Europe in Sepia

NOSTALGIA

NEW YORK, ZUCCOTTI PARK

I visited New York in October 2011, and a couple of days after arriving, I set off for Wall Street, not having checked the exact location of Zuccotti Park. Coming out of the subway, I fortunately spotted an information kiosk.

“Excuse me, where’s the, ah. . revolution?” I asked goofily.

“Just go straight on, it’s a few blocks away,” replied a young guy, his face spreading into a smile. Buoyed by the smile, I got going. As the rhythm of my pulse quickened, I wondered whether a long dormant rebel virus was stirring in me. Rebel?! Well, yeah, when you line up a few historical and personal details, it’s fair to say that rebellion and I are well acquainted.

My parents conceived me around the time when Tito said his famous NO to Stalin. I came into the world in 1949, when the Soviet Union and its fraternity of member states had recently accused Yugoslavia of “deviating from the path of Marxism and Leninism.” The same year Tito was declared a traitor and Yugoslavia condemned to isolation. I was born on March 27. On the same date, albeit eight years previously, the slogan Better the grave than a slave, better war than the pact¹ was born. It was one I adopted at a tender age, and in time I developed a form of behavior, which psychologists — so adept at creating new terms — would today classify as LAT (Low Authoritarianism Tolerance) syndrome. It’s entirely possible that Tito’s famous NO to Stalin set me on my way as a budding naysayer. The opening line of The Internationale, “Arise, damned of the Earth,” makes my skin tingle; Bandiera Rossa makes me cry. While children in other countries flicked through The Teddy Bears’ Picnic, my picture book story of choice was about a young man named Danko.² Brave Danko tears his heart from his chest, lighting the way for a cowering crowd trapped in a deep, dark forest, and leads them into a sunny clearing. Danko ends up dead, of course, alone and abandoned, what else. The part where some imbecile, having just crawled out of the darkness and into the light, steps on Danko’s still beating heart took root in my imagination forever. An unproductive affinity for dreamers who use their hearts as batteries has followed me unfailingly ever since.

By the time I got to grade school, together with my classmates I sent letters of support to Patrice Lumumba, imprisoned somewhere in distant Congo. As a girl I pronounced the names Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Kwame Nkrumah, and Sirimavo Bandaranaike, leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement, with the same ease that today’s kids pronounce Rubeus Hagrid, Albus Dumbledore, and Alastor “Mad-Eye” Moody. There’s no mystery in it; I was twelve when the Non-Aligned Movement held its first conference in Belgrade. I protested against the war in Vietnam, even though I wasn’t a hundred percent sure where Vietnam was. I spent my childhood sincere in the belief that everyone in the world — black, yellow, white, whatever — had the right to freedom and equality.

On the approach to Zuccotti Park I spent a moment checking my pulse. I wondered whether the slogan Power to the workers, peasants and honest intelligentsia hadn’t done a number on me, and in this respect, whether my compatriots, those who twenty years ago accused me of being “Yugonostalgic,” might have had it right after all. At the time I publically opposed the hysteria of nationalism, when I should have realized that nationalism is a matter of profit, not feeling. I opposed the war, when I should have accepted the thesis that war is just business, a way to make money by other means. My compatriots cottoned on to these things from the outset, and unperturbed, ran roughshod over the top of me, reenacting what the aforementioned imbecile from my picture book did to Danko’s beating heart. Drawing near to Zuccotti Park, I wondered whether that old revolutionary fervor had been hibernating in me, lying in wait for its chance to come out, now, at the wrong time, and in a place I would have least suspected.

YUGONOSTALGIA

I found myself back in America having accepted a kind invitation from Oberlin College in Ohio, where they had organized a lecture series entitled Remembering Communism: The Poetics and Politics of Nostalgia. The Oberlin invitation momentarily boosted my tattered, veteran’s self-confidence. It quickly atrophied. After twenty years of digging through the ruins, what more could I say about nostalgia, except from that, for me, it has long since lost its draw. The thought of getting down to work induced only fatigue. An insuperable mass of written and as-yet-unwritten texts swelled before me, my own and those of others. Then came the books, films, images, stories, memoirs, symbols and souvenirs, enough to fill an enormous storeroom, a chaotic archive in which all manner of things had settled: seminal theoretical texts such as Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia; popular films such as Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin; visual art projects such as the installations of Ilya Kabakov; the heap of random exhibits that had strayed their way in there.

But who gets to play supreme arbiter and rule on an exhibit’s belonging or non-belonging? The “archive” itself produces nostalgia only while it remains in chaos, while used as a storeroom, only while its existence remains “illegal.” The work of postcommunist and (in the Yugoslav case) postwar artists — self-appointed archivists, “collectors of ruins,” “doctors of nostalgia,” “archeologists of the everyday”—only makes sense as a voluntary undertaking, and only when accompanied by the artist’s recognition of the futility of his or her work. As soon as the work achieves “recognition,” it immediately becomes susceptible to manipulation (although in itself worthless, nostalgia can still be a valuable commodity), and the energy that set it in motion vanishes. It is, parenthetically, in this disappearance that the fundamental paradox of any preoccupation with nostalgia resides: Nostalgia wipes its tracks, deceives its hunters, sabotages its researchers’ toil, never remaining what it is or was.

The Berlin Wall fell over twenty years ago. From today’s perspective it is clear that it fell in an extremely unusual manner. Instead of imploding, or simply toppling left or right, the wall crashed down from a great height, like a meteor, sending concrete dust flying everywhere. Yugoslavia collapsed two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, like a row of dominos, toppling from the north and west toward the east and south.

At the time I exchanged an invalid Yugoslav passport for a new Croatian one. Two years later, new passport in hand, I left the country, one that had only just realized its “thousand-year dream of independence.” And here’s another paradox: the smaller the nation, the longer its history. Croatia declared both its independence and its (overnight) democracy, but the slogan I had adopted all those years ago—better the grave than a slave—was somehow triggered in me (my mistake, no doubt), and I quickly catapulted myself to Berlin.

The city had entered its fifth year of life A.W. (After the Wall). Pieces of the wall crunched beneath my feet, concrete dust particles shimmering on the backdrop of the deep blue Berlin sky, like a sea filled with billions of tiny plankton. I spent 1994 living in the old western part of the city, writing my novel The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. In yet another paradox, it was Berlin, not Zagreb, that served as a generator for reminiscence, as an ideal cutting desk for the montage of memories, a lens with perfect zoom and refraction, a pair of glasses custom-made for reading the Yugoslav and East European collapse.

In the immediate wake of independence, Croatian politicians and the local media (particularly the media) introduced the lilting coinage “Yugonostalgia” as a synonym for hostility toward the newly-created Croatian state. Yugonostalgics were castigated as dinosaurs in human form, people who grieved for the death of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia, Tito, Partisans, the slogan brotherhood and unity, the Cyrillic alphabet, Yugoslav popular culture — all this stuff, and a lot of other stuff besides, was tossed into the “dustbin of history,” into a memory zone to which admittance was strictly prohibited. Accusations of Yugonostalgia whizzed back and forth past people’s heads like bullets. People erased their biographies and changed their names and places of birth, sworn atheists were baptized, restaurants scratched “Yugoslav” dishes (those believed to be Serbian) from their menus, and in school the mention of Yugoslavia in history books was reduced to a few lines. They wouldn’t even give it a picture.

My Yugonostalgia had reared its head a little earlier, when Yugoslavia was still whole and there was no tangible reason to mourn its disappearance. Nostalgia is, however, a capricious beast, visiting us on a whim, turning up for no discernible reason, ambushing us at the wrong times and in the wrong places. Back then, I was haunted by an unnerving premonition that the world around me was about to suddenly vanish. This neurosis of imminent disappearance and discontinuity transformed me into an “archeologist of the Yugoslav everyday.” I convinced myself that if I managed to preserve in memory the name of the first Yugoslav brand of chocolate, or the name of the first Yugoslav film (hardly a stretch, I admit), I could perhaps halt the impending terror of forgetting. When Yugoslavia finally sank, my neurosis took on a name — Yugonostalgia — and a definition: political sabotage of the new Croatian state. And I received epithets, too — traitor and Yugonostalgic. Eyewitness to how brutally and efficiently the confiscators of memory could erase collective memory and with it my personal history, I became a member of my own personal resistance movement. I defended myself by remembering — remembering as weapon of choice against the violence of forgetting. As opposed to theirs, my bullets killed no one. Mine had too short a range.

NOSTALGIA — A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD

Back then, the Internet had yet to enter mass usage. Today, every post-Yugoslav is able to satisfy his or her Yugonostalgic appetites. There are sites with everything from old Yugoslav films, video-clips, popular TV series, pop singers, advertisements, and design concepts, to the chairs we sat in, the kitchens we cooked in, the haircuts we wore, and the fashions we followed. Today, Yugonostalgic exhibitions are in vogue. One can buy everything from souvenir socks bearing Tito’s portrait and signature, to cookbooks with recipes for his favorite dishes. The theaters perform works with Yugonostalgic content; in documentaries interviewees speak freely of their Yugonostalgic impulses. Yugonostalgia, however, has lost its subversive quality, no longer a personal resistance movement but a consumer good. In the intervening time, Yugonostalgia has become a mental supermarket, a list of dead symbols, a crude memento mori stripped of emotional imagination.

Today, the bandit capitalism of transition is able to tolerate the presence of Yugoslav souvenirs in the ideological marketplace. Yugonostalgia only reinforces its position. How? Rather than being an entry point for serious research into and understanding of Yugoslav socialism, to a real and enduring settling of accounts between the old and the new, to a generator of productive memory — and possibly a better future — today’s commercialized Yugonostalgia has been transformed into the opposite, into a highly-effective strategy for conciliation and forgetting. Buying a pair of souvenir Tito-socks, the post-Yugoslav symbolically lifts a twenty-year ban, removing the stigma from his or her socialist past. Here, nostalgia has radically changed in essence, no longer a protest against forgetting, a polemic with the existing system, or longing for a former life (if it ever meant that), but unreserved acceptance of the present. Put baldly, bandit capitalism can easily afford to behave like the Russian oligarch, Mikhail Prokhorov, who rented the cruiser Aurora, a symbol of the October Revolution, and organized a party befitting the very richest of the rich — Russian oligarchs.

On the other hand, the irritation evinced when words such as Yugonostalgia, Yugoslavia, Yugoslav, socialism, and communism are spoken suggests that having become Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, or whatever, citizens of the former Yugoslavia still have some way to go in freeing themselves of their Yugoslav pasts. As a result, public figures, whether politicians, writers, or artists, inevitably tag an obligatory footnote to every mention of the word Yugonostalgia. Mentioning Yugoslavia doesn’t for a second mean that one mourns the country’s passing, let alone that of communism — God forbid! The exhibition Socialism and Modernity, which opened in late 2011 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, both confirms and serves to inflame an irritation that has smoldered for over two decades in Croatia and other former Yugoslav republics. Visitors to the exhibition can see the first car Yugoslavia ever produced; the first Yugoslav radio and television set; excerpts from TV shows; exemplars of fashion, furniture, architecture, and design; even a trove of old bank notes, coins, posters, and photos, but the historical context remains incredibly elusive. Yugoslavia, communism, and socialism are rarely mentioned, so one is somehow left with the impression that the modernity of the fifties and the sixties was an exclusively Croatian one, one with a dissident hue, although the nature of this dissent remains ambiguous. The exhibition’s curators seem afraid of the fact that Croatia was a Yugoslav republic at the time, that Yugoslav socialism brought modernity with it, and that the socialism and modernity of the time were an ideologically harmonious pair.

American capitalism uses nostalgia in a far more adroit, refined, and enticing manner. The Levi’s Go Forth and Go Work campaigns are examplary of how capitalism rebrands itself and thus shores up its dominant position.³ Deploying the aesthetics of devastated post-capitalist spaces (the abandoned workers’ halls of Pittsburgh and Detroit), and using amateur rather than professional models, the images in the Levi’s advertisements invoke nostalgia for erstwhile values: self-reliance, strength, honesty, work, self-respect, courage — a nostalgia for the America of the pioneers. Culled from this pioneer-America are shots of freight trains and stowaways, deserted railway tracks alongside which people trudge into an uncertain future, muscle-ripped young men bathed in sweat, scrappy bundles in hand, on their faces a visible readiness to meet life head on. Accompanying the images, phrases such as things got broken here absolve those to blame for the economic crisis of all responsibility, implying that the crisis is a kind of natural catastrophe that has afflicted everyone in equal measure. The bald exhortation we need to fix it urges people (the working class!) to spit in their palms, take matters into their own hands, and rebuild their lives—your life is your life! And, naturally, no one sets off to rebuild his or her life bare-assed. Hence the necessity of a baseline initial investment — in a pair of Levi’s.

OBERLIN, AMERICANA

Still in a daze from the change of time zone, in the morning I headed out for a walk around Oberlin. It wasn’t that there was anywhere to really go. My hotel looked out over a large park. On the opposite side of the park were the university buildings, and to my left the main street with a handful of shops, including the bookstore where in a few hours time I would be giving a reading. A modest poster taped to the inside of the window gave the date and time. The bookstore wasn’t actually just a bookstore, but a kind of general store stocking anything and everything. Feigning effort to remain incognito, I bought a useless pair of Chinese-made slippers, a waste of both money and vanity given that the sales clerk had no idea I was the person in the poster photo. Nonetheless, it was an opportunity to tip my hat to my past. The store vaguely reminded me of the old Yugoslav stores of the fifties, and so in addition to the slippers I bought a copy of my book. I felt like Allison MacKenzie, who after forty years returns to Peyton Place to buy a copy of her own book, all in the hope that the hoary bookseller might recognize her.

I began my story about Yugonostalgia in the same venue later that evening, the small audience made up of students and faculty. I think my listeners were expecting me to talk about popular conceptions of Yugonostalgia, but the morning stroll around the small town center had pulled a number of mysterious threads, and suddenly images from my childhood burst into life before me. I was born and grew up in a similar small town, minus the students and the university of course. In what passed as downtown, there was an improvised cinema in what was formerly the local hotel. My mom and I would take our places on the long wooden benches (no backrests — it was the fifties!) and watch Hollywood movies. How was it that Hollywood films were my childhood entertainment? A few years after Tito’s historic NO to Stalin, Yugoslav cinemas were flooded with Hollywood films, the best kind of ideological support. Even Tito was an avid cinephile, as was my mom, as was the little me.⁴ Bathing Beauty with Esther Williams was apparently the first Hollywood film to play in postwar Yugoslav theaters.

My favorite actor was Audie Murphy, an American hero who stood barely 5’ 3”, and weighed only around 110 lbs., but who killed 240 Germans in the Second World War, received 33 prizes for bravery, acted in 44 films (in which he killed Indians by the score), and in the end died in a plane crash. However briefly, for us children Audie Murphy was a kind of Yugoslav Peter Pan. The world was straightforward then. Fascists were our enemies. We crushed fascists, just like the Americans, just like Audie Murphy. To be fair, Stalin crushed fascists too, but he was our sworn enemy.

Other stars soon took Audie Murphy’s place: Marlon Brando, James Dean, Elvis Presley, Pat Boone, Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty. . Mom used to subscribe to a film magazine; we’d guzzle reports of our silver screen heroes and heroines like sweet candies. Many of Mom’s books were American too—An American Tragedy springs to mind. At high school I identified with Allison MacKenzie. She wrote poetry and went around with books clasped to her chest, as if they were some kind of protection. I carried my books like that for while, but then came other idols, other attractions. .

All in all, in Oberlin’s MindFair Books, it became apparent that the authentic object of my nostalgia was the America of the fifties, an America gleaned from American films shown in a small provincial theater, in a small provincial town in Nowheresville, Yugoslavia. My Yugonostalgic packet wasn’t stuffed with the usual stereotypes — the red star, the hammer and sickle, the Yugoslav national anthem — all of which my young listeners perhaps expected, but with other stereotypes — Americana, Yugo-Americana. Nostalgia had betrayed me again. Nostalgia, you bitch. .

I suspect my young listeners might not have completely understood my story, the names I tossed like confetti couldn’t have meant much to them. Two or three of my peers in the audience nodded their heads affirmatively, recalling the early years of our mutual youth. Maybe later they wondered how it was that our childhoods had been so similar, and our countries so distant and different. I neglected to mention that I also have a little habit fed by the Internet. Whenever my mind wanders to a Hollywood star or starlet of my childhood, I immediately go to Google to tell me if he or she is still alive. Esther Williams just passed away, unfortunately. But Pat Boone is still around, thank God!

