In the Mall

A break between two classes, x days ago. In the mall, I got my usual sandwich ($5.15), and decaf ($1.88), admired the insanity of things all around, watched people wind their ways skilfully as if they belonged to it all, and then headed for the north exit.



Next to the Bank of Montreal ATMs I passed a very old woman, walking towards a machine with the help of a walking aid which she pushed in front of herself. Small, withered, and almost transparently thin, she resembled a sparrow. Despite the sunny day, she was wearing a cardigan and a woollen skirt; instead of shoes, she wore warm house slippers. I had never seen anyone move so slowly. Her hands gripping the handles of her rolling walker, her look fixed at the bank machine, she dragged her feet in ever so tiny steps; she barely seemed to be moving. She was only about 3 meters away from the wall with a line-up of bank machines, but at this rate of movement, it would take her a good 3 minutes to reach it. Unswerving, and shut off to anything else going on around her, she pushed forward in short but constant little steps. All her previous life, all the long days of sinewy limbs, and marathon heart, and breaths wide as the sky, all diminishing in the thinned-out perspective of memory -- all were simplified, dismantled, stripped down to this moment of pure, basic, concentrated effort of traversing the few meters dividing her from the bank machines.






For a fraction of a second, I had an overwhelming wish to take the closest ATM, rip it out of the wall, wires and all hanging from the back of it, and present it to her as a little gift. Instead, my own (oblivious) firm feet underneath my elastic shins held steady by my stable strong thighs, carried me effortlessly out of the mall, into the sunshine of the street busy at lunch hour, and into my office across the road.

In the Metro

Today in the metro I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the glass door -- and saw my mother's eyes looking at me. We smiled at each other, and went our own ways.

Impossible

DISCLAIMER: None of the words that follow represent things as they were. I don't even know why I'm writing them.


It rises slowly ahead of us, and on a broad, sunny day, it is impressive. All bridges are. This one is new -- built in 2002, it is only a few years younger than its mother-country, Croatia. Spanning two shores of the bay Rijeka Dubrovacka, just west of Dubrovnik, it looks like a giant geometrical spider-web mysteriously suspended among the bald rocky hills rubbing elbows with the Adriatic Sea.

As we approach it, the imposing sign looms up above, "Bridge of Dr. Franjo Tudjman. Length: 518 m." Franjo. Tudjman. Impossible not to think. I turn to Martin and half-open my mouth, but then realize he's fully concentrated on the road in front of us, managing barely to steal a few glances at the landscape left and right, all new to him. Impossible not to remember, while the five hundred and eighteen meters glides by the car window...

But how do I explain my grandmother to anyone? My grandmother -- who was born at the dawn of World War I, who cried when King Aleksandar was shot on October 9 1934, who lived through World War II, and cried when Tito died on May 4 1980 (at 15:04) -- declared in the mid-90s that the greatest wish in what remained of her life was to see Franjo Tudjman dead. She didn't get her wish -- she died soundlessly in 1997 in her apartment in Belgrade, 2 full years before the leader of HDZ ("Croatian Democratic Union"). It happened one day in September, when I was teaching a morning Grammar & Vocabulary class at the University. In the middle of the class, the secretary poked his thick glasses through the door and said I had an urgent phonecall. I remember thinking that I was not going to think, as I followed the secretary down the musty, dark corridors of the Faculty of Philology, where permanent students drank coffee after coffee from chipped Turkish coffee cups (courtesy of the cleaning ladies) and played cards. It was my brother's voice in the receiver, who told me that grandmother died the previous night, and that I was to come straight to her apartment after work. I returned to the classroom, taught the class to the end, hopped on the trolleybus, and went to her place, where I had lived for several years during my studies... Where I stood in epic lines for milk and bread early in the morning just a few years before, and watched old women attack and berate young women for bringing children to the grocery store and so managing to jump the line; where I dodged the stray dogs with a crazed hungry look in their eyes as I was jogging; where I sometimes made semolina (with raisins, if we had any) for me and my grandmother as a little treat in the evening; from where I ran away in disorder and depression (cause unknown) in the last year of my studies, also the last year of the war, also the year my father was drafted. When I got there, she was lying in her kitchen bed, covered fully with a white sheet, the sharp outline of her nose protruding unnaturally. Three days before I was sitting in that same kitchen, having coffee with her; now (and before Franjo Tudjman) she was gone, and with her, my nickname Nina, which only she used -- it was the name of a Russian girl who was a good friend in the 1920s. My grandmother's name was Angelina, a beautiful name.

Franjo. Tudjman. How do I explain all the things that storm my head on whisper-thin threads of whimsical memory. On the five-hundred-and-eighteen-meter-long bridge I'm walking again through that pitch-dark night of the 1993 New Year's Eve (or 1994?) with my friend Marijana who came for the holiday visit from Kragujevac; they have just cut the power in my grandmother's quarter, and on the spur of the moment Mary and I decide to walk it, to walk off the night and the cold and the stolen New Year's, and go to my cousin's place in another part of the city, where hopefully they have electricity to see the arrival of the New Year. There is no public transport, we're walking, and singing, laughing, and singing at the top of our lungs because we are in the festive mood, and we have to walk for a couple of hours.

