Waiting for a Kiss
I live by the rules of anticipation and impatience. I was like that even in elementary school: as the bell announced the end of the current class, and the others joyfully got up, scratching the legs of the chairs against the floor and talking all at the same time, my head was wrapped in the looming question, always the same, "What's the next class?" or "Which textbooks should I prepare next?" If my mind didn't run ahead of time and create the shape of things in the future, there would be just a vacuum at the end of the present moment and I wouldn't know how to function. My permanent task was connecting the dots from now to two hours or two days from now; I was impatient to see how they all joined together, and what figure they formed. A figure of my future. A trajectory of where I was moving. There had to be the projection of a complete, finished figure of my immediate or more distant future, or I'd feel uncertain, unreal, hanging in the air.There simply had to be a "next thing" and the sooner the better.
Years later, I'm the same. The trip from Belgrade to Venice this summer was a long series of exciting "stages" neatly mapped out in my head. First, a short stretch of the trans-ex-Yugoslavia highway from Belgrade to the Croatian border, with newly added rest-areas by the road. Some decades ago, in the earlier (smaller, dirtier) versions of these, whole caravans of Turkish families in mini-vans, with German number plates and curtains installed in the windows to help with the merciless sun during the long journey, used to stop here on their way to or from Turkey for summer holidays. Dark-eyebrowed men, women in multi-layers of long summer fabric, and children of different sizes would all stand or sit by their cars, eating fruit or pastries, watching the passing cars. After the Croatian border, there came a long stretch of the sun-bleached highway, wavering in the heat, with beautiful, tall oak trees lined up as incurious, taciturn thoroughfare guardians by the road. These oak tree groves, which are the unmistakable markers of summer in my mind as many summer trips started or ended with them in view, have recently been cleared a little, the thick entanglement of bushes and low vegetation cut and taken out. The sunlight streaming obliquely through the thinned groves is now powdery and translucent -- the kind of light you'd imagine in happy fairy-tales. And then there was the part I didn't know at all, from Zagreb towards and into Slovenia, because we never travelled westward when I was little. Essentially the same shades of green in the crowns of oak and plane trees continued to flank the highway on both sides although the fact that they were in Croatia and in Slovenia somehow made them different, almost foreign. Once in Ljubljana, all that my anticipating mind could think of was the remaining short distance to the Italian border and then a truly new and exciting drive along the northern Adriatic Coast, past Trieste and into Lido di Jesolo just across from Venice where we had reservations in a hotel on a sandy beach.
That's when the car broke down, inexplicably. A few hours passed by in spasmodic, desperate attempts to realign the interrupted line of progress (being towed, having a mechanic look at the problem and tell us, perplexed and apologetic, that he didn't know how to fix it, finding another mechanic dozens of kilometers away who was by then closed, and finally having to look for accommodation because it was clear we were not going anywhere for a while). So the straight, forward-moving arrow of this trip, the front engine of my anticipated dream, was ground to a halt in the small Slovenian town of Postojna, some 50 kilometers from the Italian border, and I had to accept it. But it was hard, especially the next morning when the mechanic opened his shop, looked at the car and said he'd need at least two days, during which time we'd remain stuck here, one mountain short of the sea, which I had been yearning to catch the first glimpse of almost as much as in the old times, when my family travelled to the coast for the summer vacation and the weight and intensity of the whole adventure was pressurized into that moment of the first eye contact with the body of water, casually appearing from behind a curve in the road and immediately bursting across the entire field of vision. The magic moment, the one for which anyone's childhood is worth remembering.