NEW YORK, WASHINGTON SQUARE

From Zuccotti Park I took a stroll to Washington Square and sat down on a bench. It was late afternoon, sultry, an Indian summer. I immediately noticed that the black guys who used to play chess were missing, as were those who hung out brownbagging it. Washington Square had long been a hangout for smokers, and now a sign at the entrance warned that smoking in the park was strictly forbidden. The scamps bumming cigarettes were gone, and with them any occasion for small talk. The park seemed distressingly well ordered, like a provincial college campus. Where were the dropouts, the refuseniks, the superfluous men and women, the alcoholics and smokers, the homeless, the pickpockets, the vagrants, the hustlers? Where were the grumblers grumbling to themselves, the idlers, the beggars, the losers, the dreamers? Where were the skeptics, the envious, the good-for-nothings, the weaklings, the humiliated and insulted, the capitulators? Where were they?

On the bench opposite me I immediately recognized a middle-aged woman. She was an actress, a film actress, until recently a poster girl for a well-known cosmetics brand. I felt a sudden compassion for the lines on her face, as if they were my own. The face of a goddess was showing the first signs of capitulation. Jesus, just think how many people walk the earth waving invisible white handkerchiefs and flags! And what about me? Where do I stand in the order of things?

One of the Zuccotti Park slogans beamed out the message: Listen to the drumming of the 99 % revolution. For once I remembered to take photos. In those few days the Zuccotti kids were photographed so often that thirty years’ worth of Japanese tourists haven’t managed to take more photos of Manneken Pis, the famous little peeing boy of Brussels. And it is for this reason, this reason alone, that the drums from Zuccotti Park echoed in every corner of the globe.

From all corners, you can hear the drumming. They’re sending messages to one another, the content always the same. Whether the media will end up ridiculing and destroying the kids, whether the media industry will suck them up and spit them out as profit, whether the tractable rebels will leave the confinement of Zuccotti Park and one day take to the streets to join with those from London, Barcelona, Athens, Amsterdam, Berlin, Zagreb, Moscow, and who knows where else, is, for the moment, not important. For now they’re just drumming: The days of plenty are over!⁵

I sat on the bench, warming myself in the Indian summer sun. I let my eye wander discreetly over the actress’s figure: the indistinct charcoal-colored outfit, the stooped shoulders, the body that has obviously given up worrying what a spectator might think. The actress nodded her head. I offered a friendly nod back. She didn’t notice me. She had a mobile phone to her ear and was nodding to an unseen collocutor.

“What’s the time?” a young guy asked. I was flustered, it had been so long since a random passerby had interrupted me with the question. Nobody asks for the time anymore. I looked at my watch. In almost all time zones watches were showing the same thing. “It’s time. . for revolution,” I said. And with that I headed toward the subway.

1On March 27, 1941, demonstrations erupted in Belgrade against the signing of the Triple Pact. Demonstrators bravely took to the streets shouting slogans against Hitler and Mussolini. The slogan (in the original) “Bolje grob nego rob, bolje rat nego pakt” was later plucked from its historical context and engraved in the collective memory of many Yugoslavs as artfully rhyming revolutionary code.

2The reference here is to Maxim Gorki’s short story “The Old Woman Izergil.”

3Sarah Banet-Weiser offers an astute analysis of the trend in the Dutch documentary Metamorfose van een crisis (Aftermath of a Crisis).

4Yugoslav film director Dušan Makavejev once wittily remarked that Yugoslavia’s disintegration began the moment Tito opted to appoint not a sole personal movie operator, but one for each of the six Yugoslav republics.

5The translated title and catchphrase of the German-Austrian film Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei (2004), distributed in English as The Edukators.

EUROPE IN SEPIA

LATELY I’VE CAUGHT myself turning the faces and hues of Central Europe into photographs, an automatic click on an internal camera and I’m done. A second later an iPhoto program whirrs inside me: import — effects — sepia — done. It’s as if the surrounding reality is a screen, stuck to my hand an invisible remote with three options: past, present, future. But only one of them works: past, sepia.

Maybe a recent sleepless night in Bratislava triggered the reflex. The hotel room had an unusual “dummy” window, facing not outward to the exterior, but inward, to the reception desk. I kept the window closed and the curtains drawn, both of which appeared to increase the density of the claustrophobia in the air. Having given up trying to fall asleep, it was probably around two in the morning when I opened the new edition of The Economist and stared long at a map of Europe divided into three-color zones. An alarming red color marked countries in recession, yellow the countries somehow muddling through, and green the absence of recession. Slovakia, Estonia, and Slovenia were alone in the green zone; news reports the next day announced that Slovenia had just slipped into yellow. In the hope it might send me to sleep, I browsed a tourist brochure I’d picked up at the reception. On a map of Slovakia, a settlement bearing my name northwest of Bratislava caught my eye. Rather than surprise or delight (look, the little spot and I have the same name!), in a flash of recognition I was overcome by the fact that ours was a kinship based on inconsequence and insignificance. Ah, that Slavic linguistic sisterhood, dub — dubrava, all those forests and woods, leaves and oaks, hills and valleys, water and wetlands, in Slovak all so painfully similar to my native tongue. My eye glides sullenly over the Slovak place names as if searching for lice. There’s Slovensky Grob, and look, Chorvatsky Grob. . Grob — brijeg — grb — brlog — graba. Grave — hill — crest — den — dike. (Shouldn’t Zagreb actually be Zagrob, a burial place, not merely a settlement next to a humdrum hill or commonplace dike?) The margins of the brochure teem with advertisements: roast duck, goulash, gingerbread hearts, girls in national dress wearing flower wreaths in their hair. . and then there are the bold harbingers of the new time: Thai massages, a sushi bar. .

I wondered about my sullenness and what lay at its root. It’s entirely possible that as a child I had been wound not according to Greenwich time, but rather to a socialist clock, one always rushing on ahead into the brighter future, toward progress, a tomorrow envisaged as a majestic fireworks display of a thousand shapes and colors. Maybe my childhood imagination — tattooed with the heroism of a little dog named Laika and the promise of an impending trip to the moon — permanently adrenalized the horizons of my expectations? Or had technological innovations perverted my horizons, and now, appetite unchecked, I expect the surrounding reality to behave like a 3D film, more impressive than its actual self? Isn’t my sullenness the recognition that I’d set off for a place I’d categorically never set foot before, and lo and behold arrived “home”? Maybe I carry a Central European blueprint with me everywhere, and on entering the Central European zone I compare my internal sketch with the situation on the ground, my copy with the hues of my surroundings, utterly incapable of finding pleasure in the beauty of small differences. Doesn’t my sullenness lie in the uncanny confrontation with my own position on the map? I mean, we all scratch where it itches most. Didn’t I, preparing for the trip, toddle through the Internet and the history of Slovak literature and catch myself reading with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, the exact same way I would read the history of Croatian literature, and that consequently, among the forlorn names of Slovak writers I can easily imagine my own? Wasn’t a sleepless night in a Bratislava hotel room with a dummy window facing the interior simply a painful confrontation with my own insignificance? If that’s how it was, what the hell is with my “colonial” arrogance, this eruption of an almost actionable political incorrectness, my arbitrary establishing of coordinates of significance and insignificance? Why do crappy pictures of plates of goulash induce nausea and not good cheer? I’m no vegetarian. I have no call for sullenness; Slovakia is not my country, I’m here for the first time and as a guest, the hotel room with the dummy window isn’t my apartment, my hosts are exceptionally gracious, goulash is a tasty dish, Bratislava a city on the Danube, and the Danube—Dunav — Duna — Dunaj — Donau — Danube — Tuna — Dunărea—a river with its source in the Black Forest and its mouth at the Black Sea. .

Spanning the Danube and leading into Bratislava is what is once more (as of 2012) known as the Bridge of the Slovak National Uprising, a communist architectural hangover resembling a giant two-legged robot, its head shaped like a Pyrex dish, in which sat a rotating restaurant. Roast duck on his plate and his head in the clouds, a communist Slovak might well have felt he held the whole world in the palm of his hand. For a time, towers with rotating restaurants were ubiquitous, communist architectural chic. In the restaurant atop the TV tower on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz the waitresses dress in retro-style GDR uniforms, giving their all to be as slow as they were in the good old days. Maniacal communism had maniacal architectural pretensions. Many still hold the Stalinist Seven Sisters of Moscow (and their cousins in Warsaw, Kiev, Prague, and Riga) for architectural farce, though the skyscrapers were built on American models and differ little from those in New York.

Known for a time as the “New Bridge,” Bratislava’s Bridge of the Slovak National Uprising lowers one down into the sleepy heart of the old town, where an affectingly Lilliputian statue of Maria Theresa on horseback greets the visitor. Like a toy stolen from a kindergarten, Maria Theresa sits opaquely in the November fog. With the faded yellows and greens of its façades, Bratislava seems half-deserted and unusually quiet, the fog like a silencer. From this side of the Danube, the bridge appears in the same fog as a grandiose futuristic promise.

We ten intellectuals are in town to talk of the escalation of the Euro crisis, of fear and uncertainty, of the fragile fabric of contemporary social and state structures, and of the humiliating absence of future projections. The majority of us are writers; on demand we play amateur sermonizers. The “professionals,” those who really know their stuff, are in the negligible minority. Cultural managers, smalltime NGO bosses, editors of obscure magazines, university lecturers, students and volunteers — everyone is here. My “tribe.” Summoned we gather, give each other a passing sniff, wag our tails, bark a little, and then we withdraw. . until the next time. EU pennies tinkle down invisible pipes from Brussels, gratefully collected by the hands of those who call us to assembly. Only one of our number is a “star.” He puts in a brief appearance, explaining to the assembled that — ecologically speaking — beef goulash has had its day: Cow dung emits way too many harmful gasses. Ecologists at least know what they’re talking about when they talk about the future, or perhaps more to the point, no one doubts that they know. Seeking our devotion, our sacrifice, and our faith, ecologists are our modern prophets. When they say the end is nigh, it’s believing time.

Crisis, crississ, crisssissss—the word buzzes among the old theater walls like a pesky fly. We pass down a narrow corridor, peek into the make-up room and wardrobe, stumble over dusty props, and there we are on a little stage, floodlit by antiquated spotlights and the faces of the audience. We talk, our words visibly frayed, banging into each other like heads against a wall. The air is stifling, there’s a yawn in the audience, a lack of oxygen, the theater becomes cramped. We welcome the interval with relief, and in the foyer fortify ourselves with coffee. One of my tribe, a petite woman with a pretty face and prim posture is wearing children’s mittens. Her hands bear a striking resemblance to plush paws. Her companion offers an explanatory footnote: “Her nightgown was synthetic, that’s why she suffered so. It was remarkably fortuitous the fire didn’t get her face.” His voice is subdued and cold, as if he’s worn out the emotional charge through overuse. The woman is a Polish émigré, a true European, dazzlingly fluent in several languages. Her prim fragile figure and paw-mittens induce a taut mixture of discomfort and sympathy. I excuse myself and search for the exit. In a second foyer sit two catatonic doormen, ghosts of communism, staring wide-eyed at a television screen. Although heady images of the demonstrations in Zuccotti Park beam live on all international channels, they stare transfixed at a Mexican soap. There’s a bench just outside the exit obviously intended for smokers. A Russian colleague lolls about, puffing away like a night clerk outside a communist hotel. I join him. At first we smoke in silence, then we chat a little about Russian oligarchs. Great guys, he says, smart, well-read, novels by their bedsides. One bought an English daily, another a chain of English bookstores, Russian literature’s bound to make inroads into the western market now. Yeah, what you can do, it’s the law of the jungle out there, the weakest goes to the wall. For him personally there’s no crisis, things have actually never been better. Two Slovak girls join us, a fair relief. I notice a Central European melancholy discreetly shading their faces like a fine foundation. Or is it just their long eyelashes?

Central, Eastern, Southeastern Europe. . It’s a landscape I know like the back of my hand. They were different in the time of communism; only the iconography was the same. Now it’s as if the fall of communism has felled the differences. I know how people here breathe, the way they hide themselves, playing dead like a fox in a fable, peasant cunning. They lower their gaze in conversation with outsiders, practiced in the art of restrained movement, answering every question with I don’t know—that I don’t know always accompanied by a wistful smile. They swallow the dumpling of betrayal on a daily basis, fret about making ends meet, walking on tiptoes to prevent a breach, as if expecting the dam to burst and the envisaged flood to sweep away all in its path. They don’t try planting flowers — gardening is a belief in the future, and they have no future. Peasant fatalism and moronic sayings are all that remain for them: A man needs a full belly and empty balls; we’ve always got by, we always will somehow. They huddle together, withdraw into their own shells, shrinking to their true dinky stature, only to then peddle this dinkiness as their chief virtue. They’re hawkers of cheap souvenirs, angel figurines everywhere, the Slovaks stealing them from the Poles, the Czechs from the Slovaks. Croats sell gingerbread hearts and bags of lavender. Few display any imagination — imagination doesn’t sell. They want UNESCO to protect their non-material resources; the Croats have already hocked off kulen and soparnik.¹ Yes, they live off souvenirs, like European Indians in a European reservation. Honey cookies, gingerbread, a bit of folklore, embroidery and lacework, olive oil from handpicked olives, traditional local recipes. At the markets in Vienna these Indians (Serbs? Gypsies? Macedonians?) sell fake Roman coins and fibulas. Their squaws — women with bleached hair and faces roasted like Chinese smoked duck (sun beds are still in fashion) — are ragpickers, traders in “original fakes,” clothing, caps, and scarves. Everyone sells his or her bric-a-brac. Yes, the future is definitely elsewhere. In the time of communism watches sped ahead, now they go backwards. To bridge the time difference, today parents herd their kids toward Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong, and Asia. No, not to Western Europe — that’s all over. Sure, after the fall of the Wall everyone perked up a bit, breathed a sigh of relief, got comfy in their new statelets. But you have to pay to play, so some stole, others slaughtered, and others just enjoyed a little bum-rushing. In time their heels cooled and they bowed their heads, as if occupied by an invisible force. Now here they are, back where they always were. .

“And what do you want,” demurs my interlocutor, a Croat. Everyone has always walked all over us, and yes, we bowed our heads, shut our mouths, and divided into tribes. We Slavs are a sad people. We’ve never had, nor will we ever have, a Joyce or a Beckett. Do you know why? Because Vladimir and Estragon — that’s us. We’ve been waiting around for centuries for someone to come, to fall from the sky, waiting’s all we’ve ever done; we’re artists when it comes to waiting. Maybe that’s why, unlike others, we’ve never conquered or subjugated anyone. They’ve conquered us. Our rebellion is small beer. All we do is get drunk, smash our heads against the wall, and maybe slit our veins with broken glass from the floor. What did we inherit from the ancient Slavs? The art of breathing under water. Breathing through a reed — our authentic Slavic innovation. We’ve never been ambitious. Vienna, you say? We don’t care about Vienna, and neither do the Slovaks. Bratislava wants to be Linz, Zagreb to be Graz or Trieste, that’s the reach of our ambition. Yes, we’re endangered like Indians, hence our efforts to protect what remains: language, a little mythology, a few ancient handicrafts. Our differences are small beer too: Some of us pray to the god of rain, others to the god of sun, some do their ganga,² others blow their penny whistles. We regularly summon our ghosts, excavating our ancestors’ bones. We count for nothing, we don’t produce anything, nor do we have the money to buy anything. We are neither producers nor consumers; no one needs us, not even our own kids.

A racing pulse — tachycardia — fatigue — nausea — anxiety — crisis. The rules of etiquette didn’t prevent me fleeing Bratislava before time was called. Once home (in Croatia, in Zagreb? No, in the Netherlands, in Amsterdam!) I quickly forgot my two-day “Slovak” episode. I deleted everything. Only two pictures managed to sneak into my internal album. The tiny sculpture of Maria Theresa on horseback twinkling opaquely in the November fog, and the petite woman with the beautiful face, a child’s mittens drawn over tiny burnt hands. The two aren’t necessarily a diptych, but both are in sepia.

Brought on by a fresh incident, here “at home” a new anxiety attack soon runs me down. Geert Wilders’ party, the PVV, or Partij voor de Vrijheid, launches a website cordially inviting Dutch citizens to have their say on burning questions (Do you have problems with recent arrivals from Central and Eastern Europe? Have you lost your job because of a Pole, Bulgarian, Romanian, or some other East European?). The website is visited by tens of thousands of people giving vent to their resentment at the legal presence of Central, East, and Southern European immigrants. Poles, especially the Poles. Because it’s the Poles who are taking their jobs. Poles steal, get drunk, they’re loud and liable to criminal behavior. Poles are “human trash.”

