Friday, April 30, 2010

*mideuropean*

 CENTRAL-EUROPEAN THEMES - VARIATIONS

(fragment, by Danilo Kis, translation and the joy of following his rhythm all mine)

He is now fifty years old- nothing less than fifty, only more is possible - and he lives in exile (like Kundera), writing in his mother tongue - Chech , Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian ( or Serbian or Croatian), perhaps even in Yiddish (although he seems far too young for that one), as if he were writing in a language long gone.

Thus, the language to him becomes even more precious, he speaks and reads also in French , German, Hungarian, Russian, being since his birth a bilingual, and  having learned two or three more languages later on.

And yet, everyone keeps asking , asking him, in his own mind the sole guardian of his distant and, at the same time, closely intimate mother tongue, asking why  is he unable to write in either French, or German or English, for example.


He , for the umpteenth time, explains how writing is not something done through language alone, but performed using the entire being, using the mythology, the tradition, the conscious and the subconscious, the memory,using everything that a slight of hand turns into automatism, into an accidental metaphor, into an association, into literary allusion, into the idiotism, turning it into intentional or unintentional quotation.

For what truly makes him a central European writer is his dragging along the horrible burden of the melodies lingual and musical, dragging along a piano and a dead horse, together with all that was ever played on that piano, and all of those that the horse carried through battles won and lost.

He drags along the marble statues and bearded bronze busts, the paintings in their baroque frames, the words and the melodies that are incomprehensible to anyone outside of his mother tongue, facts of life that in other languages need to be explained by long footnotes, allusions unbeknown to the great world, wars, epics and epic heroes, unique terms from history and culture, loanwords from Turkish, German, Hungarian and Arabic that carry a clear and precise half step of their own...

...because he cannot grant himself  the choice of not learning and knowing any other language, the choice easily made by a Russian, a Frenchman, an Englishman or a German...


The synonyms, the catchphrases, the proverbs, the riddles, the chants -the synonyms one must choose among, these synonyms are not the same words, neither do they carry the same sound, or the color, because the voiced  Turcism added to the phrase *near dark night*    which in his mother tongue contains distinctive audible original intonation is not the same as *dark night* , for the original construction evokes historical associations, carries the sub context of  ethnography, ethnology, and, to me, a kind of  national darkness, darkness that is heavy, dense and pastose, darkness filled with screams and cries of pain, with the horses' neighs, darkness that carries the crying of the children and the weeping of the mothers mourning them.

It is the darkness black as blood, black as a raven, black as the "two crowblack ravens" from the epic folk poem, in which this new synonym "crow-black" is, if not a new color, then at least a new shade of black, new adjective created to go with new set of nouns and phrases.


The hair of a girl is "crowblack" like that , for instance, and even then, this is not just hair that is black, not just merely black, this is the pitch-black hair or hair as dark as the night, the night that is a different kind of night and can  be "darkly dark" , and it is no longer the same as that bloody  Turkish night, filled with cries of pain and horror, but now it is the night when the moon hides behind the clouds, it is the night when the lilacs scent, the night that is somehow content...and lyrical in its essence.
....




.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

MONDAY part III

This child was pretty much shaped on its own, into a human being, flesh on the bones with the coat of skin stretched across them to protect and in most cases, tell the brain how pleasant the sensation of  skin on skin is.

As a result of such rather unusual heritage and life it was pouring into so far, Hope was never able to process affection like a 'normal' person.

The Most. The Normal. The Standard. The Golden Average.

She was neither the most people nor representative of the normal or the standard, control sample of human form of life.

Hope was like the irregular verb no linguist had sorted out and  came up with plausible explanation for, an unresolved  failure in shedding  much needed light on the irregularity beyond usual patterns of misbehaving grammar.



She needed the human touch to be and stay alive, but would feel the physical pain burn through her, soul torn with unrest, whenever someone actually touched her.

Literally, she was a human being, a girl almost an adult any day now, who was allergic to touch.

Making love will be a piece of cake, once she manages to get around allowing another living creature to successfully place a hand on her body for a second and not jump away in panic and pain.

        ***


Thus, Hope was always irrationally fearing the possibility of more intimate contact, when her mother was trying to sound emotional, like right now, starting the evening how-was-your-day conversation simply because they were supposed to have one.

-Where have you been so long? I spoke with your father and he said you left hours ago.

- I went for a swim

-Not in that filth at Ada….

-No . I went to the swimming pool.

Silence.

Some people just don’t want to react when knowing they’ve been told a lie.

-How is school?

That question was pushing it as hard as she could, mom trying really, Sisyphean hard.

She must be distressed beyond the point of repair to try this hard.

***

Hope never had any problems in school, other than her absolute and total lack of interest in it.
It was a fact of life that the grades would be in perfect condition.

She learned how to impress her new teachers in one town they had lived in after another, by actually studying here and there for the duration of first couple of weeks.

When the halo effect was in place, she would continue to keep it up with the least of effort possible. She never developed an inclination or desire for attaching herself to people or places.

She had counted too many times corners of the new room sleeping in a new bed for the first time to learn how to attach anyhow.

Except here.

Somehow, this wretched godforsaken and nearly exterminated town was the one she felt she might one day feel good enough to call a sort of a hometown.

A place to come back to one big shiny nostalgic day marked with a large red X in the calendar.

Just the small matter of getting out of first left to figure out, then.



   ***

And she had friends, those two souls that were the extremes of the same city-infested spirit which she learned how to love, and which  was, in return,  teaching her how to be loved back.

-Fine. The school is fine. Mom, can I ask you a question?- now where in the world did that come from, Hope wondered.

Mimicry.

When trying to mimic a behavior, nature of the one mimicking evolves and it truly becomes the mimicked one.

She was now pushing even harder.

But, she did have a question formed in her mind, just never expected to ask it out loud.

Her mother said yes not raising her head, deep in pursuit of that one tiny misplaced number that could bring the whole system down and have tectonic consequences if not found.

-Did father and you ever visit that village where he was born?

Mother was looking at her now.

-No. Why?

- I think someone in the refugee camp said how they were from that village .

-I thought it was deserted long time ago.


Well, now most certainly it was. Her kind was driving her other kind out.  Thoroughly.

Hope got up, and was relieved when, without raising head or eyes, silently allowing her to go and hide from more possible affection in the safety of her room, mom said goodnight.

***
She needed a cigarette but those wretched Romanian Top Specialitete ones that managed to survive only because they were un-smokable even amidst nicotine crisis were nowhere to be found.

As she lifted heaps of books in desperate attempt to maybe find a long ago miraculously lost and forgotten at least one fuckin' ciggarette, c'mon, somewhere among them, she glanced through the window too see what the murmur coming through was about and realized that there were many people in the room on the first floor of the building opposite her, and that the equipment setting looked totally different now.

Him.
She had almost totally forgotten about him. 
His arms his hands his heart that beats. 
Oh. Shit. 




    ***

There was a drum kit with a drummer tucked in one corner and keyboards and laughter and mumbling mix of many voices and dancing shadows she could see through the window on the left now.

And, behind the door number two, as she turned her head to look through the window on the right side, there he was, looking up, facing outside, standing in the middle of the room, hands crossed and palms placed on his shoulders, obviously waiting for the band to gather around him and for them all to start.

