(Magic) Carpets

I am not old enough to talk about the "good old times." And yet this will be about some of those "good old times" when everything was, as everybody knows, better, healthier, and more precious.

It's about carpets. Or, rather, how carpets used to be washed in socialist countries, at the end of the 20th century (perhaps elsewhere and at other times too, but I'm writing about what I know). To begin with, most people had carpets; none of that non-carpeted hard-wood-floors trend there and then. Just like it was a well-known fact that you should never walk barefoot in order to avoid catching a cold, or that -- if you were a girl -- you should never sit on cold surfaces in order to protect your girl-organs, so it was generally accepted that carpets were necessary in the house to ward off the insidious cold, oozing through the floors. The trouble with carpets, though, is that they trap and collect dust, and they are fully exposed to any minor or major daily accidents involving spilling and staining. So then, the question of cleaning them logically imposes itself: how and when does one do that? Clearly, outside and in the summer.

I remember all sorts of multicolored and multishaped rugs and carpets being spread over my elementary school fence (a metal affair that changed color every few years; I mostly remember it being yellow and blue). People -- almost always women -- would bring their carpets and throw them across the fence, then give them a sound beating with a wooden implement, a "carpet beater," especially designed for that purpose. On hot summer afternoons you'd sometimes hear a regular rhythm of enthusiastic thuds, reverberating among the concrete residence blocks where here and there a head or two would pop out on the balcony to see who is cleaning their carpet. Occasionally, the carpet would stay on the fence overnight, to "air" well, or to dry if it was washed. My grandmother, who came for long visits from the metropolis of Belgrade, was always puzzled by the fact that people left their carpets unattended for long hours, and that, more confusingly, no one seemed to want to steal them. She was used to a special metal construction at the back of her small residence building in one Belgrade neighbourhood, which resembled the posts of a goal without the net, specifically placed there for the residents of her apartment building to clean their carpets.

A view from the 6th floor of my old apartment building in Banja Luka at the elementary school and the still-surviving fence a couple of years ago. In the lower left corner: the edge of "the Circle" -- a round concrete playground where kids and sometimes adults gathered

But, in fact, it is precisely this public aspect of carpet-cleaning that made it such an irreplaceable element of communal living. First of all, it involved your own honest effort (as opposed to the churning of the heavy-duty machines used more recently), and secondly, it was a perfectly collective experience, with witnesses, participants, and running commentaries. It filled pleasantly the day with productivity and sociability. It took you out of your own four walls and into a public space which gave your life a stamp of social validity. You were living your life with others, and they were part of your mundane moments including the normally solitary pondering on how to clean your carpet.

Once, in Belgrade, while I was in university and living with my cousin and her family in the suburbs, she decided it was time to wash the living-room carpet. So we moved all the furniture, vacuumed the thing, and then lifted it and laboured under it down the stairway and onto the driveway at the entrance of the apartment block. In the summer, this area is always scattered with running children, men washing or tinkering with their cars while chatting with a neighbour who has nothing better to do, older people with shopping bags taking small steps towards the quotidian dose of usefulness, occasional wisps of music or sports matches wafting in and out from someone's radio.

We picked our spot, as much to the side as possible so we don't block the way, we brought pails with soapy water, cloths and brushes, and got down on all fours. In plain summer dresses (which looked a little like sleeveless workers' overalls), barefoot, and energetic, we worked up a sweat on a sizzling Belgrade afternoon. It was one of those early afternoons blinded by the white sun, with all the particles in the air drugged and immobilized. While rubbing strenuously, we alternated between giggles and tiredness, and this went on for a while. Passers-by, some of whom we knew because they were neighbours, would stop for a few minutes to keep us company or to make us laugh at some crude or political joke. One of these "encouragers" was Vlada Pitbull who was on his way somewhere when he saw us and stopped with us for a bit. He was one of a bunch of younger people -- all more or less my age, or a few years older -- who all lived in the adjoining apartment buildings (this was known as the kids from the same "entrance") and who formed a circle of very informal friends, coming in and out of each other's apartments as if they were their own, who never stood on ceremony, who yelled and laughed together (in the manner of boisterous south-European peoples), often sitting and wasting time leisurely around my cousin's kitchen table. Our place was the usual meeting place probably because there were no "proper" adults living there at the time, my aunt having died a few years before and my uncle staying with our aging grandmother at the other end of the city. Vlada -- nicknamed Pitbull because he was stocky, had virtually no neck, and was sometimes bullyingly annoying -- was a regular visitor and an inescapable element in that local social landscape. After chatting with us and teasing us in all permissible ways, he did something that made my day, and that was perhaps the highlight of my communal living; it certainly cast carpet-cleaning into a good memory. He went and came back after a couple of minutes with two ice-creams on a stick, which he handed out to us with a smile and then went on his way. I've never liked ice-cream very much, but, as we sat back on the half-washed carpet, propped up on our elbows, that ice-cream tasted like a perfect summer day, like happiness, like uncomplicated fulfillment of youth, like good times.

That was the last time I washed a carpet, and I don't think I've even seen one being washed since then. Maybe no one really does this any more. A bit of magic, gone.