There’s no reason for alarm. I’m not a Pole; for now I still pass as a Croat with a Dutch passport. The ex-Yugoslav and Bulgarian in me I’ll easily hush up. I’ll freeze like a fox in a fable until this storm, too, passes. I diligently pay my taxes to this water-soaked country. The damp doesn’t bother me; we, we Slavs, are used to forests and trees, leaves and oaks, water and wetlands. My memes are active, they remember the old Slavic art of breathing underwater. Maybe my anxiety attack is just a tempest in a teacup. It seems that way. For now. Until some new storm rolls in. And then everything will depend on that final drop of water, and in which direction the flood surges.

1Kulen is a spicy pork and red pepper sausage, soparnik an ancient Croatian dish from the Poljica region of Dalmatia, a kind of chard pie dating from before the Ottoman invasions.

2Ganga is a dissonant form of singing — or moreover, wailing — traditional in rural Croatia and Bosnia-Herzogovina, often performed by men standing in a circle with interlocked arms.

WITTGENSTEIN’S STEPS

1.

Pigeons are crazy about public sculptures. For a pigeon there’s no greater happiness than perching on the head of a sculpture and taking a dump. Sculptures are for people to consecrate, and pigeons to desecrate. The truth is that for some reason people are crazy about public sculptures too.

In December of last year, unidentified vandals attacked a sculpture of Marija Jurić Zagorka, a Croatian journalist and novelist. Zagorka’s literary production never got its due during her lifetime, nor for many years after her death. Had it not been for the efforts of the Zagreb Center for Women’s Studies — which, inter alia, had a statue erected in her honor in downtown Zagreb — her work would today be forgotten. The vandals sawed off the bronze umbrella on which the bronze authoress stood leaning in repose, the Center for Women’s Studies whipped up a media frenzy, and the city fathers promptly committed to appropriating funds for a new umbrella. Appalled by the ugly incident, the next day many Zagreb residents laid old umbrellas at the statue’s feet. There you go, that’s canonization for you!

Croats might not be pigeons, but they still suffer a fatal attraction for public monuments. Since Croatia gained independence in 1991, many monuments to the victims of fascism have suffered damage. The majority took place in the immediate post-independence years, a time of anti-Yugoslav (anti-Serbian, and anti-communist) hysteria. The new authorities had a fair degree of empathy for vandal passions provoked by collective Croatian traumas. In historical perspective, the Croatian reaction confirmed a paradox: Trauma is sometimes greatest where there is least cause; anti-communist hysteria proved most vehement where communism itself had been most benign.

2.

The truth is, even I didn’t really pay monuments any mind until I discovered a surprising truth: Most people engage in vandalism for the cash, not out of ideological or aesthetic convictions. Everyone in Holland knows who’s most enamored with copper and bronze. Yes, the Poles. In February of this year statues were stolen from atop graves in the Dutch settlements of Norg and Vries. Rheden lost a statue of the writer Simon Carmiggelt, and, wary of new thefts, a statue of Queen Beatrix was spirited away into storage. A couple of years ago a public sculpture of a mother and child, erected in memory of the victims of the Second World War, was stolen from Marienberg. In 2007 a copy of Rodin’s The Thinker was stolen in Laren. The cities of Zwolle and Nijmegen recently resolved to put their public statues in safekeeping, and in Eindhoven the police have fitted public sculptures with GPS units. If the sculptures from Eindhoven go for a stroll, the police will know where to find them. The list of Polish sins is long: Anything with a glint of copper is a target for Polish thieves. If the trains aren’t running, it’s because the Poles have ripped out the copper cables. If there’s a power loss, it’s because the Poles have pilfered the copper cables from a few windmills, the pride of the Dutch national landscape. If a remnant from the First World War explodes in the Ypres region, it’s because the Poles (ah, those moles!) have been burrowing the fields in search of copper, happy to accept the risks. The Dutch — for whom the Germans, who thieved Dutch bicycles at the close of the Second World War, had long been the preferred enemy — now blame the Poles for everything. In the settlement of Menaldum the police seized the bicycles of Polish workers living at the Schatzenburg trailer park, convinced they were stolen. It turned out the bikes had been given to the Poles by their employer so they’d be able to ride to work. “Poles” (a collective term for all East Europeans, of whom Poles are simply the most numerous) most often live in what the Dutch refer to as “Polish hotels,” which in reality means in cabins or camp trailers on the peripheries of the burgs where they work. The Dutch rent camp trailers to Poles for between fifty and eighty euro a week. That’s why many Poles prefer to sleep in tents. “Poles like working in Dutch horticulture. How can I best explain it? It’s a matter of chemistry. Dutch growers and Poles are like peas in a pod.” That’s how Johan de Jong, the avuncular general director of Holland Contracting, explained things to the media. He’s just one of the many Dutch who help Poles earn a wage in Holland, the average wage for undocumented labor being about four euro an hour, and it goes without saying that most Polish labor is indeed such.

There’s a legend about how a couple of Dutch discovered copper wire while fighting over who had dibs on a copper coin they’d spotted in the street. The Poles have now got themselves mixed up in the story. In almost every country the greatest thefts are perpetrated by natives—in Holland, the Dutch; in Croatia, the Croats; in Poland, the Poles — snugly protected by myths of great theft and devastation being the work of others, chiefly foreigners. Sometimes that other is a Gypsy, sometimes a Jew, other times it’s a Pole, Romanian, Serb, or Albanian. There’s no voice of reason that might prevent an embittered Dutchman from accusing a Pole of thieving cabbages from his garden. That’s just how things are for the moment.

Poles don’t steal cabbages. Poles steal bronze and copper. Not even Slovaks steal cabbage. Slovaks steal teeth. In a video clip he filmed himself and uploaded to the Internet, a Slovak recently admitted that he’d long been burgling the graves of famous people buried at the Zentralfriedhof, Vienna’s central graveyard. The teeth-stealing Slovak initially made off with the watches of the deceased, but soon figured he might earn more on celebrity teeth. Apart from those of Johann Strauss and Johannes Brahms, who forensics experts have confirmed are missing teeth, the Slovak claims to be hoarding the teeth of many other famous dead, prompting the Viennese police to open the graves of Beethoven, Schubert, Schönberg, and others, just to check if all bones are present and accounted for. Charges are pending against the unusual Slovak with a fetish for pillaging celebrity skeletons’ teeth.

3.

I went to Ireland in June of this year. A Dublin friend and I set off by car for Doolin, and from there took a small boat to Inisheer, the smallest of the three Aran Islands. Lashed by a stormy silver sea and menaced by a sky of black-gray clouds, Inisheer was a place of dramatic desolation. In a local café—the house of one of the islanders — you could buy hand-knitted scarves and caps, grab a coffee from the vending machine, and try a piece of local apple strudel, all of which we dutifully did. From the tight-lipped proprietress, who never set down her knitting needles, we learned there was a doctor on the island, a Croat from Zadar. Making our way down the road to the ferry terminal we came across a lonely figure, a man pushing two bicycles, wearing a suit splattered in white paint, on his nose a huge pair of glasses with yellowed lenses. The glasses could have been those of a con man, a motorcyclist, or a scuba diver, but who would know.

“Excuse me, do you live here?”

“Aaaa. .”

An indiscernible sound emerged from the man’s mouth.

“And might you know where the local doctor lives?”

“Aaaa. .” he pointed off into the distance.

“You’re not Irish?”

“Iiii. . Latvian. .” he said, his mouth spreading into a toothless grin.

Our interlocutor had a dark-red complexion, as islanders in the north seas often do, bloodshot from constant exposure to the assaults of the wind, almost as if perma-tanned — but inside out. He was, I think, blind drunk.

Like our lonely Latvian on Inisheer, at least two-hundred-thousand Poles and other East European immigrants have made their way to and through Ireland in recent years, and it’s fair to say that the Irish love affair with “Easterners” is over. Unemployment is soaring, and demands that “Poles” be banned from residing in the country for more than two years are becoming increasingly shrill.

4.

In Dublin I set off for the National Botanic Gardens, where even die-hard Dubliners are thin on the ground. Home to over seventeen thousand plant species from around the globe, the gardens were founded at the end of the eighteenth century by the Royal Dublin Society. Biodiversity is the gardens’ ideological plume and pride. My attention was drawn to plaques mounted next to certain plants, emblazoned with the question Why is it a problem in Ireland? and an explanation of said problem in somewhat smaller type. These eye-catching “wanted posters” taught me a lot: for example, that the South American Gunnera tinctoria, which grows to a height of two meters, is particularly invasive. Wherever Gunnera tinctoria takes root, native flora just doesn’t stand a chance, and consequently this ambitious plant is soon to be banned. The same applies to the giant rhubarb, and this is entirely understandable; a fleeting glance at its mighty leaves is enough to sow fear. Sasa palmata, a wide-leafed Japanese bamboo that grows to three meters, is likewise a threat to native flora; native sons are strangled dead wherever this particular Japanese immigrant takes root. The impressively named Rhododendron × superponticum is a hybrid that gladly leaps garden fences, integration and adjustment an absolute breeze. But rumor has it that it sabotages the regeneration of native trees and so it too is threatened with permanent expulsion from Ireland. The Asian Rosa rugosa, a pretty rose-colored shrub that grows on sand dunes alongside the ocean and speeds the erosion of native sands, is best described as a kind of floral Trojan horse. And so its time has also been called; every further contact with Irish soil is to be officially banned. Crassula helmsii, an aquatic invader that launched its invasion of Ireland from far-off New Zealand, is particularly noxious; resistant to frost, once it takes root it’s impossible to dig out.

Some species propagate so quickly that they’ve changed the face of the Irish landscape. A worried taxi driver treated me to a passionate tirade against floral immigrants, singling out the cordyline palm, which in New Zealand goes by the rather unromantic name of cabbage tree. “Ireland never looked like this!” he moaned. “It’s all because of those damn palms!” And, it’s true, some parts of Ireland, particularly at dusk, look like suburbs of Los Angeles.

Quite parenthetically, in Dublin I was a guest at a literary festival, which had nothing to do with my native soil, with the former Yugoslavia, present-day Croatia, or the Balkans. The moderator at my event, an affable fellow, confessed to me that he had no connection with what I was to talk about either, but that the organizers had asked him to be involved when they found out his long-deceased mother was a product of Croatian terroir. Who knows, perhaps the organizers had visited Croatia at some point and it’d seemed to them that Croats could only manage alongside other Croats, and perhaps they’d simply thought I’d feel more at ease with an Irishman whose mother was a Croat than an Irishman whose mother was an Irishwoman or who-knows-what. I felt a bit like a cabbage they’d intercepted at the border without a botanical visa, but I certainly didn’t hold it against the fine people of Dublin. Dublin — a city that has named its two imposing bridges after writers, one after Beckett, the other after Joyce — won my heart forever. The Croatian mother thing could’ve happened anywhere, because as far as that thing is concerned, it’s just how most Europeans are. Yes, Europe is organized like the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin; everyone wears a plaque bearing his details around his neck — point of origin, level of invasiveness, and threat posed to native specimens all clearly documented.

But what has all this got to do with Wittgenstein? The National Botanic Gardens are also home to a glasshouse full of tropical plants, which you enter down three steps. Ludwig Wittgenstein spent the winter months of 1948–49 in Dublin. A bronze plaque mounted on one of the steps claims that Wittgenstein liked to sit on the steps and write. I sat down and let my mind wander. What did I think about? Nothing very scientific. About how Europe in its entirety is irreparably tribal, how practiced it is in the art of world wars, and how this makes a new one a constant possibility. This time because of a “Pole”; because of that Latvian on Inisheer; because of a Serb or a Croat, both practiced in desecrating each other’s headstones; because of that Slovak who steals teeth from skeletons; or for some other reason — for the usual reason, money. Then the thought occurred to me that Wittgenstein might well have been sitting on these steps at the very moment my mother gave birth to me. And then, having severed the umbilical cord, I asked myself what in my life — a chaotic hold in which a socialist childhood, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, civil war, new passports and fractured identities, betrayals, exile, and a new life in a West European country all mix and mingle — what in my lifetime had actually been realized of all the things promised to us by communist ideologues, Hollywood films, the dapper ideologues of consumerism, the homespun ideologues of nationalism, the ideologues of European unification, by gurus of every stripe and shade?

The question bore into me like a poisonous thorn, my heart began to pound and I was overcome with fear, a sudden fear of the empty screen, of the absence of future projections. . So what, said a consoling internal voice, why do we need future projections — in the near future we’re to live much longer, at least on average (who still wants to live longer in a world like ours?!); and we’re sure to live better (no one’s promising that anymore!); and even if we don’t live better, we’re definitely going to live in greater freedom (yeah right!), in a world without borders (pull the other one!); in a world of solidarity and justice (enough already!); in a world of solidarity and justice we’re going to live like slaves: like s-l-a-v-e-s (hey now, hey now!); don’t get hung up on the details, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one. Wittgenstein, old boy, you’re bleating, it’s the only thing you know how to do. I’m not bleating, I just know that a man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push. .

And amazingly, following Wittgenstein’s instructions, my terrified thoughts pried opened the door, fluttered their way outside and raced off toward the Asiatic steppes; my thoughts deftly leapt the frothy crests of waves on the Indian Ocean, soaring above the snowy Nepalese peaks: My thoughts skated the slipstream down onto the plains, slinking through the grass like tigers; God, there was almost nothing my hyper-mobile thoughts, my sensuous thoughts, my thoughts, seductive like a National Geographic clip, couldn’t manage. There, on Wittgenstein’s steps, I calmed my racing pulse, ssshhh, and renounced the prognosis I’d just offered: Bury those fears, forget that nonsense, it’s just these damn gardens. I’d completely forgotten. I was in the stifling heat of the tropics.

MICE SHADOWS

YES, INDEED, TIME and space, the ends of the earth, and all manner of things besides, can in a given moment become muddled, inducing a jagged sense of internal terror. For months we’re oblivious and inured, then our fingernail catches a chance thread, and pulling on it, reality, like a woolen jumper, unravels before our eyes. Sometimes it’s a noise that gets to us; the disarming crash of a dropped glass, the shattering of a porcelain cup ringing out like a child’s scream, the creaking of wormholes in the night, the barely audible patter of mouse paws. Sometimes it’s the routine but unforeseeable situation that unsettles us; a delayed flight, a tedious hold-up in traffic, a gaze caught unaware. .

Who knows what pulled the thread this time? Was it the half-opened door leading from the reception of the Hotel Flanders into an adjoining room, where the melancholic face of Romy Schneider gazed out from a poster for an October 2012 film retrospective, or was it the two receptionists, little goggle-eyed gray mice, Romy’s triste counterpoints?

In late November 2012, I stood at the entrance to the Hotel Flanders in Ghent, waiting for the taxi the youthful receptionist had called for me. It was morning, the city blanketed in a fog that looked like it had every intention of hanging around until spring. Shaded by a low and murky sky, the façades of nearby buildings appeared in worse repair than they actually were. Somewhere on my left I sensed a tram I glimpsed yesterday slip by, swiftly as a blind woman, the name of its terminal station — MOSCOU — on the front. It’s entirely possible that this Moscow (yes, tram number four!), hurtling through the fog, was but a morning apparition. Yet the vertical letters to my left — SAIGON — they were no apparition; at any moment it seemed they might slide from the building’s façade and crash down onto the footpath below. Was it this moment of hostage in the fog between “Moscow” and “Saigon” that tripped the switch of my internal anxiety? Or was it yesterday’s failed attempt to pry a Ghent — Amsterdam train schedule out of the two receptionists, the pair of goggle-eyed gray mice? Online train timetables were apparently a new thing for them, and even when in a moment of final desperation I asked them to try the Deutsche Bahn site, they managed to google Deutsche Bank. Piped jazz screeched in from somewhere, and behind their mousey faces flickered the melancholic and all-empathetic smile of Romy Schneider.

