I Remember, I Remember

(For Kaisa, Lisa, Christoph, Jacek, Jaco, Knut, David, Stephen, James, Per, and me)

Some things are too important not to write about. Other things you don't dare write about because they are too precious.

For example, I will always write about my mother even when I am not writing about her. And I am only now attempting to write about England.

My England. This is how I like to think about it although the ten meagre months I spent in it hardly gives me the claim to that possessive adjective. Objectively, of course. Subjectively, there is nothing to justify. So many people have their "Englands" or their "somewhere specials" and this one is mine. Unlike Larkin, who in "I Remember, I Remember" laments that England is the place where he has "unspent his youth," I declare that this is where I really began to spend my sweet 20s. This is maybe because I was not born and bred in England, but came to it starved for anything it had to offer; anything different from the reality resembling the suffocating cardboard-box in which I unspent my late teens and early 20s in my unfortunate corner of Eastern Europe. Here, with the rest of my generation, I was growing old overnight and beginning to get used to it.

I needed an overhaul, a fix, a miracle. Or a pure, incomparable randomness of a newspaper clipping advertising a scholarship competition which a neighbour brought me one day. A year and a galaxy of administrative hurdles later, on 1 October 1996, I entered my fairy-tale, and it was called Cambridge. Cambridge with its narrow cobblestone streets, Cambridge with its fields and zen-cows, Cambridge with its colleges and inner courtyards trimmed to a reprehensible perfection, Cambridge with my shoes clicketti-clacketting into the past all the way to Christopher Marlowe's room, Cambridge with me spreading my arms to gather Chaldean constellations. It was no fairy-tale of happy-ever-afters (I tried, but failed to stay longer); it was a one-time fix of a non-drowsy zesty drug which resuscitated my clinically dead youth and which, two good handfuls of years later, still circulates in my blood stream, reminding me that I did not die, that I am still alive. That that me is this I.

~ A Few Facts Tiptoeing into Fantasy

This is Leckhampton House. I was in luck to get a small suite of two rooms in this imposing Victorian house where only three other graduate students had their quarters. Quite possibly my good fairy was one of the residents, a fiery Greek law student Despina, who was excited that a girl from her neighbouring Serbia was coming to the College and urged the Tutor to place me there (she intimated as much on a couple of occasions). Whatever the case, I didn't question my chunk of luck and enjoyed my rooms on the side of the house, where, if I stuck my head out through the living room window, I came face to face with an old massive black-iron bell which woke me up in a frenzy one early morning during a fire drill. The House was like a "home" for all of us, even the graduate students who lived in some of the adjecent, more recent -- and inevitably less impressive -- residential buildings. This is where we had a cafeteria with a restaurant where they served dinner for all those who didn't feel like walking all the way to the main College building to have the "formal dinner"; this is where we had high teas, receptions, and garden parties; this is where the elegant concert piano stood benevolently in the salon, waiting for anyone with nimble fingers and a dose of confidence (in my year the piano was synonymous with Harold). More importantly, this is where we all met for the first time, where we arrived bright-eyed and high-spirited, trailing behind us particles of our different continents, but merging into a new, powerful current taking us with it to new and undreamed-of territories with such tremendous speed that chemical reactions fumed with acceleration and laws of physics ceased to exist. A mere half-hour in that enchanted garden made you feel intimately close to another person, an afternoon conversation easily contained God, the universe, and the rest, there was eternity in biscuits and tea... We were zooming through our year at warp speed 9.9 and twisting time into new dimensions, because we were fast, because it was fun.

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: A CROSS-SECTION OF A YEAR IN FOUR EASY PIECES

~ Sibelius and Grieg at a Party

No, we don't start with them. The party booms away with whatever danceable music is in at the moment (1996 was the year of "Wanderwall" and "Stupid Girl", as well as "The English Patient" which I unpopularly hated when I saw it with a bunch of friends, and have since seen twice more to figure out what's wrong with me). We are in Kaisa's room. The glass wall is steamy with our breathing, the droplets of condensation trickle down the vibrating panes, revealing the night silhouettes of gigantic trees in the alley below. Cambridge is hard work, but Cambridge is also this: ultimate freedom, together. Cambridge is a daily struggle with super-finely-tuned and sophisticated symbolic systems in classrooms, but also this total, primitive abandon, a reaching for the inarticulate beyond. It is when we are invaded by sweet tiredness that Kaisa brings Sibelius and Grieg; the gauze-like languid music wraps around us gently, fells us to the floor, like wheat. We lie on the floor, close, my arm is pulsing throbbing next to someone else's. I am my breathing. We are all my breathing.

