Into the Cave

... ima jedna pecina stroga

u kojoj zivi Baba Roga...

It wasn't that my heart was faltering with the heat-sick molecules of a scorching late spring day, or that after a  few minutes of a steep descent on the crumbling rocks in the suffocating greenery I couldn't hear anyone ahead or behind me any more. What got to me in this breathless loneliness was the sight of a small oval table covered with a green plastic tablecloth at the foot of the break-neck trail and right in front of the entrance to the cave. On top of it was a round red alarm clock, like a red alarm. Showing real time. I've always dabbled in symbols, I make my living off of them, so I thought Dali. I thought Quentin, and the timepiece his father gave him and instructed him to break. Break time. Mostly because it will pass and make you not care about the things you care most about in the world right now. It will make your electrifying hurt and pain an unacceptable stagnant lake of stale memories. Like the memory of a smell in a vacuum.

The cave was like other caves. A grotesque mouth gaping ugly from the ground, giving you a buzz of anxious excitement, inviting you to enter the belly of Mother Earth. Is that why caves are unnerving? I don't know if I felt more like Forster's Adela or Mrs. Moore in one of the Marabar Caves: was what I felt a young woman's thrilling sense of an otherness generated by a glimpse into the inarticulate stillness of the foreign underworld, or an old woman's stifling presentiment of a finite death transpiring through the implacable walls of the cave? Adela goes on to experience a delirious encounter with a boogieman in another cave a couple of hours later -- the foreign underworld turns out to be intimately familiar though overwhelmingly irrational; Mrs. Moore dies on a ship a few weeks later, fleeing from the unwelcome realization that the universe is no wider than the oppressive entrails of a cave.

I don't think I was aware of any premonitions, though perhaps I should have been. I was skipping from one boulder to another, trying to keep the hems of my pants from getting wet in the underground stream making burbling sounds amplified by the dark echo. A little too practical for a symbolic person; most certainly not thinking of Prufrock rolling up his trousers at the edge of the ocean where mermaids refuse to sing to him as he is getting old, getting old. Practical because afraid, really. I never liked darkness. As my childhood friend Ana said once while we were walking down the stairs in our ten-storey apartment building and the landing lights switched off automatically: you never know what might emerge from the dark. That made us fumble nervously around the wall on the next landing, looking for the switch. I never liked closed spaces either. Like those elevators in our building. Once the power started going out whimsically every once in a while, I'd never even look at them, I always took the stairs. The small windows above the apartment doors let out enough light to help you navigate until your own floor. One of my worst nightmares was about my mother, wearing a black sleeveless cardigan, stuck between two floors in the elevator for hours.

The cave, like other caves, had a secret and kept it with a poker face. I sensed it on the tingling skin of my bare arms, and in the layered thickness of our resonating voices - my brother was there too; he had got down to the cave before me, and then waited so we could go in together. Our shouts and laughter rang out like a tin drum in the cave but didn't dispel the secret which hovered, fully at home, all around us. When we got out through the luminous mouth, the outside world was too brilliant and too loud although there were no other visitors and not many sounds. It felt like taking out the earplugs and suddenly being sensitive to the smallest murmur in the leaves. The red clock on the table showed 1:50, which meant that we spent only about 20 minutes in the cave.  Then we clambered all the way up to rejoin our parents who stayed by the car, my brother with much more ease than me ("That Srdjan, he is like a goat," my mother had said earlier with a typical mixture of pride and disapproval of his skipping up and down any rocks he could find).

My heart thudded dully, from the heat and from the ascent. Also from a feeling that something happened but that it escaped me because I didn't linger on it. Something about finiteness, and how soon (immediately, now, every second) it manifests itself. Something Mrs. Moore understood in that Marabar Cave and it took the breath out of her sails. But, funnily, it is also something we begin to be prepared for early on, with that nursery rhyme about the ogre in the cave. Sadly though, a child's way -- pretending not to be afraid of the ogre -- does not always seem to work later on.

The Hug

(for Srdjan)

"As they crossed the street, Anton let his gaze wander toward a certain place near the sidewalk, but he was no longer able to locate it precisely" (Mulisch, The Assault 159).

I can still locate a certain place near a sidewalk rather precisely. But in the case of Mulisch's protagonist, about 30 years has passed since a dead body near the sidewalk next to his house changed the course of his life. In my case, it's only been 6 years since something happened in that certain place near a sidewalk. It was nothing important, nothing even worth noticing if you were just a passer-by, and certainly nothing of the magnitude of an assassinated Chief Inspector of Police, lying "dead as a door-nail" on Anton's street. What I saw, from the car parked temporarily by the curb, was a hug -- just one of those zillion gestures generated in a big city teeming with people and their unique lives, which you may or may not register in passing and then promptly forget. A few days later, however, it turned out that it was a last hug, and that changed everything.