Or perhaps the thread was pulled by the young conference organizer, who couldn’t give me the name of Belgium’s reigning monarch (at the time it was Albert II), soft-soaping me with the line that he wasn’t interested in European royal houses — a lame excuse for a young Anglicist specializing in Victorian literature. But on the subject of Belgium, personally he feels more German than Belgian, which naturally makes his ignorance of the Belgian monarchy all the more understandable. I look at him, hair cropped short, cleanly-shaven, hipster glasses, the chic suit and vest, the kind of polished black shoes worn to weddings and funerals — the nerd look is obviously his schtick. Above his head, like a saintly aura, an imagined PowerPoint fires up, scenes from his future professional success assembling: marriage, two children, a wife — preferably Japanese, thin as a twig — research projects, his name a toboggan run for donor money, students just like him, slimers and asskissers, ever at the ready to laugh at his every dorky joke. My gaze can’t get anywhere near his pupils. He didn’t have a handle on the King of Belgium, but he knows all about the cost of train tickets. He’ll get me the cheapest fare, one that will see me travel five hours from Ghent to Amsterdam instead of the regular two. My turn at the conference is as an unpaid keynote speaker. I’m not under the protective skirt of a university, there’s no professorly pension waiting for me, I’m of no use as a referee for this or that scholarship, this or that job — why shouldn’t he save forty euro and have me travel five hours instead of two? This is his moment. Isn’t Your time is now! the slogan for a brand of men’s luxury watches? The Twitter-bird perches on the conference program, he’s to thank for that: Yes, you can now follow a scholarly conference on the reconfiguration of authorship on Twitter. Around him other young Anglicists blather on about new phenomena: twitterature, SMS-novels, collective writing, collaborative authorship, constructions of authorship, fan fiction. Again I try to connect with his pupils. My young “executor” (oh yes, the author and authorship need to be fundamentally reconfigured!) hides behind his glasses, replacing the absence of eye contact with a smile reconfiguring his surroundings. Smiley face!

But maybe the thread was pulled by Eefje, another vernal Anglicist who joined an esteemed elderly professor and me for coffee during the break. Eefje didn’t know who I was, and didn’t care to; it was the venerable professor she wanted to talk to, whom she was out to impress.

“The creative period in every writer’s life is limited,” she said.

“What do you mean by that?” the elderly professor inquired.

“Roth should have quit ages ago! He left his I’m done way too late. Salman Rushdie’s finished, Martin Amis washed up, Margaret Atwood too, all of them, and heaps of others besides, they’re like the living dead!” Eefje wielded her invisible sword through the air.

“And what are your plans?” asked the elderly professor.

“I’ve just finished my first novel,” said Eefje briskly, vivaciously flicking her fabulous curls.

Perhaps the thread was pulled by what I saw on the train from Antwerp to Ghent, faces like they’d escaped from old oil paintings, having first changed their hairdos and clothes; faces with defects, a little deformed, mouths too big, eyes too small, jaws a little too heavyset, faces too cramped, or too long, bodies too short. . Grayed faces, out-of-time, just like the landscape through which the train journeyed, one a passenger would swear was more Hungarian or Romanian than Belgian. And then there was the time itself, as if we’d left the present, as if it were the fifties or sixties — see that young woman on the platform, the tailored green hues of her coat, a belt accentuating her slim figure, the high heels, blood-red painted lips. The woman looks freezing and soaked to the skin, but she’s not; she gets up on her tippy-toes and passionately kisses a man who is shaved bald and otherwise utterly nondescript. The passion is from some other time, not from the present, the scene seems unreal, as if staged for a black-and-white shoot for a street fashion magazine: She’s a beauty (though she shines only today; tomorrow she’ll too have grayed, shriveled like a potato), he a pimp. The train rolls on through fields that sink into a wispy fog. Here and there horses stand motionlessly in the whiteness, as if under a spell. At every station I ask myself why Belgians enter the train and so resolutely sit themselves on the empty seat beside you, never inquiring whether it’s free. An older gentleman lowers his skinny butt onto the seat next to mine as it were a bag, though the seat opposite me is free, the seats diagonally across likewise. .

Or perhaps the unraveling began a few days before I sat in the Ghent-bound train, when at Schiphol Airport, waiting for a flight to Vienna, I entered an airport bookstore, desperation etched on my face, and bought a third copy of Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. The first time it was because I was curious, the second and now third time simply to suppress any urge to buy Fifty Shades of Grey. I grumbled to myself about the market’s restrictiveness, its lack of imagination, how besides two books—Fifty Shades of Grey on the one hand, and The Sense of an Ending on the other — airport bookstores don’t have anything else I might buy. The latter carries the symbolic imprimatur of literary quality, the former a passing literary brouhaha. Waiting for my flight I watched a girl opposite me, who, truth be told, was no different than the girl sitting next to her, or the young guy leaning up against the wall, or the guy sitting next to me, or the guy who had taken off his shoes and stretched himself out on a leather airport armchair, playing with his iPhone. They were all fiddling with their iPhones. I’m ready to bet that the more serious and sullen their faces, the more banal the content on the little screen captivating their attention. The girl sitting across from me rhythmically stroked her long, polished fingernails up and down the smooth surface of her mobile phone, as if arousing her clitoris. Was that what the faintly pornographic smirk on her face gave away? With an expression suggesting exhaustion, she then packed her mobile phone in her handbag and took out a little round mirror, beginning a thorough examination of her teeth, intermittently using the blood-red nail of her right pinky finger as a toothpick.

Or perhaps the unraveling started a couple of weeks before, kicked off by the girl with the sweet round face (one that could have just as easily been a boy’s), short boyish haircut, unmarked skin, her narrow eyes grated by silvery eyelashes. She too had that out-of-time look, an impression accented by the shape of her eyes, which drooped softly at the corners. Unflattering light might have easily transformed her into an old woman. I didn’t need a guide, chaperone (I was only going to be there twenty-four hours), or translator (her English was an incomprehensible shriek in any case); it was she who needed me. As she explained, she was studying philosophy and literary criticism, working the literary festival was a good way to earn a little on the side. Inter alia, she’d been assigned to me to discreetly suggest a hierarchy, one of which she was naturally oblivious.

The festival organizers never showed their faces; we writers and our local fixers — my young student among them — fronted the media and festival public. The expectation was that we were to praise the organization of the festival (which I dutifully did); to express our delight that the festival had given us the opportunity to hang out for a bit in an unexpectedly charming city (our cultural tourism merrily financed by the EU); to express our joy at the chance to mix and mingle with other writers and chat about important literary matters (an absolute whopper — at literary festivals writers avoid each other like the plague). Several interviews later I told the girl, who was patiently playing wallflower, that I was going to head off and find something to eat. She kindly offered to accompany me, and a few minutes later we were seated in a restaurant. The girl, who to that point had been like a mouse peeking out from a sack of grain, quickly livened up and ordered a meal in a self-assured voice, as if she were intending to pay for it. I paid, for myself and for her. And it was then I noticed a detail that shook me to the core. It was hard not to notice, because the girl didn’t make any real effort to conceal it. Her nimble fingers spirited the bill from the saucer and discretely slipped it in her handbag, all the while staring blankly at me through the quaint verticals of her eyelashes. There was really nothing there, no apology, no unease, nothing at all, and this, I guess, was what winded me. I don’t even know how to explain why it hurt so much. The girl had obviously received some kind of allowance from the festival organizers (take her out to lunch if that’s what she wants, just keep the bill). She’d squirreled a little tip away for herself, no big deal, just the crumbs from the table. It was a mouse’s theft, and in any case, there was a kind of justice in it all. In her eyes, I belong to the “upper class.” I could have explained to her that at these kinds of events I feel like an itinerant actress on a fairground circuit, performing my routine for a hot meal, and, if fortune smiles, a coin or two — but the girl wouldn’t have believed me. I belonged to a different social orbit, between us an irreconcilable gulf. She took what was hers; she didn’t need my or the organizers’ blessing, her conscience was clean. And in her, in a moment of premonition, I caught a glimpse of a potential “executor.” The image scurried past me like a mouse’s thin shadow. Yes, one day she’ll be sitting in a publishing house somewhere, deciding whether to acquire my book, or she’ll work at a newspaper, if there are still newspapers, and ever so sure of herself pass judgment on my work (didn’t she say she was studying literary criticism?). The girl looked at me with her vacant stare, and I asked myself how it was I hadn’t noticed it before, the mouse’s shadow. Look, how many there are, everywhere. .

At the airport, waiting to go home after my twenty-four-hour jaunt, I watched a young airport worker inadvertently inspire a group of female travelers to put on an unusual show. The women were lit up like Christmas trees, adorned with garish earrings, necklaces, and rings. The young guy asked each of them to remove their jewelry, place it on a plastic tray, and send it through the scanner. The first woman obediently removed hers, but the second — having figured the whole process was going to drag — decided to have few laughs along the way, and took her jewelry off as if performing a striptease. The kid went as red as a peasant bride. Some of the other women proved more imaginative still, one opening her mouth and pointing to a gold crown, gesturing to the kid to see if she should take that off too. Their infectious bonhomie sprayed the airport like frothy beer. From one of them I learned that they were all old friends, that they were from Israel, and that they’d come to have a look around “the country of their forebears,” which, by and large, meant visiting ashes sprinkled through Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka. .

I waited in front of the Hotel Flanders as if hypnotized, not knowing how long I’d been waiting — five, ten, twenty minutes? I remembered a visit to Moscow (Moscou!) thirty years before and the feeling of “hunting a taxi” (ohota na taksi), the moments of sheer panic when a taxi seemed the last refuge, the only salvation from the threatening cold of Moscow’s public spaces; from a square or street preparing to swallow us up; from a desperate sense of there being no escape; from the turbid ugliness of the urban landscape, when a taxi seemed the only remaining beacon of hope. .

“No, this can’t be!” I mumbled, looked at my watch, and returned to the reception. The receptionist’s youthful face peered out from behind the counter: A tuft of hair raised on his forehead like a little horn, high fine cheekbones, a pointy nose, that same gray hue. .

“Are you sure you called a taxi?” I asked, catching my breath.

He gave a start and opened his mouth to reply, but at that moment a taxi pulled up in front of the hotel and I, completely forgetting him, hurtled off toward it.

“To the station!” I cried breathlessly. Sitting down, I felt the accumulated tension in me clear like a fog. I just need to get to the station as soon as possible, just to take a seat in the train, I thought. The taxi driver was a Turk from Konya. He’d been here for four years. He likes it, he’ll stay, of course he’s going to stay, he hasn’t the slightest intention of going anywhere else, or, heaven forbid, going back. .

THE CROATIAN FAIRY

A fairy with a tricolor flag emerged from the sea before them, declaring: “Croats! You are few, and yet you want the most beautiful country in the world! I’m here to help. You shall have many enemies and shall wage war many times for this country. This is why your flag is red. Red from the blood you shall spill to defend her. And white is your flag too. So white and pure must your souls remain. Be truthful. Do not hate. Believe in one God!” That’s what the fairy said to our ancestors. And instead of the deep blue sea, she submerged into the blue of the Croatian flag.

(Dinka Juričić, “The Croatian Fairy,” Happy Steps 4: Croatian Language Primer for Fourth Grade, 2011)

1.

This is how our story begins. Apparently it happened sometime in mid-November 2012. But I was after the exact date. I printed off ten newspaper reports, but to no avail. Useless temporal references such as “three days ago,” “two days ago,” “for days now,” “on Friday,” left the reader to do the math. I couldn’t stop myself hammering “When was the brutal rape in Podstrana?” into Google. But only got reports headed “What happened in Podstrana?”

Podstrana is a place in Croatia near Split, on the road to Omiš, one of those sprawling settlements along the coast where begining and end are unclear. The unrendered façades are the defining feature of the many half-finished houses; residents of the sprawl are unperturbed by raw concrete block. Like many other coastal settlements, Podstrana is a joint criminal enterprise of humankind against sea and shore, one that will naturally go unpunished; firstly, because the crime is communal, and secondly, because communal consciousness of it doesn’t exist. Some students had a party in one such house sans façade, drinking three bottles of whisky and a bottle of mead. One of the girls was admitted to Split Hospital at 6:30 P.M., where doctors spent four hours fighting for her life. The papers first reported that the twenty-year-old had been raped with a broken beer bottle, then that it had been a blender, and finally, that she’d been raped by the hand of Roko Šimac, an otherwise model student — as his father told the papers. The doctors said they’d never seen anything like it in their lives; internal organs completely massacred, gaping wounds to the vagina and intestine, wounds that could have only been inflicted by the violence of a human hand. The girl is recovering in Split Hospital, and doesn’t remember anything. Doctors will need to perform several more operations. Roko Šimac is being held for questioning; he can’t remember anything either. The remaining partygoers have been released. Apparently they left Roko and the girl in the living room to make love. Some went into another room to play computer games, others out into the yard. They said they didn’t hear any screaming, and had there been any, they wouldn’t have heard it because the music had been up so loud. Before the party, Roko Šimac had posted a picture on his Facebook profile, of himself and a girl (presumably not the one he raped), his attendant comment: Why sweep her off her feet when a smack will do the trick?

2.

My frantic reaction to the missing date is defensive; a reaction against the madness of the surrounding reality, a helpless attempt to bring it to heel. Soon I am to head south, first for a brief stay in Budapest, then on to Zagreb. As my entry into a different time zone grows imminent, panic has taken hold.

In Zagreb it’s as if all clocks stop. Maybe the problem is with me, imagining things that aren’t there, maybe the geography bears no relation to my sense of temporal numbness. In any case, the more clocks there are, the more our sense of time dissipates. The media fabricates events rapid-fire, according each equal value, after all, news is news: a girl brutalized, a parliamentary session, a corruption scandal, tits and ass — just repeat in a different order: a parliamentary session, tits and ass, a corruption scandal, a girl brutalized. At some point reality itself gets caught in the tumble, as if competing with the media, and we, bowed and battered consumers, sell the media devil our souls at cut rates. He lures and enchants them, like a cat toying with a half-dead mouse. Technological innovations are syringes of temporal adrenalin, fueling the sense that time is surging irreducibly ahead. Once we killed time chin-wagging over coffee, today we kill it texting and tweeting. Gossip is the last form of concern for our fellow man — that’s how one journalistic wit put it. Perhaps it’s our final and only form, which explains our jostling as we wade the oceans of digital gossip. From screens and displays, from smartphones large and small, the human soul flashes a cheesy grin.

3.

In mid-November 2012, the beloved face of Croatian general Ante Gotovina beamed from Croatian TV screens, front pages, and posters. Tens of thousands gathered in Split on November 16 to celebrate his release (along with that of the relatively media-friendless Mladen Markač) from a prison at the Hague war crimes tribunal, his touching down on homeland soil. The same day a hundred thousand gathered in Zagreb’s main square. There were prayers, tears of joy, candles, streamers and firecrackers, singing, hugs and embraces — a spectacular display of collective (male!) national hysteria. The two generals had been exonerated of their roles in a “joint criminal enterprise” to ethnically cleanse some 250,000 Serbs from Croatia during a 1995 offensive code-named Operation Storm. Many Serb houses were burned to the ground (20,000 the best estimate), Serb property ransacked and looted, and around 600 Serb civilians murdered. Pressure from the international community initiated a restitution process that never got off the ground. It was thus that the dream of Franjo Tuđman, “the father of the Croatian nation,” came true. The number of Serbs in Croatian has shrunk from 12 percent before the war to 4.36 percent in 2011. The mass sackings, harassment, expulsions, the extorting of their houses and apartments, the discrimination and terror — all of this and a lot more besides — began before the war itself, and long before their “humane” and “voluntary” resettlement. (No one, of course, will ever acknowledge this, and even if they did, and it turned out to be true, it happened twenty years ago — so who cares.) The columns of Serb refugees, American ambassador Peter Galbraith sitting briefly in solidarity with them on a horse-drawn cart, were captured and broadcast on global television.

The acquittal of the two Croatian generals, particularly that of Ante Gotovina, a figure pregnant with symbolism, closes the file on what Croats call the Homeland War, absolving the homeland of any lingering guilt, declaring it an innocent and brave victim, wiping clean every stain from its defensive war, and returning, for a moment, the shattered honour of a long roll of murderers, looters, arsonists, and thieves. The Hague verdict triggered a long pent-up national orgasm. Like Franjo Tuđman, who was fond of a pigeon or two, Gotovina released birds of peace, appealing to Croats to look to the future, calling to the “self-exiled” Serbs to return, and, in light of his acquittal, again affirming that his testimony to the Hague judges had been beyond reproach: “I live with a sense of satisfaction that my actions were those of an honest and dedicated military officer who gave his all in difficult circumstances.”

4.

Who is this Gotovina fellow? It depends on your sources. Glancing at the Ante Gotovina Foundation’s website, you won’t find much more than a handful of bank accounts soliticing donations. All these years the Foundation has been “fighting for the truth,” meaning Gotovina’s release. His wife, also a member of the Croatian armed forces, heads the Foundation. For the most part, the Croatian Wikipedia entry confines itself to Gotovina’s military role in the Homeland War. Other sites offer more eye-opening biographical details: that at sixteen Gotovina ditched school, and at seventeen made his way to France, where he joined the Foreign Legion. Having trained as a paratrooper, he served his unproblematic duty in problematic African countries. He then worked as a bodyguard, Jean-Marie Le Pen one of his clients. Sentenced to jail for a number of criminal activities, he fled first to Argentina, and then to Guatemala, where he trained right-wing paramilitary groups. Arrested on his return to France, he served but the briefest of sentences. He arrived back in Croatia in 1991, and soon rose to the highest military rank. Ten years later he was indicted by the Hague tribunal for war crimes committed during Operation Storm and, until his spectacular arrest in the Canary Islands in 2005, spent several years on the run. After seven years in pre-trial detention, Gotovina was acquitted on appeal, surprising many observers. A few months prior the Hague court had found him guilty and sentenced him to twenty-four years jail.

