Free Love and Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon Page B

enough to organize. At least one Bosnian was required to benefit from her benefit dinner, so she tracked me down through a friend, an expert in disability studies with whom I had read a paper at a regional MLA conference. Cheryl was generous beyond the dinner; before she went back to Barrington, I took her to my tiny studio—a monument to the struggles of immigration, with its sagging mattress, rotting shower curtain, and insomniac drummer next door. I recited Dedo’s poems to her, pretending they were my own. She particularly liked the one about the man walking, during a lull in shelling, with his rooster on a leash, a soul fastened to a dying animal. Then I removed the permed tresses from her forehead so that I could kiss it and slowly undressed her. Cheryl writhed in my embrace, kissed me with clammy passion, hoisted her hips, and moaned with pleasure, as though the intensity of her orgasm would directly succor the Bosnian resistance. I could not help thinking, in the end, that she was fucking Dedo, for it was his words that had seduced her. But I took what was given and then rolled off into the darkness of my actual life.
    After the charitable Cheryl, I was somewhat ashamed and for a while I could not stand to look at Dedo’s poetry. I finished graduate school; I sold my stories; I was an author now. And somewhere along the way the war ended. On my book tour, I traveled around the country, reading to minuscule audiences, talking about Bosnia to a mixture of international relations and South Slavic languages students, simplifying the incomprehensible, and fretting all along that an enraged reader would stand up and expose me as a fraud, as someone who had no talent—and therefore no right—to talk about the suffering of others. It never happened: I was Bosnian, I looked and conducted myself like a Bosnian, and everyone was content to think that I was in constant, uninterrupted communication with the tormented soul of my homeland.
    At one of those readings, I met Bill T., a professor of Slavic languages. He seemed to speak all of them, Bosnian included, and he was translating Dedo’s latest book. With his red face, long, curly beard, and squat, sinewy body, Bill looked like a Viking. His ferocity was frightening, so I immediately flattered him by saying how immeasurably important it was to have Dedo’s poetry translated into English. We went out drinking, and Bill T. drank like a true Viking too, while detailing the saga of his adventures in Slavic lands: a month with shepherds in the mountains of Macedonia; a year of teaching English in Siberia; his interviews with Solidarnosz veterans; the Slovenian carnival songs he had recorded. He had also spent some years, just for the hell of it, in Guatemala, Honduras, and Marrakech. The man had been everywhere, had done everything, and the drunker I got, the greater he was, and the more of nothing I had to say.
    This was in Iowa City, I believe. I woke up the next morning on Bill T.’s sofa. My pants were laid out on the coffee table. Along the walls were dusty stacks of books. In the light fixture above me I could see the silhouettes of dead flies. A ruddy-faced boy with a gossamer mustache sat on the floor next to the sofa and watched me with enormous eyes.
    “What are you doing here?” the boy asked calmly.
    “I don’t really know,” I said, and sat up, exposing my naked thighs. “Where is Bill?”
    “He stepped out.”
    “Where is your mom?”
    “She’s busy at the moment.”
    “What is your name?”
    “Ethan.”
    “Nice to meet you, Ethan.”
    “Likewise,” Ethan said. Then he grabbed my pants and threw them at me.
    It was while I was slouching down the linden-lined street, where people nodded at me from sunny porches and able-bodied squirrels raced up and down the trees—it was then that the story Bill had told me the night before about Dedo fully hit me and I had to sit down on the curb to deal with it.
    Dedo had come to Iowa City, Bill said, to be in