On his fortieth birthday Boris found himself in a car with three American children driving very fast through a country without trees. Exceptionally barren, he told himself, certain there were obvious clues to the shifting American character in these grand horizons, these low hills unfolding onto even lower hills and giving the sensation of some kind of climbing descent. They die regularly in far places defending these hills, he decided, so there should be something here, something obvious.
Boris found it hard to remember the names of these children, their language sometimes way too smooth – no hooks, no hiding places, more like French than any of them would ever admit. Boris, though, had told them his name was Boris because that seemed to fit the bearded man that he was, the accented man with a very loose portfolio, a man with a forehead like a house and a back with too many scars, a man over two meters long and pretty much twenty stone in weight, at least until he’d begun walking what seemed to be the entirety of this endless country. Still, if anything in him had diminished it would likely be his prospects far more than his physical stuff. The country rarely let even its wanderers grow skinny.
No – they were coming back to him, the names. Politeness, and the constant meeting of people who tried to help him had kept his recall sharp. Ted and Angel, yes, very decisive, clipped, efficient names. They were the two in front with Angel driving the car. She was a girl with charcoal hair and a fierce concentration on the highway. Ted sat to Angel’s right, a squat boy with raggedy hair, a talker, though, an animated boy who kept changing the radio frequencies with a clicker in his hand. Finally, Boris turned to the girl beside him, a girl of pale ringlets, maybe golden brown would describe that hair, her eyes pale blue – a pale girl, that was it, the sort you might walk out into a fog with and lose her completely. Boris said, “Bertha?”
As in any group, some are happy and some are not. This girl of winsome thoughtfulness, he thought, did not seem at all happy.
“Yes?” she said.
“Your name,” Boris said. “I was trying to remember your name.”
“Well, you did,” she said.
“Bertha – that is a common name?” Boris asked.
“We call her Skanky,” the boy Ted said.
“Thank you, Theodore,” Bertha said, then turned to Boris and added, “No, sir, it is not common.”
“And Skanky is not good?”
“It’s slang, very insulting.”
Simple repartee, Boris decided, among the many languages of the young.
“So you live in that California, then?” he asked Bertha.
“Not really,” she said. “I was to be in a film, but then it was cancelled. The producer ran out of money.”
“I see,” Boris said. “American films – I am familiar. You like to have happiness at the end.”
“Only when it makes sense,” Bertha said.
“Of course.”
“Are you going home?” Bertha asked.
“My home is not what I once thought,” Boris said. “Perhaps it is not even there anymore.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Nor should you, and consider it a blessing at that.”
“Yes, sir.”
Boris felt the weight of this conversation, that something was unwelcome, a certain spirit lacking. He thought he should try to be humorous but humor was one of the most difficult of cultural transfers. He’d found it hard even to manage silence in this new land.
“Somebody told me this Chicago of yours has opportunities,” Boris said. “I will look for an opportunity. Is that why you go there?”
The young man, Ted, his face not yet adult, looked at Angel then and Boris could tell he’d been talking too much, his accent as muscular as a plate full of meat and gravy; suspect words, a suspect man. These children, he knew, were unused to suspicion.
No one answered his question so Boris concluded that opportunity was not the right word, that it had meant nothing to them, though he’d wondered on many occasions if it meant anything at all anymore – at least to him.
First, Huntsville (gone, now, from his mind, it could well be near Prague or Reykjavik), and then Los Alamos, where they would not accept the photos of his work – photos of his books, his degrees, even the old car parked near his daughter’s bicycle, the license badge clearly matching the photo of his provincial registration; thus, his name: Boris Izetbegovic, as real as could be.
Well, of course, a photo was one step away from touchable density; the viewing of that photo was two such steps. Politesse came to mind, along with other overflowing courtesies. These people, though, the ones he met in so many different parts of this truly different country – the ones he’d been referred to through referrals of referrals – they liked to ply you with drink and good food before they revealed the magnitude of opportunities available to you, all of those opportunities at some distance from where you were at the time. Optimism, thus, always bloomed at the next stop in this country, usually five or ten of their provinces (states?) away.
“Do you have money?” they’d asked him again and again – officials, acquaintances, homeowners putting his distinguished person up for the night, the question never suggesting payment, only his eligibility for survival.
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