Ante Gotovina is a fairy tale about Croatian success. Many of the half-million Croatian veterans identify with Gotovina; he’s one of the guys. His is a story about a poor kid from a Catholic family, who flunks school, heads out into the big wide world, where, yeah, he gets up to a bit of mischief, but as a professional murderer in wartime and bodyguard in peacetime, he masters lucrative dark arts. The homeland imperiled, Gotovina made haste in returning to defend it. Today, happily married for the third time, he owns an imposing villa in Pakoštane, built by his friends, acolytes, and brothers-in-arms while he was behind bars. The local municipality made its own contribution to Gotovina’s familial bliss, gifting its favorite son the land, which sits in a pine forest on a quiet inlet fifty meters from the sea, adjoining the once prosperous Club Med complex where, according to an empathetic journalist, young Ante first acquired a taste for French culture. How much has this Croatian fairytale cost the Croatian taxpayer? No one knows; the figures are one of Croatia’s most closely guarded state secrets. A villa in Pakoštane is chump change, a little gift that keeps on giving. In any case, who’s ever heard of a national hero having to buy his own lunch? On the subject of lunch, local residents slaughtered a fattened calf and organized a folksy reception in his honor.

5.

For my young niece, no dots connect Homeland and Gotovina. The only thing she’s worried about is when’s this Gotovina guy gonna go away! This Gotovina guy is hogging every channel, and she can’t watch her cartoons. Her saying when’s this Gotovina guy gonna go away! simply means when can I watch Tom and Jerry again?

Yet in December, the two of us will together go over school stuff about Nature and Society. The final mid-year class is about the Homeland. We have to revise all its symbols, learn the national anthem and the like. For her benefit I try paying closer attention to the Croatian coat-of-arms. I wonder what a military ordinariate is, what this imposing new structure in Zagreb, a monster from Albert Speer’s archive of unrealized projects, actually does. The papers say that the Military Ordinariate, the construction of which was financed directly from the state budget, is now seeking new funds for a bigger cathedral. And meanwhile, four hundred thousand people are unemployed, another hundred thousand are employed but not being paid, almost thirty percent of the country’s four million citizens are on a pension, a half million of them pensioned veterans of the Homeland War. Half a million! A Dad’s Army of this size would make a country far bigger than Croatia tremble in fear. If we’ve got half a million retired on pensions, how many have we got on active duty? The Republic of Croatia’s armed forces are a complex beast, with so many different units it’s hard to keep track. And that’s not counting the legions of police. Like all military ordinariates, ours is a legitimate child parented by the Holy See and the Croatian church, an institution for the pastoral and spiritual care of men and women in uniform, soldiers and police. A military ordinariate is a kind of spiritual beauty salon, an institute for the Catholicization of the armed forces and the police, a work of alchemy — that of turning shit into gold. It works in Croatia, a country of small-time grifters. Priests are alchemists too, which just goes to show that everything is in its place.

6.

My acquaintance Piroška knows well the effect she has on people — men, women, girls, boys. A friend designs Piroška’s clothes, a modiste trying to infect Budapest with Lolita-style. Piroška is already thirty-something, but her striking, sleek figure and baby face work to her advantage. People are drawn to her the second they lay eyes on her, and it’s usually some time before they take their leave. The way she dresses, all those miniskirts, petticoats, the taut waist, ribbons in her hair, her bangs, buttons, and clownish pins, all make propinquity a must. People huddle around stroking her hair, ribbons, and bows. There’s nothing erotic in any of this, and Piroška knows that. She patiently grins and bears it all.

“People are weirdoes,” she says merrily. “We’re all weirdoes. .”

Every time Piroška gets ready to go out, I imagine an army of dwarves and dwarfettes attending to her, combing and braiding, weaving multicolored ribbons in her hair, ironing her petticoats, corseting her up, zipping, buttoning, and unbuttoning. . My little niece would give any thing to have Piroška for an aunt. She’d trade me and her whole collection of Barbies for a single Piroška.

I saw Piroška at a Budapest literary festival in late November, the venue a boat docked on the banks of the Danube. Festival guests had already dispersed by the time some ten thousand Hungarians gathered on Lajos Kossuth Square, protesting against Márton Gyöngyösi, the leader of Jobbik, the third biggest party in the Hungarian parliament. Gyöngyösi had declared the need to compile a list of Jews who posed potential security threats to the country. Seeing Budapest residents, their coats emblazoned with handsewn yellow stars in protest, was a harrowing experience. According to the city’s Holocaust Memorial Centre, between five and six hundred thousand Hungarian Jews perished in the concentration camps. Jobbik owes its rise in the polls to anti-Semitism and its open hatred of Roma, some seven hundred thousand of whom live in Hungary — and who don’t have any place else to go. Because Roma, well, everyone hates Roma: the Serbs, the Croats, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Romanians, the Bulgarians, everyone. .

In early December 2012, I rode the single daily train between Budapest and Zagreb. There used to be an Osijek-Budapest line, but now that’s gone too. People say trains are too expensive.

It was this irreparable feeling of absence that settled in me in Gyékényes, on the border between Hungary and Croatia. It was as if Gyékényes was the edge of the world, and that nothing came after. The carriages emptied (is really no one traveling to Croatia?), and the Croatian border guard stamped my Dutch passport, his movements lumbering, the stamp moist and cold. And then darkness enveloped Gyékényes. Dim station lights shone in Koprivnica, Križevci, Vrbovac, and Dugo Selo. Everything else was lost in the murky black. Watching the pale light seeping from the tiny station office in Vrbovac, that’s what I thought about, the collocation murky black.

At some point the train stopped. A middle-aged woman appeared from a neighboring compartment.

“Where are we?” she asked, as if in an amateur theater production.

There being no answer from anywhere, she dared give it another go.

“Where are we now?”

Again there was no reply, and the woman, chastened somehow, withdrew into her compartment.

I took a taxi from the railway station, and heading toward Novi Zagreb noticed a billboard for Intimissimi lingerie. In the murky black above Zagreb, giant supermodels floated in panties and bras, laid out on their sides, heads resting on a hand, staring out into the endless murk ahead. .

7.

Zagreb is a city that often comes a halt, and then just stays there. In Croatia there is a tunnel that leads nowhere, just stops dead, right there in a hillside. One of Zagreb’s most well-known streets, Savska, stops being a proper street before it even gets going; Ilica, one of Zagreb’s main thoroughfares, is also barely urban. Perhaps this explains Zagreb’s terminal moroseness, the inspiration for countless chansons poeticizing its absence of content, its tired urban imagery: street lights, old lanterns, the banks of the Sava (which the city stubbornly ignores), parks, pigeons, and clay-tiled roofs. In this endless poeticization of return (I’m coming back, oh Zagreb, to you, you on the banks of the Sava. .), the poetic voice is always out there on the road somewhere, his return to Zagreb a sounding of the alarm. Zagreb is a deaf and indifferent urban stain, its pulse barely discernable as the poet whinnies his return.

I remember my first longer absence from Zagreb. There was no such thing as the Internet, international phone calls were expensive, letters the sole means of communication. Return was cause for real celebration. My three best friends awaited me at the airport, and we headed straight over to my mom’s, my mom having prepared a special lunch. My friends nattered away merrily, attempting enchantment with stories of everything that had happened while I’d been away. At one moment I burst into tears. My friends excused themselves, oh, she must be really tired, let’s go, we’ll leave you to rest up, let’s catch up tomorrow. . I don’t really remember what was said anymore, it wasn’t important. But I didn’t burst out crying because I was tired, I burst out crying at the regime of the Zagreb everyday, leaking from my friends’ mouths like unsightly mucus. I burst out crying because of the absence of content, because of their absence of interest in anything beyond their own lives. My friends never asked what I’d been up to in the ten months I’d been away. Zagreb fell on my cheek like a dollop of indifferent spit.

The Yugoslav Gastarbeiter of the seventies know the story well, as do the flood of Yugoslav refugees of the nineties; every returnee learns it some day. Either you are here with us, or you don’t exist. It is a cast-iron rule. And it is why every time I go back to Zagreb, slowly, like a reconvalescent, I practice the rituals of return. In Zagreb I have my pedicurist, a heroine whose handiwork supports an unemployed husband and three school-age sons. As she struggles to keep her head above water, my periodic appearance works like an oxygen mask — I see it in her eyes and smile. At the nearby market I buy eggs from the same statuesque woman, who, adorned by chicken feathers, keeps the day’s takings in a tin can, the lid of which bears stickers of the Virgin Mary and Severina,¹ the two women my egg seller worships. I visit my dentist, who isn’t actually my dentist anymore, he’s retired, but I like to sit down in his chair, and for us to talk, about his grandchildren, about mutual acquaintances, some of whom already lie buried. I go to my hairdresser, even though she does a wonky job; I go to my seamstress, even though she’s sloppy and charges the earth. All offer me a vague warmth. They are my measure of Zagreb, as much as I can handle; nothing too exciting, nothing that hurts.

The rest is just sadness, a sadness that comes from helplessness, from watching a little crappy homemade porn, from a cheap betrayal, from the realization that we’ve been had, that the streets are full of shell-game cons, that we’ve played having consented to losing in advance, and that we would’ve been conned even if we hadn’t played; it’s the suffocating sadness that comes from a momentary glimmer of hope that all is not lost, that, for fuck’s sake, all can’t be lost, and the realization that this record has been stuck for years, that all really is lost; it’s the sadness that comes from cheap revenge, from the realization that someone’s spat in our soup, that they’ve been at it for years, and don’t even themselves know why; the sadness that overwhelms us on sighting curtains with ingrained filth, from the stench of piss in our nostrils, feline and human; a sadness whose sheer weight knocks us to the ground, a sadness born of a realization of the banality of human evil, an evil that sucks the oxygen from our lungs. .

8.

Merry Christmas to our veterans and heroes in prison! — a banner snakes through Zagreb’s main square. A dozen or so men, war veterans presumably, support the banner. War veterans, volunteers, they’re a new breed, ghosted in from invisible wings to occupy center stage in Croatian life, a breed of man who voluntarily took up arms to fight a “defensive” war. When the war was over, they got themselves organized, started up all kinds of associations seeking recompense — pensions, apartments, jobs — for their voluntary entanglements. The state has paid them the deepest financial and moral respect. For many veterans, the four-year war has become an identity, a biography, a career, a raison d’être. A handful of associations (and the odd individual) spent years pestering the relevant military organs to make the veteran register public, and in December 2012—twenty years after the fact — it finally was. It turned out that the figure of half a million, which had long provoked disbelief, was indeed correct. It also turned out that almost a third of those on the register had faked their service. In recent years the number of veterans on invalid’s pensions has increased by around forty percent. An invalid’s pension is more than a regular veteran’s. And a veteran’s pension is more than a non-veteran’s pension. All told, the average veteran’s pension is twice that of a university professor.

This is another fairytale of success, Croatian-style. Get yourself in among the vets, and you’ve won a place at the very heart of the Croatian state, your mitts on the sword and cross. The slogan—Merry Christmas to our veterans and heroes in prison! — is season’s greetings to all those still in detention in the Hague, those waiting in pre-trial detention in Croatia, maybe even to fraudsters like former Croatian prime minister Ivo Sanader, who, accused of corruption, is out on bail. Those accused of heroic corruption, they were defending the homeland too.

Even the façade of Zagreb’s new Museum of Modern Art bears the graffito Ante Gotovina — hero. At Christmas 2012, master carver Josip Mateša fashioned a life-size nativity scene. Next to a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary stood a wooden statue of Ante Gotovina in his general’s uniform, Croatian flag in hand. As the wooden Jesus slept peacefully in his wooden crib, Mateša told the papers that he’d chosen Ante Gotovina as a “symbol of righteous struggle.” He didn’t, of course, go into the specifics of who or what this “righteous struggle” was waged against. A newspaper photo, with a general’s cap placed over the crib where wooden baby Jesus lay, suggests that Ante Gotovina might well be Jesus’s symbolic father. Master carver Mateša obviously had something similar in mind. Given the Croatian Catholic leadership’s adoration of Ante Gotovina, and Ante Gotovina’s reciprocal adoration of the clergy, the Church silently acquiesced to this original artistic intervention.

Croatian performance artist Marijan Crtalić probably won’t make it into the Museum of Modern Art. He is, in any case, seeking exit, not entry. In one of his pieces, “The Possibility of Exit,” he tries to bang his head through a wall. Literally. In another piece, “The World Should Know that a Croat Loves His People,” he attempts singing the national anthem with his hands bound, and tape across his mouth. Crtalić’s self-harm is artistic protest against state violence against the individual.

9.

Is it only the Croatian Catholic Church that is shameless, or is every church, ipso facto, such? The Croatian church is fed at a trough filled by the Croatian taxpayer, and despite being the wealthiest institution in the country (owing to its vast real estate holdings), it sucks the taxpayer’s teet dry. In Croatia, eighty-seven percent of citizens identify as Catholics. In other words, the Croatian everyman decides how much money should be allocated to the Church, and how much to his children’s education. With the Croatian congregation having cast its public doors wide open, the Church wasted no time marching straight on into the education system, the very heart of things. Although grade school religious instruction is supposedly voluntary, it’s Clayton’s choice — I mean, when have young children ever been able to decide this sort of thing for themselves? And the Church marched on: into secondary schools, universities and other educational institutions, into hospitals, courtrooms, the media, political structures — its influence insidious. In December 2012, the Church used every propaganda means at its disposal to attack a draft bill introducing human development and sex education into the school curriculum, with sectarian groups, the media, newsagents, and even a supermarket chain owned by a Croatian oligarch all offering assistance. The Church, which maintains a relentless campaign against homosexuality, the use of contraception, pre-marital sex, and the like, claims that sex education goes against its teachings. Citing the Pope, the Church sounded its bugle to the Croatian flock that they reject totalitarian attitudes and thinking. Introducing human development classes in schools is apparently a totalitarian act, sex education both anti-Croatian and anti-Catholic. That is the Church’s official position.

10.

I recently watched Nenad Puhovski’s documentary Pavilion 22, ten years after it was made. The film was only ever shown on the festival circuit, never on television. While judges at the Hague tribunal watched it as evidence, the wider Croatian public isn’t aware of its existence. Yet this general public isn’t completely oblivious to the “terrifying things” that took place at the Zagreb exhibition center in 1991. Several years after the fact, one of those directly involved, Miro Bajramović, gave an interview to the Feral Tribune weekly, in which he claimed that he himself had killed some seventy-six people, the majority Serbs. The case was hushed up, Bajramović dismissed as mentally unsound. Ten years later, however, police arrested six men, four of whom were released after questioning, while Bajramović and another man were eventually sentenced to relatively brief prison terms, most of which they served in pre-trial detention. All of the film’s protagonists, except the former minister of police and one Tomislav Merčep, the chief suspect, testified to the existence of notorious paramilitary units. Croatian jails emptied their cells as the war began. Apparently that’s the thing to do in wartime. Serving prisoners become “dogs of war.” Some formed paramilitary groups, one of which was led by Merčep. The documentary’s subjects maintain that Merčep’s “pack” tortured, raped, and brutalized (mostly) Croatian Serbs, before transporting them to Pakračka Poljana, where they were murdered. A hall at the Zagreb exhibition center functioned as a private detention camp, where the dogs of war engaged in “operational processing.” It seems many people knew what was going on, about the crimes being committed, but no one lifted a finger to intervene. The minister of police at the time defended Merčep’s “dogs,” claiming that they had performed an “enormous service.” He didn’t go into the precise nature of what this “enormous service” entailed. It took twenty years and constant pressure from Amnesty International for the Croatian judiciary to finally indict Merčep, who was arrested in 2010. The indictment accused him of commanding a paramilitary unit responsible for the 1991 murder of forty-three civilians and the disappearance of a further three persons. It stated that he knew about the extrajudicial arrests, the terror, abuse, torture, and execution of civilians, and that he did nothing to prevent it. His trial continues.

11.

An old friend had stubbornly refused to take me with him, and then one day he finally relented.

