Another Summer

1. He says, "We'll get some fruit and leave it for them on the kitchen table." Today is the last day my father and I are supposed to drop by my brother's place to feed Boža the turtle and water the plants while my brother and his family are away at the seaside. Belgrade is an inferno these days, with heat beating from above and doubling the scorching effect by emanating upward from the concrete so each time we need to go, we opt for an early evening visit. The freshly fallen darkness enhances the vibrating sounds of crickets and the moist scents of various trees, interspersed with a lonely high-pitched call of a swallow running late to bed here and there. Also, chances are higher that after finally finding a dubious parking spot -- which requires gymnastic agility when getting in or out of the car squeezed between other tightly parked cars in one of the nearby streets -- we'll catch a glimpse of the neighbourhood curiosity: the Marathon Man. This is an older man, perhaps in his 70s, thin with slightly hunched shoulders, who jogs tirelessly up and down the streets around this hour, a stopwatch hanging from his neck.

No one knows exactly how old Boža is. According to some calculations, at least 17 years. My brother and his wife rescued him and his mate Božidarka from a pitiable living space in the friend's parents' bathroom. Since then, Božidarka died and was buried under a tree in the woody park on a hill, and Boža continued to thrive and expand, by now reaching a formidable size even though he only eats one small raw sardine every third day. Feeding him that sardine is a delicate business. It involves careful approach and angling. The best method is to hold the sardine by the tail, draw Boža's attention and wait for his frontal approach, then when he opens his mouth wide, position the sardine on an imaginary line continuing straight from Boža's neck and head, and let him bite it evenly as opposed to lopsidedly. If the latter happens, instead of swallowing the whole sardine in smooth, steady gulps, Boža will tear it to pieces in the attempt to make it go down, and then you end with a mess in his aquarium. This is the third time I'm doing it, so I'm fairly quick and efficient, letting Boža digest in peace after administering the sardine. When I return to the kitchen, my father is standing at the sink and carefully washing each piece of the fruit we brought. I ask him why he's doing that -- they're bound to wash the fruit before eating it anyway; he only says, "It's nicer like this," and continues to wash the fruit under the faucet. Then he finds a glass bowl, thoughtfully arranges the pears and plums in a dome-like fashion, and puts  it on the kitchen table. As we're leaving, with a long look around to make sure we didn't forget anything, the fruit on the table glistens and gleams with the water drops like tiny prisms, ready to welcome those who are returning home with a little bit of beauty, and care, and attention.  

2. The road from the monastery to the village where we'll stay overnight is just a couple of kilometers long. It's already late at night, all the other visitors are gone, and there's absolutely no one on that road, which goes through fields of tall grasses, broad-shouldered oak trees - only indigo silhouettes now -- and groves of other, more closely clustered trees. The only sound is the intense nocturnal song of the crickets, the sky is a deep purple, there are no lights anywhere. Except... I see them, all of them, through the side window of the car, and the next moment, we have stopped, engine and lights switched off. We get out of the car, crane our necks at the risk of keeling over in any direction, and take it all in, the star-crammed sky, shot through the middle with a thick ridge of the Milky Way. There isn't much to say; words don't seem to belong to such a moment. An extravagant canopy of stars sweeps across the sky above us with bigger or smaller clusters of brilliance, in sharper or fuzzier formations, wrapped in wisps of gossamer haze. It's as if someone opened a door and all the magnificence of creation spilled out joyfully and silently, and if you happened to lift your head, you'd see it in all its drama and glory; if not, you'd miss it. Like many things in life. 

We stand there for some minutes, star-struck and awed, feeling the throbbing rhythms of the world; feeling that somewhere there, and right here, is everything that ever mattered, and everyone we knew or didn't know, living or dead, and all of our dead, and us with them in this momentary explosion in the sky.

