Mother woke her up for the school bitching about those goddamned junkies having their orgies over there again last night.
She smiled thinking of how that was probably the last word in the dictionary she would have used to describe what had happened.
Love.
Lust.
Desire.
Urge.
Release.
Relief.
Salvation.
Resurrection.
Creation.
Purification.
Fire.
She shivered as her body remembered the exact feeling, leaving no need for further clarification.
Hope dressed carelessly as usual, not thinking about the clothes or the way she looked in them and only making sure she had time to brush her big, strong, carnivorous teeth.
***
The road she would take going to school every day had changed significantly over the two school years.
She walked down a rich, wide boulevard, which, with a twist of local humor again, was called The Boulevard of the Revolution . No known revolution had ever taken place on it, but no one cared.
Almost every single street in this city was a place of historical significance where somewhere sometime a smartypants Serb protested against something.
She was thinking about an old folks tale that had fate / karma / destiny / judgment personified in a man giving out human lives to souls to live them out on the Earth.
Depending on his mood of the moment, you were gonna be born, live and die rich or poor, beggar or a king, loved or alone…And this character, according to the way he was portrayed in the tales, had a rather sick sense of humor, topped up by a particularly nasty temper.
She wondered if he was really pissed on the day when he was asked to pass his judgment over this tribe of lost souls, a newborn nation of people that had come with many others during the great migration of the peoples searching for a handful of dirt to live, dream, love and die on.
The god probably looked at all of them, her ancestors the Slavs, the Skits, the Celts, The Huns, and all the others who had come from the snowy deserts of the Ural mountain and the steppes of Asia, down to this magical gathering place in search of their destiny.
They all stood in lines, tribe by tribe being called out, waiting patiently to be given their path to follow and fate to carry out, before they could settle for good somewhere in the world. Somewhere other than here, hopefully.
The short–tempered Serbs must have at some point grown restless from all this waiting, because one of them eventually stood up and protested the length of the divine process.
Members of the other tribes froze in fear because, such a blasphemy, was, well, unthinkable, incomprehensible, unheard of. No one had ever interrupted the almighty god of Karma, known as Usud in these parts .
Until now.
She laughed out loud crossing the street at the thought of how truly in line with the Serbian character that ancestral idiot was.
He must have felt really proud of himself, proud of his courage and bravery to demand, proud of being the single voice that was raised to question the absolute authority and arrogance that gods had over humans, thinking blissfully of how he was going down in history to be the glorified and remembered one.
The god said nothing.
He continued giving instructions to the elders of the tribe that was in front of him. And the next one. And the one after that. When he was finished with all the others, and the Serbs were finally standing in front of him waiting for their destiny to be worded and thus sealed for all times, the god simply rose up, turned his back on them and left.
He had had his revenge by leaving this tiny tribe prone to arguing over everything, fateless.
They had nowhere to go to fulfill their destiny because they were punished with being denied the right to claim fate of their own.
So. the Serbs stayed at the crossroad of the worlds real and worlds magic, in a place where heaven and hell made love to each other on daily basis, and where all the others had to pass through in their earthly quests. They had to put up their tents and settle right there, in hope that some day the gods would allow them to upgrade this historical intersection into a wee bit safer roundabout, at least.
Nice start for a nation that went on dreaming of the times when they resided in heaven, but continuously falling head first into the hell-pits of reality.
Usually Thanks to whoever protesting for whatever reason on whatever subject.
And the rest of the lot cheering on that obligatory one bloody fool among.
***
Walking gave her brain pace that enabled visions like that to bloom, and she loved the early morning walk to the school, all the way across the town, because she knew the path by heart, and was free to roam in spirit across time and space, while her feet were automatically leading her across busy roads, autopilot-guided, avoiding the open abandoned construction sites and the trash that was building up in the streets due to the lack of gasoline needed to fuel garbage trucks.
She wondered if those images that she would get sucked into on a whim of a thought were what one might call ’normal’.
