Au Ralenti

 

Certain words or expressions just sound “right” in one language more than in another one. For me, “au ralenti” has a particular cinematic quality of a process unfolding dreamily, which makes it somehow more poetic than the English or Serbian equivalents.

But it’s usually the opposite sensation – things speeding up gradually and dizzyingly – that comes before, and this invariably happens to me in the summer towards the end of my yearly visit to Belgrade. Before I know it, June with its linden perfume and the chirpings of swallows in the air is about to open the exit door and step out unwillingly and I must get ready for another departure. There is nothing new in it for me: it has been my annual pattern for a couple of decades now. And yet it feels fresh each time and must be done from scratch.

The last couple of days of my visit are made up of a predictable frenzy of activities: going on numerous little errands in the city, primarily to get certain products such as creams or drops or sprays which I can’t get in Montreal. While they have a legitimate practical value – for example, the stinging nettle tincture, good for the immune system and circulation – their real value to me is of a more symbolic nature; they offer protection and comfort of “the known” and “the mine.” Even though some of these articles could be found in nearby private pharmacies, traditionally, I make a pilgrimage to the pharmacy of the Josif Pančić Institute which makes herbal products. It’s situated downtown, in Dorćol, and it’s another opportunity to hop on the bus and then a streetcar and ride through the summer streets of the old Belgrade which is here still its authentic, uncorporate, unsold self with aged small houses, improvised plain yards and plenty of trees. Some buses have AC, some don’t, and I play the usual game of guessing which side of the bus will be sheltered from the sun’s fierceness (I’m usually wrong). The streetcar I catch after the bus feels like a sauna on rickety rails and sitting on a red-hot wooden seat sends an enflamed wave of heat through my torso. I stay seated though, and watch the imposing old-time plane trees, lined along the street on both sides, their flaking red, brown, and light-green bark shimmering in the dappled shade. Just before the intersection where the Zoo is, I get off and zigzag through narrow, heavily shaded streets to the pharmacy from which emanates the scent of herbs. The door is open and the pharmacist inside looks lethargic, perhaps due to the oppressive heat, listening to me with seemingly no interest as I recite items from my list but then brings all of it from a back room and I leave content with my medicinal treasure in tow. I retrace my steps back, and get off at the last bus stop of bus number 16 in Karaburma where my father lives. The bus terminus is a busy little hub of transactional activity, with several tiny shops, kiosks and stalls selling everything, from Chinese plasticware, to bread and pastries, fruits and veggies, clothes, newspapers, flowers and church candles, frozen or freshly cooked food… The street is also lined with street vendors, offering their own goods and keeping an eye out for a possible appearance of the “communal police,” who will give them a fine and make them leave as they are not paying for an official vending stall in the small marketplace just behind them. On an impulse, I zip into a private pharmacy, sandwiched between a currency exchange office and a health food shop, and buy one more bottle of the stinging nettle extract so that I have enough for a whole month. Then I turn around the corner where the truck selling watermelons and melons is anchored throughout the summer and descend down our street enveloped into the silence of mid-afternoon heat broken only by occasional coos of turtle-doves.

This residential area was developed in the 1970s and the four-storey apartment buildings strung along the street are all made in the concrete-and-square style of that era, many of them extended upwards with the tacked on additional floors in the last couple of decades. Despite the uninspired architecture, the neighbourhood still has a certain homey and cozy feeling about it thanks to the thick green canopy of mature plane trees and an occasional hazelnut tree along both sides of the street and between the buildings. Each building has a differently arranged small yard in the front, with rose bushes, hydrangeas, or short but untrimmed hedges and a bench or two in various stages of disrepair. The sidewalks themselves are cluttered with parked cars as there aren’t enough parking spaces anymore and it is common for pedestrians to have to get off the sidewalk and walk on the street because some sections of the sidewalk are fully blocked by parked cars.

Our apartment building is the last one on our street before it flows into a wider one where buses pass. I walk by our bench which was for some reason built too low and is not that comfortable to sit on, and find the main entrance door wide open. The neighbour from the floor above us is there, busy with something in the hallway and the communal storage room. I don’t know her name, but I’ve often seen her walking her dog or working on the small patch of land in front of the building which she turned into a garden more or less single-handedly. A peculiar thing about her is that she always seems to be in a bad mood or furious. Even when she speaks to her dog, she sounds impatient and angry. She is one of those people who arouse a light feeling of unease and fear in others but last summer I discovered something about her that humanized her a little more in my eyes -- her true passion: horse-racing. In a brief chat she told me she is one of the referees at the hippodrome, and I saw her eyes sparkle and a trace of a smile hover around the corners of her mouth as spoke of it. Now as I enter the building, there is a palpable magnetic field of crankiness and snarkiness radiating in concentric circles around her, but we greet each other, and I tell her I’m leaving tomorrow. I add I’d like to come to one of the races next year and she immediately widens her face into a real smile and says that May and June are the best months for races. We wish each other well, I run up the flight of stairs to our apartment, and this is when something in the configuration of time particles irrevocably shifts. From that instant on, my remaining time in Belgrade is a sped-up string of tasks, actions and movements that carries me like an unnegotiable current.

