Gazing

1973: On my grandmother's couch

My grandmother said that one summer my mother, when she was a student, had written the lyrics and the music for a song entitled "Sama" - "Alone." (I remember a photograph of her, deep in thought, with youthful shoulder-length hair curled at the ends, sitting at a long, empty restaurant table in the hotel where my grandparents' family band played regularly; I don't know if the song and the photograph were related, but I always thought they were).

I thought about this, and decided that she had written it about me, even though she didn't know me yet. And I'm glad, because it means we are connected.

Perhaps the first time I thought about this was when I was leaving Halifax. I had finished work on April 25 and had 5 days to pack my entire Canadian life and move it to Montreal. I remember the day when I walked into my apartment, armed with boxes (which I had been hauling for days from Saint Mary's University, Dal, and Superstore), and looked around, sinking with the heaviness of that sensation that a mountain of work is ahead of me, that each spoon, hair-pin, postcard, souvenir and memory will need to be gathered and put away in a box until my presence there is annihilated down to the fitted carpet, until there are only empty, resonant rooms, ready to be filled with somebody else's life. And I remember thinking how one day I won't be doing this alone; I remember it because I also wrote it, with a black marker, on one of the boxes.

I thought of it again as I was sitting with the other 70 brand-new Canadians in the Montreal Citizenship and Immigration office; sitting, thinking how I should at least have someone there to take a picture (in the end, I asked the girl next to me). What made me really aware of my aloneness was the presiding judge of the citizenship ceremony who, as it happened, was the only other Serb in the room. In a nice little gesture of compatriotship, the Honourable Gordana Rakovic decided to call my name out first, to approach her, be congratulated (she wore officiating white gloves and a kind smile), and receive the citizenship certificate. I think I somehow knew she would do this, or rather, wished it, since I had no one there of my own. I wanted to be claimed, protected, winged by someone in this strange situation when I was prounounced someone I am not but, paradoxically, her consideration only highlighted my sore exposure. (Self-pity washed over me along with a memory of the awkward helpless compassion we felt for Zlatko in Grade 2, who didn't have a mother, and who wrote on his "International Women's Day" gift that we each made in school for our mothers, "Happy Holiday, Dear Dad.")

The worst was the longest trip I have ever made, the trip to the funeral. 7000 kilometers, and each one a fresh new reminder of the cataclysm, the irreparable tectonic shift in the world; each one a tireless recreation of that first abysmal shock after you get the news. Instead of spending 50 minutes in Paris, I waited seven endless hours for the connecting flight to Belgrade, since the flight from Montreal was too late. With a handful of other stranded ex-Yugoslavs converging in Charles De Gaulle from all ends of the world, I wandered around the airport aimlessly, stuck. In the process, I got to know a young girl from Belgrade whose face was twisted in frustration and streaked with tears and who claimed this was the second time Air France "had done it to her," and an elderly woman in her late fifties who was returning home (in Leskovac?) after an extended stay with her son in the States. Tall, thin, with graying hair and long narrow feet, she was the quiet, kind type of the provincial Serbian woman, the one who's the perfect and favourite aunt. The three of us sat down to have a cup of coffee, and while the young girl was talking on the phone to her mother who was supposed to pick her up, the woman asked me why I was going back. When I said I was going to my mother's funeral, there was no evident change in her look or her posture; she simply started talking about her own family and from then on, stayed close to me wherever I went. Even when, after the 7-hour wait, we were finally about to board the new plane, and they wouldn't let me in since the incomptent transfers clerk had made a mistake with my new ticket earlier that day, and I lost it and started yelling and crying, she was right next to me, and even though she spoke no English or French, somehow demanded with her whole body, her entire presence, that they put me on that plane. In the end they did, and two hours later when we were saying goodbye next to the baggage belt at Belgrade Airport, she only said, "Be brave, dear." I nodded wordlessly and walked away, loving her for saying it, but knowing that I wasn't. Brave. Outside, the same Belgrade heat that had seen me off only 5 days earlier opened its arms, not having anything else to offer in welcome. In a strangely hushed moment, when all the airplane engines and the cruising taxis fell silent, there was only the slow chirping of a lonely cricket in the uncut grass.

* * * * * * *

Summers in Montreal are beautiful. At night, in the car, while Martin is opening the garage door outside, I unfasten my seatbelt and look at the dashboard of this Japanese-made car. The sign marked "Passenger" starts to blink with alarm and urgency. I put my left forefinger over it, and look at myself, flashing orange around the fingertip.

"1961. At the window of the hotel"

Scenes from the Back Alley

For the record, back alley sounds so much more intimate and cosy in Serbian (sokak) or in French (ruelle).

But, for lack of a better word, it is really the kids from the back alley who first gauge the arrival of the spring with their infallible detectors. At the beginning of April, a faint but clearly smiling sun appears chalked out on the concrete, along with (possibly?) a flower absorbing the light. Clear as day, the spring is here once more.

And once the kids officially announce the spring's arrival, the others take notice of it too. Some think they'd better do some serious cleaning.

Others have somewhat more cryptic reactions -- perhaps a sort of exorcism after a long long winter?

As for me, one day in May I go to the back-yard porch and find that hundreds of tiny green stars have fallen on it from the vine above. Dizzy with spring sprightliness, I dilligently sweep them off, but a couple of hours later realize that an equal amount has fallen in the meantime. So I leave them, and as it turns out, it is only a one-day spectacle since they are gone by the next day.

And, technically not in the back alley but only about 5 minutes walking to the east, is a whiff of what spring is like in nature, as opposed to in the streets. In one of the famous Montreal jardins communautaires, gardening fans have been active for a few months. Neatly arranged beds with flowers, onions, lettuce etc. alternate with colourful plastic watering cans and working gloves stuck on top of thin poles, waiting for beans or tomatoes. Wind spinners are quietly going about their business.