Like two kids who stole the forbidden candy snack from the ceramic jar, feeling that special conspiracy bond and high on the rush of fearing getting caught and punished for being guilty of how sweet the crumbs stuck between their teeth still tasted on the tip of the tongue, they looked at each other for the longest while.

Defrost girl, signal something, anything, everything you are feeling right now, for the love of God, Pope, Allah and roaring Perun.

She was loosing balance fast, but their eyes remained locked ,and she filled her lungs with air like a parachuter the moment before he jumps out, knowing that the parachute is broken but still jumping, in the frenzied insanity of the ultimate overdose of pure adrenalin.

She smiled and her smile said Hi.

He unfolded his arms and the time passed so slowly that she could actually see the sleeves of the T-shirt unwrinkling the folds one by one, like waves in a distance of a quiet lake that reflected the hints of the silver moonlight.

He blinked forever, and then he smiled.

And the smile said Please little girl take me I am a smile.

***

The floor was the quicksand and she hung onto their locked eyes as if that was a rope thrown by the lucky chance traveler to save her dear life.

Mom opened the door and entered the room, making her turn around reflexively, against her will, and curse the timing on that woman , while vigorously embedding the corners of his lips into a newly activated small nod in her short-circuiting brain.

-Sasha was looking for you earlier and asked you to drop by.

The turning around had made her dizzy, and she felt her feet were heavy as she pulled them out from the wet, sticky mud.

The music of the band began, signaling the end of the scene.

Exit left, just like Snagglepuss.



Hope was able to speak again. Or at least she thought she was, because she only managed to blurt out barely understandable response to mom's intrusion.

- Thanks mom.


Thanks a lot, mom. I just got a smile that said it was a smile.

Breathe. 
In. 
Out. 
Breathe. 
In. 
Out. 
That's right. 
Now say something.

-I'll go see him right away. Perhaps it's important.

Mom nodded and turned around and left the room and closed the door.

Hope closed her eyes but the eyes still heard his smile and the tide swept through her trembling body and it took her a good few minutes before she was able to swim back to the shore.


I just gave and got back a smile. 

The smile that said please and then the universe in all of its quantum glory collapsed to its knees.



**

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

MONDAY part II

Mother was home and the fact that her bag, full of papers with numbers, ornamenting every page with cold, heartless art of calculus, looking like it had just landed on their kitchen table,was still waiting to be explored later, told her that she too had probably just gotten home as well, now every other day working the long overtime.

Hope had grown up with the image of her mother bending her spine for countless hours, after she would wash and dry and put away the dinner dishes and do the same thing with her and her brother, preparing them for the bed.

Peaking from underneath her bedpost, Hope wondered for what seamed like years, what strange stories those magical papers had.

Her brother, who on good days would plain ignore her and on bad ones use her as a punching bag, had for  reasons unknown, indulged in his tender side by reading her stories in their room every night, and Hope gleamed listening to him thinking, that if brother could come up with such magnificently wonderful princes, battles and damsels from his funny little dots in this thin,tiny, treacherously torn book, what magical world could her mother show her if she were to come and read from her, big, beautiful, boisterously bright fluorescent mountains of sheets of paper, that in her between three and four year old mind developing under the shadow of a sleeping giant kneeling at that nod in the fabric of time somewhere in the greenest part of Lika's bossom, were both towering like the Himalayas and had countless treasures hidden inside.



***

Funny how, growing up, our memories of early childhood get filtered and condensed into tiny flashbacks of pure emotion which pop up without notice, triggered by that just perfect set of coincidences into our boringly well-structured and organized adult minds.

Snow is a big deal when you're looking at the world from closer to the ground.

She remembered trying to hold her hand out till the fingers went numb in an attempt to actually see a snowflake melt. It was getting dark and in the dinarides the only thing separating you and the wolves is the tiny patch of barren , rocky ground on the other side of the fence that holds the woods from swallowing up the house.

The silence that wrapped around like a comfort blanket, the wind that seemed to hold its breath, the night that was having a time-out before it entered, the ground beneath her feet that bent inwards to hug, they all waited for the millisecond that lasted forever to end.

A tiny moment of no real importance which only contained a four year old girl stopping the world and touching magic.

***

Hope held out her hand looking through her mother working in the kitchen, disregarding the fact that only an insane person would expect to catch a snowflake in June, sitting inside.


And the world stopped again.



***

It is impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when she became old enough to realize that the papers had no magic stored in them .

Numbers instead of words.
Accuracy in place of affection. 
Matter over imagination.
Sum replacing open conclusions.

And a mother who knew not how to hug.

Well, so what. 



***

She loved her children with the love that you could never match up, even if you stacked every single gold bar that Fort Knox kept one after another, all the way up to the sky.

Equally cold on the surface, with chilling precision biting the hand that touched.


                ***
You only needed to develop a taste for her quirky way of showing it, and you were fine.

Hope had gone through this period of two of them alone in their home, due to her father working days and nights and brother being away, trying not to disturb the little everyday routine of reality that her mother hid her emotions in, the fears tucked away safely under the carpet of things you are supposed to do in your life, and repeat them in neat order until you die.

And what is not there, may only be hidden, look behind the decoy cellophane wrapping of mechanisms of fear.

It is the easiest thing in the world, blaming our misfortunes on our miserable parents, and Hope had no intention of ever doing that.

In fact, Hope had long ago decided that she was never going to be restricted by lack of anything. Life was about movement from the day she she strutted down her first path, and each new place was one step closer with every courageous wobbly walk  that grew steadier with each brave new step along the neverending road that her life was  from that day on.

Nomads of the socialist society and family in service, all four of them had severe attachment issues, with friend like mileage counters, left behind in a place before this one and forgotten upon arrival to the one after that.

Just passing through, was how her life had been lived so far.


  
   ***

Mom was the quietest girl ever, the middle child in a row of three children her grandmother had in less than three years. A boy, a girl and another one, to her husband who was some big shot farming union party official.

All land belonged to individual farmers, but the running of it was secured in the hands of the socialist structures. Things never went as bad as Soviet communal living in a kolhoz, but there was trouble ahead for anyone who dared point out any aspect of individual property and the rights of ownership in a society that celebrated collectiveness out loud.

Grandpa Martin, who spoke with heavy Hungarian accent and drank himself blind before he even left the house in the morning, had decided to abandon the screamish lot of his family and marry his complementary Hungarian secretary and start a new similarly drunken life.

Mom, of course, never talked about any of this.

Linguistic competence regarding ability to express emotions –zero to none.

The source of information was Hope’s vivid aunt Maja, who made up for her sister’s muteness on all things concerning their childhood with vivacious conversating sessions of descriptive memorabilia when Hope would stay with her, explaining in detail how grandma was a fierce piece of work dynamite woman, and the point in grandma's life when she went from town socialite to scrubbing toilets to feed her children overnight, how the three leftover kids would be marched in front of the other children in the catholic afterschool and screamed at and punished with canes for being ’illegitimate bastards’ - the bullying that intensified after grandfather Martin managed to swiftly secure himself a guiltless church divorce, in spite of infidelity so obviously flaunted around for all to see and, fearing his position in the Party, pretend it never happened.

Baaaa-stard baaastard baaastard.



