66°31’35”
one
The sky is low[1] and the sun is pale yellow and big, giving the impression that it is incredibly close. Albino Africa, cleansed of all aromas, diseases and threats. Inverted into white and imbued with the charm of the sharp gusts of wind that do not find it difficult to dare and dare again.
The heights are within an arm’s reach and the breadths are too broad. You almost feel closed in by the sky that at the same time engulfs you and shows you your limits, yet you are free to roam in any direction you choose because the expanses are so huge they are both an honour and an affront to your warm boots.
two
The bus travels from the airport to your destination down a smooth road lined by trees of perfect shape, colour and size. It seems like nature was not untampered, left to its own devices, and if it was, it would appear it knew exactly what shape to assume to look like scenery found in a children’s picture book. Suddenly, the driver breaks sharply. A moose! Almost a tragedy. Soon, reindeer herds appear on the left side of the road where one always breaks away from the rest and grazes alone.
They enter a small municipality on the border of Sweden and Finland where no one is exactly sure where the purported four thousand inhabitants really are because you can only see the two who wonder around the deserted streets with a dog and a safety pin posing as an earring, the three cruising in a big car (the people there have this weird obsession with classic cars which they turn into huge, moving, vividly coloured graffiti) and the twelve flashing their IDs in Systemet[2]. Pizza place, prefab home, prefab, pharmacy, prefab, house, house, house, picket fence, street. All very low, like the sky, simple constructions and neutral colours with very little difference between the houses.
The group of students is housed in a two-story building where they will play cards in a small kitchen on the upper storey night after night, listen to music and drink 7% alcohol Danish beer (one has to pity the Asians on this occasion).
One night, a stranger, local young man, some twenty to twenty-five years old, miraculously clambers up onto the kitchen balcony, shocking everybody sitting there, sat at the table without a word and started shuffling the cards. Then they all began a new round in complete silence until someone asked him how he climbed up and why he was not saying anything. He said he was only looking for company, but he was not overly fond of talking and that this was not his first time to visit outsiders in this way. They thought they might have to sleep with their wallets deep in their throats, but it soon became clear that he was not interested into anything of the kind and really just wanted to spend some time with people and play a game of cards or two. Winter must be a very lonesome time.
three
There were several visits to the forest, and on one occasion they were given the use of a genuine Finnish, hellish, sauna. Located in a clearing beside the river, where one of the local gals kept pouring oil on the flames, raising the temperature just a degree higher, while some fought for air, not believing it possible to honestly enjoy something like that, as their feet, even there, in the sauna, remained relatively cold, courtesy of their made-in-China circulation. Still, the ones who avoided the push under the ice-cold shower could leave the hellish cottage with some relief, only to be met by a scene of Russian girls jumping into the river, its temperature not much more than five, six degrees centigrade, looking like they did that sort of thing on a daily basis, invigorated by something that could kill someone else stone dead on the spot.
Henri the local, who they soon found out was the elementary school PE discipline enforcer, a piece of information absolutely in keeping with the rigidness glinting off his bifocals, took them to the church one afternoon. He packed them all in a Volvo with moves simultaneously strict and hysterical (if this is a viable combination at all) and sped up the strapping in process of both the guy sitting shotgun and the people in the back seat, then he strapped himself in and drove off. This was the first time they sat with seatbelts fastened in the back seat of a car moving at 20kmh and stopping at the destination a mere ten minutes later. All the insane precautions for a ten-minute ride? What a horrific injustice for the airbags which would never have their five minutes of glory under these circumstances. Still, the law is the law and the Swedes love it.
The church, Bengt Larsson’s brutalist piece from the 1960s raised where the old church that burned down used to stand is surely one of the strangest buildings they ever saw, especially if one takes into consideration that God lives there, he who loves to dwell mainly in three or five-nave constructions, or so our experience would lead us to believe. From the outside it looks like a giant kiosk or maybe a rocket, it is almost unsettling, with the Ten Commandments chiselled into a morbid, black marble slate at the entrance. Unlike the outside, the inside is very bright and the ceiling is high. The way it was designed likens it to a huge, light barn, made of white wood, with an enormous wrought iron chandelier at the top and an altar painting of a shepherd surrounded by a flock in the back. The guide talks about the building with immense enthusiasm. Still, it would be a stretch to say they shared it. No one really dares to call the church ugly, so they all leave the construction peacefully and without comment, merely guessing what might be going on in one another’s head.
