Late spring in Toledo, Oregon. Hasan Hujdur has been freeing his car from the snow and ice for two hours. First he removed what had fallen during the night, with his bare hands; without fear of the frozen touch, embracing it with his arms and pulling it from the hood, then from the windshield and roof; then he went around back, and, after two or three more armfuls, he seemed nearly done. If someone had seen him—though no one did, for who would be out and about in minus twenty degree weather—he would have sworn that the man loved his silver Buick Riviera, a first series from '63, more than a man can love a car, that he probably didn't have any children, and that he certainly wasn't from Oregon. Only a foreigner could be so careless about the winter, a foreigner from some distant, cruel land where bodies don't freeze easily and people know no illness. Doctors serve them only to verify their death, for their biggest fear, their only fear, is being buried alive. In all this—or in most at least—the accidental observer would have been correct, if he'd only existed and seen what happened after the embraces. And so, when he had cleared the car of new snow, Hasan Hujdur began what he was doing now and would be doing for at least another hour. In front of the car he'd spread a sheep skin of the sort used in Eastern Europe for Islamic prayer and on it arranged his tools: two plastic shovels with rubber edges, one small, one large, a small bottle of antifreeze for use on glass, a spray for defreezing locks, brushes, rubber scrapers and trowels, several plastic awls whose use was unclear, three hand-cut rags from rough military cloth, and another from soft lambskin. In the end he'd have put down a pack of cigarettes and, on top of that, a disposable plastic lighter, then taken a step back, verifying that everything was there and in its proper order, rubbed his hands together, more from the prospect of work than from the cold, and begun. Centimeter by centimeter he removes the ice, working with utmost care—like an archeologist on a princely mummy—not to scratch the car. He performs everything with extraordinary skill, using each of the twenty different tools laid out on the sheep skin and then returning it to its place, making sure it is clean, with neither a grain of dust nor a crystal of ice. If he hadn't always worked in such a way, the sheep skin would have long since turned black with filth rather than remaining, as it is, whiter than snow, as if it had just been extracted from some advertisement for Sardinian cheese.It's clear the man has experience; winters in Oregon are long, and this is already his twelfth. It's also clear Hasan Hujdur does not have many things in his life that make him this happy. He's not one of those sickeningly pedantic, tidy people who set about every task with the same diligence, for if he were, he would never finish, never have time to sleep, and would go mad in a manner utterly inappropriate to his social standing. He's no king or nobleman that servants and courtiers might bustle around him to make sure everything is clean and tidy. And even if he were, it's hard to imagine him letting someone else do this work, no matter how long the winter, ice, and snow might last, or how many winters there might be. Every man has one or two things he relates to in this way, and there's a Buick Riviera somewhere for everyone, whether it be a car, a bicycle, a fountain pen, or even a computer, a dog, or a horse, something that gathers him up, assembles him, makes him better, more patient. It's just that not everyone gets the chance to find that thing in life. Hasan Hujdur had had to cross an ocean and, after his scholarship had run out, to live in cell-like rooms in hotels for whores and work a hundred odd jobs before someone believed he was a cameraman; he'd had to move from city to city and state to state before at last arriving in Toledo, Oregon and there, in a supermarket parking lot, see it (or rather, her), the Buick Riviera, shining so in the August sunlight that it was painful to look at. There it is, like a foundation stone in the noonday sun, he thought, going into the store, where he found the manager, from whom he was offered a test drive—I don't need no tests—and gave the man eight hundred dollars. Only foreigners carry that much cash, just as they're the only ones who carry all their money with them. The manager took his things out of the trunk, gave Hasan the keys and documents, reminded him to watch the oil and water, took leave of the car, and the deed was done.
From that day on Hasan Hujdur was immune to most disappointments. To harsh words he responded like a dervish filled with the most profound tranquility, and he accepted other people's anxiety like a river accepts a bridge: the river cannot be as wild as the bridge that stands above it is calm. The Buick Riviera became his place of assembly; devoted one to the other, the man and his car offered each other what people never can—provided they are not priests or psychiatrists. Dogs left in front of the supermarket by their masters would understand this. The canine's anxiety that her master might never come back for her, that he might be shopping forever or might find better friends inside, never goes away. She can be left every day of her whole dog's life in front of the supermarket and still never get used to it, and whine, and bark, and mope as if it was the first time. She's not so stupid that she can't understand, but her worry is worth more than any intelligence, for it is rewarded with infinite joy when her friend returns. Habit would kill the joy, making it as worthless in the human's world as it is in the dog's. A man in front of his old car is like a dog in front of a supermarket. People who drive new cars never learn this, nor do those for whom their old car stands as a mere confirmation of temporary impoverishment. All the savagery that had amassed inside Hasan was swallowed up by the Buick Riviera, all that he'd taken from others but that could not find a place inside him except as a kind of indestructible waste, plastic sacks at the bottom of the sea, circulating undigested through his veins.