3. A sweltering August day in Belgrade. My father, my brother and my five-and-a-half-year-old nephew are at the cemetery visiting my mother's grave. It is 1 pm, the zenith heat crouching heavily on the ground; not the tiniest breeze in the still air. My brother and Didi are preparing a hole in the ground next to my mother's grave where they plan to plant a few gingko seeds: this is about the third attempt in the last couple of years -- all the previous ones failed, including the time when a young shoot actually pushed up from the soil but was mown by the cemetery maintenance people. My father is busying himself with the watering and the arrangement of flowers at the grave. The tacit etiquette at the cemetery is that you can borrow empty plastic bottles from the grave sites around, go get the water from the water fountain down the path, water your plants, and then return the bottles where you found them. It takes a few trips to the fountain and back to get all the necessary water; he walks slowly, wary of the fierce sun. The bouquet of lively little flowers we brought needs the stems shortened so they can fit well into the small vases on each side of my mother's tombstone. My father opens a small, very handy pocket knife with a hand-made handle, gifted to him by my mother's father, a couple of decades ago; with a decisive cut, he prunes the stems and we place them in the vases. Then it's time to go but before we do, I ask Didi to take a picture of us, and he's thrilled since he's never handled a camera before. I put the strap around his neck, show him how to hold the body of the camera and where to look, and finally, which button to press when he's ready. We pose, he takes a few seconds to double-check where the shutter button is and how to reach it with his small index finger, and then he's fully into it, as if he had been doing this for years, clicking away like a pro. And there we all are, together: my father, my brother, and me, as seen by Didi, my mother's silent presence at his back.

4. An infallible tradition on the last day of my summer visit to Belgrade, carried on for as many years as I can remember, is my father wrapping the bottle of šljivovica or plum brandy which I am taking with me that year. First, there's the question of picking the brandy to take. He wants it to be some first-class option, since it is going abroad. While the next-door neighbour, Uncle Ljubiša, was alive, he would often provide us with the home-made plum brandy from his village in southern Serbia. Since he died, this source has mostly dried up (except occasional offerings from Uncle Ljubiša's nephew who inherited his apartment, but only drops by once or twice a year). Instead, we look for the better brands sold in supermarkets, or we get some home-made brandy from other people, or, like this year, we buy it in a monastery. And so, on the eve of my departure from Belgrade, a small stocky bottle of "Bukovska" (from Bukovo monastery) is on the kitchen counter, waiting for its wrapping treatment so that it doesn't leak on my clothes in the suitcase, where it will go. My father has a profound reverence for plum brandy, and as we used to joke, in case of emergency would probably first grab a bottle or two before leaving the apartment. He handles the bottle carefully and gently -- his hands are not as steady as they used to be -- and begins by wrapping the bottle neck and the cap very tightly with scotch tape. Then he takes a thin plastic bag and wraps the top of the bottle in it, and then runs several new tight rounds of scotch tape around it, while as an assistant I am supposed to press my finger against the bagged bottle and slide it slowly ahead of the scotch tape so it adheres more securely. Finally, he takes a few thick middle leaves from an old newspaper (checking to see if there's some significant article in it), and wraps everything in it, like a snuggly-clothed baby, adding just a few more scotch-tape touches. Then I shove it into the bosom of the already packed suitcase, and a little bit of the sunshine and summer and the air from these parts travel with me, in the thoughtfully constructed protective shield of my father's making.

5. Then the last moment comes, the one which is looming uneasily from the very beginning of the visit, the one which is final, beyond which there is nothing, nowhere to run and postpone the goodbyes, beyond which there are only clouds and haze of the high plane altitudes which momentarily change everything, reduce people and places and feelings which were so real a few minutes ago to a maquette in some silent toy world below. The scene of the last moment is also preordained and inevitable: it's the Belgrade Nikola Tesla airport, with the sculpture of Tesla weirdly rigid, in an awkward standing position, looking sadly displaced on the side of the terminal building. My father always drives me there to see me off, and most of the time my brother comes along too. We all know it'll be half a year, or a year, or in Covid times, more than a year perhaps before we can see each other again. So even though we hate this last moment, we need it. Most of the time, this last moment happens early in the morning since my first flight -- to Paris, or Frankfurt, or Zurich, or Amsterdam -- is usually the first flight out of Belgrade. So the last day starts in the middle of the night; this time, my father and I get in the car in the eerily quiet street at 3 a.m. -- I always make a point of looking at his car-clock the moment I arrive and the moment we set off to the airport when I'm leaving -- and are already in front of my brother's apartment building 15 minutes later. Driving around Belgrade at 3 a.m. is an astounding experience, and if it weren't for the nervousness and heaviness of the occasion, it would be entirely enjoyable: there is such beauty in the abandoned, quiet streets with the traffic lights working diligently but for almost no cars and no people, electronic billboards and neon signs spilling diffuse purplish-blue light descending on the empty pavements. My brother takes a few minutes to come down, and for some reason my heart is in my throat as we're waiting in the car with the engine running; his appearance somehow marks the irreversibility of the unfolding actions of the day. 

