An hour later, after an espresso and three cigarettes, his headache was gone.
He repeated everything the next day, with the same result. Wanting to find out what in that ritual had cured him, Boris tried eliminating ingredients. He changed restaurants, ate different food, tried tea instead of coffee, did not eat at all, but the headaches still vanished after lunch. Sure that it was the writer’s magic, he brought another book from the same batch with him, but the throbbing still stopped. Certain that he was cured of whatever it was that he had, he brought The New Yorker with him to read during lunch. His head exploded again.
He finally figured it out: the shelter of his mother tongue had cured him.
Note: Lucifer
No wonder some people are afraid of immigrants. Back where we came from, we were in the light—the light of our language, of our own culture, in our own heaven—and then we fell out of it. We are all Lucifers. The fear of immigrants is a biblical fear.
—T.O., June 11, 1994
MIRROR. May 24, 1995
It was a glorious May morning, bright, warm, and not too humid, which was a small miracle considering that there had been a heavy downpour all night long. Sara had finished her article around two in the morning, woke up around eight to take another look at it, made a few changes, and took the printout to the NOW Magazine offices on the Danforth. Her editor read it while she sat at his desk. It was all good to go. Happy, Sara decided to take a little break. She took the subway to Yonge and Bloor and walked to her old workplace.
Sara wanted to take Luz to Yorkville, and Luz said she didn’t mind as long as they went there through the underground city. When they left the store together, the clerks looked like they had seen a ghost. They walked one block west and went downstairs by Mr. Grocer, where they entered the corridors full of stores under the Manulife Centre. Five minutes later, they resurfaced at Bellair and Cumberland. Sara led Luz across the street and through the short passage to the Coffee Mill. The small, secluded patio was full, so they went inside and sat in the far corner, by the glass wall. Except for two old Hungarian ladies, they were alone.
“I read your articles,” Luz said. “You are angry at your old country.”
A middle-aged Hungarian woman came to take their order. Sara asked for two chestnut purées.
“I guess I am,” she said when the waitress left, “but not because I miss it, if that’s what you mean.”
“No. But people think they have left voluntarily when they were actually squeezed out. You have every right to be angry, but I didn’t expect that it would last this long.”
Sara leaned her forehead on her hand and looked outside. “It’s been a year and a half,” she finally said. “It’s not that long.”
Luz nodded.
After Boris got his job in advertising, Sara was able to quit the store to find something better. She saw an ad in the gay village weekly, had an interview, but their enthusiasm cooled when she mentioned her husband. The people at NOW were much more open, and she got her first opportunity only a week after she had called: they asked her to cover a conference on Yugoslavia being held at the University of Toronto. After five days of sitting in the auditorium at Innis College listening to academics, politicos, and self-proclaimed experts from her old country arguing, Sara knew: there was no going back. The wound was full of pus. It would take years to heal, maybe decades. For the first time since she had come to Canada, she felt good about leaving.
Five days later, her article appeared. They gave it a plug on the cover and two full pages inside. She felt better than she had expected. Actually, she felt happy. From that point on, she published on average one article every other week, and—although the money wasn’t good enough to live on—she had found again a big piece of her identity.
The woman brought their desserts.
“So, what are you going to do now?”
“I’ve enrolled in an M.A. program at Ryerson. Media production. I have enough experience from Belgrade to do it relatively easily.”
“How is your husband?”
“He’s good, I guess. I haven’t seen much of him lately. He’s working on another big campaign.”
Luz circled her spoon in her chestnut purée, eroding the food symmetrically rather than eating it.
“How are you?” Sara asked.
“Better. Are you two good?” Luz asked without looking up.
“Why do you ask?”
“Then you’re not.”
“Luz.”
Another half-circle around the centre. Silence. Sara’s sigh. A few random spoonfuls of purée. The other half of the circle. Sara signalled with her hand, and the waitress came. She ordered an espresso and some sparkling water for Luz.
“No, we’re good. It’s just … I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
“Because you can.”
“I feel guilty.”
“Guilty?”
“Boris has done so much for us, right from the start. He opened up my eyes about Canada, he got the papers, he arranged our wedding, he earned the money for us to start here. I just don’t know if I’m giving enough back to him.”
“Sometimes just being there is enough,” Luz said.
“We don’t argue. We support each other. And there is a feeling that probably has its name in some language, but it isn’t love. Not on my part. I’ve never told you how Boris and I met. I was in love with his best friend.”
There was no change in Luz’s expression.
“My boyfriend disappeared. He was sent to fight, and I never heard from him again. I know he’s not dead, I just know, but he never tried to find me. What was I supposed to do?”
The waitress appeared with their drinks and took away the empty purée dishes. Luz remained silent.
“I know, you’re going to ask me why I married Boris—”
“Not at all. That’s a stupid question. In fact, I won’t ask you anything. All the questions and all the answers are yours. I think you need a mirror.” She coughed into her hand and drank a little water.
“A miracle?”
