The Question of Bruno by Aleksandar Hemon

The officers are nowhere in sight, the soldier next to you just soundlessly drops in the snow like an icicle, then never gets up, and the Russians keep mauling the mutilated body of the great army. He stumbles and falls through the snow-laden steppe and when he raises his head he’s in the midst of a thick forest.
    We know very well that the route of Napoleon’s army’sretreat went through what is today Belorussia and there’s no plausible explanation for Alexandre ending up in the western Ukraine, near Lvov. Certain factions in the family suggested that higher forces had had a hand in the miraculous (mis)placement of Alexandre. My father—who deems himself to be the foremost authority on the family history and one of its main narrators—dismisses the implausibility with a derisive frown, providing as evidence a map of Ukraine, dating from 1932, on which Smolensk (for example) is just inches away from Lvov.
    Be that as it may, Alexandre went astray from the straight road of defeat and found himself, unconscious, in the midst of a pitch-dark forest. He had drifted to the edge of the eternal black hole, when someone pulled him out of it, tugging his benumbed leg. There’s hardly any doubt that that was the great-great-grandmother Marija. Alexandre opened his eyes and saw the angelic smile of a seventeen-year-old girl trying to take off his decrepit, yet still precious, boots. Let me confess that a blasphemous thought has occurred to me: the angelic smile might have been missing a considerable number of teeth, due to the then-common winter scurvy. She, naturally, decided to take him home, unloading the firewood and mounting him on the tired nag (somehow, that was the epoch of tired nags). Her parents, surprised and scared, could not resist her determination, so she made him a bed near the hearth and then nursed him out of his glacial numbness, patiently rubbing his limbs to get the blood started. (Uncle Teodor sometimes likes to add a touch of gangrene at this point.) She fed him honey and lard, and spoke to him mellifluously. Yes, she rekindled his heart and they did get married. Yes, they’re considered to be the Adam and Eve of the Hemon universe.
    My mother, who proudly descends from a sturdy stock ofBosnian peasantry, considered all this to be the typical “Hemon propaganda.” And she may well have been right, I’m afraid to say. For we have no well-established facts from which the unquestionable existence of Alexandre Hemon would necessarily follow. There is, however, some circumstantial evidence:
    a) At the time of the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, my sister held in her hand a credit card in the name of a certain Lucien Hemon. Lucien was the rifle manager for the French biathlon team. He told my sister, not hesitating to flirt with her, that Hemon was a rather common family name in Brittany and suggested, after she had managed to tell him the highlights of the family history, that a Napoleonic soldier could have well carried it over to Ukraine. That was the germ from which Alexandre sprung, and the previously dominant theory that “Hemon” was a Ukrainian variation on “demon” was indefinitely suspended.
    b) In 1990, a busload of excited Bosnian Ukrainians went to Ukraine in order to perform a set of old songs and dances, long forgotten in the oppressed ex-homeland. While they were staying in a waterless hotel in Lvov, the Hemons decided to venture into the village (Ostaloveschy) that my great-grandfather’s family had left to move to Bosnia. I should point out that there was a widespread belief in the family that we had no kin in Ukraine. As they snooped around the depressed village, mainly populated by bored-to-senility elderly folks, they aroused plenty of suspicion among the villagers, who must have believed that the KGB was onto them again. In antique Ukrainian, just for the hell of it, they questioned toothless men leaning on their canes and fences about Hemons in the village, until one of them