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.
"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.
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