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.
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
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 MilosevicI 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...
posted by Tijana | 10:52 PM
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