Diary of Interrupted Days (18 page)
Read Diary of Interrupted Days Online
Authors: Dragan Todorovic
“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 contrast 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
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
.
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.
NOW
wanted an article about her immigrant experience, to publish in the Canada Day issue. July 1 was just a week away, and they needed it yesterday. Their art director envisioned a “before and after” sort of thing—one photo from before she knew what was in store for her, and one fresh, now that she knew how generous the store had been.
She rummaged through their closet, and just when she was about to call Boris at work, she found their pictures in
the large cardboard box their printer had come in. She was surprised to find them there—the last time she checked they were in a shoebox, as all normal pictures are.
She made a coffee, sat on the floor next to the box, and started taking handfuls of pictures out. At first she flipped through them quickly, trying to stick to her purpose. She liked the art director’s idea, and envisioned a picture of herself confused and oddly dressed next to a snapshot of her now. The first handfuls were all of something she wasn’t looking for. But then she slowed down. With surprise, she soon realized that although she could remember the general details about where and when each picture had been taken, the minutiae were lost to her. Almost every image was a revelation. Using pictures as doors was fine: she was able to open them, look behind them, see who and what was there, hear the sounds, retrieve the smells—but the doors closed again as soon as she put the picture back in the box.
If you want to forget something, take a picture of it. It’s as if the brain, at the moment when the shutter is pressed, gives up its responsibilities and leaves the task of remembering to the emulsion on the film.