“There’s nothing to see, unless you want to look at people neck-deep in the shit, and in that case, be my guest!” he said. Today, in a hall of the Zagreb exhibition center, welfare packets are distributed to “special cases.” The bureaucracy, the media, and even those stigmatized as such, use the expression, one that adroitly quarantines a much wider despair. Because in reality, most of the population is barely getting by; it’s the rich who are “special cases.” Like many Croatians, my friend has slipped from the ranks of the former middle class down into those of the special cases. Many “cases” have advanced qualifications, yet as losers in the transition, are too young for retirement and too old for retraining. My friend spent his working life in two big companies — the first, a state-owned enterprise in the time when Yugoslavia was still whole, the second, a private Croatian-owned firm in the post-independence period. The director of the latter was a typical transition hustler. He got the firm cheap via political connections. In time he turned the employees into his personal slaves, and ceased making statutory contributions to their health insurance and retirement schemes. Then he started paying a quarter of his employees’ wages out in vouchers, vouchers only valid in a handful of supermarkets. Then he dropped hourly rates to minimum wage, and after that, he started paying half that minimum wage out in vouchers. And now the vouchers could only be redeemed at the firm itself. The company sold construction material, which in practice meant that employees could exchange their vouchers for toilet seats and bathroom tiles. The director wasn’t entirely without a social conscience, so he started stocking his shelves with pasta, Eurokrem, and tinned goods past their expiration dates. Employees could get hold of foodstuffs, albeit at twice the price of other stores. Of course at other stores, their vouchers were no good.

The owner of the firm abused his employees in every which way, all in the hope that they’d quit of their own volition, because otherwise, at least according to the statute book, he’d have to pay a severance. He didn’t let anyone go. And then, when the recession had bitten hard, he started laying people off without paying them redundancy money, knowing full well that the Croatian judiciary is paleolithic, and that even if someone did sue, it would take years to get a verdict against him. No one sued. Apart from the cleaner; she accused him of raping her in the toilet. To general amazement, the court believed her. But even this seemed to work in the owner’s favor. Sentences for rape are much lighter than those for embezzlement, corruption, and racketeering. In the sea of criminality, rape is considered shenanigans for grown-up little boys. My friend is on the unemployment agency’s books, and the welfare line. The owner of the firm, he’s a free man. He hasn’t gotten around to serving his time.

I watched this friend of mine race to fill his box with household essentials, a big bag of cornflakes, two or three kilos of flour, sugar, and oil, a kilo of bacon, a marble cake, half a kilo of cheese. . in sum, a Christmas present from Ebenezer Scrooge. I watched him hurry out with his cardboard box, stash it the trunk, and turn the ignition. Any stoppage, any delay would mean confronting his own position, and he doesn’t want that. Christ, anything but that. Silent as shadows, he and his people turn up here once a month to collect their care packages. If they don’t show on the day of the month assigned to them, they permanently lose the right to further assistance.

“Everything looks normal, much more civilized than one would think,” I say, trying to break the silence.

“That’s the problem, everything looks normal,” he replied.

Twenty years ago, the dogs of war “worked over” their Serb compatriots in one of the exhibition center halls. Today, twenty years after the establishment of the sovereign Republic of Croatia, many Croatian citizens — stripped to their undies by their ethnic brothers, their fellow Croats — come here to gather crumbs from under the table.

12.

“Everyone knows Dora’s aunty!”

“Who is she?”

“She’s on TV!”

“Ah. .”

“You’re a writer. .”

“I think I am.”

“Then why aren’t you in our school books?”

“Would you like me to be?”

“I would!”

“I’m sorry, sweetheart. .”

“Even our teacher hasn’t heard of you!”

“Well, if your teacher had read anything, she would have!”

“Our teacher reads heaps, but you’re not in the shops, or in the library, or on TV. . If you were, our teacher would know!”

On December 27, 2012, a regular episode of the show TV kalendar aired on Croatian state television. There was a segment in which an Ustasha war criminal by the name of Jure Francetić was hailed as a “legendary fighter.” In the same segment the Partisans were characterized as a criminal band, running amok in the hills, slaughtering Croats. The only protest against this historical revisionism came from a small NGO called the Citizens’ Initiative. It’s hard for a handful of people to kick against the system. Especially when the system consists of publishers, editors, newspapers, television, radio, teachers, university lecturers, historians, and journalists — all of them engaged in peddling this sort of thing. Why? Because they can. Because they think they’re right. Because they want to please someone who thinks he’s right. But can we conceive of a primetime show on German television declaring the Holocaust a historical fabrication, six million murdered Jews an exaggeration, and Adolf Eichmann the greatest German humanitarian of all time?

In 2012, a group of young Croatian filmmakers shot a short documentary simply entitled Who Are They? The film captures responses to the titular question by ordinary Zagreb residents living near an improvised shelter for refugees. Asked to describe the refugees in their neighborhood, one replied that were dark; another suggested well-baked; a third pretty dark-skinned; a fourth that they’re not folk like us; a fifth that there are more and more of them; a sixth that every piece of shit comes to us; while a seventh, a young man with an easy smile, remarked that they closed Jasenovac, so I don’t know what we’re supposed to do with them!²

A people who in the twenty years of their state sovereignty has desecrated or destroyed three thousand monuments to the victims of fascism, burned almost three million books³ and “reduced” the Serbian ethnic minority by half, is now writing its history, a history of pure, untainted souls, of hardworking and honest folk who believe in one God. The rest is just collateral damage. People are as mindless as flies; stuck in the collective glue, they think they got there of their own free will. The brutalized girl, she’s collateral damage too, the corpse of a mindless fly in a sticky-sweet national flytrap. .

The same day Croatian hero Ante Gotovina touched down, in Podstrana a young girl was brutally raped. She and her friends had been celebrating Gotovina’s release. The rape of a girl, the blood of a virgin, is a little pagan offering to merciless gods. Residents of Pakoštane, Ante Gotovina’s birthplace, turned out to celebrate divine justice, slaughtering a fattened calf. Rape suspect Roko Šimac was released from investigative detention after a month and a half. Blood analysis showed that the group of young partygoers had not been under the influence of drugs. They were just drunk. The girl whose internal organs were ripped apart was released from the hospital for outpatient care. They say she still doesn’t remember anything.

Let’s go back to the beginning of the story: No one cares about temporal coordinates any more, not when something happened, not what happened. The clock was violently wound back twenty years ago. Franjo Tuđman was the first to mess with its hands, successfully erasing fifty years of Yugoslav social life and state sovereignty, grafting his Croatia onto the Ustasha puppet state of the Second World War. Tuđman managed to salvage and restore many icons of the era: the coat of arms, the flag, the currency, turns of phrase, and much else besides. Hence the temporal disorder that suits some so well. Because temporal confusion allows criminals to not answer for their crimes, nor murders for their murderers, thieves for their thefts, rapists for their rapes. Only in temporal confusion can victims claim they don’t remember anything.

13.

My niece and I are sitting in the back seat. Her dad is driving. We’re coming home from a children’s birthday party. We pass a lingerie advertisement. A beauty in a bra and panties lies stretched out on her side, her head supported by her hand, her indifferent eyes staring out into the murk of the horizon. .

“Look, Aunty, a Croatian fairy. .” my niece murmurs, bleary-eyed at the billboard that has just sprung up in front of her.

“Yes, sweetheart, the fairy of all Croats. .” I say. She’s already asleep. She’s sunken into a sweet dream, as if into the salty sea.

1Severina Vučković, the most popular Croatian pop singer, known also as Seve Nacionale, or simply Seve.

2“The Jasenovac concentration camp was a site of imprisonment, forced labor, and liquidation, primarily of the Serbian Orthodox population, which, in order to create an ethically clean territory, had to be completely eradicated from the Independent State of Croatia, as did Jews and Roma, who were also discriminated against under racial laws. A significant number of Croats — communists and anti-fascists, members of the National Liberation Army of Croatia, their families, and other opponents of the Ustasha regime — also perished in the camp.” (www.jusp-jasenovac.hr)

3See Ante Lešaja’s Bibliocide: the Destruction of Books in Croatia in the 1990s.

THE MUSEUM OF TOMORROW

1.

A taxi driver was waiting for me at London Heathrow, holding a piece of paper with my name on it. He introduced himself and kissed my hand. Never in my life has a taxi driver kissed my hand. Carlos, he said his name was Carlos. He was a small man, with a round face and hazel eyes like marbles. As we drove my eyes fell on his chubby little hands. He’s just a teddy bear, a living toy, I thought. His voice silky and soft, restrained, almost feminine.

Carlos was Romanian, from a small provincial town, and unsurprisingly his name wasn’t actually Carlos, it was Octavius. “Octavius” had had the guys from the taxi co-op in stitches, so they called him Carlos. He lives in London, shares a tiny flat with another couple of Romanians, five hundred pounds a month, all he can afford. He’s divorced; in Romania he’s got an ex-wife and a teenage daughter. Over here he met a Romanian woman with a similar story, with an ex-husband and a teenage son. He wants to start a new life with her, with Nausica. In London? London’s not bad, but no, not in London. So where then? In Australia, somewhere on the east coast, near the ocean. . Communism was good, because with the chronic lack of other amusements, people read a lot. As a kid he adored Jules Verne. All of us, us “Easterners,” we adored Jules Verne. In one of Verne’s books he’d stumbled across a description of Australia, a description now imprinted in his brain like a barcode. It’s true that right now it all seems like a distant dream; there’s a heap of bureaucratic hurdles to overcome, among other things, he wants to take his daughter with him, and she, the love of his life, her son. But he’s sure that one day he and Nausica will end up out there in Australia, somewhere near Great Barrier Reef, in the Coral Sea. .

“In communism we dreamed a lot, and that was the best part about it,” he said, as if drawing silk from between his lips.

Carlos dropped me off at the hotel, carried my luggage right to the reception desk, and handed me his business card with the number of his taxi firm.

“If you need a taxi on the way back, call this number. And don’t forget, it’s Carlos, ask for Carlos. .” he said, imparting a little dry kiss on my clumsy hand.

2.

A sixty-something woman, her bearing unusually upright, long straight gray hair, a smattering of coquettish afro plaits, her face lined and tanned as if she spends most of the day outside. Blue, expressionless eyes, a gaze that never meets her interlocutor, a yoga bunny, for sure. . Her voice sounds calmly from her lips, she’s happy with her life, her lot; true, things went downhill a bit when her brother died, she adopted his son, but then he died too, now she doesn’t have anyone, her mom’s dead, but at least she made it to the ripe old age of eighty-eight. Yes, it’s true, people around her are disappearing, yesterday they were here, today they’re no more. She spits the last phrase out resolutely, flicks her long gray locks and abandons the subject. She gesticulates wildly, as if wanting to bat her interlocutor’s stare from her face. She flaps her arms like wings, shooing away prying eyes. Of course she’s working, she’s got heaps to work on, projects and stuff, yeah, she was just there, there too, but now she’s off somewhere else, and after that. .

3.

They put their bare legs up on the chair, caress the smooth skin of their calves, massage their toes, and then grab their phones, stroking and caressing them as they just did their calves. They laugh, flash healthy, toothy smiles, throw their hair back, twirling curls in their fingers. They take chomping bites, like on TV — you know the show, the one with an anorexic actress feigning a wolf’s appetite. They murmur their mmmmmms, sigh, their mouths full, gourmand pleasure in overdrive. They’ve got tinny, almost metallic whines. Cartoon-girls. Tiny fingers, slender as birds’ claws, they tap away, enamored with the screens on their phones. From time to time they shoot out a brisk glance, not looking at anyone or anything, just like hens.

4.

There’s a guy on the plane, in the seat in front of mine, radiant with a wretch’s delight. Having bought a ticket, the seat’s all his for a whole two hours. He makes himself right at home, and then for some reason starts beating the back of his head against the head rest, once, twice, thrice. He must be checking if he’s still alive, whether the head rest is really his, or maybe he just wants the back of his head to make the acquaintance of the kind of head rests you get in planes. Christ, who would know what this creature wants. Maybe he doesn’t want anything, maybe his body is making the seat’s acquaintance of its own accord. He just wriggles away, exploring the space around him. Here we go — he finds the button on the side and reclines his seat with a jerk. At that very moment I’ve just opened my tray and put my book and plastic cup of coffee down. The steaming coffee ends up in my lap. The second the plane touches down he’ll be first up, opening the overhead locker, getting his stuff out, Duty Free crap, this much I know. And I automatically hunch my shoulders, because his stuff is already falling on my head. . Somewhere from a seat behind me there’s a woman’s laugh, a strange sentence nibbling my ear: It must be that gall stone I had removed that’s making me laugh.

5.

I put my odds and ends down on the counter. The checkout girl punches in the prices, pausing at the kohlrabi. She frowns, waving it at a colleague:

“You know what this is?”

“No idea.”

She looks inquiringly at me, but I just shrug, I’m not telling her what it’s called. The line behind me sucks up her confusion. In the end a woman in line loses patience and yells out. .

“Kohlrabi! It’s kohlrabi, for Christ’s sake!”

The checkout girl finds the name and code number and swiftly enters the price.

At home I take the kohlrabi and drown it in warm water together with my freezing hands. I think how the same scene with the kohlrabi has already played out three times, and that each time it was a different checkout girl. Then I take a knife and carefully peel the kohlrabi. Kohlrabi, “German beet,” kohlrübe, knolkhol, nookal, gedde kosu, navilu kosu, moonji, munji haakh. .

Then I wonder whether checkout girls should know the names of everything they sell. And I wonder how is it that they’re not even curious. But I let it go, I realize I’m asking too much. Most checkout girls are just kids, I mean, they look like kids. A lot of them wear hijabs. Why do I think they should care about some old beet they don’t even eat? Their fates are already long settled, pre-coded, a checkout girl is herself a commodity, already imprinted with a barcode, strichcode, code a barres, codice a barre, čarovy kod. . Yes, soon she’ll find a little man, bear his children, and one day those kids will have the run of the supermarket. Alongside the supermarket the benevolent city fathers will build a children’s playground, and benches, so grandmas and grandpas can sit down while they watch the kids play, while Mama’s at work at the supermarket, while Mama’s doing the shopping. There’ll be temples a short stroll away, one, two, three, for every faith a temple. Life is arranged in such a way that it can’t be better — here, we’ve everything we need. Old men in long white robes sit on the benches, drawing bread from plastic bags. With languid, beatific waves they toss out little pieces, feeding the visible pigeons and invisible rats. Maybe they’re sitting there thinking that every being on earth deserves to eat its fill; that every being on earth should know its species and breed, its name and its price. .

6.

A chance glance at the chintzy gold anklet and the butt rammed into stretchy jeans triggered an attack of misanthropy that left me breathless. The foot was in a see-through nylon stocking in a high-heeled sandal, the cheap nylon shading the anklet’s golden shine, ragged heel, and red nail polish. Getting up, the butt and gold anklet strode off toward the bathroom.

7.

“You know, not everyone who speaks Bulgarian is Bulgarian,” Meli offers cautiously. She’s actually trying to tell me that she’s a Bulgarian Turk. For some reason Meli thinks this is important. She came to Amsterdam to work as a cleaner, she barely finished grade school, which is partly explained by the fact that she’s got seventeen siblings. It seems her parents were born to procreate, and the second they were done, began decomposing like salmon after mating. Her father died, and like some matriarchal goddess, her mother lies wasting away in a Turkish village in northeastern Bulgaria, the clan’s young tending to her. Meli cleans Dutch houses and apartments. She lives in a rented Amsterdam apartment with three sisters and a brother. They all earn their keep cleaning and thus support the extended family. Meli’s never traveled anywhere, doesn’t know any place besides Amsterdam and her native village. She’s never been to Sofia. It’s not quite that she never thinks of herself though, she’s bought herself a house in the village, next to those of her older sisters. She’s slowly furnishing it. She’s twenty-two years old, but she’s not thinking of getting married, she’s too old. She chuckles and admits that she can’t remember the names of all her brothers and sisters.

8.

Wioleta Sroka, she says, accosting me at the airport. It’s me, your assistant. There are heaps of other volunteers, but I wanted to be assigned to you, you and no one else. We’re the ABBA generation, you and me, aren’t we?

Mrs. Sroka is a heavyset middle-aged woman with long, disheveled hair dyed flaming red. The cut, the bangs, the limp locks falling halfway down her back, it’s a look she hasn’t changed since the seventies. She must have been pretty when she was young. She’s still got that primary accumulation of self-confidence of those who where physically attractive in their youth. She talks a lot, her voice croaky. She’s also got that smoker’s fan of ancient fine lines above her lips, yet for whatever reason is quick to tell me that she’s never smoked a cigarette in her life.

