Looking into the mirror is an experience that is unavoidable though not necessarily always agreeable. Yet it can often be more revealing than one might expect, since looking into the mirror allows us to see ourselves, for a moment, from the outside – the way others see us. Families, communities, nations and cultures also need a chance to see themselves in the mirror, that is to say, through the eyes of others. We asked ten European authors from ten European countries to choose another country on the continent and sketch its portrait, creating a kind of literary mobility scheme, a writers’ Erasmus exchange. Each of the texts produced as part of the Mirrors of Europe project reflects a different country. Portuguese writer Gonçalo Manuel Tavares discovers what Europe is made of as he flies above Istanbul; the Italian Andrea Bajani walks around Bucharest in the company of stray dogs; Slovakia’s Jana Beňová looks for Fernando Pessoa in the Bertrand bookshop in Lisbon’s Chiado; and Vitalie Ciobanu from Moldova explores Amsterdam by bike, stopping at Anne Frank’s house and admiring van Gogh’s paintings. Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulić travels the length of Italy, from a moribund Venice to the island of Lampedusa, throbbing with immigrant voices, in which she discerns the melody of a future Europe.  Ukraine’s Andrey Kurkov has spent the past twenty-five years trying to work out the puzzle known as Great Britain while Poland’s Andrzej Stasiuk roams Moldova in the scorching heat of summer. In Oslo, Romanian Ioana Pârvulescu feels like a Viking in a boat, while Jochen Schmidt sneaks onto the roof of his Berlin tenement night after night to inflate his spaceship and fly to Budapest. French author Marie Darrieussecq feels ambivalent about her visit to Slovakia, describing it as “Europe of the small countries and undoubtedly the future of Europe: a Europe that works, that mows its lawns, piles up its logs, builds its bridges, and is not too fond of Gypsies”. And on a final, sombre note, Radka Denemarková takes a hard look at her native Czech Republic, despairing over a country that has had to rehabilitate Franz Kafka.

CONTENTS

A Walk Around Europe: What Do Shoes Know? GONÇALO MANUEL TAVARES A PORTUGUESE IN TURKEY

Ceaușescu’s Peacocks ANDREA BAJANI AN ITALIAN IN ROMANIA

Very Soon – Money and Love
 JANA BEŇOVÁ A SLOVAK IN PORTUGAL

Van Gogh by Bicycle VITALIE CIOBANU A MOLDOVAN IN THE NETHERLANDS

Dobre, Or Not Dobre? MARIE DARRIEUSECQ
A FRENCHWOMAN IN SLOVAKIA

The Tune of the Future SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ A CROATIAN IN ITALY

Europe Über Alles JÁNOS HÁY A HUNGARIAN IN GERMANY

The Bickford Puzzle ANDREY KURKOV A UKRAINIAN IN THE UK

Dear Friends IOANA PÂRVULESCU A ROMANIAN IN NORWAY

Things Are Always Happening to Me JOCHEN SCHMIDT A GERMAN IN HUNGARY

Sketches of Moldova ANDRZEJ STASIUK
A POLE IN MOLDOVA

EPILOGUE The Country That Had to Rehabilitate Franz Kafka RADKA DENEMARKOVÁ

A Walk Around Europe: What Do Shoes Know?

GONCALO MANUEL TAVARES

A Portuguese in Turkey

How do we recognise Europe? From above, we see a map and say, with the index finger: that’s Europe! And we can even, with a red marker, point out what is a part of it and what is not, as if Europe could simply be something that occupies space- a volume, a concrete material. Yet Europe may have another meaning and not simply an element that has length, width and height. Europe, it can be said, above all, is not just a paving stone.

Saying, therefore: this space is Europe and that isn’t, well that’s obvious- just evidence of outlining, of geometry. It’s not human evidence; far from it.

Europe can also be the smallest of details. For example, when a European walks the street, Europe itself walks- does it not? It is an almost playful question, but it is interesting to think of this European who walks like his ancestors used to walk, with feet and legs- and not with technical means. Therefore,  through the expense of the body’s effort, he understands perfectly what the measurements are, understands organically the distance of a thousand metres, or a hundred, even two hundred kilometres. And it is like this that the citizen is able to measure Europe- with human steps. It is a project to think about. A European who wants to measure Europe with his own steps- his body becomes the ruler.

Well then, if this European who walks like his ancestors walked, starts at a certain point in Europe and goes to the border,  firstly it would be one long trip! Secondly, just an observation: he would get tired; and, thirdly and most importantly: it would be difficult for his shoes to realise the exact moment Europe stopped being Europe.

In Turkey, for example, you feel that, precisely: the shoes’ difficulty in understanding the difference between occidental Istanbul and oriental Istanbul, not even the heartbeat can tell the difference. The European needs to teach the shoes and tell them, as if he were absolutely crazy: on that side you were in Europe, now you’re in Asia. Understand, shoes?

No shoe will ever understand.

Because, in fact, the world’s material and the way it reacts to the elements need to be taken into account. For example, there is a fundamental difference between walking on top of firm ground and walking through water. Walking through water is, in fact, walking through another element, there is resistance and friction, it makes contact with the body in another way. That said: the European’s body that enters in the Bósforo sea, gets wet.
Then, by entering into the sea, the body, the shoes, these material and organic elements won’t need to be taught, won’t require explanations. It’s useless to explain to the body that water is a distinct obstacle of calm air or strong wind. That is felt in Turkey in general and especially in Istanbul; when talking about the borders of Europe, it is difficult for the body to feel that it has entered into another element.
(However.

A European should be able to say that nothing in Europe is alien to him. But in fact, it is not the case. Staying with Turkey, we swing between the known and the unknown. We should feel protected by what we know and a curiosity for the unknown, that is what we are taught from the early ages of school. Well, yes, but the body- its appetites, approaches and instinctive deviations- what the body says is not always politically correct. For example, you may not like the strange food. And then curiosity ends right there, on the very first bite.)

Anyway, if it were only water that surrounded Europe, everything would be more simple: we wouldn’t need to teach the kids at school anything. If there were only high mountains surrounding Europe then again we would not need formal or visual explanations. The body would feel the difference between Europe and ‘not’ Europe through the effort of breathing.

But the question is precisely this: nature has no maps. And, take note, despite all the technical progress, a European’s body still belongs to nature (well then). We may not like it, but that’s the way it is: a European’s body is closer to animals and plants than to machines. It remains a natural body. Hence it accepts the laws and the maps that separate space, and it understands intellectually and sensibly, but just that. No more, no less.

Therefore, returning to the invisible and forgetting the large surfaces, another possible definition of Europe is: it is the place where a European walks.

From above, we see that there is a little point and if we are patient we can see it change position. It is a man on the move- walking or cycling. And this man is Europe. There he goes, already outside the boundaries outlined by a red marker. This European that moves is apparently in another continent. Yet there she goes, Europe, herself.

I particularly like a verse from Walt Whitman: my body is “not contained between my hat and boots.” Europe, also, is not contained between its hat and boots. This is very clear in Turkey. And this is good.
Poem- Fiction (Europe, a journey)

1
Pierre Loti, café,
at the cemetery’s entrance
the graves are seedbeds;
behind the headstone are beds
of flowers that come from beneath,
as it should be; there are roots
in the dead body, too;
they, certainly, have the light that a body gives when,
mute, lets nature
walk. That is; rise.

2.
The right answer, a child
that runs without making,
miraculously, a sound on soil, almost holy.
The rich don’t make sound
like the others (and the children of the rich are born just like this:
soundless).

3.
An island that belongs
to a football club.
In the middle of Bósforo,
an island that probably gets
substitute players,
those who fail, those
who promise yet still nothing.
Instead of Napoleon,
exile for athletes
in bad shape.
It’s fair,
here in the 21st century.

4.
I’m fond of Istanbul.
The blue mosque.

5.
On the spot where the body
falls in two
or more pieces.
On that elevated site
the body is undone by complete
lack of existing
and just the spirit remains. In the blue
mosque, even if you extend
your arms and make
the exact curve,
even then, you’re unable to
touch your feet.
You want to know until where
you can walk
without
legs at all.
Deep down, curiosity stops us from falling. We want
to keep on walking.

6.
Do not bid farewell to the exterior;
a well close to Sutanamed
square, in an almost hidden
garden
the falling water seems,
at last, to fall in the
opposite direction.
All the sound goes
from the bottom up,
as does this.
In this way we substitute
human and musical instruments
for a natural disarray.
Classical music
in one corner
and classical water
in another.
It is neither dialogue
nor struggle.
You hear in both ears
and the song is the absolute same;
because you are distracted.
And also (because you are) calm.

7.
In Sutanamed square, suddenly,
two distinct events:
a downpour in the middle of summer,
the most impressive thunderstorm,
and at exactly the same time,
the call of the mosques, the
corners calling believers.
The storm and its fear, two things that establish, one by one,
all religions.
And between two immense voices, the thunder
and the calling of the mosques,
is that delicacy of the rain, almost feminine,
it says: be careful,
do not forget that
you are mortal.
And this is the proof in Sutanamed square.
We are alive and mortal; a little after two
and it is a rare hour, a minute, to be so foolishly clear.

8.
Sheltered by the rain
in a tent that sells everything,
including umbrellas.
If one day I need shelter from
death,
I will try and find this tent.
It is in Sutanamed square,
but only exists in dreams
(and in the rain).

9.
If you concentrate on the water, forget
the music,
if you concentrate on the music
forget the water’s source.
If you drink the water you don’t hear it
(the anxiety and heat don’t let you).
You can’t drink the music;
aren’t able to hit the notes
do re mi fa of the water that falls; who
taught this element to fall
this way?
And it is this that I think: water
is one of the rare elements
that creates music
when it falls
(except in such excessive
quantities).
A quality man envies:
not even the most delicate suicide
creates music;
not the scream,
nor the crashing to the ground
can be considered
a pleasant sound.

10.
Turkey.
In the valley of butterflies nothing is new
nothing is suspended,
but a heavy animal takes longer
to fall.

Translated from the Portuguese by PATRICK HOLLOWAY

Ceausescu’s Peacocks

ANDREA BAJANI

An Italian in Romania

In Bucharest there are rows of empty buildings, but they are not the old reinforced concrete barracks of the communist era. Those are still standing, stubbornly resisting the passing of time, peppered with yellow rectangles of light when darkness falls. The empty buildings are new, built recently, and are still waiting for someone to move in. Five years ago the city was full of scaffolding, full of workers and construction deadlines. I’d come to Bucharest to do research on a novel. One of the things I wanted to write about was capitalism and what happens when it arrives violently in a still-virgin country. I wanted to talk about reverse emigration: not the same old “alien emergency,” as people in self-proclaimed rich countries say when talking about Eastern European immigrants. I wanted to talk about reverse emigration, about economic colonialism, and how it descended like a predator on what we know as the countries of Real socialism. When I arrived, Bucharest was a construction site: Italian, French, German, Dutch companies were putting up buildings as fast as you would a house of cards. A swarm of activity to build a new dream, when the old one –in Ceausescu’s latter years—fell apart with a grimace and a death sentence carried out on Christmas day, 1989.
Years went by.
Now that I’m back, I can easily see that in the interim, everything has fallen apart. The investors picked up what was worth picking up, then left for better markets. People who sold during the real estate boom made out well, but those who lingered, waiting for prices to go up, got burned when the market lost half its value. That’s what a teacher I met years before had told me. She waited too long to sell—everyone said: “Don’t be in a hurry, prices will go up; don’t be afraid, capitalism means taking risks; in the free market you have to take risks to make any money.” Well, by the time she decided to sell, it was too late; when she finally did, she got little money and much disappointment. This is the Bucharest I see today: unending road construction, the cracks of history, and above all a succession of DE VANZARE on buildings: for sale to the best offer. Many buildings rose up, the last floor completed, like children fattened up on hamburgers, but no one was left to take care of these buildings, and they were left to die. It’s a heartbreaking sight. Here are all these buildings, with “De vanzare” on them, a plea of sorts, a sign that says “I’m hungry.” I’m hungry, says the condominium, I’m hungry for people, for human beings to occupy me, to give me real life, to prove that I’m more than just a possibility. That’s Romania today. In this mild autumn, it’s a country tired of being mocked by the long, worn out, almost desperate dream of communism, and by the briefer, more precise dream of capitalism: doped up, full of energy and excitement, hysterical, erotic, the promise of a potion for a prosperous market economy, for regeneration, a rebirth in record times.
Bucharest is filled with stray dogs. They’re everywhere, from the outskirts of the city, to downtown. Exhausted and underfed, they follow after people, but only for a few short steps. They’re like bad dreams that slipped from people’s heads onto the streets of Bucharest. They look like nightmares fleeing from beds, spilling from the ears of people who can’t go on sleeping because they’re too anxious. The dogs are Romania’s nightmares, its hollow past. The country kicked them out. They spilled from Romania’s ears and its beds and the city dumped them onto the streets. The dogs follow after people, but only for a few short steps. No one looks at them, no one pets them, no one wants them. They give up and lie down again. We see two of them at an intersection. They’re at a red light, lying in the middle of the road. When the light changes, they move off to the side and let the traffic go by. People continue on as if the dogs had appeared and then disappeared. During the day, people don’t want to think about their bad dreams. They don’t want to remember. When they wake up from a nightmare they want to believe that what happened in their sleep wasn’t the real world; the real world is what’s outside their bedroom. The real world is outside, with its cars, asphalt, and roads that are going somewhere. That’s why people seeing stray dogs in the streets pretend they don’t see them at all: because the world they’re driving to in their cars is the real one, and the dogs are bad dreams at night; they no longer hold any meaning.
But the stray dogs are the real world.
They’re the same dogs from four years ago, just older and more exhausted. Before –what people say as I walk downtown—Bucharest was filled with one-story houses and with courtyards, a dog in every home, rummaging in the yard with the other animals. Chickens, cats, rabbits. Then Ceausescu tore down the houses with their courtyards and put up a bunch of reinforced concrete buildings, still the face of downtown Bucharest today. Forced industrialization; country people were called to the city to pedal for that giant Romanian engine in its efforts to keep up with the rest of the world. Hordes of people left the countryside to live packed like sardines in apartment buildings of reinforced concrete. Down with the small houses and up with the condominiums that still occupy downtown. The dogs lost their houses and have been looking for a home for more than twenty years, but there aren’t any homes, not really. The dogs stayed but have nowhere to go, they’re outside the picture, in a place where they no longer exist. A dog approached our car, and the driver, a Romanian boy whose cell telephone rang frequently, didn’t look at him, the dog was invisible. “You are my nightmare, but I live in the real world,” the boy’s eyes said.
Looking at those huge cement buildings I thought of a novel by Dan Lungu, a Romanian writer, in which I read that many peasants who’d relocated to the city had died. They couldn’t survive: “They cashed in their pitiful subsidy and moved to a city tenement. The majority of those who moved to a building after spending an entire life with their feet planted on the ground didn’t live for more than a year. They couldn’t breathe surrounded by concrete beams and died of heart break. They were always thinking about the flowers in their little gardens, the rows of onions, and the apple and pear trees that grew nearby, the few chickens they called by name. They stayed on their balconies, consumed with longing.” I look at the buildings: at the ones that are empty because people don’t have the money to live there, and at those filled with the people who were forced to come here, and I think that people can die of heart break either way.
We drive by the People’s Building. Formerly owned by Ceausescu, it’s now the Romanian Parliament. I see dozens of Western tourists getting their picture taken in front of that building, making sure to stand far enough away to fit the entire building in the frame. You can see it from the Moon, a Romanian friend once told me with pride as we toured the city. Photographs in front of the wolf’s den, in front of the monster’s house. A fascination with Evil, or may be only the conviction to be on the right side of history. I remember that I’d gone to Ceausescu’s summer house, on the Black Sea. I’d been invited to a literary festival, a poetry festival actually, as I found out later. I was the only writer who wasn’t Romanian or a poet. Till this day that invitation is still a mystery to me. A week on the Black Sea with seventy Romanian poets. Supposedly, the poetry readings took place in a hotel that used to be the house where Nicolai and Elena Ceausescu spent their summers. The poets performed on a big terrace, taking turns reading Romanian poetry. Behind the terrace was a cage filled with peacocks. One of the festival organizers told me those peacocks were there before Ceausescu and his wife were sentenced. I don’t know the normal life span of a peacock, but I doubt it’s twenty-five years. I remembered that back then, I wanted to believe it. I liked to think that those were the same animals that saw the Conducator and his family on vacation. I wondered what impression it made on peacocks to go from a dictator on vacation with his family to poets reading Romanian verses and clapping wildly for one another. While on the Black Sea, I started to notice that Ceausescu’s peacocks didn’t treat all the poets the same. With some, the peacocks were quiet-  were they enthralled? speechless? disgusted? afraid? With others, they screamed – from excitement? horror? fear?, and the poets had to yell even louder to be heard. I wondered why no one said anything, even pretending nothing was going on, just raising their voices. The poets didn’t turn around to see where the screams came from, even when they grew increasingly louder. Nothing. They didn’t turn around, didn’t get upset, didn’t stop. They just kept on reading their poems, pretending the peacocks didn’t exist. The peacocks were like nightmares, they were Romania’s bad dreams, dreams that had escaped, spilled from people’s ears only to wind up in a cage- in the garden of the summer home of the former Dictator. The poets reading their poetry on the Black Sea ignored the birds because deep down, they thought the peacocks-  Ceausescu’s peacocks— belonged to the place of nightmares, not the real world. The real world was where they were, in a twenty-first century luxury hotel, in a world that came after all of that. By not turning around, they were saying: “I’m in the real world, and you’re in the world of nightmares.” But I think those poets didn’t turn around because they were afraid. If they turned around, they’d have to look the peacocks in the eye, and then they’d turn to stone. The poets were afraid that, even if they didn’t want to believe it, the peacocks were the real world.
And indeed they are.
Years ago, when I left Italy to come here, I was searching for something. In Italy, in the industrialized areas of the North, I saw rows of warehouses with signs “For Sale,” “For Rent,” “Business for Sale.” As I drove past them, I thought that my country had failed. At its entranceway, there seemed to be a “Business for sale” sign, a “Country for Sale” sign. As I drove by those buildings, I wondered about them, about what was on the inside, and I asked myself where all the people had gone who’d given life to those structures. That’s why I bought my first plane ticket to Bucharest: I wanted to go searching for something that Italy lost. I knew that many Italians had gone to Romania, and I found them, scattered throughout the countryside. The buildings they’d put up were identical to those they had in Italy, with the Italian flag in the lobby, and even banners of soccer teams like the Juventus or Cagliari. When I found the Italians, they looked like old pioneers; some were arrogant and others paternalistic toward their workers. These men thought— they instinctively knew—that the East would be more affordable than attempting a conquest in the West. In Romania, labor was cheap and they could survive a little longer, unlike in Italy. They were miraculous survivors, those Italians who went searching for their fortunes. They had failed, but geography had given them a second chance: cars, women, power. Little fish in Italy, they had the illusion of being big, and it didn’t matter if they were in the middle of nowhere, in the Romanian countryside, with a soccer team flag in the lobby.
Now that I’m back in Romania, about to leave Bucharest for the countryside, on my way for Oltenia, Moldova, then back to Timisoara, I notice that there are no flags in these buildings; they too have “De vanzare” signs. The buildings are closed up, like nightmares, like the bad dreams that have spilled out the ears of a country. The Romanians who live in the area travel by car and by bicycle; they even travel in carts drawn by exhausted horses, these people don’t look at the buildings they pass. They pretend these buildings don’t exist, as if these concrete and metal structures in the countryside weren’t there at all. And the buildings the foreigners built while telling them: “Thanks to us, you’ll have a better future,” “Trust us and we’ll save you,” these buildings, the Romanians pretend don’t even exist. It’s as if the people who came making promises never existed either. I asked one man where everybody went. He pointed somewhere in the distance. “East,” he said. They went further east, making more promises in cheaper places, rising again from a second death. Romanians go by, and they pretend the warehouses don’t exist, that they belong to the world of bad dreams, of nightmares, and not to the real world. Romanian citizens are the only ones who live in the real world, where the road exists that they take with their cars, their bicycles, and their horse drawn-carts. And in this world there are no stray dogs, no Ceausescu peacocks, no warehouses in the middle of the plain. Those things are only nocturnal garbage, what spills out Romania’s ears while the city sleeps, what strolls about in the fields, in the streets, and along the coast—like bad dreams that have ended up in the real world.
But the warehouses, I’ve thought, are the real world too.
Before returning to Italy, I went back to Bucharest to visit one of the seventy Romanian poets whom I met on the Black Sea. He asked what I thought about Bucharest, after all these years. Before answering, I remembered what I was told four years ago when Romania was about to join the European Union and everyone wanted to believe that something was going to change. At that time, even if they didn’t quite believe it, everybody said that the past must be thrown away. They all told me that everything was changing in Bucharest, and that on my next visit I wouldn’t recognize the place. They said this emphatically, looking me in the eyes, as if searching for confirmation. Bucharest would be unrecognizable; it would be modern and fully developed. They wanted to believe that something was going to change. The future would arrive, the Westerners would bring comfort, money, beauty, rhythm, speed. At first, when the Romanian poet asked what I thought of the city, I didn’t know what to say. Then I said that it looked like it did five years before. As soon as I said this, I understood that within my claim, within the city’s resemblance to itself, there was another defeat entirely, and a trust twice betrayed. We went for a beer in the old section of the city; while we sat and drank, night was falling, and a stray dog came to sleep at our feet. My Romanian friend asked the waiter for a sandwich. He tore up the sandwich and dropped the chunks, which the starving dog devoured. The dog was dirty, with bloodshot eyes, but my friend patted him anyway. I looked at my friend, stunned, amazed he wasn’t pretending that nothing was there, that he didn’t think the dog was just someone’s imagined nightmare. When we left, the dog gathered himself up and followed after us. Suddenly, I thought that what had just happened—which was nothing, really, just a dog following after a man who’d paid him some attention—was actually something huge: a building collapsing, the house across from it flooding with light.

Translated from the Italian by LOUISE ROZIER

Very Soon – Money And Love

JANA BEŇOVÁ

A Slovak in Portugal

It is 25 July, 3:00 p.m., Lisbon, Bertrand Livreiros, the bookshop on the Chiado. An elderly gentleman has dozed off, with his head hanging to one side and a finger dipped into a book as he was about to turn the page. The shop assistant smiles at me. The reader seems to have turned into stone except that we can hear his regular breathing.
It’s all coming back to me: this is a city that is generous to books, writers, poets and readers alike. It is a thinking, inquisitive city, sustained by poetry. What else can you do to survive in a place where the ocean begins but you have no sense where it ends. (No wonder that in English depression was known as Portuguese melancholy.) In the bookshop I am dazzled by row after row of plain book covers, classic and contemporary Portuguese poetry, some by authors I have met. The complete works of Adilia Lopes, under the motto Make love, then make it again. The final line of one of her poems pops into my mind: Unloved like skin afflicted by eczema.
Next to it on the shelf lies a book by Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão, a refined lady sitting in the corner of a drawing room who might just, as if accidentally, pull a golden bee out of her ear. (The buzzing gives me pleasure…). My friend Pedro Tamen’s poetry (We share fear and clean water). I’ve come back to Lisbon 14 years after my last visit. I’ve always remembered that the bookshops here are crammed full of poetry, as opposed to my country, where poetry tends to be tucked away somewhere at the back. On the “naughty books” shelf. But perhaps it was just my imagination, something I have dreamt over the years. I wasn’t sure. Perhaps I’ve idealized Lisbon.
A friend who has come to stay with me for a weekend concurs: “yes, it does seem that way. At first sight. But if I were you I’d go and talk to a few locals to check if it’s really the case.” “How could it possibly not be, with all these books all around”, I ask her. “I don’t know but anyhow – there’s nothing like being in touch with the locals”, she says.
So I get in touch. To make sure I haven’t fallen for some kind of a Potemkin village. How well I know stories like that from Slovakia, of dummy publications – empty pages inside a proper cover – cobbled together to show the government agency that helped fund them. Stories of publishers who have printed twenty copies of a book and left it at that.
So what is it like in Portugal? I ask the young poet Nuno Brito. The news is good. He tells me that loyalty to the motherland is part and parcel of the Portuguese poetry tradition. And vice versa. I recall that fourteen years ago, when I admired the quantity of poetry published in Portugal, Pedro Tamen said: you see, our minister of culture is different from yours: instead of doing battle with poets he supports them.
Poets loyal to their country. Fernando Pessoa returned to Portugal from South Africa in order to contribute to his country’s national revival. He created a whole generation of poets, his heteronyms, each with a distinct literary style, life history, character, date of birth, horoscope. (“It may be of interest – at least I believe so – to present this movement as a single movement, one that is pursuing not just an artistic goal but also a goal that is more profound, a range of ideas demanding urgent publication so that they can influence the national psyche, which needs to be thoroughly processed and permeated by new intellectual and emotional perspectives and rouse us from our stagnation. The patriotic idea, always present in my plans to a greater or lesser degree, now matters to me even more and I don’t want to create any works of art without extolling Portugal in everything I manage to achieve.”) I was born in a Portuguese province and have met English people who say I speak English perfectly.
“Lately the publishing scene in Portugal has been more vibrant, there are more and better translations. New publishers have helped raise the standard. We have excellent new literary journals, especially in Lisbon – Criatura, Ítaca, Ínútil and Telhados de Vidro. Some older journals are also very active, such as Relâmpago, published by the Fundação Luis Miguel Nava. Literary criticism has become more prominent in newspapers and magazines. You’ll find good quality poetry criticism in Actual – Expresso, Ipssilon, Jornal de letra or Revista ler. I think we are living in a time that is very conducive to Portuguese poetry,” says Nuno Brito.

27 July, 13:00 Caparica
I feel cleansed now that I’ve jumped into the ocean – at the third attempt, undeterred by the icy water, submerged head to toe.
And what a relief to find shelter from the scorching sun in a beach bar, to give my eyes a rest from the blazing heat that pulsates in the air, in every grain of sand beneath my feet, on the glittering surface of the water. Someone once said that places that reflect light are sacred at that particular moment, because that’s when God dwells in them, even if it’s just the back mirror of an old car. I order a pingado (coffee with a drop of milk) and half a litre of water. The bill comes to 1.58. Blessed is the vagabond in an affordable country!
How laughable we are with our petty little aches and pains and problems, with our puny bodies and tiny souls. The ocean rises and falls, rises and falls, taking no notice of us.
I’m wearing the beach scarf František Osoba bought me 14 years ago at this exact spot. He and I lived together in Lisbon from April to August 1997.
I’m showing the scarf to the ocean to prove that I still have it. That it hasn’t fallen apart yet. Perhaps I should drop František a line: I’m looking at what you loved so much.

17:00
Totally intoxicated from strolling down the beach, from the gleaming and the shimmering light, sun, salt, wind and air. (O Ar!, the title of a poem by Sá-Carneiro.)
I shall never tire of watching children dance in the collapsing waves on the beach. It is an ancient dance – they jump up and down on the spot because they are overwhelmed. By the views, the ocean – the endless present.
Eventually they make a fearless dash towards the first wave but stop in their tracks and, frightened by its force, turn on their heels and run back to safety. And start jumping up and down and dancing again. As if they wanted to frighten it. The great big ocean! As if they wanted to hint that they’re coming! That it should get ready! That it should brace itself: watch out!
This is where the world is, here’s where you have to jump! And the whole crowd leaps into the first wave, raising their arms, squealing – children doing their job! Like the “workers of the sea”!
People should spend more time working with the ocean! It obviously makes them happy. The entire coast of Caparica, eight kilometres long, is lined with a wave of humanity labouring in the first ocean wave.

Not poor, not nice
In some respects the situation of all writing vagabonds never changes. It is immutable, constantly on the brink of bankruptcy.
The Portuguese have an innately natural attitude to poverty. In Lisbon the paths of the poor keep crossing those of the more affluent and the tourists: the old town is a space they share. “For me that was the main difference between Bratislava and Lisbon. When I was in Bratislava I suddenly didn’t see any poor people in the streets. And when I saw some, they’d be somewhere on the margins. Pushed aside, out of sight,” says my Portuguese friend Francisco.
“That was the Portugal of the old, pre-European days, when it was known as the poor relative of Europe. He loved this country because its population had suffered so much. We were aware not only of restaurants and fancy shops around Rua Augusta but also of the way people related to one another. People who lived in poverty, miserable themselves, always showed extraordinary kindness and humanity for the sick, the Roma, the blacks, the beggars in the street.” (This is how Peter Fabian, Thomas Bernhard’s brother, recalls their stay in Lisbon and Sintra).
Very soon, money and love, was how Fernando Pessoa understood his horoscope before he turned thirty. (According to his diary entries from 1913 he often couldn’t afford to eat. He stayed with relatives or in rented rooms, frequently moving from place to place.) “I don’t know what is yet to come – is there a chance that I won’t be crushed by the wheel? But doing foolish things is so wonderful: “Let’s cushion our Lives/Against us and Against the World…” when I think of how simple everything could be, how devoid of danger, if only it weren’t for immortal money”…
As someone has said – to be a poor vagabond these days, you need a lot of money.
On the ground floor of the house in Arco da Graça where I’m staying a man roughly my age runs a small corner shop. He sells fruit, vegetables, toiletries, wine, canned food and yoghurt. There are two more little shops like that in the same, not very long street. The man spends all his time in the shop or hanging out in the street outside. His wife sits at the register, in the only chair in the room, a baby in her lap. The owner has zero business sense. I’ve seen him try to persuade stray tourists to buy at least a kilo of peaches instead of two pieces of fruit for the road. They always refuse with a smile.
Whenever I buy more than one item it obviously costs him a huge effort to add everything up and ring it up before he starts loading the shopping into a plastic bag. He puts the tomatoes in the bag first and a bottle of beer and guarana soda on top.
Although he speaks only Portuguese, occasionally we manage a little chat. He asks where I’m from. Slovakia, I say. Czechoslovakia – I expand. Prague – I try again. Europe? he asks. I nod. Nice country or poor country, he asks. Not poor, not nice, I reply.
This is the first time anyone in Europe has asked me if I’m from a poor country. This time, however, I feel rich. I’m on a 70 euro per diem, which in local terms is a pile of gold. 14 years ago, František and I arrived on a three-month scholarship and decided to stay longer. With or without money. At first we splashed out – fresh strawberries in a café on a hill above the city, a bottle of cheap Port a day, a papaya, known here as mamaya. We spent every day of our last month on Caparica Beach swimming and lounging by the ocean. It was July 1997. I don’t remember any beach bars in those days. We sat among sand dunes eating bread and olives and sand. There was sand everywhere and the last few grains were still stuck to us at Christmas time. As they peeled off we heard them squeak between our bodies and the bed sheet.

Speak to you again on Saturday…
František Osoba is a literal translation of the name Fernando Pessoa into Slovak (it could be Francis Person in English)František dreamed of staying in Portugal for as long as possible instead of going back to Slovakia. But we didn’t even have enough money left for the bus fare to the beach. As a 22-year-old I couldn’t understand why someone would cling to a certain place, country, atmosphere, sun, images, even though he was on the verge of starvation. While back at home there would be at least some security.
Fourteen years later I behave in exactly the same way. After two days in Lisbon I feel that the city of flickering white light, the city that ends where the ocean begins, possesses healing qualities and I can’t bear to think of leaving after just one month. I want to hold on to those images at all costs, as František said.
So I write to Projekt Forum – the organisation that is paying for my stay here, along with several other writers they dispatched all over Europe in exchange for an essay – enclosing receipts for the 1800 euros I’ve paid for accommodation so that they can reimburse me. If I get the money before the end of August, I tell them, I will be able to stay longer than planned.
They reply saying it’s not all that simple. “Unfortunately, the subsidy we received from the ministry is rather paltry. I’m not sure we can repay your accommodation costs as early as August…”
I have read the correspondence between poets and friends Pessoa and Sá-Carneiro (on friendship, money, poetry, money, money, death, depression, poetry, life, loans, pawnshop, suicide).
On 3 April 1916 Sá-Carneiro writes from Paris: “Good-bye, my dear Fernando Pessoa. Today, Monday April 3 is the day I shall die by jumping under a train at Pigalle station. Yesterday I sent you a notebook with my poetry but I couldn’t afford the postage. If the letter is delivered, please pay the fine if possible…”
A day later he sends another note: “Nothing I’ve written earlier applies, until further notice – things seem to be going from bad to worse. But there is a certain lull now. Speak to you again on Saturday. Yours…”
I reply to Projekt Forum: “I’m sorry to keep going on about money but Pessoa and Sá-Carneiro were also short of money, and so is Portugal so I’ve blended in quite well… Speak to you again on Saturday. Yours…”

500 dollars
Years ago, on our way to catch the bus home from the beach, František and I used to pass restaurants and watch people guzzling juicy snails and washing them down with wine. And František said, one day we’ll be sitting there too, and this is where I’ll buy you a scarf – not one, but two! As soon as I get paid by my publisher. As soon as I get the advance on my new book. Any day now. 500 dollars, that’s peanuts for a publisher! His publisher and 500 dollars, that was our mantra. From the beach to the bus. Our dinner.
On our way to catch an ordinary bus carting people from the city to the beach. Crammed full of people, including a couple of little hooligans throwing balls over the heads of other passengers.
The bus is crawling across the bridge. It’s a permanent traffic jam. Just like fourteen years ago. But the view of Belém, Tajo and the city! Why, we should be grateful for traffic jams.
The statue of Jesus Christ up on the hill reminds me of the one in Rio. Apparently his nickname is traffic policeman. His arms are spread out. Spread over all the crossroads.
And what about the Slovak publisher? Before František had asked for an advance he kept getting glowing postcards. Dear František! Stay as long as you can… František read this as: stay where you are while we’re toiling on your behalf.
Then, out of the blue, a fax arrived: Dear Mr Osoba, You don’t seem to understand how my publishing house works… There must have been a misunderstanding…
I didn’t watch my spending because I was going to kill myself… Sá-Carneiro writes.

