In the end, we find a place, an apartment in the block of flats on bulevardul Cantemir. Blocks of flats have been sprouting up there straight from the ground, without stairs or landings leading to the stairwell inside. Those were only welded together later, and the concrete finally poured. But people had to get to their apartments even during construction, after all, so there are boot and paw prints left in the concrete. Water collects in the imprints after the rain. You have to be careful not to fall because it’s slippery. When you look up from the foot of the buildings, you can see strings running from somebody’s kitchen to the living room and lingerie hung out to dry. It’s not the colors, but the sheer image of somebody leaning out the window to hang it that makes an impression; the thought of a woman leaning out of this window, below her a dozen stories and a slippery landing marked with footprints. When I think about the space separating her from the concrete I feel dizzy.
From that window, you can see merchants packing up in the afternoon after a day at the local market. They form small groups, they joke around and wait for a car that will take them home. You can see pedestrians zigzagging across the busy freeway, and the cars won’t even slow down. You can see a man in another block of flats across the way, how he smokes on his balcony, among the bed linens hung to dry, and keeps nervously glancing over his shoulder; maybe he’s not allowed to smoke and he’s afraid of his wife. You can spot a 24/7 store, a small kiosk on the corner; and inside—an old babushka selling sunflowers with seeds ready to husk straight from her blanket spread across the floor.
Chaos surrounds the buildings, and nobody seems to notice because it has made itself part of the landscape: cars parked in the bushes, muddy hills, those bed sheets waving high against the gray wall; balconies patched with whatever’s available, wood, plastic, metal. And inside those buildings—dark stairwells, painted in bold colors, azure, navy blue, and green; they help you notice that everything else is not so happy. Doors are open throughout the corridor, there are buckets full of potatoes standing outside, someone’s pancakes, somebody else is peeling onions, and two women are sitting and smoking. It’s summer and it’s unbearably hot in those apartments, so you open the doors to air them out, and you find a neighbor to talk for a little while around the corner, where the sun can’t reach you. But when you go inside the apartments, as usual, they’re clean, neat, and homely—as if the Russian mess stayed behind the door.
And also this: you exit the elevator on any given floor and there is only a tiny bit of free space. The rest has been claimed by the residents. They’ve walled it off with steel doors, created extra hallways, and extended their balconies from the inside so that now they are like verandas. They jostle around their compact space, claiming as much of it for themselves as they can.
There’s more still deposited in my memory. Hotel Krajina in the Serbian city of Negotin: two buildings, one next to the other (the image slowly takes shape in my mind), the hallway carpeted in gray, and a group of tired men standing on that carpeting; it’s evening and they’ve just come back after being out the whole day. They smoke cigarettes and hide them in the palms of their hands. They stand around in flip-flops, in their rugged boots. They don’t look like they’re waiting for anyone, or like they’re guests in the hotel. They simply are, they’re standing and smoking under a sign that says smoking is forbidden; right by the flowerpots with dry soil. The sleepy doorwoman pays them no attention and they keep on smoking and staring at the TV that shows only muted static. The doorwoman writes down the prices on a piece of paper and shows them to us through the glass screen. The room is on the second floor, but the smell of laundry is already overwhelming enough in the lobby. On the first floor, in front of every door, is a drying rack with bedding hanging on it, checkered shirts, leggings from a previous era, anything you can find in any second-hand store for a dime a pound. There’s no laundry on the second floor, though it starts again on the third floor, and so it goes all the way to the tenth. Nobody comes to Negotin, a forgotten hellhole near the Bulgarian border, close to the mining town of Bor. The hotel is inhabited by immigrants, unemployed, a gray mass that you don’t usually see together in one place. There’s nobody on the second floor—the only regular hotel floor. No one is using the bathrooms, tiled in a dirty brown; nobody lathers up the soap with its long-evaporated smell of generic cleaning agent. Nobody looks out the windows, from which you can see the grand prize at the local casino—a Yugo.
