Unphotographable

 

Every summer towards the end of my visit, I get ready for my annual raid. I declutter my father’s kitchen table, pull out one or all the boxes from underneath the L-shaped canapé – where, many years ago when my mother was still alive, my brother slept when I was visiting – and open the dusty lids. It’s a moment of instantaneous magic. As if someone had suddenly turned on the light after eons of darkness within the box, a whole new world – black and white, and sometimes in color – blinks awake and looks up at me, looking down at it. Photographs. Dozens and hundreds of photographs. A myriad of lives crammed into little, flat pieces of paper. Some – many – touching mine in various and weird ways. After only a second of sizing it all up where everyone is holding their breath including me, I just jump into it and know I’ll be in there for hours or decades of real time depending on what “real time” really means. Or whose it is.

Everything in the boxes is fascinating with its momentarily vivid pastness, almost on the brink of saying something, and I’m not sure what I’m looking for. An instant of mystery teasing from the other side, a spontaneous configuration of known or unknown people captured in a telling tableau, a nostalgia-invoking gem of the past… Some summers I try to sort and organize the photos according to the side of the family or the decade or how familiar the faces are. But most of the time I just leaf through the piles and travel through time. There are toddlers – often my brother and me – naked or half-naked on the pebbly beaches of the Adriatic Sea; there are unidentified children at various early birthday parties (which, at the time, meant eating/drinking gatherings of the young parents with their small children in tow); there are people in their late teens and early twenties, known as omladinci in the happier times of Tito’s Yugoslavia in the late 1950s, picnicking on meadows with badminton rackets and accordions (the latter giving away my mother) or walking through a summer forest-clearing with their work shirts and pants rolled up on a field trip for a university course (my father); there are families radiating genuine happiness gathered around dinner tables – always covered with white table cloths –  at home or in restaurants, pressed close together for the picture, arms on shoulders (my grandparents and their extended family or friends).

One photo arrests my attention in a puzzling way although I recognize two out of the three people in it – my maternal grandparents. But there’s something a little odd in the placement of the three subjects and the composition of the scene: my grandfather and a man I don’t recognize stand in front of a house with tall windows lightly turned towards each other but facing the camera. My grandfather, a peasant who worked the land but also a musician with his own family band not shying from a PR opportunity, seems at ease flashing a bright smiling face, a white shirt underneath an unbuttoned good-quality dandy-looking jacket, and a cigarette between the fingers of his left hand. The unknown man is wearing a sweater, has both hands in his trouser pockets and with a slightly leaning head seems to be eying the photographer suspiciously. Between and behind them, like a third point of a triangle, is my grandmother, who is inside the house, her elbows resting on the windowsill of the open window with a white lacey curtain behind her. She is looking at the camera with a gentle (slightly vulnerable?) smile and there is something that looks like a cat’s head with triangular ears cradled in the nook of her left arm. She is wearing a necklace but even with a magnifier I can’t tell if it’s the one she gave me, having nothing else to give me, the last time I saw her some forty years later. Where were they, who was this man, what were they doing here? There is no one who can tell me that anymore, and the puzzle remains, suspended in the empty air of the photograph forever.

The photograph which I decide is my top-prize loot this summer is one of many capturing celebrations around white-table-clothed tables and it also contains three people. I know who all of them are, although I’ve never met one of them. This was the wedding day of one of my father’s best friends from university, Pera (to me, who saw the light of day a few years after this photo was taken, he was Uncle Pera), and this was at the very end of the 1960s. The other two men in the photo are Cvrle and my father. Cvrle, whose real name was Jordan (my father couldn’t recall why they nicknamed him Cvrle), was another good university friend, and the closeness of their friendship is clear in the photo: they are a tightly-knit unit of three, with Pera and my dad on each side of Cvrle. Cvrle’s right arm is squeezing Pera’s neck as if he’s headlocking him, and my father’s right arm is extended and thrown around both of his friends’ backs. They are holding various drinking accessories: a tall glass, a small jug, a shot glass. The table bears witness to the amount of drinking that was going on: there are five bottles in front of them, a soda siphon and a fat jug, one bottle showing its label in half-profile with the big letters DA (“ah, yes, we were drinking DAVID,” my father said as soon as he looked at the photo – apparently an expensive drink at the time which was normally above their alcohol budget but was there for the occasion; a good student as always, I googled it but found nothing). A heavy crystal ash tray – the kind that continued to be fashionable into the 1970s and the 1980s and that even I remember from the time when my parents still smoked – with the cigarette butts in it confirms they were living fast and with gusto.

Why did this photo pull at my sleeve, why did it demand my full attention….? There are plenty of similar photos in this box and this one is not in any sense better or special. But perhaps it epitomizes, I don’t quite know what, a thirst for life? The power and invincibility and nonchalance of youth? The highs of a thick friendship and the intensity of being there with and for the others “right here right now”? Or did my nostalgia-hunting eye detect what I see as a certain old-world quality of knowing how to be fully festive, inhabiting the width and the breadth of one’s life unquestioningly?

Although all of the above is relevant, I know I’ve been dancing around the truest reason: fragility. The power and force of life but also the inescapable frailty of any one life and its ramifications, staring you in the face, beautiful and terrifying.

The three men in the photo are in their late twenties; they are coming into their own, finally earning proper salaries in their first jobs, and beginning to make big life decisions. Their bright smiling faces are radiating a certain ease and confidence, Cvrle and my father looking straight into the camera, Pera – the incorrigible and mischievous joker of the gang – casting a salacious? mocking? flippant? side-glance somewhere out of the frame. The world is theirs at this moment. And yet… Looking at them from across almost sixty years, my admiration of their vivaciousness captured in the photo is somewhat obscured by what my vantage point imposes: an insight into the accumulation of glitches, detritus, blockages, weights and burdens brought on after this moment by the free-flowing, elusive, always dynamic and unphotographable current of time which never stands still. An insight into the unfolding of their paths – their fate, perhaps? And knowing someone’s fate is somehow never pleasant, even when we can stop and appreciate the value of certain singular moments.