Bum-bum-bum
28 August. Bairo Alto. I find myself in front of the tequila bar where František and I once got drunk. An energetic young barmaid presided over the small room. František drank mescal, I drank margaritas, six jolly Frenchmen drank tequila bumbum cocktails. The barmaid would slam the drink down on the table, the tequila would start bubbling out of the shot glasses and they had to down it at once and order the next drink straight away. Bum-bum-bum. All this to the accompaniment of frantic music, droning guitars, vibrating voices. We had to talk louder and louder. František loved this part of town. The place was full of people standing outside bars talking, dancing, swaying, sitting down, sprawling on the pavement, smoking.
All of a sudden a little girl ran up to a little boy and gave him a passionate hug. They stood there embracing, staggering from side to side, quite drunk on the atmosphere. O Ar!
I made it, my feet found their way back here. A notice announces: “since 1983″.
I take a seat at the bar. The two barmen are perfect stereotypes, one the quintessential Latino lover, all wavy black hair and eyes like embers, the other a gentle and calm presence in black.
I look at the Bairo Alto Street outside, at tourists rotating in and out of the doorway like statues in an astronomical clock, with their backpacks and cameras. Noise and tequila. A language I understand.
The Latino guy dances out into the street and before long he’s back with his first catch of the evening, three young women. He throws a few Russian phrases at them. They protest they’re from Lithuania. They speak English.
After the first cocktail they end up in the barmen’s guileless arms. An innocent yet fiery samba. Two consummate couples. As if they had been practising the dance for years.
That’s what I call globalisation!
Dancing is for free. But nothing else is. Everything else has to be paid for.
The narrow alleys of Bairo Alto are full of men selling sunglasses. It’s dark, night has fallen. They hold them out like bouquets of flowers. Hush a bye… baby. Hash… a buy.
In a letter from Paris dated 5 April 1916 Sá-Carneiro begs Pessoa to go and see his old nurse and ask her to pawn her golden chain. She should send him the money straight away.
… if you need 5 thousand reis badly (your usual crisis) I would be happy to lend it to you… please stress that it is a matter of the utmost urgency and that I’ll be lost if I don’t get this money – which I have spent already – as soon as possible.
Estrela Gardens, trees thrown open like gates. Like arms. Energetic. Erotic. Like the almost liquid, hot fig exploding between my lips and tongue.
Estrela. A little girl runs around with a skipping rope, then throws herself into another game altogether, while her father in a steel-blue suit picks up the skipping rope and pensively winds it around his hand. Estrela. A dog whose hoarse, barking screeches like old women in the south. Estrela. A young man walks on a tightrope strung between two trees a few centimetres above ground. “More suitable for tripping over than for walking on.”
Estrela. 3:00 p.m. Siesta. The Latino lover, the barman from the tequila bar, slowly approaches on the path. He’s pushing a pram.
A grandma and a grandson are leaving Estrela Gardens. Suddenly the boy breaks free and runs away, across pedestrian crossings, not looking left or right, off he goes scooting down the street. Peeedrooooo! Peeedrooooo! the angry grandma shouts after him.
Another elderly woman coming opposite instantly realises what is going on. She grabs the boy, clutches him firmly in her arms and gives him two symbolic slaps for good measure.
Grandmas in Lisbon cooperate. They form a flexible and highly effective network. One that springs into action as and when necessary.

The ocean around the corner
Paris is Paris. But Lisbon is my goal. The ocean around the corner. The ocean that breathes down our necks.
The ocean, two ways. If you want to immerse yourself in it, be close enough to touch it, head for Caparica Beach. It’s about half an hour from Praça de Espanha by bus.
The train ride to Cascais takes ten minutes longer. A new path for pedestrians and cyclists has been opened, running the length of the beach on a rocky cliff. In just over two hours I walked to the Cabo Raso lighthouse. Behind it there’s just the wild Guincho Beach and Europe’s westernmost promontory – Cabo da Roca.
You never lose sight of the ocean on this walk. The salt will turn your hair stiff even though you didn’t as much as dip a finger in the ocean. You can follow the sun for hours, high above the ocean. Between the sky and the water. Keeping one leg in a boat the whole time.
Your longer leg. The more decisive one. In the evening I’m still half deaf on the train. The wind continues to whirl around my head as I go to bed. Like when you’ve gone for a long swim in the sea and after you go to bed everything inside you suddenly seems to vibrate. Roll. Like seawater. Everything is in motion. All that water, three quarters of us humans.
It’s the breadth that matters, or rather the boundlessness. All that space, water touching the sky and feet touching the ground. Homo sapiens, a vertical expanse in the gusts of wind. A sail on a mast. Have to keep walking till I’m torn to shreds.
At Caparica, after several attempts, I pluck up the courage and plunge in. Into the ocean. It’s ice cold. For a moment every part of my body seem to freeze. Especially the head. The head and the breathing. Somewhere halfway between my brain and my sex, and back again. Click.
A single long icicle. A piece of crystal. I feel the cold assaulting the limits of my body from the inside, pounding against my skin.
I run out, my head is on fire, a fire of ice! It exposes itself to the sun hungrily, turning to face it. Seeking the sun devotedly. It submits to it. It bares itself right down to the roots of my salt-soaked hair.
And once again, and then a few more times. Any other drug would be a fraud.

13 June 1997, Saint Anthony
František Osoba had been waiting for the Feast of St. Anthony since April. The holiday coincides with Fernando Pessoa’s birthday. 13 June 1888.
He asked our Portuguese friends, poets and intellectuals, how the holiday is marked. And what is the best place in town to celebrate it. Where we should position ourselves, pitch our camp. On Saint Anthony’s day. The day of plentiful cheap wine and sardines. When the whole city is on its feet and everyone is up and dancing all night. Saint Anthony, the Patron Saint of Lisbon, who will help you find misplaced things over and over again (people, memories, roads, children, shells, fish).
So off we went – down Bairo Alto, passing neighbourhood barbecues where people started grilling the first sardines of the night, filling the streets with a wonderful smell. It wasn’t quite so nice a few hours later. And it turned into an unbearable toxic stench after midnight. Barbecue and sardines.
It might have been nine o’clock. František wanted to keep going. This was the day, he kept saying, when everyone, including vagabonds and beggars, would be treated to free wine and bread and fish. In honour of Saint Anthony. By now we were on the wide artery of the Avenida da Liberdade, as a parade representing various districts of Lisbon filed past. People in fancy dress marching and dancing down the street, by now chock-a-block. “How are we going to get home?” I whisper timidly. But František is fascinated by the waves of people rolling down the street. “Pedro said Alfama is where it’s really at,” he says. Off we go. The streets and outdoor bars are crowded, there’s nowhere to sit. Hungry, exhausted and worn out by the crowds, we find two seats at the end of an endless row of tables – the entire square has been transformed into never-ending rows of wooden tables lined with people eating. We manage to find two chairs right at the end. It means that a crowd of merry and mostly drunken people will keep passing us all the time (this is Alfama after all). Most of them are teenagers. It is obvious that Saint Anthony is an initiation ritual for most of them. It is the day when the Portuguese get drunk for the first time. Like the autumn young wine festival in Slovakia.
František orders piles of fish and wine. Sardines are tiny, he shouts, we need at least four or five a head, and he insists on ordering a dozen. We eat one and we’re full, it’s well past midnight and we can’t afford to pay our bill. Never before did we have to fork out so much for a dinner in Portugal. We laugh, a feast for beggars indeed! František tosses coins onto a tray and tells the waitress that’s all we have. He sticks his fists deep into his jeans pockets. We leave, it’s early morning.
The small squares and crossroads on our usual way out of Alfama are impassable. They have turned into a moving mass of dancing people. They’re just about dancing. With half a foot. All they can manage in the crush are symbolic moves. But when all these tiny movements are added up, the square turns into a sea of extravagant motion. An earthquake.
(The huge earthquake that destroyed Lisbon in 1755 had spared Alfama. Only its palaces came crashing down forever.)
František walks down to the river for a pee and his feet get stuck in the mud on the bank. He calls me. We struggle to free him. Somehow we manage. We manage the unimaginable walk back home, too: Alfama, Baixa, Avenida de Liberdade and the endless Eduard VII Park that is just beginning to emerge. From Baixa onwards it’s uphill all the way. Our hair and clothes are permeated with the smell of grilled fish. The odour stays in the leather belts of our jeans forever.
Too late, Pedro tells us, oh yes, yes, it gets really wild there. I was quite surprised you wanted to go, the last time I went was when I was sixteen…
Ah, the perfidious Lusitanians!

Shopping
George Steiner describes the avid exploration phase characteristic of a particular stage of childhood. It’s when you begin to put two and two together, to copy, to write things down, make lists of things only to be told by adults that all this has been done long time ago, that everything has been collected, discovered, thoroughly researched, noted. But the child keeps going on and on, with great attention to detail. The child doesn’t care. Steiner himself had collected and written detailed descriptions of coats of arms. As if he were the first person to discover them and see them.
This is what comes to my mind sometimes in these small local shops. I doubt that shops like these exist anywhere else apart from Lisbon. Tiny haberdasheries, shops selling underwear that’s anything but sexy, handkerchiefs, hats, umbrellas, gloves, minute little places where they repair watches, radios or toys. And loads of tiny mixed goods shops. Selling potatoes, alcohol, soft drinks, detergents, writing paper, tea towels, hairpins, exercise books, pen-holders, pastries.
All the stuff they sell in these shops should be drawn, painted, written down, listed in all detail. An encyclopaedia.
I walk into one of these shops. Coming from the sun, I’m blinded for a moment and can’t see anything in the dark, until my eyes adjust. After a while I make out a small table in the corner, where a father sits facing his daughter. Both are short and corpulent. I buy an embroidered tea towel. The little girl speaks English perfectly.
Our bedroom in Rua Século was at street level. It faced a small square tucked away behind our street. In the mornings we would open the blinds and watch people’s feet pass by. We’d see a bench on which a homeless man slept every night. Two boys came during the day to kiss openly. A woman with three dogs. One day we, too, sat down on the bench and looked in the opposite direction – into our window. As we returned our own glances we became a part of the story of the square. Of an unending film. Slow, like the Lisbon underground … yellow, red, green, blue… the colours marking its four lines. “What colour are emotions?”

892 or the crisis in a supermarket
Finally I’ve made it to a hypermarket, so different from the small Portuguese Pingo Dolce shops. As soon as I came in I saw cherry tomatoes in exactly the same packaging as in Bratislava, Vienna or Paris. The price was the same, too. I decided to buy some ready-made food at the deli counter. Although there were just two customers ahead of me, it took ages. I would have left if I hadn’t been hungry. And by the time I realized that there was a system in operation – the shop assistants kept glancing at an electronic display behind their backs, which showed the number 892 – I’d nearly forgotten I was hungry. But I was determined to go through with this adventure. At the end of the counter there was a wheel from which you had to tear off a number that would later appear on the digital display. In my country they have them in some offices or post offices. The shop assistants here look like bank clerks or state officials. Dignified in their starched uniforms they speak and serve deliberately, thinking everything over before they act. They place every item of food I buy – four little potatoes, a piece of salmon, a stuffed aubergine – into a separate plastic container and put the containers in a plastic bag. I end up leaving with a huge package. Packaged air. O Ar.
The fruit and vegetable counter also has numbers you have to tear off and wait until one of two plastic-gloved young men calls your number. All the shop assistants here have dreamy eyes. The atmosphere reminds me of the vast airport duty-free shops, except that there it’s the travellers who have dreamy eyes – people in between countries, climates, air. O Ar. What do Lisbon supermarket shop assistants dream of, what place, country, people and air?
Fourteen years ago the supermarket didn’t exist. There was just grass.

Birthday
As I leave Café Chiado I find my way blocked by a tram. It just sits there ringing its bell. It’s stuck on the hill and can’t move. A woman stands between the pavement and the tramline. She’s on the phone. Her face is tense, totally focused. The tram driver is going berserk. But to no avail. The woman takes no notice. She covers her free ear with a hand. I take her by the elbow and gently push her onto the pavement. The tram stops ringing and lunges forward, almost sweeping us off our feet. The ringing stops and in that moment the woman suddenly notices something is different, the sudden silence and the fact that she caused the whole commotion. She apologizes absently, explaining she was terribly upset because of what someone had just told on the phone. Right into her ear. Who knows what news it was that derailed this woman on 3 August after 3:00 pm on the Chiado, on the tracks of the hundred-year old tram?
It happened right next to the house where Fernando Pessoa was born. What she heard must have been just as mesmerising as the sound of bells from the nearby church. Pessoa felt as if he had heard them the minute he was born. His first sound. But that was back in the days “when everyone was happy and nobody was dead”. And his birthday was the greatest COMMOTION IN CHIADO!

The arse of the city
How easy it is to get lost in Alfama. Or in the streets behind it. You’re trapped – you walk around in circles until you are dizzy. You realize how close the illuminated streets, crowded with tourists and tables laden with food, are to the streets immersed in darkness, where small groups of men – bands of outsiders – sit around on steps, drinking. And young men suddenly peel off dark walls to offer you hash. They just shove it into your face without a word. Like a fist.
This is when this sunny city filled with white light and shiny paving stones suddenly shows its other side to you. Or its back. Its arse. The arse of a pompous ancient opera!
Or when you return to a favourite place after a long time. Like the café by the river. Where the river is perhaps at its widest, in anticipation of merging into the ocean.
But suddenly the vast empty breathing space, the meeting point of water and sky, vanishes. A huge ocean liner is moored in the port down by the café, its white bottom covering the Tajo.
This is my last day in Lisbon, muggy and sunless. People wander around like ghosts. All of a sudden it starts raining. A group of tourists seek shelter under the awning of a shop near Brasileira.
A beggar spots them. Standing in the rain a few metres further away, he launches into a desperate one-man show, lambasting his audience. “You want to hide from the rain? Do youoooooooooo? It’s raining, isn’t iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit? You tooooourists!”
I turn on my heels and run down Chiado. I’ve seen enough. I’m flying back home in the morning.
“But these are just fragments, fragments, fragments.”

What happened next (or is there a chance I won’t be crushed by the wheel?)

Nuno Brito: His most recent book, Crème de la crème, was published on 29 September 2011. He lives in Porto. Since September 2012 he has been working part time for a company that sells everything necessary for the production of shoes.
Sá-Carneiro: committed suicide in a Paris hotel on 26 April 1916 aged 26.
Fernando Pessoa: On 9 October 1929 he wrote to his beloved Ofélia Queiroz: Wildest Bebé, slight apologies for bothering you. The suspension of the old car in my head and my nonexistent brain are broken, they’re going tr-tr-r-r-r. He died six years later in a hospital in Bairo Alto. “Pass me my glasses” were reportedly his last words.
František Osoba: After four expeditions to Portugal he went back on 18 September 2011. He wrote: “What I’d like to do is lie down patiently facing the Tower, before I lose my speech and consciousness and go to sleep. But which way do I lie to face it? And which one of us, Bebé, can claim to have a legible face at this moment in time?”
Jana Beňová: the suspension is broken here –r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r

Translated from the Slovak by JULIA SHERWOOD

Van Gogh by Bicycle

VITALIE CIOBANU

A Moldovan in the Netherlands

Now I understand, the clock on the cathedral can organize and discipline the hours and habits of your day, even if you don’t count yourself among the community of faithful believers, gathered around the same sanctuary. In Amsterdam, the cathedral is named Jacob Obrecht, and sat across from my hotel – in the same way, the personality of this reformer of religious music from the Flemish Rennaisance, Jacob Obrecht, has dominated the character of the entire neighbhorhood.
My relationship with the church was largely conicidental. At home, in Basarabia, in my soviet childhood and adolescent years, I overlooked a similar landmark, even though my grandfather was the village priest. My parents, on the other hand, high school teachers, were always terrorized by the surveillance of the ‘guardians of atheism’, and as a result, kept me away from any encounter with the sacred. Today, having lived for two decades outside of those interdictions, even more, we have come through a phase of inflated religiosity, which has taken on, sometimes, abberant forms of grotesque collective psychosis, provoking in me a feeling of disgust and internal altertness, as in the face of danger. Confronted with this false and empty piety (which fills the pockets of greedy, hypocritical priests), I’ve come, for example, to admire the czech people among whom only 20% call themselves Christians, maintaining a civic spirit I actually envy.
In a town known for its debauchery and lack of inhibitions, it seemed a provaction to be living next to a catholic cathedral for two weeks. And even so, this happened: the long, calm chimes of the bell started to measure my day to day existence. Each hour was punctuated by the striking of the bell and a lonely sound, more faint at the marking of the half hour, so that I no longer felt the need for any other temporal way to keep track of time.
I asked myself if this scenario with the the clanging of the bell compelled me in some way to be more disciplined, to adhere to an agenda a bit less wasteful and superficial…
*
I dreaded the bicyclists of Amsterdam. There are many, everywhere, they have invaded the streets and sidewalks, sounding their horns at the last possible moment, freaking me out, at least in the early days. I perceived them as a constant threat, a priviliged tribe, aggresive and proud. They cut you off, on their own or in groups, just at the moment when it seems safe to cross the street. Attentive only to cars, like every man from Eastern Europe, a place where riding a bicycle still needs to be invented, I forgot that bicyclists move through the traffic. Bicyclists who live their right to ride with a fervor, deriving the ulimate satisfaction from that right.
The people of the city peddle on undisturbed, going shopping –baskets of food suspended over the front wheel – mothers on bicycle with children in knapsacks, or hanging out of their purses, just like a marsupial; men dressed to the nines, working at some bank or government office, leaving a vague hint of Dolce & Gabbana in their rushing wheels….And the great mass of children and young people, with headpones on their ears, they seem to live on their bicycles: speaking into their phones, eating, drinking, talking and gesturing, masters of balance on their wheels…
When I got used to this species of traveler, and learned to respect the bike lane (all too narrow for their large numbers – especially when you include those on scooters and motor bikes), I found the peace and quiet to mediate: what would happen in Chişinău, if someone would dare to bike across town and to put his child on the handle bars? It’s nearly premediated murder. I can’t imagine getting to the office in good shape on a bicycle, through the hellish traffic and aggresive motorists of my city.
I had the impression that all of Holland got around on bicycle, while in the public transit – the bus, trolley, metro – there are only forerign tourists running giddily from one museum to the next, from one shop to the next…
Bunches of bikes – on the arched bridges over the channels of Amsterdam, in the supermarket parking lots, on the side of the road, in intersections, outside the cafes… – they are an unmistakable part of the city’s identity.
*
I discovered the Museumplen on my first outing in the city, after I’d arrived at my hotel. It was near the place where I lodged, and I knew about it from searching the internet, but I couldn’t imagine that it was ‘that’ close – go 100 meters, turn at the corner of Jacob Obrecht and Lairessestratt, and you find yourself in a green field (a spring fresh green in the middle of the summer) between two museums — Van Gogh (on the left) and Rikjsmuseum right in front. A meadow paradise, opening suddenly in the midst of the sober gray stone buildings.
A place thought out by shrewd, inspired architects, and it attracts tourists like a magnet, people typically exhausted after their long perigrinations among the city streets and museum corridors.
Groups of young people hang out in the grass, listening to music and … smoking and dreaming (soft drugs are easily accessible in Amsterdam). Families eat sandwhiches from Albert Heijn, located right at the corner of the Van Gogh Museum (like some characters from Manet’s Lunch on the Grass), makeshift soccer games with improvised goalposts made of purses and shoes, a tightrope walker on a cord between two trees, demonstrating his ability and inviting onlookers to try some balancing exercises… In the corner of the pasture I listen, slowing my pace, to agitated discussions in Romanian among some gypsies, taking stock of the day: “Don’t come over when you see me doing business! Don’t crowd me, bah!”…
But the Museumplain meant most to me on my evening walks, barefoot among the grass, two-three laps from one end to the other, before sleep, after watching the televisoin, the remains of an Olympic day in which my Romanians did not stand out so prominently.
*
The faces and gestures that have been retained: Francesca from the “Peek & Cloppenburg,” who watched me attentlivly browsing agitated and yet bored among the shirts and tshirts. After seeing that I failed to pick anything out she approached, benevolent and eager to help. “Where are you from?” “From Moldova.” But my answer confused her, she couldn’t place it. “I speak Romanian, I’m Romanian by birth,” I said, trying to clarify. A eyelash raised on her face, tanned and radiant, which made me wonder (is this a complex that haunts me?) if maybe she’d had a bad experience with one of my compatriots…Then Francesca overwhelmed me with words, and I found out that she’s Italian, married to a Dutchman. But the story of the shirts in Amsterdam, like in all of Holland, is this: they had very long sleeves, or at least longer than was typical, becaue the Batavii were large, lanky and bony. “We, Europeans, make do, but imagine the trouble the Chinese have with these sizes, Francesca’s tells me without a trace of a smile on her face, and there are many Chinese here.”
The swarthy waiter from Beursplein, near the Central Station – friendly, preoccupied, his English shaky. I asked him if he was Dutch. “I was born in Holland, he told me, after a slight hesitation, but my parents were from Lebanon.” Encouraged by this brief dialogue, I watched him with interest: “And you sir, where are you from? “From Moldova, a former Soviet republic, Romanian soil…” Ah, like Georgia! I saw it on televsion…, the war with Russia. “No, we were at war with Russia in ’91, now there’s peace, but the occupying troops have stayed behind. When an enemy loves you, he doesn’t let you of his embrace,” I tried to joke. “I understand… my enemy is Israel!” the waiter tells me in a defiant-complicit tone, unguarded, before disappearing with a stack of glasses and plates in his arms. (…)
Hendrik, from a restaurant in Leidseplein, who made a charming plea for me to try the Vienniese steak (“it’s authentic, not an imitation like you’ll find in other places”), declared himself an atheist and very skeptical of the Godhead. I provoked this confession through a benign exchange of pleasentries, merely mentioning the name of God, a weekness of mine. I believe in free will, says Hendrik. But eveyone is free to believe in what they want. For instance, my colleague, an Indian, prays to 11 Gods. Some of them have extra hands and feet and that really leaves me in a fog. In Amsterdam you find all types. When someone tells me something about their beliefs, to make things clear from the begining, I ask them: listen, how many legs does your God have?
*
The yellows in Van Gogh’s paintings. The dense light, incredibly calming. The source, inexhaustible, fills you with energy. I’d looked at them for hours. How significant is the difference between the orignal and all those reproductions, out in the world. “The madman from Arles,” has become a commercial figure in Amsterdam, and not only there. He saw “the light” and painted for only ten years (1880-90), producing an enormous body of work, until the black demons wore out his brain. If he would have succeeded during his life – and, of coure, I’m not the only one who’s had this helpless dream – to sell even one painting at today’s exorbitant prices he would have lived like a king. But then he woudldn’t have been Van Gogh, would he?
The tournament of connoisseurs next to Rembrandt’s Night Watch, at the Rijksmuseum. Two ladies argue abuot the size of painting. They finally decide to call the gallery attendant, with his walkie-talkie in hand. “One moment,” says the massive Dutchman, pulling a tattered notebook from his pocket. Then he recites the dimensions, in a tone equally forecful and rigorous, as if announcing the departure of the train from the station: 3,63 by 4,37. It turns out both disputants were in error. “But those are the dimensions after cutting,” protests one of the ladies. You know that painting was shortened on all sides to fit between two columns in city hall. On the left side, there were two characters that gave a superior sense of the whole composition.”
Other commentaries, in English and…in Russian (what can I do, since I had the good fortune to learn it!) about the light distribution in the Night Watch. A Scottish woman in a hat the color of Van Gogh’s cherry blossoms, tells her confused and intimidated husband: “Can you imagine, all the figures—the guards, the noblemen from the city – were all painted separately and then Rembrandt gathered them together, like you would do when working in Photoshop.
“It’s a painting in motion. Look, the sensation of dynamics, the event in action is what this group of men impresses on you, although Rembrandt painted each of them separately. Rembrant painted them individually in his studio, so whatdid they think when they found themselves framed together in this painting?” “Hey, replies the Russian in short pants and sandals with socks, no one cares about their response anyway. Rembrant painted them, and they remain part of history, and that’s its!” This reply left no place for further interpretive delights…
I didn’t succeed in finding a reproduction of the Night Watch, at least not of a quality better than those I have in albums back home. I bought some replicas of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and The Bedroom at Arles for me and my friends in Chişinău. I got also a copy of Painter with a Pipe and Book by Gerard Dou – an exceptional metaphor of the artistic mode, which has become my aesthetic obsession after this visit to the Rijksmuseum: the painter/creator sits propped on his elbow in the window, with an open book and a pipe in his hand, a curtain in the foreground, pulled to the right. Either he, or you, the spectator, has just pulled it open. No one knows who’s watching whom.
*
At the diamond factory in Amsterdam. The guide –an exuberant blond detailed everything meticulously. She explains to us the principle of a perpetuum mobile, “The Atmos Millennium.” It’s a mechanical clock invented in 1928, produced in a limited series of only ten worldwide, a clock which funcntions without a visible source of energy. It has a capsule of gas, responding to changes in temperature, setting the mechanism in motion by means of the compression and expansion of the gas trapped in the silver chamber…
The diamond factory was built during the war, in the Jewish quarter. Holland has always been lenient with foreigners, with otherness, as we say, drawing all the dispossessed and persecuted of Europe. So, a large community of Jews, the majority coming from Spain, fleeing the purge of the Inquisition settled in Amsterdam – the future lens grinders.
I arrived at the diamond factory on a Sunday and a single worker was in the diamond cutting room. During the rest of the week, this team is not significantly enhanced: only the additional appearance of another master. The guide is very knowledgable: “the value of the diamond is determined by several criteria like the number of faces, the weight, the size, the clarity/transparancey of the surface, how it refracts light, the geometric harmony of the edges… Her voice is accompanied by the buzzing of the grinder, which the cutter looks up from, evey now and again to take measurements under the microscope. We were not even honored with a look. Cooly, completely absorbed in his work, like a picture made for tourists, like an imagological convention of respect.
The room was full of all kinds of machinery and tools that illustrate the techonological evolution of diamond processing over the years. I was stunned at the sight of a leather box, with gems the size of quail’s eyes – right there in plain view tempting the visitors… it took two or three minutes before I realized they were glass imitations… But I didn’t get to contemplate only the subsitutes. In a separate room, much smaller, in which the tour group could barely fit, after being warned to shut the door behind us, the guide showed us some true diamonds. She emptied them on the table from three velvet pouches: they were passed around, slipped through our fingers, dazzling us with their brilliance. We urge you to admire them, to compare them, her voice tinged with a trace of arrogance – the arrogance of knowing – to match our unsuspecting astonishmnet: “Look, this is worth 19,000 Euros –  and this, with the iridiscent turquoise – 48,000, but this, ruby, even with if it’s smaller than the others, would cost 64,000… What do you say to leaving with a really beautiful memory of Amsterdam?
Wanting to contribute to the sense competency she was clearly relishing in, I made a reference to Spinoza, the philosopher-lens grinder, but the girl hesitated, not catching on. Then she frowned, unsettled: she’d heard of Spinoza, but promised to find out more from her colleagues.
*
The little passing friendships you make on short trips away from home. I saw Erika nearly every day. I was walking to her cafe for a “morning coffee,” after already drinking one at the hotel, for breakfast. Her coffee was fragrant, though, with hints of cinnamon and marzipan I’d never before encountered. And the fact that I savored it with pleasure, with that muscial background, filled me—perhaps it was an illusion—with enough energy for the day. One time we discussed the language of the Dutch, or the Netherlands. I said, by way of introducting the theme, that it sounded like a mixture of German and English. What did she think? “You’re right, even if it’s closer to German.” But the second language we all speak is English. We learn it in school. A mandatory subject. They tend to speak Germen more often in the East. I go there to visit my grandparents in Emmen.” “And you’re not bothered by the conquest of the English language, I insist, briefly explaining the plight of the Romanian language in Moldova, where the native majority is prevented from speaking it and claiming it as their true mother tongue.” Erika was surprised. “It’s difficult to imagine such a thing… here we speak to be understood, no matter the language.”
We were stuck in different paradigms. Here in Amsterdam, a problem that causes so many headaches in Chişinău, cannot be imagined. In parting, as is the custom, I explain, to her joy, those two Romanian expressions, which Erika manages admirably: “La revedere! Pe mâine!”
*
The largest group of visitors waiting outside of a museum in Amsterdam was at the Anne Frank House. Not even the Van Gogh museum –the main emblem of the city – could manage to attract such an influx of tourists in a single day. An impressive line of people – families with small children, old people, students, speaking all the world’s languages – , a long column extending the down the canal Prisengracht all the way to the courtyard of the Westerkerk cathedral. They stay there patiently, almost silently, the only agitation there created by the pigeons, who wandered boldly, among the people’s feet, forming a parallel procession. There exists, it seems, among those coming here, a consensus to keep a decent, even pious attitude, as tribute to the suffering they are preparing to confront.
The Anne Frank House is not a simple memorial structure, with testimonies and illustrative guides, the type modeled by other museums: the visitor is invited to enter the skin of the tenants hidden here for 761 days in a secret annex of the house, going up and down the narrow spiral stairways. It’s physically and emotionally overwhelming, weighing you down by the end of the journey, I saw a great many people, not only the aged, on the benches outside the museum gift shop, staring with blank eyes, withdrawn, deeply immersed in reflection and meditation of what they’d just seen. After two hours, the time it takes to navigate the maze, you feel imprisoned in an atmosphere of darkness, contaminated with a feeling of insecurity which seems to emanate from those dim, cramped walls, where those eight fugitives, tried in seclusion to create some semblance of a normal life: food, books, lectures, hygenie…, feverishly listening to the BBC, tacking flags on a map for each zone liberated by the Western Allies after landing at Normandy.
I belive I witnessed the greatest piece of pedagogy we’ve managed up to now. The words of Otto Frank, the sole survivor, after losing his wife and two children in the Nazi death camps, played in one of the musuem’s monitors. Desolate from his own grief, but wanting to leave a message of hope: “I was on good terms with my daughter, but when I read her journal, I was shocked by the maturity and lucidity which which she judged people and things…Most parents, in fact, never know their children.”
*
I would place the people in Amsterdam in two categories: those on the streets and those who choose a more fluid terrain – the canals. It’s cramped all the same, both on earth and on water. The canals shoot out in semi circles, from the bay to the mainland, cleverly designed and conceived by generations of ingenious and daring architects who tamed the sea to live and conquered hostile and inhabitable tracts of land…
If you get on a ship or a little boat you have a sensation of entering in the viscera of the city. Viewed from the the water, pasing under the bridges, among the reddish stone tunnels, the lacustrian city becomes intimate. The agitation of the streets, perceived more by the ear than by the eye, youth leaning on the railings, looking down, toward you, the bunches of bicycles planted here and there, belonging to another kingdom, one you’ve defected from. You hear the man’s voice at the helm, who draws your attention to the right, to the building with the jagged gables, there William the Taciturn, prince of Orange, declared war on Spain in 1578… The Magere Brug (the Skinny Bridge), under which we passed, the last of hundreds of wooden bridges they had in Amsterdam, where the “euphorics” dive in the water. As the players from Ajax did in 1972, when their team won the Championship Cup, but this information the helmsman assures us with an accompliced air, will not be found in any guidebook to the city…
The water seems fairly muddy and unfriendly, so to dive there would not seem the most suitable way to celebrate a national victory or family event. However, I didn’t sense a damp smell, or anything rank and moldy. Perhaps the city is well ventilated by the Gulf’s fresh air, who knows? Or rather there are some sanitation crews on duty… Amsterdam has its feet in the water, so of course, it cares about water quality.
Canal tourism is a very crowded industry. Small, individual watercrafts are overhelmed by the powerful motors of the tourist vessels, who maneuver laboriously under bridges and in narrow passageways, making you shudder – you lose plenty of time in this naval traffic, waiting for your vessel’s turn to pass -, but the owners of the small boats get the most passengers. And besides, the numerous joys of this type of excursion always prove greater than for the group of grumblers who find fault in any machine that makes money.
*
On the fourth of May, which is also my birthday, in Dam Square, next to the heroes’ monument, two minutes of silence are observerd, absolute silence in memory of the victims of the World War II. The Dutch offered powerful resistance to the Nazis. It was a test of history, which highlighted the character of this nation of fisherman, masons, gardeners, traders, explorers, architects, inventors…, hardened by their struggle with nature. Amsterdam, situated 4 meters below the sea leavel, is a “trophy” snatched from the water, like the other territories of Holland. This epic confrontation, man – nature, is reconstituted, captivating and sectacular, in the city’s History Museum. Here it’s not as much the ancient exhibits, even though they are many, that represent the principal attraction – the clothes of the nobility, models of ships, harquebuses, silver cigarette cases, hoes, navigational instruments, compasses, pullies to raise dead horses from the canals, curtains and tableward from the the Ducal Palace, precious stones from the colonies…, but the history told digitally, encapsulated in video files, with multiple “small drawers,” where you find information and commentaries on diverse subjects. Short recordings, summaries, for hurried visitors, or more in depth exhibits, more erudite, like the narrated features you see on the History Channel: the toothbrush that the Dutch have been using since 1700; the coronation of Louis Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, as King of the Netherlands, ushering in the institutions and revolutionary spirit of the French Revolution, and also the guillotine – the first decapitation took place on June 15, 1812; the thriving diamond business in the Jewish quarter; the bankruptcy of the Dutch East India Company in 1799 –the world’s first multinational corporation, which if it were still in existence, would generate earnings to surpass McDonald’s Microsfot and Exxon Mobil combined; the Olympics in Amsterdam in 1928, when they inaugurated the Olympic Flame, an interview with John Lennon and Yoko One conducted from their bed in an Amsterdam hotel, where they came to spend their honeymoon; films about the legalization of marijuana, prostitution (celebrated with gusto in the Red Light District), gay rights, Johan Cruyff dribbling and the glory of the Ajax soccer club, influxes of immigrants from the former colonies – “Welcome, but don’t settle in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Haga, Utrecht, Eindhoven…., they’re overpopulated!”
In a booth for china and silver, I stopped to talk to the owner, seeming to continue my tour through the museum. He was tall, blond, slim, despite his 80 years of age, and discovering I’m a writer, stepped out of his supervisory mode for me, lapsing into an emotional life confession, the kind you seldom offer to someone you don’t know. As a young man, he worked in a resaurant, from 9 in the morning until 9 at night, for the equivalent of ten euros a week. He was a guide for a detachment of English soliders, was interogated by the Gestapo, and was due to be executed but spared at the last minute by an Ally bombing. After the war, he sought his fortune in Italy, Greece, and Switzerland, where he earned enough money to start a business. “I have three restaurants in the city that my sons still run. I’m retired now, among these old things, restoring and caring for them. And I learn a lot from people that I converse with…But don’t forget to write in your article that the high rents around here bother me!”
*
I could see his frail silhouette, rugged, static, standing in stark opposition to the bustle of the square where he’d been installed. I gathered no additional details from the tram ride over to the Central Station, but wanted to get things straight once and for all. I got there earlier than I expected, while looking for the “Athenaeum” bookstore –the most famous bookstore in the city. Although I couldn’t make the connection between the statue and the bookstore, I discovered them facing each other in Spui Square. With hands akimbo, he had a roguish air, defiant, seeming to track the reactions of passers-by, to the last trick he’d pulled. “We were also intrigued, who is this kid!”-  a couple who approached the statue carefully (walking around it, searching in vain for a legend). It’s the emblematic child of Amsterdam, a young vagabond from the streets, but for us, tourists, we’re always hungry for markers, concrete names, ‘Het Lieverdje” I was told…you’ll find more information in guidebooks to the city!”
The “Athenauem” bookstore is more spacious and labrynthine than it seems upon entering. A basement, crowded with shelves, runs around a circular staircase; on the ground floor, scores of booths seem to grow out of one another, and steps, always steps, up and down, going in every directions, like in an Escher engraving, so that you need considerable dexterity to avoid a bad fall, drawing the attention of all the patrons browsing the books with deep concentration. My questions were answered promptly: “Upstairs, there’s a floor for book launches and other events we organize here. Sometimes there are so many people, that they gather in the aisles, sit on the stairs, where they can only hear the voice of the reader. For people in the square, we put out some speakers…”
On the shelf for the new releases, I found volume 2 from Mircea Cărtărescu’s “Orbitor,” De Trofee/Corpul, translated by Jan-Wilhem Bos. It was there alongside Orhan Pamuck, Paul Auster, Salman Rushdie and Coetzee. Cărtărescu sells slowly, but steadily, the bookseller told me, when I paid at the checkout. They didn’t have, unfortunately an anthology of contemporary Dutch poetry in English, an anthology I wanted, but it could be easily ordered. The book would arrive in five days. I declined, not wanting to enter into any complicated schemes, requiring delivery and signature, in a city I’d be leaving in a few days.
*
I called it, “the siesta district,” a neighborhood in the south-west of Amsterdam by the Vondelpark where I stayed. Quiet and monotonous, the days are marked here, as I told you before, only by the calm ringing of the bell from the “Obrecht” cathedral. The Chinese hotel owner was pleased and impressed when he heard this description, “the siesta district,” We had both been making good choices: I, had put my finger on the map, right by his hotel, he had invested in a business that drew customers with a highly developed sense of beauty. One day, he invited me to climb up to the terrace on the hotel’s attic, opening up a to a panoramic view of the surrounding streets and, in fact, the entire city, as far as the eye could see. We were near the cathedral towers, and I could make out the masterful ornaments of the capitals, listening to the cooing of the pigeons from the towers, could read the numbers of the face of the clock and scrutinize the implacable mechanism there, counting out the moments of my existence. On the right, past the the #2 trolley line, stretched the Vondelpark, a sprawling green quilt, teeming with lakes. Antique street traders hawking artifacts and old books, Nieuwe Spiegelstraat, where I wandered for hours, “stealing” by camera images of rare and obscure objects, to trigger the imagination for my future prose, and the Rijksmuseum closer than I figured by foot. Dam Square –the city’s historic plaza seemed but a stone’s throw way: or the winding track of the trolley always gave me the impression it was much farther away. The geometric design of the canals, flowing, in widening concentric circles, toward the Gulf then heading south of the city. The Amstel river that feeds the canals with ships, speed boats and….house boats. “You know that there are over two thousand houseboats in Amsterdam. You can rent or buy, if your wallet is fat,” my Chinese guide tells me smugly.
*
The last night in Amsterdam. Some kids knock a ball around in the cathedral courtyard. Yesterday, there was a funeral procession –rows of cars, floral wreaths and the intermittent beating of bells. I even heard about death in this neighborhood.
I go the green field of the Museumplein. The person attracting attention is a ringer for Van Gogh: felt hat, dyed red beard, shabby frock…He rides around on his bicycle, is admired, filmed and photographed, but he talks to nobody, never responds to public exhaltations, doesn’t stop, never touched or hugged, he seems to perform a task so clear and eloquent that it needs no words for translation. He wakes up the “dreamers”/smokers on the Museumplein. They are more excited than ever, but the melancholic artist doesn’t give in.
Van Gogh on bicyle, like a phantom moving in the dusk, in Amsterdam.