Then there’s Hotel Kiev in Czerniowce. Before the war it was a classy hotel, modern, representative of the decent-sized metropolis that Chernivtsi used to be—and still is now, but in a different way. Although I’m not sure if I should believe the stories of its former glory: in 1919 Katarzyna Sayn-Wittgenstein complained about the local hotels, particularly about Hôtel Central. In her diary she wrote: “It is only our second day in Czerniowce, and already it managed to bring us down. Our hotel accommodations are unpleasant, uncomfortable, and expensive.” And almost a century later the hotel has changed, room by room, meter by meter. With every visit a new part of the hallway becomes available to the guests. There used to be little rooms with space for two beds, thin walls, and creaking floors. Now, there are hallways big as Ali Baba’s cave, covered with colorful, Styrofoam stuccos. Clean plasterboard covers the dingy plaster. The floor manager is no longer nestled at the end of a corridor, on a sofa; she doesn’t have to get up in the middle of the night to every creak, be on the move in her high heels, fully clothed, and out from under her thick comforter. I always admired the resilience of her perm, untouched, as if carved in stone. Now, opposite the stairs, there’s a huge hole in the wall behind which is a spacious room and two fold-out beds with rumpled bedding, and two female custodians talking about a wedding. “It was beautiful,” they say, “so many guests.” “Let me see your receipt—your room number is twenty-three, end of the hall.”
I remember our rides from place to place, cities, streets, people, even the weather. I greedily take notes on restaurants with people who dance until they can’t dance anymore, because I will be back for sure, or so I tell myself. I cast from my memory the hotels, empty spaces, gaps in my biography. Later, when it’s already too late, I try to recall those hallways with plaster crumbling off the walls, the elevators that stop only at certain floors. I try to remember the face of a crying housekeeper whose son had just been stabbed, and she couldn’t go to the hospital from fear of being fired. But her face disappeared somewhere and all I remember is a blue apron and words of consolation from the fat janitor-pimp. I recreate hotel bars, empty and dusty, with drunk staff; I recreate hotel restaurants—that one with a pimpled waiter who refused to serve anything, or this other one where shady businesses are discussed in the morning, and elegant older ladies have half a liter of vodka with their breakfast.
I was riding on a tram, a guy in a checkered shirt behind me, sweaty and possibly a little drunk. He’s gripping a handle, and has a suitcase in his other hand and a coat over his shoulder. An expressionless man, glassy-eyed, he keeps pushing me, but the person in front of me holds his position. I’m stuck in this vice, and the hand of a third man (also with a coat over his shoulder) pulls the money out of my pocket. I can see all of it; I read the gestures as if I was watching a game in a slow motion. The only thing that is left for me is to fight them, so whoosh, I grab the hand that I can feel, that I can see in my pocket; and I start to yell and these three yell back at me. The entire tram turns their backs on me, nobody sees anything, nothing ever happened. The hand escapes as if it was slippery with soap; the seemingly drunk guy has already passed my money to the third man. The first two are still shouting; the third disappears. And when the tram starts up again I can see him at the tram stop, standing there calmly. It was the ticket controller who pointed me out to them, the bitch, I want to yank her by her dirty hair and kick her ass. The other two have already moved; now they watch her and she indicates someone with a jut of her chin. They start to work on a woman carrying groceries. I’m standing where I st
ood before, I don’t do a thing, I don’t exit; just keep your mouth shut and keep going, I tell myself.
Lviv’s trams—a noisy whore that sells people out instead of taking care of them. The ticket controller’s a thief. The city is despicable. You already know how it is, when somebody steals your money and the rest of the world pretends that nothing’s happened. You’ve already experienced the Lviv school of pickpocketing first-hand. Everyone refers to it almost with pride, as if they were talking about the school of mathematics. They are proud because—one—it’s so incredible and—two—it’s so them; it is so them because it comes from the borderlands, and because it’s a lost art. The Lviv school of pickpockets, one of a million reasons to miss our poor motherland that is no longer ours. And so the Lviv school of pickpocketing shoved a stick up your ass, took whatever was yours, and kept on doing the same to others—and you were scared, you stood like a pillar of salt, in silence, fearing the cold of a knife. And when they left—those representatives of this famous school—you went one more stop and also exited, all sweaty, looking for objects missing from your pockets while knees kept wobbling. J. kept trying to calm you, as if you were a child, “Nothing happened,” she kept saying, “stop, it’s just few zloty.” Now you know how it feels.