But my favourite story from our block is about my neighbour from across the alley. His name is Deven, he has two black marbles for eyes, once he starts he doesn't stop talking, and he's 7. I don't remember how we became friends. I must have exchanged a few neighbourly words with him and his father, Morali, a tall lean South Indian man who has been a pasta-maker in Canada for almost 20 years. Deven likes his bike and his potted plants -- this is him with his hot-pepper plant:

He spends weekends here with his father, and weekdays with his mother, where he also goes to school. He speaks English and French with the easy gurgliness of kids, and only a little bit of Tamil. When I snap a few photos of him, he's very excited and wants me to send them to his father's email. I say sure, but I need the address. He takes pen and paper and writes, with great concentration, "1234A", then hands it to me. I look at it for a second, and say, ok, I'll talk to his dad to get the address. Deven also likes to draw. The other day he drew Kitty, me and him. Normally, my feet are turned the same way as my face, and I don't really wear glasses, but otherwise, this is a pretty good likeness of me (Kitty, with a 3-D red-ribbon tail, is also a bit more cat-like, usually):

One day we're chatting in the back alley, and I tell him that Kitty has started to explore around the yard and sometimes tries to escape through the holes in the fence. He asks me why I always call him "Kitty." I think, but have no good answer to that. Instead, I show him the problematic opening in the corner of the oldest wooden part of the fence. He promises he'll find something to fix it, and enthusiastically starts looking for that something. I have things to do so I go inside and a couple of hours later realize I've forgotten about Deven. Guilty consicence prodding me in the ribs, I rush outside but he's not there anymore. In the fence, Deven's work shines like the shimmering wet street after a spring shower.

Tebi, opet, i uvek

Translation of the poem in the video:

"Thunderous Silence"

Like a thunderous silence,

Like a gurgling brook,

Like a finger gently

Drawn along an edge,

Like air on your face,

Like the smell of camomile,

Like a sweep on a swing

With eyes closed,

Like the swell of music,

Like a touch, like

Piano

Keys

Like a clear whistle,

Like a song, like a soaring,

Like the surge of the wind

In the treetops,

Like the notes pulsating

Even after the music:

You.

(To my mom, again, and always)

(Music : from the Soundtrack "Hable con ella")

Home According to Beans

To My Grandparents, With Love

I dial the 14-digit number and wait. There's an indifferent silence, then small crackling sounds against the steady buzz in the background. I wait some more. Something happens, there's a faint hesitation, and then a click, which seems to set off the next level of the procedure, and the measured-out insistent rings burst hastily into my ear as if resuming an interrupted cycle. Unlike on some previous occasions (when someone answered in Italian, or another time, in Spanish), the connection is right - I recognize the peculiar ring of that phone, emitting sound waves which spread throughout my grandparents' small house in eastern Serbia, 7227 kilometres away. I'm imagining my grandmother, walking slowly and heavily towards the phone on a small wooden stand next to the TV set, on top of which is a fan-like line-up of colourful postcards I keep sending. She sometimes puts the phone on the table next to the bed to be able to reach it more quickly if it rings -- I guess she didn't do it this time.

I call twice a week, and there's never much to say. Small things. Careful treading around the sore spots -- acknowledging them, but keeping them in check. My grandparents are 86, 68 of which years they have been married to each other. In the diminishing vista of their lives there isn't much good left. The body is giving up and limits their days to slow shufflings around the small house, and sometimes, on good days, around the yard. Nights are a stretched-out consciousness of pain interrupted by the fitful surface of sleep. The sole purpose of both dreaming and waking states: remembering and mourning the loved ones who have gone, leaving them bewildered at such desertion, such loneliness. The narrow end of the funnel that nobody ever really expects. When I call on our fixed days, we usually talk about the weather, and Nadja's kittens, and the younger relatives, and we even try to joke, while all those other things hover in the air like the dark shadow of a bird.

The phone rings away despondently, but I know better and I wait. Finally, the rings are cut short by the lifted receiver on the other end; this is followed by a short vacuum buffering the silence while the hand with the receiver is travelling slowly, clumsily to the ear; then my grandmother's thinned voice says "Hello?", and we start our weekly trapeze walk on the trans-oceanic phone lines. Almost immediately, she musters some enthusiasm and tells me "Your beans have blossomed!" Six or seven weeks ago I sent her 4 scarlet runner beans from the "harvest" in my yard last year. I improvised a protective sleeve from a piece of paper, and lined the plump purple black-dotted beans next to each other on the bottom inside; I sealed it with scotch-tape, and then deposited it into one of those padded heavy-duty envelopes. In the post office they weighed it, and asked me what's inside -- I said "Papers", and off it went: 4 inert morsels of Montreal soil, embarking on an incognito voyage to a foreign territory. So not only did they make it across, but they are growing (Slavica, the woman who lives with my uncle in the house next door to my grandparents, sowed them in the garden by the side of the house); and not only that but they're blossoming.

I'm puzzled: the siblings of those 4 beans have been in the soil outside my window here -- where they came from, their home turf! -- for days, and yet there's no sign of life. I check the pots every day, but they look sadly sullen and barren. There's no other answer: the beans have adopted that faraway foreign plot of land as their home, and are thriving as if they were natives, among my grandmother's tomatoes, oregano, grapes, strawberries, and apples. A strange asymmetry, but we are both glad, my grandmother and I, and you can hear the gladness in the phone. We are glad because in their small, blind, vegetable way, these beans in my grandparents' garden are performing a tiny miracle, creating their home against all odds, negating the negated life. Offering my grandparents passionately scarlet flowers before the curtain call.

Twin tomatoes: one homeless and one with a home