I never met Cvrle. In the photo, he commands the most attention with his middle position, the whiteness of his shirt unfettered by a jacket, and a tanned healthy face radiating with overflowing happiness. He is also the one whose path stopped abruptly just a couple of years after this photo was taken and before I was born. Unlike Pera, who got his first job in Macedonia and my father who started his career as an engineer of geology in Bosnia, Cvrle was lucky to land a job in Belgrade after graduating. Yugoslavia was a fast-developing country in the 1960s, rebuilding and building the post-war infrastructure everywhere, so they often found themselves travelling to different locations as part of the pre-construction terrain work. The summer Cvrle died, he and my father had terrain assignments in Montenegro, and they made a plan to meet up. My father’s work was in Kotor, while Cvrle’s was in Budva, where they agreed to meet one evening. When my father arrived, Cvrle was not there and at the bar they told him that Cvrle decided to leave as it was getting late, to make it to Cetinje where he had booked a hotel room. In the era of no cell phones and no reliable landlines if one was not at home, it took a few days for my father to find out that Cvrle was killed in a car accident that night as he was making his way up to Cetinje.

Geographically speaking, Montenegro is a landmass bunched up into spikey hills and mountains hugging the Adriatic coast, with vertiginously curvy roads often skirting the edge of precipices, with the sea or steep cliffs in the distance below. That night, probably after having had a few drinks, Cvrle didn’t make a sharp left turn and drove off the road, falling dozens of meters into a rocky abyss. He managed to get himself out of the car and started crawling up towards the road but didn’t make it. In the morning, shepherds taking their flocks out to graze found him. Weeks later while still on the job in Montenegro, my father followed in his tracks and says he was chilled to the bone when he saw the sharp turn instantly realizing that’s where the accident happened, stopped and peered down into the precipice: the remains of Cvrle’s red mini-Fiat were still scattered below.

I did get to meet Pera – Uncle Pera to me – mostly when I was a child but also later a few times. Although my father and he remained very good friends, they ended up settling down in different parts of the country: my father in Bosnia, and Pera in Belgrade after his initial working stint in Skopje. My childhood memory of him is quite hazy; perhaps the sharpest fragment is the excitement I felt as he was about to enter our apartment during one visit, and my mother whispering to me, “And look, now he’ll tell me ‘How are you doing, sister?’” And then he did it, exactly as she said, and to me it seemed like magic, filling me with admiration for the cool lives of adults. He was loud and festive in an old-fashioned way. During another visit much later, I remember him telling us how thrilled he was when his daughter Jelena, a year or two older than me, explained to him she couldn’t go to her swimming practice because of “women’s reasons,” and he then went and treated friends to drinks because his daughter “had become a woman.” Jelena later went to school in New York and stayed there; he visited once and went to Las Vegas too from where he brought my father a pack of “original” casino playing cards – which are still in my father’s kitchen; we take them out every now and then and play a little poker. Life then got more turbulent – Pera got divorced from his first wife, Milena, whose presence is invisible but implicit in the photo I’m looking at; he went to work in Libya for several years, earning good money which he frantically tried to preserve during the hyperinflation in the 1990s; his son, Milanče, went to the U.S. where he fell in with the wrong crowd, got hooked on drugs, and had to flee for his life to Canada, where Pera went to get him and bring him back to Belgrade; he remarried and spent most of his time on a piece of land he acquired an hour away from Belgrade, where he had an orchard (and I remember a wonderful apricot tree most of all).

The last time I saw him was at my mother’s funeral. She died suddenly and I had to come at a moment’s notice; still jet-lagged and completely out of it, I sleep-walked through those first few days, lost in a strange kind of unreality. But towards the end of the funeral as the June rain was beginning to come down and wet the soil, I looked at Pera who seemed small and hunched over, and something happened. I still don’t understand it. Out of the blue, I felt a certain lightness, a relief, a brightening from inside, like you might feel upon finally coming across an answer to a long-standing troubling question. I even smiled a little, inexplicably. “Uncle Pero,” I called. He looked at me without really seeing me. “Come, let’s throw a handful of earth there together,” I said. And we did, both of us smiling and tearing up at the same time. At the end of that summer, he was gone too; my brother called me to tell me he just didn’t wake up one morning. I did not attend his funeral but visited his grave with my father a year or two later.

And then there is my father. The only still living one of the three, inching into his mid-80s now. His path isn’t completed, and I don’t want him to belong to this story quite yet. But he’s been my dad for almost two thirds of his life now, so I have a fairly good insight into how things unfolded for him after this photographed moment of festive elation and camaraderie. As one can expect, there was a lot of good stuff: getting married, having kids, settling into a more comfortable phase of his life after the post-war deprivation and penury, enjoying the stability and jovialness of the good, solid mature years. But there was also the less good stuff, still nowhere visible on the horizon of the young man in the photo, flanked by his best friends and bolstered by the uncomplicated handsomeness of youth (including his older brother’s ring – borrowed for the occasion – on his left hand). It’s hard to rank tragedies but chronologically the first one, which was both a private and a public one, was the cataclysm of the Bosnian civil war in the 1990s, into which my father was conscripted in the last months of it. Almost forty years older than the majority of the rounded-up soldiers (one of whom would have been my brother if my parents hadn’t sent him off to Serbia to my grandparents while the borders were still open), he preserved his sanity by planting vegetables wherever they were stationed for more than a couple of weeks and by cooking for the scared and traumatized boys in uniforms. He doesn’t talk about it much and I don’t ask. I do remember that he had lost twenty kilograms by the time the peace treaty was signed, and I barely recognized him when I saw him. Then followed a few years of continued financial and political chaos when my parents got cripplingly indebted (to Uncle Pera, who was in Serbia and who had earned foreign money in Libya) in the attempt to stay afloat, and then took a few more years to repay the borrowed funds. Then he lost his older brother, my Uncle Bata. And then my mother died suddenly just half a year after they both stopped working and were getting ready to return to Serbia (by that point a different country after the breakup of Yugoslavia) and enjoy retired life. My father had always been an epitome of strength to me, but this really knocked the air out of his lungs. Overnight, he’d become a solitary man, a widower whose children had left home and who now had to go through the final reckoning with the forty years of his Bosnian life on his own, pack what was worth keeping, and move back to Serbia, where he didn’t entirely belong any more. It must have been disorienting – having to rethink and reinvent oneself at the beginning of one of the latter chapters in one’s book. But, highly adaptable and realistic, he did find his footing again and I’m always impressed by how he manages to find daily meaning despite a sizeable reduction of his life field, which is fast-funneling into the distance.