A day later they are invited to the town hall to learn about the deportation of trash into a neighbouring community. The lecture is more comprehensive than anyone could have guessed or wanted it to be, and when they half-open their eye-lids in the chairs so conducive to napping, they can see the odd slide of a truck, or the highway, or a big black bag. There is the odd scheme, diagram or graph, although no one is able to follow the story of travelling trash told with such unusual enthusiasm. Friend A sputters when the very same night friend B picks up an empty bottle of wine and solemnly informs it that it is expected in the neighbouring municipality.
Fish, potatoes, salad, fish, potatoes, salad. It is a dream come true; but every afternoon and evening… That is a bit too much, even for a dream. Still, it is all beyond delicious. Coffee cups can be endlessly refilled in all cafeterias, coffee shops, restaurants, even in IKEA. No one goes hungry here, the plates often laden with food people could not finish. Used books can be found at the price of two chocolate cakes, sometimes four or five of them at once. Since they have nothing to spend their money on they do it by purchasing sack-loads of sweets, every time choosing different combinations of tastes, colours or shapes. They are turning into fast feet and big mouths, and thanks to the endless traipsing almost none of it ends up on the girls’ hips. They walk off what they eat, although they could always walk more and further, and they begin to worry that they might return home significantly improved (antonym: peaky, scrawny).
One evening, assorted snacks are handed around; sweets from every time zone, from Mexico to Japan. So many that friend A no longer looks at what he picks up; he just shovels them into his mouth and automatically chews. His hand reaches for something the Lithuanian girls brought. He takes their candy, stuffs it into his mouth without much analysis and after a bite or two thinks how strange the things they eat are, but decides to persevere out of respect for diversity and to see what it was that they found so tasty – because if they could, then by God so can he. He soon realizes that he has bitten off more than he can chew so to say, but he keeps working on it, certain that anything in this world, except for diamonds, can be broken with teeth; he chews with dedication, the Balkan crocodile, resolved to win the game of unusual snacks and finally manages to break down one of the candies, while the other remains a challenge. However, he starts to fear that he has maybe chipped a tooth in the intervention, but he is not entirely sure of it so he runs his tongue over the tooth in question a couple of times, while suspiciously looking at the people around him in the hope that someone would finally meet his gaze and confirm that Lithuanians don’t know the first thing about candy and have served an abomination. He can see that maybe two or three of the others have spat out the pellets and that he was the only one not ready to receive the signals his own teeth were sending, when at one point someone approached him and said it was not candy, it was goddamn amber. He still could not for the life of him understand what a mineraloid was doing basking in a colourful bowl, so rudely similar to candy, instead of being distributed with a clear instruction to be used for good luck, as a shelf ornament, bar fight instrument, anything but eating. Having recovered from the disbelief, followed by a horrific fit of laughter, he thanked the girls for the exceptional present, got up and went out to solicit donations for an orthodontist.
four
At one after midnight in late July it is still very light outside, like at dusk. However, twilight comes earlier every day and by mid-August days are days, and nights are nights, and one can sleep normally. The days are still relatively warm and you can ride a bike wearing only a shirt, but it is a good idea to have long sleeves because of the increasingly aggressive swarms of mosquitoes as you move toward the neighbouring forests and swamps. All of Sweden lies more or less on swamp ground. Going somewhere insignificant by bike is the best, somewhere where there are no monuments, churches, museums or restaurants; where there is nothing except small neighbourhoods and where you cannot be 100% sure whether the houses are regular residences where people live the whole year round or just cottages they visit in the summertime. Old men spooling fishing reels or doing odd jobs around the house, old women sitting in rattan chairs fiking[3], children pushing plastic tricycles through backyards, lazy dogs and cats sprawling in the low grass. Time does not seem to flow here, especially since behind some of the yards you can find houses from the first half of the 20th century, small abandoned local factories and storehouses made of dark red brick, some of them partially overgrown with weed. If you press on, settlements disappear and the road leads you through forests or around swamps where the abovementioned bloodsuckers swarm and make riding a pain. That is when it is best to return to the community, among other things because the sun begins to set and it becomes colder. The air is humid because water is near and in just a couple of hours the weather will call for a jacket and scarf because at night the temperature drops to mere eight-nine degrees centigrade, despite it being August.