How the only time they saw their father was when grandma took them to beg for food one cold winter when no one could spare her a job to earn it – and how his new wife answered the door in a wild flowered minidress, and he only came out and stuffed a few banknotes in greandma's blistered palm shouting abuse and smelling of smuggled cigars and cognac.

Baaaaastard. Baaaaaaastard. 
You will go to hell baaaaaaaaaastard.

No wonder mom was the way she was – restricted and seemingly numb, in her sisters words ’great to talk over the phone, but do not make a mistake and ask her to come over and expect her to be able to talk face to face like that'.



***

Hope and her aunt sometimes joked how even with a professional soldier in the house, her mother was the sharpest shooter around.

Somewhere sometime long ago once Hope had dug up and read those love-proclaiming tearjerker postcards written to her father from the distant Germany where mom was with her team preparing for the Olympics. She was a promising athlete, and her choice of sport - air rifle and gun - coupled with her impeccable character, were about to take her far.

And then she met my father.

Young cadet in an uniform, sharpest looking tall, handsome, and irresistibly blue-eyed, and mom's virginity fell victim to his charm that same night


Instead of aiming for the medals, some eight months later she was in labor pains and her brother’s big head coming to this world between her twitching legs had signaled the end of her sports career, and pretty much the end of her mother ever again daring to attempt to have fun in life.

Once was more than enough.

 

***
So it was never about how mom didn’t love her children. It was just unfortunate set of circumstances that she never had anyone to teach her how to speak her love out, how to hug, kiss, pat, spank or cuddle her daughter, or her son.

It was her fear of another failure and more bullying that forbid her to show her love.

Show me so that I can show you back is how interaction between humans happens. 

With no one to quote on the subject, Hope was almost the exact replica of her parents.


*******

They have struggled through what most other people would just run away screaming from if given the summary of the years that were to come up front.

Her parents endured the blessing of a mixed marriage, which, back then, meant they could count on relatives gathered for one of the holiday feasts to start throwing punches after only a couple of hours of being civil.

There was always politics to sift through and centuries of hating thy neighbor to chew on and sense to be beaten into equally drunk and numbed by too much food relative-opponent of different religion.

One such joyful occasion had resulted in Hope acquiring her mark – a sharp scar that was cut straight into her right brow, with eyebrow and its curve broken in two permanently, making her soft face somehow instantly rememberable to most people.

Add a touch of imperfection to a perfect face, and it no longer seems unreal in its beauty, it becomes human.

That night she learned that rage was what made furniture fly.


***

Father’s harsh mountain warrior genes only made things worse, and contributed to the mess Hope was to be.

Her paternal grandfather was a Muslim miner from Bosnia, who, due to the shortage of marriageable women in his own village, had to go across the mountain and fetch himself a Serbian bride. It was common practice to unload an extra daughter to the first man showing interested who called, greeted with joy in a household with seven girls and only one son.

The fact that she was to marry outside of own religion and convert bothered no one.

The need to get rid of an useless extra female mouth to feed surpassed the interest of faith by far.

So grandmother Evica, seventeen at the time, converted, and married the awkward man they only showed her glimpse of through a curtain, before the deal was sealed by elders spitting in their hands and shaking them instead of a signature on this convention contract.

The marriage only lasted about three months, when father’s father , after a drunken graveyard shift and on his way home from the mine, was waving goodbye to his pals and realized that he had misplaced his nice, shiny and polished newly- issued-just-last-week hard hat.

That was trouble in those days.

Biiig trouble.

All things, beautiful and useful and those not, were the property of The Party.

People, too.

They were not quite as highly regarded as the machinery, but the cult of belonging was under no circumstances  to be questioned. Losing any item belonging to the Mother Ship - The Party, would have been grounds for disciplinary hearing and interrogation.

Even jail, or if the political climate was right - wrong actually, one would have ended up doing serious gulag time for an offense as insignificant as raising the hand at the council meeting at the wrong moment.

Fearing dire consequences of his forgetfulness, which in those murky days was readily interpreted (and punished) as subversive and against the order of the universe in accordance to Marx, he returned down to the mining tunnel, found his tragic prop - the hard hat with pretty much no effort, but, on his return , in drunken stupor, managed to slip and fall down an unsecured open shaft.

Probably sober, but definitely dead, still holding the hat in his arms, her grandfather the Muslim was gone, and yet, this didn't prevent him from causing future troubles in the lives of his descendants.




Grandmother Evica was promptly returned to her family, minus the wedding bribe and plus Hope’s unborn father who was almost as good as a bastard.


Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaastard . 
Son of a sheitan. Bad seed.

****

That is how her father got his Muslim family name, orthodox faith, and enough emotional baggage to pass on to his ever more complicated offspring he was about to start  having upon marrying Hope's visibly pregnant mother, six months after the life changing date at the nicely decorated Community center Friday dance night.

*****

Never truly accepted by his family or countrymen, viewed always as an outsider, he was sent off to ’study army’ in the big city, far away from the family inheritance that was understandably divided between more appropriate heirs - ones whose faith and origin was spelled out in their proper Serbian names.

That is why Hope had, from a very early age, clearly understood the reverse, dark side of the story of multiethinic paradise that her country was portrayed to be.

The other side of the shiny medal of the brotherhood and love.


Someone should have shoved that stinkin' badge of honor up your nationalistic arses long time ago, you bunch of enthusiastic hypocrites, perhaps then non of this bloody war lunacy would be happening now.



***

Their lives were like a torn, tangled web of balancing out counterbalancable family fragments, that moved through time and universe with them, like a dog chasing its tail, caught in the perpetual reflex it knows not how to stop before its too late and it goes mad.

She never asked ,but she knew how her father wanted to belong more than anything, and probably ended up leading the life of a nomad and rearing her to be a wandering spirit in his deepest effort to try to fit himself and all of them into a normal family blueprint he carried in his heart.

In an dislocated attempt to patch up his own broken down identity, perhaps, from then earliest recreatable memories, Hope recalled his long, serious speeches of how the family was always more important.

More important that what, she once asked

More important than life.

More important than you, me or us.

Then how did I end up like this, feeling I was born all alone and on my own to fight to stay alive with no one by my side?

****

Sunday, April 25, 2010

His and Hers / The Dual

Hers were the light of The Sun, the warmth of The Night and the blessing of The Rain quenching the thirst of the hungry new life.

Hers was the early waking of The Reliable Rooster that sounded the dawn, hers was the easy spring of The Tame Deer that wandered through the luscious forest, hers was the empowering strength of The Patient Ant that carried the promising seed and the life inside.

Hers were The Wildest Cherries in the laboring orchard, hers were The Shadiest Limes down by the water, and hers were The Immaculate Peonies smiling from the hillside.

Hers was the breezing breath of life and the protective hand of the mother, the smile of the faithful wife and the comfort of the eternal companion.

His was all and everything and nothing and all that was and all that was to come.

His was the right of The First God and the birthright of The Forefather.

His was the seed. His was the life it sparked.

His was the spinning wheel and his were the eight hands of the symbol.

His was the throne that he sat on ruling, his were the two scepters that governed the law and his was the name of the king and the kingdom of gods.

His was the Third Day of The Seven Days that held together all days of all lives of all of the times.

His was the fearsome eagle sitting on his chest and his was the forceful bull that his helmet was made of.