This time, however, that magic moment remained tantalizingly hidden beyond the craggy mountain covering up the horizon on the west side of Postojna. In the afternoon, while we were trying to while away the waiting time, we walked through the fields gilded with the low-lying sun, the air full of glimmering insects and particles of hay, most of which was rolled neatly into bales scattered around. In front of us, like a gigantic crouching elephant, loomed the mountain which hid the sea beyond (called "Nanos," as mechanic Silvo told us the next day, when we went for a test run after he fixed the engine). Impatient, I kept walking towards the mountain. "How far do you want us to walk like this?" asked my father, who was up for a nice late-afternoon stroll I had suggested but was beginning to doubt my true intentions. "All the way to the mountain. To the sea," I was pouting. "Do you think we could see the sea from the top of that mountain?" I sized it up, the rivulets of sun cascading into my squinting eyes. He laughed and we turned back. That evening, we bought a handful of perfectly ripe, dark cherries from a man selling them out of his car in front of our motel, sat on a bench and ate them in silence, watching the sun sink behind the mountain.
It was the next day that this unanticipated landscape showed me something I'll remember probably longer than I would any Venetian bridge or work of art had we made it there. We were in the bowels of the earth, the Postojna Cave, a limestone maze of tunnels, darkness and humidity, going down into the ground over 100 meters, made of numerous stalactite and stalagmite-decked chambers of varying colours and shapes, harbouring pigmentless long-fingered salamanders skinny-dipping in the creator of this marvel, the Pivka River, exuding primaeval subterranean dampness, or at least 2 million years of it. We were there, and for a few moments - as the guide had alerted us they would do -- they switched the lights off so we could feel the deep, steady entrails of this place we live on; so we could see the vast, bottomless night we hailed from. Constantly and always there, soundless, motionless, directionless. One would expect this to be horrifying but it wasn't: no one from the group made a sound, not even the smallest tots in their parents' arms cried out. When the lights were back on, the first thing I saw was the embodiment of something quite unnamable but unmistakably essential: a rocky couple, a low-hanging stalactite with its corresponding column-like stalagmite a few centimeters below it, formed by the drops slowly dripping from the stalactite and imperceptibly growing upward towards it. A whole host of such couples, in fact. "It takes one hundred years for a centimeter of calcite to accumulate," the guide informed us, and fell silent for a few moments, letting us calculate. Thousands of years for a kiss to seal them together. To solidify the foundations of all the fitful illusions and aspirations fast-forwarded and accelerated on the surface -- a vital deep-core process unknown to anyone except, perhaps, when anticipated destinations are not reached, deadlines are not met, and one is sidetracked and detained, to get a glimpse of things underneath.
Years later, I'm the same. The trip from Belgrade to Venice this summer was a long series of exciting "stages" neatly mapped out in my head. First, a short stretch of the trans-ex-Yugoslavia highway from Belgrade to the Croatian border, with newly added rest-areas by the road. Some decades ago, in the earlier (smaller, dirtier) versions of these, whole caravans of Turkish families in mini-vans, with German number plates and curtains installed in the windows to help with the merciless sun during the long journey, used to stop here on their way to or from Turkey for summer holidays. Dark-eyebrowed men, women in multi-layers of long summer fabric, and children of different sizes would all stand or sit by their cars, eating fruit or pastries, watching the passing cars. After the Croatian border, there came a long stretch of the sun-bleached highway, wavering in the heat, with beautiful, tall oak trees lined up as incurious, taciturn thoroughfare guardians by the road. These oak tree groves, which are the unmistakable markers of summer in my mind as many summer trips started or ended with them in view, have recently been cleared a little, the thick entanglement of bushes and low vegetation cut and taken out. The sunlight streaming obliquely through the thinned groves is now powdery and translucent -- the kind of light you'd imagine in happy fairy-tales. And then there was the part I didn't know at all, from Zagreb towards and into Slovenia, because we never travelled westward when I was little. Essentially the same shades of green in the crowns of oak and plane trees continued to flank the highway on both sides although the fact that they were in Croatia and in Slovenia somehow made them different, almost foreign. Once in Ljubljana, all that my anticipating mind could think of was the remaining short distance to the Italian border and then a truly new and exciting drive along the northern Adriatic Coast, past Trieste and into Lido di Jesolo just across from Venice where we had reservations in a hotel on a sandy beach.