Translated from the Romanian by MARTIN WOODSIDE

Dobre, or Not dobre ?

MARIE DARRIEUSSECQ

A Frenchwoman in Slovakia

No one knows where Slovakia is. Our friends head for Ibiza, Turkey, Italy, rock festivals in Brittany, or for Dubai where it is very cold in the hotel and very hot outside. We head for Slovakia.
For most of the French people I know, Slovakia is half a word – half of the name Czechoslovakia. Most of the French people I know have never understood why the Czechs and Slovaks separated. For them Prague is visible, unlike Bratislava.
“There are bears in Slovakia, aren’t there?” several friends have asked. Most of the other French people I know confuse Slovakia and Slovenia. They don’t know where Slovenia is either. Just another of those little newly-independent countries.
I am Basque, French and European. I’m used to having to explain where the Basque Country is located on the globe. Geographically speaking it’s easier to point out than Slovakia, because there is the sea: a right angle formed by the Atlantic in the small of Europe’s back, where the waves roll into the Gulf of Gascony between France and Spain. Slovakia, on the other hand, is in the middle of middle Europe with no access to any sea, no coast outlined on any ocean. But in political terms I can understand that the Slovaks, like the Basques, should want (and in their case gain) their independence within Europe.
The independence of small countries is a very sensitive issue in Jacobin France. Seated atop a thousand years of Francocentric self-assurance, France, the elder daughter of the Church, does not appreciate that the absence of frontiers might be a bane. There is a tendency for others to have a utopian vision of France – a great world of openness, freedom, equality and fraternity, like our beloved motto. A world without frontiers – and without too many immigrants in our back yard.
Anyway. We land in Vienna, an odd starting-point for a holiday in Slovakia. It’s as cold and rainy as in Paris on this late-July day. We are welcomed by Martha, Andrea, Martin and Katarina with kindness and efficiency. The first thing they give us is a GPS (because no one knows where Slovakia is). We are to travel to Bratislava by bus and then hire a car: it is far cheaper than in Austria.
I’ve already made this journey from Vienna to Bratislava. I’ve already taken this road. There are places that you’ll say you’ll return to, such as Rio de Janeiro or the caves at Lascaux. Or that magnificent ancient rubber tree in the Recoleta neighbourhood of Buenos Aires: I visited it last month for the second time in twenty years. But I had never intended to repeat the trip from Vienna to Bratislava. Flat fields, a few trees, villages of pink and yellow houses. A line of hills rising to the horizon and Bratislava Castle hovering like a transfer print on the sky. A bit like Kafka’s Castle but not Kafka’s actual Castle. A somewhere else that looks like something familiar but isn’t quite. What Freud described as unheimlich and the English as uncanny. That sums up Slovakia: Europe, the heart of Europe, already seen but never really seen. You think you already know it but it is always strangely different.
Just outside Bratislava, in one of the flattest and most deserted locations in the countryside, there is a group of structures that I recognise without recognising them. Being born Basque, in a country divided by the Franco-Spanish frontier, I am very familiar with those tobacco and alcohol shops and that atmosphere of neglect that inhabits the frontier posts vacated since the signing of the Maastricht Treaty.
But here it is not any old frontier. The fact that the place is so flat and above all so empty – I realise with a jolt – is because this was definitely once “no man’s land”. It is not a frontier but the frontier, which took material shape in the Berlin Wall. From the top floors of the concrete blocks in Bratislava they must have had a striking view of Austria and what was called the Free World. There must have been barbed-wire fences here, armed men, dogs, and perhaps watchtowers. They must have tried to cross this empty space, this horizon of fields, this hostile flatness, perfect for the bullets to hit you. Nowadays there remain ruined shops and maybe a bistro. Or nothing. The bus passed it too quickly for me to get a good view. The bus did not slow down at all and neither the driver nor the passengers betrayed the least emotion, the least hesitation. We were all Europeans. It’s incredible. I tried to explain to my ten-year-old son the significance of this insane flat and empty place. I was nineteen when the Wall came down. When the wall was taken down, I explain to him, because people say the Wall came down, but it didn’t come down of its own accord, even if the speed of events was unprecedented – faster, politically speaking, than this bus geographically speaking.
My son asked me: “Was it a real wall?” as if adults were more childish than children. Yes, it was a real wall. I told him about those two splendid young Czechoslovaks with rucksacks who set off in a hurry to visit western Europe – Paris, Madrid, Lisbon – with no money at all and were assisted by everyone in our student circle in Paris. They told us that the whole of Europe had helped them, given them lifts, put them up and sponsored them, from Düsseldorf to Strasbourg via Barcelona and Brittany. Western Europe was utterly bowled over to see East Europeans arrive in the marvellous shape of this starry-eyed young couple. Things have become a bit more complicated since then. Worthy French workers fear an invasion of “Polish plumbers”, presumed to be after their jobs. But the links have become inextricable, in my view, and the split is gradually being repaired day by day. My children have never yet heard about the Eastern Bloc and all our baby sitters were born after the Wall came down.
At Bratislava’s miniature airport we hire a car: a fine Škoda Berline family saloon. Škodas have changed a lot too. We drive towards Nitra. The Bratislava-Nitra road looks like any other place in the temperate zone of the western world, take my word for it. Or put another way: any other place in a rainy European summer. The Bratislava-Nitra road looks like something a French child would draw if asked to draw a picture of the countryside. Green trees. Green and yellow fields. A perfectly asphalted European road. An enormous grey and white European sky.
Where is the centre of the world? It’s not between Bratislava and Nitra. But if some extra-terrestrials landed here in these fields they would get a fairly good idea of Europe, an average Europe, a kind of essence of green and peaceful Europe. The concept of Europe is here in the middle of the middle, the Mittel of Mitteleuropa.
I don’t manage to pronounce Banská Štiavnica, our first stopover. (The man at the car-hire firm told me I had a very difficult name to pronounce. That’s true. My name is unpronounceable all over the globe. Fortunately, being aware of the problem, my parents baulked at giving me a Basque first name. They had been thinking of Oïhanna. Oïhanna Darrieussecq, for heaven’s sake. At least everyone knows Marie). Anyway, at Banská Štiavnica, it was pouring with rain like everywhere else in Europe this 24 July, a fact confirmed by texts I receive from various friends in Helsinki, Paris and Bayonne. The house is magnificent. We immediately light the wood stove. Warmed up a bit, we go shopping at Billa (we have three children to feed). We will subsequently come across Billa with their yellow and red sign all over the country, the only rival to Lidl that covers the whole of Europe. We sort of explore the town – pretty, Baroque and Catholic. I’m a very bad tourist. There’s a chateau, a museum, lots of churches, a gypsy quarter on the edge of town, torrents, lakes, disused mines… We climb up to the Baroque Calvary. A young woman in hi-tech sports gear climbs on her knees, beating herself on the shoulders and crying out.
In the centre of town, the synagogue, in ruins. A people is missing. The sun comes out and we climb up to Paradajz, with its panorama of the entire volcanic region of pine woods and few people. Facing us is Poland. Auschwitz is three hours away by road.
Raspberries, bilberries, mushrooms. Clouds. I read, I write. The children play. At Levoča, the second stage of our journey, we are welcomed by a photographer, Peter Župník. He lives in a beautiful low house in the former shtetl. During his first night there (he bought it in 2000), three ghosts welcomed him. A man and two women, he specifies. Melancholy tales accompanied by slivovica, the excellent local plum brandy. We eat incredible vegetables, raw and cooked: custard squash and chiefly “calerabes” (or at least that the word I seem to recognise when Peter pronounces it in Slovak). It tastes like cauliflower and looks like some beautiful intergalactic vegetable, green or violet, with things like tentacles and antennae. Our children dub them “glouglou” and refuse to eat them, preferring the crisps).
Just as at Banská Štiavnica, every house in the suburbs of Levoča has its own dog: shut in and barking, with a notice on the gate: “Pozor”. I start to think that “pozor” means dog, but later, in the light of the multitude of road signs saying pozor I am obliged to conclude that it means “Caution / Watch out!” “Pozor!” my children yell as they hurtle down water slides at the numerous swimming pools which were their delight throughout our stay. Slovakia has no sea but loves water. “A sea of summer adventure ! Not salted? No, it’s enjoyable!” is the somewhat long-winded slogan of the “Spectacular Slovakia” website. At Aquacity in Poprad I drink a vodka on the rocks in my swimming costume in a water bar with seats in warm water – inflatable floating armchairs. A billionaire’s dream for two euros fifty.
It rains. It’s going to rain for twelve days in a row. Just as at Banská Štiavnica the town is dominated by an enormous place of worship: the Marian Basilica. The Virgin, that figure of Christian make-believe whose name I bear, mysteriously decided to make an appearance there. Apparently John Paul II drew half-a-million people to this little mount. Peter tells us that however hard they tried to ban the pilgrimage under the Soviet-dominated regime by putting in road blocks, the faithful would arrive by field tracks and as many as fifty thousand would come and pray in this forest
My own pilgrimage will be to Štrbské Pleso, the lake where Freud spent a holiday in 1919, writing furious letters to Ferenczi, who had recommended the spot. “It is seven degrees here and we are in the grip of fog” (in mid-August). Indeed it takes us two attempts to pierce the cloud that seems to sit permanently on the Tatra mountains. The first time, the sleet is so thick that it is impossible to get out of the car with the children. The second time the sun is shining nicely on the lake… and all I understand (it is 3 August) is that in 2011 Štrbské Pleso is undoubtedly the biggest tourist trap in Slovakia: traffic jams, full car parks, thousands of hikers. I buy a souvenir magnet for my fridge and finally manage to memorise the name Štrbské Pleso, but never to pronounce it. Margita, the baby sitter, is in stitches. The kids are tickled pink by the bear that we can have our photo taken with (so there’s at least one bear in Slovakia, unless it was a human in disguise).
The entire road back looks like what I know from Switzerland, a Switzerland slightly less rich, but certainly not poor. The whole country is astonishingly clean. Not a single greasy paper by the side of the impeccable roads. Every town is extremely tidy. The gypsy encampments are far from the centre while the geraniums in the window boxes are perfectly centred. The way the logs are stacked is almost frightening, one lengthways, the next sideways, all of exactly the same length. The only really sunny day we were able to enjoy started at six in the morning with the sound of electric scythes in all the gardens of the little town.
“What are you doing here?” is the question that Slovaks ask us in restaurants, grocery stores, on footpaths or along the road. They all want to visit Paris, where they have been already and they tell us all about it. Students dream of the United States and some of them go there for good (one of our local baby sitters is leaving to studying in Seattle and the young man who waited for us at the airport has found a job in New York). What are you doing here? On the last day I reply truthfully: “I don’t know.” Admittedly Slovakia is pretty, the forests are dark, the castles live up to their Carpathian promise (thick walls, ruined keeps and Ottoman decapitations on the old paintings). But there is no Dracula here, that’s further to the East in Transylvania. Kafka is further north, Tolstoy, much further to the East. And the great political events seem to have passed through Slovakia like the mountain winds – the Spring was in Prague; to my knowledge Koudelka’s well-known photos only show Prague streets. In France we also associate the Velvet Revolution only with Prague. It’s not that nothing happened or was written or built in Slovakia, it’s more a question of images. Publicity. A question of communication. Or of banks, such as in Switzerland. Are visitors to Geneva or Zurich asked, “What are you doing here?”
Take Master Paul of Levoča: I’d never heard of him, but then I’m no expert when it comes to religious art. Master Paul was an extraordinary wood carver and sculptor at the beginning of the 16th century, who left behind a phenomenal altarpiece, as well as profoundly human figures of the Virgin Mary and Christ: he was inspired by the faces of the townsfolk with their defects, their expressions and the look in their eyes. One of those Madonnas was depicted on hundred-crown bank notes… but those notes with their Virgin were swept away by the Euro. And as I return from Slovakia via Austria I realise that the Billa supermarkets that I thought “typically Slovak” are actually Austrian.
What is Slovakia? What have I made of it all, here at the very heart of Europe? From my first trip to Bratislava in 2006 I brought back Jana, a young Francophile woman who came to us an au pair and ended up settling in Paris. Tall and blonde, catholic but broad-minded, patriotic and anti-Hungarian, and liable to express her emotions with tears and laughter – a stereotypical “Slav”, is Jana to Slovakia what Marianne is to France? Slovakia’s forests and mountains are stretched between the Ukraine, Romania, Poland, Austria and Hungary. The ski resorts are charming and one assumes there is no shortage of snow in winter. The honey is good, the yogurts sublime (I recommend the Sabi brand). The cheese too. The beer is excellent and it is one of the first words that I learnt off by heart (“pivo”) along with the ubiquitous “dobre”, meaning ok, yes, fine.
Slovakia is Europe of the small countries and undoubtedly the future of Europe: a Europe that works, that mows its lawns, piles up its logs, builds its bridges, that is not too fond of Gypsies. A future a bit short on imagination perhaps, but then, is imagination the future? (I fear not.) Dobre or not dobre?