There was nothing normal about the intensity with which they would take over her mind and body and the savage depth of the feelings she experienced during them.
These were visions, she feared often, but definitely not in that consumer western sense. As if the past had a way of coming to life through her . As if she was forced to live through all of the lives lived accumulated in her gene pool for some reason.
She blamed her parents for this.
They had made a single mistake when she was born that had screwed up the rest of her life, in giving her a name which provoked the destiny in such a manner, that not even the god of fate could have come up with on a particularly bad day.
They named her in a country in which it was possible for a child to be born and have at least three religions instantly claim right over her soul ,and even more nations and nationalities demand obedience.
She was a mix of mixes, a secular and religious paradox that was only to be born here and nowhere else.
The Usud god who had the power over lives of ordinary humans, had probably just shrunk his shoulders in despair when they brought this child before him and told him that her name was Hope.
Tiny Hope, actually.
Nadica.
Itsy bitsy thing one could find only at the bottom of Pandora’s box. And in the streets of the hopeless capitol.
Since she was born, the country had fallen apart. Wars started. Communism, or its rather lax local version, was all gone.
Hope was left to live under the name that reminded everyone of utter hopelessness after one of the biggest and bloodiest fuckups in the history of the mankind, better known as Yugoslavia, had been ripped apart, in the place and in the time where no one had any hope left to spare or desire to wait for its unlikely return.
She carried her cross with endurance and dignity, lately even getting into fistfights when someone would tease her about the name at school. She loved it and hated it but eventually decided that she was gonna live, dream, love and die with what was given to her.
You don’t argue with gods and idealist parents, she had learned this far.
She was back walking through the street that lead her across the deserted square, a beautiful large plateau whose architecture was reminiscent of how people who built it had admired a lot the Austro-Hungarian kitschy version of secession.
Laced windows, peaked towers and colorful vitrage glass that screamed of lack of true taste and any originality. Like the candy house from Hansel and Gretel fairytale, she thought.
All sugar coated on the outside but housing a witch or two somewhere in it definitely.
As she tried to cut around the corner, she was almost carried away by the sudden stream of people running down the steep street, stampeding over everything and everyone in their way.
Faces as lifeless as the morning sky above their heads, they all looked alike because there was so many of them moving so quickly, like a herd of animals searching for the water well in a drought stricken field.
They have become a regular sighting - she grew accustomed to seeing them, the smugglers and petty street-sellers from the cities in deep in the province that came here on the early morning train to shop and trade and grab whatever they could find and make a few dinars off of it when they resold it back home. They all carried those huge, ugly nylon bags which were empty in the morning, when they were rushing to make their deals.
She would meet some of them again on her way back home, this time no longer running or walking, but rather crawling uphill with their faces distorted in painful grimaces from the heavy bags mounted on their backs, full of a lot of little somethings.
Everyone was trying to survive. Crime thrived and black market was the only place where you could find those luxury goods like
Soap
Chocolate
CD's
Tampons
The life was launched back into the darkest of ages.
She thought of the brutal barbarism of the war economy that was most visible in the open markets, where people actually started trading goods.
Potatoes for deodorants.
Bread for milk.
Cigarettes for condoms.
We had progressed back into the stone ages, she thought and heard a voice of a man sing inside her head, somewhere between eyesight , ear-sight and a brain pulsating in an effort to recreate streaming sounds out of memories.
I’ve always craved to feel the touch of
Money in my hands
Glued with sweat and greased with blood
Money in my hands
Loves me loves me not loves me loves me not
Money in my hands.
Buy me, sell me
Buy me sell me
Money in my hands.
More like smuggle me and trade me, steal me and exchange me these days.
The inflation unprecedented for as long as the world could count the money in its hands rampaged through the country, and the war and UN sanctions combined had isolated them into a society that resembled a patient that was in terminal condition, without any chance of recovery whatsoever, that the doctors had decided to euthanize simply by removing the feeding tube.