The only bar they found was below ground; a vast room immersed in blue neon, with one disco ball and two barmen. It is desolate. It looks like no one ever ventures there except for a few teenagers who, besides them, just happened to be there. After an hour of fun-time parody (dancing seems to be becoming a half-ironic activity, which is apparently a rather global phenomenon), they go back to their rooms because they figure the atmosphere there is much more humane. They crack open cans, play whatever music they want and talk till the wee hours.
five
In one of the workshops the conversation turns to a comparative cultural analysis and though the moderator is very interested in assessing the variable from the comments of everybody present, the Balkan crocodile can’t help but notice that he was consistently skipped over, and it begins to seem to him that the lady has simply dropped the country he comes from off the map. He is starting to get annoyed by the fact that she calls out on everyone but him and apparently he would have to confirm the stereotype of the rowdy noisy Balkanite if he wants to be noticed or heard. He finds it interesting to note something he had not before – as much as his national feeling snoozes and sometimes downright snores when he is at home, it clamours up when he is elsewhere, in situations when politically (in)correct people, suffering from selective senility, begin to disregard him because they think they already know all they need from the media. Therefore, the whole thing soon becomes monotonous and irritating and he leaps at the invitation to bike down to the Systemet before closing time.
Tomorrow is the last day, so friend A and friend B decide not to make an appearance, instead they spend the day roaming the neighbourhood. In the morning they go to the museum of modern art and stay there for the next two hours. They are having a good time and not in any hurry. In one of the rooms they practically stumble over a naked Jesus rag-doll lying on the ground; there are also some portraits of women with pale blue eyes haunted by suppressed hysteria, and an unusual sculpture of a forest witch in the guise of an elderly woman wrapped in a warm housecoat, spewing flames of petty bourgeois madness from her mouth. Modern Scandinavian art wakes you up faster than coffee. In the capacious lobby massive windows instead of walls separate them from the outside and these are spaces where people usually feel most at ease. Friend A notices a piano and approaches it on the lookout for how the girls working there would react, but counting on their being used to at least half of the visitors coming to the spontaneous idea to play pianist, if only for ten minutes. It seems the girls do not mind much, just give him a hand signal not to veer outside of the realm of soft and unpretentious. They drink filter coffee, make sure they pour twice, and look through the big window at the flat green plateau where some walk, some exercise, and some are still absent (where are the four thousand inhabitants hiding anyway?).
Before the beautiful but lazy afternoon turns into a lazy and unused day they get up and move on; they walk as far as their legs take them. They visit all the insignificant places, enter stores seeking the most grotesque clothing combinations, they wander around workers’ districts and peep into small square balconies and apartments where people argue, laugh, have lunch or hang their washing, and then they walk on as dwellings dwindle and they lose any sense of where they are. Soon, all they come across are road works and now they trudge through muddy fields recently ploughed over by bulldozers. Friend B takes photos of friend A because she thinks it is important to capture the muddy scenery. They laugh and friend B says that they don’t know any better. After all, some travellers are destined to tour mud-caked burrows and munch on amber. However, maybe that is better than being shown a backdrop cobbled together for your eyes only.
As evening descends they enter a bar where one group of people is playing darts while another is having fun with a karaoke machine. This Lase fellow, a good-natured musclebound mountain of a man, is celebrating his thirty-something birthday and they are invited to have a drink with him. When they go into the street a little later it is already dark and it is difficult to find the way back, but after an hour’s walk they can make out the big clock that at night gives the time and temperature on the main square. They know they are home.
As he lies in bed covered with a light duvet, friend A thinks that somewhere down there in the south it is real summer now, but he just burrows deeper under the coverlet with a special kind of shameless delight. He wakes up again around three in the morning and is momentarily startled by the pile of sweaters and shirts he has been systematically stacking into a tower on the chair, which looked like Whistler’s Mother[4] in the dark. Somewhere before morning he wakes up and decides to get up. He looks through the window at the white roofs of the low prefabs and the pale sun emerging behind the thinning canopy.
