. . . Mom used to subscribe to a film magazine; we’d guzzle reports of our silver screen heroes and heroines like sweet candies. Many of Mom’s books were American too—An American Tragedy springs to mind. At high school I identified with Allison MacKenzie. She wrote poetry and went around with books clasped to her chest, as if they were some kind of protection. I carried my books like that for while, but then came other idols, other attractions . . .
All in all, in Oberlin’s MindFair Books, it became apparent that the authentic object of my nostalgia was the America of the fifties, an America gleaned from American films shown in a small provincial theater, in a small provincial town in Nowheresville, Yugoslavia. My Yugonostalgic packet wasn’t stuffed with the usual stereotypes—the red star, the hammer and sickle, the Yugoslav national anthem—all of which my young listeners perhaps expected, but with other stereotypes—Americana, Yugo-Americana. Nostalgia had betrayed me again. Nostalgia, you bitch . . .
I suspect my young listeners might not have completely understood my story, the names I tossed like confetti couldn’t have meant much to them. Two or three of my peers in the audience nodded their heads affirmatively, recalling the early years of our mutual youth. Maybe later they wondered how it was that our childhoods had been so similar, and our countries so distant and different. I neglected to mention that I also have a little habit fed by the Internet. Whenever my mind wanders to a Hollywood star or starlet of my childhood, I immediately go to Google to tell me if he or she is still alive. Esther Williams just passed away, unfortunately. But Pat Boone is still around, thank God!
NEW YORK, WASHINGTON SQUARE
From Zuccotti Park I took a stroll to Washington Square and sat down on a bench. It was late afternoon, sultry, an Indian summer. I immediately noticed that the black guys who used to play chess were missing, as were those who hung out brownbagging it. Washington Square had long been a hangout for smokers, and now a sign at the entrance warned that smoking in the park was strictly forbidden. The scamps bumming cigarettes were gone, and with them any occasion for small talk. The park seemed distressingly well ordered, like a provincial college campus. Where were the dropouts, the refuseniks, the superfluous men and women, the alcoholics and smokers, the homeless, the pickpockets, the vagrants, the hustlers? Where were the grumblers grumbling to themselves, the idlers, the beggars, the losers, the dreamers? Where were the skeptics, the envious, the good-for-nothings, the weaklings, the humiliated and insulted, the capitulators? Where were they?
On the bench opposite me I immediately recognized a middle-aged woman. She was an actress, a film actress, until recently a poster girl for a well-known cosmetics brand. I felt a sudden compassion for the lines on her face, as if they were my own. The face of a goddess was showing the first signs of capitulation. Jesus, just think how many people walk the earth waving invisible white handkerchiefs and flags! And what about me? Where do I stand in the order of things?
One of the Zuccotti Park slogans beamed out the message: Listen to the drumming of the 99% revolution. For once I remembered to take photos. In those few days the Zuccotti kids were photographed so often that thirty years’ worth of Japanese tourists haven’t managed to take more photos of Manneken Pis, the famous little peeing boy of Brussels. And it is for this reason, this reason alone, that the drums from Zuccotti Park echoed in every corner of the globe.
From all corners, you can hear the drumming. They’re sending messages to one another, the content always the same. Whether the media will end up ridiculing and destroying the kids, whether the media industry will suck them up and spit them out as profit, whether the tractable rebels will leave the confinement of Zuccotti Park and one day take to the streets to join with those from London, Barcelona, Athens, Amsterdam, Berlin, Zagreb, Moscow, and who knows where else, is, for the moment, not important. For now they’re just drumming: The days of plenty are over!5
I sat on the bench, warming myself in the Indian summer sun. I let my eye wander discreetly over the actress’s figure: the indistinct charcoal-colored outfit, the stooped shoulders, the body that has obviously given up worrying what a spectator might think. The actress nodded her head. I offered a friendly nod back. She didn’t notice me. She had a mobile phone to her ear and was nodding to an unseen collocutor.
“What’s the time?” a young guy asked. I was flustered, it had been so long since a random passerby had interrupted me with the question. Nobody asks for the time anymore. I looked at my watch. In almost all time zones watches were showing the same thing. “It’s time . . . for revolution,” I said. And with that I headed toward the subway.
1 On March 27, 1941, demonstrations erupted in Belgrade against the signing of the Triple Pact. Demonstrators bravely took to the streets shouting slogans against Hitler and Mussolini. The slogan (in the original) “Bolje grob nego rob, bolje rat nego pakt” was later plucked from its historical context and engraved in the collective memory of many Yugoslavs as artfully rhyming revolutionary code.
2 The reference here is to Maxim Gorki’s short story “The Old Woman Izergil.”
3 Sarah Banet-Weiser offers an astute analysis of the trend in the Dutch documentary Metamorfose van een crisis (Aftermath of a Crisis).
4 Yugoslav film director Dušan Makavejev once wittily remarked that Yugoslavia’s disintegration began the moment Tito opted to appoint not a sole personal movie operator, but one for each of the six Yugoslav republics.
5 The translated title and catchphrase of the German-Austrian film Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei (2004), distributed in English as The Edukators.
LATELY I’VE CAUGHT myself turning the faces and hues of Central Europe into photographs, an automatic click on an internal camera and I’m done. A second later an iPhoto program whirrs inside me: import—effects—sepia—done. It’s as if the surrounding reality is a screen, stuck to my hand an invisible remote with three options: past, present, future. But only one of them works: past, sepia.
Maybe a recent sleepless night in Bratislava triggered the reflex. The hotel room had an unusual “dummy” window, facing not outward to the exterior, but inward, to the reception desk. I kept the window closed and the curtains drawn, both of which appeared to increase the density of the claustrophobia in the air. Having given up trying to fall asleep, it was probably around two in the morning when I opened the new edition of The Economist and stared long at a map of Europe divided into three-color zones. An alarming red color marked countries in recession, yellow the countries somehow muddling through, and green the absence of recession. Slovakia, Estonia, and Slovenia were alone in the green zone; news reports the next day announced that Slovenia had just slipped into yellow. In the hope it might send me to sleep, I browsed a tourist brochure I’d picked up at the reception. On a map of Slovakia, a settlement bearing my name northwest of Bratislava caught my eye. Rather than surprise or delight (look, the little spot and I have the same name!), in a flash of recognition I was overcome by the fact that ours was a kinship based on inconsequence and insignificance. Ah, that Slavic linguistic sisterhood, dub—dubrava, all those forests and woods, leaves and oaks, hills and valleys, water and wetlands, in Slovak all so painfully similar to my native tongue. My eye glides sullenly over the Slovak place names as if searching for lice. There’s Slovensky Grob, and look, Chorvatsky Grob . . . Grob—brijeg—grb—brlog—graba. Grave—hill—crest—den—dike. (Shouldn’t Zagreb actually be Zagrob, a burial place, not merely a settlement next to a humdrum hill or commonplace dike?) The margins of the brochure teem with advertisements: roast duck, goulash, gingerbread hearts, girls in national dress wearing flower wreaths in their hair . . . and then there are the bold harbingers of the new time:
