Rock-solid

 

Another sticky July day, approaching the zenith fury amplified by the heat-emitting concrete and blinding glass around the airport. I’m leaving again, and it’s another goodbye. Every year offers a slight variation but the invariable constant is the lump in my throat as I navigate through the practical necessities and the emotional nebulas of the last few hours before I sink into the airplane seat and cast one departing look on the sun-withered grass and corn fields around the Belgrade airport.

This time there are four of them in my seeing-off committee (identical to my welcoming committee one month before). We are making our way almost reluctantly from the multi-floor garage where my father’s whimsical car, which occasionally and unpredictably decides not to start or refuses to stop, is left on some level or other (the kids are repeating the level letter and number so they can find it easily afterwards). The sun outside is punishing; the heat has settled low above the ground and is sitting oppressively on any living thing. We pass by the abandoned café-bar “Borik” where up until this year we would always sit outside after I check in, for one final drink and a photo; it is now closed and derelict-looking, its late-socialist décor – unsteady chairs, aluminum ashtrays, checkered tablecloths, stacked somewhere in the back – sad reminders of a long-gone past. “Life is a miracle” is scribbled unevenly on one of the whitewashed walls. No one says it, but my father, my brother and I are thinking of another Borik: the part of town where we used to live while we were still in Banja Luka, in Bosnia, and when my mother was still alive, a lifetime and a country ago.

We are all a little quiet, hushed by the heat as we are walking towards the terminal and pensive from the slightly nerve-fluttering goodbye-occasion. Zozi  (who is four and a half) is lagging behind, saying something under her breath, the words muffled by the soundtrack of the airport. My brother leans over, and she explains she has a pebble in her sandal, which is bothering her. We are so close to the sliding doors; he says we’ll take a look as soon as we’re inside, but no, she insists, her voice taking a pouty turn, her sandal needs to be emptied now or she can’t walk. We stop for a moment, my brother quickly does it, and as soon as the stone the size of an index-fingernail is removed, she’s as bouncy and light on her feet as usual and is running down the big hallways inside the terminal along with her brother.

Then things unroll fast: I check in, we walk around and weigh ourselves on the old-fashioned luggage scale (Didi+Zozi+me = 101 kg), we get juices and coffees in one of the busy inside cafes and take silly pictures, Didi (who is six and a half) goes to check how long the passport-control line is, and then we make our way towards it, slowly. It’s now the last few minutes (I can’t decide if time has stopped still or turbo sped-up), the last hugs (they always feel different; perhaps we should always hug the way we do before a long absence?), the last few meters they walk with me, all of us apparently jokey, until we reach the point they can’t cross, one more look over my shoulder (arms high up in the air, waving), and then I’m on my own. I’m suddenly aware of all the things I’m carrying, including an orange denim jacket I had no room for in my bag.

 The rest of the trip until I reach my apartment in Montreal is made up of familiar tableaux with some variations here and there. The window seat and transfixed glancing at the Danube snaking below, a German airport – in Munich this time – clean and bright and half-empty with connecting passengers sleeping in awkward positions in lounge chairs, a long boarding onto the plump transatlantic plane, an aisle seat, headphones and movies, the darkness of the oncoming night outside and the darkness of the imagined ocean below. A strange portal, involving interstitial spaces and unhuman movement through air and time zones. By the time I unlock my apartment door some 15 hours later and walk inside, trailing my retinue of bags, I’m a zombie, my head cloudy and my limbs heavy. I open my phone – a poignant symbol of distance – go through messages that arrived in the meantime and find one from my brother.

“… a little secret,” he writes “In the left pocket of your orange jacket you’ll find a treasure from Zozi’s sandal; we slipped it in there when you weren’t looking….” I walk to the coat-hanger in the hallway – thousands of kilometers away from Zozi’s sandal -- shove my hand into the left pocket of the jacket, feel around it, and my fingers encounter a small hard object in the pocket corner. I pull it out, and we look at each other, the small familiar stone and me. For a second, I am aware of it intensely – the sounds, the smells, the sights, the movements from half the world away where the stone and I were just a few hours ago. And I feel it, the bond, the cord, the fine and robust tissue of love, which anchors you even in the insubstantial air, rock-solid, which keeps you and your people close and together even when you’re not.

I turn it over a few times inside my palm, put it on a shelf, and, feeling warm and welcome, begin to unpack. Life is a miracle.