Free Love and Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon Page A

never wrote poetry again, and a few days later I left Sarajevo for good.
     
     
    My story is boring: I was not in Sarajevo when the war began; I felt helplessness and guilt as I watched the destruction of my hometown on TV; I lived in America. Dedo, of course, stayed for the siege—if you are the greatest living Bosnian poet, if you write a poem called “Sarajevo,” then it is your duty to stay. I contemplated going back to Sarajevo early in the war, but realized that I was not and never would be needed there. So I struggled to make a living, while Dedo struggled to stay alive. For a long time, I didn’t hear anything about him, and to tell the truth, I didn’t really investigate—I had many other people to worry about, starting with myself. But news of him reached me occasionally: he signed some petitions; for one reason or another, he wrote an open letter to the pope; to an audience of annoyed Western diplomats he recited Herbert’s “Report from the Besieged City” ( Too old to carry arms and fight like the others—/ they graciously gave me the inferior role of chronicler ). Once I heard that he had been killed; a hasty paper even published an obituary. But it turned out that he had only been wounded—he had come back from the other side of Lethe with a bullet in his thigh—and he wrote a poem about it. The paper that published the obituary published the poem too. Predictably, it was called “Resurrection.” In it, he walks the city as a ghost, after the siege, but nobody remembers him, and he says to them:
    Can’t you recall me? I am the one
Who carried upstairs your bloodied canisters,
Who slipped his slimy hand under the widow’s skirt.
Who wailed the songs of sorrow,
Who kept himself alive when fools were willing to die.
    Then he meets himself after the siege, older than old, and says to himself, alluding to Dante, I did not know death hath undone so much. It was a soul-rending poem, and I found myself hating him for it: he had written it practically on his deathbed, with no apparent effort, as his thigh wound throbbed with pus. I tried to translate it, but neither my Bosnian nor my English was good enough.
    And he kept writing like a maniac, as though his resurrected life was to be entirely given over to poetry. Poems, mimeographed on coarse paper, bound in a frail booklet, were sent to me by long-unheard-from friends, carrying the smell (and microorganisms) of the many hands that had touched them on their way out of besieged Sarajevo. There were, naturally, images of death and destruction: dogs tearing at one another’s throats; a boy rolling the body of a sniper-shot man up the street, much like Sisyphus; a surgeon putting together his wife’s face after it has been blown apart by shrapnel, a piece of her cheek missing, the exact spot where he liked to plant his good-night kiss; clusters of amputated limbs burning in a hospital oven, the poet facing the toy hell. But there were also poems that were different, and I cannot quite define the difference: A boy kicks a soccer ball up so that it lands on the nape of his neck, and he balances it there; a young woman inhales cigarette smoke and holds it in as she smiles, everything stopping at that moment: No tracing bullets lighting up the sky, / no pain in my riven thigh / no sounds ; a foreign conductor hangs on a rope, like a deft spider, over his orchestra playing the Eroica in a burnt-out building. I must confess that I believed for a moment that I was the conductor, that I was part of Dedo’s world, that something of me remained in Sarajevo.
    Still, living displaces false sentiments. I had to go on with my American life, keeping Dedo out of it, busying myself with local survival, getting jobs, getting into graduate school, getting laid. Every once in a while I unleashed the power of his words upon a sensitive American woman. The first one was Cheryl, the idle wife of a Barrington lawyer, whom I met at a Bosnian benefit dinner that she was kind