So the feeding tube was gone, and now the patient was slowly dehydrating and starving to death.
An entire country was sentenced to die, of course not literally, but to disappear and dissolve and go away and stop starting trouble.
Those sitting in the Security Council of the UN who were responsible for this decision, probably had best of intelligence and analysis on their hands, that told them of ’great likelihood of successful outcome which would result from this decision’.
But they were wrong.
Or perhaps they were right, it’s just that no one had read history books carefully enough, and there was no one to tell them that …this strategy was supposed to break a nation that had made a hobby out of starting world conflicts and enduring what others feared to imagine.
Fateless people that could screw with civilizational designs simply because they had nothing better to screw around with in the meantime.
So they were all surviving together against all odds.
Smuggling across closed borders, chipping away last remains of the golden times, adjusting to every new deprivation like they were playing the game of poker refusing to accept that they had no cards whatsoever left to play with.
She stood waiting for them all to turn corner and then crossed the street and passed by the supermarket that had only a couple of loafs of bread in the windows and an endless line of pensioners waiting to buy it.
They were dropping like flies all over the city. Newspapers would carry a story of one or two elderly citizens dying in a queue every day.
Waiting for hours, even days, in the merciless concrete heat, first to get their pension money from the bank and then as quickly as possible joining another eternal line trying to spend it in ghastly empty stores before it became worthless.
She remembered how how her accountant mother had tried every morning to predict, with the zeal of a professional stock exchange floor trader, how much money given in the morning would still be enough to buy a snack around lunchtime.
Even mom had given up on trying to calculate the daily triple digit inflation rate a couple of weeks ago and started packing her sandwiches instead.
***
For some reason, today, none of this bothered her at all.
She was humming along to the clear sound of his voice inside of her, swiftly short-cutting through a dirty garbage dump that once was a playground, joining the trajectory of many other students who were, like bees around the queen bee mating, gathering in front of the school door.
Getting through the crowd with having to endure only a couple of Hi!s and Hey!s she climbed the stairs and got into the classroom.
She smiled thinking of how that was probably the last word in the dictionary she would have used to describe what had happened.
Love.
Lust.
Desire.
Urge.
Release.
Relief.
Salvation.
Resurrection.
Creation.
Purification.
Fire.
She shivered as her body remembered the exact feeling, leaving no need for further clarification.
Hope dressed carelessly as usual, not thinking about the clothes or the way she looked in them and only making sure she had time to brush her big, strong, carnivorous teeth.
***
The road she would take going to school every day had changed significantly over the two school years.
She walked down a rich, wide boulevard, which, with a twist of local humor again, was called The Boulevard of the Revolution . No known revolution had ever taken place on it, but no one cared.
Almost every single street in this city was a place of historical significance where somewhere sometime a smartypants Serb protested against something.
She was thinking about an old folks tale that had fate / karma / destiny / judgment personified in a man giving out human lives to souls to live them out on the Earth.
Depending on his mood of the moment, you were gonna be born, live and die rich or poor, beggar or a king, loved or alone…And this character, according to the way he was portrayed in the tales, had a rather sick sense of humor, topped up by a particularly nasty temper.
She wondered if he was really pissed on the day when he was asked to pass his judgment over this tribe of lost souls, a newborn nation of people that had come with many others during the great migration of the peoples searching for a handful of dirt to live, dream, love and die on.
The god probably looked at all of them, her ancestors the Slavs, the Skits, the Celts, The Huns, and all the others who had come from the snowy deserts of the Ural mountain and the steppes of Asia, down to this magical gathering place in search of their destiny.
They all stood in lines, tribe by tribe being called out, waiting patiently to be given their path to follow and fate to carry out, before they could settle for good somewhere in the world. Somewhere other than here, hopefully.
The short–tempered Serbs must have at some point grown restless from all this waiting, because one of them eventually stood up and protested the length of the divine process.
