In a Nutshell

The door is unambiguously locked. The working hours displayed on a piece of paper in the door suggest the Museum should still be open for another hour and a half. We try the door once again, a little more firmly, with a bit of a shake -- in case something is just stuck and only seems locked -- but the result is the same: the thick silence of a hot June late afternoon, descended on this small town by the massive, dozing body of the Danube two hundred meters away. I walk around the building to see if there is maybe another entrance but there isn't. Back at the front door, I begin to punch the phone number written on the same piece of paper into my phone: the managing board of the Museum. Surprisingly, there are only a couple of rings before someone picks up on the other end. I explain the situation: it's only 5 in the afternoon, and while the door sign says the Museum should be open until 6:30, it is closed. We are here only today, and would like to enter; what are we to do? The man's voice sounds a little perplexed by all this: he isn't sure what to say. I begin to wonder if maybe we are the first visitors that showed up in days and have now disturbed the comfortable sleepy rhythm of this place, counting on being forgotten. He says that the guard should be inside, and that he'll transfer the call; at that moment, there is a clanging sound of the unlocking keys on the inside, and the door opens, revealing a stocky young woman with short, dyed hair, wearing a guard's uniform. Somewhere in the depths of the space behind her, a phone is ringing. "Is it you calling?" she asks. I confirm and disconnect. She apologizes for the delay: she indeed dozed off in her office and didn't hear us knocking right away. She opens the door wide and we walk in: there is a heaviness of stagnant air, lying low and heavy in the stuffy heat of an indoor space undisturbed by any air-conditioning. While she's explaining what's in each room of the small Museum, she is pulling the hem of her shirt down, trying to make it meet the edge of the black pants over the hefty mound of her pregnant belly. "You are the only guests at the moment; feel free to go wherever you want," she ends with a smile, and retreats into her office close to the entrance.

The total emptiness of the place, the faint odour of dust and staleness, and the angled late-afternoon sun filtered through the tinted high windows are all strangely reassuring. I realize I have never before been in an empty museum; it feels just right. The three or four small rooms display a jumble of curious material and artifacts spanning the centuries of life traces in this Danubian region: amphoras, oil lamps, hair pins, jewelry, figurines with broken parts, Roman bricks, chipped heads of statues, segments of wall decorations, and a few massive bones of prehistoric animals, including a mammoth tooth, bigger than my foot. One room has large prints of old black-and-white photographs mounted on the wall, showing some of the relevant archaeological sites and excavations; one is particularly intriguing: Tabula Traiana, or Traian's Plaque, still in its original place, in the rock above the road built by the Emperor, before it was flooded when the Danube levels rose after the building of the hydroelectric power station Djerdap in 1969. What the photo shows -- a narrow road cut into the rock, with five or six people on it, reading the Emperor's declaration chiseled into the Plaque some 2000 years ago -- is now 20-odd meters under the surface of the river. The block of the rock with the Plaque in it was cut out and raised in order to be preserved but is now accessible only by boat. Seeing the people in the photo, standing in the spot which is now underwater, feels almost like witnessing a miracle or a magic trick. 

We stroll through the musty rooms a few more times, basking in the sweet solitude of the exhibited objects and us among them, our existence in time and space overlapping for a minuscule moment; the absence of any other people makes it seem like we own these things, or at least their presence. Torn from their context, their only content or purpose now comes from our gaze; from our acknowledgment of a story or history behind them, even though we know no details. There's something in the drowsiness of the air inside the Museum that sends such thoughts from somewhere below the surface: of the rocks, of the river, of the mind.

Back at the entrance, we knock on the half-open door of the guard's office, and she comes out, with a smile. She's wide awake this time.We chit-chat a little, about the heat, the low rate of visitors, the poor working conditions. She keeps pulling the hem of the shirt down over her taut waistline. "They won't get me larger pants," she says apologetically. "I'm going on maternity leave in a couple of weeks, and they say it would be a waste of money." She's a little embarrassed about it but there's a playful spark in her eyes as she says it. She has endured and will endure worse things; this is just small change. We say goodbye, wish her good luck, and step out into the stickiness of the unmoving air outside, where the low-lying sun has begun to spill and leak in orangy hues close to the horizon.

A couple of days later, I tell the story of the pants to a cousin. He first says nothing, just nods a little, as if confirming something he suspected; his eyes glaze over, and seem to look into an absent distance. "Yes," he says with an air of bitterness, " and there's Serbia in a nutshell for you." He keeps nodding slowly, sadly. 

And he's right, although not the way he thinks he is. There is in it something that captures the essence of living under those skies, with that particular history behind one's back, descending from the generations of ancestors who made these Danubian regions their home, and lived their lives out underneath that specific constellation of good or bad-luck stars. Life certainly feels reduced here in many ways. But within that field of reduced life possibility which seems to be an uncontested and familiar background to people in those parts,  there is a resistance, an endurance, a refusal to buckle even when one recognizes and accepts that imposed reduction. In fact, you count on such constrictions lurking at every turn; you see them in the life of others, your closest family, your friends, your neighbours, strangers. You might hate it but it's just something you live through, like everyone else. Out of the smallness you're stuffed into, you grow a handy strength.

 In a nutshell, there is a certain Serbianness in having to wear the pants one size too small literally or metaphorically; but somewhat less obviously, there is also something to be said about pulling the hem of your shirt with a smile, a confidence, a stubbornness, even though you know if won't reach the pants.

 

Tabula Traiana in the 1960s

 Tabula Traiana in 2019