EEG

by Daša Drndic

  Today the rooms of the Récollets castle are home to an architectural school, and scientists, artists and writers from all over the world stay there.

  Once in the course of my three-month Parisian stay I found myself with other inhabitants of the castle. I was told there was a meeting in the piano room. This was a hall, an unheated long narrow room with two conference tables and some fifty cheap folding chairs, to say nothing of the nonexistent piano. The light was neon, like in a deserted train station. Of the eighty or so people who stay in the castle, about a dozen had turned up, mostly young scientists in training, paid to work in laboratories and presumably renting rooms in the castle for little money. Four physicists, two technicians, two architects and a few heavily made-up Parisian shop assistants came. One had been in Paris already for a year and didn’t know three words of French. Two were from Italy — from Rome and Milan — one woman was from India, and there were some Greeks. I asked them what they did after five and at the weekend, did they go to the cinema, to the theater, to exhibitions, to bookshops, to concerts, to discos. Silence. I didn’t know what to talk about. They mentioned wires and currents, chemical experiments, laboratory analyses, I didn’t understand a thing. On the conference table there were wrapped cheeses, bread you broke with your hands, all the wine was cheap (except mine), there were no glasses or knives. I stayed for half an hour, because I was beginning to feel cold (and we were sitting in our coats), not to say sad. What world did I belong to? I went to put antiglaucoma drops in my eyes, which often water. Still, I had discovered what liquid solids were, that glass is in fact liquid, fluid, although I didn’t know, and still don’t, what to do with this knowledge.

  An Albanian painter, Edi Hila, was staying in the room next to mine, and unlike most of the French people I met at that time he seemed somehow close, I wanted to ask him all kinds of things, about Enver Hoxha’s bunkers, about Skënderbe cognac, which I hadn’t tasted for more than three decades but had heard that it was no longer what it once was, about cleaned mussels in jars which were imported into Yugoslavia from his country, cheap, perfect for risotto, about persecuted writers and painters who for years, right up until 1991, had been savagely tortured in prison-fortresses scattered through the mountains, not even reachable by goat track, let alone by road, and who had written their books and poems on remnants of toilet and cigarette paper, noting or sketching their frozen dreams; I wanted to ask him about Kadare, had he really been Enver’s spy, there were all kinds of questions I wanted to ask Edi Hila about the country which had walled itself in, about its forty-year whispering, about the fear that makes a human voice break, and the throat gape like a dumb black hole, I wanted to ask the Albanian painter Edi Hila all that and lots more, because I had long wanted to visit that country, that country of dignified, proud people (besa), where only the eagles were free and at times not even they. But I communicated with the Albanian painter Edi Hila with difficulty, although we both spoke French, because the Albanian painter Edi Hila painted the whole time, and he was also driven crazy by mice, he hadn’t been able to get rid of the mice in his room and they got everywhere, into his clothes, his food, even into empty plastic bags where they rustled all night long, and so, in passing, we talked about mice. I went to the opening of his exhibition, but there Edi Hila was surrounded by invited guests and the media, so it was not exactly conducive to a tête-à-tête. Then I went back to one country, and Edi Hila to another.

  Two years later I wound up in Albania, and in Tirana I unlocked Edi Hila’s story. Otherwise, I didn’t get at all upset in Tirana. Nothing bothered me, no one ran into me, people walked normally, on the right, penetrating voices didn’t hammer at my brain, the sky was blue and there were no (or not many) Americans. I was afraid only that some vehicle might run me over, because there were few cars there and no one gave a fuck about traffic lights, neither pedestrians nor drivers, and the pavements were abnormally high, almost half a meter. The city looks, roughly, like the center of Berlin, because in Berlin too there are broad boulevards that stretch out of sight, and gleaming shop windows with expensive goods. The cafés in Tirana are full, the young people are fashionably dressed, they smile and peck at their iPhones. There are shopping centers, supermarkets with every conceivable alimentary product, there are many large, luxurious hotels and small, private ones, there are parks, and there is the Lana river. And, wherever I drank it, the macchiato was first class, better than in Italy. There were birds, both in cages and in the sky, and every morning I was woken up by the crowing of a cockerel.

