Sarajevo

I cannot begin to describe Sarajevo, except with adjectives that evade specificity (incidentally, those favored by students when they don’t really know what they mean: adjectives like complex, confusing, and unpredictable).  Remember those books for kids that have panels? You start with the bottom half of a flamingo and the top half of a flamingo, but you can turn the top pages so you get a giraffe’s tail under the flamingo’s head, or vice versa. These hybrid animals are the best metaphor I can muster for Sarajevo. 

I was standing at the corner of the Latin Bridge, where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was famously assassinated. Looking up, there were rugged peaks, green with some craggy stone bald spots.  A whimsically elegant Austro-Hungarian library sat at the base of the mountain, across the street from the bridge with its white stone-working and arches. 

I looked down to the river, expecting to see the deep green water so characteristic of European towns.  Instead, it was the giraffe's tail: yellow and one foot deep, below ten feet of bullet-peppered and graffitied walls.  An empty bottle of baby oil was stuck bobbing in a dizzyingly circular current, until a dead cat floated by and tapped it with a still paw, releasing it on its way.  They both sailed down the tepid waters together.

Apparently Sarajevo’s the only place in the world besides Jerusalem where you can stand in a central spot, and see the spires of a Mosque, a Synagogue, a Catholic Cathedral, and an Orthodox Church.  I wish we lived in a world where this trivia wasn’t so impressive, where such a skyline didn’t remind me of a fantastical, impossible animal.

A student once told me that she remembers the smell of the United States.  That it was the first thing she noticed when she got off the plane from the Dominican Republic, at eight years old.  Countries have their own smell? I asked, struck by her poeticism.  She looked at me like I was an idiot.  Of course they do. Sarajevo has its own smell.  Rich, enticing at first but then a touch toxic: it seems to be a combination of baking bread and of auto oil. Perhaps this is exactly what it is, or perhaps it’s some other strange dichotomy of welcome and warning.

At ten p.m., I stood in front of a gay club and listened to the thumps of Rihanna mingle with the singing of prayer at a Mosque down the street, like some sort of trendy, politicized mash-up. 

Maybe if I was a better writer, I could have conveyed these contradictions with mere adjectives, the kinds that are easy enough to conjure about most cities. To feel at home in Somerville, for instance, you need to be idealistic, crunchy, and a little self-serious, as these are the characteristics of the place itself.

I think Sarajevo draws me in because it seems anyone could fit in here. After all, there’s no human being who isn’t incongruous, confounding, improbable.

I tell a local my name.  He responds, “we have a Sarajevo Rose.” During the war in the ‘90’s, Serbian grenades would land in the street and create floral patterns in the concrete – the center a crater from the initial impact, and an array of petals carved by pieces of flying shrapnel.  “After the war,” he explains, “we painted some of them red.  That’s a Sarajevo Rose.”

Strangers on a Train

“Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.”

These are not words I live by in the slightest.  Which I guess makes it kind of fake, as my students would say, that I bought a tote bag donning the motto at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris the other day. 

The bookstore was meeting place for Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Ernest Hemingway, and I owed my teenage self a souvenir. I was the post-World War I ex-pat writers’ biggest fan at age 17, due in small part to my dissent over the Iraq War but mostly because my beautiful AP English teacher thought Hemingway was really cool, and I thought she was really cool.

But I digress.  I’ve been hoping no strangers have read the quote on the side of my tote bag while I was busy being wildly standoffish to them, as I don’t wish to be thought of as unintentionally ironic.

I think I’m quite friendly to servers, baristas, flight attendants: people with whom my interactions follow an understood pattern and have an expected end.  However, I am not as friendly to people sitting next to me on the train or at the bar.  Small talk makes me anxious. If I exchange pleasantries, I think, what if they keep talking to me? What if I don’t know how to make it stop?

People love to quote Blanche’s exclamation at the end of A Streetcar Named Desire:  “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” but sometimes they seem to be forgetting that when she says this, she is in a straight-jacket, being taken away to an insane asylum.  It’s a testament to the lunacy of trust, to the unlikelihood of serendipity.  The kindness of strangers hasn’t served her very well at all. 

