Of Spoons* and Dogs

“I’ve been waiting the whole day for this moment,” you say in a muffled voice, and turn your back to me in bed, purposefully. I cling close to you, my head leaning on your shoulder-blades, my arm scooping your waist and chest, my legs outlining the length of yours. I often burst out into inexplicable explosions of laughter spiced with silliness – this is not one of those times. My eyes are closed, but I’m not sleeping, I’m simply clinging. You’ll be gone in a minute or two, off to where I can’t follow, and I’m just squeezing the moment to the last drop. Suddenly, I think of my grandfather’s dog Džekson from about 20 years ago, and how he loved to stretch out on the warm stone steps of the house in the silence of a summer afternoon heat; how he sighed deeply and contentedly when you sat next to him for a moment and stroked him. You could tell that’s all he ever needed, in the whole wide world. I hold your body heavy with sleep and I smile. This is no different. This is the same.

*Hats down to the beautiful English expression "to spoon"...

Never Too Late, or Thank You Leita

"Don't tell me you call that a hug!" she says, mirth and tease in her eyes. It's 1998, I've only been in Halifax for a couple of months, and I've just witnessed my first Canadian snow. In fact, it's about 2 a.m. but here we are, standing on the landing midway down the staircase in the rickety, brown, typically Haligonian residence house (that smells like goat-piss, like any old house, said Tal, and with reason), celebrating the snow, and hugging. I knocked on her door and woke her up, in honour of the snow -- I know she doesn't mind, she lives for the little moments, like me. Leita has already seen one winter here, previous to this one, but as a Haitian she still appreciates the novelty of it. We are not unused to the small hours; Leita, Sophie (our inseparable French third) and me did lots of things in the dead of night, procrastinating and genuinely enjoying each other's company. Once, on the wings of an exhilarated night mood, we played "drums" in the kitchen, using all available pots, pans, and utensils and created a most blissful racket (Christine, whose room was right next to the kitchen, wasn't impressed though).

So, "Don't tell me you call that a hug!" Leita teases. "What's wrong with my hug?" I make a couple of small steps back so I can see what she means. "Well, you need to use your entire body when you hug, not just the shoulders and the neck. This is what you do, look." She inclines the upper part of her torso slightly forward, firmly leaving her middle and the legs planted vertically and away from the imagined person she's hugging. It looks distant, antiseptic, superficial and, above all, ridiculous. Do I really look like that? She stays motionless for a little while to give me a chance to study this unlikely posture. When she thinks it has sunk in, she goes back to her normal self (the lovely, graceful, bodily type of self), and I'm still thinking (she has a point, now that I come to think of it). "When you really hug somebody, you cling to them with your upper, middle, and bottom parts; you hang on to them, you encircle each other for a moment in time, so you can feel each other. Now, that's a hug!"She demonstrates, and as she's folding me gently but firmly into herself covering as much surface as possible, something shifts almost imperceptibly, clicking into place, like a dislocated bone which finds its groove again; as in a puff of magic, the world has moved slightly and fallen into place. On the staircase of this old, funny-smelling house, I'm learning again how to hug, and I think of my mother and how she held me close in a broad hug, sitting on the edge of my bed early in the morning when she used to wake me up for school.

Perhaps hugging is like riding a bicycle: you never really forget how to do it. Perhaps this tiny moment was more important than any of the postgraduate ramble I learned that year. And certainly, you learn more from some people than from others.

My Little Red Box

... or: I Stand Guilty of Nostalgia and I'm Fine with It

This is how it happened.

The other day I felt an urge to bake something, and that something soon crystalized to be no more no less than gingerbread. When I finally made it to Toronto from Ottawa (winter 2000 or 2001?) on the last leg of my winter holidays, Aaron's mother welcomed me with a fresh-baked, still-steaming loaf of gingerbread, which I simply loved. I even tried to make it myself later on in Halifax, which is why I thought of my little red box.

My little red box is rather faded; the colour has peeled off, especially on the corners of the lid. I got it in Cambridge (1996?) as a way of making my double room more homey. Candles, and my huge map on the wall, a few pictures, and a red box - just for the colour. How daring! said Knut when I walked into his room across the hall while he was in the shower... He had small homey things in his room too (where we often sat sipping tea or elderflower juice) -- including a ridiculous white-and-red porcelain rooster-alarmclock which cockadoodledooed early every morning, starting Knut off on his inevitable morning rituals before he'd cycle off to his lab at the university. Tall and upright, with trouser-clips at the ankles.