Sometimes he is alarmed by the speed with which reality transforms, the efficiency of travel, the speed with which one goes from one place to another… It is not that important to him to transport himself as much as it is to travel and he would like it to last some time, a longer time. He needs time for everything to settle and turn from a fluid impression into a solid memory.
He is excited by the thought that the North Pole is not far, though he cannot rationally explain why its proximity is important at all. He feels perfect unity with the moment he is in, aware that what he would like the most is to be exactly where he is, as if there is no better place, nor can there be. That is probably part of the sense of north.
[1] I was very surprised to find the description “Low, almost Germanic sky” as an almost identical impression in the Italian travelogue Tre uomini in bicicletta. There must be something low about that sky if that is the impression it leaves on all of us.
[2] Systembolaget – government-owned chain of liquor stores in Sweden and the only retail store allowed to sell alcoholic beverages that contain more than 3.5% alcohol by volume.
[3] Att fika (Swedish) – drink coffee with someone (usually accompanied by cake).
[4] A famous painting in oils on canvas created by the American-born painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler in 1871.
_____________________________________________________________________________
TO THE PIAZZA AND BACK AGAIN
one
A hot July morning is trying its best to make its way in through the window even though the thick wooden blinds are working just as hard to keep it out of the room. The Little One opens her eyes and shoots a quick glance at the Big One’s bed. Empty! Oh, how she hates it when anyone wakes up and begins the day before her. As if by that token they already know more than her, have something she has missed, lost, overlooked… She’ll never get that time back.
She walks down into the kitchen and sees the Big One in her pyjamas. She is sitting at the round white table and eating. She looks sick. Sick?
“What’s the matter with you, got a temperature? Since the early morning? How did that happen? That sucks…”
She sits at the table and picks up a bowl. She feels her own forehead… “Uh-oh, I feel a bit warm this morning too. I don’t know what it is, must be the water since we’re both feeling ill, can’t be anything else.”
They feel each other’s foreheads, look at one another full of understanding for the other’s troubles and slowly sip the compote from their bowls.
A few years later the house will be sold, right around the time Perast[1] becomes a tourist Mecca for the English and Russians in their conquest of the Montenegrin seaside. It was a lovely stone house, right by the old Krilović three-storey building, all overgrown and secretive though actually full of lizards and “accidentally” dropped cartons, juice boxes and bags. Ninety steps stood between them and the beach but they were clearly worth the climb, they could feel it every time they stepped into the big stone yard overgrown with vines, in the company of an old wild orange casting a shadow over the yard and yearningly looking toward the Verige strait.
Since they were in no condition to go to the beach, the only thing to do was play cards, carry their bread-and-meat-spread bearing trays upstairs, and crumple their sheets exhausted by the summer heat and sudden fatigue. If they were old they would also light up a couple, but since they are not they’ll resort to other, children’s guilty pleasures; maybe a pudding if anyone would deign to make them some. They hope someone will because when you’re sick you’re the king of the world and the ultimate focus of the adults’ attention. Anything is possible.
The fact is, back then they used to spend a vast portion of the summer at the seaside, sometimes from the beginning of July to the end of August when days turned dark and gloomy and swimming in the sea was possible only in the breaks between heavy and increasingly frequent downpours. But that surely could not have been the reason for the rhythm and concurrence of their sicknesses, there to keep them lying about in bed, eating from their trays, playing gin rummy till they drop, as if the beach was some kind of a punishment to be endured under duress, not a place to rush to enthusiastically and stay until the sun’s last caresses on the skin.
The adults could not get it. They get irritated, roll their eyes, cite that other children would give anything to be able to have what they do, a summer on the beach, but do they appreciate it, no… Then they move into a more direct attack: You will go to the beach and we do not want to see you for the next two hours. So they go, make an appearance, reluctantly get into the water, it is cold, no sooner are they in do they get out again, stand around for a while and return to the house. You could not chase them away with a stick!