The apartment building door opens and he appears, his shoulders bouncing as he walks towards us, a reassuring smile on his face ("it's just another day, just another time you pick me up, and we go somewhere, it's all good" it seems to say). He gets in, cracks a couple of jokes about the hour, and we're off; in minutes, we're on the highway under the inky sky, zooming through the sleeping landscape of corn fields towards the airport, and just like that, I feel like I'm already gone. Once we park and make our way into the terminal building, we're in some sort of no man's land, with displaced people pulling their luggage, shuffling from one end to the next with a forlorn expression on their faces, about to go hundreds, maybe thousands of kilometers away. After waiting in the gargantuan line in front of the Lufthansa check-in desk and successfully leaving my luggage, we're free to roam around and spend the last hour trying not to think of that last hour. We exit the terminal and are braced by the fresh night air -- the first almost chilly night in Belgrade since I arrived, and a welcome break from the tropical days and nights. Next to the terminal is a restaurant where we usually spend that last hour, after I check in and before I depart. We like it there because it's away from the madness of airports, and because it's called Borik -- we used to live in a part of town called Borik many years ago, when my brother and I were children, when our mother was alive, when we lived a regular, not particularly memorable but nevertheless precious family life; a simpler life, when we were together. Just after 4 a.m., however, Borik is wrapped in darkness and doesn't open for another 4 hours. We sit down at a table outside and for the sake of tradition, take a selfie, with my father in the middle gathering us with his arms around our shoulders. We have several such pictures from various years; in each one, we are a little older, a little smaller. Then we walk back to the terminal building, take the escalator to the departures level, and sit down in a bar, which is also closed but more comfortable. I pull out the three sandwiches I made last night (egg&cheese in big subs), and we eat, still in good spirits, my father and brother objecting to how dry the sandwiches are, and I feel teased but happy. It's the last 15 minutes before I have to go through the passport control. It's hard to swallow the last bits of the sandwich, and it's not just because it's dry. And then it's time. We get up and walk slowly, like kids who've done something bad and now must face their punishment, towards the passport control zone where they can't follow me any more. I take one of my carry-ons from my brother who insisted on lugging it around all this time, as we're passing under the old departures board, which is eerily silent for the first time since I got to know this airport. In the past, the thin rectangular planks inside the board -- each one with the number and destination of a flight -- would keep flapping frantically as they turned, with two red lights next to those flights which were boarding at the time. Motionless and soundless, they are only a memento now. 

Before we join the final line (they will walk it with me until the last possible moment, when I have to show my documents, and they have to step away behind the line separating those travelling from those not travelling), we stop for the hugs; those would be impossible in the line. A whole summer and a lifetime are crammed into those hugs, without many words, and with an attempt to commit to memory a tactile sensation of holding, to last until the next time. The line moves quickly and it takes less than a minute, they fall back, and I proceed towards the passport control booth, turning a few times with a nervous smile to wink or wave at them and they respond with a jokey pantomime. By the time I've got my passport stamped and am ready to go through the sliding door beyond which are corridors leading to flight gates, I'm having trouble distinguishing them among other people seeing someone off. When we do catch each other's glances, we motion towards the left side of the terminal, and we all know what it means. I stretch my right arm up as far as it will go, and just hold it there without waving -- a kind of an ultimate salute -- then pass through the door and hurry towards the C wing even though I have an A gate this morning. I'm walking as fast as my backpack and my laptop bag slung over my shoulder will allow: I'll have to walk all this way back, and then down the A corridor before I get to my gate to board. The airport has been under construction for a few years and each time I'm here it seems bigger and brighter. There is a faint smell of cigarettes, mixed in with the vaguely nauseating odor of public washrooms, as I'm making my way towards the big glass panels overlooking the entrance to the terminal outside. I stop at the nearest window and notice the first cracks of dawn somewhere in the distance. I look down: they are not out yet. I watch people on the ground level coming in or going out, and catch my mind beginning to grapple with the practicalities of the day: will the first flight be on time, will the connection in Frankfurt go smoothly, will all my documents be accepted, how will I feel once I reach the destination.... Then the two familiar figures exit the building, and I'm fully back in the present moment. They look up and see me, I wave wildly from inside and they do an improvised silly little dance on the pavement outside. It's another of our traditions from way back when; in reality, another way of stretching time almost to a breaking point, using up the last little crumbs of it. It is also one of the most difficult and beautiful things humans can do: filling the void of absence meaningfully with absurdity. With love.

Then, officially, it's the end of another summer and it goes quickly and heartbreakingly, the way summers do.