These days he walks with an uncertain step, uses a cane and has difficulties walking uphill; he might tell you the same story a couple of times; he can doze off within seconds. But he is still there, and trying to make it all meaningful, somehow. Looking at this photo, he doesn’t have any particular emotional reaction – he simply tells me about his friends. There isn’t even any nostalgia in his story, only facts, and perhaps that is by far the best way of going about it: choosing to feel a sustained continuity about oneself and others regardless of disruptions, blows and losses along the way.

I look at the three young men again, looking at me with all of their past and all of their future condensed in this forever-toast. How lovely, how beautiful, how memorable. This is why these flat little pieces of paper have so much more depth and power than one’s literal mind can muster. And so, I gather my selection of photos – this year’s loot – and take with me these known and unknown, dead and alive people with their moments and continuities to keep me company, to play on my team, to remind me to walk the walk without always looking for the path. To empirically remind me of the unphotographable stuff of life throbbing inside everyone, everywhere, regardless of time.

"That's All We've Got!"

(For my mother, who left 18 years ago but is still a part of it all)

 “That’s all we’ve got!” a voice blasted from the crowd,

Enthralled and apologetic at once, rising above the

Mad symphony of screaming, roaring, shrieking and howling

That picked up speed and volume as it grew darker,

The glaring disc of the sun disappearing steadily,

Unstoppably, behind the unsuspecting moon,

And then there it was, that long expected yet

Completely shocking celestial spectacle

We had all gathered to see.

 

Unperturbed by the momentary panic,

Insanity and pandemonium below,

The sun and the moon performed their

Ancient dance in full form and without hesitation

As they must have done again and again

Through the eons, unwittingly raining

Cosmic blessings on anyone looking up,

Thousands, millions of us,

Stunned and mesmerized by that spectral crown

Glowing in the primordial darkness;

 

Thousands, millions of us,

Made up of that same stuff, 

Giving it all we’ve got,

Moved and disarmed by

All that beauty, all that madness.

Connections

 17 years later, you are still here on your birthday (and any other day). This October you are sharing this space with a small but special bunch.

Connections

Gile, 1.

November 2012

The day Gile arrives to the house from SPCA, he is so tiny he can fit into the stretched palm of my hand. The first encounter between the two older feline residents and the baby newcomer is predictably awkward and standoffish. A minuscule fluff of brownish down-like fur, he needs to stand his ground however improbable that seems. I’m close, ready to intervene; these are the critical first moments. When the other cats approach a little too much, Gile clambers onto my crouching right leg, huddles up, and from this safe platform begins to take in the coordinates of his new world. His small paws are gently pressed into my leg, just enough to make us both stable and aware of each other’s presence.

February 2023

The vet oncologist is young, soft-spoken and permanently smiling. After she and her assistant spent half an hour with Gile, going through all the reports and examining him once more, they come get me in the waiting area and I join them inside the exam room. Gile is standing on a wide metallic table, big-eyed and a little cowed down but alert and bright. I sit down, and the vet begins to explain carefully and slowly, the tonality of the voice unmistakably colored by the sad register. I have already seen the reports and half-way through her speech, I stop listening, noticing Gile’s elegant and silent leap from the table to the floor. He goes around my chair, jumps lightly and easily straight into my lap, and then huddles up on my right leg positioning himself comfortably and safely. His paws are softly pressing into my leg, like a stamp of our synchronized presence and quiet love, and as we sit there not listening, we might as well be anywhere and everywhere, for all we care, forever.

 

Gile, 2.

Piggy-backing, from the beginning to the end.

December 2012

Spring 2023

Scissors

 I open the cutlery drawer in my father’s kitchenette and the first thing I see is the scissors, looking up at me. They have their designated place in the front of the drawer, wedged inside a plastic spoon. Once I mistakenly placed them elsewhere, which caused a mini crisis, as my father believes that the frequently used objects should always be kept in the same spot so they can be readily accessible. These scissors didn’t always live in this particular drawer; I first got to know them in another kitchen drawer in another apartment in another city, where we lived when I was a child, and when my mother was alive. Being the only scissors in the house (not counting the small nail scissors which dwelled in the bathroom), they were often needed and used: in the kitchen, in the children’s room, in the pantry. To cut thread, string, scotch-tape, paper, hair. When an object is an integral part of your household and your personal universe and you share it with other members of that universe, you get to know it extremely well; its very shape, its contour, its lines become something you’re familiar with, something you know intimately well, something that could even be said – granted, with a slight touch of exaggeration – to be one of the foundation blocks of your identity. You look at that object, and you see yourself and your life as you know it or remember it, since it was intricated in many moments, each one containing an array of circumstances, emotional landscapes, mental dispositions, efforts, goals, dreams (many of which get coated with a sweet blanket of nostalgia in later years). The soft ovals where the fingers go, the blackened screw joining the two blades in the middle, the chipped glaze on the side and at the tip, all give these scissors a face and a body, which I recognize instantly. And it’s summer with all the windows in our drafty apartment open, my mother is busy at the kitchen counter, her hair short, her mind drifting with the music coming from the long-antenna radio; there’s a smell of cooking from our stove and from the neighbours’ also, and small sounds of errands, doors opening and closing and someone, my brother perhaps, walking carefreely through the hallway, and children’s voices from the bright, wide outside beyond and below the balcony where the laundry is drying. A whole intimate world well preserved and alive in the shape of the scissors. 

