Aunts and Autumns

Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives. ("Reference Back," Philip Larkin)

The narrowness of a shallow-lit drab autumn day occupies the living room, punctuated only by small flurries of falling leaves, giving up and downspiralling by the window looking onto the empty street. In the silence of the unarticulated dread of something unavoidable approaching, a small but brusque sound asserts itself. Past the coat-hanger (with a crumpled paper ball hanging on a thread -- one of Kitty's first toys), past the fake mantle piece (with various greeting-cards, glass coasters from several trips, flat pebbles from a Cretan beach, and a menu from a Belgrade restaurant), past the rows of dictionaries, encyclopedias, and anthologies --the clearly-defined mechanical sound wells in surges from an old-fashioned fake-gilded alarm clock, carrying its full belly on two rounded little feet in one square of IKEA bookshelves.

Its two delicately thin and pointy hands have small fluorescent elements in them so they could glow in the dark; roman numerals, golden-yellow against a black circle for each, are lining up the inner circumference of the clock, like a spread of dark petals. Just underneath XII, there's "EUROPA" written in small capital letters, and just above VI, in even smaller letters, "2 JEWELS." Tiny beads of fluorescence are underneath each number. There is something olden about this clock's appearance, especially about its lonely-person's-home sound that absorbs and dictates simultaneously the autumness of the day. It was my aunt Cana from Kragujevac who gave me this clock a couple of years ago when I was visiting with my father, but when I was packing to go back to Montreal that summer, I decided to leave behind a number of "not immediately necessary" things, so the alarm clock stayed in Belgrade with my father (I only asked him to put it away if my Aunt came to Belgrade, which he duly did). This summer, though, when I came for a visit again and saw it, round and patient and waiting, I knew I needed to take it with me. So we took it to a watchmaker who cleaned and fixed it, and this time I brought it with me.



And now here it is, displaced on its IKEA bookshelf square, thousands of contexts away -- but emitting the same vibes, perforating the silence with the same code, occasionally (when all other sounds coincidentally die down) overwhelming the living room.

My first thought even before I look at it, is of Aunt, of course. She couldn't quite remember how long she'd had it when I asked her about it; she knew that it was either Uncle or their son -- both truck drivers who drove long distances, to Bulgaria, and Russia, and Italy -- who brought it for her from one of the trips. Both are also dead now. Uncle, a tall and strong mountain of a man was a die-hard smoker, and died of lung cancer, in hospital, only one month after they found it; Misha, their son, died the following year from an asthma attack, in his truck, on the Bulgarian border while he was coming back home. He was 26, and he was Aunt and Uncle's second child to die. Their first was only 12 when he didn't survive a heart surgery. Aunt spent most of her life alone, waiting for her men to come back from trips that sometimes lasted for months, but this new kind of being alone is different. It's aloneness with a certainty of never ending; a fruitless, futile aloneness. So she goes to the cemetery every morning, then sits in her house with the curtains closed, smokes, coughs and watches TV soaps religiously, surrounded by trinkets such as the clock she gave me which give off a sourish odor of a life gone by.

The same odor of diminishing perspectives and closing-in spaces that would hit you on the nose as soon as you entered the minuscule apartment of another aunt of mine, Aunt Marica, who, after Uncle Panta's death, lived alone until the end of her days surrounded by old black-and-white retouched wedding photographs mounted on the walls, snow-white starched laced doilies thrown over arm-rests, and relentless silence-deepening ticking of an alarm-clock like this one. Come to think of it, my grandmother's neighbour, in a small Belgrade apartment building where I lived while studying, had the same name, and everybody called her "Aunt Marica" although she was no one's aunt. I remember the day her husband died: she rang the doorbell all flushed and in a rush and told my grandmother that her Sima collapsed and she couldn't wake him up. My grandmother, an iron-willed woman who got divorced in the 1950s and brought up her two sons single-handedly, flew upstairs with Aunt Marica, and with all the doors and windows open in the small building, I could hear my grandmother slapping the unconscious Sima and calling his name loudly and somewhat angrily, it seemed. Later the ambulance came and took him away, and Aunt Marica continued to live alone in their neat and square apartment, where every table had its proper table-cloth, and all the horizontal surfaces were filled with little objects and figurines. And a ticking alarm clock, much too loud for its own good.

It was one late-autumn afternoon when I was walking home from school that I felt for the first time with unshakeable certainty that I too will have to die one day. There was something in the feeble light of the expiring day that shrank it and boxed it in; there was something in the broad-brimmed chestnut trees, naked and lined up far ahead into a diminishing perspective finalized in a dot, that put a lid on your existence, and made you aware of it. Made you aware of the downsizing ahead of you which will become more palpable every autumn; made you almost feel -- even at 12 -- the narrow days towards the end, closed off in a miniature space (all that's left of your life), interspersed with tatters of memories clinging to small objects on shelves, punctuated by relentless ticking of an alarm clock.