  So, although it was terrible, Edi Hila’s story turned out not to be appalling compared to the ten, twenty or thirty years of monstrous torture suffered by writers such as Fatos Lubonja (b. 1951), the poet Visar Zhiti (b. 1952), or the architect and painter Maks Velo (b. 1935) and the painter Edison Gjergo (1939–89), who died in a prison for political prisoners, one of the three most dreadful in Albania, Spaç Prison. Then, in Tirana, I sat in cafés renovated in a West European style, drinking either Albanian brandy or Skënderbe cognac and listening to Fatos Lubonja and Visar Zhiti, or leafing through the powerful and painful portfolios shown to me by the smiling eighty-year-old Maks Velo. About them and about much else I shall write on another occasion, probably when (if) I decide to relate what I now know about Adam Kaplan.

  In Tirana I don’t talk with Edi Hila (b. 1949) about mice, in Tirana I look at catalogues of his old and new paintings, many of which are now hanging in museums and galleries all over the world, and (as though) incidentally, I hear about what was for him the disastrous canvas commissioned by the government in 1971 (large format — it’s in the National Art Gallery here in Tirana). In the painting joyful young people with red scarves around their necks dig holes and plant what were for the Communist Party of Albania unacceptably impressionistic seedlings. In the picture, young men and women bend in a furious rhythm, giddily, with no order or discipline, carving out their future. Although at the beginning of the 1970s the Party loosened the reins a little, just enough to give the people the illusion that better days were on their way — men were allowed to wear sunglasses and jeans and grow beards, while rock music made its way timidly into homes, and households turned their television aerials toward Italy and Yugoslavia — after the IV (so-called "Black") Plenum of the Central Committee of his Workers' (Communist) Party, in 1973, Enver Hoxha changed his mind and walled up the country again, filling it with new camps, new prisons, new bunkers to which he consigned the democratically inclined artistic and intellectual elite, and this time wrapped Albania in even heavier chains and Shqipëria devoured itself, sinking into terrible, painful invisibility.

  Because of this insufficiently socialist-realist painting (“Tree Planting”) with its exaggeratedly joyful, disobedient youth bathed in a gentle golden light, which could have borne it upward toward the sky (and in the sky strange, suspect shapes flutter), far from the pits which it is “voluntarily” digging for itself, in 1974, Edi Hila, on his return to Tirana after a three-month stay in Florence, where Albanian state television in statu nascendi sent him for “training,” was arrested and sentenced to six years of forced labor on a remote chicken farm, where he dragged sacks of grain around all day and night. After he was “given his freedom,” for as long as Enver Hoxha’s regime lasted, right up until 1991, Edi Hila was unable to exhibit (and his earlier works were “bunkerized”). In double isolation, both personal and that into which reality nailed him, for two decades Edi Hila created his sometimes hideous, sometimes dreamy worlds. My friend the poet Arian Leka said of Edi Hila, During the night, he dreamed of the sun and that was a crime.

  After 1974, when I came back from Florence, Edi Hila told me, I wondered for a long time what my life was, what kind of a life was it without freedom, without artistic freedom. Florence was my first encounter with real art; for the first time I had the opportunity to see the original works of great masters, great art. Then it all sank, I looked at the world again from a distance, like a memory that
has been transformed into the vestiges of reality. I thought that I would never again step into living, illuminated reality. Those were the conditions in which I had to exist and survive.

  Today Edi Hila teaches painting at the Academy of Art in Tirana. He has no wish to recall those Parisian mice.

  At that time, Tomaž Šalamun and Marko Sosič came to Paris. They read their poems in a small café-bookshop, now in French, now in Slovene, then we got together on a human, not scholarly level. Then Tomaž died.

  I didn’t write anything in Paris, in that castle/monastery. The internet was no good, the radiators were small and lukewarm, the electric heater kept going off and, toward the end, I had that disaster with my eyes.

  As in Brussels, in Paris too there was a school near the castle, and beneath my windows there stretched a park, which had presumably once belonged to the Jean-Antoine Villemin military hospital, because it was called Villemin Park. I lived in the attic and looked out at the park and the school. Unlike the one in Brussels, this was a primary school, and at break the squeals and uproar coming from it were at times too loud. I could hear the school bell as well. To my great surprise that didn’t bother me at all, in Rijeka I would have been tearing my hair out. During break and after school the children swarmed through the park, which had fountains and an incredible variety of trees and plants, and also some fifty beds in which the local community grew flowers and fruit.