He was wiping the headlights with the lambskin when Angela woke up the first time. She looked at the clock, three fifteen, rolled onto the other side of the bed, saw that he wasn't there; two small swords of displeasure appeared at the edges of her mouth, remained for several seconds, and disappeared when she fell back to sleep. Angela Raubal had had a rough night. The night doorman and Swan Lake extra Al Rahimi had brought her home from the theater somewhere around five. Then she'd sat in the kitchen and cried a little, from the new moon, the cold, the director's insanity, or because it hurt her that Hasan didn't stay up until she got home anymore. It used to be different, she thought. He used to jump like a happy puppy regardless of the hour, but now he was breathing deeply in a sleep that a pneumatic drill wouldn't disturb; he breathed like a child asleep at a movie theater.
Hasan Hujdur had begun learning to breathe that way a long time before, since the first time he'd thought that love was turning to war and he was trying to outwit more often than please her. He would squint into the dark, see her standing in the doorway, waiting, sometimes for ten whole minutes, urging him to wake up, begging him, getting angry, yawning and scowling as if she was going to shout, then dismissing him with a wave and walking away like a young tennis pro after a loss, consoling herself with the thought that that was what getting old meant: some men start to snore, even though they never snored when they were first married, but others, it seems, just sleep more soundly. He would be gripped by sadness then: he was doing something bad, but it wasn't as if he had much choice. If he had waited up for her, who knows what sorts of demons she might have brought home. Hasan didn't remember the nights and mornings when Angela had come home in a good mood, or he simply excluded them from his count. Later—he didn't remember when—he started forgetting all the good, just as up to then he had forgotten all the bad. In the theory of marriage, it could be written that that was the moment when he ceased to be in love. But still, while he breathed deep beneath the covers and peered at Angela waiting, he wanted her to shout or at least clear her throat to wake him. Instead, she tip-toed away. When, after cleaning up, opening and closing the fridge, and turning on and off the TV, she came to bed, he would already be asleep. Two hours later he would wake up, carefully disengage himself from Angela's embrace, leave her arm on his pillow, and go out to see if the morning paper had come, taking a seat in the kitchen to smoke, read, and drink his first Coca Cola of the day.
She was sleeping deeply again when, having passed the softest of rags across the glass and having defrosted every lock on the Buick Riviera, he completed his ritual. He ordered all the tools in the red linen pack, folded the lambskin rug in its bag, sat behind the wheel, breathed deep, and turned the key. The motor's heart came to life, the old thing roaring loudly at first, then growing ever quieter until it had settled into its rhythm, unchanged since the day JFK was killed in Dallas. Lives that knew nothing of one another had passed in that rhythm. Nor was it likely that they would ever cross paths. Hasan Hujdur did not know the names of the Buick's owners, the seven men who preceded the one he'd met at the supermarket, but he sensed a mystical connection with them, stronger than most of the other connections it is possible to establish among people. Their fingers had sunk into the recesses of the steering wheel and, over the long years of driving, been deepened by another who had gripped the wheel somehow in his own manner, depending on physical constitution, temperament, spiritual state or who knows what, though that manner was unique to him. Driving a car that has belonged to others, in time a man will learn everything about them. Were they nervous or phlegmatic? Did they drive with one hand, leaning the other on the passenger seat or laying it dead in their lap? Or did they grip the wheel hard with both hands, fearing accidents and constantly worried about being able to stop in time should a child jump out in front of them? What to one person is a source of nightmares to another is the greatest joy. Maybe a car doesn't have a soul or a memory, but it remembers the people who've driven it. From its standpoint, people are not divided into those who drive fast and those who drive slow but rather into those who enjoy themselves while driving and those for whom driving is the greatest of torments. The ones driven by frightened, unhappy people have the shortest lives.
Like the pits in rock made over a hundred years by a faucet trickle in the harem of the greatest mosque, so did the trace of history appear to Hasan Hujdur in the Buick Riviera. The car had not survived like something one must lock up at night and equip with alarms against thieves. It was a life miraculously copied onto a gleaming product of Detroit's automotive industry.
Miljenko Jergović was born in Sarajevo in 1966. A poet, prose fiction writer, and journalist, he has published more than twenty books (of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction), and his work has been translated extensively throughout the world. Buick Riviera was made into a feature film in 2008 by filmmaker Goran Rušinović, and the two were in turn awarded the Golden Arena prize for best screenplay. He lives in Zagreb, Croatia.
Russell Scott Valentino is a translator and scholar based in Iowa City, Iowa. He has published eight books and numerous essays and short translations of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from Italian, Croatian, and Russian. He is the publisher of Autumn Hill Books and Editor of The Iowa Review. He teaches in the University of Iowa's Translation Workshop.