Bubble Gum & Blue Jeans
Petržalka: a city of its own, built up and annexed to the main of Bratislava. Between the two parts of the city the not so blue Dunaj, rushing past black with cold. Everything was black, frozen. So much more separated the two parts of the city, old and new. Petržalka, with its rows upon rows of matchboxes stacked high, teeming with people and spilling with noise should anyone ever make any. White buildings turned grey in neglect: new, but already older than the most ancient of the old city’s architectural treasures. No treasure this area, but treasure hunters? Favour seekers? Ah yes. Side by side, up one street and down another: pale face after pale face, red noses, cold eyes regarding one another or hastily turning away. Faces draped in black, bundled against the cold which reached to the bones, wrapped itself around the very soul. Cold, dark, dreary. And against it all, the ever present, evanescent shriek of the grimy grey train against the blank backdrop of silence.It was not always that way. I didn’t remember but now like a faint light coming through a crumbling wall it flickers and the shadows fall away and I do remember. It was not always that way.
Once trees rustled in the wind, white birch growing slanted and perfect for us to monkey up. We played ball now and then, went to camps in the country, and sang in our pretty uniforms for ceremonies and occasionally, concerts. We had a bike, red and faded but I knew it was bright. I don’t know where from but we kept it and hid it and rode around and through the puddles in it. Me on the handlebars, barefoot and gay. Nadia as tallest on the seat, our best peddler, Lucia, Katka, and tiny Eva; and those days were speed and fun and laughter and the brightest colours of the world and it didn’t matter that we didn’t know so much about the world, we made up for it in wild imaginations and secrets that held no danger.
Oh yes. I remember it now, as clearly as the water rushing down from the snow on the Tatras looks after a bleak winter you thought would never end.
They say it takes forever to grow up, but they are wrong; it only ever needs a moment. I know, because I was just thirteen, and suddenly I was eighty.
It happened the night he went away, my neighbor; just disappeared. I had come back to the little square flat and Babka’s big kisses as usual, dressed in my mismatched clothes, bright colours all and whistling a new tune I’d learnt that day in school. I remember; I had pulled off my hat and scarf before getting inside and how she scolded me and said that I would surely die as she whacked me lovingly on my bare head and I smiled, warm and secure.
But it happened that night, after our lights were off and Babka—dear Grandmother—she snored under her duvet and I dreamt of red bicycles. It happened and we all heard it; how could we not through the walls between us, thin as paper. First came the voices of strangers pounding at the door; harsh voices you never wanted to hear, breaking the silence of our night. Then the screams; her screams—mother, lover, wife, and little girl all in one body, one voice and I knew it but I didn’t know it. Angry shouts, stomping and pounding of boots and muffled moaning. I never knew the night could sound so cruel. My blanket could not ward the horror away and I slid off the orange flowered couch that served as my bed, slunk to the papery wall and waited for Nadia to tell me what was happening, waited for pale blond blue eyed Nadia to tell me what was going on; waited for the coded taps, but they never came, only Babka, who scooped me up in her wrinkly arms and hauled me away and put me in her bed and I didn’t want to but what could I do?
In the morning, I asked her, first thing—what had happened? Could I see Nadia? But she just hushed me and scolded me and would not say a word, but her eyes, they spoke a lot all the time, but I never had been able to read them before.
Nobody talked about it—nobody ever did—but nobody needed to. I knew.
I knew because Nadia left the next day to go to the country. We barely got to say goodbye and she was gone: gone out the cement block building we had made our castle. Gone, a lone figure wrapped up like a shroud, down the enchanted path we had walked together that had somehow turned into a dingy grey street through the night.
Gone on that dirty old croaking train that would carry her away from me and the safety of our friendship, both of us knowing our kingdom had ended, our reign over, and there would never be a hello to wait for.
I knew because when her mum came out, she suddenly looked old with hollowly, ringed eyes looking indifferently at you. Looking through you like you weren’t even there at all—or maybe like she wasn’t.
I knew, because Nadia’s dad was never seen again.
I woke up that morning, before Nadia left—before I even really realised what had happened at all—to Babka shaking me, more wrinkly looking than ever. Busses, school—life as usual, but I noticed walking out of her little room that my couch had faded in the night, though I didn’t know to miss its cheery orange then. Even when I looked in the mirror; splashed freezing water on my face; my eyes stared back at me grey, not blue. I didn’t know what I wore that morning; everything looked the same to me. Maybe that’s how I came to have dressed all in black; black, like everyone else in the city: my blue sweater and rainbow coloured leggings in a heap under my bedclothes, spilled on the floor. I left them there behind me. I didn’t know what I was doing. I have always remembered that day, that night. I never could forget it, if for no other reason than looking at the class picture we took, with Nadia gone and me a shapeless, lifeless blob in black.
I remember it all now, but I still don’t see colour except in memories from before that night. Ever afterward, just darkness and grey and nothingness threatening to swallow you up at every turn and you got so you didn’t want to turn. You just walked straight. You were all straight, and you didn’t even turn your heads to look at one another. Maybe what was there would bite you; maybe you would bite what was there.
I cannot remember my parents, though. I tried even then, but I never knew them. Once upon a time I had asked Babka about them.
Babka, do I have a mami and papi?
Babka had been pulling our soup off the stove. I remember because she dropped it, and we didn’t eat that night.
Yes, of course you do, she answered, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was just staring at that pot by our feet.
Babka, how come I don’t live with them? I had pressed.
She knelt down slowly. I thought how her feet must hurt through her slippers, burning in all that hot. She started wiping up.
There was an accident, Zuzička, and now they are gone.
I wanted to know where, but she held up her hand. Don’t ask me again, she said, and that was the end. And I never did ask again, but I also never stopped wondering.