Translated from the French by GERALD TURNER

The Tune of the Future

SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ

A Croatian in Italy

To its people, Venice is probably at its most beautiful when seen from afar, like in one of Canaletto’s eighteenth century vedute. On an autumn afternoon, when its magnificent palaces are reflected in the shimmering water, Venice, in all its unreal beauty, really does look like a movie set.
Indeed Venice today is not much more than a stage setting.
When my first floor neighbour at the palazzo where I had rented an apartment finally came downstairs, I pulled shut the heavy front door. In her late eighties, Signora Immacolata walked with a cane. We headed down Calle dei Fabbri for her to show me the nearest supermarket. Our progress was slow, not only because of her but because at nine o’clock in the morning the street leading from the Rialto bridge to Saint Mark’s Square was already packed with tourists. Diminutive and stooped, dressed in black, Signora Immacolata barely managed to make her way through the crowds, dragging her shopping cart behind her. When we reached the first little bridge she stopped. Holding onto the railing, she barely managed to haul herself onto it. There are two such bridges crossing the canal on the way to the supermarket and both of them are stepped. Even though the Co-op supermarket near the Campo Santa Maria Formosa is only a leisurely five or six minute walk from her house, it takes Signora Immacolata at least twenty minutes to get there. And when we arrive we find a long line at the checkout counter, because every budget-conscious tourist invariably seems to find their way here. All in all, it takes the old lady at least an hour to do her shopping. “And it’s like that every day…” she sighs. Her legs are still okay but she cannot carry things up the stairs. Luckily, her badante, the Croatian woman who looks after her, is due back soon.
There used to be a bakery near her apartment in Corte Gragolina, and little general stores, and a butcher’s and a green grocer’s, and a newsstand, and a cobbler – in short, everything needed for everyday life was close at hand. Now they have all been transformed into souvenir shops. Her street is a continuous succession of small shops selling fake Murano glass, pizzerias charging eight euros a slice, tourist restaurants, bars and pastry shops. That entire area around Saint Mark’s Square has only two supermarkets, one smaller than the other, and, I think, a single post office that I had a hard time finding.
“Venice is not a city you can live in normally anymore,” says my neighbour, a bank clerk who lives in the building across from ours. “You can’t make it to work or to an appointment on time in the morning because it’s so crowded that somebody my age simply can’t push his way onto the vaporetto. The whole infrastructure is geared toward tourists, from the prices in stores and restaurants to the theatre performances in English and concerts of classical music in churches where the musicians wear Baroque costume. Property is absurdly expensive, and there are fewer and fewer supermarkets, schools, kindergartens, clinics, hospitals.”
My neighbour is right, of course. In the past fifty or so years Venice has lost 65 per cent of its population and only 23 per cent, mostly older people, live in the city’s historical centre. Just a few decades ago, 150,000 people lived in the old part of town, but today that number is barely 40,000, and it is steadily declining: partly because Venice is too expensive to live in and people are moving to outlying areas, to Mestre for instance, and partly because there is no work for the young and educated. Venice has an excellent university, lots of young people come here to study, but they don’t stay. “If you don’t want to be a waiter or a maid or to help the elderly, you don’t have much of a choice. And even those jobs have been taken by foreigners, by immigrants,” says my neighbour resignedly.
Still, there’s no need to shed a tear for the Venetians. Some are earning a pretty penny from renting out apartments, others have sold their property and are now nibbling away at their capital. The fact remains, however, that for those who live here – and it is an aging population – life is becoming increasingly hard. One has to survive the onslaught of millions of tourists every year, that mass of people pouring through the streets of this magnificent city of canals and little alleyways that are rarely more than three or four metres wide. Venetians know only too well that they are living not in a city but in a museum. And that Venice is becoming less and less a real, living city, and more and more a museum of Europe’s past, embodying all the glory, wealth, power, beauty and art of times long past. That is precisely why millions of tourists come to see it. The mass tourism industry was the first to realize that there was money to be made not only out of the splendour of Venice but also its importance as an open-air museum.
At the same time, the Venice of today is a perfect metaphor for Europe as it once was, the Europe whose culture and values Europeans swear by, take pride in and wish to preserve.
Bari, in the far south of Italy, offers a very different picture from Venice. It is still warm. It is the end of September, but the holidaymakers have gone. On a Sunday evening in the Piazza del Ferrarese in the old part of town, the incidental tourist will find the locals perched on a low wall or sitting in little cafés drinking beer or strolling around the square, which serves as a kind of corso, a promenade. The several thousand people gathered in the square look as if they all know each other, children are playing tag at nine o’clock in the evening, teenagers are cooling themselves off with an ice-cream and their nicely dressed parents, and even grandparents, are standing around talking loudly, gesticulating, like in one of Vittorio De Sica’s black-and-white movies from the 1960s.
This is a lively town. If Venice is where old Europe is dying, then Bari is where new Europe is emerging. It is one of the entry points for immigrants to Europe.
Twenty years ago, in the summer of 1991, an Albanian freighter called the Vlora sailed into the port of Bari carrying more than twenty thousand refugees. Older readers will probably remember that Albanian exodus across the Adriatic Sea, prior to their “velvet revolution”, if the Albanians ever had one. A picture of the huge freighter crammed with people made the rounds of the world at the time. Sometimes, a single photograph can symbolize a particular time or a historical event. So it was with Jeff Widener’s photograph of a lone man facing a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square. And with Nick Ut’s picture of the naked little Vietnamese girl and her brothers scorched by napalm, with Eddie Adams’s photograph of a police chief in Saigon shooting dead a Vietcong with his pistol, and with the recent photo of prisoners being tortured at Abu Ghraib. And so it is with Luca Turi’s famous photograph of the Vlora. His exhibition, Flight of the Eagles, marking the twentieth anniversary of the event, had just opened in the foyer of the Teatro Petruzzelli. As the Vlora sails in, people throng the decks and railings, clusters of human beings hang from the smoke-stack, from the ropes, from the masts. In the next picture they are within reach of the shore and are jumping into the water, swimming, as if afraid that the land will slip from their grasp. And then there is a superb but terrifying picture of a vast mass of people, taken from above, who have disembarked and are on the waterfront, standing under the scorching sun. This scene of 20,000 people frozen just at the moment they have finally made it onto dry land looks positively biblical.
Those years saw a wave of some 100,000 Albanians enter Italy – today their number stands at about half a million. Since Romania joined the European Union, there has also been an incoming wave of almost a million Romanians. Roughly ten per cent of the Romanians are said to be Roma, the latest scapegoats of Europe’s anti-immigration policy. The West deports them and revokes their residence permits (Italy, France) – in the East they are fenced into ghettoes, beaten up and murdered (Slovakia, Czech Republic, Hungary).
And yet, a mere five or six years ago, foreigners in Italy, and indeed in Europe, did not pose the problem they do today. Anti-immigration, and in particular anti-Muslim hysteria, intensified after the publication of controversial caricatures of the prophet Mohammed in 2005, assuming serious proportions with the onset of the recession in 2008. The people of Bari were supportive and helpful, because at the end of the nineteenth century millions of Italy’s poor emigrated from the city and from the province of Puglia to America, the promised land, where in a matter of two or three generations they became completely assimilated. Some hundred years later, Italy had become the promised land to some other immigrants.
Of late, Bari has served as a transit town for immigrants, more for refugees than for economic immigrants. Accommodated near the airport, they are part of the latest wave of some forty thousand refugees who have reached the island of Lampedusa from Tunisia and Libya, following the political upheavals there. The authorities house the new immigrants in one of the Reception Centres for Asylum-Seekers (CARA) and then a commission decides on their fate. Italy has eight such CARA centres, thirteen Centres for Identification and Expulsion (CIE) and seven First-Asylum and Identification Centres (CPSA), with only a few commissions deciding the future of these people. Last summer, Bari was again cast into the public eye because of the refugees, more precisely the asylum-seekers from CIE. At the beginning of August, hundreds took to the streets on the outskirts of town, stopping trains and clashing with the police. The result was 80 injured and 29 arrests.
I ask my new acquaintances about the incident. Every day at lunch time they gather at a bar, the Il Borghese, on the corner of Via de Rossi and Corso Vittorio Emanuele: lawyers Dario Belluccio and Maria Pia Vigilante from “Giraffe”, an organization that gives legal advice to immigrants; Maddalena Tulanti, the editor of the local paper Corriere del Mezzogiorno; social worker Silvana Serini; Erminia Rizzi from the local Immigrants Advice Bureau. This is a particularly difficult problem, says Dario, a human rights activist and one of the few people to have access to the CIE, which is off limits to both lawyers and journalists. When the Libyans arrived, they came with a smaller number of people from Ghana, Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso and some other African countries, who had been working and living in Libya for years. Under the law, they are not entitled to war refugee status like the Libyans, but are treated according to their country of origin, regardless of how long they may have lived and worked in Libya. They therefore have no chance of obtaining a temporary residence permit on humanitarian grounds. Not only do their cases take agonizingly long to resolve, but in the meantime the authorities are treating them like common criminals. Deprived of contact with the outside, their living conditions are worse than prison, says Dario. By taking to the street they were trying to draw attention to their impossible situation.
Among the refugees in Lampedusa are a large number of children. Silvana looks after unaccompanied minors, in other words parentless child refugees. She tells me about two brothers, war refugees from Afghanistan, who came as teenagers. They were illiterate but now are finishing school and working, she says proudly. Then she takes out the latest issue of the weekly l’Espresso; in it there is a report by Fabrizio Gatti entitled “A Children’s Prison”, about 225 children and adolescents imprisoned for months on end, housed with adults at the CPSA camp in Lampedusa. They live in squalid conditions, without even minimum care, even though these are traumatized children, some of whom have not only witnessed the violent deaths of their parents but also have gone hungry and thirsty for days. In the six months between March and the end of August 2011, 707 children landed on this island, some of them mere toddlers or infants, while others were born on Lampedusa itself. Their situation is even worse and even more uncertain.
Don Angelo, a priest at the church of San Sabino (right next to the city beach of Pane e Pomadoro), is the best address in town when refugees need to get help, I’m told. He had just graduated from the seminary when the Albanians disembarked; he saw them on the waterfront and in the stadium, where 10,000 people were detained. The authorities released them only after the intervention of Don Tonino (the well-known pacifist and bishop Antonio Bello). Don Angelo had also been on humanitarian missions during the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo.
This tall man with red hair and a disarming smile talks about “institutional racism”, about the reasons for the frustration of the rioters, who feel that they are utterly discriminated against compared with the Libyans and Tunisians, even in terms of the colour of their skin. He confirms Dario’s assessment that they live in impossible conditions, in complete uncertainty as to the length and outcome of the legal procedure to which they are subject. “Their anger is contagious, it will spread to other centres. This is no longer a situation where immigrants gratefully accept a crust of bread, and then keep quiet and wait. They want an answer.” Indeed, even before Bari, embittered by the way the authorities were treating them, immigrants protested in Mineo, then in Crotone, but also in the north of Italy. “It’s about despair, not some externally orchestrated revolt. It’s incredible that the authorities don’t see that,” Don Angelo tells me.
The gulf between the refugees and the authorities is one side of the coin. But a gulf has also emerged between the locals and the refugees. The inhabitants of Lampedusa, which is closer to Tunisia than it is to Sicily and has a population of just over 5,000, initially pulled the drowning people out of the sea, saving hundreds of lives, and helping refugees to survive. But last September, by which time no less than 40,000 refugees had come onto the island, things went sour. The locals turned against the refugees when the latter set fire to the CPSA, the First-Asylum Centre, where about 1000 refugees were accommodated (far more than the Centre’s actual capacity). They were hoping to force the authorities to speed up the resolution of their status; some twenty people were injured in clashes with the police.
The fact is that the government is too slow in keeping its promise either to transfer them onto the mainland or deport them; and so, after the rioting, the mayor declared that he would not let a single more refugee onto the island. As a result, this isolated, neglected island became a kind of victim itself, a hostage to the authorities’ machinations. Because something had to have gone very wrong for the locals to switch from solidarity to disgust in a matter of a few months. Something had to have greatly changed for those same Lampedusans, who had been the first to reach out and rescue hundreds of drowning refugees, now to hurl stones at them, shouting “throw them back into the sea, they’re all criminals!” Clearly this small island community, which lives in difficult conditions itself, cannot carry such a heavy burden without help from the state.
Emanuele Crialese’s film Terraferma (Dry Land), which won a special prize at the 2011 Venice Film Festival, is about precisely this clash between humane principles and the law after a group of refugees arrive on just such a small, unnamed island. I saw it in Bari a day after it had premiered. There were only ten of us in the audience at the 18:30 showing. Maybe it was too early for the movies, maybe it was too hot. Or maybe the viewing audience was so small because the film deals with a complex issue.
The island is inhabited by fishermen. But since they can’t eke out a living from fishing alone, in the summer they live off of tourism. When the sea disgorged the first refugees from North Africa onto their island, it complicated their lives, corroded family relationships and raised moral dilemmas. The refugees are not only a “bad advertisement” for this little tourist paradise, they bring the kind of problems the locals are unused to and cannot understand. One fisherman puts it this way: “Can it be that the state is prohibiting us from rescuing people from the sea? All our lives we’ve done just the opposite, and if this is how it is now, then our ways are above this law.”
“A beautiful, very humane movie,” an older gentleman unexpectedly remarked to me as we were leaving the movie theatre. There were several films on the subject at Mostra this year, films like Andrea Segra’s Io sono Li, Francesco Patierno’s Cose dell’altro mondo and the great Italian director Ermanno Olmi’s Il villaggio di cartone. Much is also being written about the problems of immigrants and refugees, not only by well-known commentators but also by sociologists, politologists and writers like Gabriele del Grande and Luca Rastello, to name just two. But the refugees themselves, those who have stayed on in Italy, are also writing. People like Elvira Mujcic, originally from Bosnia, and Igiaba Scego, whose parents are from Somalia. In Italy, there seems to be far greater social and especially artistic awareness of the refugees and immigrants than is to be found in the official policy, which favours closing the borders to them.
Many people in Italy still remember the exodus that ravished whole swathes of the country, especially at the start of the twentieth century. Italians know that few people leave their country, culture and language for the sake of pure adventurism. They emigrate out of brute necessity, usually to escape war or economic poverty, prepared to risk even their own lives as they set off into the unknown, very much like today’s North African newcomers. In the past 150 years, 18 million people have emigrated from Italy, a figure equivalent to the population of a medium-sized European country. Mostly, they went to America, more than five million of them, which far exceeds, say, the number of Irish emigrants.
Visiting the Museum of Italian Emigration in Rome, I saw why documenting emigration (and immigration) is important for the history of a nation, and for understanding its underlying reasons. Located to the side of the Il Vittoriano monument, on the Piazza Dell’ara Coeli, the entrance to the museum is inconspicuous, certainly not a place where you will see swarms of tourists. No, mostly it’s Italians you see here, walking around, looking at the video archive, the library, the rooms exhibiting frayed suitcases and yellowed shipping charts, with passenger lists and identity cards and passports, faded photographs from home, and the first photographs of arrival in their new, far-away countries and continents. Perhaps these visitors are remembering their ancestors, perhaps they are looking for their names on the lists. Letters, diaries, sports clubs, folklore groups – they all tell individual stories of the despair and hopes of these impoverished peasants, who left the south for an unknown world, on their own, some barely fourteen years old. Just like the desperate of today. This was all just a few generations ago; there are still people who talk in front of the camera about the drama of leaving, about relatives or parents standing on the pier, waving until they become mere dots on the horizon.
As I walked around the museum, I thought of the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. There you can see the many different ways that the East Germans tried to escape to West Berlin, ringed by a 140 kilometre-long wall. Some of these attempts were quite incredible, from flying with a balloon to digging a tunnel under the wall, smuggling people in the trunk of a car or swimming the Baltic Straits.
At the beginning of the movie Terraferma, a flimsy overcrowded boat sinks and all that is left floating on the water are letters, photographs, documents, toothbrushes… Shouldn’t such items be collected as symbols of identity and exhibited in a similar museum dedicated to the refugees of North Africa? Shouldn’t it collect testimonies to the ordeals of those who suffocated on deck, who drank urine just to survive, who threw living people over the railings? That, of course, would be a museum dedicated to suffering. But it is something the refugees deserve, wherever they may come from.
So I was glad when, not even a week later, I spotted a small news item in an Italian newspaper: “Pieces of wood, family photographs, pages from the Quran, shoes, food boxes, music cassettes… items salvaged from the sea or left behind on the boats that carry thousands of immigrants across the Mediterranean every year, all this can be found in a small room, ten square metres in size, which forms the heart of the museum of immigration set up in Lampedusa by volunteers of the Askavusa association.” It was founded by a local artist, Giacomo Sferlazzo, in the hope that others would join the initiative.
You can also find immigration figures at Museum of Italian Emigration. Italy has 3,891,295 immigrants, accounting for 6.5 per cent of the population. Caritas Migrantes gives different figures: roughly five million immigrants or 7 per cent of the population. Interestingly – and this was confirmed by many of the people I met – Islamophobia is not prevalent here and fear of Muslims is not used as a means of propaganda as it is in the north of the continent. However, activists like Don Angelo and some journalists caution that a different kind of generalization is at work – both the law and the media criminalize refugees as a group. By and large, the authorities treat them like common criminals, even though they have done nothing to deserve it. This is one of the reasons why they are protesting. And even that is a problem, because Europe is still not used to refugees protesting. Europeans expect only gratitude.
Public television plays an especially interesting role in the policy of fear. Citing research conducted by Demos&Pi, La Repubblica writes that in the first four months of 2011, news about immigrants accounted in Italy for 13.9 per cent of news programs on TG1. For the sake of comparison, this figure stands in France at 1.6 per cent on France 2 television and in Germany at 0.6 per cent on ARD. It is worth noting, however, that Italy was experiencing a so-called “invasion” of immigrants at the time. All the same, the heavy news coverage did not have a decisive impact on the viewing audience. According to the same source, only six per cent of Italians cited immigrants as their main concern, compared to 55 per cent who cited the cost of living. “This goes to show how the sense of insecurity is a political and media ‘construction’, which introduces and stokes ‘fear of others’ and increases the already present feeling of insecurity that exists for economic and (un)employment reasons,” writes author Ilvo Diamanti.
There are numerous humanitarian and civic organizations, such as Fortress Europe, that advocate the rights of immigrants and offer them very tangible assistance. These organizations believe that immigrants will keep coming regardless of increasingly restrictive, and even immoral, legislation; regardless of the walls erected and the other obstacles awaiting them. Because where they come from things are even worse. Immigration policy should, therefore, be rational rather than based on fear, because the only ones to profit from the latter are politicians and parties that promise the impossible. Fear of immigrants is the yeast on which they grow.
In Rome, refugees live behind the Termini train station, in a part of town known as Esquilino. I realized how different Esquilino is from other neighbourhoods in when I took a walk down Via Carlo Alberto toward the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele. There I saw something that I last saw maybe fifty years ago in Yugoslavia: a street knife-grinder. The dark-skinned young man was hunched over a big whetstone, sharpening a knife for a woman leaning against a doorway, smoking, waiting for him to finish. They were speaking in Romanian.
This is where my friend Alessandra lives. Admittedly, you can’t see the crowds in Piazza Vittorio Emanuele from the big balcony of her top, fifth-floor apartment. The piazza is ringed with shops selling all and sundry, not that there seem to be many buyers. The shops are mostly owned by the Chinese. But as soon as she walks out of her building, Alessandra finds herself surrounded by people from different continents, of different colour, speaking different languages. She took in a little boy from Cameroon, but after a few years his mother took him back. Looking at David’s photograph on her desk, I think of the difference between Europe and the States: had he been in America instead of Italy, this same little boy would have become American. In Italy neither he, nor indeed his offspring, will ever be Italian, citizens of Italy. But his white peers, whose parents come from Albania or Bosnia, will become Italian, as will their progeny.
Alessandra is a psychologist and works as a volunteer on projects that help immigrants adjust to and integrate into their new environment, by learning the language, going to school and finding a job. The Fund for the Social Inclusion of Immigrants supports a whole range of these programs and activities. Alessandra shows me a book and DVD called La meta di me (Half of me), the product of one project that focused on the second generation, the children of immigrants. There are plenty of such initiatives. Experience tells her that most of this generation will remain in Italy and that they need to be given a chance to become equal citizens as soon as possible. She thinks that immigration policy is all wrong. The law allowing immigrants to be joined by their families has been abolished, so that most economic immigrants and war refugees are young men, who wind up facing a whole slew of problems, from depression to alcoholism, drug addiction and crime. They have no motivation and no goal. Brute survival is not enough of an incentive. Alessandra referred to something I had heard mentioned before – the experience of Italians in the United States. When you give people an opportunity to establish themselves in a society, they usually take it. To be sure, the American melting-pot offers a different model of integration; but equally, says Alessandra, immigration policy should be based both on the principle of solidarity and humaneness, and on the principle of mutual benefit.
One example of mutual benefit is Elvira Mujcic, a young woman who was not even thirteen when she came to Italy as a refugee from Srebrenica. A high school and college graduate, today she is a successful young Italian writer – for it is in Italian that she writes. As we lunch on melanzane alla parmiggianna in a little restaurant in Via del Boschetto, we talk about identity. She sees no contradiction between her Bosnian origins and the fact that she writes in Italian; indeed, she speaks it better than her mother tongue, which, in the course of our conversation, she periodically apologies for. Identity is not some rigid mould you fall into or not. On the contrary, we talk about how the one, let’s say Bosnian, does not rule out the other, Italian. She loves Bosnian food, but she loves the Italian language. She no longer wants to live in her birthplace, and it’s not just because there is no work in Bosnia. She feels that she belongs here: this is where she went to school, where she lives and works, where she loves.
Still, it was easier for her to assimilate as a refugee because she is European. It is harder for those around the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, especially if they come from other cultures and other continents. But even here there are success stories. Take the interesting story of the Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio. Today it is quite well-known, with three albums under its belt, some three hundred concerts worldwide and a documentary film. It embraces musicians from Tunisia, Brazil, Cuba, America, Hungary, Ecuador, Argentina, Senegal, India and, of course, Italy – but its composition changes. The orchestra was formed in 2002 by conductor Mario Tronco as part of a project to help save the Apollo movie theatre.
Even more interesting than the story of the orchestra’s formation is the kind of music it plays. In Rome one evening I managed to get a ticket to their premier of The Magic Flute at the Teatro Olimpia. Rome’s leftist, progressive elite was in attendance that evening – I recognized a number of well-known public figures – because it was simply an event not to be missed. A casual visitor to the auditorium, who knew nothing about either the orchestra or the opera, would have seen it as part concert, part opera. They played a mixture of classical and ethno-music, jazz, pop, rap, reggae and mamba. Every so often, in between the Tunisian singer and the solo sections on the Arab lute and African instruments such as the kora, djembe, dumduma and sabara, you could hear excerpts from The Magic Flute, such popular arias as the Queen of the Night, Papageno, Sarastro, Pamino. This “opera” is performed in six languages: Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish, German, English and Wolof. Not even the story follows the libretto and the ending comes as a complete surprise… Admittedly, this is not a performance of the opera. Even the poster warns us that it is an interpretation: “The Magic Flute according to the Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio”. Mario Tronco himself says that this is not about faithfully performing Mozart’s piece: “We took great liberties with the score, we chose only what suits our orchestra. Our performance is full of references to other cultures. Our musicians come from far away, and I don’t mean just geographically. Each one of them brings to this opera his or her own culture, own language…” Tronco says that while Mozart’s opera is about “how it once was”, the Orchestra’s performance is about “how it will one day be”.
And indeed, that opening night was for me as if the orchestra had cracked open the door to Europe’s future. Mozart’s music lies at the very heart of what we see as Europe’s cultural heritage. Most Europeans would probably like to hear them give a pitch-perfect performance of the original, because that would be proof of integration. This interpretation/adaptation/improvisation on the theme of Mozart, however well-performed and interesting, sounds blasphemous to their ears. But it is more likely that non-European immigrants will also bring something of their own to Europe, and that we will increasingly be faced with a mixture of cultures, be it with Mozart or any other holy of European holies.
This interpretation showed that newcomers from other cultures will not necessarily completely adapt to our dominant culture, which is what they are expected to do, but will try to adapt the culture they encounter, in all its elements, to their own. And they will do so in both the arts and in life. Statistics will be the decisive factor here: with the number of immigrants from Africa and Asia growing, it may not be that just food, music, fashion and customs will undergo change – European laws may do so too. Yet very few people in Europe will openly say today: Yes, that’s true, so what?
It seems that to talk about the integration and assimilation of immigrants (the only two models ever discussed) makes sense only up to a point – only when it concerns newcomers from Europe, say eastern Europe, such as Albanians or Bosnians, but not when it concerns Roma, who come from the same part of the world but do not share the same culture or history. But what about the non-European immigrants pouring in from the south, via Lampedusa, Sicily, the Spanish coast, and from the east, from Afghanistan via the Turkish-Greek-Bulgarian border, where the largest number come from? Europeans, be they pro or contra immigration, agree on the civilizational bottom-line that newcomers, especially from different cultures, must not cross – the emancipation of women, respect for human rights, democracy. But what about art, which, by definition, breaches all boundaries?
Maybe it is better to be aware of how the greats like Mozart, Bach and Beethoven might sound in the future. But also of how many other traditions that we hold dear will change, if they haven’t already. Take the production of Murano glass. The little island of Murano, famous for its glass since the end of the thirteenth century, presents a sorry picture today. Most of its factories have closed. The jewellery, figurines, bowls, lamps, paper holders, and stoppers that are sold massively in hundreds of Venice’s souvenir shops are made in China. Yes, you get a certificate saying that the necklace you bought is Murano glass, but more likely than not it is Murano glass Made in China. The ordinary tourist won’t notice the difference or even wonder how the little island he visited the day before, where glass is not mass produced, can churn out such a vast amount of souvenirs. Or how such a wonderful glass ring or bracelet can cost just a few euros. And most importantly, how the vast majority of these items are identical, that is mass-produced. Because, on the little island of Murano, no two items made by hand can be the same. That’s one distinction; their fine workmanship is the other.
I had a chance to see this for myself in a shop behind my apartment, on the corner of Calle Fiubero. Andrea, who works there, took me to the studio and showed me all sorts of objects, from a paper holder to lovely jewellery. They say it is hard to distinguish the Murano made originals from their Chinese copies. On the Internet you can find warnings and information about how to tell the difference, but you can also find advertisements for Murano glass manufactured in China. Of course, this is nonsense, since Murano is the name not just of a certain glass-making technique, but also of the glass objects made in Murano. Andrea picked up two bracelets. One was of precise, flawless workmanship; the other, I could see with a bit of effort, was a crude, approximate Chinese imitation. Mass tourism has led to a demand that Murano cannot meet, even when working at full capacity. And, as Andrea says, the Chinese have neither the same understanding of the original nor any moral dilemmas about producing imitations. But what upset me most was when he compared the millefiori pearl necklace made in Murano with the one from China. Because that was when I sadly realized that the necklace I had bought in another shop the previous day was a common or garden fake!
The “danger of invasion”, as European politicians are wont to exaggerate, lies not only in the number of immigrants (after all, there are only around 200,000 Chinese in Italy, and roughly 2,000 in Venice), but also in the investment of money and buying up of property. Money is much faster in bringing change than immigrants. First the Chinese in Venice bought up small shops and turned them into “Murano” glass souvenir and leatherwear shops. Then they bought bars and restaurants; now they are following up with palazzos, turning them into hotels.
One evening, as I was taking the vaporetto no. 2 from Ponte dell’Academia to the San Marco stop on the Riva delgi schiavoni, I noticed that entire sections on this part of the Grand Canal were without light. Huge palaces were steeped in darkness, as if nobody lived there. These are the summer residences of the rich. But among them are also palaces that belong to the city and that the city is selling off, explained a friend of mine who lives here. Because change comes in many ways, not just with the poor wretches who make it in one piece to Lampedusa or some other patch of Italian soil; not just through food, fashion, custom and music, but also via banks, investments, money-laundering, corruption of the local administration. And while Europeans ponder future changes and whether to put up a wall around Europe (if only they knew what its boundaries were), while they contemplate measures that will contain immigrants at that same imaginary border and Europe’s culture and the values that need to be preserved (although globalization, in other words Americanization, has already utterly changed them), the Chinese are freely investing, buying palaces in Venice in order to turn them into hotels, thus making even more money out of Europe’s cultural treasures. From the Venetian viewpoint, in comparison with the investments of the Chinese – nota bene, some people here call it money-laundering – fear of Muslim immigrants in France and Germany and further north looks almost pathetic.
My neighbour says that Venice is increasingly turning not into a museum, as I romantically thought, but a Disneylandish amusement park owned by the Chinese, who alone profit from it. He is probably right. Be it at a slow pace or fast, legally or illegally, with or without money, as refugees or otherwise – the immigrants are coming. As I leave Venice with my fake Murano necklace, listening to the Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio, I try to imagine what Mozart would sound like if it were adapted, not performed, by a Chinese orchestra in the Teatro Fenice in the not so distant future.

Translated from the Croatian by CRISTINA PRIBICEVIC ZORIC

Europe Über Alles

JÁNOS HÁY

A Hungarian in Germany

Does Europe have a spirit? If so, what kind? Is it a Christian spirit that keeps putting the Muslims on edge, or a multicultural spirit gradually grinding away all tradition and turning Europe’s inhabitants into a mass of consumers without a past? Or is the spirit of Europe the secret emissary of Mohammed, working behind the scenes to set up a gigantic caliphate, where everyone will finally live according to Sharia law? If we consider the matter from the perspective of the leading States, is the spirit of Europe represented by a Frenchman possessed by diversion and easygoing social graces; or is it better represented by an Englishman, the queen’s aristocratic envoy, who haughtily withdraws to the Isles when something in the way the allies operate displeases him? Or is the spirit of Europe a hard-working German who bristles at those poorly organized, shiftless Southern countries frittering away all that money?
If Europe has a spirit at all, should it be feared, especially if it’s German? Or should we be glad that we’ve arrived in exactly the age in which the old spirits are extinct, while the new ones are in their childhood, and it can’t yet be determined how they’ll function once they’ve grown up?
You’re standing at Charlemagne’s marble throne in Aachen, the starting point of European history in the classical sense, and you realize the utter impossibility of pinpointing a place like this for our time, a place from which current developments can be seen. After all, you yourself are in the thick of the transformation. How would we know that something old is at an end and something new has begun? Or that the old endures, only slightly differently. How many Roman citizens in A.D. 476 sensed that the Empire had just come to an end?
We’re like a deceived wife who’s the last to notice that her husband hasn’t been living within the expected matrimonial bonds for quite some time. Even so, again and again, we try to understand the changes whirling about us. So let’s take a tour of one country and examine it thoroughly enough to see whether the changes we observe there lead to any generally valid conclusions. For our purposes, let it be Germany, a country without which there’d be no European Union, since the deteriorating economic situation would long ago have set the members at one another’s throats.

The Virtual and Actual Borders of Germany
The Bismarkian enterprise, the creation of a unified Germany (1871), was a joyous occasion for the Germans living within the new borders. But the joy of that occasion overshadowed the fact that the Empire’s borders were now identical with those of the actual state configuration, whereas the virtual German Empire had arched across Europe. Almost every significant Northern, Central, and Eastern European city had German inhabitants, a German press, a German theater. Industrial culture, the orders of knighthood, the squirearchy in the north were all German. Being German in, say, the nineteenth century, meant being at home throughout Europe. With unification, the virtual borders were lost, but the citizens of the new Empire never forgot their connection to Kaliningrad and Braşov, Copenhagen and Gdansk, Prague and Banská Štiavnica. Like an amputee, they were habitually aware of the absence of those lost limbs. It’s as if the great wars were about this too: We cannot reconcile ourselves to that loss; the actual borders ought to be pushed to the edge of the virtual empire.

The One-and-Only Voice of Europe
You’re careening across the landscapes of the virtual empire, through various nation states. You can measure the level of each economy by the volume of traffic on the highway. There are no borders, no crossings to indicate your arrival in another country. It’s only from the number of trucks and the quality of the roads that you can tell whether you’re still in Slovakia, or now in the Czech Republic but not yet in Germany. You hardly notice that the radio is no longer broadcasting in Hungarian. There may have been a linguistic change, but the acoustical offering is the same. The world is continuously talking to you, but saying nothing. You don’t have to know the other languages, after all, this ‘nothing’ doesn’t have a language like Hungarian, Czech, or Slovak. Copies of American radio announcers are shouting and letting the disc changers pour on that empty, maudlin syrup – the current hit songs. The Europe that boasts of diversity and multi-cultural interests has shut itself into the prison of uniformity. The songs are the same, the advertisements are the same, the shops and products are the same. Can anyone look different? Who’d want to? The music is playing, how many times can ‘love you’, ‘heart beat’, ‘miss you’, ‘with you’ be heard within one minute across the world? The flower children should be gratified: feelings are emanating from everywhere profusely. Undeniably, though, those erstwhile ’68-ers, disillusioned by alternative lifestyles, have played a manifest part in the building of this comfortable but cynical and empty one-and-only world.

The German Tourist
But the Germans can’t allow themselves to be disillusioned. They suckle industriousness with their mother’s milk. According to my grandfather, not even in captivity did they abandon their work ethic. One of his German fellow prisoners, for example, unloaded fish from a barge on the Volga so diligently, he didn’t notice that his nose had frozen off, and sure enough, when he wiped it, something more than what he’d expected remained in his handkerchief.
Germans are industrious even as tourists. How they do it is a mystery, maybe they sleep in their hiking shoes, but by the time a Hungarian tourist pulls himself together and emerges to start the day with a filling breakfast, his German counterpart is already traversing the romantic woodlands. There’s no making up for lost time. It’s not worth even setting out. And indeed, the Hungarian tourist on a three-day weekend doesn’t even bother to catch up. On the first day, thanks to the alcohol brought from home, he’s so far out of the running that he can hardly guzzle enough hair-of-the-dog beer to keep his killer hangover at bay. Then on the last day he drives home thoroughly exhausted, while the German tourist, full of joyful memories, energized and deliciously tired, arrives at his city apartment ready to tackle the next day’s work with vim and vigor.

East–West
The mountains of Germany are inhabited by the personages of great German myths of old: sorcerers, dwarves, and witches. The Harz Mountains and the Black Forest harbor meeting places of mysterious fabled beings, though the memory of the Nibelungs, along with Luther and the myth of Weimar Classicism, perished in the vortex of twentieth-century history. Divided Germany (1949) gave birth to new myths. West and East each tried its hand at different myths. The East was home to the dissidents, who were able (with some outside help, but that wasn’t too essential, so it wasn’t even brought up) to restrain the orgy of evil. They must have felt like Siegfried and Hagen, which is a nice calling for a person who wants to shut himself into a world of myths. But those heroes of the GDR longed for the simple world of West German myth – consumerism. They longed to be subsumed in material, in the world of tangible goods. They wanted the Rheingold, but not virtually; they wanted it in their wallets, ready to be spent.

GDR
Though it visually hardly exists any more, the GDR remains the GDR as an attitude. It’s a slightly hapless world, where everything seems more fallible. They hardly speak any language other than German there. If an Englishman asks for directions, they’ll eagerly gesticulate the answer, but it’s better not to count on verbal help. The faces are rougher, the clothes more modest than in the Western region, but the houses are richly colored, with only a few villages preserving the erstwhile grayness, and a few people who failed to notice the passing of that former world. They still sport hairdos appropriated from Udo Jürgens or the soccer players of Bayern München, or some other onetime iconic personage. The hair is short on top and mane-like at the neck. They look as they did thirty years ago, except that, in addition to their bellies, their necks and heads have also become distended.

Dresden: Ruins and Models
I look at these locals, and I’m reminded of the wartime years, when they weren’t yet born, or if so, they were snuggling in a mother’s arms, as tens of thousands were fleeing into the cities, because they thought those wouldn’t be destroyed by a West that sets so high a value on culture. There could be some doubt in the case of Nuremberg, because there was reason to despise that Nazi nest. But what was Dresden’s offense? Nothing. The city will squeak by and we along with it, thought the Germans seeking shelter with their Dresden relatives and acquaintances. As for the British, well, this is their favorite city. The population multiplied, the city was bursting at the seams like an over-stuffed bag. And when it had reached the saturation point, the airplanes appeared and dropped their bombs. No matter where those fell, they destroyed with the greatest possible effect. As if beyond destroying the evildoers, everything else also had to be destroyed, everything the Germans contributed to the world, so that nothing would remain of the culture from which this world-scale destructive force burst forth. If the material remains could be destroyed, maybe the underlying spirit, the German threat to the world, could as well.
I’m thinking about the image of Germany after the war. Ruins. The ruins of buildings and people. Ruins without and within. No more than the residue of people and buildings. And then that residue begins rebuilding the whole thing, stone by stone. Rebuilding the past. The buildings made level with the ground. And what comes of it? A full-scale model.
Dresden is a model, Nuremberg is a model, and the past that we project onto them is a model. They are illustrations from an old book. Everyone knows this isn’t the real thing, even so, nobody wants what’s real. Modern Dresden, modern Rostock, the Stalinist baroque buildings, socialist-realist modernism. The real is ugly, the old is beautiful. Tourists abhor reality. They want the fabled past. They want to revel in the storybook scenery of storybook heroes. That’s what makes life worth living, they say, because there’s a past; some day our time will be a past that will lay the foundations for what’s to come. We won’t disappear without a trace, since our time will remain, claiming its place in this enormous time-construct.
For a while the rebuilders are proud of having built the past out of nothing, then the documentation of the ruins, the photographs, the descriptions, the still-remembered images become disconcerting. Those have to disappear. If we don’t display them, they don’t exist. And the model once and for all takes over the role of the real. Even the new statuary turns black, the new sgraffito on the facades fades, the memory of the image before the bombing turns real. The traveler may think that this is the real world, more beautiful than when it was new.
To build the past is to obliterate the past. If I come back in ten years, I won’t be able to detect the heritage of communism in the small villages either. The distant past is being built anew, the recent past is being lost. This is how the citizenry of today is trying to reestablish the order of things. To wipe out the forty years that are no longer needed. How many decades are missing from the past? Who knows? New generations, for whom that time didn’t exist, whose parents’ time doesn’t exist, are growing up. They have no fathers and mothers, only grandfathers and grandmothers, but sometimes not even that, since the grandfather, contrary to family lore, wasn’t a member of the antifascist commando, he served in the SS.

Dream
In the East, reality was a dream for forty years. The areas alongside lakes and vacation resorts are subdivided into little parcels with tiny houses, garden plots, and run-down miniature copies of villas, replete with flowers, garden gnomes, and satellite dishes. Just as folk tales adorned the peasant house that turned into a palace, here vest-pocket enclaves of recreation have come into being. True, as long as you don’t see these things in the flesh, for example, on the island of Rügen, you can’t imagine how a house and a plot of land can be so small. This is the dream of poverty: to desire something, but only within the limits of the possible. This tiny bit of space is worth only as much as the amount of life stuffed into it, and who can deny that real life has been throbbing within it for twenty, thirty years now, or even longer. Even so, it’s so captivating to imagine how that mother and that father come together apprehensively at night and make love with great circumspection, so that the children don’t wake with a start. Of course, we’re all like that, polishing our petty lives, until finally all the sheen is worn away. We become as worn as the clothing of retirees, and our only hope is for something to flash beyond the borders of infinity.

Tourist Hordes
The composition of tourists changes seasonally. The summer belongs to families and vacationing students, the spring and fall belong to well-off retirees on price-controlled group tours. They’re squandering the well-deserved pensions of a lifetime of work. This is either active relaxation or active preparation for the final good-bye. They’d like to carry into the next world some special scene (The Black Forest, the Brocken or the Zugspitze), some special cultural memento (Goethe’s house in Weimar, the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig), the memory of a few sounds and tastes. Their Eastern counterparts would be eyeing them enviously if they knew about them, since they too hustled away their lives, but their reward could at most be to perish quickly and painlessly, so as not to burden their families for long with their uselessness.
In addition to the retirees, there are groups of schoolchildren being shepherded on class trips through European tradition. They’re bored. One or two eager-beavers ask questions, such as, did Luther really translate the Bible here, sir?, but most of them are just waiting for evening, when the teachers finally make themselves scarce. A few gay couples of both sexes, as well as girlfriends in their fifties, who’ve rediscovered each other after divorce and are now each other’s agreeable travel companions in place of the husband, who, when he was induced to move from in front of the TV and behind his beer, surveyed the first half of the sights as if sleepwalking, the second half inebriated from local potables.
Businessmen show up only on weekdays, but even then you can run into them only if you rise at the right time, because by ten they’ve had two business meetings, and by noon they’re in the car on the way to catch a flight so they can brief corporate headquarters on the success of their trip. A few young couples who got away from their places of work, with as yet no children, so they can travel at any time as long as their company head isn’t obsessed with everyone vacationing at once, in August. A few old men with young women for whom this trip is probably a gift, the start of a possible future, albeit not a very long future, judging from the man’s age; or else the trip marks the close, after a few years, of a love affair: he’ll provide her this trip, but if she doesn’t get pregnant, then it really is over, and he goes back to his wife, who doesn’t threaten all his free time, doesn’t want anything from him any more, neither children nor sex, as long as he spends his time at home, wheezing like a household pet.
And finally there are ramblers like me, those fleeing the crises of love, the lone wanderers. Sometimes others look at me as if I were gay. They feel sorry for me for traveling alone because, so they speculate, my partner left me for some wealthy Swiss tycoon who’s disgusting, but to my boyfriend money was more important than love, so he chose to stand by a physically deteriorated old queer, a child molester – this is generally known – to boot. In such a tolerant country as this, where a language teacher in Berlin roots for the Nigerian team at a German-Nigerian soccer match, because she wants to avoid any semblance of national partiality, it’s not too bad being gay. Beyond the obligatory solicitousness, you can rake in a little extra love too.

Following the Rules
If you hail from an uppity country, it’ll serve you well to pay close attention to your new surroundings. Never mind how nerve-racking it is, you have to follow the rules, because everything here is by the book. Rules within rules: a well-oiled machine. Everyone is tranquil, as if they were all on Xanax by the fistful, whereas it’s only Order that they’re on. They don’t get bent out of shape because something unexpected might happen.
The reward for following the rules is that everything works. And if you don’t comply, you pay the price, not only in irritating warnings about no crossing on red, bicycles not allowed, pedestrians not allowed, no passenger vehicles; all we want to do is help, some even bother to explain why this or that is not allowed, and you just stand there like a frightened child saying, yes mama, I’ll never do it again.
But the reprimand is not the only punishment. Breaking certain rules, for example, exceeding the speed limit, costs money. I’ve been here five days, and I’ve already been caught by radar speed gun three times. There’s no slipping out from under the rules here, no loopholes such as Officer, it’s only because there was no traffic, and I could give you five thousand to disregard this little transgression. Thirty kph here is thirty kph, and everyone besides me honors it.
Suddenly I’m possessed by paranoid thoughts, because a Hungarian always suspects a conspiracy of outside forces; not even remotely does it occur to him that he may be the cause of all those fines. I’m marked, I thought, the German system has pegged me as a capable delinquent, and now they’re dotting my route in advance with radar guns, because they know which way I’ll be heading, whereas often even I don’t know yet, but they have access to my subconscious. I’ll lose my shirt. The economy is in the toilet because everybody follows the rules. If I don’t violate rules, there’ll be a shortfall in the German budget. But they can trust me, because I grew up in the kind of country where I wouldn’t entrust my dog to the State, and where freedom can be experienced only in the violation of the rules.

Migration of Peoples
I peer into a restaurant kitchen, at the bustle of guest workers in the background. They make up the cleaning crews of the big hotels too. They’re cordial in those places, but if you ask them something in the street, they snub you. Going into an Arab or Turkish eatery nowadays doesn’t instill a sense of security in me: You see, pal, I’m white, but I don’t belong here either. Such familiarity is over. Outsider status doesn’t create community. They serve me, but they’re cordial only within bounds. They do what’s required, but they make it clear to me that I’m on the other side. The sociological cross-section of immigrants differs fundamentally from that of Germans. Most of the dirty work is still done by guest workers. The German elite doesn’t throw open the doors to them. A Turk can at most be a soccer player, a model, or a pop musician. Intellectuals or those who’ve reached middle-class status form a disproportionately thin social stratum.
The migration of peoples has been going on for decades. The countries of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa are shoving out more and more transports. Poverty and overpopulation – economic and biological compulsion – are driving the seekers of luck from their native lands. And in the host countries, economic and biological compulsion is what makes it necessary to receive them. How else could the vacant jobs be filled in a growing economy with a declining population, so as to produce those lavish German retirement pensions?
The workers recruited from abroad have redrawn Europe’s features socially and culturally. Not to notice this is to close your eyes to it. In Bonn, a demonstration is organized (2012. 05. 07) because of Mohammed cartoons. We could nonchalantly ask: why not? But an odd thing happened: The demonstrators didn’t attack the rightist counter-demonstrators, but the police. Turkish rappers and pop musicians agitate for the jihad, openly. Some commentator, seemingly a Muslim, says that this is a generational problem, which can be explained by the rebellious nature of youth; they’ll outgrow it. To be sure, this is not his opinion of the know-it-alls on the extreme right, chanting anti-Islam slogans; they aren’t socially acceptable to him either. Word is that 25 million free Korans are being distributed among the Germans; let them study the true letter of the law, you never know when the need for that knowledge might arise. The Salafis are the catalysts behind all these processes. Radical Islamists are recruited mainly from among the Muslim youth. Their ideological hotbed is the King Fahd Academy in the Mehlem quarter of Bonn, which of course is maintained by Saudi funds, officially. The ideology is unequivocal: hatred for the morally decayed West, whose behavior justifies even violence.
The various Muslim groups are capable of demonstrating unity in the face of the clear-cut enemy. The deepest of spiritual and emotional commitments holds them together, which the West, based on tolerance and cultural pluralism, is at a loss to handle. Europe’s faith-based unity crumbled in the course of the new age. We may find common cause in the battle against global warming, but not in the struggle against another ideology. The ethos of the old Europe, which can be located somewhere along the paths of the nation state, tradition, Christianity, the family, and private property, is now gone forever.
A few people still want to define these developments as the struggle of good vs. evil, in which European tradition stands for good, and Islamic tradition, based on the impoverishment of personhood, for evil. But this is an underhanded distinction; we’re quite aware of how often we were willing to accept an evil deemed useful to Europe’s interests. The question of good vs. evil is a matter of viewpoint, and behind any viewpoint are biases and interests. Neither good nor evil will determine what’s going to happen, tenacity of purpose will.
While the countries concerned rack their brains over how to simultaneously check the extreme anti-Islam movements and the Jihadists, biology is at work. The number of immigrants is continuously growing. Eventually they’ll cross the critical boundary, and simply by virtue of their numbers, come into view from the background, regardless of every Arian’s secret wish to keep that Middle Eastern rabble on the frontiers of menial work.

Special Places
With the Turks, Europe has met its match and hasn’t noticed. We come and go in the world, we travel and have fun, the goal is to enjoy ever-longer vacations, while the “vagabonds” of the Third World keep the services going. The fast-food restaurants in Germany’s big cities are in Arab and Turkish hands, but in the smaller towns the wandering Chinese and Vietnamese turn up to nourish tourists, worn out by the quest for adventure, with a few Far Eastern flavors. These flavors are inexpensive and exotic next to German cuisine. Compared to cabbage, indistinguishable sausages, ham shank, and pot roast, Chinese fast food is redemption itself. It’s hard to understand how such high-quality culture could have been built on such a low-quality cuisine as the German.
The stuffed tourist casts himself with renewed vigor into collecting experiences. He looks for a special place. One where only locals live, that isn’t full of foreign wayfarers. Every traveler longs to partake in an original, special experience, ahead of the other travelers. This is known by authors of guide books, who ferret out even the most secret places, thereby making public knowledge of them, and offering them to the tourist crowds longing for the unique. And so those places are robbed of their uniqueness. In fact, the tourist industry grinds all particularity into a mass of commonplace experience.

