clothing, caps, and scarves. Everyone sells his or her bric-a-brac. Yes, the future is definitely elsewhere. In the time of communism watches sped ahead, now they go backwards. To bridge the time difference, today parents herd their kids toward Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong, and Asia. No, not to Western Europe—that’s all over. Sure, after the fall of the Wall everyone perked up a bit, breathed a sigh of relief, got comfy in their new statelets. But you have to pay to play, so some stole, others slaughtered, and others just enjoyed a little bum-rushing. In time their heels cooled and they bowed their heads, as if occupied by an invisible force. Now here they are, back where they always were . . .
“And what do you want,” demurs my interlocutor, a Croat. Everyone has always walked all over us, and yes, we bowed our heads, shut our mouths, and divided into tribes. We Slavs are a sad people. We’ve never had, nor will we ever have, a Joyce or a Beckett. Do you know why? Because Vladimir and Estragon—that’s us. We’ve been waiting around for centuries for someone to come, to fall from the sky, waiting’s all we’ve ever done; we’re artists when it comes to waiting. Maybe that’s why, unlike others, we’ve never conquered or subjugated anyone. They’ve conquered us. Our rebellion is small beer. All we do is get drunk, smash our heads against the wall, and maybe slit our veins with broken glass from the floor. What did we inherit from the ancient Slavs? The art of breathing under water. Breathing through a reed—our authentic Slavic innovation. We’ve never been ambitious. Vienna, you say? We don’t care about Vienna, and neither do the Slovaks. Bratislava wants to be Linz, Zagreb to be Graz or Trieste, that’s the reach of our ambition. Yes, we’re endangered like Indians, hence our efforts to protect what remains: language, a little mythology, a few ancient handicrafts. Our differences are small beer too: Some of us pray to the god of rain, others to the god of sun, some do their ganga,2 others blow their penny whistles. We regularly summon our ghosts, excavating our ancestors’ bones. We count for nothing, we don’t produce anything, nor do we have the money to buy anything. We are neither producers nor consumers; no one needs us, not even our own kids.
A racing pulse—tachycardia—fatigue—nausea—anxiety—crisis. The rules of etiquette didn’t prevent me fleeing Bratislava before time was called. Once home (in Croatia, in Zagreb? No, in the Netherlands, in Amsterdam!) I quickly forgot my two-day “Slovak” episode. I deleted everything. Only two pictures managed to sneak into my internal album. The tiny sculpture of Maria Theresa on horseback twinkling opaquely in the November fog, and the petite woman with the beautiful face, a child’s mittens drawn over tiny burnt hands. The two aren’t necessarily a diptych, but both are in sepia.
Brought on by a fresh incident, here “at home” a new anxiety attack soon runs me down. Geert Wilders’ party, the PVV, or Partij voor de Vrijheid, launches a website cordially inviting Dutch citizens to have their say on burning questions (Do you have problems with recent arrivals from Central and Eastern Europe? Have you lost your job because of a Pole, Bulgarian, Romanian, or some other East European?). The website is visited by tens of thousands of people giving vent to their resentment at the legal presence of Central, East, and Southern European immigrants. Poles, especially the Poles. Because it’s the Poles who are taking their jobs. Poles steal, get drunk, they’re loud and liable to criminal behavior. Poles are “human trash.”
There’s no reason for alarm. I’m not a Pole; for now I still pass as a Croat with a Dutch passport. The ex-Yugoslav and Bulgarian in me I’ll easily hush up. I’ll freeze like a fox in a fable until this storm, too, passes. I diligently pay my taxes to this water-soaked country. The damp doesn’t bother me; we, we Slavs, are used to forests and trees, leaves and oaks, water and wetlands. My memes are active, they remember the old Slavic art of breathing underwater. Maybe my anxiety attack is just a tempest in a teacup. It seems that way. For now. Until some new storm rolls in. And then everything will depend on that final drop of water, and in which direction the flood surges.
1 Kulen is a spicy pork and red pepper sausage, soparnik an ancient Croatian dish from the Poljica region of Dalmatia, a kind of chard pie dating from before the Ottoman invasions.
2 Ganga is a dissonant form of singing—or moreover, wailing—traditional in rural Croatia and Bosnia-Herzogovina, often performed by men standing in a circle with interlocked arms.
1.
Pigeons are crazy about public sculptures. For a pigeon there’s no greater happiness than perching on the head of a sculpture and taking a dump. Sculptures are for people to consecrate, and pigeons to desecrate. The truth is that for some reason people are crazy about public sculptures too.
In December of last year, unidentified vandals attacked a sculpture of Marija Jurić Zagorka, a Croatian journalist and novelist. Zagorka’s literary production never got its due during her lifetime, nor for many years after her death. Had it not been for the efforts of the Zagreb Center for Women’s Studies—which, inter alia, had a statue erected in her honor in downtown Zagreb—her work would today be forgotten. The vandals sawed off the bronze umbrella on which the bronze authoress stood leaning in repose, the Center for Women’s Studies whipped up a media frenzy, and the city fathers promptly committed to appropriating funds for a new umbrella. Appalled by the ugly incident, the next day many Zagreb residents laid old umbrellas at the statue’s feet. There you go, that’s canonization for you!
Croats might not be pigeons, but they still suffer a fatal attraction for public monuments. Since Croatia gained independence in 1991, many monuments to the victims of fascism have suffered damage. The majority took place in the immediate post-independence years, a time of anti-Yugoslav (anti-Serbian, and anti-communist) hysteria. The new authorities had a fair degree of empathy for vandal passions provoked by collective Croatian traumas. In historical perspective, the Croatian reaction confirmed a paradox: Trauma is sometimes greatest where there is least cause; anti-communist hysteria proved most vehement where communism itself had been most benign.
2.
The truth is, even I didn’t really pay monuments any mind until I discovered a surprising truth: Most people engage in vandalism for the cash, not out of ideological or aesthetic convictions. Everyone in Holland knows who’s most enamored with copper and bronze. Yes, the Poles. In February of this year statues were stolen from atop graves in the Dutch settlements of Norg and Vries. Rheden lost a statue of the writer Simon Carmiggelt, and, wary of new thefts, a statue of Queen Beatrix was spirited away into storage. A couple of years ago a public sculpture of a mother and child, erected in memory of the victims of the Second World War, was stolen from Marienberg. In 2007 a copy of Rodin’s The Thinker was stolen in Laren. The cities of Zwolle and Nijmegen recently resolved to put their public statues in safekeeping, and in Eindhoven the police have fitted public sculptures with GPS units. If the sculptures from Eindhoven go for a stroll, the police will know where to find them. The list of Polish sins is long: Anything with a glint of copper is a target for Polish thieves. If the trains aren’t running, it’s because the Poles have ripped out the copper cables. If there’s a power loss, it’s because the Poles have pilfered the copper cables from a few windmills, the pride of the Dutch national landscape. If a remnant from the First World War explodes in the Ypres region, it’s because the Poles (ah, those moles!) have been burrowing the fields in search of copper, happy to accept the risks. The Dutch—for whom the Germans, who thieved Dutch bicycles at the close of the Second World War, had long been the preferred enemy—now blame the Poles for everything. In the settlement of Menaldum the police seized the bicycles of Polish workers living at the Schatzenburg trailer park, convinced they were stolen. It turned out the bikes had been given to the Poles by their employer so they’d be able to ride to work. “Poles” (a collective term for all East Europeans, of whom Poles are simply the most numerous) most often live in what the Dutch refer to as “Polish