His were the hands that hammered the starts and the skies to contain them, his was The Sun that he hung above to shine, his was the brother that turned the wheel of The Starry Sky and his was the muscle that built The Twelve Pillars to hold it upright.

His was the hammer that stopped the mountains and his were the sparks that exhaled gods.

His was the pride of the creator that carried the two of them together down to The Earth to show off the divine design.

His was the wife that slept and dreamed the dream of creatures like them to walk the Earth and his was the omnipotent art that carved out the image of the two of them that were a man and a woman.

His was the blind faith of belief that entrusted humans with will of freedom and gave them governance over an independent mind.

His was the male principle that left the humans mute, and his was her complementing perfection that inspired a spared breath of a god each and made the perfected perfection come to life.

His was The Sturdy Oak and hers was The Gentle Willow, his was The Man of Good and Hers was The Woman of Love.

His was the right to oblige them to offspring the Earth and live by fate of their own choosing and outcome.

His was the ring of loyalty and guard over the blessed union.

His was the steel and the secret of perpetual improvement that it unlocked.

His was all and his she was his other one that summed up one and one into one that was the dual of them together.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

INTRO

................................................

She’s gonna be eighteen
Years old this June
And has no idea what to do
After the graduation .
People are very mean
Looking at her breasts
People are  mean
Looking at her skin.

She is waking up.

All her life
They’ve stuffed her mind
Dolls, clothes and skirts
Are the things for the girls.
Skipping rope
She never learned how to.
Preparing lunch
Was never what she was all about.

She is waking up.

She has no one
No one to tell her
You are mine.

People wonder
Can she really think?
People wonder 

Is she allowed to know  these things?
People are very mean
Looking at her breasts
People are mean
Looking at her skin


She is waking up.

........................................




(ONA SE BUDI 1981 )

........................................



.........................................












Wednesday, April 21, 2010

MONDAY part I

As she settled cozily   into the seat at the very end of an almost empty bus, her mind was trying to process the afternoon she sensed was not barely lived through, more like survived, and definitely not without scars.

She closed her eyes and dozed off in a matter of seconds, like those left behind to mourn close the blinds in a house that someone had just died in .

***

She was the wolf and she was grabbing across the moonlit clear and open fields following the scent of the prey that was heavy and hung around her like a cloud.

As if the creature made of elegance and perfection, limbs reflecting the blackness of the midnight light was wanting her to hunt him down.


So she did, with unrepentant devotion.

Across the fields and through the woods onto a hilltop where he was standing waiting for her .

The human side almost took over for a moment, as the beast stood in awe of its opponent and praise of the battle that was to take place, a battle between the slave and the oppressor, a  showdown of the darkness and the light, head bowed down in acknowledgment of the force that drove them here tonight to dance on the edge of the worlds, between the seams that held all life and all of the death together.

Both creatures knew what was going to happen.

And they both had lived their lives with emptiness that called, waiting for this moment of the reckoning to unwind.

***

The wolf cried as the teeth gripped and tore and ate the flesh while the warmest blood still spurted from the edges of it, and the beautiful animal beneath her was still alive.

***


Woken suddenly, with the taste of warm blood on her lips, by the buss pulling over to pick up passengers on the edge of the town, she tried to trace back the images that hung around her like flickering dancing shadows on a curtain , in a desperate attempt to pull herself back into reality.

She was wiping her mouth like crazy, hands slicing through the air, trying to shred the ominous figures she had unwillingly summoned.

Hope was afraid, powerless against the truth  that nightmarish images were telling her, how  she was sporting a beast of her own somewhere underneath the layer of an  almost eighteen year old little girl, less than a week from now, staring blandly back at her from the reflection in the smudged window.


She was of the wolf kind, or at least, a big part of her obviously was.

With her mishmash puzzle of genes, any kind was her kind, at some point in time.

Those bloodthirsty genes. The pre-human hunger.

And the teeth that would flash menacingly and create uneasiness even when revealed by the widest of her smiles.

           ***

Well. So what? We all are.

At least I didn’t turn into a werewolf when the full moon descended upon us.

And she had her well-nurtured human side to take care of now, she needed to cleanse and feel she is a human.

A human of the city kind

As the bus drove through a familiar suburb, she got the idea exactly how.

***

She got off the bus where the hill ended in a dangerously steeply descending curve, almost falling down straight into the river.

Prying eyes of everyone standing in the station, as she crossed the road towards and pass them, going home after spending their day trying to fry themselves on the shores of a small lake that was created in the river’s old path, in the evening like this, stinking of piss and sweat of hundreds of thousands of people who cooled themselves in it during the day, told her how odd anyone going towards it, when everybody else is moving in the opposite direction, must have looked.

She walked across the narrow land-bridge, created in one of those ’voluntary’ work actions during the golden fifties, when everyone believed they were living in the mother of all countries, blessed with communism as the ultimate civilizational development.



Well, not exactly everyone.

She remembered the writer she could quote for days, who was in the prison doing his time for organizing anti-communist youth and practicing his writing skills on pieces of toilet paper smuggled in, who had obviously, thanks to a functioning brain and a brilliant deductive mind, managed to miss the enthusiastic spirit of the times.

Oh-oh, he’s gonna kill me.

She realized with horror, thinking of Sasha’s book down in the dirty dumpster alley between her building and the SKC, that would on normal days stink just like the lake did right as she passed it by. She’ll have to go dive down into the trash and look for the book when she gets home .

Yikes.

Hope avoided the cultivated beach, and headed for the quiet piece of undeveloped, unspoiled riverbank deeper on the island.



For some reason, like rabid beasts develop hydrophobia, she had feared water more and more as she was growing up, and hated all rivers and lakes and all water that had things crawling floating and creeping all over her body in it, but felt desperate enough for a swim to settle for this one right now.

Her body needed water.

Hope was good at knowing things, and trusting her instincts without the need for a rational explanation why.

Why was always down the line, and if you wasted time looking for it you could get in a lot of trouble with life that usually waited on no one.

Turning a full circle on her heels, she checked the bushes first for perverts and voyeurs, before she undressed completely.

This was one of their all time favorite sightseeing spots int he city, due to the vicinity of the probably only nude beach ever to exist in a communist country, which was still open nearby.

***

The water touching her feet eased her soul like a mother patting the child gently to drive away the pain of a bruised knee.

Her soul was all bruises and the skin wrapping it hurt in pain that was the sum of all the individual pains she had witnessed today.

God have mercy on us, she thought as she joined her palms in a prayer of sort and pushed herself into the river.

Water touched and the touch healed.

This liquefied comfort felt homelike to her aching body and tormented mind.



***

She was five and six and seven again, in that small Bosnian village that was the closest habitat to the military camp where her family lived in a cubic wooden barrack, once designed to be extra kitchen storage for the millions of meat cans stacked up, there to ensure survival of the Yugoslav armed forces through the cold war crisis escalating times.



The cans of meat byproducts started disappearing from it the moment they were first stored there, providing a source of extra income for the army kitchen personnel.

The empty shed was  repainted in haste and installed with a small window, when the soldiers found out that their new commander was crazy enough to bring his family along to this harsh, isolated place with no proper civilization around to facilitate a normal life.

The storage-unit-turned-house had only one room with those metal-framed army beds, a wood-eating stove and a squeaky limping picnic table with two interrogation room chairs.

