(One day I'll shake hands with the tiny Proust crouching in my ear)
HALIFAX ......... BANJA LUKA
When I heard it, I knew I was in Halifax, but it felt like I was in Banja Luka. And it was hot, and all the windows were open, and the air was thick with the promise of summer, inhaled by the entire heat-hazed apartment block.
The one thing I liked about that bedroom in Halifax were the shadows of the sidewalk tree dancing on the wall at night -- something my bedroom in Banja Luka didn't have (but it had the hills almost within reach from the third-floor eye-level, and stars in the purple sky above the white slab of the monument for the WWII dead, visible on top of one of the hills). When I heard that sound in Halifax, though, it was broad daylight, and I don't remember what I was doing in the bedroom -- possibly depriving myself of any visual stimulus too easily found elsewhere in the house and especially in the yard, so that I could read for the comprehensive exam. I was sitting on the floor (the thick, faux-Persian cherry carpet was a superb collector of dust but also the softest thing in the house to sit on), surrounded by open and closed books, notebooks and loose sheets, concentrating and trying to be fully there. And then the sound, metallic and vibrant, repeated a few times, came from somewhere across the street: probably a neighbour working with something in the yard. It rang outside and inside, spreading in concentric circles, and ended a mystery I wasn't even aware of until then; it posed and solved it in the same second, and in the form of a shoe-wiping grid.
Whoa, you're thinking, it's all a bit crazy, and you're right: it did seem crazy how apparently completely unrelated things converged in my brain at that moment. But what happened was that, after about 20 years of unconscious search, at the moment when I heard the sound, I discovered two things simultaneously: a) I had heard a similar metallic, vibrant sound many times before, and it was in Banja Luka, mostly in summertime, and b) the sound that I had registered then but didn't know I had until now in Halifax, was the sound of the shoe-wiping grid, installed at the entrance of our apartment building, being stepped on and sending audio-vibrations, easily carried through the heavy summer air and entering even third-floor apartments through the open windows, along with the muffling but comfortable heat. And somewhere there beyond the open bedroom window, I was sitting, reading perhaps, and hearing without listening, memorizing without knowing the slice of Bosnian summer through that sound, packing it and storing it for the long trip across the ocean where it will surprise me much later, like something dear you forgot you had and then found by chance. What it was, of course, was a note I left for myself to combat the amnesia brought about by persistance in time. I don't know if I am more impressed or terrified to think that there must be millions of other such notes whose language I have forgotten.
FRANKFURT ......... MONTREAL
Not all the retrieved and rightly interpreted notes are pleasant. In December 2006 I was sitting in the Frankfurt Airport, waiting for my connecting flight to Belgrade. It was a first in many ways: the first winter without my mother, my first trip home in December, my first serious connecting-flight delay. It was announced that thick fog had settled over a good part of the Balkans, and the airports in Belgrade, Sofia, and a few other poor cities without the fog-guiding system were shut down indeterminately. For a while, there was a lingering feeling that the postponed flights to those destinations might take off later the same day, so I roamed around the terminal, scouting for comfy-looking places to lie down. The best there seemed to be were some benches in a waiting area, half-filled with travellers who seemed to be heading for much further destinations than mine, and who were asleep in various curled-up or crooked and deformed positions, some barefoot. I chose a bench, slumped down, put my feet on my luggage, and began to doze off carefully, reserving a sliver of alertness for possible public announcements. I don't know how much time passed; I know that I heard a rumbling behind my back, approaching with iron inevitability. I jumped up, and was in Ursula's office where Noah, Ursula, and I barricaded ourselves along with three students who happened to be right there in the corridor when the shooting started. It was around 1:45 p.m. at Dawson College in Montreal, in September. Soon, meticulous timelines about the whole event, and precise sketches of the area under attack would be availabe on the news and online, but right then, at 1:45 p.m. on September 13, 2006, there was an urgent commotion in the cafeteria one floor down from where we were, and there was someone, or a bunch of someones, shooting, there were official-sounding voices yelling at everyone to get away, and, perhaps the most disturbing of all, a herd of galloping, tramping feet running for their lives both above and below us. (What if they set us on fire, I thought; and as if reading my mind, Noah said we could try hurling the microwave into the thick, break-proof window panes). The first special-unit police officers in tall boots came rushing from the back court yard and dashed by the window -- and the airport employee pushing a huge, half-empty, metal luggage-rack on small rickety wheels passed by, the infernal noise rolling in his wake through the half-deserted terminal. The vibrations it created in the floor remained even when he was out of sight, and felt like a trembling thud of hundreds of panicking feet. But I was back in Frankfurt, and, giving up on the idea of sleep, walked over to the information desk only to find out that I would have to spend the night there since the fog showed no intentions of lifting.
Another note found and decoded successfully. Filing them, though, is a different matter.