Truth be told, you knew the feeling from before. You knew it perfectly well. But you didn’t want to tell anyone. You were on a train from Bystrzyca to Bucharest, because it was in Bystrzyca were we stopped on our way to Syhot. The trip to Bucharest takes I don’t know how long, so we stop there to see the city and spend the night in a motel. And these five men who were on the train with us kept drinking all the way. They were smoking in our compartment, even though it was forbidden. The ticket controller caught them, they paid the fine, and started shouting, mad about the money I guess, that it was our fault. So they kept smoking, blowing smoke in our faces and yelling. The controller walked by but didn’t say anything more. He checked our tickets, not theirs, because they had stopped being nice and were already telling him to go fuck himself and that he was alone. So he checked our passports not to lose face completely, and went on. I said: “Let’s go, I can stand the rest of the way, come on.” But B. remained seated and said “No, we’re staying, because if we go, then I’ll snap.” So we stayed.
The landscape outside the window was rather flat. The leg of the trip north of Salva and all the way to Syhot, is a ride on precarious mountain-side road: bridges, tunnels. You could lose your mind. But so far, in the lower region, it was rather calm, except for those guys. We were pretending to be asleep and they kept singing some army songs right into our ears. So finally, I don’t remember how it went down exactly, but I found myself choking the one in front of me, the big one. I was choking him and the others were kicking me and B. was trying to do something about it. But there wasn’t much to be done.
“Fags!” they kept shouting, “Just you wait!” And then: “Passports, you fuckers, give me your passports. Wallets. Money. Luggage.” (The controller passed outside the door, took a quick look in, and disappeared). They couldn’t decide, as if this was some kind of game, and kept laying our stuff out, picking their prize: credit cards were out of the question, and we had almost no cash. In the end, the big one said: “This.” It was a Roamer from my great-grandfather, a cheap watch, but the only thing I had to remember him by. I had never met my great-grandfather, the one who hid out in London; the watch was all that I had of him. The rest of him, the memory, is in me and will die with me. He sent these watches one time for me and my brother. “This,” said the big one, and that’s how great-grandpa and the only tangible souvenir that remained between us went to hell. The other two men held me, the fat one took off my watch and I did nothing. I just kept screaming, “You leave that alone you fuckhead, ty chuju!” I kept screaming in my own language. And he, as if nothing had happened, simply strapped on the watch and pressed it to his ear. It worked nicely, although it ran a little late; such was my great-grandfather’s revenge.
I kept screaming; my ears had turned red and I screamed like that so that everything that needed to be said was said. That was the first time, and I’ve never talked about it before, I experienced the adrenaline that comes with theft, the bad kind, and it was a huge dose. It was bad because it felt like being publicly raped; and there’s also the question of honor. You feel as if someone injected you with pure alcohol and, to make matters worse, later you have to collect your shit and leave quietly. Those who just robbed you will kick you in the ass in farewell, so you leave amid peals of laughter. “Motherfuckers,” I thought, “I’ll kill you all”; and simultaneously: “Thank God it’s only a watch”; and also: “I hope they won’t look for us later, on the train”; and finally, without making any sense: “What will I do without the watch, without my great-grandfather on my wrist?”