No closets, no toilet, no running water nor electricity, only the stench of thousands of cans that was inhaled by the thin walls that made the place heat and cold resistant as if there were no walls at all.

The father was apologetic about the accommodation….this is only a temporary solution, he said as they entered the ’house’, the glorious army will most certainly build them a proper one in no time.

Father was happy having his family around and her brother enjoyed himself like crazy playing with real guns. Mom had never complained to father about anything in her or their life, so Hope was presumed to be OK, since she was still a child.

The temporary stay was temporary enough to last three years and almost cause her to loose eyesight learning to read and doing her homework by the petroleum lamp light.



                ***

She often wandered down the narrow almost invisible path that lead into the village- a row of no more than ten deserted houses on one, and ruins of the old church on the other side.

After the last war, the Second World War, which was only considered to be the last in the present absence of the following one, there were not enough people who survived left to rebuild the church one more time.

There were scattered ruins of a few stone walls of a house up the hill by the road, a little hidden and sort of invisible, like they were cast out by the other houses which looked like they didn’t want even these scarce remains to be within their sight.

There was a big tombstone by the side of the road where the ruins were, and there was an old woman, with the face of ageless centuries, sitting on the bench in front of it, sitting in unbroken silence that seemed to suck all sound right out of the air around her too.

She was there every time Hope walked by.

Day or night.
Rain or shine.
Under The Moon and under The Sun alike.

Hope, in her still imprintable mind, believed that the old woman had never left that exact spot.

The old woman was a wondrous creature that never moved, never ate or went to the bathroom.

She existed only there, sitting like that, sitting silently with her dirty spring muddy river colored hair that had visibly been falling out in bundles, keeping guard over a long destroyed home and the grave of her loved ones, and her memories of the times when that heap of broken stones across the road was probably her home, her life and her house.

The witch.

Children from the village on the other side of the outpost would spit three times and take three steps back each and every time, crossing themselves fiercely three times, walking briskly past her in the morning, as they climbed the dusty provisional road towards the school, situated on top of the hill on the side of the meadow.
.
This local witch, their superstitious minds believed, could curse the life out of them if they failed to produce enough saliva, or took two instead of the three magic protective steps, or crossed themselves starting on the wrong side.

In dire panic, trying to get the procedure right, they would, of course, naturally, get one or two or all of those things wrong, and had to repeat the odd ritual usually at least half a dozen times, before they succeeded in getting it right, thus ensuring they were alive to do it all over again, on their way back home.

They whispered stories how she was once a Rusalka, a female spirit that had lived together with her sisters in the nearby river, the one that the devil himself had given a human body to live in because she was a good servant who procured him many souls.

Rusalkas were ghosts, nymphs, found in or around the water, demonic creatures hostile towards men and known to drown a tired traveler looking for a refreshing bath, especially on the nights when the Moon was bloodthirsty and young.

They could kill with their loud laughter and curse a man into madness with their smile.

Some folks even believed that they were the souls of the girls who had drowned young, or have endured a particularly violent and painful death. Taken before they had chance to wed, these brides of sorrow were believed to be courting the mortal men haunting the nearby river.


Hope would sometimes stare at her face for hours, with absence of fear so typical of the small child yet to be corrupted by the world of adults, and, if the Sun was casting its light in a particular manner, she would see a young beauty, immersed in golden red waterfalls, smiling at her from where the old woman was.

The old forgotten woman, the witch, the immaculate golden vision of youth, the Rusalka.


All of this, she was.

***

She was the Rusalka that a local boy fell in love with one hungry night when, hidden among the soft birch trees, he saw her dance with her sisters as they prayed dancing, to their shining silver father, high above, to take the souls of the drowned misfortune passengers.

They swirled and turned and danced and twisted around long past the midnight.

When their dancing prayer was over, and the pale see-through exhausted bodies fell down to the ground , in an impulse of a person that does not what he should, but what he needs and must, he snatched the golden hair vision he had followed the whole night, the one among them that smelled of honey and lust when he leaned over her and picked her up.

He placed her, unconsciously  asleep and insanely exhausted, over his shoulder like a weightless sack of flower, and, careful not to step on the other demonesses  that laid senseless on the riverbank, snatched her away, and walked uphill, carrying her tenderly  as far away as he could, following an instinct that told him that in order to keep her for himself, he must keep her far away from the water.

He laid her gently on the ground in a sweet smelling orchard in full spring blossom, when he assumed that they had escaped far enough, and watched how her face lit up with thousands of fires with the first rays of the dawning Sun.

She woke up silent and confused, wondering why the water felt so distant.

She was scared realizing how there was no sound of the waves smooching the shores anywhere around her.

But, she was scared only for a moment, and she was no longer afraid when she saw the young man sitting by her side, and after her eyes that hid honey and lust, had taken a look into his wide open heart.

             ***

And he bent down and kissed her lips, and her lips became alive.


And he touched her breasts, and her breasts became alive.


And he made love to a spirit made of water, and the spirit became flesh and blood.

                  ***

The villagers spoke how he must have had sold his soul to the devil after he had almost drowned on that night, asking the Satan in return to give this abhorrent ghost of the dead life, and let him take her home as his wife.

He brought her home, and the night she stepped over the threshold, the old sheppard dog died,  first victim of the evil presence, the villagers murmured watching her work around the house in the days that followed.

She left wet footprints in the ground when she walked, and every animal she touched died in agony shortly afterwards.

The villagers were all quite disturbed and agitated by her presence among them, and were united in demanding casting the strange couple out of their lives and out of their god abiding village, to live in that half-torn house that had no friends, stranded all alone at the rim of their universe.

After a while, and, almost a year had passed by, and no one in the village had seen, or heard them, or noticed any sign that they were alive, except for a tiny glimmer of light in the cracked window sometimes, the young man appeared one morning walking down the road that led into the village.

He had aged decades, and his body was shattering under the weight of an invisible burden.

The once young man slowly went down to the church, not raising his head, not even once, to look at people gathering in the street, watching him pass them by.

He knocked on the church door and, the head never raised, asked the bewildered priest to perform the wedding ceremony for him and his cursed bride.

The priest refused and slammed the door of the temple shouting in horror how this wretched lost soul dared insult the speaker of God with such an abominable proposal, turning a deaf ear to his desperate plea to save the soul of his unborn son.

Still not lifting his head, he sobbed long, just standing there.
Then he turned around and set up hill into the dusk, followed by the angry shouting of the villagers.

             ***

Then came the morning.
And everyone knew what had happened.

All the cattle was dead of unknown disease that left stricken corpses laying around frozen in spasmic, contorted piles.

Between the time the Sun had risen and the time it went down, someone had died in each and every house.

Like an avalanche, the cries of grief poured out into the street as one by one gates were opened for the mourning to be announced. An old man here, a child there, a random soul taken from each and every hearth.

Then came the night.
And everyone knew what was to happen.

The villagers, armed with guns and clubs and crosses freshly dipped into holy water, and the priest as their ultimate weapon by their side, went up the hill to the house carrying torchlights, and started barricading the two of them, the young man who had fallen in love with the spirit of the water and the woman who was the spirit before his love turned her to flesh and blood.

Then came the child.
And everyone knew that it was to be born and to die.