St. John’s Wort Oil

It has changed about four fridges, and in each one, it had its place in one of the drawers in the door. A small glass bottle that once held juice (the side of the lid says “Cappy”) has a tag saying, in my mother’s clear all caps handwriting, “ST. JOHN’S WORT OIL FROM 1996.” The piece of transparent scotch tape over it is so old that parts of it are yellow or cracked, and the paper from the original bottle label on the side is so worn out that it has turned into a fuzz of fine fibers and threads. It has become a permanent fixture of the fridge and if one day it isn’t there, there will be something very odd about it. My father uses it whenever he has a burn or a blister. 27 years after my mother made it and 17 years after she died, I open the little bottle and pour a few drops onto my left thumb which has been sore for a few days. I don’t know that this oil is good for such things, but I rub it in anyway. The liquid, which was originally yellowish-brown, has turned a vibrant ruby red and has a silkiness of a most delicate handkerchief. As I let it permeate my skin, I wonder where my mother picked the herb, where she left it to dry out, how long it was there… Which olive oil she used, and how she drained it. I’d love to retrace the steps, all the way to that walk she must have made and the moment – probably in late summer – when she stopped and picked the yellow flowers, deciding she’ll use them to make the remedy. Did she know that that moment would then permeate three decades, and possibly more, even after she was gone? That it was a kind of legacy and an instant of magic, an alchemy of love reaching far beyond her fingers and into other lives? Healing, connecting, perpetuating. Loving, and not needing anything else to be said.

Lines

“Hey,” I say, “let’s try something.” She comes over quickly, with a bouncing gait of a 5-year-old girl. “What?” her voice is curious and cooperative. I stretch out my left arm and kneel down so we’re on the same level. “See this line, just below the inside of my elbow?” I point to it. “Ha,” she says and looks intrigued, “what’s that?” “Well,” I say, “your dad’s mom, who was also my mom, had one just like that on her arm too.” She thinks a little and says, half-stating, half-asking, “my grandmother.” She is still learning family relations and trees, and placing correctly those she’s never met and never will is somewhat difficult. “Yes. So your dad and I have it because she did, and I think you have it too. Let’s see your arm.” She stretches out her arm and when she sees the same line in the same place, she’s fascinated. “Look, it’s the same, I have it too!” Her voice is excited and also serious, as if she felt honored and proud to be admitted to some kind of an adult club. Nearly 45 years separates us – and most of the year, a whole ocean – but right here and now, we couldn’t be more connected, and we both feel it in our different ways: I with my half-century, she with her half-decade. We put our arms side by side with our lines continuing each other, and there it is. The continuum, the long line of those who lived before us and continue to live in us, even if we’ve never met. The long line of lives full of aspirations, tribulations, histories, loves and griefs, which weren’t ours but which inform our own and expand our inner space to galactic and cosmic dimensions, linking us through all the generations to something far, far back when existence was measured in particles and pulses. And at the other end of it: Zozi’s arm and mine, side by side only for a few minutes before something else calls our immediate attention and we run off to it, but unmistakably marked by lines of connection, criss-crossing, reinforcing, hemming, securing the fabric of our days.

 

On Whistling but You Can Try It with Other Things Too

or: "perfection" 

is when you know exactly

what the next note should be

while you whistle

                (and you should whistle whenever

                you find yourself in acoustic

                happiness)

and then you know beyond a doubt,

as you feel the warmth of the breath

you are about to push at an optimal angle

between your tongue and your lips,

that as soon as this scoop of air

hits the outside atmosphere,

it'll be that exact note

            (and it's almost as if you've already

            done it except you haven't,

            and you gear yourself up for the double

            pleasure of anticipating and getting)

and then it spills out into the world

in a way designed, directed

and blessed by you,

and it is fully and unmistakably

that very note,

which then,

after a lingering moment of satisfaction,

takes its place, becomes transparent,

and blends into the rest of this

inner-turned-outer universe

you whistled into

perfection.

Transformations

 (For Cikki. And Martin)

With awe and trembling

she pushes against that fine line

between being and living

and replaces the cardboard-box constraints

with wide open spaces

of a heart-thrilling wilderness

she has dreamed of (unknowingly)

all her life:

tall grasses leaning heavy

with fresh morning dew,

broad-leafed bushes

with inviting shades,

and spidery groves echoing

with mysterious nocturnal calls.

Once she steps, first gingerly

then resolutely, out of

the known dimensions

into the endless universe

no force can stop her,

and like a summer cloud

transforming into a mighty fortress
(buttressed with love),

she sails free and unbound

with nothing in her way.

No predators now,

no diving birds of prey. 

In June

 

June is the month of linden perfume

and a reminder of your departure.

This June is special: I've sent you

Gile, the gentlest kitty-soul I've ever known

who, like you, left too soon.

He is the tenderness you taught me,

the delicate touch of love

that needs no words

and connects everything that's ever lived

or died.

Such peace, that comes only

from everything falling in line

with everything perfectly:

I can feel him by your side

and both of you by mine.