And just how do I explain the letters from home in Bosnia, addressed in my mother's clean, careful handwriting, giving us the latest news (but without too many details) and instructions on where and from whom to pick up the money they were sending; or the calls connected via radio-amateurs while the phone lines between Serbia and Bosnia were cut, calls during which you could barely recognize the other person's voice deformed by a strange hollow-sounding resonance enveloping it; or the wobbly pontoon bridge my brother and I crossed in a bus once, travelling through Bosnia where the old bridge was blown up.

Franjo Tudjman and the other name that rhymed with it, Slobodan Milosevic, himself dead 7 years after Franjo. (It's funny, how some names rhyme for eternity: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Romeo and Juliette, Marx and Engels, Tudjman and Milosevic...). My mother, whose family name happened to be the same as Slobo's, and who had always been fiercely proud of this name claiming that it was the most beautiful Serbian surname, symptomatically stopped mentioning it in the 90s. What's in a name, you might ask (along with Shakespeare), or any one word? Oh so much. I can't read the names of Franjo or Slobo (in the papers, on the wall, or on a bridge) without thinking of neighbours disappearing, overnight, without a warning or a goodbye -- like the family Lozic from the sixth floor (whose boy Vanja played tennis with plastic rackets with my brother behind our apartment building), who, we later heard, successfully fled to Sweden; of walking in the boots around the house and studying with gloves on during one very cold winter; of the uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach of breaking the law whenever I went to the Belgrade market Zeleni Venac to exchange dinars into marks or marks into dinars, where all you could hear was the low hiss "devizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzze, devizzzzzzzzzzzze" of the black marketeers hanging out at their usual corners, waiting for customers and keeping an eye on the civilian policemen...

Three dead men: Alija Izetbegovic, Franjo Tudjman and Slobodan Milosevic

I can't hear those names, and not think of that haunting sensation of narrowness in the autumn sky, of days reduced to the minimum of a cardboard box, of a life shrunk and arrested in mid-step, with which we'd wake up in those times. And for so many other people. And for some so much worse.

By the end of the five hundred and eighteen meters of the bridge, I have a lump the size of that Panama cruise ship anchored in the Dubrovnik Harbour in my throat. And it's not because just a few hours later near Prevlaka (inside Croatian border with Montenegro) someone will scratch our rented car with Montenegrin number plates while we're on the beach; or because I realize with horror that I'm carefully picking "neutral" Serbo-Croatian words not to reveal where I am from; or because I am irritated by the irritating degree of my self-consciousness. No, I let the bridge drop behind wordlessly because it is just impossible to be truthful to these thoughts. Impossible to take them out of the closet, and air them, and look at them from all sides, and still feel that they are as real as that sweet, earthy, Mediterranean smell of cypresses all around...

Osam Minuta i Dvadeset Dve Sekunde

Za one koji razumeju.

Airport Ballet

The first thing I saw when I entered the plane was a mouth smeared with chocolate. Folded into himself, with big tears rolling down his cheeks and over the melting chocolate at the edges of his mouth, a glassy unfocused look in his eyes, he seemed like a sad poppy seed lost inside an airplane seat. A small bright orange plastic bag hanging around his neck with travelling information declared loudly his solitude.





Keeping an eye on him, I placed my bag in the compartment above, and turned to him. "Hey, I'm Tijana," I said and held out my hand. He looked up, twitched one corner of the lip into a half-smile, tears still dripping: "I'm Nikola." He held out his hand, completely covered in chocolate. "Aaaa, maybe the other hand?" I said and we both laughed.



Now that we were friends officially, we started chatting across the empty seat between us. Still sniffling a little, he told me he was eight. This was the second time he was travelling alone; and he was only changing planes in Paris, but he was really going to Montreal, where his mom would wait for him. His dad stayed behind in Belgrade (but they were not divorced, he informed me right away). I told him I was also going to Montreal - his eyes bulged out, and he said excitedly how it was great because we could go together.



At that point a smiling Japanese woman claimed her seat in between us, and so our little team got a third member. Her name was Akiko, and she was going back to Tokyo via Paris after two weeks she had spent with her Serbian friend (who in a few sentences transformed into the boyfriend). It was her first time in the Balkans and she loved it; she worked as a tax investigator for the Japanese government, and had to be back at work the morning after she arrived. In fact, she said laughing, her boss had called her the day before to make sure she was coming back on time.



Just as we were beginning to feel it was natural to be talking and sitting motionless on the hot Belgrade tarmac, the plane suddenly made that first, tentative move, the one that always marks the end of something. We started to roll slowly down the runway, getting into position, in the middle of corn fields. I craned my neck towards the window, trying to look out over Nikola's head. In the blinding noon hour, I squinted, looking for them.