They nailed the thick wooden planks carefully - like piecing together a puzzle, chanting their prayers in a trance, covering all of the windows and the only door of the small house.

When they were done, then they nailed on top of it another layer of planks, making sure nothing escaped this house turned coffin, not then, not now, not ever under the Sun.

When they were finished with this long, exhausting carpentering work that took them almost a couple of hours to complete, the cries of the man, the woman and a new born baby coming from inside of the house had died down and they hammered the extra planks on top of the second row in total silence.

The priest gathered them and they formed a circle around the house.

The prayer was said and as he said the last Amen, he threw his torch onto the straw covering the roof, which instantly caught fire.The villagers amened that by throwing their torches onto the already burning roof as well.

As the last torch parted the hand that held it and in a long series of somersaults landed into the fire, they crossed themselves one more time, waiting for a sign of approval from above for the God’s work that was done..

The house fought with last few squeaks of the melting stone and vanishing wood, trying to keep the familiar form and remain in the place it had occupied for a long time.

They watched the frail structure collapse and they opened their mouths to cheer the grand finale of this cleansing bonfire.

Then came the silence.
And then everything stopped.

The very next moment, the night became absolutely dark, freezing the vocal chords and stealing the air from their lungs. The rain poured down in an instant, heavy as the rains that carried The Flood that was escaped only by Noah and his animal farm .

Then the fire was gone.
And they blinked for the last time.

And then there was more silence, of the inside of a grave and buried alive kind.

And the eyes looked through the nothingness of the dark and the eyes that saw nothing saw her standing in the middle of the dead bonfire, moving her lips and slowly turning around to take a moment to look into every man’s eyes.

They tried to shut them but could not.

They stood paralyzed as the silent curse wrapped itself around their hearts. The words that didn’t need sounds to carry the message around, the words one can hear resonate inside the bones and penetrate through the skull, were her prayer for her lost ones.

She had cursed them never to hear the sound of a child born alive.

She damned them to live and watch all of their children be born to die.

She cursed them never to have a new house built in this place that will stand the light of the first full moon and not fall apart.

She cursed the church never to be rebuilt and the remains of if to be burned to the ground two more times, for the two souls it had cast out of the skies.

She cursed the nations that united in blind hatred to extinguish one another in a bloodbath.

She cursed them and cursing them with every word her face was carved with a new line.

She cursed them and cursing them with every word the flesh and blood of the woman they torched died.

When she was done, she had become the spirit again.

She walked out of the circle and, when she reached the bench across the road, she sat down to wait and watch for her revenge to uncoil, before the spirit could return to the water to mourn her life of the human kind.




***

The river smelled of sweet wine and cinnamon and she stood for a while after she had dared to come back to the outside, waiting for her skin to absorb the scent of childhood and the wind to dry her eyes.

She could still feel the softness of the grass growing in the shades of the blooming orchard under her feet.

The sun was down and she was able to pretend she was a city creature again .

Almost a human of the city kind. 





***

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

SUNDAY part VII

Hope entered through the gate that was, by the look of it, a fairly recent addition, and went for the reception stationed in the cottage on the right. A few people were sitting behind a wooden table in front of it, wearing white aprons over their clothes with huge washed-out red crosses , chatting loudly.
 
Just as an uniformed policeman was about to stop her, clearing his throat to be officially loud, one of the ladies in the funny aprons recognized her, and she was taken to the small trailer behind the reception ,where she was told that her father was stationed.

She entered , knowing all too well that knocking was useless because the sound of him snoring was more than clearly audible, bending the branches of the trees around the caravan with its heavy, weight of the world on the shoulders vibrations.

Her father’s snoring had driven her to tears many times, but not now.

She was missing him, for the few weeks he had spent his free days out here, only coming home to take a shower and put a clean uniform on, Hope never even saw him, most of the time he was gone before she woke up.

She tiptoed inside, left the clothes and the ammo on the small worktop, and decided to stick around until he wakes up.



***

The registration point and the entrance were situated on the top of a slope, and as she sat down to have a coffee offered by the volunteer medical nurse that knew her called Jovana, she herself a heavy built Serbian refugee,  one of many people her father had helped in the past who was now returning the favor and helping out., Hope dared to look down towards the rest of the camp for the first time.

Save from a few elder men walking towards the gate, the place seemed spooky empty .

The dead on the inside rarely venture into the light

Hope was introduced to everyone, and wondered how these people she was sitting with could cope with a situation like the one they had at hands here.

They were obviously all old Red Cross volunteers from the time before the wars, when Red Cross was for blood donations and annual first aid exercise, nothing more than that.

They really do desperately need someone like father in charge.

She thought, sipping a proper 'Turkish coffee' while it was still too hot, how it was rebranded into 'Serbian coffee' on the menus in all the restaurants, and asking for coffee by its traditional name could land a person in a lot of trouble.

As if the bloody coffee tasted any different, anyhow. 



         ***

Nurse Jovana suggested she could maybe help with handing out the lunch/dinner meal when  Hope asked if there was anything she could do while waiting for her father to wake up.

The two of them passed a row of small, wooden triangular somethings on the left – about a dozen or so, too small to be proper cottages and looking as if they were the roofs of some dwarfish houses that had sunk down into the ground.

Down the path, she saw a big shiny metal container on the right – that was the police 'official' outpost where people registered for documents, which despite the exotic location , had proper working hours and was now closed.

Further down, by the shower and toilets building was where the kitchen tent was set up. A small pick up truck was parked in front of it and the big metal barrels were being unloaded and opened in the makeshift distribution area.

Smells like goulash.



She realized and was reminded by her growling stomach that she had skipped lunch. And breakfast. And how and why  that had happened.

And that the mere thought of him twisted her into a whirlpool of desire.

                 ***

A tall, pale boy who looked as if he were twelve years old but ended up in an adult size body, greeted them nervously. Nurse  Jovana introduced her as the daughter of her father, and told Amir, the oversized child, to be careful and let Hope help with food distribution.

Careful about what ?

Amir was one of designated helpers in the camp, a group of young Muslim boys who were discharged from the JNA, the once glorious Yugoslav National Army the month before.



Unable to go home, or perhaps equally unwilling – they risked being killed by the Serbs or forced to mobilize by the Muslims, they were stuck in this limbo for now.

These boys, mostly from rural somewhere wheresoever villages had asked her father to allow them to stay in the camp, after several of them were caught and returned swiftly to Bosnia to fight by a representative of Muslim authorities who was there 'helping' the refugees once they crossed the border, usually the Hungarian in the North.

So her dad was an like an officer again, with his own little army to play around.

Finally made it to the general. Heart of Darkness anyone?

 Hope smirked as she was given her very own red cross plastered- back- and - front  funny apron to put on .



She poured food into plastic oversized cups and felt uneasy how, with the line in front of her table that had formed almost unnoticed growing smaller, no one ever raised their head and looked her in the eyes.

They are all afraid , afraid of anyone and everyone. 

They lost everything, and now they are here, begging for mercy  distant relatives of the people who made them refugees in the first place.

She felt sick to her stomach and could swear she smelled ash and aftermath of house turned into bonfires in the air.

The lousy meal made with, ironically considerate beef only, was all she could give to make up for her share of  guilty conscience.