“A mirror,” Luz repeated. “Everyone needs a mirror. Not a piece of glass, dear. But the people around you. Your people. You have lost your country, your language, your place. You have no refuge. There is no reflection of you. You must find something to measure yourself with. Not against. With. Either you let yourself go, give yourself to the wind, and see where it takes you …”
“Or?”
“Or you find a mirror in something, someone.”
Sara stared into her dark eyes, but Luz did not show any sign that she would continue to talk.
Sara sighed. “I don’t know how to do any of that.”
Note: Sunglasses
You can search for the perfect sunglasses all your life. First, they have to suit your face, make you look mysterious, but not like a spy, hide bushy eyebrows if you have them, and reveal your cheekbones, the only part of the face that looks good even in old age. Then, they have to fit properly, the arms hugging your ears and not turning them into antennae. They should have hydrophilic socks. The nose pads have to be tight, but soft, and not cause sneezing. A guy spent months and thousands of dollars on curing his recent case of sinusitis, taking so many antihistamines and other allergy medicines that his liver became swollen. In the end, he replaced his supermarket shades and was good again. Except for his liver, which could have been sold as foie gras to a restaurant in Coventry.
The lenses are an entirely different story. What do they block? UVA or UVB or UVC or all of them? What about harmful blue light? Are they impact resistant? Plastic or glass? Is there an iridium coating? Sometimes it’s good if the contrast is increased, but sometimes you don’t want that. The same lenses can turn a patch of snow into a Tabriz rug, but they can darken your golf course to the point where you will think you are up shit creek. What do you want to see through them? What do you need to hide? Sunglasses are very good at mitigating guilt. If the lenses are dark enough, there will be less con
trast between the people around you—they will all turn into one large organism, a faceless, mute presence. It’s easier to feel guilt before God than before a crowd.
It was written somewhere that Nero watched gladiatorial combat through precious stones to dim the sun. He preferred emeralds, they say. Green is the colour of spring, of new life. He was a very ironic man, Nero. You watch men fighting to death, but put a filter between the scene and your eyes, and that filter says, “Death is new life.” Perhaps that’s why he torched Rome—maybe from his perspective he was giving the city new life. The ultimate catharsis. And it is true: every time you create something new, you kill something old.
The question is whether something new is always born when something old dies. I believe it is. I believe there can be no vacuum of ideas, no emptiness of any kind, anywhere. We don’t always see everything, but there is always something there. Energy, matter, rays, colours, feelings, ideas. The planes and ships that disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle—maybe they hit a giant idea that’s been floating there for centuries, waiting for the right head.
But green, green over red! A gladiator lashes, and blood spurts, and the crowd is beside themselves—their man has scored. Red is all over the victim. Red excites, inflames. Only one man does not see red; through his emerald, Nero sees dark brown. He is watching the rust taking over a man. The man is corroding before his eyes. While everyone else is enjoying a murder, Nero is being served a metaphor.
Nero didn’t go down in history as the man who invented sunglasses, though. That happened in the twelfth century in China. The Chinese took quartz full of imperfections and made metal frames for it, not to protect the eyes from the sun but to make their expression unreadable. The rulers wanted to remain detached from the events and stories before them. They needed cool. They found that looking cool helped them rule. A cold face and hidden eyes will win every time. Emotional people don’t get respect.
Still, sunglasses didn’t catch on. For eight hundred years nothing much happened. Then came Hollywood. Big stars, bright studio lights, California sunshine, the need to remain beautiful if you wanted to work. Actors adopted sunglasses first. By the 1930s, they really took off. The Polaroid filters of 1936 were the first real protection for the eyes. In World War II, some soldiers got sunglasses sent from home to save their lives in the sunny countries.
I’m still thinking of the way it all started: how the need to protect the eyes conveniently led to the chance to hide the feelings. It was never really about the sun. From the beginning, sunglasses were about hiding oneself from others and cushioning others in our view. They are a Walkman for our eyes.
I bought my first Walkman in 1980, I think only one year after they were invented. It came with a blue holster made of cheap plastic, and I carried it everywhere. In Belgrade, people on the street would look at my headphones, they would follow the cable down to my belt and the strange machine, and—although they did not know what the little box was—they quickly realized it was something that separated me from them. It was great to watch their eyes and their process of deduction. In the end, their eyes would try to meet my eyes, which was, I’m sorry, impossible, because I was wearing dark sunglasses. Their inspection of me invariably ended with a degree of hatred. They thought they were smart and good-looking, and I had no right to filter them out.
At one point, I was almost persuaded that they were right. Too much isolation can thin you out. I bought a small red Aiwa unit that could record as well as play. I would plug in an unobtrusive stereo microphone, walk down the street at noon, and record for as long as the cassette ran. Then I would rewind the tape, take the microphone out and plug the headphones in, and I would continue to walk, listening to the immediate past. I soon discovered that the sounds that other people had just left fitted with those who were just passing me by. It was a resident stream, the native sound of that particular place. You can record a sixty-minute tape on any given street in the world, and then for several years you need not bother listening to the reality of the same place. Even if something dramatic happens, a war starts in that country, a mass murder is committed the previous day, even then—just speed up the tape about five per cent and play it ten per cent louder. That is humankind.