Lullaby for the Wet Paws

(To Gile, with love and gratitude. October 2012 - May 2023) 

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)

All the places they’ve gone to

Been in

Ran through,

These paws

The adventures in the yard

The deep greens of the ferns

The intricacies of the trellis

The pebbles

The earth

The illegitimate escapes in the alley

(But always running back,

Always pitter-pattering home,

A good boy),

These paws

Pushing through the back of the chair

To pull at my sleeve,

These paws

Pressing gently against my side while napping,

These paws

Daintily gripping at my shoulders

While hitching a piggy-back ride

These paws

Are now wet because you stuck them

Into the water bowl, trying to cool down in your illness

Needing to take them somewhere else

Somewhere they haven’t been.

 

These paws

Need to stop

And rest

And dream

(Of kitty cuddles, spring puddles…)

And I will have to

Wipe the floor and erase

The fine trail of your paw prints

Meandering through the house

One last time

Before I let you go.

 

Religare

a surprise video-call, and off we go again, cancelling

thousands of kilometers.

pixelated through the distance, dusk is beginning to fall

across the other continent,

and in the gathering darkness, he is just a small boy

in front of a massive church.

saints in gilded icons and towering marble columns

seem hushed and irrelevant

behind his boyish smallness as he leans over flickering flames

intently, his coat oversized,

the blue sneakers on his 7-year-old feet seeming to belong

to an older boy.

these are for the living, he murmurs as he lights the frail

candles stuck into the sandbox,

and these ones for the dead, he says, as if he knew

what it's all about.

i wonder if he senses, somehow, that he's closer than ever

to my mother - his grandmother -

who never had a chance to meet him,

as he officiates, priest-like, among the candles, lighting the new ones

with the flames of the old ones

keeping the ancient line alive between the dawns and the twilights,

between the ends and the beginnings,

between the lost and the found, his small hands ceremoniously

gliding through the air,

like a conductor decisively, gracefully making music,

to link the sky and the ground,

and everyone who's ever lived,

anywhere,

and all the time.

 

Read more »

Rock-solid

 

Another sticky July day, approaching the zenith fury amplified by the heat-emitting concrete and blinding glass around the airport. I’m leaving again, and it’s another goodbye. Every year offers a slight variation but the invariable constant is the lump in my throat as I navigate through the practical necessities and the emotional nebulas of the last few hours before I sink into the airplane seat and cast one departing look on the sun-withered grass and corn fields around the Belgrade airport.

This time there are four of them in my seeing-off committee (identical to my welcoming committee one month before). We are making our way almost reluctantly from the multi-floor garage where my father’s whimsical car, which occasionally and unpredictably decides not to start or refuses to stop, is left on some level or other (the kids are repeating the level letter and number so they can find it easily afterwards). The sun outside is punishing; the heat has settled low above the ground and is sitting oppressively on any living thing. We pass by the abandoned café-bar “Borik” where up until this year we would always sit outside after I check in, for one final drink and a photo; it is now closed and derelict-looking, its late-socialist décor – unsteady chairs, aluminum ashtrays, checkered tablecloths, stacked somewhere in the back – sad reminders of a long-gone past. “Life is a miracle” is scribbled unevenly on one of the whitewashed walls. No one says it, but my father, my brother and I are thinking of another Borik: the part of town where we used to live while we were still in Banja Luka, in Bosnia, and when my mother was still alive, a lifetime and a country ago.

We are all a little quiet, hushed by the heat as we are walking towards the terminal and pensive from the slightly nerve-fluttering goodbye-occasion. Zozi  (who is four and a half) is lagging behind, saying something under her breath, the words muffled by the soundtrack of the airport. My brother leans over, and she explains she has a pebble in her sandal, which is bothering her. We are so close to the sliding doors; he says we’ll take a look as soon as we’re inside, but no, she insists, her voice taking a pouty turn, her sandal needs to be emptied now or she can’t walk. We stop for a moment, my brother quickly does it, and as soon as the stone the size of an index-fingernail is removed, she’s as bouncy and light on her feet as usual and is running down the big hallways inside the terminal along with her brother.

Then things unroll fast: I check in, we walk around and weigh ourselves on the old-fashioned luggage scale (Didi+Zozi+me = 101 kg), we get juices and coffees in one of the busy inside cafes and take silly pictures, Didi (who is six and a half) goes to check how long the passport-control line is, and then we make our way towards it, slowly. It’s now the last few minutes (I can’t decide if time has stopped still or turbo sped-up), the last hugs (they always feel different; perhaps we should always hug the way we do before a long absence?), the last few meters they walk with me, all of us apparently jokey, until we reach the point they can’t cross, one more look over my shoulder (arms high up in the air, waving), and then I’m on my own. I’m suddenly aware of all the things I’m carrying, including an orange denim jacket I had no room for in my bag.

 The rest of the trip until I reach my apartment in Montreal is made up of familiar tableaux with some variations here and there. The window seat and transfixed glancing at the Danube snaking below, a German airport – in Munich this time – clean and bright and half-empty with connecting passengers sleeping in awkward positions in lounge chairs, a long boarding onto the plump transatlantic plane, an aisle seat, headphones and movies, the darkness of the oncoming night outside and the darkness of the imagined ocean below. A strange portal, involving interstitial spaces and unhuman movement through air and time zones. By the time I unlock my apartment door some 15 hours later and walk inside, trailing my retinue of bags, I’m a zombie, my head cloudy and my limbs heavy. I open my phone – a poignant symbol of distance – go through messages that arrived in the meantime and find one from my brother.