“How on earth could you have no one to hang out with, what with all the children milling about? The boardwalk is full of them!”
“They’re all jerks.”
“You don’t say. What, all of them?”
“Well they are.”
“Come on, off you go, down to the sports field, don’t give me that no-one-to-hang-out-with shtick, come on, let’s go, and I do not want you back before dinnertime.”
So they go to the field, turn around and agree to say that there was no one there. But first they have to mill around not to be too transparent and return after fifteen minutes. But soon, there they are, back, it’s hopeless. Asocial, that’s what they are. The folks go ballistic, they do not know what to do with them so they finally let them do what they want with the wan hope that puberty would do its bid.
two
“Could you believe it, it was easier for us to get sick than to go to the beach, can you believe that mindset.”
“Insane”, the Little One laughs. “Do you remember, every time we went somewhere, the moment we got down the steps I’d have to go right back up to use the toilet. We’d barely reach the end of the staircase and I’d do an about face to zip right up. It drove the folks crazy. Pavlovian reflex.”
“In a word – idiot children. Especially you when you got in a mood!”
“Cannot deny that… Buster Keaton[2], mom used to call me. We go to the green market and she is annoyed by the fact that I cannot spare the vendors a smile, come on, one smile, she says, doesn’t cost you anything, just don’t stand there like Buster Keaton, it annoyed her, she could not see what the problem was, and I just go, why should I smile when there is nothing funny. When something funny happens, I’ll smile.”
“Yeah, you were one serious kid alright. And painfully naïve. Screaming your lungs out for ice-cream but grandma won’t give you any because she thinks it is too cold for you so she fills a cone with pop-corn and you lick and lick at them, wishing they were ice-cream, as they keep dropping around you in a circle…”
“Naïve then and naïve now. If you tell me it’s ice-cream, I’ll believe you. No wonder I had so much pop-corn in my life.”
three
And so puberty came. A hot summer evening and smells of different perfumes mingling with the smell of pots and creels on the docks nearby. Chatting and drinking beer, eating ice-cream and pancakes. If she is in the mood, one of the most wonderful girls on the boardwalk likes to do a bridge with very little persuading. Then the others applaud because for them the bridge is a remarkable feat. They look at the stars, so many of them that their gaze dissipates in the attempt to even remotely count them. When their bladder is full they rush somewhere, anywhere but home because there are too many steps to keep running to the piazza[3] and back again. Different people happen by telling different stories. There are as many madmen as the stars in the sky. If it is early August they can see the Tears of Saint Lawrence[4]. Once, the Little One, when she was a little bigger, counted no less than eleven shooting stars.
They soon enter a phase when the bay is too small and they have to run from the rains that descend upon it in late summer, so they do not shrink from venturing onto the open sea every day. They throw themselves into the waves and jump from rocks. There was a time when they used to run into the sea the moment a downpour started because swimming in the rain is the best, but later they learned that it is dangerous and that took all the fun out of it. In time, their fear of sharks grew into an honest to god phobia though it was as realistic as the fear of crocodiles in the Sava[5] river. But, you can never be too careful.
Though they claim it is essential to have shiny earrings to fling at the beast when it approaches to distract it or just keep your wits about you and kick the bitch in the nose because that is its most vulnerable spot and then elegantly swim to shore with your best butterfly stroke while it’s left to wonder what the hell happened, it always seemed to her that she would just tell the shark bon appetite if they were ever to have a close encounter and lie back to make for an easier meal.
When they sit on the wide stone step at the entrance to the yard, they look straight at the hill hiding the place with the highest rainfall in Europe. It is clear all through July, but clouds accumulate in late August introducing an element of distress into the picture, the kind without which beauty is incomplete.
The sea is at its best at the beginning of September, when summer dies and autumn approaches.
The sky is always blue and the days are sunny, but it is a cool and faded sun. In times like these one gets the feeling that the Earth is travelling to a new place, sinking deeper and clearing a path toward something dark and new.
four
In time, south moved further southward and it became clear that Greece is more than the blazing crowded hub bunches of tourists flock to in the summer, wanting to experience the highlight of the year only to, immediately after, return to the simultaneously loved and hated everyday like a fallout shelter they feel protects them from outside threats and life itself, and at the same time, buries them alive. That is where they will rush to buy their next ten days of freedom which should, if all goes well, come in a mere 265 days. Oh, it’ll fly by!