Permanently Late

I don't know exactly what's in my suitcase, but I know that all I need is there, and I hang on to it. Ever since that nurse insisted on taking away from me the white plastic bag into which my parents had put a couple of comic-books, some paper and a pen when I was 6 and in hospital to have my tonsils taken out, I hang on to my things. It didn't help much that my parents managed to figure out the window of my hospital room and knocked from outside with smiling faces, for moral support -- the damage had been done, the evil nurse had removed my one personal possession in that neutrally sterilized building, and I felt abandoned.

This is the first time I'm at the L.A. airport, and I look around rather nervously, presuming it is a big place and wondering if I'll make it to the gate in time. If I stand on my toes and look left and right around people's backs and shoulders, I can just about see my family slipping behind a corner ahead. I can't remember why I am lagging behind, but trying to catch up is a hell of a task in this sleek and curved ultra-modern space crawling with people, all running somewhere with a clear map of immediate intentions stamped on their faces. I was actually never late for a plane. Once, I was late for a train, and another time I was almost late for a bus. The train debacle happened in Ottawa, one December when I went to visit my friend Steve for New Year's. We left the house too late, and standing in the bus taking us to the train station, I could see we were going to be late but didn't say anything. Steve was trying to be cool about it and made small jokes as silhouetted shapes of buildings passed by behind steamed up bus windows. As soon as we stepped down from the bus, we ran insanely towards the platform only to see the behind of the train, teasing with two red rear lights in the distance, like in the movies. They were nice at the ticket-office, though, simply exchanging my ticket for the following day (you can go to Halifax only once a day, 6 days a week). At first just a light chill condensing in small pools in the areas of my skin exposed to the vacuum-cold airport air-conditioning, an ominous dread begins to invade me and fill me up. I turn the corner where the others disappeared but have now lost them completely from view. My accelerated breathing is suddenly a painfully present variable to keep in mind; my feet automatically try to match the tempo. What saved me from being late for the bus that other time was the short distance between my home and the bus station in my hometown, and the fact that my father drove as fast as he could to drop me off at the station, before going to work himself. I was 17, and was travelling to Belgrade with Ognjen and Dijana from my high-school class -- I can't remember exactly why, but I'm guessing we were going to take the university entrance exams that summer. For some forgotten reason, I was the one who had all three bus tickets, and was supposed to meet the others directly at the bus station. Which I did, 4 minutes before the departure, when all the passengers and their baggage were already on board, the engine rumbling in preparation, with Dijana standing next to the bus awkwardly and Ognjen pacing nervously up and down the platform, the sharp movements of his thin gangly limbs betraying unspoken fury.

My right-shoe lace seems to be tied too tightly: as I arch my right foot, trying to walk fast, I feel constriction but have no time now to take care of it. I reach the end of the corridor whose entire wall is made of glass giving onto a strip of tarmac, and realize there is an elevator leading somewhere below. A white beluga of a plane on whose side is written in red letters Kenya Airways glides lazily on the ground level by the windows. Is this really L.A.? I begin the arm & shoulder twisting manoeuvre of slinging my backpack from behind me towards the front in order to unzip one of the small top pockets and pull out my passport and the boarding pass which they will request in the elevator. Omnia mea mecum porto, always. Like in that gigantic suitcase made of gray fabric which my father's colleague, Milan, who had once travelled to America, lent me indefinitely (he wasn't going to go back to America) when I was leaving for England. I was leaving for 10 months, but I was carrying half of our household with me in that gigantic suitcase, including an iron. On the way back, the front pocket carried the neatly folded massive World Map where people I hung out with that year signed their names and wrote small messages across seas and oceans.

Then I remember that I carefully packed all the documents into a purse and stuck the purse into the big compartment in the backpack so that it's safer and so that I'd have a hand free. Now I'm positively panicking -- it will take me several additional minutes to get to the purse and wrestle the papers out. The next second I know that I am not making it in time; I know I will keep running with a half-swallowed breath stuck in my throat, but I won't make it. I begin to mourn this fact, an image of my family laughing at some joke just 15 minutes ago while I was still with them flashing through my mind. And it is horrible, much worse than any of the atom-bomb mushrooms blossoming across the dream-skies of my childhood. Once -- I was in elementary school -- the puffed up, quickly-spreading atomic mushroom loomed big right behind the paper-factory elephantine chimney which we could see from our third-floor balcony, in the same direction as the ugly-green atomic shelter built in the 70s, which was later turned into an indoor parking lot. These dreams never went beyond the mushroom-in-the-sky image; it all always stopped at this moment of initial dread, hanging in the air, but was never "consummated" in the fire and brimstone of a fear completely played out, labelled, and demanding reaction.

This time it's different, the elevator arrives, the heavy slabs of metal slide open, and I step in, still fumbling inside the backpack, looking for my documents. Inside, two uniformed officials stand with a wheel-on cart filled with rubber stamps, and give me a quick, professional look. Without waiting for anything further, and clearly not interested in what kinds of papers I could produce, the one with a stern face selects a stamp from a tray, leans towards me, and presses it against my forehead. When he leans back, I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror behind them, and read my label backwards: PERMANENTLY LATE. The elevator doors close, the suspended machine twitches into action, and my descent towards something I am already late for begins.