Members of the other tribes froze in fear because, such a blasphemy, was, well, unthinkable, incomprehensible, unheard of. No one had ever interrupted the almighty god of Karma, known as Usud in these parts .
Until now.
She laughed out loud crossing the street at the thought of how truly in line with the Serbian character that ancestral idiot was.
He must have felt really proud of himself, proud of his courage and bravery to demand, proud of being the single voice that was raised to question the absolute authority and arrogance that gods had over humans, thinking blissfully of how he was going down in history to be the glorified and remembered one.
The god said nothing.
He continued giving instructions to the elders of the tribe that was in front of him. And the next one. And the one after that. When he was finished with all the others, and the Serbs were finally standing in front of him waiting for their destiny to be worded and thus sealed for all times, the god simply rose up, turned his back on them and left.
He had had his revenge by leaving this tiny tribe prone to arguing over everything, fateless.
They had nowhere to go to fulfill their destiny because they were punished with being denied the right to claim fate of their own.
So. the Serbs stayed at the crossroad of the worlds real and worlds magic, in a place where heaven and hell made love to each other on daily basis, and where all the others had to pass through in their earthly quests. They had to put up their tents and settle right there, in hope that some day the gods would allow them to upgrade this historical intersection into a wee bit safer roundabout, at least.
Nice start for a nation that went on dreaming of the times when they resided in heaven, but continuously falling head first into the hell-pits of reality.
Usually Thanks to whoever protesting for whatever reason on whatever subject.
And the rest of the lot cheering on that obligatory one bloody fool among.
***
Walking gave her brain pace that enabled visions like that to bloom, and she loved the early morning walk to the school, all the way across the town, because she knew the path by heart, and was free to roam in spirit across time and space, while her feet were automatically leading her across busy roads, autopilot-guided, avoiding the open abandoned construction sites and the trash that was building up in the streets due to the lack of gasoline needed to fuel garbage trucks.
She wondered if those images that she would get sucked into on a whim of a thought were what one might call ’normal’.
There was nothing normal about the intensity with which they would take over her mind and body and the savage depth of the feelings she experienced during them.
These were visions, she feared often, but definitely not in that consumer western sense. As if the past had a way of coming to life through her . As if she was forced to live through all of the lives lived accumulated in her gene pool for some reason.
She blamed her parents for this.
They had made a single mistake when she was born that had screwed up the rest of her life, in giving her a name which provoked the destiny in such a manner, that not even the god of fate could have come up with on a particularly bad day.
They named her in a country in which it was possible for a child to be born and have at least three religions instantly claim right over her soul ,and even more nations and nationalities demand obedience.
She was a mix of mixes, a secular and religious paradox that was only to be born here and nowhere else.
The Usud god who had the power over lives of ordinary humans, had probably just shrunk his shoulders in despair when they brought this child before him and told him that her name was Hope.
Tiny Hope, actually.
Nadica.
Itsy bitsy thing one could find only at the bottom of Pandora’s box. And in the streets of the hopeless capitol.
Since she was born, the country had fallen apart. Wars started. Communism, or its rather lax local version, was all gone.
Hope was left to live under the name that reminded everyone of utter hopelessness after one of the biggest and bloodiest fuckups in the history of the mankind, better known as Yugoslavia, had been ripped apart, in the place and in the time where no one had any hope left to spare or desire to wait for its unlikely return.
She carried her cross with endurance and dignity, lately even getting into fistfights when someone would tease her about the name at school. She loved it and hated it but eventually decided that she was gonna live, dream, love and die with what was given to her.
You don’t argue with gods and idealist parents, she had learned this far.
She was back walking through the street that lead her across the deserted square, a beautiful large plateau whose architecture was reminiscent of how people who built it had admired a lot the Austro-Hungarian kitschy version of secession.
Laced windows, peaked towers and colorful vitrage glass that screamed of lack of true taste and any originality. Like the candy house from Hansel and Gretel fairytale, she thought.
All sugar coated on the outside but housing a witch or two somewhere in it definitely.