Cleanliness
You can go anywhere, to the rarest and strangest of places, but in one way they’re all identical: there’s such cleanliness, as if nightly, before the witches of the Brocken could mount their brooms, the country had been swept clean, or as if one of the mythic heroes, let’s say Siegfried, who can no longer draw a sword after so many bitter wars, swept the country clean with a huge broom. Sometimes, though, his work leaves something to be desired, as when he just sweeps the garbage into a neighboring country; let’s remember when, a few years ago, German garbage by the freight car was arriving in Hungary. It is true, of course, that this sweeping of garbage is by no means done by the heroes of German mythology, but rather by those heroes of the Thousand and One Nights who found their way here.
Otherwise, the Germans are environmentally aware: they recycle, they’re thrifty, they don’t defile what needs to be kept clean, they fight for alternative energy sources. Solar panels and wind turbines are everywhere. Germany has been in the forefront in the area of alternative power plants for years. The lighting is kept at moderate levels. Even when you turn on all the lights in your hotel room, it’s still too dim to read comfortably. Street lighting is conservative too, turned on at the last possible moment, and the lamps are not turned up very brightly.
In India by contrast, even at Himalayan lookouts, plastic bags are billowing in the surrounding trees. There is merciless smoke and noise in the streets of the big cities, still, the carbon footprint of the Indians can hardly be detected. That of the Germans is also hard to notice, not because it’s small, but because they hide it so well.

The Main Shopping Street
The carbon footprint has been made to disappear in the fields and around the neat houses, but if you stumble onto the central street of a big city like Frankfurt or Cologne, you’ll see otherwise. The main shopping street is the dress rehearsal for hell. Jam-packed rows of customers are on the prowl among piles of consumer goods — items no one has any real need for, but now they’re a few euros cheaper. Now is the time to buy them, you never know when you might need them. Whoever can’t get the hang of shopping on sale is a second-class consumer.
Shoppers throng, carrying shopping bags blazoned with commercial logos. To shop at all costs! To dread not buying, not augmenting the store of items we possess, because then the emptiness will engulf us. Consumerism has become the culture of the unified Europe. This is what should be included in the European constitution, not Christian roots.

Similarity
Global habits of consumption are uniting lifestyles, molding the members of various consumer categories into distinct groups. A German housewife is closer to a Hungarian housewife than to a German single person, the way a German single is closer to a Hungarian single, a German teacher to a Hungarian teacher, a German college student to a Hungarian college student, a homeless person to a homeless person, than to anyone else from their own nation. And there is no ethos, no habit, no cultural or consumer specialty that could overwrite that. Lifestyles have become so standardized that Europe can no longer be defined in the context of the nation state. At most, that context boils down to how much money a country has at its disposal to manufacture this lifestyle.

The Awkward
The States of Central Europe are truly like an awkward Germany. They’re similar in framework, goals, societal expectations, ideology. We’re similar, it’s just that we don’t function.
At the same time Germany, precisely because of its good and reliable functioning, is a lot more boring than a messy Central-European or Balkan State. Most likely a woman would choose Germany for a husband, but for a lover she’d seek out the kind of country where it’s not possible to know for sure what’s going to happen. The husband himself also frequents these lovers who produce such merriment and unexpected turns of events. If they’re artists, he buys paintings from them, he finances their study-tours. But if the lovers are of a mind to put the system at risk, to shake the husband’s secure and strong status in the world, well then, he beckons them and says: it’s okay for you to be screwing my wife, and for her to talk about you all year long, for you to swipe a bunch of my money, but I draw the line at your tearing apart my marriage and stealing my bank cards. And then the lover takes offense, the way the Greeks took offense, and the Italians, and of course the Spanish: what an asshole that husband is.

Europe’s Boundary
Standardization knows no bounds, because the market has no boundary, only prosperity has. And that boundary isn’t the Elba, as was once customary to say in the historical sense. That boundary is the eastern border of Germany and Austria. Those living beyond it are just loitering like unemployed guest workers on the street corner, yearning for something from that glistening economy to rub off on them. And, of course, sometimes it does, a little capital, a little investment, but always too little. Just enough to survive as a market, but not to attain prosperity, the independence needed to appear on international markets as qualified producers of goods. The way multinational firms compensate their leading managers is the way the wealthier countries sustain the déclassé ones. By giving them just enough money to stay dependent.

The Bulgarian Girl
The Bulgarian girl, Marina, isn’t going home, except maybe during the summer. She’ll finish her university studies here, with a master’s degree in economics; she did her first three years back in Sofia. She’s blond, she’ll assimilate easily. She’ll soon be, let’s say, Frau Marina Schultz. A middle-class boy chooses her out of revenge against his father, whom he has hated since early childhood, because the father wanted to force his own principles on him, such as marrying someone from a family like theirs, so that at family celebrations they can cheerfully guzzle beer while cursing the Muslims, laugh at anti-Islam caricatures, because it’s so funny that a Lutheran church, surrounded by minarets, asks “How can I integrate?”, or a representative in the German Parliament asks another, “Hey, Ali, we really need to address the German question already.”
This German boy got his father’s dander up by choosing someone else, but the dander didn’t stay up long, because Marina became more German than a middle-class German daughter-in-law. In her zeal to fit in, she overachieves even in being German. Gradually the Bulgarian relatives fell away: they grew old, they didn’t feel like traveling, then they died, so there was no longer any reason for her to go home. Only later, around fifty, did Marina cry for the first time, because of some smell or because she heard someone in the street speaking Bulgarian, which conjured up her childhood. It wasn’t so much the memories that made her cry, but the strangeness of those Bulgarian sentences she heard, as were the ones that came to her as a result. As if they’d come from another person, as if those years had not been part of her life. She’d been dreaming in German for a long time, and if someone in a dream said something in Bulgarian, that person was a foreigner, a guest worker, a Bulgarian girl studying here, or a tourist.
Her girlfriend, who works in the same café also because of study expenses, is not so lucky. She has black hair, the complexion of a Turk and, if we really dig into her background, we can find a Muslim grandmother. For her, a different path to assimilation seems to be taking shape. It could be that in five or ten years they’ll no longer be speaking to each other. And their children will be fighting on opposite sides.

Blaring
The car radio is blaring. Turkish pop music is enveloping the street. Subcultures are jostling everywhere with local cultures. At a time when Europe is striving for the greatest possible unity, the small cultures are demanding their autonomies ever more vocally. It’s as if the EU were too large an entity, and it frightens Europe’s inhabitants rather than making them feel secure. A pan-European identity has not emerged. The individual is meandering, lost in the vastness. He’s searching for a foothold, something he can identify with. The traditional European States are fading into sameness while clinging to some cultural particularity, most often to unfashionable, archaic values. We insist on the cocoon of our nation, our region, our city, our religion, our profession, our soccer team, our hobby, and if we take that seriously, and not as a game, we soon become ridiculous. In the face of this, the followers of Islam experience local differentiation, the comfort of the flock, and belonging to a Muslim dream-empire in which, when it becomes a reality, they will be dealing the cards.

The German Spirit
Of course they’re not dealing the cards yet, but they’ve already indicated that they’ll soon be holding the deck, because they’ve got a few trump cards up their sleeve. The cards are being dealt by the majority Germans, who today, as so often in the past, are prone to intoxication over their own economic, financial, and political role. From the time of Weimar Classicism, the Germans have harbored the image that they, as opposed to the wheeling-and-dealing British and Dutch, the voluptuary French, the indolent Southerners, are always pursuing some noble idea.
And this, as a matter of fact, explains their many political failures. They never paid attention to the little games of self-interest, only to the nobler final goal. To be sure, those who couldn’t have cared less about the future of humankind were able to emerge from it all victoriously, with full pockets and chest thrust forward. This German self-image, albeit not even close to reality (to the extent that it is, God help us), came in handy when their historical fiascos needed explanation: We failed because we’re possessed by noble ideas, but even if failure repeats itself a hundred times over, we mustn’t sink to the level of the greedy nations. In this we Hungarians are akin to the Germans, after all, we can’t make enough excuses for our many blunders either, the only difference is that the Germans never put down the crowbar while equivocating, whereas we got to feel so sorry for ourselves, we couldn’t even pick it up.

The Ruhr Valley
Work in the Ruhr Valley takes place in shifts. This is a mountain-range-sized inhabited area where the cities run together, as do factories, assembly plants from all different eras. The traffic surges on the eight-lane highway that dissects the region. One lane in each direction is for trucks only. They’re dumping finished goods onto the world, onto, among others, the disdained Southern and Middle Eastern countries, from which not a small amount of raw materials arrives at the industrial entities.
Germany is still in the modern age, in which industrial production requires workers by the millions. Automation has not yet replaced the industrial workforce. The second economy, the third, is not yet a topic for discussion, we don’t have to think about what will happen with all those jobless people if technology takes over industrial production. A sociological study has found that whereas the populations of the Scandinavian countries prize environmental awareness, human rights, the welfare state, and the protection of minorities, Germans are prouder of their success in modernization, economic strength, and international political significance.
It’s daunting to see these gigantic trucks full of merchandise, as if rolling off to war, and in fact, they are: to vanquish or to outperform every economy in the world, or at least in Europe. Not everyone in Europe can live at the same level, a professor of philosophy in Bremen told me, indicating that Germans are fed up with being the ones who have to bail out any EU member that gets into trouble. Whereas there’s no choice in the matter, because if they turn off the money tap, Germany will also suffer, a Greek politician says on TV; he knows why Germany needs Europe’s Southern region, and that there are decent German fiscal-policy makers in Berlin, who can figure out exactly what’s what.
The German economy may be repeating the experience of the 1950s, when a half million new jobs were created annually. Shops have openings for sales clerks, restaurants for waiters, construction projects seek workers, buses and trams need drivers. Everywhere jobs are available. Construction cranes are in evidence downtown and in the suburbs; highways are being put underground; great effort is being put into rebuilding deteriorated roadways; and these gigantic projects are steadily extending the domestic market and production. For the traveler, construction activity is almost a more intense experience than the cultural traditions or the richness of the historical monuments and the natural wonders.

Provincial Germany
The inhabitants of provincial Germany seem to be living in the world of the Brothers Grimm. They think those story-book villains are the most dangerous enemies in life. With their clean yards, tidy houses, honor, diligence, and well-deserved prosperity, they live in a world that no longer exists. The big cities that used to give the country its strength no longer do. They haven’t for a long time now. If you walk the length of Kaiserstrasse in Frankfurt, you soon see on the litter-strewn sidewalk the clustered bands of Central-European guest workers: Poles, Slovaks, Ukrainians; the Arabs loitering in front of the cheap kebab joints; the third-class whores offering the quickest-possible sex. Willy Brandt Square is full of tents surrounding that ridiculous statue honoring the euro. It’s the Occupy Frankfurt crowd: alternative activists and the tramps and refugees they’ve attracted. I suspect that by today the tramps and refugees outnumber the warriors of the cause. But what is that cause? We are the 99%! Power to the people! Jail the bankers! Clichés, impulsive rallying cries against inequality, lacking any concept for truly transforming society. That’s why the whole thing boiled down to the ranting of civilians, a kind of jamboree during which, for a moment, those wronged by society came together. But soon most of them went away to take care of their affairs, after all, you can’t demonstrate indefinitely. Only the obsessed and the tramps remained. To them, time doesn’t cost anything.
Walking on, I reach the main shopping street. Young drug addicts are panhandling; tramps and beggars, most often with dogs, settle under the archways; street musicians, cripples, derelicts are everywhere; farther on, at the corner of a bank building, thirty to forty well-dressed young financial types are smoking – it’s Friday, party time at the firm. Once again, this week they have cause to celebrate: some transactions were winners. As you walk past all of this, and even take in some events of Chinese Cultural Day on the banks of the Main, you probably know for sure: provincial Germany got stuck in the world of fables, and maybe won’t ever drift out.

The Sounds of the Street
I open the window, it’s dawn, the street is being cleaned. Turks are shouting to one another, because the machines are so loud, then somebody whose day also starts early comes along, also a Turk, German words and sentences get mixed into the Turkish. Sometimes this increases the reliability of being understood. Later some British tourists appear, oblivious to the nerve-racking racket they make by dragging those giant suitcases across the pavement; the street is reverberating, they’re giggling, talking about the week spent here, then city life starts up, languages mix together, but this mélange doesn’t offer the comforting, multicultural experience of New York. These cultures seem to exist entirely separate from one another. Albeit in the big cities the younger Turks, especially at the lower social level, become absorbed in the local society. Their mother tongue wears thin and turns itself over to German, with which they can establish a place for themselves in the community. Blacks, Turks, and Arabs cluster together, of course along with a few German boys from the outlying districts. They live on the level of society where culture consists in daily subsistence. They couldn’t care less about national identity. Mixed couples: the parents aren’t interested in what color the boy or the girl is. The blood is mixing at the bottom.

Architecture
It’s all the same whether we look at Hamburg, Frankfurt, Rostock, or Dresden, somewhere deep in both socialist architecture and that of the other side, the same plain practical-mindedness is visible: unrefined forms, housing developments lacking any livable urban character. Maybe only the quality of the materials is higher on the Western side, though since unification the concrete of the East has been upgraded with Western veneers.
Modern architecture is, in any case, the repository of plainness. At first, a few buildings dazzle you with their staggering scale and novel materials, but, as soon as you get used to the scale and materials, their planarity, and their lack of formal sophistication are striking. It’s as if as soon as the first-year architecture students entered school, the doorkeeper or some expert operator of a mind-altering apparatus drew all aesthetic sensibility and inventiveness out of their heads. Or maybe when they confront all the functional, structural, and mechanical issues involved in designing a building, there really is no resolve or energy left for its appearance. They simply sheathe the practical structure in the outer cladding; it gets what fits it.
It’s a special treat when, despite all this, something exceptional comes together, like, for example, the Reichstag dome. Are the old buildings really more beautiful, or do we admire them merely because of their age, as a value accepted by tacit consensus? After all, what makes the cathedrals of Cologne or Mainz beautiful?
A significant portion of the monuments of Central Europe and the Baltic region were created by Germans. When the Germans were driven from the virtual empire, their cities were left to go to the dogs. Later, of course, with money that was directly or indirectly German, in other words, with EU money, these cities were renovated, the way the bombed-out Hanseatic cities were rebuilt, regaining their old splendor. But, when all is said and done, walls can be built, ruins can be cleared away, but where life doesn’t want to go, it can’t be crammed in by force. And without life, these radiant cities, like Lübeck, are just large-scale stage sets, spectacles for the roving tourist. Having made the obligatory tourist rounds, a person craving life flees those places, and casts himself into the bustle of urban life surrounded by ugly modern buildings.
Of course, at times the old also comes to life. In numerous cities – Berlin, Worms, Cracow or, for that matter, Budapest – the erstwhile Jewish quarter has turned into a recreation district. This is understandable, since the narrow streets are not conducive to residency, the street-level storefronts and workshops make good restaurant spaces, and the districts are close to downtown, but not in the most expensive areas. Even so, it’s somehow inappropriate that in places where for years people were trembling for their lives, where the day ended with “Oh, my God, we’ve made it through another day, the children are in bed; even if hungry, they’re alive,” that in those places jolly tourists are now carousing.

The Last Ones
Truly, does Europe have a spirit? And if so, what kind is it? I ask again, this time nearing the end of my journey. I look at my travel companions, the retired seekers of experiences. These tourists are the last Mohicans of the one-time Europe, where this question didn’t even have to be asked, since asking about the self-evident is pointless. They still have recollections of the Europe where a person of color in their midst was a sight to behold. They’ve lived through the building of the social welfare state, the benefits of which have been dwindling since the eighties. To them the Turks were still nice, hard-working people, who cleaned the offices, scrubbed the toilets, and accepted all the jobs that were beneath the Germans. The Turks came from a miserable existence, they were glad to get work at all, what they earned from the lowliest of jobs was a fortune compared to what they would have earned back home.
The majority of these elderly people were born in the thirties and forties. They have memories of war, ruins, rebuilding, they lived through the great economic upturn of the fifties, they increasingly prospered. To them, life was unequivocably going somewhere from somewhere, it had meaning, but really it was going only here: to retirement. And, of course, what follows the retirement years can’t be wished away. They experienced the trauma of being torn in two and the joy of reunification, and the awareness that their work also helped spruce up the reattached part of the country.
While they were living this well-justified life, the world changed. Socially and technologically, a complete transformation took place. Compared to the micro-technology of today, the modern is antediluvian. The post-industrial revolution has rewritten knowledge, redrawn the globe’s economy. The steady economic growth has sucked the East’s excess population into Europe. This permanent migration of peoples has once-and-for-all broken up the unity of population and culture. The face of Europe no longer resembles her former face. But it’s pointless painting a portrait of this face, after all, today’s face will change by tomorrow, and tomorrow’s by the day after. As a matter of fact, nobody knows where the endpoint of this transformation will be. Nobody knows what will come of this unwavering migration, and of the biological passivity of Europe’s indigenous population.
“The world is changing every second,” announces the BBC, but nobody has any idea what overall process these many changes are part of. The workers at the TV networks certainly don’t know, after all, they toil day and night to mold the world into a single pictorial mass. On the large international networks, the world’s transformation is the transformation of the techniques of broadcasting, which usher every event, every war, natural disaster, and economic change into the languor of sameness.
In Europe, as everywhere in the world, monotonous sameness coexists with a multivalence of lifestyles and cultures, and supposedly not even the aggressive ideologies can change that. Of course, the way things are, whatever has to merge will do so, blood will mix, cultures will mix, after all, since time immemorial peoples and empires emerged from that kind of intermixing. Nobody knows what may be in the cards, neither did Charlemagne know – in the palace of Aachen, when he invented the organization of the state on which our present world is still based – what would come, which of the migrating tribes that roved the bygone landscapes of Europe would remain, and how they’d turn out.

Translated from the Hungarian by EUGENE BRODYÁNYI

The Bickford Puzzle

ANDREY KURKOV

A Ukrainian in the UK

After spending twenty-five years trying to put together the intriguing puzzle called Great Britain, an island of booming cities and decaying peripheries, populated by lovable eccentrics and jolly pensioners, Andrei Kurkov decides that, given a choice between Ukrainian and English old age, he would opt for the latter.
For the past 25 years I’ve been trying to piece together a jigsaw puzzle called ‘Great Britain’. It’s been a rather fascinating pastime but, being a pragmatist, I realize quite a futile one, since there is absolutely no prospect of the puzzle ever being completed. It might seem that assembling this imperial island shouldn’t be too difficult. Imperial islands, however – or, to be more precise, their inhabitants – are given to idiosyncrasies. And there’s no doubt in my mind that Great Britain is the most idiosyncratic of all island empires. Therefore, while piecing together a geographical puzzle might be just about possible, nobody can ever hope to complete a psychological puzzle that also goes by the name of Great Britain. Nevertheless, even in its unfinished form, it will never cease to amaze and delight.
My interest in Great Britain was triggered, quite unexpectedly, by the term ‘Bickford fuse’, which has entered the Russian language. I will come to this expression later. But first, a few words about my English mother-in-law. She is the person who, to a large extent, has shaped my perception of Great Britain. It all started well before I married her daughter Elisabeth. In April 1988 London greeted me with a burst of sunshine. After the five days it had taken me to cross Europe and reach Great Britain, I found myself in London, at Waterloo Station. I had no idea how to get to Walton-on-Thames. Seeing a public telephone on the station wall I went to examine it, trying to figure out how it worked. An unknown Englishman, apparently having noticed my confusion, immediately helped me dial the number, even inserting the requisite coins. Then he helped me buy my ticket and made sure I boarded the right train.
My future mother-in-law, Mrs. Olive Sharp, met me with a reserved smile and the following words: “Just don’t think you have to get married just because you’ve travelled all the way here. You’re welcome to stay for twenty days or so and then return home.” This was my first encounter with what one might call the ‘English national character’. At that time, in the spring of 1988, the English still had the Cold War fresh in their memory. Spy scandals would break out with much greater frequency than they do now. Every now and then ‘grey-cloaked knights’ from Warsaw Pact countries would launch their operations on the noble English soil, killing political exiles and trying to recruit future cabinet members or members of parliament while they were still at university, before they even started to think about their grand and important futures. Of course, in England it’s not difficult to spot future MPs and government members – they all attend the same schools and then enjoy a carefree life as students at Oxford or Cambridge. I think that in those days many English people regarded the Soviet Union not so much as a country inhabited by more than a hundred different nationalities but rather as a state populated by 250 million communists. No wonder then that some of my relatives-to-be initially took me for a spy, while others viewed me as someone who wanted to marry an English woman just to avoid having to go back to the communist USSR. And even though much of the Soviet propaganda of the time struck me as laughable, I began to expect that any minute now I’d be recruited by British intelligence. Moreover, my future wife’s sister, who worked for a company that handled UK Ministry of Defence contracts, duly reported to her superiors that her family had a visitor from the USSR. As a result, she was transferred to a less secret department, and later left the company altogether and changed her profession.
My future mother-in-law gradually came round to accepting me. She was a typical representative of the middle class although in her case typical meant only that her character combined English eccentricity and unpredictability with a profound religious sentiment. At the beginning of World War II her fiancé had looked after aircraft at a military aerodrome. He was killed when, after two sleepless nights, he came too close to the spinning propeller of a fighter plane. That’s when the 19-year-old Olive Charles enlisted for front duty. She took a driving course for lorries and served as a driver throughout the war. She used to say she was authorized to drive ‘every kind of vehicle, including tanks’. And indeed, I’ve had many opportunities to experience both fear and excitement while sitting in the passenger seat of her Ford Fiesta, which she drove like a tank or, at the very least, a Land Rover. Being a slightly absent-minded driver, she once joined the motorway in the wrong direction. When she noticed that all the other cars were driving towards her, she got angry and signalled repeatedly. I retreated as far back into my seat as I could, expecting an accident. But after swearing at the cars that sped towards us and managing to swerve at the last minute to avoid a collision, she realized she had made a mistake. She drove onto the kerb, crossed the strip of lawn in the middle, and joined the traffic on the right side. There was a screeching of brakes as a car nearly hit us but Olive, repeating “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” just moved out of the far left lane and continued driving in the right direction. I’ve had a number of opportunities to admire her calmness at the wheel. This is what probably gave rise to my firm belief that keeping one’s cool is the distinctive character trait of all English people. They are simply as cool and reserved as the English climate.
I have no way of telling how cool and reserved was mining engineer William Bickford whose name has entered the Russian language through the term Bickford fuse. The Bickford fuse is a tube filled with gunpowder instead of a wire, and its purpose is to delay the igniting of dynamite. My interest in the inventor of the Bickford fuse goes back to the late 1970s. In fact, I was so fascinated by this mysterious Englishman that I spent four years writing a novel entitled The Bickford Fuse, completing it in 1989. But well before that, I asked the first group of exchange students who arrived at my university in 1980 if they knew the name of the famous mining engineer. It turned out that no one had heard of him, and even the expression Bickford fuse didn’t ring any bells. In fact, the term does not exist in the English language. During my first visit to the UK I found myself in the British Library. Piqued by my strange request, the library staff let me into the patent department and helped me discover the engineering genius William Bickford, the man who had patented a number of inventions including the said rope, known in Great Britain simply as a safety fuse. I was unpleasantly surprised by the fact that Bickford was virtually unknown among his compatriots. I had almost come to believe that these days the English care more about football players and pop stars than scholars, engineers and industrialists who have contributed to Great Britain’s fame. But then, in 2002, the English redeemed themselves when voting for the 100 most influential Brits. Engineer and bridge-builder Isambard Kingdom Brunel came second, right after Winston Churchill. Sadly, William Bickford didn’t make the top one hundred. I guess it’s because the British love their bridges and Bickford’s rope had helped to blow up thousands of bridges all around Europe during World War II.
In the summer of 2012 I found myself in Cornwall, working on this essay.
At a certain point the five-hour journey from London to Penzance began to feel like a journey back to the past. All over Penzance what surprised me was countless unfamiliar flags, with a white cross on a black background, evoking the image of pirates. The flags were hoisted everywhere: on poles erected in front gardens as well as above windows. The Cornwall flag is also known as St. Piran’s flag, after the 6th century Cornish abbot. Rumour has it he was the one who first discovered tin deposits in Cornwall and the flag itself was the fruit of the abbot’s imagination, inspired by the sight of white molten tin that poured out of the black ore in a furnace. Well then, as early as in the sixth century the abbots of Cornwall had been engineers! Mind you, history books tell us that Cornwall was settled by Bretons who had crossed over from France. Which means that the present-day inhabitants of Cornwall, at least the native ones, are easily distinguishable from the mass of the English. They relish being different. They have always been different, just like their pasties, which are still popular throughout England, known as Cornish pasties. Cornwall used to have another claim to fame – the pirates of Cornwall, usually depicted in children’s books as well as in advertisements for Cornish pasties as vicious, terrifying and bloodthirsty. The pirates used to speak Cornish, a language that was closer to Breton than to English. Not far from Penzance, three miles north along the coast, on St. Michael’s island, which becomes part of dry land every day during the ebb tide, stands a castle belonging to the ancient Cornish family of the St Aubyns.
In its history Cornwall had seen a real industrial boom, which occurred some 200 years ago when processing of underground tin deposits began all over the peninsula. Nowadays, as you travel by bus, wherever you go you see tall brick chimneys of small defunct tin processing factories towering above the hills on both sides of the road. Local enthusiasts have turned a few of the remaining mines into industrial museums. I stopped by one of them, Poldark Mine. The reason for my visit was an old TV series, long forgotten in England, which I had watched with my children a few years ago. The series, entitled Poldark, is the family saga of the eponymous Cornwall aristocrat running a tin mine. The series also reflects the complicated relations between the local notables and London. These days London supplies Cornwall with tourists. And Cornwall pays London back in Cornish pasties, or rather, their recipe. Londoners are particularly fond of the seaside resort of St. Ives, a place which, even in the foulest weather, manages to elicit a surge of romantic sentiment. And if, by chance, the sun pops out the seals swimming up to the shore are the only reminder that you’re not on the Côte d’Azur but much further to the north.
Cornwall has its own cul-de-sac, set up especially for tourists. Its name is Land’s End. It is the westernmost point of Cornwall. The bus from Penzance to St. Ives makes a stop here and no sooner does the curious traveller leave the bus to see what it’s like to stand on land’s end, he finds himself trapped. The trap is not particularly dangerous. It’s just that the next bus is not due for another two hours and apart from the land’s end and the infinite ocean there’s absolutely nothing around, except for a small hotel and a couple of restaurants. The buses of the 300 line that go there and continue along the coast to St. Ives are always open-top double-deckers. As soon as it starts raining the tourists retreat to the lower deck, and the bus starts to resemble an ordinary English pub where you can easily tell tourists from the locals. The locals are always silent and focused, hardly ever looking out of the window. The tourists are the exact opposite.After we passed St. Ives I noticed a road sign for the village of Tuckingmill. It gave me the shivers. I knew the name of this place but for, some reason, thirty years ago I had been under the impression that Tuckingmill was in Devon. Tuckingmill is where my beloved English engineer William Bickford was born in 1774. His portrait hangs in the ethnographic museum in the neighbouring town of Halston. Apart from the portrait the museum contains nothing relating to Bickford. And not a sign of the Bickford fuse!
Since William Bickford’s days the economy of Great Britain has been through many ups and downs, each economic downturn hitting the outlying counties much harder than London. With each downturn the proletarian, mining peripheries such as Cornwall and Wales have lost part of their population, which emigrated either to London or to America. In some places the proletarian spirit itself has vanished, turning into a museum exhibit. It survives only in a few places, for example in Wales. Scattered on the coast around the city of Aberystwyth, there are huge numbers of caravan parks. Holidays in these parks have long been popular among the frugal inhabitants of Wales. Every night holidaymakers gather in their caravan park social clubs to drink beer and play a game of bingo. Whole families, from grandmothers and grandfathers to grandsons and granddaughters, sit around tables listening intently to the caller, who shouts out numbers pulled from a draw machine, enlivening the proceedings with humorous catch-phrases. “Two fat ladies – eighty-eight; two – a lonely duckling; ninety-nine – nearly there…” Almost the entire coast of England and Scotland is covered with caravan parks of this kind. This is the way typical working class families spend their holidays. The middle – ‘non-working’ – classes used to spend their holidays in Margate in Kent. A hundred years ago or so this city on the coast, not far from London, was so popular that there were over three hundred hotels to cater for the holidaymakers. Alas, Margate these days is one of the most depressing cities in Great Britain. Half of the shops in the High Street are closed. And the once popular hotels have been turned into dormitories for migrants from Eastern Europe and social housing for the unemployed sent here from other counties, since living costs in Kent, particularly in Margate, are much lower than in Liverpool or York, which means that the unemployed and their families sent here are much less of a burden on the country’s budget. In the streets of Margate I was delighted to see street signs explaining where to dispose of glass bottles in English, Polish, Romanian and Russian. The silence of the night is constantly interrupted by police sirens. However, Great Britain hasn’t forgotten Margate. It now boasts its own Tate Gallery, built to raise the city’s profile and attract tourists. The city is beginning to show signs of a revival. And although it no longer resembles the popular resort it once was, many have not forgotten that it has one of the best beaches in England. Although, of course, you won’t see many people swimming there, except for British Indian families sometimes at weekends or on bank holidays. Fully clothed, they stand up to their knees in the water and spend an hour or two standing there, enjoying leisurely conversations. Not even light rain makes them return inland.
On a recent visit to Margate I saw a group of young people unload plastic furniture from a lorry and carry it to the sandy beach in pouring rain. When they finished setting up three tables and a dozen plastic chairs they brought out and assembled a rain tent canopy and started a barbecue underneath. A couple of hours later, as I was returning to the railway station after walking along the coast up to Botany Bay, the young revellers, having finished their picnic, were loading the plastic furniture and tents back onto the lorry. Their happy faces suggested that their party had been a success, in spite of the weather. Bags with empty beer cans were also loaded up. They took everything with them – from their happy mood to their rubbish. Clearly the picnic is a much more important English invention than Bickford’s rope. The English love their lawns, or rather, they are in the habit of meticulously maintaining their lawns, in what seems to be an original form of repaying mother nature for the opportunity to sit on the grass in parks and woods, enjoying sandwiches and bread with butter. Obviously, I don’t mean Russian buterbrody, which are of German origin but real sandwiches, named after their inventor, Lord Sandwich, a passionate card player, who did not want to waste time on meals. So his servants invented sandwiches: a piece of meat between two slices of bread that he could eat without interrupting his card game. However much I tried to avoid the subject of gastronomy, it somehow forced itself on me. Lord Sandwich’s original sandwiches were quite sophisticated, consisting as they did of bread and cold turkey. Since his days the culinary «inventiveness» of the English has turned sandwiches into something of a culinary joke. If statistics on sandwich consumption were available they would most likely feature, in a prominent place, sandwiches with chips and sandwiches with potato crisps – a favourite delicacy of English children. For my part, ever since my first visit I’ve been fond of a more traditional, although now less fashionable variety: cucumber and Marmite sandwiches. For many years now, however, chicken curry with rice has been the particular favourite of most English people. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a dish my mother-in-law had ever prepared. In fact, she hardly ever cooked, as she generally didn’t think much about food. What mattered to her was charity. And in this respect she was also quite a typical representative of the English middle class. When she was no longer young herself, she would drive around Walton-on-Thames distributing cheap meals to residents who were older than her, and who were prevented from leaving their homes by illness or old age. This process involving tens of thousands of inhabitants of foggy Albion is known by the slightly ironic name Meals on Wheels. When Olive Sharp was no longer capable of driving a car and found herself confined to her home, younger pensioners brought her cheap hot meals. The English mutual help ‘industry’ is much better developed than in any other European country. Each British village and small town has its senior citizens’ clubs. An Englishman’s or – woman’s social life doesn’t come to an end until the moment of physical death. As long as they live they will socialize, help others or receive help, play bingo and follow the adventures of characters in their favourite soap operas. And as long as English people live they will travel. It doesn’t have to be a long trip. My mother-in-law Olive really meant well when she gave us a honeymoon trip as a wedding present. She arranged it through a travel agency for elderly people. And so my wife and I spent a week on a bus driving around Scotland with a merry and joyful crowd of English pensioners. Although they were all 40 to 50 years older, they derived as much joy and happiness from the sights as us youngsters. Today, 25 years later, as my own retirement begins to loom on the horizon, I recall these English pensioners more and more frequently. Everyone has heard of the American dream but I’ve never heard anyone talk of the English dream. Who knows, maybe the English dream is the dream of a joyful, happy old age, with a lively social life and a lot of travelling? In any case, if I had to choose between Ukrainian and English old age, I think I would opt for the latter. But before it arrives, I will pay many more visits to Great Britain trying to get better at piecing together the complex jigsaw puzzle of that name, into a clear, though undoubtedly complex, picture.

