While my head was still on the pillow, my nightmare not completely erased by the sudden awakening, I opened my eyes and saw a cockroach running from the stove, over the gray kitchen-floor tiles, getting on the carpet, running a bit slower, as if on sand, going beneath the chair, coming diagonally across, going around my slippers trying to reach the safe space underneath my futon. I watched it, it was running fast, never stopping, going straight without hesitation. What was it running from? What was running that little engine? Desire to live? Fear of death? The instinctual–perhaps, even, molecular–awareness of the gaze of the supreme sharpshooter? What a horrible world, I thought, when every living creature lives and dies in fear. I reached for my left slipper, but the cockroach was already underneath the futon.
From “A Coin”, part of The Question of Bruno, by Aleksandar Hemon
All of the stories gathered for The Question of Bruno have their merits, though “A Coin” is the standout. It’s a gruesome existential meditation on what it is to live in a ctiy in which the most menial tasks are fraught with terror as the rooftop snipers perched high above wait for civilian targets to come into view. The story takes the form of correspondence exchanged between a war correspondent and a Sarajevan émigré living in Chicago. Hemon does not make it entirely clear if all thoughts posited are expressed in letter form or remain internalized, doesn’t matter because either way the impact is the same.