All of Romania was like that, just my wanderings. One time I slept in the corridor and nothing bad happened. I slept in the first-class waiting room in the town of Dej because the waiting room was empty. People with tickets for second class were afraid to come inside, even though the train was already a few hours late and they could barely stand. But they had tickets for second class, so they sat on the concrete floor of the train station. I had fallen asleep in the waiting room even though, just like them, I had a ticket for coach. But I didn’t give a shit, because I could always say that I didn’t understand anything. And when I woke up, I was lying in a sea of Gypsies. My head was resting on the lap of a fat guy with a mustache. When he realized I was awake, he just tipped his hat and pointed to my back-pack to let me know he was watching it. A child was asleep on my stomach. Everyone was smoking, we shared, we drank some vodka. There was always somebody behind the train station with a barrel of it; you could buy yourself half a liter in a plastic bottle. Someone would always host me in Romania, someone always took pity. When there was nowhere to go, for example, these two boys from a tiny hotel appeared—although “hotel” barely fits this regular house with a garden and a regular family, all crammed into one room so that they could rent the rest of the house to visitors, down to the last bed. These two boys would sleep in one bed together, so that I could also fit. And right after I woke up I took a ride to the train station in a rusty bus—but maybe that was in a different city, a different summer, and only I think that it was then. I had my backpack between my legs; a man got on the bus. He leaned over to the driver, his jacket over his shoulder because it was getting hot. And I could see under this jacket he had already opened up my backpack and was trying to pull something out. I grabbed him and he started to run, and just before he took off—he took a swing at me, but missed. And then it turned out that everybody had seen it; there was a French teacher sitting next to me and she told me, “Oh, mister, I know this one in and out. He steals here all the time.” “So why didn’t you say something when he was working me?” I responded. How is it that when you’re somewhere far away and there’s poverty all around, and even though you look just like everyone else, for some reason you seem to be the better target?
I intoxicated myself with Romania, year after year, forgetting—or no, bartering rather—bad deeds over good ones: like this guy at a hotel next to Gara de Nord who tried to screw me over, he was replaced by the memory later that evening when the house of a drunk in Moisei burned down, and the whole village stood watching, smoking and drinking, giving advice to the youngsters who were climbing on the roof, trying to salvage whatever they could. The entire village stood there and debated the crime and the just punishment. Memories of attempts to extort a bribe from me have been traded for a day when the priest’s wife presented me with her cunning goodness; I say cunning because the goal was not to feed the traveler, but to secure the future of her daughter, a medical student in Bucharest (who, unbeknownst to her mother, had a boyfriend there); or for dozens of less significant moments: all this inexact change I got back from a cashier, attempts to fool me at a currency exchange kiosk, some conmanship here and there. But I still keep coming back and trade
for more memories: petty theft for a grand experience, and I get what I want. I don’t know myself where this mercy comes from, maybe from the fact that there’s no price I wouldn’t pay for what happens to me out there; to eat cheese with highlanders in a cable car sliding, it feels like it, into the abyss. A woman holds the bread to her bosom, a man tears off a huge chunk of cheese with his hands, cuts it with his little knife into pieces, shares it, even though he was supposed to sell it at the market. We drink vodka, we drink water from a brook—the train stops and you can get off sometimes, stretch your legs. Together, we save a drunk who sits on the steps of the train car the whole way and who keeps vomiting, or hanging low and trailing his hand over the ground, which moves too fast for him and makes him laugh.
“You’ve lost your mind!” says J. “You’re starting to see thieves everywhere.” But what am I suppose to do, it’s a litany, a chain of evil hearts. We barely got of the plane in Madrid and already on the subway some man knocked into me from behind, hurrying to grab a seat. But before he sat, he slowed down and stopped. And I see it again: shabby clothes, his eyes meeting those of a guy behind me, and of course the jacket—always the jacket hanging over the shoulder. Only the slight tremors of his muscles reveal what’s actually happening: it looks like he’s nodding off while standing, but in reality he’s looking through a crocodile-skin bag. Its owner doesn’t understand English, so I gesture to her what’s happening. And it’s as if she was kicked by a horse, her face all flushed. She’s screaming, and her husband is grabbing the thief, who is barely responsive; he’s pushed out onto the station platform, someone grabs him and his being taken somewhere immediately. That’s how I am now, even in Palermo—instead of enjoying the city, which is covered by turns in dirt and the baroque, with bushes in places where bombs fell almost seventy years ago, instead, I keep staring at a guy on our bus ride, and I know. A beginner, although not young, or maybe he’s just poor at his job. He’s working on some fellow. He’s trying to open his back-pack and it takes him almost ten minutes. I can see how he’s sweating because the zipper keeps grinding to a halt, until the one who’s being robbed realizes what’s going on and the usual happens: shouts, the thief and his partner exit the bus. They’ll wait for the next one.
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