Translated from the Russian by JULIA SHERWOOD

Dear Friends

IOANA PÂRVULESCU

A Romanian in Norway

29 June, Oslo
Dear Friends,
– Mir fehlen die Worte…, I have no words, said the pilot with a tone of absolute desperation, just as the Norwegian pine forests came into view, reflecting black, in the lake’s silky varnish. The start of my trip north, Nor-wegian, as you can see, was quite dramatic.
Yesterday afternoon, I started from Bucharest in a Lufthansa jet, with a Nikon camera and a book by Thor Heyerdahl The Kon-Tiki Expedition, in my carry-on. I surrenderd the suitcase to the cargo hold: there I left my travel equipment for three weeks, along with all my fears and predjudices (all in all, 11,5 kg). Being the first in my family to travel to Norway, a heavy burden fell on my shoulders. I felt like the explorers of old, bravely pushing past the known boundaries of the map: HIC SUNT LEONES. In vain I told myself that I am going to a European country where you don’t see lions, only meek and civilized reindeer, and blonde people, also civilized. In vain, I recalled my trips that covered the European map. In vain, the raised eyebrows, astonished and incredulous expressions of those to whom I confessed my anxieties (and now yours!), people who let me understand, quite gruffly, that they would gladly change places with me for the next three weeks! I would be leaving for shady green spaces, the most beautiful landscapes in the world, while they remained behind, baking in the July oven-month of Bucharest.
That night I changed planes in Munich and went on to Oslo, also on Lufthansa. Around me, tourists from all nations. Next to me, a boat builder from Oslo, who helped dispel my first predjudice against Norwegians: that they are quiet. With the utmost kindness and efficiency, he recommended all sorts of things that I should see in his home country. I kept staring out the window, however, trying to guess what lay below us through the patchwork clouds. And, as I said, when the first lace of trees from the Norwegian forest came into view, I heard the pilot announce: Mir fehlen die Worte… , “I have no words”. A real desperation was felt in that voice through the microphone though there had only been confidence and cheer at the beginning of the flight. For several long moments, I didn’t understand what was happening, which was my fault, of course: I hadn’t paid attention to the announcements, and even when I had, couldn’t distinguish everything that was said, it seems to me that in every train statioan and on every plane, these announcements are geared specifically to increase the traveler’s anxiety. Then, in a flash, I understood: Germany, that night, had faced Italy to qualify for the finals of the European Champhionship of football, after allowing the second goal, the fate of the match was sealed. The rest of the flight passed in deathly silence, and when we landed in Oslo (the pilot didn’t even tell us the ground temperature, the local time, or adios), the stewardesses, one of whom had the German flag painted on her cheek, and the other a garland of flowers, also in German colors, around her neck, said goodbye, wearing the melancholy smiles of someone abandoned by the goddesss Fortune.
The capital of Norway receieved us cheerfully, with surprising brightness, though it was nearly midnight. At 11, when I was already in the elegant Flybussen, on my way toward the hotel, the sun had still not set, as a crystalline air accentuated the contours of the city.
Be happy and healthy, as the classic saying goes, while I go back to looking at my compact mirror,
Ioana

Oslo
My dears,
Be brave, this is the first law of the Vikings, unofficially translated, but understood widely across the whole of Europe. It’s true that they follow up by saying be aggressive, but I don’t agree with this part. Moreover, Oslo is where they hand out the Nobel Prize every year. I’ve never seen such peaceful people, so peaceful, so gentle, and no one is more unprepared in the face of evil than the Norwegians (with the exception of crazy Anders Behring Breivik, may his name be forgotten!) When, in 1994, thieves stole the first version of Munch’s Scream from the National Gallery – they gave us the news, you may remember –  , they left in its place a thankful note, tongue-in-cheek, for the poor security measures. The thieves entered the window and did the job in less than a minute. A year later, the painting was recovered, but ten years later the crime was repeated, and not even today, when I visited, do the security measures seem strict enough. I discovered Crhistian Krohg here, who supported Edvard Munch and immortalized him in Albterine, a type of Norwegian Nana.
I proclaim that in Oslo I feel like a Viking in his boat. If this is not a very large city, it’s still quite lively. Perhaps it doesn’t have the mystery of Stockholm, but there are places which keep calling to you, there are people who invade the streets, leaving their children to wallow free and naked in fountains in the city center as soon as the sun comes out, there are young people who sing and dance outside at night and there’s a wonderful harbor with an old shipyard converted for public recreation. What don’t you see here? A white forest of masts like great birch trunks rising from the sea, a diverse fauna of people, old buildings, in red brick, werehouses from the 19th century, others ultra-modern, suspension bridges, restaurants, fountains, polar bears with children climbing on them, bronze statues on stilts, large plastic balls in pools of water, which children try in vain to get up on, ice cream, beer, red kites in the wind, vessels coming and going, people, people, people; people that don’t know what to do, what to look for, they do nothing, look for nothing, gaping. And on top of it all, you sometimes hear music from the clock at City Hall, announcing the passage of every quarter hour. Then, without warning, this hoarse screaming, when you first hear it, articulating the irony of the gulls; they walk with a dignifed air, marching step by step with the city’s respectable citizens.
The light in the sky is always changing, putting its mark on the streets and the houses: as if an unseen painter was constantly changing the wallpaper of familiar places, so he doesn’t get bored. However I saw the modern and never boring architectual masterpiece of the opera house (finished 4 years ago now). Steeped in the waters of the gulf, with edges and surfaces made from white Carrara marble and glass, it resembles a half-submerged iceberg. The impression is reenforeced by a glass sculpture, an ingenious copy (not a copy and paste!) of Caspar David Friedrich’s “Das Eismeer”, detached, you would say, from the body of the glacier-building and sunk in the waves around it. In the winter it’s covered in frozen scales seeming natural, as in nature. It’s the only opera house in the world where you can climb the roof, or ride a bike or push a stroller up it. I could give you more precise data, having gone on a tour with a guide who once was an opera singer – she had a melodious voice, trully full – but I don’t want to bore you, I prefer to play the role of a mirror, which offers a picture that even if deformed it has the advantage of freshnes.
To its credit, Oslo has far less tourist kitsch than many other famous european cities, you’ll recall the Eiffel Tower keychains, the golems and Kafka mugs, the Roman cherubs, the Viennese glass trinkets, the little pesant dolls in our Romanian national costume, the Bavarian beer mugs, and so much more. Here, however, you can scarcely find a few trolls with bulging out at you. I was glad to see them, having a the vaguest picture of these adorable creatures who are forced to live underground (the lowest of comforts), however now, behold, those eyes are before me. They’re earthy, small in stature, much like their relative the goblin, with big bellies, and with variable numbers of fingers and toes, big mouths and teeth shamefully unclean. They’re up to ugly mischief (it could be their teeth, a dentist might prove useful). And perhaps they, the trolls, turned off the lights in my hotel room for two hours last night and again this morning, I was reminded of the power outages from our communist days. Anyway, I thought these days, you’d see more female trolls, which would be unfortunate for the imaginative European, but I’ll have to wait for a walk in the woods to find them, where, no doubt, they’re protected by law. I send on some rain, because here I have more than I need here.
Ioana

My dears,
Be prepared, is the second law of the Vikings. And the final point of emphasis is Choose one Chief. I am happy to tell you that I chose myself as the chief for my expedition around Bergen in Die Berge, backpack on. I went to bed during daylight and woke up in the same, and I can’t even tell you if we had any darkness because I pulled the heavy, I asume vinyl, curtains shut. After a walk through the fish market, with a smell strong enough to displaces the nose, looking at all kind of frozen marine wonders (in my Norwegian’s Kon-Tiki book they are alive and friendly, even the octopuses and the sharks), I hurried to hike Floyen mountain with the help of the floybanen or cablecar. In a few minutes I got to a vista point where happy tourists expressed their admiration in all the languages of the world, but especially in the common language of interjections (Oooh!, Ahhh!), the city spread out below, bathing in a tiny port. Then, I started walking through the extraordinairy Norwegian forests, the most misterious places I’ve yet been pemitted to see. Gigantic old trees, thin grass growing wild, like unruly hair, soft moss. Soft enough to sleep on! The flowers, when they are in season, grow large, meaty and healthy as if they’d been training at the gym. The trails wend away from one another, like Proust’s phrases, a chain of subordinate clauses without end. Often there appears unexpectedly a black lake, a small little wooden house, like a crooked man tormented by rheumatism. There is so much poetry in these forests that you feel on the verge of talking in verses or whispers, the first form of silence. With my excellent sense of orientation I managed to get lost, as always, in spite of how well the trails are marked. I’ll point out one oversite on the part of the authorities so you don’t think that I lost my critical eye: the markings don’t display the duration of the walk, at least by way of comparison, so you can choose the longer or shorter route. I started to consider a bed of moss as soft and inviting as the bed in my hotel room, wonderinf if I could spend the night here, in the forest, when a benevolent troll with a modern hair cut, and a dog by his side, showed me the way down and I descended to the familiar Bryygen, with its wooden houses from the 1700s, for the brave merchants of yesterday, of today and of all times. You know I appreciate the merchants, they are always open-minded and friendly. At the lower part of the forest, the more touristic area, you find several wooden signs that amused me like the one that read “Flying on the broom is forbidden” or, when appropriate, permitted. Otherwise, I am going to let you know that around here, the money melts fast, not the snow. Melting of tiredness,
Ioana

9 July, Ålesund
My dears,
The third Viking rule: be a good merchant and you’re always urged here Don’t promise what you can’t keep and Arrange things so that you can return. As for me, I believe I enhanced the image of the French and Italians which I was always mistaken for, always greeted warmly with grazie, merci, au revoir, arrivederci. Of course, I responded with the Romanian equivalents, mulţumesc and la revedere, and invited them to visit Romania, briefly telling them about the beloved clichés of our dear Dracula and the vampires so popular among young people. Now you know!
Probably, one of the most beautiful trips I’ve ever made was from Bergen to Ålesund. I had the true sensation of entering another world. But enough of descriptions. The truth is that I’ve never seen such poetic places. I promise to return with a picture to prove it. Now I am in a city that was burned to the ground in 1904, and was rebuilt in only 3 years (with German help), all in art nouveau style, so very beautiful! I couldn’t have imagined a better place, especially as I’m working on a novel set in 1897. Today I had breakfast on the waterfront (the hotel’s restaurant is at the water edge), watching the sea gulls engage in their morning grooming regimen. Don’t be angry if I neglect to tell you about the fjords (speaking about the trails along the fjords, I couldn’t stop singing the whole time, badly, of course, from Grieg, Morgenstimmung and The Song of Solveig). I just think that everyday there are thousands of pictures taken here resulting in millions of small fjords, in all the homes of the world, from America to Japan.
I prefer to tell you about two opposing incidents, on the “public transport“. First traveling by boat. In Bergen, I got a ticket for my first ride on the fjord. I arrived early, choosing a perfect spot, that’s not to say on the roof, and waited for the 11 o’clock departure. At exactly 11 the motors started up (unfortunately the boat was computerized, not traditional), but surprisingly, after some ten minutes of spinning in vain, they finally gave out. The guy who sold us the tickets was also a deck-hand, and in a calm voice as if nothing happend, he informed us that the trip was canceled and advised us to come back tomorrow at the same time. The tourists began to protest, asking if we should move to another boat. No way, the kid assured us: just come back tomorrow at the same time. A group (including me) were leaving at 2 that day and couldn’t change those plans, so it wasn’t possible to come tomorrow, but he merely raised his shoulders with calm indifference. It took quite a fuss to get our money back (some 60 Euros). It took forever, in fact, and he made it clear they were doing us a favor. And when some complained that they’ve already lost too much time, having wasted most of the day, the kid answered curtly that they could wait for their money or leave without it. I watched it all unfold like a performance, a spectacle, so that it didn’t get on my nerves, I was zen like in Mircea Cărtărescu’s journal, even more so!
The other incident took place on a bus. They don’t have many railroads on account of all the mountains, so buses are the most common mode of transport. Some have bathrooms and even a machine to make coffee, which you avail yourself of at will. But not while moving, ‘it’s very dangerous’. You should sit, as in the airplane, with your seatbelt fastened, but no one does that. The drivers change ever two hours, never tired, they handle baggage, tickets, everything—they’re extremely attentive, and I remain struck by the gestures they made, raising their sunglasses before entering a tunnel or swiping their cards at the onboard computer. At one point, an old man got aboard, a very old man, and the driver realizes he wanted to go in the other direction. What’s more, the bus the old man needed had left the station 5 minutes ago. The driver jumped down, very agigated, and made some phone calls, securing a taxi for the old man and sending him to catch the departed bus. Can you believe it? And that in a system where the buses leave when they should, often timed to link with each other and with ferrys that will not wait. On a side note, climbing in and out of a ferry, to travel the fjord, is a national sport, and everyone is in excellent shape. I want to wish you a good night and may your busines run like clockwork (in parentheses, it should be said, there are many broken clocks in the cities of Norway),
Ioana

16 July, Oslo
My Dear Friends,
The last Viking rule and one which we, Romanians, should adopt as our motto, is Keep the camp in order. With order you can cross the sea or pass over the hump of history. I asked myself why, here, are there no conflicts, no tension, no anxiety, some you might even take some as indolent, although people are incredibly sensitive, which manifests itself through a lump in the throat or a slight redness in their white cheeks. I think I’ve got the answer: they know that despite any obstacle standing in their way or any little delay, the journey will end, as in the movies with a happy ending. Sooner or later, the obstacle will be removed, and they will continue on the path, bright, happy, and smiling. Or, for us, this option does not exist. We know that for every bit of good, even in the short-term, the end result is uncertain, and we must struggle with that uncertainty. For us, this notion of relaxation fails to correspond to reality.
But maybe I talk this way because I’m tired. As such, I will randomly record some disparate yet expressive details for the benefit of those who have not yet been here.
In the elevator, you can’t find the P (common in Romania for the ground floor), with the button for the lobby being labeled L (I often found myself in the basement).
Mail boxes and bus stops rise suddenly out of the perfect, peaceful scenery, seeming truly unreal. But the holiday cottages are more enticing that you can imagine, especially if you see them basking in the sunlight.
In the supermarket, you can’t buy alcohol, you can’t even buy beer, after 8 in the evening, or, after 6 on the weekends.
Many Norwegians have upturned noses.
They don’t talk on their cell phones, not on the streets, or in restaurants, not in buses or trains. It’s not polite. In Italy, they do just the opposite.
In the art museum you stick a paper badge on your chest, but when you leave, there’s a box to recycle it in. At most museums, you can take pictures, so I came back with dozens of paintings to use in my courses.
In the supermarket, you see many goods displayed in boats. It’s a handy prop. Also in churches, you see boats hanging from the cupolas.
I’m happy to say that thanks to one big-hearted man, Steinar Lone, the translator of Cărtărescu into Norwegian, and because of one soulful book store owner, Nina Rylan, my novel released by 2244, Livet börjar på fredag, is in a great Oslo bookstore, Norli, near the National Gallery.
Ibsen dined and took his coffee at the Grand Hotel. There, on the second floor, on his way to the North Cape, lived my favorite 19th century Romanian critc, Titu Maiorescu, in 1890.
They say that Ibsen owned a bathtub before even the king. He lived, moreover, near the palace. His last words, before dying on May 23, 1906, were symoblic: “On the contrary!” But behind them, as is the case with Goethe, with “Licht, mehr Licht!”, there lies a domestic meaning. The nurse: “Mr. Ibsen, you look great today, I hope you’re felling better!” “On the contrary!”
They say he had talent, but his wife, Suzannah, had personality. That doesn’t mean that he didn’t cheat on her. On the contrary!
With an area slightly larger than Romania, Norway has a fraction of our population, approximately 5 million. In truth, there are many trees, but few people. Maybe that’s why you see so many statues. In the cities, there are men made of bronze mixed among the living, assuming the most natural positions, they read the paper, they stare into the distance with hands on their faces, stand in doorways with arms folded, you see even bronze drunkards and vagabonds, fallen at the corners of houses. Though in the forests, you find wooden bears, witches, and trolls.
The store clerks are the most courteous in the world. They receive you as an old acquaintance, a relative, but they don’t pester you to buy and usher you out fondly when you leave.
I studied the psychology of the tourists: one of their great joys is to break from their eternal back and forth to go eat. Norway’s bounty of fish, reindeer, berries.
Norway achieved independence in 1905, over a quarter century after we did. But wealth came only with the discovery of oil in 1969, in the North Sea, another way of saying that the great treasures from their folk tales finally materialized in the real world!
Traffic signs appear that read: “Attention, waterfall!” showing a man falling into a stream. Indeed, there are some of the longest waterfall I’ve ever seen, coursing down steep mountain walls, dropping hundreds of meters. And below the rushing water looks like a giant pot set to boil.
There are houses covered with earth, grass and flowers, hiding in the beautiful landscapes, adapted to the environment like the birds or animals.
The boats take on personality and life: some are simple and natural, others are foppish, garishly painted, some gentle, others slippery as eels, well behaved boats, fat ones, happy ones, ond ones, young ones. Boats with names and lives.
I touched a boat’s life ring, thinking it would be soft: but to the contrary if someone threw it and hit you on the head, you wouldn’t need any more saving.
In the houses on steep slopes, the Norwegians keep their children on ropes, as we do sometimes with horses, so they don’t fall over the precipice.
All of Norway seems made of wood and water.
Night is, in July, supreme, and in my opinion, you have to pay extra.
When it all was done, I missed you all, even more! I even missed the oven-month (July) of Buchareast, the songs of crickets and mosquitos, the dusk and the darkness, the noise. Most of all I missed the starry sky. My story ended well. I’m coming home!

Translated from the Romanian by MARTIN WOODSIDE

Things Are Always Happening to Me

JOCHEN SCHMIDT

A German in Hungary

“Man stays young as long as he can simplify” – István Örkény

Sometimes at night, instead of practising my writing skills, I sneak onto the roof of my house in my pyjamas and inflate my spaceship, which I keep hidden in a box under the bed during the day. It’s just as well that the spaceship is made of rubber since the flexible material allows it to stretch to almost any length at high speed. I usually fly into the past, a feat that can be accomplished only by means of an inflatable spaceship made in Hungary but no longer in production. Hungary has always been much closer to space than we in the GDR, as I learned from a series of Hungarian postage stamps featuring a mission to Mars. The spacecraft had a rather American, that is to say, science fiction look to it. It was wonderful to see entire fleets orbiting Mars’s satellite Phobos. And for children there was a metal moon vehicle that drove around balancing a styrofoam ball although, sadly, I had never owned one. The Hungarians must have had access to space travel since they themselves originate from the star Sirius, which is why they are not related to any other nation in the world, except perhaps the Egyptians. After all, Akhenaten spoke Old Hungarian, as anyone who can read hieroglyphics as well as the Szekler runic script can verify. The runic script is being used again in place name signs, mainly as a way of covering up the Romanian place names. And if you wonder how on earth the Hungarians managed to travel vast distances in space thousands of years ago, you ought to ask yourself why it is that it was the Hungarians who invented Vitamin C. Only much later did I learn – from Gyula Illyés – that the Hungarians also invented the X-ray machine. You stick a light bulb in your mouth and the doctor can look inside your bum.
To get an idea of what it feels like aboard a Hungarian spaceship you’d have to take a ride in an old Ikarus 260. Why name a bus after Icarus? Is it because every journey leads to the sun? At one time 30,000 of these buses cruised around East Germany, but after the last ride – on 31 August 2010 in Zeitz – they disappeared with hardly anyone noticing. Like elephants, they end their lives in their birthplace, and that is why you can see so many of them in Budapest these days (the Cuban ones are stuck on the other side of the Atlantic). But Trabants, Wartburgs and W50s are no longer quite at home in Germany either, used as they often are to advertise second-hand car dealerships or bowling alleys. On Castle Hill in Budapest I saw a Trabant with a Perspex bowl attached to the windshield. It had a hole for dropping coins in: “Your donation will be spent on my maintenance: Thank you”. In August 1989 we were sitting here, at the foot of the Hilton Hotel, eating Danone yoghurts and white bread and debating whether to spend the night on a stone bench. One of us hadn’t washed his feet since Romania and managed to last until Berlin. I was slightly disappointed by the Fishermen’s Bastion, having imagined it would be more like the Kleine Bastei in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains. Earlier that day I was approached by a man brandishing a piece of paper with an address scribbled on it and asking if I knew where it was. No, what’s supposed to be there? It turned out to be the meeting place of all the people from the GDR in those days. I had no idea what he was talking about as we’d been away travelling for a few weeks. We were still hungry after hiking in the Romanian mountains. And since in Hungary you could get watermelon, Schweppes and all the records in the world, we thought the Hungarians had already reached the ultimate goal. I walked into the first McDonald’s of my life, in Váci utca, and treated myself to a hamburger. (We were so clever we figured out how to turn a hamburger into a cheeseburger by means of a slice of cheese from the supermarket.) A chubby Japanese boy wearing a baseball cap and a bored expression stood outside the McDonald’s sipping a milkshake. For him this state-of-the art form of nutrition was nothing special. I envied him although he had more reasons to envy me, except I didn’t know it then.
I use my inflatable spaceship to fly to Hungary, a country where dwarves come pouring out of water taps. I set out on a quest for things that were part of my childhood but can no longer be found in Germany. For the past few years I’ve been addicted to reunions with these kinds of objects, from which we had not parted properly, they just vanished overnight.  In my childhood every playground had a spacecraft-shaped climbing frame. You could climb from one ring to another all the way to the top and when it rained you could shield your head under its pointed roof while waiting for the countdown. I’ve seen a climbing frame like this in a Hungarian black-and-white photograph and have been looking for it everywhere but the playgrounds have been refurbished. Before the regime change I had never paid attention to things like that, taking them for granted. In Hungary we recuperated from the hardships of weeks of hiking in Romania, living off packet soups and sweeteners brought from home. Apart from Vietnamese crab chips there wasn’t much to eat in Romania. Once the train crossed the Hungarian border at Oradea it suddenly sported a dining carriage. We entered hesitantly, expecting to be chased away. Instead we were able to sit down at tables with white tablecloths and a waiter asked us what we would like. After three weeks in Romania a question like that was quite a culture shock.
*
What did I know that came from Hungary? Ketchup! Very rarely, perhaps once a year, it was available in the department store on our Berlin housing estate; they didn’t even bother taking it out of the cartons, as people would crowd around like ants. If I happened to be at the department store at the right time, I would buy three bottles, the most you were allowed to buy.  Back at home I tried to persuade my brother to go back with me so that we could buy three more bottles each. I loved dunking a cold Wiener sausage directly into the bottle. We only had a ketchup substitute called “Mostrich” that must have been invented in the final days of the war. And even worse: lecsó in jars. It sounded almost as unattractive as “datcha” and “Moskvich”.
– The magic cube: amazingly enough, another Hungarian invention. Ours came complete with instructions, which is why I was able to solve the puzzle almost without looking. Half the school would bring me their cubes and I would promptly solve the puzzle during breaks, earning myself the respect accorded to a shaman.
– Károly Soós and János Gyarmati: two of the earliest GDR national team coaches in the 1950s and 1960s. In those days the players wore shirts their mothers sewed from coal sacks. Why did we have Hungarian coaches? Did all the German ones perish at Stalingrad?
– An air sickness bag from MALEV: my best friend brought it back from Lake Balaton because I used to get sick in the car. I had never flown before and that is why, on my first flight to New York City, I thought there was a parachute under each seat.
– The Hungarian aunt of the main character in our favourite post-communist film “Stranger Than Paradise”: every time she beat her criminal nephew at cards, she would say, in a thick accent I never grew tired of imitating: “I am the winner”. Before I could speak a word of Hungarian I could speak English with a Hungarian accent!
– The Bolyais, father and son, who had invented non-Euclidian geometry although most people had trouble understanding the Euclidian version. Only someone from Eastern Europe could come up with the idea of two parallels meeting at infinity. I am sure Western parallels don’t actually meet at infinity.
– Georg Lukács: I attended a seminar on his “theory of the novel” at university after the regime change because the title made me think I might learn how to write the perfect novel but instead I only learned that I was suffering from “transcendental homelessness”.
– Dénes Törzs, the friendly announcer on NDR, the third channel of West German TV, who used to introduce the Saturday night Buster Keaton films. There was a hint of gentle irony in his eyes, while his woolly sleeveless sweater lent him a homely appearance that seemed somehow comforting to us, living in the East and watching Western TV. He had made it but apparently hadn’t yet forgotten us, for we were sure that his kindness was meant for us.
– “Next year at Lake Balaton”. On a school trip I was among those who preferred to stay at the hostel and watch a Louis de Funès Film on TV instead of going to the corrugated iron cinema to see the DEFA road movie set in Hungary. When the others came back they reported, enraptured, that a Dutch hitchhiker stripped naked in the film. How could I have missed that? With my otherwise unfailing instinct for nude scenes!  After all, “Örömszerzés” (The Sense of Pleasure), a Hungarian sex education brochure we had fished out of a waste paper during a scrap collection had alerted us to the looser morals reigning in Hungary.  Strangely enough, the two protagonists – a man with a moustache and a blond woman, who gradually peeled each other from their stonewashed jeans before they embarked on joint gymnastics – faced away from the camera in all the photos. They obviously didn’t care for fame and all they wanted to do was to share their sense of pleasure.
*
It’s New Year’s Eve 2012 and I find myself in Budapest again, not an easy feat considering how dark it is. After a few days you start to favour the almost forgotten Eastern Bloc darkness in the streets since it allows you to see the stars. At last I’m in a country where I won’t be tempted to learn the language, I think to myself. But once I’ve spotted a sign with a car symbol and the word “gépkocsi” (machine car) I can’t resist. Surnames are the best mnemonic. Frank Flour (Ferenc Liszt), Marc Brave (Márk Bátor), Stephen Taylor (István Szabó), Michael Furniture (Michel Bútor), Judith Citizen (Judit Polgár), John Nice (János Kedves), Emmerich Gardener (Imre Kertész), Georg Grove (György Ligeti), Thomas Dawn (Tamás Hajnal), Judith Fisher (Judit Halász). And the terrifying Czech national player with the exotic name of  “Ujfaluši” is really just Newtown. I love reading the names at the entrances to old tenements and enjoy the random but suggestive combinations of names.  One of them even includes  “Détári”, who used to play for Eintracht Frankfurt!
Hotel Astoria used to be a secret police hotel.  Franz Fühmann stayed here sometime around 1970. I wonder if his room was bugged. Perhaps the tapes have survived and one can hear him snoring? An irritated Fühmann noted in his diary that breakfast was included in the price of the room, a “Habsburg vestige”.  Just like “eggs in a glass” that were served everywhere. He also said he felt closer to Hungarians than West Germans. I share his feelings in a bookshop as I discover children’s books by Éva Janikovszky, László Réber and Károly Reich, which I used to read as a child. Ditto in a retro café, as I read the commandments for the young pioneers': “10. Egészségesen élek, edzem testemet” (10. I lead a healthy life, I keep fit.)  And also when, in the shop window of the Polish Cultural Centre in Andrássy út, I see a Polski Fiat, its roof laden with luggage, guitars, a TV set, a samovar, Chinese bags, a badminton racket, a coffee grinder, a hand held mixer. The bumper has been repaired with scotch tape.  Or watching a 1960s Hungarian TV show and spotting the sputnik-shaped musical clock I’ve just acquired for a packet on eBay.
I wish I could see myself walking down these streets aged 18, wearing factory floor shoes as a substitute for hiking shoes. I always feel that, whenever I leave a place, a clone of mine stays behind waiting for me to release him. But what might he look like now? Like one of the many homeless people? Why does the Roma woman sitting in the doorway of that house look at me as if she knew me? She sits there every night in the freezing cold, bundled up in her skirts. Perhaps my clone had learnt Hungarian in preparation for defecting to the West but the beauty of the language made him stay in the country? Does he now sport a Leslie Mandoki moustache? And what is the purpose of those Hungarian moustaches anyway? The samurai grew beards to make sure they weren’t mistaken for women after battle, because women’s heads were just thrown away without a second thought. Male ones, on the other hand, were impaled, made up and coiffed, and the victorious commander would walk along inspecting the row of heads. No decent warrior would have wanted to miss out on that.
I have to get used to the unusual speed of the elevators in the underground. That is also part of feeling at home! Besides, the elevators change direction every day, without an obvious system. I let small coins roll down the elevator banister, the way we used to during a trip to Leningrad in our final year at secondary school. They used to crash into the warden’s cabin at the bottom of the stairs. A notice board counts down the time until the next train.  I’m just as fascinated by this innovation as I was in 1989. For back home one never knew if it was worth waiting for the train. Deák tér – we used to look forward to the announcement, which sounded as if the person reading it was about to be sick. Lajos Kossuth opposed the settlement with Austria, Deák supported it. I have never been able to make up my mind on serious matters like these. The train was made in the USSR, by the Mytishin Engine Factory: “Мытищинсий машиностроитељный завод 1983г сделано в СССР.”  You hang on to the strap with your left hand and swing through the forest, Tarzan-style, girlfriend in arm.  We didn’t have anything like that. That is why I have never understood the cartoon from the “Big Fat Zbigniew Lengren Book”, in which a man on a tram holds on to a woman’s huge earring instead of the strap.
Coming from East Berlin, where until recently we lived in the post-war period, but where lately its traces have become almost invisible, I’m suddenly in a city that is still full of firewalls, surfaces with stories to tell. The tourist guide keeps sending me to colourful Jugendstil facades but instead I stumble across a model Bauhaus housing estate in Buda. It has refreshingly sober 1920s architecture with the emblematic flat roofs. The round, projecting balconies, the portholes, the aerial poles, all reminiscent of shipbuilding, in its day the epitome of modernity. Also purely by accident I find a piece of Moscow, the Ganz Factory building. To get there you have to pass kilometres of warehouses with stuff from China. And on the way back the entry hall of the Semmelweis Medical University, rays of sunshine passing through the multicoloured glass panes. How bold, sober and modern those 1970s lines are. Meanwhile, ever since building his Intercontinental Hotel, professor József Finta has been constructing increasingly absurd fortress-like hotels and department stores in his petty-bourgeois version of postmodernism. The rule of thumb – every particularly ugly building has been built in the past 25 years – applies also in Hungary.
Since I ride every tram and bus all the way to the terminus, I discover by accident (and it is only by accident that it can be discovered) the pioneers’ railway, complete with child ticket inspectors and Russian signs on the windows warning you not to lean out. The woods outside are covered in snow; a station emerges from the mist, adorned with a fresco of music-making young pioneers. Next to it a tent camp with young pioneers admiring flowers and stroking deer. Am I still in the present? After that, quite by random again, I take the funicular down to the city, for Budapest is situated on hills. There are trams, buses, the underground, suburban trains, taxis, ferries, I’m sure they also have a submarine line to old Fiume, only they keep it to themselves. Hungary is a maritime nation, Horthy was an Admiral. After all, even the Czech Republic is actually a maritime country, “Ahoy!” being their most common greeting. How big would the world need to be to allow all countries to be as big as they feel? As for myself, I wouldn’t mind Germany being a bit smaller. It feels so good to take the Eurocity train from Berlin to Dresden, which has Prague as the final destination, because the announcer has a Czech accent. Wouldn’t it be nice if Germany had only international trains – every journey would feel like a holiday away from Germany.
Seeing the sign “Hanglemezbolt” outside a run-down shop brings memories flooding back. Budapest was full of shops like these in ’89. Or were these the only shops we noticed then? I still remember asking a shop assistant for a Velvet Underground record. He turned around and produced a stack of records, and I was really embarrassed as I had expected one at most and didn’t even have enough money for that. (We had to fork out 142 GDR-Marks for 1,000 Hungarian forints while West Germans got the same amount for only 20 D-Marks – figures that stay imprinted in the memory.) One of us splashed out on a sleeveless heavy-metal T-shirt that said “Rock against Reagan” – surely the DDR border police wouldn’t object? They didn’t speak English anyway. All the great Hungarians who had made it onto a banknote had either died of hunger, syphilis or committed suicide. At a flea market in the suburbs one of us bought a map of Manhattan, longer than it was wide, you never know, it might come handy if you ever made it to New York… The Dutch were smoking some unusually smelling tobacco at the campsite. There were cheaper accommodation options, such as the “GDR concentration camp”, set up specially to stop hitchhikers from the GDR camping on Margaret Island. You had to hand in your ID card in the evening and would get it back when they kicked you out at 6 a.m.
I recall the ice cream scoops of every conceivable colour, there was even poppy-seed ice cream.  Schweppes and Coca Cola were sold from stalls in the streets. The GDR Mark exchange rate was so bad I felt constantly cheated – what was the point of socialism then? Why should I be worse off than the West German tourists who were surely all unemployed back home? I took a bottle and wandered off trying to look inconspicuous, feeling the eyes of the crowds I normally don’t run away from. The bottle was a perfect fit for my GDR backpack and it served me well on many a later trip.  These handy bottles came free with a fizzy drink and one could keep them! Now I see little birdhouses made of these bottles hanging from bushes in Budapest parks, some even have little roofs above the holes to keep the rain away. I guess they’ve been made by pensioners, an undiscovered folk art.
*
Back then I looked for the West in Hungary, these days I’m looking for the East. A 1953 edition of the “Kisdobos” (The Little Drummer Boy) in a second-hand bookshop window. A letter addressed to “Kedves jó Rákosi elvtárs” (Dear, kind Comrade Rákosi) in a child’s handwriting. I study Hungarian in order to read it but also to be able to communicate with extraterrestrials such as the Hungarians. Multi-coloured plastic shopping baskets with black collapsible handles are piled up by the entrance to the shop, didn’t we have identical ones? I’ve almost forgotten, we used to have shopping baskets in bookshops, too!
On the bank of the Danube an old house boasts an advertisement for Wernesgrüner Pilsner, which you couldn’t find anywhere in the GDR. Next to it the sign “Moszkva Autoexport”. I think I’m happy in cities where you can’t tell if the neon advertisement is still current or if it’s just been left behind, like the sceptre-shaped neon advert on one of the houses by Elisabeth Bridge.
Or are the round door handles made of glass that look like two eyes, the kind you come across buildings all around the country, the most typical thing about Hungary?
In Újlipótváros I find a wall painting that shows mechanics at work. It’s the only artistic rendition of a tire being changed I know of. Here and there one can still find art glorifying work, mostly involving women.
A little transformer hut in Óbuda looks like a concrete UFO. Perhaps it really is a UFO?
An enormous club, a former factory, looks as if Hungarian history had exploded inside. Telephone receivers for flushing toilets, an Elvis figure skiing down on his chest, dolls with vacuum cleaner arms, welding masks on the walls like trophies of a defeated tribe. The club looks like Berlin 20 years ago, it even has a branch in Berlin because it’s so popular with visitors from Berlin, where nothing looks the way it looked twenty years ago anymore.
The numerous, variously-shaped flag brackets on houses and windowsills. The countries with flag brackets used to be communist. At our housing estate in Berlin we used them on New Year’s Eve to launch firecrackers. One night I will travel all over Hungary sticking sparklers into the flag brackets.
*
For Bram Stoker the Balkans, and thus also the Orient, begin in Budapest, where a bridge across the Danube “led us into the traditions of Turkish domination”. He thought that the fact that trains didn’t run on time was a further sign that one was about to enter the wilderness: “It seems to me that the further East one goes the less likely the trains are to run on time. What might it be like in China?” The streets are left in disrepair on purpose “lest the Turks regard it as an invitation to bring foreign troops into the country.”
Faster than expected the motorway takes us to Dunaújváros, where in the museum one can admire a large book with signatures of the local people who had pleaded with Comrade Rákosi to put in a good word with Stalin to let their town adopt his name. It didn’t keep the name for very long, just like Eisenhüttenstadt in Germany. I can’t see any old climbing frames but spot a statue of a little girl with a glove puppet. I feel home in this aesthetic. “Steel Mill Street” – now that would be a great address for a writer.
In Pécs, the Zsolnay mausoleum, commemorating the God of porcelain. His son had it built on a hill where his father loved to sit and watch his factory. Dozens of lions scare the visitors but the two remaining originals are hidden in a wooden box. The caretaker keeps a little oil radiator next to his chair.
Every hotel where we stay has a Béla Bartók hall because he once gave a concert here.
Szeged. Someone has covered the back of the air conditioning box with woodchip wallpaper. That appeals to me. A memorial for a species of mosquito by the river. Terraces for regatta spectators on the river bank. And at last a playground with table tennis tables and old climbing frames. The circular arches that look like handles for grabbing the earth. They made your hands smell of metal in the evening. The Pick salami factory, the Zwack liqueur factory. All that’s missing is a Muck coffee factory: Pick, Zwack & Muck. Unicum: I wonder if the secret of the herbal liqueur’s success is its bomb-shaped bottle?
The menus written in the kind of German no poet could invent.
A car ferry to Ópusztaszer. The grumpy ferrymen turn giant wheels and manipulate heavy chains, and the current pulls the ferry over to the other bank by means of the cable. The ferrymen are irritated by their customers’ enthusiasm for the archaic technique. On the other side a holiday village on stilts, the houses concocted from a random collection of materials, every single one looking different.  As a matter of fact, poverty always results in diversity and wealth in monotony. The great diorama of Feszty, the Hungarians’ Prince Árpád crossing the Carpathians. The local prince and his lamenting daughter. The women of the subjugated tribes dragged into slavery. A female shaman tries to read the future from the smoke. Who knows, perhaps she can see me?
Since I planned our route with the help of the Rubik cube, we end up in Debrecen. The hotel has a swimming pool but there’s no butter or fruit for breakfast and sugary water is served instead of fruit juice. The hairdryer packs up. A tiny TV set and not just one but four paintings on the walls. Two holes in the windows where the air conditioning tubes are connected in the summer. I climb the church tower, like the kids in the “Pagans of Kummerow”. A leather heart in a glass case: “A vidám szív a legjobb orvosság” (A Merry Heart is the Best Medicine). The tram network is user-friendly, comprising as it does only one line, making sure you never get lost. A sign warns in German: “Der Fahrer soll von der Rückgabe des Geldes befreit werden!” (The driver should be free of having to give change!) The bold vaulting of the railway station, more sublime to me than any church.  The train timetable is glued to tall cylinders that can be turned by hand. When I was small, a sophisticated structure like that would have kept me occupied for hours.
On the motorway to Eger we are caught in the blizzard. We don’t have a hatchet we could throw in the air to make the weather better. During the siege of Eger the women are said to have given their men the last of the wine to drink. The Turks thought their enemies were drinking bears’ blood to get stronger and ran away. The round concrete bus station could double up as a landing strip for UFOs. Anyone who finds it as lovely as I do is a friend of mine for life.
We haven’t even left and we already feel nostalgic about the time we arrived in Budapest and everyone was buying red blinking devil’s horns for New Year’s Eve. I have rarely felt more at one with humanity than on that night of general hooting, with horns blinking on people’s heads. Our landlord’s name was Ördög [devil] for good measure. I almost proposed to my girlfriend on the Chain Bridge, without noticing that the lions had no tongues. They must have fallen off when the lions tried to learn Hungarian. We practised useful idioms from our old GDR textbook, which included gems such as: “Hey, girls, girls! (“Hej, lányok, lányok!”). We were so busy mumbling Hungarian words (“Zöldség, Gyümölcs … Üdvözöljük …”) we started to pronounce even German “o”s as “ö”s. As a German I try to picture the moving scene when the ancestors of the Hungarians separated from their brethren, the ancestors of the Finns (did they fall out?). For a while the riders can still see each other but from now on their languages will also go their separate ways.
*
We’re spending our last few nights in Buda, in a circular 15-story hotel. Its flat roof would be ideal for taking off in my spaceship. Just before leaving Paris, the hero of “Szerelmesfilm” (Lovefilm), directed by István Szabó in the year I was born (it’s the best film about Proust that I know, although Proust is never mentioned) runs out of the railway station one last time to absorb the images he will cherish for the rest of his life. This is the way to experience cities at their most intense, in a few brief seconds. That’s what I want to do, too, and as I go out for my last walk, someone calls out to me. I don’t turn around but the person keeps calling. Someone waves at me, asking me to come over. His Wartburg won’t start, he wants me to help him push. This used to be just as normal in the GDR as helping women carry prams up the stairs at a station. And suddenly I am home.