“… a little secret,” he writes “In the left pocket of your orange jacket you’ll find a treasure from Zozi’s sandal; we slipped it in there when you weren’t looking….” I walk to the coat-hanger in the hallway – thousands of kilometers away from Zozi’s sandal -- shove my hand into the left pocket of the jacket, feel around it, and my fingers encounter a small hard object in the pocket corner. I pull it out, and we look at each other, the small familiar stone and me. For a second, I am aware of it intensely – the sounds, the smells, the sights, the movements from half the world away where the stone and I were just a few hours ago. And I feel it, the bond, the cord, the fine and robust tissue of love, which anchors you even in the insubstantial air, rock-solid, which keeps you and your people close and together even when you’re not.

I turn it over a few times inside my palm, put it on a shelf, and, feeling warm and welcome, begin to unpack. Life is a miracle.

thereness

 

beyond the fields of reference

with their words, and tropes

and inference,

we’ll wind our way into the woods

and sit under the trees,

our eyes glowing with the fire of stars,

the wind rustling the leaves

(soft fingers in the hair).

 

my left hand on a feline

your right on a canine,

we’ll breathe-in the world,

undo the time,

and, cradled into the arms of the night,

just be there.

 

nocturne

at the exact moment

when the night kisses the day

and a fine line stitches

yesterday to today

unfurl your canvas across the sky

made from sturdy nocturnal cloth

look left and right, i'm there

my canvas steady, waiting

for a southerly breeze whispering

are you ready

    are you ready

        are you ready

for this dance:

exploding clouds of white moths

flitting across the endless expanse

somewhere

where light stirs to life

and darkness blooms into flowers

under the canopy of a star-filled tree

on the fuzzy edge of a waking dream 

(in the hazy gossamer of the air in-between)

    armed with a pair of walking shoes

    and eyes glimpsing at magic unseen

meet me

when the purples bleed into the blues.

 

Balcony Magic

~Another one of her birthdays without her~

“Just a minute,” she says and disappears into the depths of the apartment, the light-fabric, semi-transparent peach-colour curtain swaying back and forth in her slipstream. My father and I remain waiting on the balcony. It’s late summer, the heat has lost some of its edge, it’s pleasant and cool to stand on the third floor and cast a glance at the neighbourhood. My elementary school is below, a few playgrounds and a big meadow between the surrounding apartment buildings, somewhere to the right the river is flowing fast and green at the foot of the hills. I’m 18, my hair is long and I still haven’t decided what to do with it, and I have an analog camera which I’m learning how to use. This is my last summer “at home” before I’m off to university in another city. I’m bent on taking photos of what has been my entire world up to now but I do it coolly, as if from a distance of curiosity, not with a mournful eye. I’m too young for that.

My mother, however, has sensed the defining potential of this moment, and has decided to make herself more photogenic. A few minutes later she comes back with a touch of lipstick, a trace of eyeliner, and a white diaphanous hair ribbon (made from an old curtain). I herd my parents together, with the newly painted orange balcony doorframe behind them (my father’s doing), they hold still for a few seconds, and I snap the photo. I don’t know that I will never live in that apartment again, that the balcony where my father in his pajamas once stared down a crowd that had assembled outside after an earthquake, where I used to stand and observe the boys from the hood playing soccer, and where the pigeons often came announcing summer, is about to become a memory, a symbol, a thing of the past, framed and remembered only through photos like this one.

And there they are, underexposed but present, he with an easy cross-armed and wide-collared confidence of a content man in his prime, and she with her long neck, slightly parted lips and a look of vulnerability… Vulnerability in the face of time, which she must have felt starting to slip away from her and take, irrevocably, one by one those things that are precious. I am about to leave and her world will change drastically. This is her missive, her letter for the future me, which she is sending via my photo, and in her small, fragile way she keeps time still whenever I look at her, decades down the line. She doesn’t have much with which to fight the inevitable separation and diminishment brought by time, but she does have that little bit of magic at her disposal, and she improvises with it, magician-like.

She was, is here. She was, is beautiful. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

A Thank You Haiku

 

for piecing together the cracked upper-right corner of the picture frame in the washroom

for refilling the ice-cube tray and replacing it in the freezer before you left

and a few other vastly more important things.

Another Summer

1. He says, "We'll get some fruit and leave it for them on the kitchen table." Today is the last day my father and I are supposed to drop by my brother's place to feed Boža the turtle and water the plants while my brother and his family are away at the seaside. Belgrade is an inferno these days, with heat beating from above and doubling the scorching effect by emanating upward from the concrete so each time we need to go, we opt for an early evening visit. The freshly fallen darkness enhances the vibrating sounds of crickets and the moist scents of various trees, interspersed with a lonely high-pitched call of a swallow running late to bed here and there. Also, chances are higher that after finally finding a dubious parking spot -- which requires gymnastic agility when getting in or out of the car squeezed between other tightly parked cars in one of the nearby streets -- we'll catch a glimpse of the neighbourhood curiosity: the Marathon Man. This is an older man, perhaps in his 70s, thin with slightly hunched shoulders, who jogs tirelessly up and down the streets around this hour, a stopwatch hanging from his neck.

No one knows exactly how old Boža is. According to some calculations, at least 17 years. My brother and his wife rescued him and his mate Božidarka from a pitiable living space in the friend's parents' bathroom. Since then, Božidarka died and was buried under a tree in the woody park on a hill, and Boža continued to thrive and expand, by now reaching a formidable size even though he only eats one small raw sardine every third day. Feeding him that sardine is a delicate business. It involves careful approach and angling. The best method is to hold the sardine by the tail, draw Boža's attention and wait for his frontal approach, then when he opens his mouth wide, position the sardine on an imaginary line continuing straight from Boža's neck and head, and let him bite it evenly as opposed to lopsidedly. If the latter happens, instead of swallowing the whole sardine in smooth, steady gulps, Boža will tear it to pieces in the attempt to make it go down, and then you end with a mess in his aquarium. This is the third time I'm doing it, so I'm fairly quick and efficient, letting Boža digest in peace after administering the sardine. When I return to the kitchen, my father is standing at the sink and carefully washing each piece of the fruit we brought. I ask him why he's doing that -- they're bound to wash the fruit before eating it anyway; he only says, "It's nicer like this," and continues to wash the fruit under the faucet. Then he finds a glass bowl, thoughtfully arranges the pears and plums in a dome-like fashion, and puts  it on the kitchen table. As we're leaving, with a long look around to make sure we didn't forget anything, the fruit on the table glistens and gleams with the water drops like tiny prisms, ready to welcome those who are returning home with a little bit of beauty, and care, and attention.  