Her eyes welled up and she was having trouble seeing the greasy siphon she was holding in her hand.

 The  ice cold voice was howling  verses through her mind:

 Into the darkness we were taken by force
 Into the darkness afraid we arrived
 The moon has gone wild above us
 The stars have hid themselves from us
 Our bones torn apart by the winter
 The wind howled at the top of its lungs...

..........our children forgot how to cry, our children are refugees thrown outside...




That was it. These people, their children, all these hundreds of people here deadly  silent.



The camp was no louder than a graveyard . Everyone dead. Inside and almost out.

Staring down at her own hands trembling, her tears now lacing every rationed portion with her own need for redemption, Hope understood why there was a heavy smell of fire suffocating her.

Burn a man's home and you might as well have the decency to finish him off and put a bullet through his brain 



****

Amir was visibly relieved when there was no one left from the long orderly line that had formed in front of them  just a few minutes ago, and Hope informed him that she will leave to see if her father had woken up.

She started to climb up the path towards the gate just as her father stepped out of his trailer.

Like a bear out of his cave.

Her father was in a foul mood usually hours after getting up, his internal clock out of tune for the decades he spent awake almost every other night as the officer in charge, protecting the homeland from enemies within and those lurking outside.

There were so many questions she wanted to ask him, but decided better not to when he pulled her close and gave her his lung-crashing hug. that was his way of saying:

It’s alright. You're safe now.


His eyes were  all swollen and the bags under them were dark indigo color. The afternoon nap was probably the first one he has had in days, weeks even.

-So? What do you think?

Dad was making a half-circle with his hand, showing the entire stretched premises of  the camp, like perhaps an engineer father showing a beautiful suspension bridge that he designed to his firstborn son would have somewhere, sometime.



Except for the fact that in our family, the firstborn son is an idiot and the daughter gets the speaking parts.  

Wow dad nice job being the exact appropriate line.

-It's ….OK. Better than the train station park, I guess. At least you keep them safe before you kick them out .

- Shut up, he barked at her.

- I am doing what I can here. All wars all like this and if you think that these people here are just innocent victims, you go ask them where their men are - shooting at our brothers Serbs in Bosnia right now .

Shooting at her moron of a brother maybe right now.

The stupid son of a bitch  had volunteered to go. Hell, they even threw him an obligatory farewell party.

To sign up for the army that was kinda at war. To feel proud to be doing your country a favor when anyone with least bit sanity left over was trying to get out. It took a special kind of upbringing to be that brainwashed.

Having the man in front of her, arguing fiercely what he believed was right,  for a father, was probably enough to do the same in the long run.



                ***

They stood silent for an awkward moment, knowing too well where the conversation was headed and putting reigns on themselves to stop it from going any further .

This was definitely not the right moment for a father-daughter fight on the subject of war. No matter how at odds, the two of them somehow couldn't cope  without each other.

- I have to go now, dad, the last bus leaves in half an hour. I left you the two clips mom said to bring  on the worktop in the trailer. Anything else you need?  I could  come over tomorrow....
 
-No. You stay home. Go to school and take care of your mother. This is no place for a child.

No shit, Sherlock.

- OK,. I’ll go then. Bye, dad.

She was about to start walking away, but changed her  mind in an instant and  dived for another hug, for a moment loosing her footing in his arms.

                 ***

As she went past the gate, she heard her father calling out:

- Hey! Amir can walk you to the station, make sure you get there safe, right Amir?

Hope turned and before she could shout no, Amir was already running past her father to catch up with her, projecting the same body language of fear that she had noticed about  him earlier .

A  lost boy with no home to go to without risking being shot, either in the head by his enemies or in the back by his fellow nationals.

No wonder he is scared for his life like that.

Hope tried to figure out what to talk to him about without adding up more pressure  to the already intimidating situation.

Five minutes to the station later, and the only response to her river of questions, that she managed to pull out of Amir, was the name of the village he was from.

It sounded awfully familiar, and she was still wondering where she had heard it before as she climbed the bus and gave him a little wave through the dirty window.

Amir waved back, and was gone the moment the driver closed the door and started the engine of the empty bus that would take them back to the civilization..

Or what was left of it in Belgrade,  calling her like a prodigal child to come back, scattered across the distant horizon in the dusk.

Monday, April 19, 2010

SUNDAY part VI

When she got home, Hope dipped herself shortly through a shower, trying to rationalize some of the things that were cluttering her fragile teenage mind beyond repair.
 
Perhaps it’ll do me some good to be alone for a while.

Home, alone, and undisturbed, she was safe from visions and creatures unknown that inhabited distant and yet to be fully explored corners of her brain.

Perhaps I'd better leave them exactly  where they are. 

Mess with visions and gods, and you may end up with more than you bargain for.


                  ***

Their crammed apartment was safely anchored in the real world.

These rooms, made-up  and furnished and abused by the neverending  list of its temporary inhabitants, never instigated anything other than repulsive need to leave as quickly as possible.

She always felt like a trapped wild animal, caught inbetween the damp-ridden chipped walls, that looked like they were about to collapse, from the weight of the dirt on them, any moment now.

Lack of money that her family suffered constantly had left her with no room of her own, and she was a proud owner of  a broken down fold-out sofa in the living room and a battered cupboard, the only place her mother dared never open, fearing the chaos  that Hope bred in there would come alive, and swallow her somehow.



She went to the kitchen thinking that she should eat, opened the fridge and lost all of her appetite seeing  the neatly labeled food conspicuously arranged inside.
 
Oh yes, mom was the true believer of the church of order.

That one time when she and her father were left alone when mom was in a hospital, two of them only attempted to prepare lunch once.

Green peas turned to black smoke, stuck to the bottom of a ruined pot, was the image that floated from her memory, that had back then inspired her father to run to the nearest restaurant and sign them both for the daily menu for the rest of mom’s involuntary absence.

Mom took care of everything and everyone by default.

         ***

Hope entered her parents'  bedroom to pick up what she was ordered to – extra rounds from the second drawer, left , two crisp clean and immaculately pressed shirts, underwear, socks from the shelf, closet on the right.

If only anything else in life could be folded this neatly and picked up when needed from the exact spot.




Hope  realized she was standing in front of the closet wondering who the true soldier  in this house was - her robust, free spirited father or the super inhumanly accurate mother.

***

And the whole refugee camp thing was soooo typical of her father.

As an ex-officer of a broken down army, he had no skills whatsoever to do anything else but be a soldier. Yet,  this war, it had no need for a  man with code of conduct and knowledge of Geneva convention.

A solder who had lost his war before the whistle said go rip your heads off.

This was the war fought by humans reduced  to their less human form,  downsized of their own choice and free will, to mere beastly animals.

Overnight, with the ease of  coming home, the tribe of men that were wolves once had returned to their pack in spirit and actions.

        ***

So her father  was now a reserve policeman, too old and too educated to ever become a good  or useful one.

His superiors were very savvy of this strange man, unable to trust him because his family name sounded  rather odd, and was not Serbian enough, although his accompanying papers claimed otherwise.

He was given one of the worst beats to patrol, the train station downtown.

Imagine a landfill that’s fulled up and spilling over, she thought. Imagine it on a veeeeery hot day. Now imagine the nauseating smell.

Yep, that’s what the the Belgrade train central smells like after it’s been cleaned, Hope wrinkled her nose with disgust.