Translated from the German by JULIA SHERWOOD

Sketches of Moldova

ANDREJ STASIUK

A Pole in Moldova

I could have gone to Italy. I could have travelled around for three weeks as part of a project, and written about it afterwards. I’d been to Italy once before. Twice, actually. Once to Tuscany and once to Calabria. Spent a week in each place. Just travelling around. I liked everything I saw but had nothing to say about it. I left the country feeling exactly the same as when I arrived. So I wrote back and said I’d be happy to go to Belarus, a country nobody visits. Or Ukraine. Someplace east, in any case. For the simple reason that, before it is engulfed by the Pacific, the East devours a continent of tens of thousands of kilometres. An infinity in human terms. The reply came saying the only eastern country available was Moldova. It sounded sheepish, as if there was something slightly embarrassing about offering this country to anyone. I replied straightaway to say I was going. I loaded my bike into the car boot. The front wheel stuck out so I unscrewed it and stowed it inside the car. This was a good idea, as the front wheel is easy to take off and you can never be too careful. I threw in a sleeping bag, a tent, a gas cooker, a kettle, two tin mugs, a spoon I had bought the year before in Ulanbator, a decent knife, and a small shovel.
It’s the end of November now, a northern wind is blowing and the trees are slowly being covered by hoarfrost. I am trying to recall everything just the way it happened, but some images stand out more than others. A yellow dog somewhere in the south, in a village near Cantemir. It was lying by the side of a bend in the road, a huge dead thing covered in blood. It still had a chain around its neck. It had made a dash for canine freedom only to be killed. It can’t have been easy since there was hardly any traffic here. The cadaver was a bit bloated; it must have lain there for some time. People were passing by but no one did anything, no one would even drag it to the roadside by its chain. That’s the kind of thing that comes to mind: dead animals and the penetrating, sweetish stench of carrion.
But the thing is, my portable drive has crashed and I’ve lost all my pictures. I have to summon everything from memory. I have to go back to the scorching heat that wouldn’t ease off even at night. And to the stench of carrion that was almost omnipresent the minute you ventured beyond the city limits. In Trebujeni I stayed in a small hotel by the museum. I assembled my bike and spent whole days riding around in the sweltering heat. Sometimes I would squeeze into a narrow gully, like the one near Batuceni. It got so tight I had to get off the bike and inch my way along through thorny bushes. The remains of a black cow lay dotted about. In the still air and hot stench I felt as if I was in a silent horror film with the sun beating straight down. I didn’t feel like turning back. I hauled the bike onto my back and clambered up to the plateau, half dead.
Or I would ride high up above the village, to the edge of a rocky precipice, and ransack the vineyards. After some foraging I would crouch down in the shade eating red or white grapes. They weren’t large but they were very sweet. I would wash them down with some water and sit there surveying the vast landscape with a meandering river, white rocks and the steeple of a white church. The village nestled in the valley that the river cut through. Grapes, water and the bike. Day after day. In the solid heat. And from time to time the sweetish smell of animal carcasses. In hollows, ditches, at roadsides, I would come across ribs, the skulls of horned cattle, cattle-legs still covered in black fur. Once I saw mongrels from the village climb the rocks to the top of the hill like mountain goats to get to these burial grounds or, to be more precise, dumps. Yet there was something strangely primeval about this mix of life and death. About those bunches of grapes and the bones. Vines and carrion. Village people would drive their clunkers to the top of the hill to tend their vineyards and dump animal remains so as not to poison the air in the village. The dogs gathered together, with birds flying high above them and ants swarming around. As time went by I found myself automatically sniffing the stench in the air. I started to miss it.
Things didn’t work out with the tent. I only managed to pitch it a couple of times. The countryside was empty, yet it was impossible to find a place for a campsite. Everything belonged to someone. In the south, somewhere between Colibaşi and Vulcăneşti, I drove off the tarmac and turned into cornfields. They stretched all the way to the horizon. Hillock after hillock. Dwarf trees grew on the ridges dividing the fields. This is where I was going to hide, among a strip consisting of dried-out shrubs. There was crackling and rustling everywhere. I heated up a tin of mutton. Sipped some wine. Gradually the night fell. It was getting darker and darker, and more and more still. In the stillness I could hear sounds from very far away. Someone talking at a solitary farmstead in the valley a few kilometres away. A motorbike clattered, its small light fluttering in the rustling darkness. I couldn’t sleep. I was listening out. I wasn’t scared, I just felt sort of naked. In the nakedness of the landscape where it was impossible to hide. This was a continuation of the steppe, the western edge of a steppe that began somewhere in the east, in Manchuria. No matter that corn and vines grew on it, it was still the steppe. I lay down and put my ear to the ground. I could hear sounds approaching from every direction. They were coming from the past, for surely the earth must have absorbed all this: the beating of hooves, the rumbling of thousands of cattle, of herds and horsemen, the creak of large-wheeled wagons, everything that had happened a long time ago in this treeless nakedness, under the canopy of a sky resting on an undulating horizon. Lying now on my side, now on my stomach, I felt the warm earth and knew it wouldn’t cool off before sunrise. It was ancient and saturated with heat. Naked and empty. Unbelievably empty. Covered only by the thinnest layer of cultivation. All I could see for miles, for dozens of miles, were crops. And underneath, the black earth of the steppe and ancient sounds of the days of the Tatars. I fell asleep like a night watchman on duty. In the morning shots sounded somewhere in the distance. Someone was hunting, or just scaring birds away. The ground was dry. Not a trace of dew. I finished my tin even though ants had sneaked into it. Furtively I gathered up my stuff, covered my tracks and moved on like those ancient horsemen whom I had heard overnight.
I drove on in search of towns. Leova was pretty in its way. Streets intersected at right angles. Cube-shaped houses of grey brick spaced at regular intervals. Chestnut trees growing all over the city. They were all sick. The town was surrounded by summer and green trees but here you were in the middle of autumn, amidst an unhealthy golden glitter reflected on grey walls, crumbling concrete and weeds growing from every crack. I circled this place, part settlement, part encampment, from which something was missing. I couldn’t shake off a kind of existential discomfort. Eventually I realized I wasn’t able to find the centre. I come from a place where, as you enter an unfamiliar town, you instinctively start scanning the horizon for the outline of a church steeple against the blue backdrop. A steeple high up and a market square below. But all I found here was a kind of flat egalitarian space without a centre. A motionless encampment in the steppe. Nothing but vaguely formed, solidified and abandoned matter. People did live inside it, but outside it was disintegrating, crumbling, eroding like something generated by nature. And yet, communism was in fact supposed to have been a kind of geological process. It was supposed to have altered the shape of the Earth forever. It was meant to discard everything old and create something new. Yet Leova looked like the product of tectonics and meteorology. There was no point looking for a market square or a centre. The centre was meant to be in Moscow, in Red Square, and nowhere else.
When, after ten years of living in Moscow, Daniel Kalder, author of “The Lost Cosmonaut”, moved to Texas on the Mexican border, I asked him why he had chosen to go there rather than anywhere else. He said that after Russia he was interested in apocalyptic landscapes. You just have to recall Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” or “The Crossing” to understand what Kalder was talking about.
It’s this definition – apocalyptic countries or landscapes – that I had been lacking all my life. I have been roaming the peripheries of an ancient empire discovering its remnants, the slivers of its skeleton. Just like the grey cement wall, the cracked concrete and the weeds growing in the cracks of this place, Leova. This is what Bratsk airport was like, Zabaykalsk on the Chinese border was the same, and so was Darkhan and Ulaangom. And also Khotyn, for that matter, with a hotel constructed of the same brick as the houses in Leova shaded by sick chestnut trees. This is what I have been tracking in all my wanderings. Like an archaeologist on a dig, looking for a crumb of an ancient spine protruding from the earth. Watching out for rusting iron. For those primary components of a utopia now reverting back to the kingdom of minerals. Every town in the steppe — be it here, in Kalmykia, or on the edge of the Gobi desert — looked as if someone had swept up stones from the horizon, piled them up into a small hillock and said: “Come and live here. Right here, where there has been almost nothing before. Except villages with houses squatting like tortoises in the hot dust and horsemen periodically emerging on the undulating horizon.”
I was searching for the town centre of Leova. The sun was slowly setting. Brightly-lit, cube-shaped plastic boxes with names of banks and mobile phone companies were the only things shining in the dusk. They were the only things aglow. They were meant to set this ancient, post-imperial darkness alight. To make it burn down like dry grass, like blackened paper, to allow something new to emerge from behind the flames. Apocalypse following apocalypse.
Michai could have been ten or eleven years old. He stood by the roadside waving his arm. This was in the village of Michailovca right by the Ukrainian border. He climbed in and was slightly taken aback when he realized I was a foreigner. But once we started talking in Russian his shyness left him. He told me his father bred horses. He was small, fair-haired and wore a slightly oversized jumper and baggy jogging pants. He wanted to catch a train in Bugeac. On his way to visit his grandma. He kept glancing at my Nokia. Eventually he plucked up the courage and asked if there were any games on it. I said I wasn’t sure, I only used the phone to make calls and send text messages, and told him to find out for himself. He got hold of the phone, found some games within a few seconds and then the beeping began. He was so absorbed in it he seemed to have forgotten he had got a ride from a weird foreigner in a SUV covered in grey dust with a bike attached to the spare wheel. I asked him what he did, if he had any family, if he’d ever travelled further afield. He went on clicking without taking his eyes off the screen. Yes, he’d been to Taraclia with his father once. “A beautiful town,” he said in Russian, jumping up with joy, having evidently scored a victory in the electronic war. But we soon reached Bugeac and it was time to say goodbye. With sad eyes he handed the phone back. He got off at the crossroads and turned right. I watched him disappear among old vans and horse carts, and cross an impromptu market place at the intersection. Michai, small and frail like a sparrow, who had a better idea than I did of what my phone contained, and who’d been to the beautiful town of Taraclia.
The tent had proved useless but the bike came in handy. Stopping in Trebujeni I spent four days riding around. I tried to drink as little wine as possible in the evenings so I could get up early before the heat descended. It was September but it felt as hot as in July. I would grab some water and get on the bike. Maşcăuţi, Jevreni, Izbişte. Long rides along white, hot gravel roads in the motionless air. Only here and there a lorry or a car whipping up a cloud of dust, followed by more silence and heat. I could choose to ride along the edge of the road seeking shade beneath the walnut trees that flanked every road. Kilometre after kilometre in solitude. It was a strange feeling because the whole country was cultivated, it belonged to someone, with signs of busy domestic activity everywhere, yet not a living soul to be seen. Sometimes a wrecked car stood by the edge of a field, a sign that somewhere deep inside, in the depth of the crops creeping from one gigantic ridge to the next, there were people. Toiling in the heat. Bent down, crouching, blackened by the sun. Or sometimes, when I stopped at the edge of a field, it was calm and quiet and I could hear rustling in the depths of the corn grove. There they were, working, invisible and absent. By the end of a day I would have salty patches on my t-shirt.
But I could also choose to take small paths, away from main roads. For example, immediately after the bridge in Trebujeni I could go down to the river Raut and ride upstream along the bank. Rising on my right, in the east, a massive cliff delayed the appearance of the sun. At its summit monks’ cells have been carved out into the rocks. A few years ago I had visited one of them. A skinny bearded monk thought I was a Slovak. His stony niche housed a bed covered with a red throw. Right next to it was a chapel with an altar and some icons but I found the lack of space, the stoniness and claustrophobia oppressive. Once it might have been a good place for a hermitage but as I was leaving I found other curious visitors waiting by the low entrance. This is what it must have been like all day long. That is why this time the thought of calling on the monk didn’t even cross my mind. A couple of kilometres further up there were deserted cells in the cliff face. Leaving my bike behind I climbed up twenty or thirty metres. The caves carved into the soft stone were dry and warm. I found fragments of inscriptions, remnants of reliefs. The entrance offered a magnificent view of the river and the valley. I tried to imagine the way they had lived here three or four hundred years ago. Within the rock watching the valley, the motionless world, the slow changes of season, the weather. Rain, snow, wind. On the edge of the steppe. There was almost nothing around. A few stone buildings, some ruins. The restless presence of Tatars on the other side of the Dniestr. Was it fear of emptiness that had inspired the hermits’ heroic faith? Or was it the enormity of the steppe world, its boundlessness and infinity, that had allowed the human spirit to relax here completely, to try and reach beyond the visible, I wondered inside the stony cell.
As the sun rose and its rays began to fall on the far side of the river, I heard a dry cracking noise. First one, then another, and another, more and more. In the complete silence the noise was coming from several hundred metres away, amplified by an echo reflected by the cliffs. It came from plastic bottles that had been piled up in their hundreds on the other side of the river, which looked like an illegal dumping ground. The bottles were decompressing in the heat. They made a piercing and unpleasant sound in the morning stillness, in the landscape full of long shadows moist with dew. I was sitting on porous white rocks marked with traces of tiny shells. There I was, submerged in the abyss of geology, in the depth of centuries, inside a hermit’s cell, with a panoramic view of a dump.
This is what this country was like. Remains of animals rotting among vineyards. Here, in the midst of the communist erosion of matter, the cancer of a future world was starting to grow, a world in which everyone would have their own bank account in order to feel human, their own hole in the mesh of the net in order not to die of solitude.
But solitude wasn’t really the problem here. Whenever I talked to someone, whenever I gave someone a lift, after a brief conversation, once they discovered I was a kind of tourist, that I was sort of sightseeing and admiring the beauty of a forgotten country, sooner or later they would pose the question: But why are you on your own? On my way back after visiting the deserted monks’ cells I came across some anglers and we got talking. First, rather pointedly, they asked why I was speaking Russian and not Moldovan, or rather, Romanian. I apologized and explained that unfortunately I was Polish, that Russian came a bit more easily to me. They nodded with understanding. A minute later they asked: Why are you on your own? Where’s your wife? Sure enough, I was alone in this country. I hadn’t really met anyone else who was alone. Except for the people standing by the roadside waving their arms for a lift, which would bring about a peculiar encounter between our respective solitudes, but they too would eventually ask the same question. They thought I was a weirdo, or perhaps something worse, for solitude was something akin to sin or a curse.
In Bielce I asked the hotel porter to look after my bike. He locked it in his sad cubbyhole and charged me a few pennies a day. He was in his sixties, grey, tall and hunched. He said it didn’t matter whether you were a Moldovan, a Russian, a Ukrainian, a Pole or a German, because all people were brothers, and honesty and the goodness of your heart was all that counted. He gave this speech unprompted, giving my hand a mighty squeeze. It sounded like a Soviet slogan but he was quite sincere, as if trying to show that he didn’t mind my being foreign and alone, and that he accepted me into the community.
Little Michai was the only one who didn’t ask any questions, except for the phone games. He didn’t make any speeches either. As he got off, I watched him disappear thinking that I ought to go to Taraclia and see what this beautiful town looked like. It wasn’t far away. I drove through Comrat where I saw a woman dressed in black sitting on a tractor trailer next to an open coffin, chasing flies off the face of the departed with a branch. After a further 30 kilometres I turned left onto a road running along the top of a dam. The lake shared its name with the town. I found the main street. There wasn’t much to see. A church, a market square, a few shops, a few cash machines, and that was it. Immediately behind the main street it turned into a village. Cottages shaded by orchards. The tarmac came to an end. I got out of the car and tried to look at all this through Michai’s eyes, slightly from below to make everything appear bigger, taller, more dignified. I imagined arriving here from Michailovca where the hot wind blowing from the boundlessness of Ukrainian corn churns up dust on the main road. I imagined seeing something beautiful. It wasn’t all that difficult. It occurred to me that I hadn’t really grown up, that I was still a child, a little boy who leaves his home and wherever he goes some kind of miracle seems to happen. I still remembered well what it had felt like forty years ago: the visible world was just a pretext for the gaze that pierced the world’s veneer, only to melt away somewhere on the other side, in the boundlessness of the real and the imagined, to dissolve and vanish in the intoxicating mixture, as I, too, would disappear in the wondrous bowels of the real, fictitious and supernatural. I had to visit Taraclia to realise that the only thing I had ever sought was a return to the intensity of those days. That is why I hadn’t wanted to go to Italy. I didn’t want Italy, with its sophisticated, refined, complex existence to overlay the childhood abyss into which one falls the way one falls into the deepest sleep, yet without losing consciousness for a single moment. I know it’s perverse to choose instead of Italy a dead dog with a chain round its neck lying in the dust of the road surrounded by a swarm of flies. But childhood is perverse in that it challenges reality, cancelling it or transforming it. So, in truth, I had never been to any foreign countries, I’d just been travelling into the depth of landscapes that had enabled my mind to become divorced from everyday life. This is how it was meant to be, and this was the real impact of those places that are not so obvious, places with a hidden suggestiveness, with an existence not for the sake of appearance. Like the edge of the steppe. In Taraclia.
Or Vulcăneşti. Or Cantemir. Or Giurgiuleşti. Or Cahul. At noon. Whatever will become of this country once it has renounced its melancholy? What form will it take? Will it betray its own fate by taking on the shape of its own fantasy? All these countries, cast up onto the riverbank by the current of time, what do they wish to resemble? Other countries or themselves, seen through a magician’s looking glass? What will it turn into, this antiquity interlaced with the remains of the communist utopia of the end of time? Again and again, I would leave the main road to roam on my bike and look around. On the face of it everything was the same as before. People carried sheaves of corn. They sat outside their houses on the edge of the tarmac, shucking golden cobs. They walked along roads with long sticks knocking walnuts off the trees, planted in rows dozens of kilometres long. People pushed bikes laden with bags full of roadside crops. Sheep were the same colour as the grass burnt by the sun. Their smell was dry and intoxicating. Horses stood on empty pastures, their heads lowered, casting long shadows. White flocks of geese swam on ponds. Poultry made a din at dawn. Ducks were the noisiest. Maybe because they had woken up into complete silence and complete darkness. All of this seems to have been going on for a very long time.
One day a brand-new black Mercedes drove up to my little hotel in Trebujeni. A burly chap with a shaven head got out. He sported all the requisite paraphernalia: gold chain, gold watch, and a blasé self-assurance. The new era has dawned, I thought. When I came back a few hours later I could barely recognize him. He was wearing only shorts, rubber flip-flops and the chain. Bent over a plastic tub, he was processing a slaughtered pig, removing the giblets from the flesh. Fat and covered in blood, he looked as if he were chopping himself up. Then he flung half the carcass over his shoulder and set off for the kitchen, bent under his load. I couldn’t tear myself away from the sight, which resembled a painting by Bacon and the Bruegels rolled into one. Surreptitiously, I took a picture.
But in fact all I had to do to see a city that was sleepy and wild at the same time was go to Chișinau. A city that was shedding its skin, pupating from a wandering ruminant into an animal of prey. A city with deranged, delirious car traffic. Men would sit around cross-legged, picking their teeth, staring, munching sunflower seeds as they had for centuries, but as soon as they found themselves behind the wheel of a car they would start racing as if possessed. Honking, overtaking on solid yellow lines, scraping so close to your car they almost hit you. And then they would pull up, get out of the car and sit around again chattering, scratching their bellies, plastic flip-flops kicked off, fingernails rubbing bare calves. As if someone was letting an electrical current run through them at irregular intervals.
I had never seen so many money-changing booths before. They were everywhere. Tiny indentations in nooks and crannies, in alleyways hollowed out of the walls, carved out of the city’s rocks, illuminated by a yellow light and so tight one could hardly move inside. A desk, a calculator or a wooden abacus, a metal safe, a chair, a light bulb. The money changers sat inside like exhausted cash machines, counting without raising their eyes or saying a word. As if they had been immured alive, cave dwellers of prosperity. On the corner of Ştefan cel Mare and Ismail streets a beggar in a wheelchair was sitting on the stairs to the underpass, his waxy flesh-coloured prosthetic legs exposed. His arms ended at the elbows. He shuddered in a stationary version of St. Vitus’ dance. Someone had to carry him down and then carry him back up again every day. Crowds brushed against him. Passing by him I forgot to stick my hand into the pocket where I kept a bundle of one lei banknotes specially for Chișinau walks. I wanted to make up for it but the stream of humanity swept me on. When I returned a few hours later he was gone. That same evening I sat in the Green Hills Nistru garden sipping a beer. There was a man, around forty, slightly creased and rather grey, not far away. He proffered a plastic cup suggesting I share my beer. I poured some into his cup. “American?” he asked. I shook my head. “German? English?” Eventually I told him. He looked at me, his interest aroused, as if through my country of origin he had discerned in me something akin to humanity. He may even have smiled. “I see, you’re a Soviet man,” he said and vanished into the Chișinau night. I felt a jab at my heart. As if he had hurt me. I wanted to protest. Me? A Soviet man? How dare he, with his beggar’s plastic cup, with his shuffling walk? How dare he? But then I finished my beer and told myself: Yes. I am a Soviet man, albeit maybe just a shadow of one. I’ve been roaming the former empire obsessively. I’ve been looking for traces of the extermination of an old world. Nothing quite as powerful has occurred in my lifetime. And I suspect nothing as powerful ever will. It wasn’t good or beautiful but it did happen, like a cataclysm or a religion. And it was still frightening. These remains of an anti-civilization, which, deluge-like, has eradicated mankind with its entire history, past, faith and wisdom. The crumbling concrete, the rust, the weeds. Anti-matter. There was nothing for me to look for in Italy, for I’ve been looking for traces of an extermination that was supposed to bring mankind ultimate redemption. OK, I said to myself into the Chișinau night, repeating the words of the stranger. I guess I am a Soviet man.
I went back via Costeşti. The road to Romania runs along the top of a dam on the river Prut. The lake extends eastwards and is some twenty kilometres long. It was a calm day and the sky was blue but as far as the eye could see there wasn’t a trace of a sail, of a boat, of anything. The Moldovan border control took only a few minutes. Someone in front of me was transporting watermelons and tomatoes in a Dacia estate car. I drove onto the dam. Across the barriers the wind blew wandering shrubs in the shape of globes. Like in a Western. A kind of rose of Jericho.

Translated from the Polish by JULIA SHERWOOD

EPILOGUE

The Country That Had to Rehabilitate Franz Kafka

RADKA DENEMARKOVÁ

27 October 1989: the playwright Václav Havel is taken into custody for the last time. He doesn’t know if he’ll be held for two days or two years. A month later the musician Michael Kocáb (of the band Pražský výběr) announces that Havel is to be nominated for president. On 10 December 1989, on behalf of Civic Forum, the actor Jiří Bartoška officially nominates Václav Havel for the office of Czechoslovakia‘s president. Nineteen days later the Parliament – inherited from the previous regime – unanimously (!) elects Havel. Two months later the President addresses the US Congress.
Old family friends come back to the country. People are free to travel. To the West. Vienna opens its doors to its neighbours, making entry to museums and historical sites free for several days. Yet they remain empty, for the Czechs and Slovaks prefer to feast their eyes on the sight of shops filled with goods and market stalls with rows of neatly laid out fruit and vegetables. Including pineapples and bananas… Guides show visitors around department stores, where they ask butchers what feed they give their pigs to achieve the wonderful pink of the meat. It’s the dawn of the era of coffee machines, coca-cola, electric kettles and deep fryers. Our neighbours still harbour illusions about us and have yet to realize that the mindset of Eastern Europe is that of thieves. Everyone wants to buy something. At least one little thing. Even though the exchange rate is incommensurate. When I got to Vienna I had to look at the sign that said ‘Vienna’ several times to check if I really was there because I hardly saw any Austrians around. I brought back a filter coffee machine, which has become a permanent adornment of our villa. You may be interested to know that we drink about 50 cups of coffee a day. But what was most memorable was having a coffee with the exiled journalist Ivan Medek.  Even in these heady days I would sometimes see Marta Kubišová: ours is a strange friendship – we first met when she was working in an office, typing up reports on the Prague sewer system, and all of a sudden she’d become a singer who managed, in addition to typing the reports, to appear at four gigs in a single evening.
Marta Kubišová becomes a national symbol, washing away the sins of other people. Like Josephine in Kafka’s story “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”. The people forgot that they had strangled her piping; Kafka’s fellow mouse folk forgot. “She pleads that she is tired, not in the mood for singing, feeling faint. And so we get a theatrical performance as well as a concert.”  Then one day, all of a sudden, Josephine disappears. “Of her own accord she abandons her singing, of her own accord she destroys the power she has gained over people’s hearts.” The mouse folk get on with their lives, Josephine is forgotten.  She had always provoked her petty-bourgeois environment. Back in March 1970, at the Lucerna concert hall, everyone could see and hear that she was a singer of world calibre. I’m not saying she was as good as Aretha Franklin, but she was definitely on a par with Dusty Springfield. She was comparable. The Husák regime put a stop to Kubišová’s career when she was at her peak. And it was complete nonsense, they didn’t stop her because she was the best singer or the greatest rabble-rouser. No. They stopped her because she was the one who had most annoyed the party officials‘ wives. Right from the outset. They regarded her as a slut, they were irritated by the way she looked and the way she sang. They could never get over it and made her pay. Literally, pay. It’s another matter that later she went on to sign Charter 77. The Theatre of Music in Opletalova Street is run by the Supraphon record company. The same company that had ignored Kubišová for years and that instantly re-issued her albums with the advent of a market economy.
Meanwhile Václav Havel reiterates: “We still haven’t learned to put ethics above politics, science and economics. We still fail to understand that the only true backbone of our actions – if they are to be ethical – is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher… responsibility to a higher order of being where all our actions are indelibly recorded and where, and only there, they will receive a fair appraisal. And the mediator between us and this higher authority is what we traditionally call the human conscience.”