That's when the car broke down, inexplicably. A few hours passed by in spasmodic, desperate attempts to realign the interrupted line of progress (being towed, having a mechanic look at the problem and tell us, perplexed and apologetic, that he didn't know how to fix it, finding another mechanic dozens of kilometers away who was by then closed, and finally having to look for accommodation because it was clear we were not going anywhere for a while). So the straight, forward-moving arrow of this trip, the front engine of my anticipated dream, was ground to a halt in the small Slovenian town of Postojna, some 50 kilometers from the Italian border, and I had to accept it. But it was hard, especially the next morning when the mechanic opened his shop, looked at the car and said he'd need at least two days, during which time we'd remain stuck here, one mountain short of the sea, which I had been yearning to catch the first glimpse of almost as much as in the old times, when my family travelled to the coast for the summer vacation and the weight and intensity of the whole adventure was pressurized into that moment of the first eye contact with the body of water, casually appearing from behind a curve in the road and immediately bursting across the entire field of vision. The magic moment, the one for which anyone's childhood is worth remembering.
This time, however, that magic moment remained tantalizingly hidden beyond the craggy mountain covering up the horizon on the west side of Postojna. In the afternoon, while we were trying to while away the waiting time, we walked through the fields gilded with the low-lying sun, the air full of glimmering insects and particles of hay, most of which was rolled neatly into bales scattered around. In front of us, like a gigantic crouching elephant, loomed the mountain which hid the sea beyond (called "Nanos," as mechanic Silvo told us the next day, when we went for a test run after he fixed the engine). Impatient, I kept walking towards the mountain. "How far do you want us to walk like this?" asked my father, who was up for a nice late-afternoon stroll I had suggested but was beginning to doubt my true intentions. "All the way to the mountain. To the sea," I was pouting. "Do you think we could see the sea from the top of that mountain?" I sized it up, the rivulets of sun cascading into my squinting eyes. He laughed and we turned back. That evening, we bought a handful of perfectly ripe, dark cherries from a man selling them out of his car in front of our motel, sat on a bench and ate them in silence, watching the sun sink behind the mountain.
It was the next day that this unanticipated landscape showed me something I'll remember probably longer than I would any Venetian bridge or work of art had we made it there. We were in the bowels of the earth, the Postojna Cave, a limestone maze of tunnels, darkness and humidity, going down into the ground over 100 meters, made of numerous stalactite and stalagmite-decked chambers of varying colours and shapes, harbouring pigmentless long-fingered salamanders skinny-dipping in the creator of this marvel, the Pivka River, exuding primaeval subterranean dampness, or at least 2 million years of it. We were there, and for a few moments - as the guide had alerted us they would do -- they switched the lights off so we could feel the deep, steady entrails of this place we live on; so we could see the vast, bottomless night we hailed from. Constantly and always there, soundless, motionless, directionless. One would expect this to be horrifying but it wasn't: no one from the group made a sound, not even the smallest tots in their parents' arms cried out. When the lights were back on, the first thing I saw was the embodiment of something quite unnamable but unmistakably essential: a rocky couple, a low-hanging stalactite with its corresponding column-like stalagmite a few centimeters below it, formed by the drops slowly dripping from the stalactite and imperceptibly growing upward towards it. A whole host of such couples, in fact. "It takes one hundred years for a centimeter of calcite to accumulate," the guide informed us, and fell silent for a few moments, letting us calculate. Thousands of years for a kiss to seal them together. To solidify the foundations of all the fitful illusions and aspirations fast-forwarded and accelerated on the surface -- a vital deep-core process unknown to anyone except, perhaps, when anticipated destinations are not reached, deadlines are not met, and one is sidetracked and detained, to get a glimpse of things underneath.
posted by Tijana | 2:32 PM
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