Suddenly I had a whole new revelation, horrifying and dark but now real and plausible and I hated it. What did you say to children when people die but that they have gone away. But what if my parents really and simply went away? And what if they went away the same way Nadia’s papi did? An accident?
Classes and life and I didn’t want to be a part and didn’t know how and not at all how to be alone. Our teacher always talked about enemies of the State, and we always listened, quiet and all of us nodding and not understanding at all but I understood that time and for the first time, I was angry. We sat there on those hard little benches, stood up saying Dobré ráno, Pan Učitel when he entered and began shouting almost at once.
An Enemy! He had screamed. He was an enemy, a traitor to the State and now they will send him to work out his punishment and that would be a mercy!
I had never known the enemy before.
Nadia’s father: I hadn’t known he was Christian and I didn’t know what a Bible was but I had thought of him, alone and huddled for warmth on one of those closed up filthy black freight trains with soldiers peering out the windows. I could see them—always hear them—from Babka and my little square flat. She fussed about it but what could you do? Nothing. Nothing at all.
I wondered if he was conscious; heard the kicking, grinding of boots in my mind again; the screams, and I wanted to chew bubble gum: wanted to stick it under the seat and I said to myself tomorrow. Tomorrow I would find some; delicious and forbidden and foreign to this world I had woken up in. But sometimes tomorrow comes early.
I thought about Nadia, alone; white and red from anguish, from crying; stripped of our dreams and heading out to anonymity, to exile. I and now she too, both living with our Babkas.
I remember it now; it seemed that day would never end, and when classes finished at last I escaped into the pressing silence, hurried slowly back to Babka, probably still in line for bread. There is not much to remember, as though perhaps I was sleep walking through it all—would that I were but not so, not so. I joined in the throng of people hurrying slowly home, back to square rooms in square houses: our little matchboxes piled high. Side by side, up one street and down another: pale face after pale face, red noses, cold eyes regarding one another or hastily turning away. Faces draped in black, bundled against the cold which reached to the bones, wrapped itself around the very soul: cold, dark, and weary.
When I had arrived back home that afternoon, Babka had not yet returned and I had only to stay still a moment to imagine her carried off, too. Enemy of the State! Enemy of the State! Those words hissed venomously at me, stamped across the forehead of Babka. In the near distance, the whistle of the train and I turned and jammed my hat and scarf back on, scribbled a quick note to Babka, and fled.
Darkness everywhere, piercing me; the silence I had never heard before now screamed at me. Would they watch me? But I had become just another face among all the rest. Thirteen turned eighty, alive but dead and yet my eyes roved frantically; theirs never turned, never blinked: all blank stares straight ahead or straight down.
Black boots echoed across black cobbles of the Old City; my feet trudged slowly one before the other across the treacherous ice. Before me, St. Martins Cathedral; tall, cold: a fortress of black weathered stone crowned at the last, at the steeple rising near to heaven, like a prayer stopping halfway up and moaning there, alone. Inside, ringing tiles echoing the footsteps of the dead, filling with the ancient song of latin mass that has no place in the modern, atheist world, free of all gods except government. No new development this, not a work rendered from a troubled present, a rocky twentieth century, but an ideology long since in place, for King Henry set his throne over the church and declared a new order. So this idea resounded daily in the setting of the Bratislavský Hrad over the Dunaj, over the city: over the church. Towering above everything, with its largest tower facing West: once a beacon of welcome, now a fortress of warning—these borders are closed. Of course in the near distance behind, the black shadow of the radio tower, mirrored across the border on another hill, both proclaiming the correct order of being to the other. And there in the city, the bridge, towered over by a wonder of the age: Nový Most, symbol of power of the state, standing on the ground once covered by the beautiful, ancient synagogue and the Jewish sector of the city. Nothing now except the bridge. Nový Most. New Bridge. New life. And the Dunaj, rushing past, rushing beneath it, carrying the garbage of the West far away to the black dump. And I walked slowly across the bridge over it all.
Babka opened the door for me, had been listening for my return and I saw her for the first time truly old and wrinkly, her cold, chapped lips smacking my cheek and my heart tightened a little. Our eyes met, reading and wrestling until she turned away and if I was eighty she grew older yet and slowly turned away, shoulders slumping, head dropped. She shuffled across the dank little room, struggled down to her knees, peeled the baseboard off our wardrobe as I stared wondering. Now she beckoned and I knelt and I had to swallow my heart back down but it stayed in my head pounding loudly over my thoughts, in my ears. My fingers itched and jerked into the slit I had never known; jerked back out, then eased more slowly back in again.
Some things you cannot forget; I never forgot the feel; hard-soft, almost grainy, and cool and I grasped and pulled and stared at my lap and looked up at Babka and saw myself staring back in her eyes.
Your mother’s, she choked, before I could ask; before I could barely move at all.
I just stared.
Now it is yours, zlata.
I had gone into the washroom, stared at the grey eyes of a stranger looking at me. Stared at the blue jeans clutched to my chest. My trousers lay in a heap at my feet, and I slowly pulled the blueness up: big, but I would grow to fit. Big, but what else could I do? With a belt to secure them, I slowly pulled my trousers back up, the night swallowing the blue day sky but that sky was still the same: it was still there even in its coat of darkness and you knew it better because it was hidden and it burnt you beneath the surface.
Babka looked at me and I looked at her and our eyes were full, and I said goodbye and we knew that every day after would always have to be goodbye. But I had to go out, had to get out; had to think.
Darkness, everywhere. I took the bus across the river and I thought everyone could see through me, thought everyone could see the blue edge sticking out, but no one saw anything. Our world was coloured in one pigment alone but for me and for me blue was not colour but a lifestyle, a vision; an illegal hope.
posted by Lada @ 12:17 AM
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