No one listens to him, on either side of the ocean. People find other places and ways of fulfilling their potential. He is left standing in the square, alone. The same square where he used to stand on a pedestal, surrounded by crowds so thick that people couldn’t breathe. What’s happened to people? Are they drunk on freedom? What is their idea of freedom? What had we expected of freedom?
THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE: If not us, who? If not now, when?
When freedom dies away, it does so inch by inch.
I live in a country where fascism, racism and anti-Semitism are a reality.
I live in a country where people are denied basic human rights only because they have found themselves in a desperate situation.
I live in a country that mocks the misfortune of others.
I live in a country where populism cuts across political parties and the media distort the truth.
Eastern Europe sorely misses self-actualized people of Václav Havel’s calibre, people capable of acutely perceiving things around them, distinguishing things and actions that are authentic and original from those that are fake and false. Problem-oriented people see life’s difficulties as something that demands a solution rather than as intractable problems and blows of fate. Independent people accept themselves and others as they are. Spontaneous, creative people have an uncomplicated attitude to reality and a sense of humour; they are devoid of malice and the desire to inflict pain. These are people endowed with integrity and what Alfred Adler called social interest – a sense of community and solidarity with others, interested in the benefit and prosperity of others. Social interest is manifested in character traits such as respect for others, humility and compassion: humanity in the broadest sense.
We have been brain- and heart-washed by communism. Humanity as a whole is plagued by national and religious frustration. We ridicule Germany, a country with a functioning civil society whose quality of life rests on three pillars: the rule of law, with everyone equal before the law; quality education; and a dignified life for all. It’s easy to object to something we haven’t even tried to understand. Or is our “no to refugees” a sign of a perverse emancipation of the adolescent nations of Eastern Europe from the European Union? Is this the source of our self-confidence?
The world extended its helping hand to successive waves of emigration from our country in 1938, 1948, 1968. The world knew that some secret policemen might sneak in after 1968. It is absurd to assume that we would stop terrorists by closing our borders and establishing a police state. Whenever, through no fault of their own, some people in this country find themselves on the margins of society, solidarity and civic compassion suddenly evaporate. Instead, these people are criminalized, their misfortunes pushed to one side so that it does not contaminate society. Instead of being helped.
Before 1918 we were Austrians. Vienna was full of Czechs. In 1918 the founder of the first Czechoslovak Republic, our first President Thomas Masaryk opened the country to emigrés from Soviet Russia, and in the 1930s Czechoslovakia offered asylum to people fleeing the Nazis (including Thomas Mann’s family). But nowadays politicians question a moral stance, they mock the legacy of both President Thomas Masaryk and Václav Havel – one of the few things we’ve had reason to be proud of. Shouldn’t the strength of democracy mean being able to paralyze those craving power? We show off before the rest of the world but all it takes is a glance at the history of countries such as Syria or to research any small detail in the history of mankind: fingerprints as a means of identification had been known in China and Japan for a thousand years, while in Europe they weren’t discovered until 1880…
Our East European mindset has also been shaped by the first outbreak of mass hysteria: the 1945 expulsion of nearly fourteen million Germans. At school no one ever told me that Germans and Czechs had cohabited in this country for centuries (in the textbook version they arrived with Hitler and their expulsion was thus justified). The Munich Treaty, the secession of the Sudetenland, the application of the Nuremberg laws to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the occupation, the Holocaust and extermination of Jewish culture and the post-war expulsions in the aftermath of Nazis: all this forcibly terminated Czech and German coexistence. Nearly three million Germans had lived in the Czech Lands before the war. After the war indiscriminate, hostile anti-German sentiment based on the principle of collective guilt prevailed, merging – in a perverse irony – with traditional anti-Semitism and culminating in the Germans’ expulsion.
The closed nature of Czech national culture was further enhanced by the official position of the post-1945 Czechoslovak government, which either distorted or completely suppressed the presence of the Jewish and German element in the history of the Czech culture. The organized expulsions of a substantial part of the German population of Bohemia and Moravia between December 1945 and 1946, further justified by the notion of the nation state, was carried out in compliance with the victorious powers’ decisions. However, as early as in the summer of 1945 unorganized expulsions (known as “wild” expulsions) began. They were carried out by local authorities and accompanied by terror and the mass murder of Germans, collaborators as well as those unjustly accused. The Germans had been expelled, the Jews were dead or in exile. For many decades the German and Jewish contribution to the history of Czech culture was denied, for all intents and purposes.
After World War II we expelled three million people.  We should be able to accept as many now. Some Czechs have never forgiven the Jews for having survived, for having returned, for having the audacity to demand the return of their stolen property. Ironically, one of the most distinguished writers associated with the Czech lands is Franz Kafka, a German-speaking Jew. He was among the first authors writing in German whose work could at last be mentioned in the more relaxed 1960s, only to be turned into a “brand” to attract tourists in the 1990s. He was lucky. He didn’t end up in the gas chambers. He wasn’t expelled.
Europe has dragged its unresolved traumas and its pigeon-holing of the past into the 21st century. Totalitarianism hasn’t vanished.  In addition to Nazi and communist totalitarianism, there is also totalitarianism in companies, in the family, in human relations. Totalitarianism in relations between countries. Europe is a family. There is no escaping the network of family relations.  From the point of view of the system, individual opinions of what is good and what is evil are random. No single group knows what another group regards as good. Every group has to be able to endure the guilt and alienation that will ensue if it breaks with what the “family” holds to be the correct rules. Everything that is suppressed in private life damages the individual and is bound to rise to the surface a few years, decades or generations later. A society that has suppressed something in its past is an unhealthy society.
Mass hysteria threatens the very foundations of democracy and is drawn to power – it is this combination that makes our era so tragic. Because the masses long for a strong leader. East European countries reject the truth because they used to be pawns on the great powers’ chessboard. This was all they knew. They clung to the more powerful because they knew they would never be the boss. Evolving social frameworks and the fatalism of the human soul have played a key role in the history of Central Europe. Highly intelligent people who lack emotional intelligence and have no social compassion very rapidly acquire power, gaining leadership positions at every level, not just in companies. They are the managers and politicians. Such people – I call them kobolds – set the rules of society because they know only too well how to manipulate and treat others to their own advantage. It is this manipulative behaviour that I regard as the primary wellspring of totalitarianism. Where everyone is guilty, no one is guilty. Prosperity breeds social apathy, a particularly aggressive kind of apathy and mass indifference, in which the fundamental things that make human beings human suddenly disappear. These fundamental things are compassion, empathy, basic decency, as well as the art of conversation, people listening to each other, people hearing each other. It’s not a pretty sight. The labels we have brought with us from the past decades, such as collective guilt and collective heroism, remain.
Is the end of the era of old Europe and its patterns nigh? Are the dreams of the superiority of the white man who dominates and patronizes the world coming to an end? But what is about to take its place? What will begin when terms such as ‘human rights’ become just useless junk and religious zealots relegate the word ‘love’ to books? You can’t shake the past out of the world like an old duster. Kobolds and their advisers hold talks on how to preserve Europe, they talk as if Europe were threatened by an invasion of barbarian hordes, as if it needed to mobilise, as if they might turn Europe into another ghost city.  In fact, what we are seeing is a movement of people and nations that has been happening since time immemorial – this planet belongs to everyone, people are always fleeing wars and leaving their homes in pursuit of hope. If they could, the kobolds would tear Europe away from the rest of the world, turn it into an island, a raft with machine gun-wielding soldiers positioned along the sides and poles to push away the swimming bodies that can’t go on any longer, that are trying to get hold of the raft but are not given a chance. The kobolds imply that those approaching are half-animals. Half-animals is the word I hear them say more often than anything else. They apply it to everything apart from themselves. Kobolds and their men hold talks to figure out what to do so that Europe doesn’t lose face. Faceless men holding talks.
Europe is a strange place. Exciting. In Australia you can travel for thousands of miles without anything changing. In Europe you travel a few hundred miles, in some regions just a few dozen miles, and everything changes. Language, architecture, the food on your plate and, first and foremost, the mentality of the people. Mentality is the communicating vessel of 19th century notions like nation and patriotism. We keep tripping over these notions. The twentieth century has yet to end. We are stuck in it. Intellectuals such as Susan Sontag regarded Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka as a great revelation, European culture was the source of all culture. From this perspective Sontag regarded America as a colony of Europe. Everything is different now.
Comparisons between the EU and the US are not apt, we lack a common language and common cultural background and thinking, which is related to language. Although customs posts have disappeared, the borders are claiming their rights again: mentality and different historical experiences have left their mark on the landscape, on the behaviour, faces and gestures of people. Human weaknesses, sympathies and antipathies also play a role (for example, former German chancellor
Gerhard Schröder couldn’t stand the French or peasants, presumably French peasants in particular; a list of everyone and everything Czech presidents Václav Klaus and Miloš Zeman can’t stand would be interminable and pointless.)
THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE:  You new-old rulers of the masses: we’re not just dumb asses!
In the twenty-five years that have passed since 1989 no one in Eastern Europe has said that we human beings are defined solely by our actions, not by our words, which we change depending on whether it’s 1938, 1953, 1968, 1989 or 2016. All those who have aided and abetted a murderous regime must answer for their actions. Anything else is an insult to the dead. The trials of communist criminals have dragged on; no one has been punished, and no one will be, because we refuse to accept our own share of guilt. The message we pass on to younger generations is clear: everything is allowed because every monstrosity can be wiped off the board by saying “when we were young we made a few mistakes”, what matters is slipping through the net and securing a good life for yourself. Executioners have been conflated with their victims. The memory of the past is being used solely for scaremongering by populist politicians.
The pre-1989 regime wasn’t only about suppressing freedom and about state terror but, first and foremost, about creating an atmosphere of distrust, powerlessness and hopeless resignation. It’s not enough to say that this is what the times were, or are, like. Specific individuals are to blame. The only solution is to go back to the beginning of all things. The trouble is, nobody is interested in the beginnings. We live in an era of mortgaged cowards, an era of submissive philosophy or indifference and consumerism. There has been much debate about the consumer society and its negative impact. Here in Eastern Europe we also have a consumer society, albeit one that is permanently frustrated. It is not a pretty sight. It is, in fact, a farce. The first step towards normality??
Living in confinement and under the threat of political police is degrading; it eats into one’s skin. Those who have lived in a socialist country, under an occupied regime, as Russia’s vassal, seem to have lost the ability to live in a different kind of world. These days, young party guns in the Czech Republic are trying to create capitalism with a human face: victory for the chosen ones, without any competition (just like under socialism they used to disqualify rivals by means of political persecution). They have the same mindset: instead of supporting the talented and capable, they support the less able ones just because they are loyal and have no scruples. Political parties pledge their support to the arts but it’s a lie. They’ve come into money again. They are only interested in supporting commercial – that is, the most conformist – art. They keep trying to destroy everything and everyone who dares to point out that the emperor has no clothes.
It’s the experience of the past century that has driven the Czech nation into this distressing state. For the Czech nation bears an uncanny resemblance to someone who has survived many years in jail – six years under Nazism and forty years under socialism – and has returned to the world mentally wrecked, capable of and interested in nothing but grabbing as much for itself as it can. Those who have never had to resist the pressure that would have given them a chance to test their ability to maintain their integrity now have the upper hand, yet they attack those who have served time in prison, were forbidden to practise their profession, or were driven into exile for defending the right to free expression. The significance of their stance is being downplayed, belittled. Those who worry they might lose a tasty slice of the cake will support anything; they don’t care about anything. They weathered the pre-1989 era of organised dumbing down at their weekend cottages, drinking their Pilsner. The weekend cottage obsession used to be interpreted as a form of redirecting creative energies. Then, as now, the majority didn’t give a damn about injustice.
The longing for party membership perks has survived, the country’s president enjoys the status of a monarch, a tsar. It’s the eastern virus that we continue to carry inside: the fear of civil society, trying to take advantage of others, to get around them, to pretend that we are not part of Europe, as if Europe was somewhere outside of us and worthy of mockery, as demonstrated by the Czech politicians’ fiasco at the helm of the European Union in 2009 or the more recent presidential election. A further danger is our navel-gazing: the Czechs are not interested in what is happening outside their country’s borders, they believe they know everything, that they are the centre of the universe. It’s all about money, despotism, violence and arrogance. The Czechs have a propensity to have the last word, ostentatiously and out loud. The country enjoyed genuine freedom during the first Czechoslovak Republic under Thomas Masaryk. He was afraid of the lackey mentality, the mindset of maids, for which we were known in Vienna, the mindset of the knave who gets up in a pub every now and then to shout what he really thinks of his master. The lackey mindset seeks out whipping boys on whom to let off steam and its inferiority complex. We pretend not to see the faces of murderers and people who collaborated with occupation regimes. Where have all the state security officials gone? We live in an overwhelming atmosphere of admiration for the stronger ones. Victims are humiliated both by people who had destroyed them and who reproach the victims for allowing themselves to be destroyed. What is the explanation for this unscrupulousness shown by so many? Entire generations besmirched by those times. The temptation not to be among the persecuted is understandable.
What is missing is humility, humanity, inquisitiveness and the understanding that life does not have to be a contest. Why do so many of us find it so hard to identify with ourselves? We keep pretending to be someone we are not. For some in the Czech Republic this is a part of their survival kit. The Czech variety of capitalism has reinstated the law of the jungle, that the strong rule the weak. However, the laws of human society dictate that the strong should protect the weak.
Only a few courageous young people won’t fall into the trap. They won’t be caught by the lasso of either communism or capitalism. They are not afraid of the truth, of creative work, of humour, they are not afraid of being authentic. This is what independence looks like in 2016: it needs no labels, it doesn’t need anyone else to be aware of their independence, it doesn’t have to pigeonhole people, it has no need for barricades, the chanting of slogans, the drafting of government declarations, resolutions, charters or petitions, wearing of badges, long hair, dreadlocks or uniforms, it has no need for political parties, academic titles, coffee house tables, careers, gender, expressive gestures, religion, shouting, drugs, Sunday barbecues, it doesn’t feel the need to make friends with groups of similarly lonely or similarly strong or elitist people; they are wise enough not to flaunt their independence, they simply are independent. And this hope of truth is what it’s all about. The ability to enjoy life, not to be afraid of getting one’s hands dirty by living and living one’s life regardless of ideologies or the sediment of time. These young people harbour no illusions about anyone, demonstrating at the same time that there are countless ways of seeing the world, that the words we rely on to think with can be purified and used differently, that it is possible to live one’s life differently, that the freedom to be creative and exult in many forms of existence know no bounds. What matters is perseverance.

For me people like these are the indispensable laboratory of a new generation of humanity. They force us to think of others because they think of others: through specific projects and meaningful work that is not, ultimately, about nationality or other labels, but about quality of life, respect, and the attempt to understand and hear each other. To channel thinking towards an unburdened future. To break down prejudice and intellectual simplifications, to break down the Czech narrative of pettiness, fear and the feeling that we are just a buffer between East and West and that we constantly have to “side with” some world power or other. We are Europeans. We are human beings.  Ultimately, there is only one boundary: that between individual human beings. It turns out that the same situations can be presented through very different narratives. What matters is that we don’t keep own narrative a secret. We have to contribute our own, authentic experience. And new experience has to be made, not picked out of thin air, as Ingeborg Bachmann has said. Only those who have never experienced anything pick it out of thin air or take it from others. The vanishing of experience has greatly increased due to the evolution of mass media, second-hand life. It turns out that the attempt to conquer freedom and practise free critical thinking is difficult in every era and that it never ends.
THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE: Freedom? A clear conscience.
The 2015 refugee crisis exposed the EU’s and Europe’s problems to the bone. There is less lying now. Economy, too, has forced politicians to lie less. The economy and markets rule, sacrifices are being made for their sake, not for things like human rights. So now we know who rules our globalized society, covertly and totally. I could draw up a list of words that cheat in their own right: democracy, freedom, equality before the law and equal rights for all, solidarity and sovereignty. What is going on?  Is Europe, too, turning into a place with no room for the soul? Yes, Europeans have been travelling to India in search of the spiritual. But they have been doing business with China. Conflicts between differing worldviews will never cease to exist both on a social and on an intimate, personal level.  Politicians sometimes try to turn the living, natural order, as vibrant as life itself, into a “system”. We live in falsified history and prejudice and in the racial supremacy ramblings of the 20th and first decades of the 21st century.
The blindness has deeper roots. In 2016 the Czechs boast of their liberal outlook. But surely the unwillingness to lend anyone a helping hand, closing our eyes to problems the world is grappling with and refusing to have our fingers burned cannot be the tell-tale signs of liberals? Not for nothing are the Czechs the nation that has had to rehabilitate Franz Kafka. We have no need of borders. We have excluded ourselves.  We may close all borders, erect walls reaching to heaven, install barbed wire, words such as borders, fences, walls mean nothing to fanatics.
Violence against women in public spaces, which East European politicians invoke and blame on Islam, is not a religious issue either; it is a question of attitudes to women in general. Just look at the hysterical response of East European post-communist politicians to women demanding their natural rights. These demands arouse their anxiety in the same way as have slaves, Jews, immigrants and others throughout history. Yes, we have adopted patterns of democratic civilisation and market economy post-1989 but we have forgotten to smash up the backward East European patriarchal social structure, the patriarchal thinking and behaviour. It’s lodged in the marrows of both men and women. The patriarchal dimension of Eastern Europe hasn’t made much progress. As Margaret Atwood has said, football and elections are purely an exercise in male rivalry and women are expected to be cheerleaders at best.
This issue has been examined from a sociological perspective by Zygmunt Bauman and Tim May. They contend that the birth of modern anti-Semitism in 19th century Europe was the result of industrialisation and the emancipation of Jews who had arrived from ghettos. They mixed with non-Jewish city dwellers and took on “normal” professions. When political and industrial transformations aroused similar anxiety in post-war Britain, it turned against immigrants from the West Indies and Pakistan. Nowadays I encounter the same male resistance to women’s demands for equal rights in the workplace and competition for high profile offices. Demands for equality fan the flames of prejudice, disguised as allusions to the “natural” state of affairs. What does ‘natural state of affairs’ man? It boils down to the claim that women should know their place in the hierarchy of social relations, in which men take precedence.
I travel regularly to Germany, Austria and France and haven’t seen any of the things the Czech media report. They cherry-pick, and further distort, news reminiscent of the hysterical alarmist reports spreading in the Middle Ages: about the Jews poisoning the wells and causing the plague. But it was we East Europeans who have been poisoning the common European well over the past few months. The pandemic is spreading. I am horrified to hear Czech politicians say that we have to set women’s and minority rights aside because we are facing other problems now. I disagree: now is the time for us to learn to respect everyone’s rights. Without exception.
We have failed. Our political representation is inhuman because its words contradict its actions, because it has adopted the vocabulary and arguments of countries from which people have fled from war and hunger, because it downplays violence, openly mocks women, because sexist innuendo on live television is becoming increasingly common (the Czech President said he opposes Islam though he wouldn’t mind banning women from driving). The majority of people are entertained and elated.  Whenever any group is referred to by their physical attributes we have to prick up our ears because this is a sign of fascism. In one of the most atheist countries in the world everyone has suddenly become an expert on religion and the Catholic Church has also found an axe to grind. And all this is purely virtual since we don’t have any refugees to integrate, they don’t want to come to this country and if they happen to stray to these parts we lock them up in concentration camps that we call refugee housing. What we should worry about instead is the strengthening of links to Russia and China. Communism is a tragedy but the real enemy is always the greedy, hypocritical right-winger dressed up as “patriot”. We split the world into them and us. But the world only consists of us.
We say that children are our hope. But children are raised by their parents, who pass on to them their own prejudices, clichés and ideas of the world, the past and of how to live their life. Only the strongest individuals who pluck up the courage to show things in a different light can get to the truth. It is easy to adopt the version of events whereby we are all either victims or heroes. In this part of the world we tend to claim that we always know better, that it is the others who are evil and we have always been the victims. Every society tends to say this. However, some societies have managed to come to terms with shameful periods in their history. All that it takes is to admit the facts, not to avert one’s gaze, to apologise. Only then can a society be healthy. Any uncomfortable facts in our family’s or our own private life that we have suppressed or hidden from the world will come back to haunt us. Decades later or in future generations. And it is the same in society. The things it suppresses and sweeps under the carpet will continue to fester, making the society sick and preventing it from moving on.
THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE: The most dangerous weapon is the one that is in the hands of a weakling.
We have seen a chain of cause and effect unfold before our eyes: whichever country the refugees head for, they find that they are not welcome. Temporary camps for refugees and asylum seekers are turning into permanent establishments, alongside affluent ghettos and ghettos inhabited by the discriminated poor. Of course, Western style liberal democracy is the model that people around the world wish to emulate. Except they don’t know how to make it a reality in their countries. Nevertheless, even those dreamt of countries that have been accepting refugees don’t have bottomless capacity and the local population has started rebelling in weird ways.
Thus the world is getting increasingly full of people who have been driven out. Human rights have become something abstract, they no longer offer protection. Or perhaps they do but only if the abstract notion is applied specifically to the rights of the Hungarians, the British, the French, the Czechs, the Americans and so on. And so it will again be left solely to a nation, state, or territory, to take the decision. This is a solidarity of threat and anxiety. Hannah Arendt has resolutely condemned this manner of uniting. The struggle for freedom and independence never ends. Nowadays everyone discovers that the world is a jungle as soon as they leave their home. Everyone wants to carve out some space in the rock face for her- or himself.
However, freedom and independence ought to be intrinsically linked to empathy and compassion for others. I am wary of the way we submit to the process in which everything is determined by economic considerations and to satisfying the whims of consumers. Or am I supposed to pretend that I haven’t noticed that politicians don’t take any decisions anymore?  That they pretend they are not manipulated by multinational companies, businessmen, influential lobbyists and election campaign sponsors? I am trying to understand the nature of the market system that is tying our hands. We have reduced democracy and the market economy to sheer business and I have been watching the scum float to the surface. It turns out that non-market behaviour poses a threat to the market economy. The market economy requires only selfish and isolated individuals. That is why it poses a threat to things like friendship, solidarity, helpfulness, love, kindness. The market economy regards these things almost as a realm of dangerous anarchy.
You can’t enter into a dialogue with any kind of zealotry dominated by irrational thinking. Faith and religious affiliation should be an absolutely private matter, and people should be allowed to choose it as adults rather than having it thrust upon them as newborns, whose lives we instantly stake on extortionist education depending on what kind of religious family they are born into. Church must not be identified with the state as is the case in the Islamic world or, in the past, in Byzantium. States must be free, but individual thinking and internal resources even more so. Raising children requires an environment that facilitates the development of individual thinking and character. No totalitarian system enables that. Not even one imposed by the parents.

But love of life and of the world is very different from the kind of political blindness or religious faith that is fearful and hateful, and that labels people as undesirable. Religious faith is passed on only through culture and family tradition. It requires people to renounce everything they see and feel. They are required to believe only what others say. But real love of the world embraces and loves the world in all its diversity.
This is why I have set out to rehabilitate the meaning of the word humanism through my writing. I no longer accept any labels. The struggle for human rights and indivisible respect for all human beings is of fundamental importance to me. Humanity has become incredibly frustrated both at the national and the religious level. I won’t go into details here, as I have covered these issues in depth in my novel “A Contribution to the History of Joy”. Europe’s neat civilisational cycle is coming to an end and all I can do is write elegies and symbolically blow up an orange-coloured building at the foot of the Petřín Hill in Prague, which houses an archive of the history of mankind.
A strange distrust prevails because rules have become so ephemeral. But the good news is, a surprise transformation might come from the most unexpected place. Not from the site of our anxieties, as we have experienced many times before. For instance, the French social scientist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard declared that 2000 would not arrive because we’ve been so oversaturated with information that information ceased to exist, and intellectual structures have been consigned to archives. Or Francis Fukuyama, who proposed in 2001 that the fall of communism meant the end of history and that the future will be sad, a century of boredom. And that brings us back to infantilisation.  So idealism, ideological struggle, courage and imagination will be completely replaced by the satisfying of consumer needs? Will there be no art or philosophy in the new post-historical era? Only looking after museums of the history of mankind?
Europe’s civilisational cycle is indeed coming to an end. We might believe that we could return to the age of innocence, an age when, childlike, we still hope in our heart of hearts that people are good… I no longer believe this. It’s been refuted by reality. It has something to do with the state of humanity. There is violence. This is reality. There is no policy of common humanity. We have forgotten the need to share the world with others. We have forgotten that the whole world is our home. We have forgotten the obvious, that everyone could be a citizen of any city without a worry, that our planet is an “island” and nobody can escape from anything. It’s strange how everyone flaunts their individualism these days, forgetting the positive and highest stage of individualism, i.e. cosmopolitism. Eastern Europe shares with Russia an aversion to the truth. But literature, if we are to highlight one word, must not lie. The mission of literature remains the same, boundlessly simple in its complexity: not to lie.
Indeed, it turns out that the acquisition of freedom and free critical thinking is difficult in all ages and it never ends. We are Europeans. We are human beings. Only one path remains, the ancient and most vexing one: respect and making the effort to understand and hear the other. Ultimately just one and only one boundary exists: that between one human being and another.
There are no states, there are no nationalities, there are no religions, there are no superior genders.
There are only human beings, swallows and the air.
There are no languages.
There is only the common language of bodies.

Translated from the Czech by JULIA and PETER SHERWOOD

CONTRIBUTORS

ANDREA BAJANI is an Italian writer and journalist based in Turin, regarded as one of the most exciting authors writing in Italy today.  He has won the Premio Mondello and the Premio Bagutta for his fiction, the latter for the novel Every Promise in 2011.  His publications include Cordiali saluti (Cordial Waves), Se consideri le colpe (If You Consider the Faults), as well as reportages Mi spezzo ma non m’impiego (I can break myself, but I don’t bend) and Domani niente scuola (No school tomorrow). He is a regular contributor to RAI Radio 2 and the dailies La Stampa, l´Unità, Il Sole-24 ore and the journal Lo straniero.

JANA BEŇOVÁ is a Slovak writer based in Bratislava.  She writes poetry as well as her own very distinctive, poetic fiction. In 2013 she took part in the University of Iow International Writing Program. She has published collections of poetry and short stories, and several short novels: Parker The love novel (2001); Plán odprevádzania (Seeing People Off, subtitled Café Hyena, 2008), which won the 2012 EU Prize for Literature;  Preč! Preč! (Away! Away!, 2012) and Honeymoon (2015). Since 2002, she has been a regular contributor to the popular Slovak daily, SME; a collection of her newspaper columns, Jana Beňová— Dnes (Jana Beňová — Today) appeared in 2010.

VITALIE CIOBANU is a author and journalist from the Republic of Moldova.  From 1986 to 1993, he was editor and editor-in-chief at the Hyperion Publishing House. Since 1994, he has been editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Contrafort and is a member of the International PEN Center (Chişinău), and since 2004, president of Moldova PEN Centre.  He is the author of a novel, The Change Post (1991) and several collections of shorter texts and award-winning essays including The Waltz on the Scaffold (2001) and The Fear of Difference (1999).

MARIE DARRIEUSSECQ  is a French novelist and literary scholar, based in Paris. She has taught French literature at the University of Lille, specializing in Stendhal and Proust. In 1997 she successfully defended her PhD thesis on the autofiction of Doubrovsky,Guibert, Leiris and Perec. Following the success of her first novel she gave up lecturing, a profession that she found hard to combine with dedicated novel writing. Her novel Pig Tales (Truismes) caused a literary sensation when it was published in 1996. Her other books include Breathing Under Water (1999), A Brief Stay With the Living (2001), White (2003) and My Phantom Husband (2008).

RADKA DENEMARKOVÁ is a Czech writer, literary historian, playwright, essayist, and translator based in Prague. Her novels include Money from Hitler (2006, winner of the prestigious Magnesia Litera prize) and Kobold (2011). Her latest novel, Příspěvek k dějinám radosti (A Contribution to the History of Joy) appeared in 2014. Her books have been translated into fifteen languages and the German edition of Money from Hitler (Ein Herrlicher Flecken Erde) won the Usedom Prize for Literature and the Georg Dehio Prize. In 2009 she won the Magnesia Litera for non-fiction for Smrt, nebudeš se báti aneb Příběh Petra Lébla (You Will Not Be Afraid of Death, or the Story of Petr Lébl, 2008), followed in 2011 by the Magnesia Litera for her translation of Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller’s Atemschaukel.

SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ is a Croatian writer and journalist. She graduated in comparative literature and sociology from the University of Zagreb. From 1982 to 1992 she was a staff writer for the Start bi-weekly newspaper and news weekly Danas (both in Zagreb), writing mainly on feminist issues. She emigrated from Croatia in the early 1990s and is currently based in Stockholm, Vienna and Zagreb. Her books include the novels Holograms Of Fear; Marble Skin and S. – A Novel About the Balkans (made into a feature film As If I Am Not There) and Frida’s Bed. She has published several collections of essays, including How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed; Balkan Express: Cafe Europa: Life After Communism; They Would Never Hurt a Fly and A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism.

JÁNOS HÁY is one of Hungary’s most popular writers, publishing in a wide variety of genres, including the short story, poetry and the essay.  He has also been editor of several literary journals, a founder of Budapest’s Palatinus Books, a playwright who made his mark with A Gézagyerek (The Géza Kid, 2004), and not least a novelist, best known for Dzsigerdilen (1996, reissued in 2004), which has also been translated into German. He has published 18 volumes so far. An occasional actor and artist, he is the illustrator of his own books. His work has been nationally recognised by the award of a number of prizes, notably the Attila József prize (2002) and the Márai prize (2009).

IOANA PÂRVULESCU is a writer, literature scholar and translator, a distinct voice in Romania’s literary circles.  She teaches modern literature at the University of Bucharest, has worked as an editor at the literary journal România literară, and has translated from French and German several books by Maurice Nadeau, Angelus Silesius and Rainer Maria Rilke. She is a member of the Romanian Writers’ Union and a founder member of the Comparative Literature Society in Romania.  She has published poetry, essays as well as a novel, Viaţa începe vineri (Life Begins on Friday), for which she won the EU Prize for literature in 2013.

ANDRE KURKOV, who writes in Russian, is one of Ukraine’s most famous authors. Having graduated from the Kiev Foreign Languages Institute, he has worked as a journalist, prison warder, film cameraman and scriptwriter, and has written critically acclaimed and popular novels including the cult bestseller Death and the Penguin (1996) and its sequel, Penguin Lost (2004) and The President’s Last Love (2007).  Altogether, he has written 13 novels and 5 books for children and his work has been translated into 25 languages, including English, Japanese, French, Chinese, Swedish and Hebrew. He has also written assorted articles for various publications worldwide. His Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, a record of the events shaking Ukraine in the wake of the Maidan revolution, appeared in 2014 and his latest novel in English translation, The Bickford Fuse in 2016.

JOCHEN SCHMIDT is a German writer and translator from French and Catalan. He grew up in Berlin, and studied German and Romance languages and literatures and computer science. His fiction includes a novel, Schneckenmühle (2013) about the last days of the GDR, and the short story collections Chaussee der Enthusiasten (The Enthusiasts Avenue, 2005) and Meine wichtigsten Körperfunktionen (My Key Bodily Functions, 2007).  In 2008 he published Schmidt liest Proust (Schmidt Reads Proust), a collection of his  blogs written between July 2006 and January 2007 while he read 20 pages of Marcel Proust‘s In Search of Lost Time a day. He has also written the travel books Gebrauchsanweisung für die Bretagne (A Manual For Brittany, 2004, Gebrauchsanweisung für Rumänien (Romania, 2013),  Gebrauchsanweisung für Ostdeutschland (East Germany 2015).

ANDRZEJ STASIUK is a Polish novelist, travel writer, playwright and essayist. In the 1980s he joined the pacifist movement and after deserting from the army spent a year and a half in a communist prison. In 1987 he settled in the Beskid Mountains near the Polish-Slovak border, where he founded Czarne, one of the leading Polish publishing houses featuring contemporary Polish as well as Central European authors. Many of his works have been translated into English including the novels Nine, White Raven, the collection of short stories Tales from Galicia, and travel books Fado, On the Road to Badabag and Taksim. His most recent books are Dziennik pisany później (A Diary Written in Retrospect), Wschód (The East, 2014) and Kucając (Crouching, 2015).

GONÇALO MANUEL TAVARES is a Portuguese writer based in Lisbon. His most successful and widely translated novel, Jerusalem, won not won Portugal’s three most prestigious literary awards in 2004 but was also voted the book of the decade by critics of the Público and has been included in the European edition of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die. Since 2002 he has been writing a series of books entitled Bairro (The Neigbhbourhood). His books translated into English include Um Homem: Klaus Klump  (2003, A Man: Klaus Klump (2003), A Máquina de Joseph Walser (2004,  Joseph Walser’s Machine) and Aprender a Rezar de la Técnica (2007, Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique.

TRANSLATORS

EUGENE BROGYÁNYI is an American translator and editor. He has translated the works of contemporary Hungarian playwrights, as well as modern classics by Ferenc Molnár and Arthur Schnitzler.  He is the editor of Drama Contemporary: Hungary (PAJ Publications, New York).

CHRISTINA PRIBICEVIC ZORIC is a former Chief of Conference and Language Services at the UN ICT and an acclaimed translator of Croatian and Serbian literature, and Slavenka Drakulić’s court translator into English. Her translations include Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars and Zlata’s Diary.

LOUISE ROZIER is an associate professor of Italian at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Her research areas are in the fields of translation and in early twentieth-century Italian literature, with a focus on women writers.  Her English translation of Fortunato Pasqualino’s The Little Jesus of Sicily (1999) won the 1996 Renato Poggioli Translation Award.

JULIA SHERWOOD is a Slovak-born freelance translator. She translates from Slovak, Czech, Polish, Russian and German, with a focus on contemporary Slovak fiction, for example, works by Daniela Kapitáňová and, jointly with Peter Sherwood, by Peter Krištúfek, Jana Juráňová, Uršuľa Kovalyk and Balla.

GERALD TURNER one of the foremost translators of Czech literature since the early 1980s, when, under the pseudonym A.G. Brain, he translated the writings by Václav Havel and many other banned authors. More recently, he has translated works by, among others, Tomáš Halík and Michal Ajvaz.

MARTIN WOODSIDE is a founding member of Calypso Editions, an independent US press and a translator from Romanian. He has published a chapbook of poetry, Stationary Landscapes(Pudding House Press) in 2009 and two books of Romanian poetry in translation, including the anthology Of Gentle Wolves (2011).