  At the entrance to the park there was a metal notice, and in the park a stone post, a pillar, and they both say: let the children be, let them run, let them jump, let them shout, let them chase balls, let them cultivate their own flowerbeds, because once, from 1942 to 1944, the silence, the hush and the nausea must have been so enormous and terrifying, so petrifying, that they could not fit even into a child’s shriek, let alone into crying.

  The notices under my windows say that from 1942 to 1944, from this arrondissement, the tenth, more than seven hundred Jewish children were deported to death camps, and seventy-five very little ones wrenched from their families, killed and never buried.

  There is a notice like this in every Paris arrondissement. From 1942 to 1944, the Nazis, with the wholehearted and active support of the Vichy authorities, deported a whole children’s town, a town of children — 11,000 youngsters — out of France to concentration camps, mostly to Auschwitz-Birkenau. I took a photograph of this notice, in passing, as I went down “my” rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin toward the Seine.

  That rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin, in addition to the fact that there are rough-sleepers living in its side streets, has a history, every street has a history, every house has a story, it’s just that we don’t have time, and when we do have time, something to do with our eyes, our sight gets snagged.

  The tenth arrondissement was once known as the warehouse district, arrondissement de l’Entrepôt. The tenth arrondissement was where the working class lived. Today various classes live there, classified and unclassified, belonging and not belonging, of various colors.

  So, I go down rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin and examine the buildings, I am forever looking at buildings, wherever I happen to be, I am charmed by some façade, and even in places which I apparently know I will come across seductive architectural faces, façades which offer me new (secret) stories, and now, like Borislav Pekić’s poor Arsenije Njegovan, about whom few in Croatia know anything and who, after, as he puts it, “an autotrophic way of life,” with the sorrow of a man lost in time, doggedly insists that buildings are like people, with which I would not entirely agree, people forget, buildings remember, and as I look at the structures I am walking past I collide with a reality that I can sometimes no longer distinguish from what has passed.

  I stop. The edifice is impressive. At the top, but under the attic gables, so that it should be seen and heard from the street, this evidently recently renovated building with huge upper windows and three broad shop fronts, which invite one into its interior, but which in turn offer an open view of the world, of what is outside, of what is happening outside, at the top, on a mosaic background of blue and gold ceramic tiles, that building proclaims to passersby that it is here, that it is ready to devote itself to the working class. In large letters, the palace at 85–87 rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin proclaims aux Classes laborieuses.

  Then I catch sight of a plaque, a memorial plaque at eye level for the average pedestrian:

  During the Occupation and with the help of the Vichy regime, this building, at the time the Lévitan furniture shop, served as an annex of the Drancy deportation camp. Here, between July 1943 and August 1944, hundreds of Jews, of whom many were later deported to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, were forced to sort through the furniture and objects that the Nazis had stolen from the apartments of Jewish families.

  May this never be forgotten.