***

She had made it to the suburban bus station without stopping, and fell ill at the sight of some two hundred people waiting for the bus designed to carry fifty-to-seventy people at best, that she was supposed to get on somehow.

Cattle ride on a top of a train in India sounded like a good idea compared to almost an hour of no air to breathe, people’s smelly armpits pressing on her face and the unavoidable trash turbo-folk music soundtrack to the ride outside of the town, into a world  people blissfully unaware of urbis and its meta-troubles occupied.

She greeted every stop along the way with immaculate rejoice, for the people getting off on each of them provided her with space to unfold her limbs one by one, and she eventually got off at the last stop and made it across the overgrown field down towards the camp.

                                   ***

Civilization was on the move.

 Unfortunately, here it was going backwards, and someone had pressed the ultra speedy rewind button.

When the first war broke out, people said: We'll survive.

And then there was another one.

And, yes, another one.

Those fighting them grew so fond of the blood and destruction, that they started fighting against their allies, just to keep the hunger of war alive.

Cities lay in ruins, entire villages were extinct. Families had brothers shooting at each other standing on opposite sides.

No soul was spared.

Ethnic war demanded proving how much you love your own nation by how many others you were able to kill, annihilate, murder .

The accounts of war crimes that were whispered among those who managed to escape from under  the knife were unbelievable, in the sense that a normal, reasonable human being on either side of the conflict  could not understand how these acts of torture, humiliation and mutilation, could be taking place here, on European,  enlightened, Old World soil.

The year of 199something in the Balkans was  definitely not  good  for anyone.

***

The ethnic cleansing in Bosnia was increasing in both tempo and intensity, and the Muslims driven out by the Serbs had to endure one last humiliation of  having to make a stop in Serbia, to apply for the documents issued by mainland Yugoslavia, before they could get a valid passport to cross the border and get the hell out.



With often nothing more than a plastic bag holding all of their earthly possessions, entire families, conspicuously lacking adult males of military usable age, were forced to spend weeks hanging around the train station , staying close to the police headquarters, where the documents were being  issued, camping on the benches in the infamous junkie's haunt park nearby .

As the Bosnian Serb forces made advances that year, their numbers started rising with rapid progression.

Mothers, children, old, almost immobile people and babies born on the run, sometimes  three or four generations of a family with nowhere to go but as far as possible away, was what her father encountered on his no longer routine night rounds.

The policemen were instructed to ignore them, pretend like these people did not exist, and only make sure that, once they had the documents, they were on the first train or bus or whatever out.


Close your eyes and it does not happen.

But her father could not.

             ***
One cold and rainy  springily night, when a young mother was trying to feed her baby on the bench, with another little bundle crying soaked wet on her lap, he gave in,  a refugee of a sort himself, because he never could  just pretend that everything was honkey-dorey alright and walk by.

He had remembered some closed down auto camp at the edge of the suburbs from one of his burglary 911 calls, knew it was empty safe for the night guard who was somewhere sleeping passed out drunk.

Her father, once a proud officer, nowadays an ashamed petty policeman, with the heart in all the right places, took the scared, exhausted woman and her children to his patrol car, found another mother with three children inside the station that he had noticed earlier, and drove them out to the camp.

He woke up the confused guard and, paying no heed to his loud protesting, broke the locks on one of the small wooden cottages that were built for the tourists during what was known as better times.

Upon returning, he put up his scariest official front and went to find the station supervisor.

Dad made him declare the station bife open shelter for the night.

He made them serve every refugee he found drenched in the park a meal of hot soup and bread, and waved a gun at the bartender just to make sure that it was understood that they were to let these poor people stay inside for the night

As he returned to check the terminal, a new train had just pulled into the station and three more families with about twenty children among them were coming past him, keeping their heads bowed down.

Father sighed and frowned, deepening the lines that already crisscrossed his face carved with legacy of compassion in hard times, and drove three more times out to the abandoned camp that night.

Next evening he was on duty again, trying to figure out what he was going to do with the women in children in the camp.

The rain was merciful enough to stop,  but there was almost a hundred or so refugees gathered, waiting for him, at the main entrance.

Word of mouth had traveled like lightening, they knew that he was the man who would help them before they even arrived.


And so he did.



***

The once-not-a-very-successful tourist camp site, that was one of fine examples of the socialist times ingenious planning mind which truly believed that motorized people would flock to the dirty capitol’s suburb, surrounded by nothing, just because they built a camp for them to flock to, was thus woken from its slumber and turned into a refugee camp.

Not officially, of course.

We are not the ones turning people into refugees, they are, cried the national TV farce every night.

When father’s commander found out what he had done, there was nothing left to do to punish or straighten him out, without acknowledging the existence of these refugees and the camp they were now in, so, instead,  they authorized him to take care of the security of the location and make sure that no public or procedure  disturbance happened.

And continued to keep their eyes and their mouths conveniently shut.





             ***

Hope knew about the euphemistically  named ‘ transit help camp’,  that her father was now semi-officially running, few weeks after that rainy night , but was never allowed to visit him there on site.

Dad always tried to keep the bad things away from his little girl’s eyes,  wanting to keep her in a world where what he saw and lived through each day didn’t happen.

Mom was more practical, and didn’t stop to think about anything other than making sure that a list of things to do for that day was ticked off , and was only worried if her daughter would manage to remember what she was told to pick up without turning all the closets upside down.

Hope was curious about what she was to find in the camp, and thankful for something to do to prevent her from  the spontaneous combustion the image of him had  been sparking in her  all day long.


              ***

Her father had pulled a lot of strings – somehow there were a lot of people who owed him favors, - to get the food supply  organized, to have the city buss take people from the station here, and take them back to town when needed , to borrow military tents and blankets when the population of it grew to a couple of hundred and they couldn’t  fit them into broken down trailers that were parked out back any longer

The police had started registering people there in the camp, making the whole passport issuing process faster – even the authorities were willing to help  make these people disappear as quickly as possible across the border easier.

A local photographer was coming in daily to take photos and probably prevent the refugees from going over into the village and finding his shop.

Regular business tends to suffer when people have to question their conscience while running errands.

The camp also had the Red Cross volunteers who were appointed as personnel.

Father knew most of them from his own volunteer work, which included driving a truckload of food into a town in Croatia where his ' brothers the Serbs' were under siege last winter.

No one in the Red Cross dared drive that truck, and they needed to find someone insane enough to even try.

Crazy bastard almost got killed on his way back, the truck was returned zigzagged with bullet-holes, and father got a nice Thank-You -For-Your-Contribution card that was promptly framed and mounted on their kitchen wall.

Someone always had to volunteer to do the goddamn right thing to do, no matter what the cost was. Someone who believed, and was stupid enough to believe in anything here and now.

Yep, that was her old man.

Two meters and hundred plus kilos of pure idealism, powered by the purest of hearts.

And besides, he told her, it was not madness, it was 'helping his own people, his blood'.

His kind.

Well, these five hundred desperate souls stashed here in the camp weren’t his kind .

Now , with the same righteousness in his step, he had to take care of the people his fellow Serbs were driving out of their homes leaving them with nothing .

Nothing, except for the hatred to get by until the next war breaks out and the score is evened for a while until the next historical rerun.



*****