sweaty brow. “I just want to say one more thing to you.”
We waited in the overwhelming silence, the priest closing his eyes, anticipating a punch. But Michael could not think of one more thing to say, so he finally said nothing, turned on his heel, and marched out, not bothering to slam the door this time. The priest grabbed a couch pillow and started banging it against his forehead, howling and hissing in pain. I took the opportunity to slither toward the open door.
“Wait,” he wailed. “I want to subscribe. I want subscription. Wait a minute.”
So I signed him up for two plum two-year subscriptions. His name was Father James McMahon. For the rest of the evening, I went around the neighborhood telling everybody—the old ladies, the young mothers, the cranky ex-policemen—that Father McMahon had just subscribed to American Woodworker and Good Living, wouldn’t you know it? A few asked me how he seemed to be doing, and I would tell them that he had had a big fight with his young friend. And they would sigh and say, “Is that so?” and frown and subscribe to Creative Knitting and FamilyFun. It was by far my best day as a magazine salesman. At the end of the shift, waiting to be picked up by the turf manager, I watched the flickering TV lights in the windows and the sparkling stars up in the sky, and I thought: I could live here. I could live here forever. This is a good place for me.
Szmura’s Room
H e stands at Szmura’s door, his left hand suspended in midair, reluctant to knock. Flanked by two suitcases, one of which is held together by a frayed rope, he palpitates, out of shape and undernourished. He is clad in a dark coat, the collar striated with lint and dandruff, the sleeves tragicomically short, exposing his dirt-rimmed shirt cuffs. When Mike Szmura opens the door, wearing nothing but pajama bottoms and a front of frightening chest hair, Bogdan utters his lines in stuttering English. “Right off the boat,” Szmura says in a maliciously nasal voice. He steps aside to let our boy enter the apartment, the roped suitcase banging at his ankles, the other one smashing against Szmura’s knee.
At least, that is how Szmura described it to us later, exhibiting the obscure alleged bruise on his knobby knee. We had interrupted our poker game (my two jacks were waiting to lure Szmura and Pumpek into surrendering their weekly income) so that Szmura could use his meager narrative talents to depict and embellish Bogdan’s arrival. The other players, Pumpek and a couple of realtor buddies he brought along to serve as suckers, were unabashedly American and uninterested, and they impatiently waited for Szmura to finish so the game could go on. But in a likely attempt to distract me from the game, Szmura added, “He is from your lousy country, Basnia, whatever you call it.” My two jacks promptly responded to the insult, and by the time I had raked in the loot with both hands, I had forgotten all about the forlorn foreigner at Szmura’s door.
At subsequent poker games I learned more. Szmura attempted to entertain us with a repertoire of dumb-foreigner acts and bad-accent jokes featuring Bogdan, and from these performances, I gathered that Bogdan was much like me, an oddity: a Ukrainian from Bosnia, although, unlike me, he was not from Sarajevo. Szmura had no interest in internal Bosnian cultural differences and presupposed that there was a deep, essential kinship between us, which is to say that by mocking Bogdan he was making me the target. I preferred taking his money to taking exception—he had reached the point of writing promissory notes, and I kept them, as if they were love notes, even after he’d made good on them.
Bogdan had been delivered to Chicago through some lamentably narrow refugee channel—a Uke priest knew a Uke priest who knew about a cheap room at Szmura’s. The size of a closet, the room was in the apartment that Szmura rented from his ex-girlfriend’s grandmother, who
We waited in the overwhelming silence, the priest closing his eyes, anticipating a punch. But Michael could not think of one more thing to say, so he finally said nothing, turned on his heel, and marched out, not bothering to slam the door this time. The priest grabbed a couch pillow and started banging it against his forehead, howling and hissing in pain. I took the opportunity to slither toward the open door.
“Wait,” he wailed. “I want to subscribe. I want subscription. Wait a minute.”
So I signed him up for two plum two-year subscriptions. His name was Father James McMahon. For the rest of the evening, I went around the neighborhood telling everybody—the old ladies, the young mothers, the cranky ex-policemen—that Father McMahon had just subscribed to American Woodworker and Good Living, wouldn’t you know it? A few asked me how he seemed to be doing, and I would tell them that he had had a big fight with his young friend. And they would sigh and say, “Is that so?” and frown and subscribe to Creative Knitting and FamilyFun. It was by far my best day as a magazine salesman. At the end of the shift, waiting to be picked up by the turf manager, I watched the flickering TV lights in the windows and the sparkling stars up in the sky, and I thought: I could live here. I could live here forever. This is a good place for me.
Szmura’s Room
H e stands at Szmura’s door, his left hand suspended in midair, reluctant to knock. Flanked by two suitcases, one of which is held together by a frayed rope, he palpitates, out of shape and undernourished. He is clad in a dark coat, the collar striated with lint and dandruff, the sleeves tragicomically short, exposing his dirt-rimmed shirt cuffs. When Mike Szmura opens the door, wearing nothing but pajama bottoms and a front of frightening chest hair, Bogdan utters his lines in stuttering English. “Right off the boat,” Szmura says in a maliciously nasal voice. He steps aside to let our boy enter the apartment, the roped suitcase banging at his ankles, the other one smashing against Szmura’s knee.
At least, that is how Szmura described it to us later, exhibiting the obscure alleged bruise on his knobby knee. We had interrupted our poker game (my two jacks were waiting to lure Szmura and Pumpek into surrendering their weekly income) so that Szmura could use his meager narrative talents to depict and embellish Bogdan’s arrival. The other players, Pumpek and a couple of realtor buddies he brought along to serve as suckers, were unabashedly American and uninterested, and they impatiently waited for Szmura to finish so the game could go on. But in a likely attempt to distract me from the game, Szmura added, “He is from your lousy country, Basnia, whatever you call it.” My two jacks promptly responded to the insult, and by the time I had raked in the loot with both hands, I had forgotten all about the forlorn foreigner at Szmura’s door.
At subsequent poker games I learned more. Szmura attempted to entertain us with a repertoire of dumb-foreigner acts and bad-accent jokes featuring Bogdan, and from these performances, I gathered that Bogdan was much like me, an oddity: a Ukrainian from Bosnia, although, unlike me, he was not from Sarajevo. Szmura had no interest in internal Bosnian cultural differences and presupposed that there was a deep, essential kinship between us, which is to say that by mocking Bogdan he was making me the target. I preferred taking his money to taking exception—he had reached the point of writing promissory notes, and I kept them, as if they were love notes, even after he’d made good on them.
Bogdan had been delivered to Chicago through some lamentably narrow refugee channel—a Uke priest knew a Uke priest who knew about a cheap room at Szmura’s. The size of a closet, the room was in the apartment that Szmura rented from his ex-girlfriend’s grandmother, who
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