This is Me

I live for little moments. This is what the blog is about.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

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"



2 Comments:

Blogger Centigrado said...

Wow... this was pobably the most intense and intriguing entry yet, it is intriguing because I would have assumed that you have been able to somewhat eliminate that sensation of loneliness thanks to the people who surround you, but at the end of the story, I really understood. it happens to me too... when I look around and I realized I am "the only one" I am here, with my thoughts, and my memories, and many many times, my fears.

Who did you go to your citizenship ceremony with?

10:06 AM  
Blogger Tijana said...

Yes, the writing of it felt intense; it took me to places where I didn't necessarily want to go again. I don't think we can ever get rid of the occasional "aloneness" -- and I mean everybody; but perhaps people in our situation get to feel it more sharply.

I went to the ceremony with myself :-) (just the particular circumstances of that day when no one was free...)

11:57 AM  

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