I've always had the fascination with a "last" anything. Or, it isn't exactly "fascination;" I've always felt the need to be aware of something that's the "last" of its kind, for some reason. As a kind of paying the last respects to the end of something, perhaps. For instance, for years I tried to be fully concentrated on the last moment of our family visit to my maternal grandparents who lived in a small provincial town and whom we saw about once a year, mostly in the summer. It was a classic scene, repeated with small variations each summer: they would see us off through the yard and onto the street, we'd hug them, get into the car, Dad would start the engine, my brother and I would turn around in our back seats, and as the car slowly drove up the street, we'd wave and wave all the way until they were tiny and then gone, when the curve of the uphill and meandering street finally hid them from view. And all along, I would try to etch their bent figures, with their hands waving slowly, into my memory, thinking that this might be the last time I saw them. They died a few years ago, a couple of years apart but, ironically, I do not remember the last, very last moment I saw either of them.

What I saw by the curb was my brother hugging my mother by way of saying goodbye, as my father and I waited for her in the car. It was late spring 2006, and we had just spent a couple of weeks together while I was on vacation, travelling around Serbia and finishing the tour with 4 days at the Adriatic Sea in Montenegro (our first trip to the sea together since 1987; those trips used to be a yearly certainty since before the beginning of my memories but were then cut short by an escalating economic chaos, the war, and finally my brother and me leaving home). As the final leg of my visit, I was now travelling with my parents from Belgrade to Banjaluka, where they still lived, to spend a few days in the city where I grew up and sleep in my childhood bed, before taking the bus back to Belgrade and then the plane back to another continent. My brother had no more days off and couldn't join us so he was staying behind in Belgrade. Why we left him there, on the sidewalk next to the so-called "White House" (the central police station in that municipal precinct, made of once white -- now dirty-yellow -- construction material) on the morning of our trip to Bosnia, I can't remember any more. Was he catching the city bus to work from a bus stop around there? Or did he actually have to finish some ID-related paper-work in the White House (as all of us had to do very often, in the country burdened by the vestiges of a bureaucracy-dominated ex-communist state)? In any case, this is where he had to get out of the car, and where our family summer trip came to an end.

The car was parked illegally (and right in front of a police station), so it was a quick, improvised hug on the part of the sidewalk that contained a rectangular stretch of parched soil and sun-browned grass. My brother hunched a little, his long arms around my mother, while she strained upwards and pressed the side of her face to his, with her eyes closed. A tableau of tenderness grown desperate because time passes and takes us away from each other much before death does, and leaves us fragments like this one, stolen from the business of an indifferent day.Was she remembering how she held him close in her arms, wearing her white pharmacist's overcoat, when he was 5 in the hospital corridor after his hand operation? Was he? Or perhaps neither was, but that hug and every other one from the thick-woven tissue of love between my mother and my brother was part of that inconspicuous sidewalk hug -- their last one -- in front of a police station, on the sun-scorched grass that couldn't care less but nevertheless framed the scene into something eternal? Did I already know all this, and was that why I watched carefully, tenderly through the car window?

The edges of that memory are rugged. I don't remember if there was any waving from the car, or a goodbye glance over the shoulder as the three of us drove away from the curb and plunged into the morning traffic (quite possibly, there was). The day was shaping into an oppressively humid June day, and later while we were on the highway approaching the crossing point on the border with Bosnia, gray clouds thickened above, lashing out one of those quick blustery showers. It grew chilly, and my mother gave me a knitted blue sweater to put on -- an old one that her mother had given her since it was too small. And then things happened fast. After a few sweet-and-sour days in the town of my childhood (where everything screams out your old life, and you love it, and feel ambiguous about it, and both you and it are beyond the pale, never to be really accessed again), I left, and about a week later, my mother was gone.

I'm back in Belgrade every summer. Every time we pass by the White House -- it's still on our way when we go downtown -- I let my gaze find that certain place on the sidewalk. When it does, nothing special happens: there is only a silent friendly recognition (lined delicately with just a trace of familiar sadness) that fortifies my day. I wonder if my brother remembers. I hope he does. Such fragments of nothing which contain everything are the true keepsakes.

I Had a Dream

(for Miss Emily)

I had a dream which chafed and itched --
I wondered why -- then realized:
It wasn't mine.

We danced a last dance, stopped and smiled --
Exchanged a few words, deeply bowed --
And said goodbye --

Then parted ways on friendly terms:
It went in search of someone's sleep --
I -- of other dreams.