~ Never Underestimate a Punt

Because Per is the MCR (Middle Combination Room) President and has the keys to the Corpus dock, we have access to Prudence -- Corpus Christi's punt -- at any hour. One evening we imprudently decide to take her out for a little night punting. The Cam is quiet and smooth, like honey in a jar, the usual daily crowd is gone, and our only witnesses are silent colleges by the river, outlined sharply against the dark-purple night sky. They somehow really begin to exist only now. Per manages to fall into the water -- he says he didn't see a bridge -- but in reality he was holding on to the pole that got stuck in the river bed after he had pushed the punt off; the damage is minimal, the water is only hip-deep anyway, a couple of outstretched arms, and he's back at the stern of the boat, dripping miserably, our laughter ringing above the water. Ahead of us is what looks like just another stone bridge. But something happens as we slowly go under, and we fall silent. The small ripples from the punt do their orange dance on the stones above, and it is magic, and when we are exactly mid-way underneath, someone starts a long, uninterrupted low sound, and we all join in, and it sounds like an exhaled "ommmmmmmmmmmmmm." And no one laughs.

~ Betrayal at the Pond

Why won't you swim.
It's cold, I told you.

We are walking briskly towards the Pond at the southern-most tip of the Garden, next to the Chinese Pavilion. He is in a white bathrobe, with a striped towel around his neck, and two candles in his hands. In the dimming light of a fast-approaching dusk, he is a white blur ahead of me. When he speaks, he doesn't turn, he just forges on.

How can you not swim now? After we talked about it so much...
But you never mentioned you wanted to do it in March!

At the Pond, he is very methodical. If he has any hesitation inside, he shows none on the outside. He gives me the towel and the candles, takes off the bathrobe, and wades in. A quick half-circle, and out, with shuddering teeth. I stand there, half-lost, and hand him the towel.

Coward.

On the way back to the warm glow of the Leckhampton House, we are silent. He is walking fast, with his hair dripping, and me trotting behind.

I closed it. I closed that door myself.

~ The Day I was a Zeppelin ~

It is June, and I am leaving soon. They have left the grasses tall in the upper half of the garden, and I go to this sweet-smelling patch of wilderness with a small blanket. Some people have left already, and Leckhampton is half-empty. There is no one in the garden. The sun is warm, the grasses are heavy, and I get sleepy. I stretch on the ground, facing the clear sky, and close my eyes for a second. When I open them, I am no longer alone -- a humongous gray zeppelin is hovering plumply not far above. We eye each other briefly, establishing benevolent intentions; I have a sensation of levitating dreamily, close my eyes, and am gone, gone.





OPTIONAL: A WALK TO GRANTCHESTER

(which we often jogged)

Open Google Earth. Find Leckhampton House at 52◦12′05.53″N and 0◦06′03.22″E. Walk south through the trimmed narrow garden (at 52◦11′56.96″N and 0◦06′01.67″E you will see the Pond), then pick your way through Wolfson College and a bunch of buildings, still going south (just follow a south-bound road) until you reach the fields. Stay on the south-bound road until you come closer to the river Cam, a few hundred meters to the east. Once there, cross the fields and find the foot-path on the Cam’s west bank. Walk south on the foot-path for a couple of kilometers (remember to enjoy). End your walk at 52◦10′40.12″N and 0◦05′48.53″E – The Orchard Tea Gardens in the village of Grantchester – and, as you are sipping your tea, think of Brooke, Wittgenstein, Forster, and Virginia Woolf who often sat there. Think of the cows too…

Yellow and a Little Girl

(For my mother. Because it's today, and because she would like this).


I've been back for a few days, and I notice him immediately. He seems to have adopted the grassy patch below the apartment-building as his turf, at least temporarily. He sleeps there most of the day (which makes me think he's possibly sick), gets up occasionally, and stretches his front legs, and then his hind legs, in a cat-like fashion. Perhaps it's just the heat that slows him down.

Belgrade is full of stray dogs. It must be the European capital of stray dogs, or maybe coming up a close second after Bucharest. Dogs of all sizes, ages, and shapes live on the streets freely, mid-way between their originally wild state, and the more recently acquired domesticated 'man's-best-friend' type of status. They have rediscovered the group dynamics, and often band up into small packs of 4 or 5, but retain friendliness and submission to man. Their daily occupation: barking quasi-ferociously at spinning wheels (on cars, or horse-carriages driven by Gypsies whose settlement is just a couple of streets down), and wagging their tails sociably at any passer-by who looks at them.

My father's apartment being on the first floor, and the kitchen window being always open in the summer, I have an excellent and close view at anything moving or hopping on two or four legs beneath. So I could observe his comings and goings with regularity, even before I named him Yellow. I call him Yellow because, well, it sounds good in Serbian, and because he is the dark-yellow colour of almost-ripe wheat.




The second day I decide it's time to make friends. I tie my hair into a pony-tail high at the back of my head, put on my trainers, grab some change, and run down the stairs and across the street to the grocery store. I buy a small pack of the cheap liver paté and cross the street again to where Yellow is lying on his side underneath our window. I approach silently and crouch. He cracks one eye open and simultaneously starts wagging the tail with minuscule motions. I stroke his forehead, then show him the paté and he perks up immediately, jumping to his feet. He swallows quickly, without too much chewing; when he is done, he licks his lips, and wags the tail some more, this time more energetically. Now we're officially introduced.

On the way back, I practically bounce off the concrete with my rubber-soled steps, my pony-tail swings left and right in a wide inverted arch, and for a moment, I am 5 again. I've just made a furry friend, mom is calling me to scrub my hands clean, and the world is a big sunny place waiting for me.