Now it seems to me that the last game I ever played was against my father, though that is almost certainly not true — it was just the last one that mattered. I was visiting my parents in Hamilton, Ontario, sometime in 1995, and I challenged Father to a game. Having settled in Canada, my parents were at the nadir of their refugee trajectory, and, it seemed at that time, at the end of their rope. Tormented by the brutal Canadian climate, uncomfortable in the language they were forced to live in, short on friends and family, they were prone to devastating nostalgia and hopelessness.
I was not capable of helping them in any way. During my visits, we argued much too often: their despair annoyed me, because it exactly matched mine and prevented them from offering comfort to me—I suppose I still wanted to be their child. We argued over the smallest things, hurtfully remembering and bringing up unresolved fights and unforgotten insults from before the war, only to make up a few minutes later. We missed each other, even while we were together, because the decaying elephant in the room was the loss of our previous life — absolutely nothing was the way it used to be. Everything we did together in Canada reminded us of what we used to do together in Bosnia. Hence we didn’t like doing any of it, but had nothing else to do. I spent entire days on the parental sofa (donated by a kind Canadian), watching reruns of Law and Order. I would snap out of my TV coma with the urge to scream at somebody, akin to what had driven Peter to terrify the hapless Loyola students.
One of those hopeless days, I challenged my father to a game. I admit I was burning to beat him; having gone through the Atomic Cafe boot camp, I was ready to discard his shadow after a few decades of not playing against him. I could now redress the long-lasting imbalance between us by winning and putting him in a position to feel what I felt as a boy. I offered him my fists, each clenched around a pawn, to choose; he picked the black one. We set up the pieces on a tiny magnetic board; we played; I won; I found no pleasure in it. Neither did he. It is possible that he finally let me win. If he did, I didn’t notice it. We shook hands in silence, like true grandmasters, and never again played against each other.
KENNEL LIFE
Sometime in 1995, in the teachers’ room of a vocational school where I was teaching English as a Second Language, I met L. In the course of our small-talking she declared that Robert Bresson was her favorite film director. There was a Bresson retrospective at Facets that week and I suggested that we go to see Pickpocket together; she consented. On her way to the classroom to teach, she made a little leap getting around a chair and a thought — if that is the word — appeared in my head: I am going to marry that woman. It was not a decision nor a plan; it was unrelated to desire or a sense of connection. It was simply a recognition of an inescapable future: I recognized that I would marry her, the way I recognized it was night at night.
We went to see Pickpocket, then, later, Lancelot du Lac, which relates the story of Lancelot and Guinevere while stripping it of any romantic fluff — when the knights walk around in their armor you can hear it relentlessly creaking and you imagine the flesh inside it, the rotting sores and all. Afterward, we went for a drink at the Green Mill and I kissed her at the bar; she stood up from the stool and left. She had a boyfriend at the time, and she tracked him down at a party where he was jumping up and down to some exhilarating song; she brought him down to the ground and broke up. Thus we started dating. A year and a half later we were living together; two and a half years later I proposed to her, while tying my shoe — practicing, as it were, the cliché of tying the knot. She didn’t hear what I said and I had to repeat it. I had no ring on hand, but she accepted.
We did things together. We traveled: Shanghai, Sarajevo, Paris, Stockholm; I taught her to ski; she had grown up in Chicago and told me stories of the city I could not have known otherwise; we lived in a house where the front door-bell rang if you stamped your foot at a particular spot on the kitchen floor; we bought an apartment with two fireplaces; we had a cat and it died. Once, she took the ring off to wash her hands and it fell and rolled across the floor straight into a heating vent, never to be found. We both thought of ourselves as decent people and loved each other enough to cover up the cracks, which started appearing pretty soon.
It took a few years for me to gradually realize we shouldn’t have tied the knot, but I’d inherited the concept of marriage from my parents that was contingent upon, like everything else in their lives, hard work. Thus the operating metaphor of our marriage for me was the mine — as in, being married was like descending into a mine every day and digging for some valuable ore. The possibility of a functioning, rewarding marriage was dependent on the grueling effort put into it, which is to say that being simply happy was perpetually deferred into some hypothetical future — if we kept digging we would one day be happy. But there might never have been enough ore for us to dig; and at the end of each daily shift, I was angry and exhausted. Soon, periods of reasonable calm, squeezed between destructive fights, were taken to be the ore of happiness. We reached the point of accepting not-fighting as the goal and purpose of our marital union. We showed and recognized love only in the form of trying hard to make up. What we offered to each other in lieu of deep affection was gestures of either reconciliation or aggression — sometimes, confusingly, both at the same time. I had frequent outbursts of anger, the congealed life-inflicted hurt I did not know how to heal; I flung it around hatefully, like offal.
The end of my first marriage came unexpectedly, even if it was a long time in coming, because the pain and misery were now habitual, a side effect of descending daily into the mine. I kept finding myself angrily building my case against L., ever waiting for an opportunity to lay out the irrefutable evidence that none of it was my fault, that I was in fact the one wronged, the one with more pain inside. It finally ended at the top of the umpteenth screaming match, unremarkable in and of itself. The confrontation had a recognizable, well-practiced pattern that inescapably led to my screaming and smashing objects at hand. It would have been normally followed by a period of horrible guilt on my part for losing control and hurting L. yet again — guilt was all that was left to connect us toward the end. This time, in the middle of it all, a thought — if that is the word — appeared in my head: I could not do this anymore. There was nothing I wanted to say or prove to L.; nothing was worth fighting and nothing was worth trying. My bottom fell out and, as in a Zen parable, I was emptied of all the anger and love in an instant — I ended my mining life in less than a minute. That night in January 2005, I drove L., through a torrent of tears, to her mother’s place in Indiana, then drove back to our empty apartment.
* * *
Once a marriage ends, what is left is the heavy-footed dance of dissolution. I could not bear staring at the cold fireplaces, and within a week I was looking for temporary, furnished lodgings, where I could stay until the mess was sorted out. My funds were limited, which meant the places I was hurriedly considering were rather dismal. Each of the dreadfully furnished apartments was shown to me by a building manager who despised the people desperate enough to live in such places; each had a door opening directly into the world of thick, gloomy loneliness. One studio available in the fancy Gold Coast neighborhood looked as though someone had just been murdered in it and the management had been considerate enough to whitewash the blood-spattered walls.