On top of the newly opened Belvédère (Vidikovac) -- a bald, dusty-looking mound of earth from which visitors could watch the planes from close up -- I saw them; the only two figures moving about beneath the merciless August sun. As the plane passed by them on its way to the take-off position, they waved, and jumped, and did a bizarre little ballet, and signalled: at the plane, at me, though they couldn't see me. "Look, everyone," I told my two companions, "those are my dad and my brother over there, saying goodbye." Nikola straightened up immediately and glued his face to the window, "Where??" In the few seconds that we had for this, as if moved instinctively by some mysterious force, all three of us started waving back, Nikola, Akiko, and me. We were waving and waving (although it took only a few seconds), strangely part of this mute communication: the figures outside were waving not seeing us, and we were waving knowing they can't see us.



The plane made the final leap of faith, and left everything on the ground below, sending our centres for coordination into the abyss of unexplored territory. We leaned back in our seats. Nikola got Akiko to show him her weird-looking Japanese cell phone/computer/camera/i-pod while she was tidying up his food tray, and then he embarked on telling me the story of how this one time, he saved all the children from the plane, which was on fire, and he was the one who opened the door and let the children escape (...). Not losing her polite smile even for a second, Akiko pulled a bunch of photos from the bag at her feet and showed me the highlights of her trip.


Another voyage was underway.


And I was leaving again.

Gra(c)(t)eful

Well, I somehow always got what I wanted from others. Or almost always. I suppose I was lucky (although luck is a relative thingy) to be surrounded by people patient and kind enough to want to do things for me. Why, I don't know. It's as if there were a tacit understanding around me (and without my intervention) that things that please me are to be done.




I don't expect this, and yet it happens, sometimes from people who I didn't even know still thought about me, or cared about what I want. It invariably surprises me, stops me short, makes me gasp for air for a second, disarmed and cut to the core by such a gratuitous gesture.





For example, Bane, a few weeks ago. Bane is one of the very first people I ever met. Sons of my father's good friend form work, Bane and his brother Vladica were my oldest friends. In the good old days of pre-school paradise, or in the early grades of elementary school, we often saw each other -- either I'd go with my parents and brother to the third floor across the street from our building, or they would come visit us on the third floor of our building. What magical worlds we constructed in our hall, pulling out a well chosen selection of props from the toy cupboard. Bane, as the oldest among us (two years older than me, in my turn two years older than Vladica, and he in his turn two years older than my brother), often threw destructive or mocking curve-balls into our games, affirming his superior age, experience and coolness. Sometimes he exhibited a positively wild streak (like when, for example, I found him tearing into the mattress on my bed with his teeth), but there were also miraculous moments when he was this unexpectedly gentle and timid boy (like that one time when we were playing house in an abandoned phone booth, and he kept bringing me bunches of beautiful purple field flowers, or when he offered to pull a splinter out of my fingertip).





When we were still in elementary school, Bane's family moved to a bigger apartment in a distant part of the city, and we saw each other less and less. By the time we hit high school and the weirdness of puberty, we weren't even acknowledging each other any more if we happened to meet on the street. Bane fell in with the rough crowd, walked around the city with the swagger of a black-clad heavy metal fan, and as the war approached, developed an interest in drugs. On the other hand, I was rushing down my fast lane of academic success, and dreaming of green, green meadows of England where I wanted to go. Perhaps we both wanted to talk to each other, but we never did.






Then war happened. While I was meticulously and avidly studying English phonemes, morphemes, and syntax at a safely distant university, Bane was conscripted into the army where he spent a few years, was captured by the other side and tortured, released, and drawn into even heavier drug abuse and trafficking underworld when he came back home. In periods of soberness, he tried a few manual jobs but couldn't keep them down so he gave up on work, and got himself so eaten away by drugs that a couple of years ago he had to be hospitalized, lingering on the edge. He has partly recovered and has been living with his parents, not doing anything in particular, simply existing in the precarious twilight zone of an ex narcotic addict.







In the last fifteen years I saw Bane two or three times. The last time -- a few weeks ago -- it was only for a few seconds, as he decided to stay in his room during our visit. While we were chatting with his parents and brother on the balcony (the summer crickets singing lazily as the night fell), his absence hung heavily around us; his presence in the room on the other side of the wall made me listen for any sounds, and wonder. He came out only to say hello when we arrived, and goodbye when we were leaving. There was not much left of my old friend in this prematurely aged man, now in his mid-thirties. Thinned and slightly hunched, with a withered face and lifeless eyes, he moved in a cloud of indifference.





As we were parting, I wanted a picture of everyone. I didn't know if I was coming back, and wanted us all in a photograph, for my records. It was one of those awkward moments of people huddling together for a pose, even when they probably don't feel like it, and it was then that Bane surprised me, without a word, without even a look. He stood next to me, and simply put his hand around my elbow. Because he cared about what I want, and about my picture, and because he wanted it to turn out well; perhaps also, because he didn't want me disappointed. Such a small and simple movement, but it felt like a boundless act of grace. It was an act of good will stronger than a broken life, stronger than indifference; and it felt like the lost time regained, like the dead friendship redeemed.




Thank you.