She doesn’t leave my side, barges into my hotel room uninvited, scopes the place out — the hotel is new, it’s got five stars, that’s irrelevant, you know how sloppy they build these days. . She obviously has no intention of going anywhere, heads out onto the balcony, checks out the view, insists on waiting while I get ready. To go where? To the formal opening of the congress. No, I say, I’m exhausted from the trip, I’d rather stay in. Shall I wait for you in the lobby? No, thanks, there’s no need, I say. It’s as if she’s going to burst into tears. Fine, I’ll come and get you tomorrow morning, she says, almost offended.

She doesn’t leave me alone for a second. When I meet other conference guests she takes a bunch of business cards from her bag, handing them out indiscriminately. That’s me, she says, running her finger under the name on the card. She hands me a bunch too. She’s got green ones and yellow ones, which would I prefer? She stands guard for me outside the restroom, like she’s scared I’ll give her the slip. She looks like a former ABBA groupie, a gone-to-seed Agnetha clone.

She’s constantly inserting herself in the frame, chin-wagging with the TV crew, that’s me, she parrots, palming off her business cards and running her finger under her name. That’s me! As the camera starts to roll she fixes my scarf. There, she says, satisfied.

Apparently it’s time I ate. I try to abscond with an acquaintance for lunch. No luck, she and I go to lunch together. She’s a widow, her second husband died recently. She doesn’t go on annual vacation, what’s the point of annual vacations when you’re on your own? Better to volunteer for stuff like this, it’s way more interesting, and besides, she’s a poet herself, she publishes in literary magazines. She pulls out a thin volume of poetry, placing it in front of me. That’s me, she says, pointing at the name on the cover. Yes, she’s got two sons from her first marriage, they’re big boys, she’s already a grandmother, but she doesn’t see her boys much, they rarely call. She’s retired, but you can’t live on three hundred euro a month. She and her mother combine their two pensions and somehow survive.

Her second husband was an angel, a real angel, they met at clay pigeon shooting. . What? Clay pigeon shooting, people get together and shoot clay pigeons. Here you go, that’s him, she says, taking a picture from her wallet. A good-natured chump in a hunting jacket and hat looks up at me from the picture. There’s a feather in the hat, a feathery souvenir fallen from a mighty angel’s wing. They were married for five years and he went within six months, pancreatic cancer. . She’s been on her own since then, lives with her ninety-two-year-old mother. Mom’s doing okay, everyone in the family lives to a ripe old age, it’s in our genetic code, she says. She’s decided to just get on and be happy with her life, her lot, to stay active. She insists we have a photo together, just me and her, then her, then me and the students, then her, then me and some folks who came to the reading, then her, me, and the acquaintance I caught up with at the congress. .

I recently came across a photo on the Internet. Wioleta Sroka and me, a couple of gone-to-seed ABBA groupies, Frida and Agnetha. We’re standing there on some steps leading to God only knows where. .

9.

Caught in motion, the fragments assembled here are randomly stored images: a gesture, body, phrase, way of behaving, tone of voice, a snippet of conversation, a haphazard and disconnected internal slide show. Only in retrospect do I see the common associative thread: Not one of these images is happy — though it’s true that none is particularly unhappy.

We dreamed a lot in communism, and that was the best part about it, said Carlos, my slip of a taxi driver. This best part will never find a place in any museum of communism for the simple reason that it’s intangible: It crouches hiding in literature, in film, in painting, in the architecture of an epoch that believed it was creating a new world. In turn this new world gave birth to a new art, a good part of which spent its life in the underground, because the world that created it quickly lost any connection to the real existing one. The art in question had an oneiric power. The other truth is that many of its consumers were dreamers too.

In Rio de Janeiro, Santiago Calatrava is building a museum that promises to be one of the most beautiful buildings in the world: the Museu do Amanhã, the Museum of Tomorrow. The museum’s content will apparently be devoted to the “eco-sustainable development of the planet.” Couched in this kind of bureaucratese, the content doesn’t seem particularly alluring, perhaps because the oneiric architectural beauty of the future museum is — in and of itself — the content. The very name of the museum trips a light in the future visitor’s head, bringing to mind many things: the awareness that man inhabits a planet surrounded by other planets; the awareness that there is a future for which we are responsible, for which we refuse any responsibility, the future being something that presently worries us least; the awareness that one day future inhabitants of the earth will judge us, that this judgment will be in accord with what we have bequeathed to them, the kind of world we have passed down as an inheritance, the art, music, living spaces, literature, the kind of people, cities, parks, values. . Yet it’s entirely possible that things are much simpler than this. Perhaps only a country that believes it has a tomorrow (even if this tomorrow is named the 2016 Olympic Games) dares build museums.

“Europe no longer loves life,” Peter Sloterdijk said somewhere. “The radiance of historical fulfilment is gone, in its place only exhaustion, the entropic qualities of an aging culture,” a reign of “spiritual nakedness.” Is our epoch really “a time of empty angels”?¹ What messages does the European today send out to the Europe of tomorrow?

If one were to ask me, as a writer I would, perhaps predictably, immediately think about human beings, of a record of everyday human lives, something akin to a perfect (and perfectly monstrous!) archive for future readers, its files taking account of the smallest details of the lives of regular, anonymous people, like the archive of Danilo Kiš’s The Encyclopedia of the Dead, inspired by a newspaper report on the Mormon archives.

Yet when I try to put myself in Carlos’s position, that of a consumer of dreams, I immediately change tack, and choose the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin as my launch pad for broadcasting messages to the future. It’s cosy, sensual, and wired with oneiric energy.

Yes, the National Museum of Cinema in Turin. Flopping down into a recliner in which you lie more than sit, we place headphones over our ears, direct our eyes high toward the cupola of the Mole Antonelliana — one of Turin’s strangest structures — and watch the inaudible slide of the panoramic glass lift, full of visitors, descending from or ascending to the lookout point at the cupola’s peak. Having ourselves ridden in that same glass cage, we observe others on their gentle vertical slide, up and down. We are no longer participants, but observers.

Lying down, headphones over our ears, we immerse ourselves in a huge canvas as clips from Europe’s neglected film history are beamed before us. We catapult ourselves into the world of images, and swaddled in the imagined future like a mouse in cheese, we observe our recent past. God, look at them all: Luis Buñuel, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Lina Wertmüller, Liliana Cavani, Jean-Luc Godard, Miloš Forman, Sergei Eisenstein, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Bernardo Bertolucci, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jiří Menzel, Jeanne Moreau, Simone Signoret, Anna Magnani, Giulietta Masina, and scores of others — where did they all disappear to? And I think, seen from some future perspective, isn’t it the case that cinema — and not literature, music, or visual art — is the most powerful and enthralling legacy of our epoch?

And so we sit and watch the film assembled for museum visitors by Gianni Amelio, a montage of dance scenes from European and American films. With the force of a laser, these dancing images smash loose the deposits of misanthropy that in the accumulated years have clogged my veins. It now seems that I know the content of the message that, if called upon, I would send out into the future, to a museum of tomorrow. My message would consist of images of couples dancing — not of “dancing with the stars”—but the dancing of ordinary people projected into the sky like stars.² The message would be accompanied by a single caption, Amanda Wingfield’s heartbreaking line from Irving Raper’s 1950 film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie: “I’ve always said that dancing is the most civilized form of social intercourse.”

1“The time of empty angels is a syndrome in which everyone wants to be a messenger, yet no one makes the least effort to receive the messages of others; everyone wants to cut through the clatter and be heard, be in the control room, get something into print, but unfortunately they’ve got nothing to say. This syndrome, with its unheard messages, results in media nihilism. Working in tandem, the means of transmitting these forgotten messages only increases.” Interview with Peter Sloterdijk, Zarez, 19 (1999), 12–13; Magazine litteraire, September 1999.)

2Ettore Scola’s silent film Le Bal (1983) features couples as they dance their way through almost the entire twentieth century, proof enough, if one is so inclined, that history (in this case, recent European history) can be easily portrayed from the interior of a dance hall, by gesture, music, and movement.

MANIFESTO

1. A VIDEO CLIP

A Zagreb acquaintance recently sent me a YouTube clip that’s been making the rounds. It’s actually a newsreel chronicling Zagreb’s economic triumphs between 1967 and 1969, and was originally used as propaganda in city councilors’ re-election campaigns. Well into the 70s, newsreels would play in movie theaters before the feature, just like the ads and trailers we get today.

The voiceover and images tell a phenomenal success story. In the given two-year period, the city built new factories, schools, hospital wards, kindergartens, roads, new residential settlements — the graphics, numbers, and statistics are all there to prove it. My Zagreb acquaintance tells me that today, forty years later, the clip has been an online sensation in Croatia. Why? What could be so gripping about an old Yugoslav (socialist) puff piece? Its truthfulness. What?! Yes — it’s the truthfulness of it that gets people. All those factories really were built, and what’s more, some of them became Yugoslavia’s biggest exporters; the schools, residential blocks and neighborhoods, they were built too. In 1972, my parents bought a fourteenth-floor apartment in one such “skyscraper.” Watching the clip, I recognized both my old neighborhood and my future skyscraper. I still remember the joy the amazing fourteenth-floor view out over empty fields provoked in me. From time to time, new clusters of tower blocks rose from the fields, stretching up toward the horizon. All this happened within the space of some fifteen (communist) years.

The Internet is like the ocean — every day it washes new debris upon the shore. The clip in question is just one such piece of detritus. Viewed by anyone able to claim it as part of his or her own mental baggage, it’s bound to prompt a reaction. My Zagreb acquaintance complains that her husband just sits there on YouTube all day, watching the clip over and over, bawling his eyes out. “He’s completely lost his marbles! How can someone cry over a bunch of sepia shots of factory halls?!” she protests. Her husband used to work at the factory. In the “transition” period it went belly-up, and he was forced to take early retirement.

People cry for all kinds of reasons, most often when confronted by their own defeat. “Twenty years they’ve been feeding us crap on TV, in the papers. The media used to be much better quality,” a first person says. “Life itself, the one we had in Yugoslavia, used to be better quality,” a second chimes in. “Why did we march off to war then?” a third asks. “What war? You, old fella, are lost in time. That was twenty years ago,” a fourth responds. “This ongoing idioticization of the people is becoming unbearable. Politicians have fried our brains, and soon they’re gonna toss us in the trash,” a fifth adds. “We’re already in the trash,” a sixth comes back at him. “It’s what we deserve for being such fools!” a seventh concludes. “It’s comforting to know that we’re not the only idiots. Look at the Italians. All the shit they’ve been through, how can anyone still vote for Berlusconi?!” an eighth observes. “Put up and shut up, that’s all that’s left for us,” a ninth summarizes. “Right on, voting is a complete crock anyhow! What’s the point, we’re already dead,” a tenth fires.

“You’re drawing the wrong conclusions. It’s got nothing to do with the fact that we’ve been betrayed by both systems, by communism and capitalism. Personally, I can start bawling for no reason at all, it’s enough for me to watch National Geographic and the tear ducts burst. We’re all depressed, believe me,” another acquaintance tells me. He’s forty-five years old, single, pays his bills on time, is gainfully employed.

Once two zones separated by a pretty decent wall, in the space of twenty years Europe has become a chaotic mega-market. There are now no walls, and no coordinates either; no one knows where the West is, and where the East. The West is settling in the East, the East surging into the West, the North heading South, and the South, well, it’s mulling its options. Young Spaniards are abandoning their homeland en masse; young Greeks seeking out relatives long dispersed to far corners of the earth; trying to extract themselves from the ever-widening quicksand, young Croats recently snapped up three hundred Canadian working visas in a record forty minutes. The Spanish coast is flooded with refugees from Africa, most of whom live crammed into refugee camps. There’s no place to go anymore. The Albanians have given up on Italy — there’s no room since the Chinese hordes invaded. Highly-qualified Bulgarian women work in Turkey as cleaners. The few remaining Austrian elderly who can afford it hire highly-skilled caregivers from Slovakia. The Russians are making a big noise just about everywhere; doing deals in Austria, living large in England, summering in Montenegro. Bulgarians once surged in the direction of Spain, yet now they’re in retreat, as if caught in a vicious undertow. The backwash has caused of tidal wave of Bulgarian prostitutes to swamp Amsterdam. The red lights of Amsterdam’s red light district now burn in other parts of the city. During the day, fish, meat, and vegetables are sold at the Albert Cuyp market, and at night, in the streets parallel, red lights illuminate human flesh in shop front windows.

“It’s terrible,” says another acquaintance. “Have you heard that thing about the earth opening up?” What do you mean by opening up? I ask. “The earth just opens up, and then there are these gaping holes that swallow everything in sight! It’s happening everywhere, in Guatemala, in China. . Some guy in Florida had this hole open up in the middle of his bedroom, and it swallowed him and his bed together! We’ve had the same thing here at home, in Međimurje, in Slavonski Brod, in Drniš. Didn’t you hear about that guy from Lovran? He was sitting on a bench on the promenade, and suddenly a hole opened up in front of him. The guy and the bench went in together!” my acquaintance shrieks, and then quietly adds: “I don’t know, I’d rather die of hunger than be swallowed up by a hole!”

In Europe it used to be only the Easterners who did the grumbling. Today everyone’s at it. Easterners grumble because they didn’t get what they expected, and moreover, because everything they ever worked for was sold for a pittance. Westerners grumble because their personal wealth has plateaued, and of course it’s all the Easterners’ fault — whoever those damn Easterners are. Western Europe has been leveled by a tsunami of Easterners. Polish is the most frequently spoken language in England after English! C’mon, that can’t be normal!. . The reality is, Europe is a ruin; the continent littered with industrial skeletons, graveyards of progress, of communist and capitalist utopias alike. Europe is a twilight zone inhabited by losers, by “human remains,” rats, drug addicts and alcoholics, prostitutes, the living dead, all furiously trying to end their own lives.

Europe is a circuit board for human flesh, travelers, traffickers, hucksters, migrants, new slave contingents, tourists, adventurers, believers, day laborers, pedophiles, pilgrims, pickpockets, drug dealers, undocumented workers, smugglers, murderers, tulip pickers and dish washers, street musicians and entertainers, the exploited and their exploiters. Everyone’s on the make. People cry over old black-and-white images, their former lives seem a whole lot better. People cry watching National Geographic, moved by the deeply human lives of flora and fauna. People cry over clips of their past, suddenly seeing it in a completely different light. The threatening clatter of money has sent words once in general use into general hiding, or so people say. What words? Hope, dreams, passion, curiosity, the future, compassion. . Today the only thing we hear, from all four corners of the globe, is a monotone rumbling drumming, hungry stomachs on the march. Tam-tam-tam-tam-tam-tam. .

In the essay “Europe Today” (1935), Miroslav Krleža wrote that in Europe absolutely everything can be bought and sold, “and in place of the human being, money is today the only measure, the only scale, the only testimony to human virtue.” Is money really the only measure of all things? “Europe — it’s all about the dengi, dengi, money, money,” a taxi driver tells me as we glide the snowy streets of Oslo. He’s Afghan. For some reason he’s convinced I’m Russian, and so stutters away in Russian before translating himself into halting English.

Options still smolder in the dirt, but the prisoners of starvation are too exhausted to arise. . Debout, les damnés de la terre. . Stand up, damned of the Earth. . Ustajte prezreni na svijetu. . Vstavaj, prokljat’em zaklejmennyj. .

2. A BOOK

A recent re-reading reading of Yuri Olesha’s novel Envy provoked an equally disproportionate reaction in me as the old video clip did in my Zagreb acquaintance’s husband. Olesha’s short novel is what we might call “a great book.” What makes a good book good, or a bad book bad, is a little easier to explain than what makes a book great. The books they hold dear say a lot about individual critics, reviewers, and other arbiters of literary values. In this respect, Nabokov’s most personal book is that on Gogol. In his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino outlined the six characteristics a book must bring together in order to become “great”: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and consistency. Envy combines all six characteristics, yet even they don’t fully explicate the greatness of Olesha’s slender novel.

Canonic texts are not always reliable indicators of value; the protective embrace of the literary canon is often where thickest dust settles. Once it settles, literary kitsch fused with artistic mythologization is as hard to get rid of as dust. And who can be bothered jerking around making literary denunciations? It’s an ungrateful job — canonization, like corruption, is something where there are many hands in the pie. Thankfully, by a kind of divine grace, some works establish standards of literary excellence under their own steam. Olesha’s Envy is one of them.