I’m not me anymore, I’m the task at hand: packing, including careful wrapping of this year’s plum brandy to prevent accidental breaking, checking in online, calling important people for official goodbyes, going through my father’s collection of precious rocks and minerals (I have  seen it many times but I always need to see it again), selecting two or three old family photos to take with me from a dusty box under the kitchen L-shaped low sofa (which, inexplicably, I forgot to do this summer). Trying not to think about the morning.

The night provides a surprisingly solid block of oblivious sleep but finishes with an early waking which allows me to stay still for a few moments and look around with the departing eyes, taking in and archiving the precise shape of things: the contour of my father’s back, the light filtering through the leaves of the plane tree by the window. Once my feet hit the ground from the bed, there is no more time for anything. There’s breakfast, although no one is hungry, last minute suitcase adjustments, my father’s customary walk to the bakery on top of the street to get fresh bread rolls for sandwiches I’ll make for the road. Morning light strengthening on the Lešće hill across from the window, where my mother is buried.

My brother and the kids will be here any moment, morning-fresh, sleep still etched into their faces, to pick me and my father up and drive us all to the airport – my annual seeing off committee. And then they really are there, the children’s energy adding to the general mayhem. We pack ourselves into the car quickly, as if we can’t wait to get going. I sit on the back seat between Z (who still sits in the children’s seat) and D, and cast parting glances at the perennially crowded parking lot where getting in and out requires a PhD in car maneuvering, at the cherry tree tirelessly dropping fruit bombs onto the concrete below or any unfortunate car parked underneath it, the metal garbage containers on wheels by the curb, regularly checked by people hoping to find usable items and emptied by the city cleaners and their truck every night between midnight and 1 a.m. A near-entirety of my summer Belgrade universe is there, and I am saying goodbye again.

I’m always saying goodbye, it seems. I used to think I’m really good at it but that’s not it. What I am is hyper-aware of ends of things and their beauty as they end. A whole world crammed into a single moment, wavering, glittering one last time before it disappears perhaps forever. I never quite understood the power of this moment over me, but I was always chasing it, trying to identify “the last” of something – like the very last shred of the view of my grandparents standing on the street in front of their house and waving to us as we drove away in our yellow Beetle at the end of the summer holidays, up to the point when, due to the slope of the street, they would literally just vanish. Or the view of the Adriatic Sea just before I turn away to leave at the end of a vacation and still feel its presence behind my back for a few seconds, not knowing when I’ll see it again. I’m always saying goodbye although it’s more about paying respect to something that has been but that is about to exit and cross that most essential of boundaries that defines our basic categories. To be and then not to be. It could be an era, a person, a feeling, a gesture, the streak of day in the gathering night. Acknowledging its passing is the home of bittersweetness and nostalgia. Acknowledgment, sadly or not, doesn't always happen, though; some last moments reveal themselves as last only in retrospect, when it's too late to notice them, frame them and remember them and sometimes their absence is a glaring void -- for example, the unremembered last view of my mother, despite the fact that I know where and when that was.

But when the noticing and the acknowledging do take place, time invariably cooperates. It hushes, pretends it isn’t there, trickles minimally, leaving room for the loose ends to be tightened, for whatever is exiting to be seen off, accompanied to the threshold of the other side. And so, as I’m sitting in the middle of the back seat, all sound disperses into low-pitched long waves of a slowed-down audio track charging the surroundings with a surreal note. I feel I begin to blink in slow motion, forever sitting behind my brother’s hand giving the steering wheel a long turn, and my father sitting next to him, pointing to something on the street in a sustained way. I take in the ear lobes (one right, one left), the curve of the shoulders (one right, one left), and the drawn-out syllables of their conversation, the inklings of a muffled melody from the radio. The sun is a permanent state of the world. Random details outside assume the familiarity of a never-changing fixture: an orange fence on the left, a blue-panelled construction site on the right. In my peripheral vision, the pink of Z’s shirt on the left takes up the west, the white of D’s shirt on the right fills up the east, holding me steady and safe on this little planet of our own that I need to say goodbye to. Then someone says, ‘let’s make videos in slow motion!’, and there we are, sitting in the car eternally, Z’s hair flying, flowing au ralenti like a daydreamy waterfall, D’s lips blowing a slow-bursting, long-exploding raspberry (‘I saw Mbappe do it,’ he says, a corner of his mouth curving upwards mischievously). I concentrate on erasing any time stamps and keeping this moment pure, all the way to the airport and beyond, like a piece of home that stays inside the beat my heart skipped, long after all the goodbyes.