hat and the hat was transformed into a beige stain on the snot-green sea. I began crying and sobbed myself to sleep. When I woke up the ship was docked and the island was Mljet.

Uncle Julius impressed a stern, moist kiss on my cheekthe corner of his mouth touched the corner of my mouth, leaving a dot of spit above my lip. But his lips were soft, like slugs, as if there was nothing behind to support them. As we walked away from the pier, he told us that he forgot his teeth at home, and then, so as to prove that he was telling us the truth, he grinned at me, showing me his pink gums with cinnabar scars. He reeked of pine cologne, but a whiff redolent of rot and decay escaped his insides and penetrated the fragrant cloud. I hid my face in my mothers skirt. I heard his snorting chuckle. Can we please go back home! I cried.

We walked up a dilapidated, sinuous road exuding heat. Uncle Juliuss sandals clattered in a tranquilizing rhythm and I felt sleepy. There was a dense verdureless thicket alongside the road. Uncle Julius told us that there used to be so many poisonous snakes on Mljet that people used to walk in tall rubber boots all the time, even at home, and snakebites were as common as mosquito bites. Everybody used to know how to slice off the bitten piece of flesh in a split second, before the venom could spread. Snakes killed chickens and dogs. Once, he said, a snake was attracted by the scent of milk, so it curled up on a sleeping baby. And then someone heard of the mongoose, how it kills snakes with joy, and they sent a man to Africa and he brought a brood of mongooses and they let them loose on the island. There were so many snakes that it was like a paradise for them. You could walk for miles and hear nothing but the hissing of snakes and the shrieks of mongooses and the bustle and rustle in the thicket. But then the mongooses killed all the snakes and bred so much that the island became too small for them. Chickens started disappearing, cats also. There were rumors of rabid mongooses and some even talked about monster mongooses that were the result of paradisiacal inbreeding. Now they were trying to figure out how to get rid of mongooses. So thats how it is, he said, its all one pest after another, like revolutions. Life is nothing if not a succession of evils, he said, and then stopped and took a pebble out of his left sandal. He showed the puny, gray pebble to us, as if holding irrefutable evidence that he was right.