When I said my goodbyes to England (no, not 'adieu' -- wrote Harold on the farewell note, stuck on my door that July day that I left -- rather, 'au revoir'), I took the little red box with me, so it travelled first to Belgrade, then to Halifax, and then to Montreal. Over the last decade, it came to represent a sort of a "treasure-box," where I keep some of my trinkets, and, above all, recipes. (Tough luck with the gingerbread recipe -- it wasn't there). In the respect of my recipe-keeping habits, I can safely say that I am reproducing those of my parents. They never had a well-organized system for managing the ever-increasing pile of all sorts of papers, notes, memos, cut-outs, handwritten or typed, sometimes with dates and names of people who donated the recipe. All this was in a couple of small plastic bags, themselves placed in a bigger plastic bag, in the tiny storage room in our apartment. Teas, powders, flower and sweet things on the right; bottles, jars, and pickled things on the left; fruit and vegetables in baskets or bags on the floor. And Srdjan, maybe 2 years old, slipping inside when he thought mom wasn't watching, to plunge his hands into the sifted flower.

In reality, they are more than recipes; they are records of other lives and other times and other me's put together. There's Cathy in there, with the recipe for the famous chocolate balls her mother made one Christmas in Picton, Ontario; and Sanja, with the recipe for kiflice with cheese, of which she is the undisputed mistress; Srdjan, with a recipe for fish in wine, hastily scribbled as he dictated it to me over the phone; my father, and his winter pickles; my mother, with the recipe for tufahije (on which something spilled and browned the edges), podvarak, sarma, and prebranac; Suzy and her magic pie; baklava of the Greek fest guys in Halifax; sangria, which F and I made very successfully for one of my birthdays; my grandmother, with her walnut strudel (even signed and dated by her); Jakub, with his apple crumble; Pallavi, with beautifully calligraphed recipe for chana masala; Sho, with the miso-soup recipe full of smiley faces and music notes; Ivana, with the typed-out series of recipes for fancy breads; my cousin Martina's son Miloš, who copied a recipe for "wet cake" in the unsteady big handwriting of one who has just learned how to write; my mother, father and brother again, with a list of popular dishes typed by my brother, dictated by my father, and accompanied by a letter from 1999 written by my mother. By some fortunate mistake, there is also a slip of paper with the two stanzas of a song about the "kidnapping" of my grandmother by my grandfather, written in their honour and popularized by fellow-musicians in their county -- with a short shopping list on the other side, in the handwriting of my mother (bread, yogurt, beer, washing detergent).

On the bottom of the box, underneath these layers of time -- a few simple objects, each assuming symbolic dimensions in its singleness. A Toshiba thermometer, non-functioning (I've had about three mercury thermometers, and all three ended up broken when I shook them too strongly, terrified and fascinated by the quickly-forming balls of mercury running around the floor); 1x0.5 g analgin, 3x500 mg febricet, 1 caffetin (the whiteness of the pharmacist coat with her initials embroidered in red on the upper edge of the pocket); a yellowed 1998 church calendar; a slightly chipped light-green round handsoap I "stole" from Leckhampton on my four-day visit to Cambridge the spring following my fairy-tale year there

and

above

all

a small white pharmacy paper bag, worn out and bursting at the seams, filled to capacity with -- buttons; buttons of all kinds, sizes and styles. She must have known I wouldn't really need all those buttons; I guess in her mind they were a little something she could give me to take from home, a substitute for protection, a reminder of love, a part of my day away from her. Round, solid, and invincible, on the bottom of my little red box.

Why I Don't Like Coming Back to a Dark House

The short answer would be: due to existential angst. The longer one involves one late afternoon, when I was going home from school and the third square from the bottom of my apartment building (our kitchen window) was disquietingly dark. "Oh, it looks like there's no one home at your place, what are you going to do?"said Leonora, shooting me an inquisitive glance of slightly exaggerated concern. That was the time (probably in Grade 3) when, for some forgotten reason, I hung out with the cool kids -- girls with fancy names like Leonora and Andrea. A couple of times they came to my house to play with me. That was also the time when I carried the house key on a blue elastic ribbon around my neck, kind of like a necklace. I normally never had the need for the key in the afternoon since my parents were always at home when I got back from school -- but the key was always around my neck, "just in case." I remember the ribbon because in Grade 2, they came to take our individual enlarged photos, and when it was my turn to sit in the chair in front of the photographer, he looked at me and said, "Take that ribbon off, kid, you don't want it in the picture." I was a little confused, but dutifully took it off and asked a friend to hold if for me until the picture was taken. And there I still am in this photo, with my somewhat spaced out milk front teeth, wearing a dark-golden cardigan, with no blue ribbon hanging around my neck -- the photo was later framed and my mother kept it on a chest of drawers. But that afternoon, as I walked towards my darkened home heavy-hearted, the key was dangling on the blue elastic around my neck, reminding me that I would soon have to go through those horrible few minutes of unlocking the door to a silent apartment and facing the ill-boding emptiness. The terror of the situation truly lay in those few moments -- and, in fact, I can't even remember how this episode ends, whether my parents were at home but simply had neglected to turn the lights on in the murky zone between night and day, or whether they had indeed gone somewhere and came back soon after me.

