Summer Love
Nothing has ever come close to the epitome of love and devotion I saw from our third-floor balcony one summer in Bosnia.
Summers were hot in Banja Luka. Or maybe they seemed hot because I was a child and summers were supposed to be hot. But on the hottest days, even the toughest kids from the concrete highrise blocks where we lived stayed away from the mid-afternoon sun hitting mercilessly in vertical rays everything on the ground and bringing scorched grass and softening concrete to the brink of white heat, wavering in a haze just above the ground. On days like those, neighbourhood kids would stay in the deep shade of the entrances to their apartment buildings (the entrances to the highrises, which offered a reasonable, sheltered spot for hanging out, rain or shine, were important identification codes: everyone was from a certain entrance, labelled by street name and number; there were literally dozens of "entrances" in our sprawling "new" neighbourhood, built at the height of the socialist-realist architectural enthusiasm for collective concrete ant hills). Free from school for the eternity of two or three months, the kids switched to some other, "life-as-it-should-always-be" reality, which was full of free time and unencumbered by any schedules, homework, or rules despite the fact that the school building was where it always was, right in the middle of our neighbourhood, visible to everyone all the time. In the summer, though, it turned into an anonymous building, dormant, and negligible, not worthy of anyone's attention, interesting only because of the playgrounds it offered, where interminable soccer matches went on all the time. On the killer hot days, though, even these matches were suspended until the early evening, and if you looked down from your balcony in mid-afternoon, you'd see literally no one and nothing around except the wilting brownish grass in the open areas between the buildings.
That summer, I must have been visiting -- I was already "grown up" and not one of the kids in the neigbourhood any more since I had moved out to study in another city. Once back here, though, I'd slip right into the old familiar groove that growing up in any one place etches unnoticeably in how you move your limbs or breathe in the air when in that place. Surveying the world from that balcony when the direct glare of the sun slid behind to the other side of the apartment building always felt right; objects, trees, even (and particularly) some permanently parked cars were exactly where they should be. The elephantine thick chimney of Incel, the paper factory, was right in front at a certain distance and visible between two zig-zagged rows of more apartment buildings (where surely someone was on a balcony, facing my way); to the right behind the school-building and beyond the green river invisible from here, the slopes of soft, wide-curved hills rose gently, with clusters of red-roofed houses -- western suburbs of Banja Luka. My elbows propped against the handrail (often decorated by the dried-out white droppings of local pigeons, and equally often scrubbed by my mother, who fed the birds at the same time), I took an eyeful of all this, exhaled, and saw them.
They were directly below, on the asphalt footpath going towards and then all around the school building. He was 11, maybe 12; she was about 7 and had a pink bike without training wheels. In her open-toe sandals, she was pedalling cautiously, fully concentrated on the ground in front of her. He was of a small build, one of those lean, sinewy boys who would be a soccer wizard in a couple of years. He was barefoot and was jogging right next to her back wheel, his hand levitating lightly just above the end part of the seat, ready to steady and balance her when she started keeling over to one side. The trouser-legs of his baggy tracksuit rolled up unevenly due to the heat, he was jogging silently on his dusty feet, straightening her up every now and then. They went towards the school yard, then up to the small (and currently deserted) fruit and vegetable market place (where probably even the fat, heavy flies dozed off at the moment), getting smaller and smaller in the distance, then turned and came all the way back on the other side, only to start again. And all the while she sat rigidly upright, sweating from the balancing exercise, and determined to get it with a sweet stubbornness only little girls can have, with him jogging steadfastly, never turning his gaze away from the bike, and never falling behind, his face (which I could only see when they were passing right underneath the balcony) watchful and untired.
They circled and circled, alone in the white heat, safe in their small empire of trust and protection, not bothered by anything. And even when the relative shade of my balcony began to give way to relentless forays of stiflingly hot air, I stayed there, glued to the handrail, following their circular trajectory with almost imperceptible beats I kept with my nodding head. It's not every day you're witness to such a gratuitous, pulsating rhythm of love. And it's not every day you take a mental snapshot that will last you a lifetime.