2. The road from the monastery to the village where we'll stay overnight is just a couple of kilometers long. It's already late at night, all the other visitors are gone, and there's absolutely no one on that road, which goes through fields of tall grasses, broad-shouldered oak trees - only indigo silhouettes now -- and groves of other, more closely clustered trees. The only sound is the intense nocturnal song of the crickets, the sky is a deep purple, there are no lights anywhere. Except... I see them, all of them, through the side window of the car, and the next moment, we have stopped, engine and lights switched off. We get out of the car, crane our necks at the risk of keeling over in any direction, and take it all in, the star-crammed sky, shot through the middle with a thick ridge of the Milky Way. There isn't much to say; words don't seem to belong to such a moment. An extravagant canopy of stars sweeps across the sky above us with bigger or smaller clusters of brilliance, in sharper or fuzzier formations, wrapped in wisps of gossamer haze. It's as if someone opened a door and all the magnificence of creation spilled out joyfully and silently, and if you happened to lift your head, you'd see it in all its drama and glory; if not, you'd miss it. Like many things in life. 

We stand there for some minutes, star-struck and awed, feeling the throbbing rhythms of the world; feeling that somewhere there, and right here, is everything that ever mattered, and everyone we knew or didn't know, living or dead, and all of our dead, and us with them in this momentary explosion in the sky.

3. A sweltering August day in Belgrade. My father, my brother and my five-and-a-half-year-old nephew are at the cemetery visiting my mother's grave. It is 1 pm, the zenith heat crouching heavily on the ground; not the tiniest breeze in the still air. My brother and Didi are preparing a hole in the ground next to my mother's grave where they plan to plant a few gingko seeds: this is about the third attempt in the last couple of years -- all the previous ones failed, including the time when a young shoot actually pushed up from the soil but was mown by the cemetery maintenance people. My father is busying himself with the watering and the arrangement of flowers at the grave. The tacit etiquette at the cemetery is that you can borrow empty plastic bottles from the grave sites around, go get the water from the water fountain down the path, water your plants, and then return the bottles where you found them. It takes a few trips to the fountain and back to get all the necessary water; he walks slowly, wary of the fierce sun. The bouquet of lively little flowers we brought needs the stems shortened so they can fit well into the small vases on each side of my mother's tombstone. My father opens a small, very handy pocket knife with a hand-made handle, gifted to him by my mother's father, a couple of decades ago; with a decisive cut, he prunes the stems and we place them in the vases. Then it's time to go but before we do, I ask Didi to take a picture of us, and he's thrilled since he's never handled a camera before. I put the strap around his neck, show him how to hold the body of the camera and where to look, and finally, which button to press when he's ready. We pose, he takes a few seconds to double-check where the shutter button is and how to reach it with his small index finger, and then he's fully into it, as if he had been doing this for years, clicking away like a pro. And there we all are, together: my father, my brother, and me, as seen by Didi, my mother's silent presence at his back.

4. An infallible tradition on the last day of my summer visit to Belgrade, carried on for as many years as I can remember, is my father wrapping the bottle of šljivovica or plum brandy which I am taking with me that year. First, there's the question of picking the brandy to take. He wants it to be some first-class option, since it is going abroad. While the next-door neighbour, Uncle Ljubiša, was alive, he would often provide us with the home-made plum brandy from his village in southern Serbia. Since he died, this source has mostly dried up (except occasional offerings from Uncle Ljubiša's nephew who inherited his apartment, but only drops by once or twice a year). Instead, we look for the better brands sold in supermarkets, or we get some home-made brandy from other people, or, like this year, we buy it in a monastery. And so, on the eve of my departure from Belgrade, a small stocky bottle of "Bukovska" (from Bukovo monastery) is on the kitchen counter, waiting for its wrapping treatment so that it doesn't leak on my clothes in the suitcase, where it will go. My father has a profound reverence for plum brandy, and as we used to joke, in case of emergency would probably first grab a bottle or two before leaving the apartment. He handles the bottle carefully and gently -- his hands are not as steady as they used to be -- and begins by wrapping the bottle neck and the cap very tightly with scotch tape. Then he takes a thin plastic bag and wraps the top of the bottle in it, and then runs several new tight rounds of scotch tape around it, while as an assistant I am supposed to press my finger against the bagged bottle and slide it slowly ahead of the scotch tape so it adheres more securely. Finally, he takes a few thick middle leaves from an old newspaper (checking to see if there's some significant article in it), and wraps everything in it, like a snuggly-clothed baby, adding just a few more scotch-tape touches. Then I shove it into the bosom of the already packed suitcase, and a little bit of the sunshine and summer and the air from these parts travel with me, in the thoughtfully constructed protective shield of my father's making.

