Free Love and Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon

D. watches them from a bridge:
    Whichever way I go, now, I’ll reach the other shore.
Old, I no longer know what they know: how to regain
what is meant to be lost. On the river surface
snowflake after snowflake perishes.
    He began his recitation in a susurrous voice, riding a tide of iambic throttles and weighted caesuras up to thunderous orgasmic heights, from where he returned to a whisper and then ceased altogether, his head bowed, his eyes closed. He seemed to have fallen asleep. The Table was silent, the muses entranced. So I said, “Fuck, that’s old. What are you now—a hundred?” Uncomfortable with the silence, doubtless as jealous as I was, the rest of the Table burst out laughing, slapping their knees. I sensed the solidarity in mocking Muhamed, and for the first time I thought I would be remembered for something other than conducting—I would be remembered for having made Muhamed old. He smiled at me benevolently, already forgiving. But that very night, everybody at the Table started calling him “Dedo”—Old Man.
    This took place just before the war, in the relatively rosy times when we were euphoric with the imminence of disaster—we drank and laughed and experimented with poetic forms into the late hours. We tried to keep the war away from the Table, but now and then a budding Serbian patriot would start ranting about the suppression of his people’s culture, whereupon Dedo, with his newly acquired elder status, would indeed suppress him with a sequence of carefully arranged insults and curses. Inevitably, the nationalist would declare Dedo an Islamofascist and storm off, never to return, while we, the fools, laughed uproariously. We knew—but we didn’t want to know—what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.
    Around that time I found a way to come to the United States for a little while. In the weeks before I left, I roamed the city, haunting the territories of my past: here was a place where I had once stumbled and broken both of my index fingers; I was sitting on this bench when I first wedged my hand into Azra’s tight brassiere; there was the kiosk where I had bought my first pack of cigarettes (Chesterfields); that was the fence that had torn a scar into my thigh as I was jumping it; in that library I had checked out a copy of The Dwarf from a Forgotten Country for the first time; on this bridge Dedo had stood, watching the boys recover the ball, and one of those boys could have been me.
    Finally, I selected, reluctantly, some of my poems to show to Dedo. I met him at the Table early one afternoon, before everyone else arrived. I gave him the poems, and he read them, while I smoked and watched slush splash against the windows, then slide slowly down.
    “You should stick to conducting,” he said finally, and lit his cigarette. His eyebrows looked like hirsute little comets. The clarity of his gaze was what hurt me. These poems were told in the voice of postmodern Old Testament prophets, they were the cries of tormented individuals whose very souls were being depleted by the plague of relentless modernity. Was it possible, my poems asked, to maintain the reality of a person’s self in this cruelly unreal world? The very inadequacy of poetry was a testimony to the disintegration of humanity, et cetera. But of course, I explained none of that. I stared at him with watery eyes, pleading for compassion, while he berated my sloppy prosody and the cold selfcenteredness that was exactly the opposite of soul. “A poet is one with everything,” he said. “You are everywhere, so you are never alone.” Everywhere, my ass—the water dried in my eyes, and with an air of triumphant rationalism I tore my poetry out of his hands and left him in the dust of his neo-Romantic ontology. But outside—outside I dumped those prophetic poems, the founding documents of my life, into a gaping garbage container. I never went back to the Table, I