Settlement "Borik" in Banja Luka, being built in the 1970s
Summers were hot in Banja Luka. Or maybe they seemed hot because I was a child and summers were supposed to be hot. But on the hottest days, even the toughest kids from the concrete highrise blocks where we lived stayed away from the mid-afternoon sun hitting mercilessly in vertical rays everything on the ground and bringing scorched grass and softening concrete to the brink of white heat, wavering in a haze just above the ground. On days like those, neighbourhood kids would stay in the deep shade of the entrances to their apartment buildings (the entrances to the highrises, which offered a reasonable, sheltered spot for hanging out, rain or shine, were important identification codes: everyone was from a certain entrance, labelled by street name and number; there were literally dozens of "entrances" in our sprawling "new" neighbourhood, built at the height of the socialist-realist architectural enthusiasm for collective concrete ant hills). Free from school for the eternity of two or three months, the kids switched to some other, "life-as-it-should-always-be" reality, which was full of free time and unencumbered by any schedules, homework, or rules despite the fact that the school building was where it always was, right in the middle of our neighbourhood, visible to everyone all the time. In the summer, though, it turned into an anonymous building, dormant, and negligible, not worthy of anyone's attention, interesting only because of the playgrounds it offered, where interminable soccer matches went on all the time. On the killer hot days, though, even these matches were suspended until the early evening, and if you looked down from your balcony in mid-afternoon, you'd see literally no one and nothing around except the wilting brownish grass in the open areas between the buildings.
That summer, I must have been visiting -- I was already "grown up" and not one of the kids in the neigbourhood any more since I had moved out to study in another city. Once back here, though, I'd slip right into the old familiar groove that growing up in any one place etches unnoticeably in how you move your limbs or breathe in the air when in that place. Surveying the world from that balcony when the direct glare of the sun slid behind to the other side of the apartment building always felt right; objects, trees, even (and particularly) some permanently parked cars were exactly where they should be. The elephantine thick chimney of Incel, the paper factory, was right in front at a certain distance and visible between two zig-zagged rows of more apartment buildings (where surely someone was on a balcony, facing my way); to the right behind the school-building and beyond the green river invisible from here, the slopes of soft, wide-curved hills rose gently, with clusters of red-roofed houses -- western suburbs of Banja Luka. My elbows propped against the handrail (often decorated by the dried-out white droppings of local pigeons, and equally often scrubbed by my mother, who fed the birds at the same time), I took an eyeful of all this, exhaled, and saw them.
They were directly below, on the asphalt footpath going towards and then all around the school building. He was 11, maybe 12; she was about 7 and had a pink bike without training wheels. In her open-toe sandals, she was pedalling cautiously, fully concentrated on the ground in front of her. He was of a small build, one of those lean, sinewy boys who would be a soccer wizard in a couple of years. He was barefoot and was jogging right next to her back wheel, his hand levitating lightly just above the end part of the seat, ready to steady and balance her when she started keeling over to one side. The trouser-legs of his baggy tracksuit rolled up unevenly due to the heat, he was jogging silently on his dusty feet, straightening her up every now and then. They went towards the school yard, then up to the small (and currently deserted) fruit and vegetable market place (where probably even the fat, heavy flies dozed off at the moment), getting smaller and smaller in the distance, then turned and came all the way back on the other side, only to start again. And all the while she sat rigidly upright, sweating from the balancing exercise, and determined to get it with a sweet stubbornness only little girls can have, with him jogging steadfastly, never turning his gaze away from the bike, and never falling behind, his face (which I could only see when they were passing right underneath the balcony) watchful and untired.
They circled and circled, alone in the white heat, safe in their small empire of trust and protection, not bothered by anything. And even when the relative shade of my balcony began to give way to relentless forays of stiflingly hot air, I stayed there, glued to the handrail, following their circular trajectory with almost imperceptible beats I kept with my nodding head. It's not every day you're witness to such a gratuitous, pulsating rhythm of love. And it's not every day you take a mental snapshot that will last you a lifetime.
Settlement "Borik" in Banja Luka, being built in the 1970s
posted by Tijana | 12:25 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home