5. Then the last moment comes, the one which is looming uneasily from the very beginning of the visit, the one which is final, beyond which there is nothing, nowhere to run and postpone the goodbyes, beyond which there are only clouds and haze of the high plane altitudes which momentarily change everything, reduce people and places and feelings which were so real a few minutes ago to a maquette in some silent toy world below. The scene of the last moment is also preordained and inevitable: it's the Belgrade Nikola Tesla airport, with the sculpture of Tesla weirdly rigid, in an awkward standing position, looking sadly displaced on the side of the terminal building. My father always drives me there to see me off, and most of the time my brother comes along too. We all know it'll be half a year, or a year, or in Covid times, more than a year perhaps before we can see each other again. So even though we hate this last moment, we need it. Most of the time, this last moment happens early in the morning since my first flight -- to Paris, or Frankfurt, or Zurich, or Amsterdam -- is usually the first flight out of Belgrade. So the last day starts in the middle of the night; this time, my father and I get in the car in the eerily quiet street at 3 a.m. -- I always make a point of looking at his car-clock the moment I arrive and the moment we set off to the airport when I'm leaving -- and are already in front of my brother's apartment building 15 minutes later. Driving around Belgrade at 3 a.m. is an astounding experience, and if it weren't for the nervousness and heaviness of the occasion, it would be entirely enjoyable: there is such beauty in the abandoned, quiet streets with the traffic lights working diligently but for almost no cars and no people, electronic billboards and neon signs spilling diffuse purplish-blue light descending on the empty pavements. My brother takes a few minutes to come down, and for some reason my heart is in my throat as we're waiting in the car with the engine running; his appearance somehow marks the irreversibility of the unfolding actions of the day. 

The apartment building door opens and he appears, his shoulders bouncing as he walks towards us, a reassuring smile on his face ("it's just another day, just another time you pick me up, and we go somewhere, it's all good" it seems to say). He gets in, cracks a couple of jokes about the hour, and we're off; in minutes, we're on the highway under the inky sky, zooming through the sleeping landscape of corn fields towards the airport, and just like that, I feel like I'm already gone. Once we park and make our way into the terminal building, we're in some sort of no man's land, with displaced people pulling their luggage, shuffling from one end to the next with a forlorn expression on their faces, about to go hundreds, maybe thousands of kilometers away. After waiting in the gargantuan line in front of the Lufthansa check-in desk and successfully leaving my luggage, we're free to roam around and spend the last hour trying not to think of that last hour. We exit the terminal and are braced by the fresh night air -- the first almost chilly night in Belgrade since I arrived, and a welcome break from the tropical days and nights. Next to the terminal is a restaurant where we usually spend that last hour, after I check in and before I depart. We like it there because it's away from the madness of airports, and because it's called Borik -- we used to live in a part of town called Borik many years ago, when my brother and I were children, when our mother was alive, when we lived a regular, not particularly memorable but nevertheless precious family life; a simpler life, when we were together. Just after 4 a.m., however, Borik is wrapped in darkness and doesn't open for another 4 hours. We sit down at a table outside and for the sake of tradition, take a selfie, with my father in the middle gathering us with his arms around our shoulders. We have several such pictures from various years; in each one, we are a little older, a little smaller. Then we walk back to the terminal building, take the escalator to the departures level, and sit down in a bar, which is also closed but more comfortable. I pull out the three sandwiches I made last night (egg&cheese in big subs), and we eat, still in good spirits, my father and brother objecting to how dry the sandwiches are, and I feel teased but happy. It's the last 15 minutes before I have to go through the passport control. It's hard to swallow the last bits of the sandwich, and it's not just because it's dry. And then it's time. We get up and walk slowly, like kids who've done something bad and now must face their punishment, towards the passport control zone where they can't follow me any more. I take one of my carry-ons from my brother who insisted on lugging it around all this time, as we're passing under the old departures board, which is eerily silent for the first time since I got to know this airport. In the past, the thin rectangular planks inside the board -- each one with the number and destination of a flight -- would keep flapping frantically as they turned, with two red lights next to those flights which were boarding at the time. Motionless and soundless, they are only a memento now. 

Before we join the final line (they will walk it with me until the last possible moment, when I have to show my documents, and they have to step away behind the line separating those travelling from those not travelling), we stop for the hugs; those would be impossible in the line. A whole summer and a lifetime are crammed into those hugs, without many words, and with an attempt to commit to memory a tactile sensation of holding, to last until the next time. The line moves quickly and it takes less than a minute, they fall back, and I proceed towards the passport control booth, turning a few times with a nervous smile to wink or wave at them and they respond with a jokey pantomime. By the time I've got my passport stamped and am ready to go through the sliding door beyond which are corridors leading to flight gates, I'm having trouble distinguishing them among other people seeing someone off. When we do catch each other's glances, we motion towards the left side of the terminal, and we all know what it means. I stretch my right arm up as far as it will go, and just hold it there without waving -- a kind of an ultimate salute -- then pass through the door and hurry towards the C wing even though I have an A gate this morning. I'm walking as fast as my backpack and my laptop bag slung over my shoulder will allow: I'll have to walk all this way back, and then down the A corridor before I get to my gate to board. The airport has been under construction for a few years and each time I'm here it seems bigger and brighter. There is a faint smell of cigarettes, mixed in with the vaguely nauseating odor of public washrooms, as I'm making my way towards the big glass panels overlooking the entrance to the terminal outside. I stop at the nearest window and notice the first cracks of dawn somewhere in the distance. I look down: they are not out yet. I watch people on the ground level coming in or going out, and catch my mind beginning to grapple with the practicalities of the day: will the first flight be on time, will the connection in Frankfurt go smoothly, will all my documents be accepted, how will I feel once I reach the destination.... Then the two familiar figures exit the building, and I'm fully back in the present moment. They look up and see me, I wave wildly from inside and they do an improvised silly little dance on the pavement outside. It's another of our traditions from way back when; in reality, another way of stretching time almost to a breaking point, using up the last little crumbs of it. It is also one of the most difficult and beautiful things humans can do: filling the void of absence meaningfully with absurdity. With love.

Then, officially, it's the end of another summer and it goes quickly and heartbreakingly, the way summers do.