As she tried to cut around the corner, she was almost carried away by the sudden stream of people running down the steep street, stampeding over everything and everyone in their way.
Faces as lifeless as the morning sky above their heads, they all looked alike because there was so many of them moving so quickly, like a herd of animals searching for the water well in a drought stricken field.
They have become a regular sighting - she grew accustomed to seeing them, the smugglers and petty street-sellers from the cities in deep in the province that came here on the early morning train to shop and trade and grab whatever they could find and make a few dinars off of it when they resold it back home. They all carried those huge, ugly nylon bags which were empty in the morning, when they were rushing to make their deals.
She would meet some of them again on her way back home, this time no longer running or walking, but rather crawling uphill with their faces distorted in painful grimaces from the heavy bags mounted on their backs, full of a lot of little somethings.
Everyone was trying to survive. Crime thrived and black market was the only place where you could find those luxury goods like
Soap
Chocolate
CD's
Tampons
The life was launched back into the darkest of ages.
She thought of the brutal barbarism of the war economy that was most visible in the open markets, where people actually started trading goods.
Potatoes for deodorants.
Bread for milk.
Cigarettes for condoms.
We had progressed back into the stone ages, she thought and heard a voice of a man sing inside her head, somewhere between eyesight , ear-sight and a brain pulsating in an effort to recreate streaming sounds out of memories.
I’ve always craved to feel the touch of
Money in my hands
Glued with sweat and greased with blood
Money in my hands
Loves me loves me not loves me loves me not
Money in my hands.
Buy me, sell me
Buy me sell me
Money in my hands.
More like smuggle me and trade me, steal me and exchange me these days.
The inflation unprecedented for as long as the world could count the money in its hands rampaged through the country, and the war and UN sanctions combined had isolated them into a society that resembled a patient that was in terminal condition, without any chance of recovery whatsoever, that the doctors had decided to euthanize simply by removing the feeding tube.
So the feeding tube was gone, and now the patient was slowly dehydrating and starving to death.
An entire country was sentenced to die, of course not literally, but to disappear and dissolve and go away and stop starting trouble.
Those sitting in the Security Council of the UN who were responsible for this decision, probably had best of intelligence and analysis on their hands, that told them of ’great likelihood of successful outcome which would result from this decision’.
But they were wrong.
Or perhaps they were right, it’s just that no one had read history books carefully enough, and there was no one to tell them that …this strategy was supposed to break a nation that had made a hobby out of starting world conflicts and enduring what others feared to imagine.
Fateless people that could screw with civilizational designs simply because they had nothing better to screw around with in the meantime.
So they were all surviving together against all odds.
Smuggling across closed borders, chipping away last remains of the golden times, adjusting to every new deprivation like they were playing the game of poker refusing to accept that they had no cards whatsoever left to play with.
She stood waiting for them all to turn corner and then crossed the street and passed by the supermarket that had only a couple of loafs of bread in the windows and an endless line of pensioners waiting to buy it.
They were dropping like flies all over the city. Newspapers would carry a story of one or two elderly citizens dying in a queue every day.
Waiting for hours, even days, in the merciless concrete heat, first to get their pension money from the bank and then as quickly as possible joining another eternal line trying to spend it in ghastly empty stores before it became worthless.
She remembered how how her accountant mother had tried every morning to predict, with the zeal of a professional stock exchange floor trader, how much money given in the morning would still be enough to buy a snack around lunchtime.
Even mom had given up on trying to calculate the daily triple digit inflation rate a couple of weeks ago and started packing her sandwiches instead.
***
For some reason, today, none of this bothered her at all.
She was humming along to the clear sound of his voice inside of her, swiftly short-cutting through a dirty garbage dump that once was a playground, joining the trajectory of many other students who were, like bees around the queen bee mating, gathering in front of the school door.
Getting through the crowd with having to endure only a couple of Hi!s and Hey!s she climbed the stairs and got into the classroom.
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