Although the author of one of the more svelte oeuvres (a short novel, a handful of short stories, a play, a book of autobiographical sketches, a book for children and adults) within the general corpulence of Russian literature, Olesha is a shining light in the Russian avant-garde. Envy was published in 1927. Olesha obviously wasn’t bothered by communism during its writing, and neither did communism have any qualms about publishing it. In the intervening years, nothing seems to have lessened its power. Down through the decades, it’s as if a secret internal energy has kept the novel afloat, and it’s as if this same energy catapulted it into the future, into our present; and that owing to this energy, it is today more brilliant, alive, and relevant than ever before.

What’s the trick? Among the mythological anecdotes about Olesha there is one about him stopping by his publisher’s office to collect his fee. The cashier refuses to hand it over because he hasn’t got his ID on him.

“How can I pay you your fee when you don’t have an ID? Tomorrow some other Olesha might show up with his hand out!”

Olesha, who was short in stature, straightened himself to his full height, and with magnificent tranquility replied: “There’s no need to get worked up. If another Olesha ever appears, it’ll be four hundred years before he comes along.”

The trick, however, certainly isn’t in the author’s self-assurance. As in the aforementioned video clip, it’s got more to do with the passing of time, the quality of distance. For my acquaintance’s husband, the clip has the force of a surprise epiphany. The man — the one sitting at the computer in his Zagreb apartment, bawling his eyes out over banal images — is no mental patient. Like the majority of people, he’s just a loser. And he might well have fallen straight out of Olesha’s novel.

Envy consists of two parts: The narrator of the first part is Nikolai Kavalerov, a twenty-seven-year-old “loser,” “poetic soul,” and “nothing man.” The second part is written in the third person, the novel’s backbone formed by two antagonist characters, the two brothers, Andrei and Ivan Babichev. Andrei is a successful businessman, a man of the time, the time being that of the Soviet New Economic Policy. Ivan is a representative of the old, a “dreamer,” “conjurer,” “inventor,” and a “drunk.” Ivan is convinced that his brother Andrei has stolen his daughter Valya away from him, and that he now controls her. Together with Andrei and Valya, Volodya Makarov, a talented soccer player and Andrei’s protégé, makes up the trio of representatives of the new time. Valya and Volodya are a successful young couple, the Soviet future. One night Andrei Babichev picks the drunk Nikolai Kavalerov up off the street and pityingly offers him a bed in his apartment until Volodya returns from a trip.

Kavalerov thinks his savior a monster: He is a man who “sings on the toilet” in the morning, a “glutton,” a sausage maker, and big shot (“He, Andrei Petrovich Babichev, is director of the Food Industry Trust. He’s a great sausage and pastry man and chef. . And I, Nikolai Kavalerov, am his jester”). Andrei Babichev is a man who “lacks imagination,” a man “in charge of everything that has to do with eating,” he is “heavy, noisy, and by fits and starts, like a wild boar,” and is both “greedy and jealous” (“He’d like to cook all the omelettes, pies, and cutlets, bake all the bread himself. He’d like to give birth to food. He did give birth to the Two Bits”). Kavalerov hates Andrei, and even when Andrei laughs, Kavalerov is fearful of him (“I listen, horrified. It’s the laughter of a heathen priest. I listen like a blind man listening to a rocket explode”). Enormous and strong, Babichev has a terrifying physical presence, his head “like a painted clay bank.”

Kavalerov (who, in spite of Olesha’s efforts to avoid detection, is the author’s alter ego) is characterized by his way of looking at the world. He sees the world from a bird’s-eye perspective (and thus a cutter on the river is like a “gigantic almond cut lengthwise”); in the fragmented perspective of street mirrors (“I’m very fond of street mirrors. They pop up along your path. Your path is ordinary, calm — the usual city path, promising neither miracles nor visions. You’re walking along, not assuming anything, you raise your eyes, and suddenly, for a moment, it’s all clear to you: The world and its rules have undergone unprecedented changes”); through various poetic lenses; through movement, color, scent, sound, and half-closed eyes; he sees the world in metaphors, seeing the things no one else sees (“that man is surrounded by tiny inscriptions, a sprawling anthill of tiny inscriptions: on forks, spoons, saucers, his pince-nez frames, his buttons, and his pencils? No one notices them. They’re waging a battle for survival”). Kavalerov observes the world through a “defamiliarized,” “deautomaticizing,” “deformed optic,” so that a truck looks like a beetle “bashing around, rearing up and nosing down,” cheeks like knees, a voice makes “the same sounds as an empty enema,” a pair of glasses have “two blind, mercurially gleaming pince-nez disks,” Anichka’s face looks like “a hanging lock,” her bed “like an organ.”

Kavalerov is convinced that his life is a “dog’s life.” He scribbles “repertoire for showmen: monologues and couplets about tax inspectors, Soviet princesses, nepmen, and alimony,” he’d like to be famous (somewhere in France), but knows that this is not his fate. Even “things don’t like me. I’m hurting the street”; furniture “purposely sticks out its leg for me”; he even has a “complicated relationship” with his blanket—“a polished corner once literally bit me.” Kavalerov is an envier, a Chaplinesque figure, a klutz, a coward, a doubting Thomas, a human “zero.” Between the two opposites — the future embodied by his temporary “savior,” Andrei Babichev, a successful NEP industrialist and sausage maker getting ready to feed the socialist world with a fast food chain named the Two Bits — and Ivan Babichev, a mad man, a fantasist, a trickster, the inventor of the Ophelia supper machine, a fabricator, and a prophet (“Who is he — Ivan. Who? A lazybones, a harmful, infectious man. He should be shot”), Kavalerov chooses the latter: “‘My place is with him,’ said Kavalerov. ‘Teacher! I shall die with you!’”

This organizing typology is not new in Russian literature, there being clear antecedents in Russian Romanticism, in the figure of the educated, sensitive, and socially excluded hero (the so-called “superfluous man”), in the work of Pushkin and Lermontov, or in the heroes from the underground (Dostoevsky) who collide with the social apparatus. Goncharov’s Oblomov provides the most direct antecedent of Envy’s oppositional pairing, its eponymous anti-hero a dreamer, a layabout, a loser who fears life itself. Oblomov’s antagonistic other is Andrei Stoltz (the son of a Russian mother and German father), a practical, pragmatic, conscientious representative of the new time, a man of the future, and a man for the future. With Goncharov’s novel, the term Oblomovism (oblomovshchina) entered the Russian lexicon of ideas as a synonym for slothfulness, for the sensitive “Russian soul” who rejects rationalism, pragmatism, progress, and “the European West,” whatever that was supposed to mean. Yet there is a further parallel between Olesha’s and Goncharov’s novels: Having retreated from life, Oblomov lives with the widow Pshenitsina, while Kavalerov, it seems, will end his days sheltering in the bed of the widow Anichka Prokopovich. The yellow pillow that the false prophet Ivan Babichev carries about everywhere links him with Oblomov, too. (“Tell him: Each of us wants to sleep on his own pillow. Don’t touch our pillows! Our still unfledged heads, as rusty as chicken feathers, lay on these pillows, our kisses fell on them in a night of love, we died on these — and the people we killed died on them. . Here is a pillow. Our coat of arms. Our banner.”) The figure of the tragi-comic anti-hero, the weakling, the “poetic soul” reappeared in the literature of the Russian avant-garde (e.g. Ivan Bezdomny in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita), even smuggling itself into the literature of the seventies, as with Venichka, the alcoholic in Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line, the emblematic figure. The pillow, like all symbols in Olesha’s Envy, also has a contrary meaning as a symbol of physical and moral fall (“and the pillow sat there next to him, like a pig”; “I would have hurled myself into the terrible abyss, into the pillow’s icy abyss”).

It is as if the widow Prokopovich, with her impressive bed (which her late husband won in the lottery), stands before the gates of hell. She’s “old, fat, and podgy” (“You could squeeze her out like liverwurst”), cooks for “a collective of hairdressers,” and “goes around entangled in animal guts and sinew” (“A knife flashes in her hand. She tears through the guts with her elbows, like a princess tearing through a spider’s web”). Kavalerov’s fall seems steeper still if we remember his dream of wooing Valya, who “whooshed by. . like a branch full of leaves and flowers,” who “will be washing up at the basin, shimmering like a carp, splashing, tickling the ivories of the water.” (The description of Valya calls to mind Nabokov’s Lolita.) Ivan Babichev is the opposite of his brother, their mutual hatred fierce. Andrei threatens Ivan with jail, and Ivan tells Andrei that he’ll send his invention, the machine Ophelia, to kill him. Nothing of the sort actually happens: Andrei remains in the world of industrial fat cats (surrounded by his “adopted” children, Volodya and the beautiful Valya), and Ivan remains the self-declared “king of lowlifes.” The successful remain on top; the people of the bottom, on bottom.

Ivan Babichev is one of the most memorable tricksters in European literature (“No charlatan from Germany— / Deceit is not my game. / I’m a modern-day magician / With a Soviet claim to fame!”). Ivan is a garrulous barfly, a kind of dilittante-Christ, whose miracles either miss their mark, or, according to legend, punish rather than heal. He’s a drunk, a raconteur, in his self-description, a representative of “an epoch on the wane.” The “steeds” and “elephants of revolution” are trampling his epoch underfoot, he a representative of the world of yesterday. (“That’s me sitting on the pole, Andrysha, me, the old world, my era is sitting there. The mind of my era, Andrysha, which knew how to compose both songs and formulas. A mind full of dreams, which you want to destroy”) Ivan, equally plausible as both Antichrist and pseudo-messiah, believes in his mission in the world. One such mission is to rouse “the bearers of decadent moods,” those who feel “pity, tenderness, pride, jealousy,” “all the emotions comprised by the soul of the man in the era now coming to a close”—and to warn them that they are doomed. Ivan finds an ally in Kavalerov and invites him to join the insurrection, advising that one should depart the stage of history “with a bang,” that one should “raise one’s fist to the coming world”:

“Yes, envy. Here a drama must unfold, one of those grandiose dramas in the theater of history that have inspired the lament, ecstasy, sympathy, and fury of mankind. Without even knowing it, you are a bearer of a historical mission. You are a clot, so to speak. A clot of envy in the dying era’s bloodstream. The dying era envies the era that’s coming to take its place.”

“What can I do?” asked Kavalerov.

“My dear, here you must resign yourself or else. . create a scandal. Go out with a bang. Slam the door, as they say. That’s the most important part: go out with the bang. Leave a scar on history’s ugly face. Shine, damn it! They aren’t going to let you in anyway. Don’t give up without a fight. .”

Readers are generally able to identify with literary heroes, and their lines — whether those of Volodya Makarov, who wants to be a machine and considers that the understanding of time must become the chief human emotion, or those of Ivan Babichev (him being a prophet and all) — can form attractive manifestos. Olesha, however, rejects a world in which ultimate truth exists. And in “a world where there is no ultimate truth (a world without Christ), every option reveals itself to be incomplete, only partial. Ivan is the antipode of Andrei, yet also similar to him (he is contrary, but not contradictory, speaking the language of logic).”¹

Great novels are like blotters, absorbing the fundamental dilemmas of their epochs while blindly anticipating future ones. Olesha’s novel is one such blotter, functioning at multiple levels, uniting not only the richness of Russian literary history, but also that of West European literary history. The novel boldly calls up conflicts between the European giants, Rabelais and Cervantes, between biblical concepts (Adam, Jesus, the Antichrist), between avant-garde utopias (Volodya as man-machine) and socially utopian ideas and systems (revolution, communism, capitalism). Olesha draws the reader into a dramatic polemic of opposing concepts, yet nowhere does he offer final answers. Today, in a post-utopian time — when concepts flap around us like battered, moth-eaten flags, and when few still believe in the institutions of democracy, in the state, justice, equality, progress, the rule of law — we stand, each with our own pillow (whatever it might symbolize: security, home, a belief in family values), not knowing where to turn. We’ve tried all the options, and we’ve compromised the lot. And so we — like Kavalerov, who dithers over whether to sleep on a park bench or in the widow Anichka Prokopovich’s bed — we dither between equally bad options in our own lives. To reach the bed, Kavalerov has to walk the stinking hallway where Anichka cooks soup from animal entrails (“Once I slipped on something’s heart — small and tightly formed, like a chestnut”), meaning that in order to survive he has to embrace indifference — which is, in any case, what the prophet Ivan Babichev’s new program encourages:

“I think that indifference is the best of all conditions of the human mind. Let’s be indifferent, Kavalerov. Take a look! We’ve got ourselves a room, my friend. Drink. To indifference. Hurrah! To Anichka! And today, by the way. . listen: I’ve got some good news for you. . Today, Kavalerov, is your turn to sleep with Anichka. Hurrah!”

Like Kavalerov’s, our resistance is feeble, and soon peters out. We’re easily bought, which only sees our bitterness grow by the day. We can’t make out the face of our enemy, or perhaps we simply don’t want to see him. Perhaps that’s why we constantly point the finger at others. Like Kavalerov, we’re eaten by envy. We are the end of an era, unable to decipher the signs of what is coming. Our ability to imagine a new society has expired, and so we stand, like a blind man waiting expectantly for an explosion. We’re caught in the same trap Olesha was in not even a century ago: “We know what was, we don’t know what will be.”²

3. AND YOU, WHERE DO YOU STAND?

Oh, yes, you’re probably wondering how things turned out for my Zagreb acquaintance, the one who sent me the clip, and her husband. There’s nothing much to tell. Her husband, thank Christ, finally quit bawling, and took matters into his own hands. How so? He took the taxi driver’s exam, got his permit, and off he went. The children still haven’t found jobs, so they sponge off her and her husband. .

Oh, yes, what’s the latest with my Zagreb acquaintance? Not much. Her husband ended up in the psych ward, they’re going send him home soon, and then it’s going to be tough, someone has to be with him, and she can’t, because she works. She can’t put him in care, a home costs more than double what she makes in a month. The kids are trying to go abroad, but that’s tough too, their applications for Australian work visas were just rejected.

Oh, yes, what happened with my Zagreb acquaintance? Nothing much. She won the lottery. Not big money of course, but enough. They bought a little piece of land, they’re going to breed Californian earthworms, they even got an EU loan. And their son has started up a little business too. What kind of business? He’s making fake ice cubes! How do they work? They’re made out of plastic and go phosphorescent in the glass, but without cooling the contents, it’s some sort of trick, people are crazy about them. .

Oh, yeah, what happened with my Zagreb acquaintance? Nothing much. I’m trying to think up a happy ending, but it’s not going so well. You’ve already worked it out — I’m with the losers. Nikolai Kavalerov is my brother (“I’m never going to be handsome or famous. I’m never going to come to the capital from a small town. I’m never going to be a commander, or a commissar, or a scholar, or a racer, or an adventurer”). Yes, I am his sister. Everything gives me away. I see the world through his eyes. I’m lazy like he is, envious like he is, and things don’t like me either: The door handle is always catching my sleeve, the door always banging me on the snout. And like Kavalerov, I hate the high and mighty from the bottom of my soul. I’m drawn to snake-oil peddlers, conjurors like Ivan Babichev, slickers, street vendors hawking magical potions to eliminate stains, fire eaters and tub-thumpers, whom people avoid as if they were contagious, yet who only speak the prosaic truth. Oh yeah, I’m promiscuous, if one can put it that way. You can easily imagine me in bed with both Nikolai Kavalerov and Ivan Babichev — the old widow Anichka Prokopovich is in here too. The bed is enormous, joining with the horizon, we’re all lying about — you’ve no idea how many we are! Oblomov’s here, and Don Quixote, charging at pillows like they’re windmills, Emma Bovary’s here too, and Oskar Matzerath, and Molly Bloom, and Humbert Humbert, and Margarita, and Stephen Dedalus, and Tess d’Urberville. . Many authors and their characters are here, and we’re here too, their faithful readers, we’re all here, lying about on this enormous bed under a clear blue sky. Our faces write a manifesto, bristling, unsettled, and shimmering like a fish hatchery. We’re on the bottom, and somewhere up high, high above us rumbles time (“Then for the first time I heard the rumble of time. Time was racing overhead. I swallowed ecstatic tears,” says Kavalerov), roars the modern world. Yet something tells me that this bed full of losers, each clutching his or her pillow like a life raft, will endure for a time to come, and that those above, that they are ephemeral, like the sun and rain that cast a rainbow above us, like the wind that blows golden leaves upon us, like the snow that covers us like a duvet, and then melts. . Of course, one shouldn’t believe in such things. Betting on the ephemerality of those on the top, and the eternity of those on the bottom, is but the sweet refuge of all losers. But then again. .

By the way, though — you, where do you stand?

1Igor Smirnov, “Roman i smena epoh: Zavist Jurija Oleshi,” Zvezda, 8 (2012).

2Ibid.