That is why art works.
We are only repeating the words of those who came before us. We are a tape, a very long tape, lasting decades. Sometimes, our words coincide with what is going on around us and what we are saying sounds relevant and fresh.
That is why art works only rarely.
—T.O., June 18, 1996
CITIZENSHIP. November 29, 1996
The room was already full of people when they arrived, and Sara and Boris had to ask a woman to remove her bags from two adjacent chairs so they could sit. The space was a large office with a row of numbered windows on one side, its ugliness only emphasized by the cosmetics of red flowers and small paper flags. The amount of red and white, the manner in which someone had decorated this unpleasant space with precision instead of joy, reminded Sara of the Communist holidays of Yugoslavia in her childhood. November 29 was, incidentally, the biggest holiday of the old country, the Day of the Republic, and they still officially celebrated it in Belgrade. The only thing missing here was some revolutionary music and then the Central Committee could enter.
The door on the left suddenly opened and a giant black man in the red uniform of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police led a line of men and women into the room. He told everyone to rise, and then introduced the woman in the middle as the citizenship judge who would preside over the ceremony.
“She’s a Tito,” Boris whispered.
The judge welcomed everyone and explained in a soft and authoritative voice what was expected of them. Then she read the oath, slowly, and they all repeated after her: “I swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, Her Heirs and Successors, and that I will faithfully observe the laws of Canada and fulfil my duties as a Canadian citizen.”
The judge indicated to them to sit and gave a short welcome speech. Sara’s mind drifted away. It was her thirtieth birthday the next day, and the symbolism of this event just made it harder to separate things. Was this a new beginning or the pompous end of something? They’d crossed into another life and the door had closed behind them. But what had remained the same, and what had changed?
“What now?” Sara said when they were outside.
“Let’s go somewhere for a coffee,” Boris said, pulling his collar close to his chin to keep the cold out.
“Sure. But I mean, what now, are we different?”
“Well, yeah, I guess. We’re free again.”
While slowly walking up Yonge Street, Sara thought about that. She didn’t think Boris was being philosophical. He probably meant it on a practical level: they were free again to move, to travel. When the West imposed sanctions against Serbia, their passports had become useless overnight. Not that they had the money to travel, but the fact that they had been at the mercy of the foreign embassies, almost none of which gave visas to Serbs, made them feel locked out and cut off. The Canadian passport was like the Yugoslav one in its glory days: when you had one, only a few countries demanded visas. In that sense, yes, they were free again.
But where to go, what to carry, where to arrive?
Her grandmother, the wife of an army officer, had never worked a day in her life. She was lucky that her husband had chosen the right side when the Germans invaded, and after the war she was awarded a hero’s pension. Ever since Sara could remember, her grandmother had always behaved erratically. An image of virtue one day, all shyness and tact and manners; an evil machine the next, torturing Sara’s mom and her two other children, demanding, never satisfied. Until she reached her old age, when she became stable in what could best be described as absolute irresponsibility. She just chirped around, light as a feather, nothing touching her, nothing worrying her, as if her life had reached a level of unprecedented ease. As if
she could make anything out of it, on a whim turn it into what was only in her dreams.
Once, Sara’s mom had reprimanded the old bird. Sara’s parents were already divorced and her mom had some worries at work. When she tried to complain to her mother, during their regular daily visit when they brought milk and bread and magazines, Grandma did not even try offering advice, or words of comfort.
“Can you for once try to help me, Mom?” Sara’s mother said.
“Darling, it’s your life,” the old woman had answered. “Nobody can decide for you, right? My life is over now, every day is a bonus, and I just can’t be bothered with problems.”
As if life were a ride, and when she had arrived at her destination, she had switched the engine off to take a rest.
Had Sara arrived anywhere safe enough to turn the engine off? Had this thing today made a difference?
Note: Dying means forgetting words
If the idealists are right, nothing exists until we name it. Dying, then, must mean forgetting words, losing language, going to the place where there are only shifting shadows and shapeless fogs. Some religions call that place Hell.
Apparently, some people, when they cross that border between life and death, are capable of taking words with them, of keeping the words. When they enter that grey zone, they start naming things, giving birth to colours, passion, energy. They start building a world that is immensely more beautiful than the caricature we live in. Those people go to that world every day, they die a little every day—because that is the only way to enter—and they work, they build, they create, they beautify, hoping that that other world will spill over into this one, and improve it a little.
Some religions call that world Art.
—T.O., September 6, 1997
BEFORE AND AFTER. June 23, 1998
Boris had brought an old Pentax with him, its body made of steel, heavy as hell; she used to grumble about having to carry it when his hands were full of cheap furniture, or groceries. There must be some photos from their early days in Canada. She thought they were probably in a box in the closet, waiting in ambush, the way all memories do, but she couldn’t recall seeing any, ever.
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