I don’t mean to imply that I’m fearful of strangers; rather, I’m doubtful.  I find myself expecting the worst from small talk.  What if I have to hear about someone’s asinine politics? What if, when I say what my job is, they use phrases like “oh, you teach those kinds of kids” or say “oh man, I always hated English class” (you’d be surprised how eager people are to tell me this.  I don’t understand what response they could possibly be expecting).  And of course, when men strike up a conversation, I never give them the benefit of the doubt, but instead go all stereotypical-lesbian and assume the worst of their intentions. 

I found out at the entrance to an old fortress in Nafplio, Greece, that I haven’t been hiding my skepticism of friendly strangers as well as I thought.  A Greek guy struck up a conversation with me.  I kept throwing out my characteristic polite-yet-conclusive comments, but he wasn’t having it.  Not because he couldn’t tell what I was doing, but because he could.  He crossed his arms (oh, to see yourself parodied) and grinned, switching to a falsetto that probably sounded exactly like me. “Hi, how are you? Oh I’m fine, how are you?” I smiled obligingly, you-got-me style. 

He continued. “I know how it is in America, I’ve been, people there, how you say, make walls.”  The impermeable stone fortress of Nafplio stood impressively behind him as if in illustration.  “Here in Greece, we connect.  We are real to each other.  Maybe it’s cultural.  I don’t know why. ”

So in the interest of cultural open-mindedness, if nothing else, I’m trying to live up to the trite yet substantial challenge posed by my tote bag, and give myself over to small talk more often.  The impact is more than what it would be back home, because the interactions with strangers are the only interactions I have here.  The most invigorating conversation I have, the kindest thing I say, and the most profound connection I make in a given day will all inevitably involve strangers. And if, like any traveler, I hope to receive kindness, the kindness of strangers is pretty much the only option.  So let’s hope Blanche wasn’t so crazy after all.

Angels in the Barley

“Well, there’s no sign that says not to make snow angels in the barley.”  I was in the Guiness Brewery, one of Dublin’s kitschier tourist sites, looking at a huge vat of dried barley, when I heard a woman (American) say this jokingly to her boyfriend.  Earlier that morning I had walked by an open cathedral and into the courtyard, where I sat down on a concrete slab only to read on the opposite wall that I was sitting on a nineteenth century crypt. 

Where in America would you be able to sit on anything that’s it noteworthy to say you sat on? America’s a place where there’d definitely be a sign to make it clear that it is prohibited to get within three feet of the crypt, or to make snow angels in the barley. 

I didn’t realize how much these totally reasonable, if self-explanatory, regulatory elements of exhibits in the U.S. were impacting my experience in museums until I began to notice their absence in Dublin. The “do not touch” signs, the burgundy velvet ropes that hang in arcs, the lines of tape that show you how close you shouldn’t get, they’re all dilutions that impact your ability to interface with the object of attention without intervention.  It’s the equivalent of texting with what you’re seeing instead of having an in-person conversation.

My girlfriend told me that in French, there’s a word for the feeling when you get when you are standing at the edge of the sea and you feel an improbable yet intense calling to start walking until you disappear beneath the waves.  Isn’t this feeling, this very real possibility, what makes the ocean so majestic? And don’t you feel it less when you’re looking at the ocean through the protective bars of a fence? And the knowledge that, when sitting on a 300 year old crypt, you could theoretically tag it with your girlfriend’s initials, or even bend over and lick it, that’s part of the experience of authentically interfacing with it; your inherent sense of respect stops you.

Of course, I’ve always thought of these precautions (the “do not touch” signs, the roping off) as necessary – an anonymous curator or historian or someone somewhere whose job it is to protect humanity from itself.  But if it was so inevitable for humans to violate anything sacred, wouldn’t there be evidence of such? Wouldn’t there be snow angels in the barley?

It’s possible that Europeans raise their kids to be more inherently respectful human beings, but I’ll reject that explanation simply because it’s not very hopeful. My other theory comes from (surprise) the classroom, a place where people tend to rise to the standards that you set for them.  Imply to students that you see them as adults, treat them like their frontal lobe is fully developed, and you’re often pleasantly surprised.   

The trust that is extended to the public here in Ireland, the offering of an unadulterated connection with artifacts of the past, does not go unappreciated.  Perhaps the respect received is passed on.   Barley is untouched, and crypts are only sat upon on by accident.