You can discover all manner of things when you veer off the beaten path. Unusual vegetation, smells and colours, small villages hiding even smaller ones, just a couple of houses inhabited by people complaining of poverty even though when you get the chance to peek into the interior of their dwellings you can see that some are better equipped than apartments in the centre of Belgrade. Old women acting or looking like old men and old men acting or looking like old women, stony tracks leading nowhere, tiny churches no bigger than a phone booth, blind men giving directions, sheep scattered in dark green yards backing onto olive groves, precipitous paths leading to beaches worth the twenty-minute descent carrying your bike across your shoulders, secluded little cafes opened by IT students back to their distant native islands defeated by the inability to find any kind of work in Athens. Still, they concede it is difficult being a mediocrity and shrug graciously while a wave of open admission that maybe they did not try hard enough washes over their face. They intend to give their point of origin a try. As luck would have it, it turns out they are familiar with at least one URL[6], Ur Really Lost! cocktail unknown to probably any metropolis and the ingredients for which they borrow from the local ecosystem and, naturally, will not reveal for love or money.
The south is also the cunning ploy of a bronzed seductor who whistles at you to make you turn, and when you look too closely to the horizon calls out Hey, baby, the view is not over there, it’s here! South is also the somewhat more skillful Italian negotiator who first gives you directions but asks for recompense in the form of a kiss, the cheek will do, or meets you on a Roma bus or train and then lures you outside with the intention of taking you further into the night, but if he finds you not to be that easy a target, he hastily stuffs you back into the next train or bus so that you don’t have the time to process what just happened and speeds off. No time to lose, all is haste. A perfect amalgamation of tension and casualness like the simultaneous sense of lightness and weight brought on by high temperatures even in the late nigh hours. The south is also the island under the Boot where grapes of happiness grow in Avola, where on the slopes of the “mountain with hiccups”[7] a traveller feels to be on a different planet and where a person can sit down with a recent inhabitant of Sicily to have a glass of white from red[8], talk about everything, as well as not say a thing despite everything, and being silent with someone and enjoying it is a sign of a special relationship.
five
Still, the south is also strings of superfluous words, spoken despite the thirst, the shouts of street fruit and vegetable vendors, watermelon halves invaded by ravenous insects, artificial exhaustion at midday and endless siestas leaving the starving tourist, just hours after noon, in a check-mate of agony.
When the Little One was little, the north was the area at the top of a map, and the south was the thing underneath, and accordingly – west was left and east was right. Objects in space functioned according to the same principle; north was, obviously, in front, south behind, and the east and west in their rightful places. The world was a place brimming with certainties.
However, our view of the world, often at an unconscious level, still relies on these childish perceptions, because it is important for us to go up and down, just to avoid level ground, to exhaust ourselves climbing, only to be rewarded by the descent. I’ll go up to them and then down to the city.
North could also be where the head is and start where the lungs fill with oxygen when you inhale the sharp air by an open window. Among other things, south could be down where we feel the summer heat dry the thought and invigorate the urges; in the direction the hand glides down the stomach to slip between the thighs. An intoxicating, exciting and warm place, full of perfumes, joy, fireworks, comfort.
Above all, comfort.
[1] Perast is an old town in the Bay of Kotor in Montenegro.
[2] Buster Keaton (1895-1966) American film actor and director, popular comedian of the silent era – “The Great Stone Face”, the actor who never smiled.
[3] La Piazza (Ital.) – square, a commonly used term along the Adriatic coast.
[4] The Perseids – known as The Tears of Saint Lawrence, are the best known meteor shower that happens once a year, with maximum activity usually the night between 12th and 13th August.
[5] The Sava – a river that feeds into the Danube in Belgrade, their confluence is one of the Serbian capital’s major features.
[6] URL – Uniform resource locator or web address is a complex string of characters.
[7] Mount Etna – according to a saying a volcano is a mountain with hiccups.
[8] White wine made from red grapes.
Translated by: Mirjana Slavkovski
VERNAKERA 