What I do remember is this strange fear as I was approaching our apartment building, the kind that takes over your whole being. The kind that brings into question your entire existence, and leaves you short of breath because you don't have an answer or a solution. I remember it well because I was its prey many times in childhood -- and always about the same thing: if for some reason my parents were late after a day at work. They would usually show up between 3:00 and 3:30, and when the clock on the wall in the hall went beyond that magic window of time, I would get anxious, and would strain all my being in order to pick up the first, distant sounds from the belly of the building, indicating that one of them was approaching, and sending waves of relief through my body. I would glue myself to the front door, and, transforming into a giant, sophisticated ear, I'd start a listening journey down the staircases and landings (hunting for the reverberations of the familiar steps: my mother's slow, laborious ones, or my father's determined, springy ones), by the two elevators (the mechanical, mournful whizzing of either may have meant that my father was on the way -- my mother never took the elevator), by the metal bars in the railings on all three storeys that separated me from the groundfloor (including the one missing bar in the railing of the first floor), past the mailboxes at the entrance, and out the main door, where on summer mid-afternoons small kids from the building spent lazy hours, their shrieks and babbling trickling in thinly from the distance, together with faint echoes of the life passing down the street.

What was it that I was afraid of? What was I imagining? That something unspeakable had happened to my parents, and they were not coming, and I was doomed to stay motionless there for eternity? Or that they had simply forgotten me and our home, and I was abandoned? It's hard to tell. Above all, there was that devastating feeling of suddenly being alone, severed from some organic part of me, left unprotected and small, unable to read meaning into the momentarily changed world, and crushed by the overwhelming question beginning to form in my head, "And what now?"

I am not in Grade 3 any more (haven't been for a long time), and I left my parents' home a lifetime ago, it seems -- and yet, there are moments when my body remembers and recognizes this anxiety of a child whose world is precariously endangered because the parents are missing... Some things don't change much, do they. We only learn better how not to show that all we want to do in moments like those is cling to that door, ear painfully pressed to it, listening for the saviour-sound.

And that's why I don't like coming back to a dark house.

Dangling on a Thread

I am about five pages away from the end of Kenzaburo Oe's The Silent Cry. A curious moment, the one when you know you are about to finish a book. Its world is dangling on a thread, and once your eyes scan the last few lines, hitting the final period, it's as if you were cutting the thread with a pair of scissors. That is not to say that I will be particularly at a loss once I've cut the thread of Oe's Cry, letting it drop -- where, exactly? Into the abyss of all the read books? (An image worth working on some more, I suppose). On the whole, the book didn't get to me -- or perhaps it is I who didn't get into it. But there were a couple of very powerful images in this novel, which will stay with me even long after The Silent Cry has hit that rockbottom in the abyss -- this is where, for me, Oe's true strength lies.

Take, for example, the opening. Tokyo, the 60s. A man, 27 years old, blind in one eye, whose one child is no more than a vegetable placed in an institution for retarded infants, whose wife has turned into an alcoholic, and whose very good friend just committed suicide (after painting his head crimson red, sticking a cucumber up his behind, and hanging himself), wakes up to a predawn sky and takes his sick dog out. Outside is the square hole the workmen dug the day before for the septic tank. Holding the dog in his arms, he climbs down the ladder and into the pit, filled with puddles here and there. "Sitting down directly on the bare earth, I feel the water seeping through my pajama trousers and underwear, wetting my buttocks, but I find myself accepting it docilely, as one who cannot refuse." For minutes on end, he sits there with the dog clawing anxiously into the muscles of his chest, keeping its balance.

There is something simply striking about this scene. It oozes despair, lack of alternatives, quiet sadness, letting things overtake you -- like that water slowly soaking the pajama trousers... This is not how I ever want to wake up.