  That day I lost the will to go for a walk. Three memorial plaques in one half of one street, in a small urban space within an hour’s walk. How many of them are then nailed into other parts of this city? That is not why I came to Paris, but again, as several times in the course of my roaming round Europe, History had grabbed me by the throat and clouded my already problematic vision. And now, perversely angry that in Croatia I don’t come across so many plaques, and that if I do happen across some, they are small, almost invisible, placed high up, their letters fading, or else they are desecrated, chipped by the mallet of a passerby of unsound mind, in comparison with whom my former patients are like the lost, invisible souls of good, or else, instead of those former plaques, on the walls there are only marks, the outline of their erstwhile frames, dried mortar, flaking, and the holes of the screws by which they were once attached to the buildings and, because the National Liberation Movement was the fourth member, the fourth member of the International Antifascist Coalition, ahead of France, I decided to set about photographing memorial plaques put up to remember the victims of Fascism and Nazism wherever I happened to be. A colleague of mine is putting together a “gallery” of Ustasha “U” signs. For enraged fanatics, for genuine lunatics with bloodshot eyes, it will be an irritating monograph, if my colleague ever manages to find a publisher for it and manages to emerge from his “project” in Croatia with his life. I thought, for fun, of making a list of all the hotel rooms in which I had slept, with their numbers, but the activity with the plaques now seems healthier for my compressed spine, because it demands movement. Between 1945 and 1990 in Croatia alone around 6,000 monuments, busts, sculptures and memorial plaques were produced, dedicated to events and people connected with the National Liberation Movement of Croatia and Yugoslavia, and between 1990 and 2000 precisely 2,964 memorial signs, 731 monuments, and 2,233 other kinds of memorial signs were destroyed or damaged (by whom? name and surname, by whom?). By 2012 around 400 antifascist monuments of lesser artistic worth had been restored, and only a few of the most significant ones. People who presumably count them say that altogether in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia some 15,000 monuments were erected, dedicated to the National Liberation War. Then, recently, the Belgian artistic photographer Jan Kempenaers came to Croatia and said that those monuments (erected at the time of socialist Yugoslavia, and some less than ten years after the end of the war) were magnificent (the ones he found), that with their abstract and futuristic appearance they could be considered the best of international monumental architecture.

  Then, standing in front of numbers 85–87 rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin, Arsenije Njegovan came back to me, he sat on my shoulder and whispered:

  But when did great passions

  care about small considerations?

  I leaned against that building as if it were a human being, to touch it, to have it touch me, but instead of warmth, a chill ran through my body. I stroked the plaque and continued to the river, but it, that former furniture store for the working class, monumental and brilliant, dragged itself after me, panting.

  In the course of the war, in France, 71
,619 Jewish apartments were confiscated (38,000 in Paris alone), from which were stolen 1,079,373 cubic meters of “goods,” loaded onto 26,984 railway wagons, along with money and bonds with an estimated value of 11,695,516 Reichsmarks. That and many other dire operations of plunder throughout the German-occupied territories were orchestrated by that same Alfred Rosenberg who, at the time of the disappearance of Frida Landsberg, the violinist from Latvia, was strolling round Riga, and as he requisitioned the pianos and violins of Latvian musicians, he nostalgically evoked memories of his student days. This, this plunder in France, was undertaken by a branch of Rosenberg’s special organization Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the so-called Western Agency (Dienststelle Westen) within which a very lively and dedicated “Furniture Campaign,” the Möbel Aktion, was carried out, which, of course, apart from period furniture, implied not only the theft of works of fine art and jewelry, weapons, valuable porcelain, and oriental sculptures, but also worthless articles for everyday use, cups, plates, cutlery, linen, clothes, shoes, underwear, even light bulbs, nails, tools, curtains, tablecloths, blankets, pillows, frying pans, saucepans and teapots, children’s toys, from dolls and balls to little cars and electric model railways, the theft in fact of everything that makes a life, the theft in fact of the lives of those whose physical lives were also taken from them. That working group of Rosenberg’s was moving through France as early as mid-July 1940, appropriating “degenerate” oil paintings, rare musical instruments (Rosenberg, as I’ve said, adored music), archival materials and valuable libraries, and when the terrain had been more or less taken care of and all that treasure more or less catalogued, photographed, and sent to Germany, some to warehouses for Hitler’s future museum in Linz, but far more directly to Göring’s country villa Carinhall, situated in picturesque hunting country within reach of Berlin (in which the morphine-dependent Göring pedantically arranged his more than 1,800 stolen works of art), Rosenberg asked for and was granted permission to continue the action, for the further cleansing of “abandoned” Jewish houses and apartments in order to satisfy the needs of the German civilian population in the newly occupied eastern territories of the Reich. But these fragments of life traveled also to Germans whose homes were destroyed by the bombs of the Allied forces, to the ordinary innocent people, so that Greater Germany could soothe their war traumas and offer them hope in a better future. Today, when at flea markets all over Europe we buy a crystal glass, a silver spoon or a china cup, a “family photograph” for a trivial sum, when we stroll through elegant or modest antique shops, when we attend auctions, we can only imagine what journeys are written into this enormous movement of people and objects across a continent and further afield, into this vast planetary exchange of lives which merge into a general chaos, a commotion, a bazaar of the past and present.